Learn True Health with Ashley James

Magnesium Soak: Use coupon code LTH at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com 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 Dr. Krause's site: https://doctorjkrausend.com   Easy Lifestyle Changes To Improve Overall Health https://www.learntruehealth.com/easy-lifestyle-changes-improve-overall-health   Highlights: Importance of breathing Physiological signs that the body is in stressed mode Drinking water makes a big difference Checking mineral status to see where you’re deficient in Physical signs that you have mold in your house   There are many health and nutrition advice out there that sometimes we try to do them all at once and get overwhelmed. But in this episode, Dr. Jannine Krause says, “less is more and daily routines are more important.” She talks about little tweaks we can do to improve our overall health such as breathing and drinking water.   Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. In today’s interview, you’re going to learn easy lifestyle changes that you can start doing today but will make huge changes to your overall health and well-being. One of the habits I highly recommend you take on is soaking in magnesium. If you haven’t already, go to learntruehealth.com and search Kristen Bowen and listen to my episodes with Kristen Bowen. She shares about all the benefits of soaking in magnesium. No, I don’t mean Epsom salt or those magnesium flakes. I’m talking about her concentrated, undiluted magnesium from the Zechstein Sea that also contains other cofactors. We’ve actually had over 2000 of our listeners purchase her magnesium soak and have amazing results, and many of them have shared the results in the Learn True Health Facebook group. I myself have had fantastic results. I love soaking in her magnesium. They’ve done tests where they’ve seen that the body up takes 20 grams of magnesium while soaking in it. All you do is put a quarter of a cup of her magnesium soak in a big bowl or basin of water and put your feet in it. Just enough to cover your feet, and it doesn’t matter what temperature the water is. If it’s summer you can have cool water. I did that last summer when it was really hot and it was very refreshing. And of course, over the winter, it’s nice to have hot water to put your feet in. And then you soak for about 45 minutes. You can do it between 30 minutes and an hour to optimally get all the magnesium that you’ll get in that session. You stay in it for an hour. For children, you can actually put it in their bathtub. It’s completely safe. We noticed right away that our son started sleeping better when we put the magnesium soak in his bath, and he became calmer, which was really exciting. My restless legs went away. My fatigue that I had. I was still having sleep problems because my son was colic, so I’d be up with him in the night and I would have fatigue. I noticed that my fatigue was significantly diminished. I had more energy, my muscle cramps went away, and I’ve been oral magnesium for years and I was still deficient. She explains why you can take her magnesium, her soak, and her magnesium and even if you’re taking oral magnesium, you’ll have even better results because your soak absorbing. Your body absorbs what it needs. So go check out my interviews with Kristen Bowen. You can actually just purchase her magnesium soak by going to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. That’s livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and be sure to use the coupon code LTH. That’s the special listener discount. I also highly recommend checking out her Magnesium Muscle Creme as it is, in our home, absolutely mandatory to always have a jar of her creme around. If anyone in our family has a headache, usually just a tension headache, we rub it on our neck and our headache immediately goes away. It is very soothing for any kind of aches or pains. And it’s highly concentrated magnesium that you would put locally on the skin. I’ve also used it on my son when he had a bump and he had some pain because magnesium helps the body to turn off the pain response. There are many uses for magnesium and I absolutely love her magnesium products. That’s Kristen Bowen. You can go to learntruehealth.com, type in Kristen Bowen to find all the episodes with her. She shares about even how she’s used magnesium to help rid herself of parasites, so we’ve had some create interviews and great discussions. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group and ask. If you’re interested, ask other listeners, other members of our community to share their experiences with her magnesium soak. I just think it’s a wonderful habit for self-care. It’s something that you can do while you’re watching TV or even while you’re working during the day at your desk. I often do it when I’m doing an interview. You can also use her soak in the bathtub like I mentioned, you can even use it in the sauna, or you can go outside because it’s the summertime and soak your feet outside while you’re just enjoying nature and breathing or reading a book. This is such a great habit that’ll help you to decrease your stress levels and achieve the goals that our doctor today in this episode is going to share with you. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this episode and other episodes with your friends and family. Please continue sharing this podcast so we can help as many people as possible to learn true health.   [00:04:43] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 438. I am so excited for today’s interview. We have on the show one of my favorite kinds of guests, Naturopathic physician Dr. Jannine Krause. I’m so excited to have you on the show. Welcome.   [00:05:08] Dr. Jannine Krause: Thanks, Ashley.   [00:05:09] Ashley James: Now you practice Naturopathic medicine and acupuncture and you are also a podcast host, so we’ll make sure that the listeners know how to get to your podcast—The Health Fix podcast. I will have the links to your podcast and website in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. You went to Bastyr University here in Washington State. That’s a university I’m very familiar with. So many of the Naturopaths that I work with have gone there. How long has it been since you graduated?   [00:05:44] Dr. Jannine Krause: I graduated in 2007, so it’s been 13 years actually this month. Wow. Yeah, 13 years.   [00:05:52] Ashley James: Time flies, right? It just feels like yesterday. That’s crazy. Since you started practicing, in the last 13 years, what has really surprised you? Have you had any big aha moments as a doctor?   [00:06:07] Dr. Jannine Krause: Yeah, for sure, for sure. I think in the last, I’d say, five years, it has started to come together for me that less is more and daily routines are more important than all of the herbs, supplements, and trying to really spend a lot of effort on testing the daylights out of people. While that’s still important, it’s just that I’m finding that less is more and some of our daily routines might need to be tweaked to get the results we’re looking for.   [00:06:40] Ashley James: What kind of daily habits did you tweak in your clients that saw you maximize the results, that had you have those aha moments?   [00:06:49] Dr. Jannine Krause: One of the biggest ones is breathing, which seems silly because obviously we have to do it, otherwise we wouldn’t be alive. Actually, having folks take the time to slow down their breath but also target it when they’re feeling stressed or when they’re finishing up a workout. Because so many folks I see, I’m in a little bit of a different practice may be in terms of I have a lot of folks who have chronic pain and chronic illnesses, but then I have a whole other subset of folks that are athletes. Pushing themselves to the limits and finding that gosh, they just seem wired all the time, anxiety, and things of that nature. But if we could get them to breathe and slow down for five minutes after a workout, it’s like this parasympathetic reset. Finding that breathing is this amazing tool was kind of a big game-changer.   [00:07:46] Ashley James: I love it. It’s so funny. My husband holds his breath all the time. He doesn’t realize he’s doing it, but when he’s stressed or concentrating, he’ll hold his breath, and then he’ll just do this big exhale. I’m like you got to breathe. You just have to take slow deep breaths, become more conscious of it. If people do that when they get tensed up and then they hold their breath, do you have any steps for teaching people how to reorganize their brain so they begin to breathe in a healthier way?   [00:08:13] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely. It comes down to setting a routine. It’s much like anything that you’re going to practice like learning how to ride a bike. You had to do it a couple of times before you got in your groove. In the same case with breathing, I have folks waking up in the morning starting their breathing practice. Some people are already down with meditating and have that going on. They’ve got their thought process going and they’re just not really taking advantage of the breathing aspect that they could integrate into it. Or we have another set of folks who the first thing they do when they wake up in the morning, they grab their phones and start looking at the newsfeed, texts, or things of that nature. There’s a great little time frame in our morning when we first open our eyes that we can work on some of our breathing techniques. I’m talking like five counts inhale, seven counts exhale, that kind of stuff. And then finding time throughout the day that we can practice it. Usually, I’m finding that folks will have little stressors right around the time that they’re either driving to work or right before they start work, so I’ll do another session then. And then after work kind of trying to close down the day because I think so many of us like go from work and then boom right to the next thing. Now, granted, the coronavirus has given us a little time to not have to have so many social events after work, but unfortunately, so many people don’t take advantage of that time frame after work to unwind. And I think that’s a great time to start to practice working on breath work and flipping out of the sympathetic mode into a parasympathetic mode so that you can chill for the rest of the evening.   [00:09:53] Ashley James: For those who don’t know if that is, you’re switching the nervous system into a state of healing and switching it out of a state of stress.   [00:10:01] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely, yes. We’re all sympathetic-driven just the way our society is. Meaning, that we’re constantly on alert. Our nervous system is in fight-or-flight mode most of the time. And to switch into parasympathetic, which is known as rest, digest, and I add in the chill component, it’s huge for us because so many people are caught in being chronically fatigued and chronically anxious because they’re literally running marathons within their body. Whether they realize it or not, that sympathetic mode and that fight-or-flight mode just keep them on for hours and hours on end. Taking more time to pull yourself out of it and flip that switch is huge. It can be a game-changer.   [00:10:48] Ashley James: Since Naturopathic medicine is science-based, what changes did you see in labs? Or did you actually see some changes when your patients started to change their breathing that had you go aha, this minimalistic approach is actually we’re maximizing all the things we’re doing with them because they’ve started to breathe better?   [00:11:12] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely. I think that’s one of the ways when I started to connect like huh, if we tried this, would it change labs? In particular, a couple of different things that I’ve found over time—cortisol, in particular saliva cortisol tests are something that I use. I use it in terms of four points. If folks who are listening aren’t familiar with a saliva cortisol test, you are going to spit into a little tube and you’re going to do it when you wake up, before lunch, before dinner, and before bedtime. What we’re going to do is look at that pattern in terms of what’s happening with your cortisol release. Naturally, we’re supposed to have higher amounts of cortisol in the morning, then it’s going to taper off, and it’s going to go down lower to get us ready to go to bed in the evening. What I found, with a lot of folks who were not taking the time to breathe and were pretty stressed out, that we had either really high spikes in the morning right about the time the folks were going to go to work. Or we were having higher earlier spikes, say 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM in the morning, which can also be related to hormone stuff and we can talk about that later but I would see that. And then I would see the second blip of an increase in cortisol right around the evening time, almost like someone was becoming more amped up and the body was having signals that they should have more cortisol around 5:00 PM, 6:00 PM. With working with breathwork, I timed it to when the cortisol was out of range. Like I mentioned before, the morning is always a good time for most people. I see that 9 times out of 10, then I see it 9 times out of 10 before work, and then this evening time. I had people working on their breath work and then three months later or six months later, depending on the individual we were retesting. Sure enough, we were able to bring down the cortisol from doing that. I also added in a little bit of ashwagandha as well in some cases, so I can’t say 100% breathing, but I did see, in quite a few folks, quite a difference of bringing things down. That was one of my first inclinations like okay, we can do this. Then the next was starting to look at hormones and thyroids because so many people are on thyroid medication and they’re not seeing results. They’re not feeling good. As a Naturopathic doctor, I get mad. I’m like I’m not fixing this person. Why am I not helping them? What’s going on? What are we doing wrong? One of the things I found is that if we can get the body out of sympathetic mode a little bit more, we start to see the T4, which is your hormone that comes directly out of the thyroid, we start to see that coming up and we start to see conversion better. T4 is the hormone that comes out of the thyroid and it gets converted to T3. We’re starting to see higher levels of T3 compared to someone who had lower T3 levels, and we’re just getting more and more medication to try to bump up the T3, so a little Cytomel if you’re familiar with that medication, that is a T3 supplement. I found that these folks didn’t need these medications anymore. Almost as if their metabolism was starting to kick in naturally on their own when we were working with getting them out of sympathetic mode and more into the parasympathetic mode with breathing.   [00:14:28] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. I love it. The body becomes more efficient, it responds to protocols. I think, in this society, we really do not value getting out of stress mode. We really don’t value self-care. It’s kind of like oh yeah, that’s for other people. I’m a mom. I also have a job. I have this, I have that. We think I’ve got to cook dinner, then I have to do this, and I have this list of things I have to do. We don’t put self-care on that list because it doesn’t seem important. I was just talking to a client yesterday. She has these bouts of panic attacks where it’s so bad she has to lie on the floor and just do breathing. Her whole body feels like it’s dizzy and spinning and her heart is pounding. We talked about a list that she can make of things that really help to manage her stress like going for walks, taking a hot shower while doing some breathing in the shower, and having a tickle fight with her kids. Make a list of things she knows gets her out of stress mode and to do them throughout the day. I said, “I bet if you think about the last time you had one of those panic attacks were on the floor totally unable to be there for your kids because you have to lie on the floor for 45 minutes. If you think about it, there were signs leading up to that. There are signs throughout the day leading up to the heart palpitations.” If she’d go to gone to an MD, they might have put her on medication for the heart palpitations, medication for high blood pressure, and medication for the anxiety. Meanwhile, none of those medications—they mask symptoms but they’re not addressing what caused her to have a panic attack in the first place, which is not taking care of herself in terms of self-care, managing her stress, and doing activities that get her body out of the sympathetic mode and into the parasympathetic healing response. I just can’t imagine how many people are on drugs—multiple drugs. And how many people are on drugs, like you said, with the thyroid medication where the medication isn’t even working efficiently because of their lifestyle. Simple things they could change. Their lifestyle is causing their body to break down instead of being a healing mode. I’d love for you to talk more about the physiological effect of stress on the body and the physiological effect of getting out of stress mode so we can really understand how important it is to put the self-care, install the self-care. As little as five minutes in the morning doing some deep breathing, install self-care throughout the day in order to make the whole body go into that healing mode and stay away from the disease mode, which is being in chronic stress mode.   [00:17:40] Dr. Jannine Krause: I think one of the big connections that I like for folks to make here about the physiological effects of stress—I have so many folks that come in to see me and they have the anxiety and different things that we would think about—stress. But what they don’t connect is why is the wait keep going up? They’re like I need more thyroid meds. I need my hormones adjusted. No, I don’t think it’s all that because I’ve done that with so many people. In my 13 years, I’m kind of like no, it’s lifestyle. I’ve seen it over and over again work, but physiological effects of stress—you’re going to gain some weight or yes, you could lose weight. But what happens is we start to have fatigue. Fatigue to the point where you wake up in the morning and maybe you’ve had 8 to 10 hours of sleep and you’re like I feel like I got no sleep. I’m so tired. I could sleep for 20 more hours. Just wanting to like pull the sheets back over your head and just crash back out. Where another area of fatigue you can see as folks might be getting out of bed and kind of plugging through the day but like 2:00 PM they’re starting to really crash. I mean not just like you can solve it with going by the candy dish at the office or picking up a snack. It’s like you have to lay down on the couch and actually take a nap. That is where we’re really starting to hit the wall with stress. Another biggie, physiologically, that I’ll see with folks is that we actually see the labs start to change. I was talking about it a little bit more in terms of the thyroid where the TSH, which is thyroid-stimulating hormone and this is signaling from the brain to the thyroid, this number starts to go up. It may not be in a completely abnormal number, so let’s say it’s around 2.5, 3. The number at which conventional medicine starts to say you need medication is around 4.5. Some doctors are changing that. Naturopaths start to think about uh-oh, we got problems when we’re seeing that TSH around 2. This is going okay. So our brain is trying to tell our thyroid, hey, we need something going on. Metabolism is slowing down. What are we doing? Why aren’t you responding to me? That’s one physiological sign. T4 is another one. This is where that hormone coming out of the thyroid starts to also slow down. Now, we’re not pumping out the main hormone from the thyroid that has to get converted for us to have proper metabolism. Now, we’re having issues with low T4 and T3. That could be some physiological changes that you might see. The next thing is blood sugar starts to creep up. We’ll see that someone’s A1C, which is blood sugar, over time in about three months average snapshot of what’s going on with their blood sugar. You might start to realize all of a sudden oh my gosh, I’m pre-diabetic, which is an A1C of 5.7 or you might be right on the borderline or you might actually have your fasting glucose going up. You’re going okay, that’s weird. You’re gaining weight on top of that, and your thyroid numbers are starting to suffer and be lower. These are some of the physiologic signs. Now, another physiologic sign that’s really common, and a lot of people will start to play off, is multiple food sensitivities. When you start to be like I just can’t tolerate foods anymore, or I can’t tolerate dairy, wheat, or wine. That’s usually when people start getting upset is when the wine is starting to bother them and I’ll get complaints, but that is a sign that you’re physiologically starting to become stressed because your body’s getting overloaded. Rashes are another big physiologic sign that we’re starting to overload the system. That’s a snapshot of what’s most common. I will tend to see things where we’ve got autoimmune antibodies starting to pop up. When we go specifics, we don’t see anything specific but the autoimmune antibodies come up as well, so the body starts to attack itself a little bit. These are all some of the most common physiologic signs that I see in my practice in addition to pain. Pain comes along with the CRP, which is known as C-reactive protein. That’s an inflammation marker in our blood. That’ll start to go up and the pain will go up. Sed rate which is how sticky your blood is as I talk to folks about. Platelets might increase as well, and you might even see eosinophils or basophils which are white blood cell markers that there is an allergic surveillance reaction going on in the body. That it’s sending off signals something isn’t right. I’m getting overloaded. Ashley, that’s what I look at to see what’s going on physiologically if someone is starting to get to overload of the sympathetic nervous system mode.   [00:22:32] Ashley James: Can you walk us through physiologically? So someone’s in stress mode for a long period of time. What’s causing multiple food sensitivities? Is it that when we’re in sympathetic nervous system response that the body shunts blood away from the core, away from digestion so digestion suffers? Does being in stress mode affect the microbiome? Does it increase the chances of leaky gut? Or is it that when people are stressed out they’re probably eating foods that are harming their gut? Can you just walk us through what you think is the root cause of why long-term stress causes food sensitivities?   [00:23:15] Dr. Jannine Krause: I think all of those. D, all of the above. Your microbiome changes as you’re stressed because certain bugs are super sensitive. The lactobacillus family is extremely sensitive to stress, and you’ll see it low on stool samples in someone who’s really stressed out. Your gut lining separates the part with stress. One of the most, I guess, common examples I use in my office is looking at some of the big marathon runners who win. A lot of them will have bowel issues, and unfortunately, sometimes they get documented on some of the media in terms of the gut not behaving. There is a true thing of gastritis related to exercise because of the stressors it puts on the body. You don’t actually have to run a marathon to have that same kind of reaction. The other thing with like you were saying the blood shunting away and being in the muscles because we’re at this state of any moment we need to run away from that bear. Not having the blood in the digestive system to help us with circulating the molecules, things sit longer, we don’t produce digestive enzymes like we should. We don’t produce the hydrochloric acid to break things down like we should. So that, combined with when we’re stressed, we’re usually eating on the go. We’re usually not sitting down and taking our leisurely time to eat. We’re eating faster so bigger pieces of food get in the gut. They sit, they ferment, they irritate the lining, and now we’ve got issues with leaky gut happening there. Yeast is another common bug in the gut that is naturally supposed to be there, but in excess, its little finger that grows out and spreads cells apart. That can be a leaky gut factor. And we also have the factor of declining estrogens, in particular estradiol and progesterone. Lower amounts of estradiol will also have an effect on the gut lining just like it has an effect on your skin. I like to tell folks that what you see on the outside on your skin is kind of a reflection of what’s on the inside of your gut lining. So if you’re getting wrinkly, chances are, the inside of your gut is getting a little wrinkly and might be getting a little leaky at the same time. Progesterone, if we drop on progesterone and just a little insight for folks if it’s not been mentioned or you’re not familiar, when the body stress we steal progesterone. We steal the precursors to make cortisol versus progesterone. Progesterone is needed to keep histamines in check. So if you’re eating a lot of high histamine foods like tomatoes or let’s go with nuts, seeds, or maybe some aged cheese, chocolate, all the good stuff in life. All of that stuff can create more histamine reactions within the gut, which creates more of an inflammatory reaction. And now we end up with leaky gut too. There are a lot of different factors that can be contributing to this.   [00:26:11] Ashley James: It’s really interesting about histamine that it’s converted in the gut. Isn’t it converted in the large intestine? Or it’s broken down I should say.   [00:26:25] Dr. Jannine Krause: Yes. The liver and large intestine have a lot to do with histamine breakdown.   [00:26:33] Ashley James: Can you explain a bit about that? Because I think a lot of people have allergies and then they just take medication for it. But of course, my listeners want to do things naturally and actually get to the root cause and heal. I had a woman who was on medications for many years. It was a prescription drug for hay fever and having to deal with pollen. She lived up in Northern Alberta. She said that if she didn’t take her pill every day, during the spring, summer, and even into the fall, if she didn’t take it she wouldn’t be able to drive. Her eyes would itch and burn so bad her face would become puffy. She just couldn’t even see enough to drive. She started cleaning up her diet. She cut out all the gluten grains and took in a lot of antioxidants, took in some supplements. One day,9 she’s driving to work and she realized she had forgotten to take her medication and she wasn’t having that response. She freaked out. She stopped taking the medication just to see what happened and sure enough, she couldn’t believe it. But I’ve heard this over and over again that when people cut out foods and focus on healing the gut and focus on taking care of themselves that their doctor told them, their MD told them they would have allergies their whole life. That’s it. You’ve got to be on this medication for the rest of your life. It’s such an injustice that is done, which she actually looked at the side effects that it said that if you took this medication long-term it can cause cancer, and her doctor never warned her about that which is really frustrating that there are nasty side effects to so many medications and yet we’re just masking a symptom of a broken body and we can heal our body. Just tell us a bit more about how we can help the body to metabolize histamine correctly and correct the situation for those who have allergies.   [00:28:31] Dr. Jannine Krause: Sure. Histamine, we have a couple of different things. Diamine oxidase, otherwise known as DAO, is the enzyme that helps break down excess histamine in the body. It can do it in our kidneys, it can do it on the lining of our intestines, also helps in the liver, and this enzyme is a game-changer, but it can be blocked based on certain foods, and it can be blocked based on how irritated a gut is. What can you do? There’s a lot of foods and there’s a whole list—and I think it would be exhaustive for me to do the whole list—but often what I’m finding is having folks go through a list of the high histamine foods to just really go okay how many of these am I eating in a day and how much together? Because tomatoes and cheese—like aged cheese’s—that seems to go together in a lot of recipes, so do spicy foods, so do things like having pineapple salsas, for example. Now you’ve got pineapple and you’ve got tomato. Two things that are super high in histamines. It’s a little bit of slipping out the histamine connection there. There’s a gal, Dr. Becky Campbell, she has a great book that I use for patients because it has four phases of helping you go through the histamine connections in the body and going okay, how many of these things do I eat at once? I joked earlier about the delicious things in life being part of the problem with histamines because what I often will find is folks will come to me after they’ve been to like a wine party. They’ve had aged cheese. They’ve had like almonds. They’ve had chocolate. They’ve had sausages or different types of cured meats. And they’re like I’m so itchy and I don’t feel good. It’s going oh my gosh, you just ate every single high histamine food in the universe in one evening. Unfortunately, it’s overloaded, builds over time. One of the ways that we can help our body to clear these guys is to limit the amount that we have in one sitting, but also I will have folks—if you know you’re going to go to a wine party and you know you’re sensitive and you’re just like I don’t care I really just want to have fun—take a combination of nettles or quercetin. My favorite is a brand and called Ortho Molecular D-Hist. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that guy, but it’s one of my favorites for just knocking down histamine so that we don’t have a reaction when we go out for that food. Now granted, is something happening in your gut? Absolutely. It’s not going to cure the issue, but it will help you to manage these things. Typically, as in the case of your gal that you’re mentioning, I’m usually going to find out how many of the high histamine or DAO, diamine oxidase, blocking foods are they eating and can we remove those over time while giving quercetin, nettles, and things of that nature to try to help manage this. Now, there are also ways to clear out the liver a little bit because sometimes the system you will build up when our liver’s overloaded with toxins et cetera. I will often use milk thistle, in that case, to help clear the liver out just kind of push things out of the way and detox. Then we have the whole concept of MTHFR, which sounds like a dirty word but methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase deficiency. This is a mutation and you’ve probably had someone for sure talk about this on your podcast. This can be another issue and we’re looking at B12 and folate as being helpers to clear out some of the histamines as well. N-acetylcysteine can help. And looking just that the overall life’s lifestyle is kind of my favorite is looking at how many things that we added adding up to the system. Keep in mind that the more stress you are in general the more your body’s on surveillance mode, and histamines are your natural neurotransmitter in the body to tell the body something’s up, something’s happening.   [00:32:59] Ashley James: I love that. This is such a great example of Naturopathic medicine versus allopathic medicine. If you go to an MD—I’m not MD bashing. I just want people to understand that we have been brainwashed our entire lives by the mainstream media, by Hollywood. We have been brainwashed our whole lives to think that allopathic pharmaceutical-based MD medicine is the only doctor to go to and that all these other doctors are quacks or they’re “alternative medicine”. As part of their marketing campaign, they started coining holistic medicine alternative medicine to say that it was less than. That this is something that you would go to maybe in addition to or less than. It’s a nice alternative, but it’s not the main medicine. It’s clever but it is so it’s so misleading. What we have to understand is that when you go to an MD, you’re given maybe 15 minutes. Their type of medicine is great for surgeries, for acute injuries, not chronic injury but acute injury, and infections. They’re great at trauma care. You want to go to an ER filled with MDs if you have some kind of trauma.   [00:34:31] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely. Yes, do not come to me.   [00:34:33] Ashley James: But that’s where it ends. Or I should say, you go to more of a specialized one like an OBGYN or you go to one for those specialized care. The Naturopath where they shine is when you go to them you’re going to get a 45-minute to a 90-minute appointment, they’ll examine your entire life, and they figure out you’re not breathing. You change your breathing now all sudden your thyroid medication is working. They dissect your life and figure out—and they take labs and they’re a real physician but they figure out how can I help your body heal itself. You go to an MD they’re philosophically different. They’re reductionistic and that they’re looking to reduce you down to symptoms and parts and manage the symptoms. Whereas it’s a totally different philosophy that you have as a Naturopath. Naturopathic medicine is looking at the body as a whole and how the system as a whole affects itself. How is something as simple as not getting enough sleep or quality of sleep is affecting your stress levels, or the fact that you ate certain foods that are triggering histamine and you’re in stress mode and now that coupled with not breathing enough, for example, is making your thyroid medication not work. These are things that an MD would never see because it’s not part of their training or their philosophy when they approach medicine. We as consumers, we as patients need to know when to go to which doctor. You’re not going to always go to a plumber for every problem in your house. Why do we always in our society go to the same doctor for every problem? It’s ridiculous. That’s my little soapbox. I love Naturopathic medicine. Because of Naturopathic medicine, I was able to reverse some major diseases and that’s why I do the show, why I do this podcast is to keep spreading this message so that people who didn’t know that Naturopathic medicine was available could find doctors like you. In the last 13 years, you’ve been helping people, helping support the body’s ability to heal itself. Can you tell us some stories of success where patients came to you with chronic problems and through working with you, the body was able to heal itself?   [00:36:45] Dr. Jannine Krause: Yeah, absolutely. Probably one of my favorite stories that I have, and I still see this patient to this day because we’re still working in terms of maintenance for chronic pain. Because as an acupuncturist, I do believe that. This is something too that I’d love to folks to really embrace is that we need maintenance. It’s not like we just take care of ourselves and all of our main symptoms go away, our stress goes away, and life’s perfect. We need to maintain ourselves. It’s the same with a weight loss program. You can’t lose your 100 pounds and then expect you to go right back to your way of eating. I have quite a few folks who are on maintenance programs for helping to keep their body just in balance, little tune-ups. Today actually, in fact, I saw a fellow of mine who has had over nine different surgeries from multiple different accidents that he’s had over the years. He had very, very chronic pelvic pain to the point where he wasn’t able to urinate properly. He was just not even able to sit properly. I mean everything hurts—standing hurt, sitting hurt, laying down really flat, and still was about the only thing that he could do when he came in to see me. We looked at his labs, we looked at his lifestyle, we looked at where he was hurting and came up with a plan. Ultimately, what happened over time with this fella, we were working on breathing and in particular, a lot of trauma stuck in his body from the multiple accidents that had really shut down his ability to metabolize carbohydrates. He was ending up gaining weight and the weight just kept going up and up and up. Of course, he wasn’t moving because he was in so much pain. We first started working on what was going on with his stress management because the pain, of course, creates stress. It took us—and we’re about four years in. I see him about once every six to eight weeks. He just came back from a very long motorcycle ride from here over to Boise, which is a good eight plus hours. His muscles felt pretty decent, but if he had done that when I started working with him, things would have been extremely tight and tense and he would have suffered for multiple weeks. By working with his breathwork and working with acupuncture to help with controlling pain, I also worked with some herbs to help his body to manage stress better, adaptogenic herbs. In fact, my favorite one is ashwagandha for calming elevated cortisol. I also worked with some cordyceps to give him a little bit of energy. I like to think of ashwagandha and cordyceps as giving a little gas, then putting a little bit of the pedal, and then finding what that sweet spot is for someone. We worked with that for him to manage the stress. Now in addition to all of this with the pelvic pain, we did pelvic floor release techniques. I actually work with a public floor physical therapist with this fella as well. On top of that, he had a lot of gut issues and multiple microbiome bug infections, so a little bit of SIBO going on. In this case, we treated his gut lining, worked on getting it healthy, and then worked on what I call a weed and feed, which you may have heard from some other Naturopaths if you’ve listened to this podcast long enough. But what we did was we helped him to balance out his microbiome. We found that part of his microbiome issues really was coming from just grabbing quick foods because when you’re stressed, when you don’t feel good, and when you’re in pain, you’re grabbing quick stuff and just whatever is going to feel good at the moment and not necessarily great in the end. We found a huge connection with this guy and his gut and inflammation contributing to the pain. Once we were able to get him eating a little closer to nature, teach him how to cook a little bit because he wasn’t so great in the kitchen on his own, we found a lot of big changes. I didn’t have to use a whole evil protocol as I call it with fancy antibiotics and things to take care of his SIBO. We rechecked it, things are good to go. It just was ultimately calm the stress down, work on breathing, work on some meditation with him, and work on visualization to work on clearing the pathways to open up the flow of blood in his body to create some blood flow for where he was having the stuck. When I call it the stuck Qi, this might sound super woo-woo to folks, but the pain is blockage in the body. It’s energetic blockage if you get it to the woo-woos, but if you get it to more of a scientific pattern, you look at it in terms of circulation. As we’re finding with a lot of the research on coronavirus and COVID-19, a problem that a lot of us have when it relates to pain, when it relates to stress, when it relates to organ failures and multiple breakdowns in the body is circulation. Pain is a circulatory problem and so is an issue like a digestive complaint such as SIBO. Many folks have been through so many different treatments of bug-killing, weed and feed, and all of those different things and not had success. I truly believe that it has to do with circulation. The last thing that I did with this fella is worked quite a bit on visualization with circulation in the gut and visualization with circulation through the different acupuncture channels. Taught him a little bit about where they are, how they move, and really starting to enhance that and added in nitric oxide boosting supplements to help with the circulation. And then on top of that, some vitamins and minerals to help with mitochondria. Because if we can’t get the blood circulating, we can’t get ourselves in little factories, the mitochondria working properly. The combination of all of those together was what got him to be where he is today—riding motorcycles and doing so much better. There are some things I can’t change because of his accidents, but he is going from lying in bed and not functional whatsoever to up and about and participating in life again. That’s huge.   [00:43:31] Ashley James: I love that story and just what a contrast. Did he go to MDs before he went to you?   [00:43:38] Dr. Jannine Krause: Oh, yeah. He had been to so many different docs. I think he had said, at one point, 35 people. He had it on his list in terms of all the different consults. It’s crazy.   [00:43:51] Ashley James: And they tried a bunch of different drugs, right?   [00:43:53] Dr. Jannine Krause: A bunch of different drugs. He had been on antidepressants, gabapentin for nerve pain, Vicodin, you name it. By the end, they were just like maybe you should do some medical marijuana. Maybe that’ll be the answer to your issues and left it at that and tell him we don’t really have anything else for you. Really, his biggest issue was the pelvic pain and pelvic floor dysfunction. Even though he had pelvic PT and even though he had tried to work on it in the conventional model, the pain meds weren’t working, the gabapentin wasn’t working. They’re about to consider a biologic for him for his gut because they were like you’re headed towards Crohn’s. It was just a change in the diet. He didn’t need the biologic for the gut. It’s crazy.   [00:44:49] Ashley James: When you say biologic do you mean a stool transplant?   [00:44:55] Dr. Jannine Krause: No, an autoimmune type of medication. An immune blocking medication.   [00:45:03] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. I get so frustrated when I hear that because so many people become so sick from all the meds. The body doesn’t have a medication deficiency.   [00:45:13] Dr. Jannine Krause: He was not having a medication deficiency, and if he hadn’t gone to Naturopathic doctor, what would have happened? Who knows? I mean much like many people who have given up on their life, really. I don’t want people to give up.   [00:45:27] Ashley James: If he had seen him an enlightened MD who had sent him to a pelvic floor physical therapist, which I have a really great episode all on that by a pelvic floor specialist. It’s so cool. It’s such an amazing therapy for those that need it like women. Most women pee when they laugh and that means they should go see a pelvic floor physical therapist. Men have this problem too, right? If men have problems urinating, have pain down there, or ejaculation issues, they should get examined by a pelvic floor physical therapist because there are so many muscles down there. Often, we’re doing Kegels wrong and putting it out of balance. If he had gone to just that, he still would have had his other problems because you addressed the root cause which was the way he ate, how he manages stress, his emotional issues around food, and managing stress. You approached his life from an emotional standpoint and a physical standpoint and then supported the body’s ability to heal itself income into balance. That’s what we all want to do. I just tweaked my diet. I eat very clean and I just made a tweak to my diet in the last week and I’m waking up two hours earlier now. I’m like whoa, I have way energy. It’s just amazing how we can make these—I like how you said it. You said less is more. We can make these simple changes in our life and get these big results. I want to learn more from you today. I want the listeners to learn more. What kind of small changes can equal the biggest results?   [00:47:13] Dr. Jannine Krause: Okay. We’ve already talked about breathing. The next one—it seems like a duh kind of component but it is really important and often gets passed off—is really making concrete habits around drinking water. It really does make a difference. You really do need at least half your body weight in ounces of water a day. Hands down. I’ve seen simple things change just with hydration. In particular, I see a lot of pain and I work a lot with chronic pain. Having someone better hydrated—let’s put it that way—can make an absolutely huge change in someone’s quality of life, but also in terms of gut function. In terms of overall function. Another big thing is getting outside. I just interviewed, on my podcast, Ian Hart. He’s a great fella who has a book dedicated to connecting back to nature. He and I have a very big love for folks getting outside, smelling the roses, taking your shoes off and earthing. My dad, I grew up in the middle of Illinois. Super conservative area. I was the hippie child wanting to run around with my bare feet. I love it to this day, and I find a lot of people get great, great results with just calming their nervous system by taking your shoes off, getting outside, and just really feeling the ground again or just growing some plants, growing some herbs. Whether it’s cilantro or something. I don’t know why that one just came to my head. Oregano, mint grow in the Pacific Northwest like wildfire here, but these are things that they’re very simple that we just don’t think about. Another big one is channeling your inner five-year-old. So much of what’s gone on with our life of adulting and having to be professional and having to change ourselves and not being true to who we truly are, it wreaks havoc on us. There are a lot of folks out there who are not in careers they want to be. There’s a lot of folks out there who are not in relationships, and they’re also not in a space of their being who they actually want to be. I have folks look at who they were that when they were five and what did they love to do and playing more during the day. You had mentioned your five-year-old son. Just looking at kids and how they play, as adults, we’re too cool for that. I don’t know why we are. We need to go back to that and really honoring. You’re sitting there and you’re like ugh, my workdays grinding. I’m not really having fun. Okay, fine. Go outside. Who said you can’t go outside? Who said you can’t walk outdoors? Who said you can’t jump rope anymore? Who said you can’t use a hula-hoop? Whatever it is. It’s something that I think is absolutely huge and can make a world of difference. It also ties into my next thing that I work with on a lot of folks. I put folks through nine movements in my office. It’s hinging over, it’s lunging, it’s squatting, it’s reaching forward, it’s reaching back, it’s turning left to right, and using those motions to see how good is your mobility. Because if you can’t really bend over well, chances are your rib cage is locked up. If you can’t reach overhead very well, chances are that’s a rib cage and a neck issue as well. And this box your ability to breathe, but it also blocks your ability to send proper signals from your nervous system to your brain and from your brain back down to your nervous system. All of this locked up in the body we have miscommunication. Now, we’re contributing to that vagus nerve, which is our most important nerve of regulating the nervous system for those of you folks that are listening in. But it’s also the nerve that controls inflammation in the body. If it’s telling your body like you’re hunched over, your rib cages are all collapsed in, it doesn’t rotate left to right very well, you might not be pooping very well, you might not be breathing very well, you might have gas, you might have bloating, and it’s not SIBO. It’s just that your thoracic cage is not moving well. What happens is your body can’t control the inflammation in your intestines, in your gut, in your stomach. We have a lot of things related to this. I really, really work on mobility in my office big time with folks. I put you through the movements and we figure out how we can get you to move as best as possible within your motions. And I see a lot of change with that simple mobility.   [00:51:54] Ashley James: If they didn’t even realize it. They’re doing mobility tests and all sudden you point out that their ribcage is jacked up. How do you fix it? Do you give them exercises? Do physical manipulation? Do you send them to a chiropractor?   [00:52:13] Dr. Jannine Krause: It depends on the situation. Most of the time, I am going to work on exercises because a chiropractor love chiropractic, not knocking on chiropractic at all or not even knocking on myself because with acupuncture, it’s something I’m doing to you. But we also have to have the homework because I’m doing acupuncture and telling your body okay, this is what you’re going to do, body. Here’s the plan. The body has to go along with it and be like okay, right. I’m going to come along. But we have to have the day in day out, and the exercises are what get the results. It’s not all the manipulations. It’s not all the acupuncture. I believe it works, but I believe that it’s focusing on the right exercises and having someone keep you accountable, but also having someone watch and make sure you’re doing it right, which where PT can fall into place. But the problem and the limitation with PT—and this is because of insurance restrictions, I know from having so many good friends that are PTs—is that we work on the body segmentally. When I’m talking about exercises, I’m not just talking about your ribcage. I’m talking about what’s happening in your lumbar and spine, what’s happening in your pelvis, and what’s happening in your neck. Connecting it all together exercises not just ribcage exercises. I believe that exercises are the way to go, and yes I do some manipulations. I do a lot of cupping. I do a lot of Gua Sha. I do a lot of PNF kind of stretches and myofascial release. I think myofascial is one of the most amazing things in the universe, and there are so many studies in Germany. If anyone’s listening to me and going myofascial, what the heck? It’s the wrapping around your muscles. If you imagine chicken. That wrapping that’s around chicken when you pull it out of the package, that is your myofascial tissue that can be stuck to your muscles but also stuck to your skin. And it has a lot of nerves in it and it can tell you where you are in space. If it doesn’t know where you are, if your body doesn’t know where you are in space it’s going to send a message of pain. A lot of chronic pain and a lot of chronic trauma pain has to do with myofascial connections. There is a ton of research coming out of Germany. A doc with the last name Schleip. It’s great stuff. You can totally google myofascial Schleip and you’re going to come up with a ton of info on it. And I do a lot of myofascial work because I think that is, in addition to the exercises, some of the most bang for your buck to get results.   [00:54:41] Ashley James: How do you spell Schleip?   [00:54:43] Dr. Jannine Krause: S-C-H-L-E-I-P.   [00:54:46] Ashley James: Thank you. I had this really weird occurrence in my abdomen almost like a hernia. I actually got examined by a Naturopath and he wanted me to go see a surgeon. I had remembered that I was told by an old school Naturopath, been practicing for over 25 years, something like that. He said always go to a Bowen practitioner for hernia. I went to her three sessions it took for this so-called hernia to go away. And she said it actually wasn’t hernia. It’s very common after women give birth that the abdomen splits open. I forget the technical name for it. You’re going to say it and I’ll remember it.   [00:55:36] Dr. Jannine Krause: Diastasis or diastasis recti.   [00:55:38] Ashley James: Diastasis recti, that’s right. The abdomen splits open, and she did really neat things. A lot of free range of motion. She would do a range of motion and then she would touch my clavicle and then she would say okay, lie here for 15 minutes I’ll be back. Then she’d come back, do a free range of motion, and then she would touch my shoulder. Then she would have me rest. The whole time I’m thinking this is a complete rip-off. She’s not touching my abdomen. This doesn’t hurt, it’s supposed to hurt. She’s working on the fascia, it’s supposed to be painful. She’s barely touching me. I stood up and I felt two feet taller and I couldn’t believe it. I bought a package of four sessions. I didn’t even need the fourth session. It was done, it was corrected. My husband who had had a chronic shoulder injury that would keep coming back for 20 years, got on the table. By worked on him I mean like she would vaguely touch an area then say okay, lie here for 15 minutes then come back and just gently touch another area after doing a range of motion. Again, we feel like she’s like a witch doctor. She said she was just helping the body release the stuck fascia and his chronic shoulder pain for 20 years just disappeared. It was amazing. It was so cool. He walked out of there having a full range of motion of his shoulder and he just couldn’t believe it. Really, really neat. It’s so cool. If I’d gone down the route of what the doctor first told me to do, I would have gone to a surgical consult. I would have gone down that road and I might have had some surgery to put some mesh in my abdomen whereas go see a Bowen practitioner. We have to know when to go to what practitioner. You’re looking at the body using physical medicine while you’re also looking at the person as a whole and their life as a whole. You had mentioned also drinking half your body weight in ounces, and for those who are on kilograms, you take your kilograms and times it by 2.2 and then drink that many ounces a day.   [00:57:57] Dr. Jannine Krause: Yes. We got to cover the Canadian folks and all of the European folks. I’m not as good at my metric system at all. I apologize.   [00:58:05] Ashley James: No, it’s fine. Maybe about 10% of our listeners are around the world and so just for those who are like I don’t know how many pounds I weigh. Basically, drink a lot of water all day long as much as you can, right?   [00:58:18] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely, water. And sometimes I’ll also say if you got some really good high-quality sea salt hanging out, throw a couple of grains in there. I like throwing berries in my fruit versus the citrus because I do think it can have a negative effect on the enamel if you do it too much. But having a little bit of raspberry, a little bit of blackberry, whatever berries in season. Or even apple kind of tastes yummy in there. I like to throw a little piece of fruit, a couple of grains of sea salt and now you’ve got like natural Gatorade if you will or a natural electrolyte drink because it helps. A lot of us, we’re burning through stuff during the day and maybe we feel dizzy, which is a super common symptom that a lot of people who are stressed out will feel. Sometimes, it’s just you need a little bit of electrolytes because unfortunately, the stress that you’re putting on your body is making your body think you’re running a marathon. What do folks need when they’re running marathons? Electrolytes. Sometimes it’s just you drink your water and throw a little bit of electrolyte trick in there and see how it goes. It sometimes can be a game-changer.   [00:59:23] Ashley James: Coconut water is great for that as well. A lot of headaches, nausea, and dizziness lately because people are wearing masks and definitely wearing masks incorrectly, but medical masks—the disposable kind—should only be worn for 20 minutes and they need to be thrown out. People are keeping them for weeks and weeks. I’m frustrated because I almost fainted in Whole Foods a few weeks ago. I was wearing a medical mask. They hand it out to you at the door, so it was a new one. I’m standing in line. I’ve been in there maybe 15 minutes and all of a sudden I started blacking out. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. I’m getting dizzy. I’m falling over. I was so terrified. My heart was pounding and it took me hours to recover. I was exhausted afterward. The rest of the day was shot. I felt so sick. I came home and I’m thinking what’s wrong, what’s wrong? And then I read an article about hypoxia where you’re breathing in your own CO2. You’re breathing it in the mask, and these are the mask they’re handing out at the door. I’m not exerting myself. I’m just walking around a grocery store. I spoke to a gentleman at a grocery store who was helping me find something last week, and he was wearing a mask. I asked him, “Have you noticed that you or your co-workers are experiencing headaches?” And he says, “Yes. We all have chronic headaches now.” And he said, “I actually blacked out a few weeks ago.” I told him about hypoxia, but it’s very concerning especially for our state—Washington state. Our governor has now mandated that everyone wear masks in public. I went to Amazon and googled breathable masks and I found one that’s meant for hunting. It has lots of little holes in it and it’s very breathable. I’m very afraid for people especially children because they’re putting masks on children. If I, as a healthy adult, in 15 to 20 minutes of wearing a medical mask can get hypoxia, imagine what these children—they’re going to get brain damage basically from low oxygen. Especially since now they’re talking about children wearing masks eight hours a day or six to eight hours a day when in school and when in school buses. It’s very scary and they need to know, people need to know that if you start developing headaches—you talked about breathing is so important. And lack of oxygen from not breathing correctly can lead to all these problems. What about wearing a mask? Have you seen, in your practice, people have any negative problems with masks and how do you handle it?   [01:02:12] Dr. Jannine Krause: Oh my goodness, yes. This has kind of put a wrench in some of my breathing techniques with folks that have gone back to work because obviously, they have to have the mask on. But yes, I cringed about Inslee’s comments of us having to have them on no matter what because not only am I seeing hypoxia issues, I’m also seeing a lot of sinus issues and allergy issues increasing. Because unfortunately, a lot of folks in Washington or probably in a lot of states where it rains a little bit more, we’ve got a lot of folks that have mold already in their sinuses. We add the mask to the mix and now we’re going to have folks that are recirculating what they’re breathing, and if they’re breathing out some methane or if we’re looking at it in terms of methane or hydrogen that’s coming from bugs that are in their gut, now we’re recirculating that back through up through the nose and through the sinuses. And it makes me wonder, what are we doing to our microbiome of our sinuses and our digestive systems by recirculating air too? Not only the hypoxia component, I’m also thinking like what are we doing? Is there going to be an uptick of folks with a lot more of allergies and issues of that nature? In my office, we’ve been doing sinus needling and we’ve been doing a lot more of reinforcing when you’re at home, that’s when you’re doing your deep breathing. As much as you possibly can, getting outside in your backyard and really trying to make a conscious effort to get the masks off more often than not. And when folks are going back to work, I’m going all right, try to take time before you go to work out in your backyard. Just breathe a little bit without that mask, and when you get home, that’s like you’re unwinding as I mentioned earlier. Taking the time to unwind in your backyard and get some fresh air that’s not recirculated before you go back inside. Because now, on top of it, one in every two homes has mold issues in Washington State. We’ve got folks being in homes more and more mold exposure there, then you’re breathing stuff. This is a problem we’re going to have. Honestly, you’re absolutely right. We’re going to have respiratory issues that are going to compound by a lot. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing at all. I’ve started to have people use essential oils in masks to help with at least opening up vasodilating and opening up the respiratory areas. I’ve been using a combination of grapefruit and eucalyptus for some people. The doTERRA Breathe works, thieves works, or anything that’s going to help to open up the sinuses—thyme, tea tree—great stuff.   [01:04:57] Ashley James: My favorite is Olbas. Have you heard of it?   [01:05:02] Dr. Jannine Krause: No. What is this?   [01:05:03] Ashley James: It’s my favorite. You can get it at pretty much every health food store, Whole Foods, wherever they sell a bunch of supplements, but I’ve been using it since the 90s. It’s been around for a long time. It’s a synergy of essential oils for breathing, the sinuses, and the lungs. I had this wicked, wicked science infection when I was a teenager. I went to the crunchy hippie, you know that smell? There are no health food stores anymore. Do you know the old school health food stores? Because I grew up in them. My mom had me on soy milk. We were dairy-free. I’ve been seeing a Naturopath since I was six years old. My mom would take me in. I was never allowed to have chocolate, but I’d get a carob or there would be this Rice Dream was the ice cream that I could have. Or they even have this frozen banana with carob coating on it or something or they would give you a little honey stick. I remember walking in and I would smell all the herbs combined. I just loved being there. I get if I could ever smell that smell going into the old apothecary, it just brings me right back. I love crunchy hippie health food stores. Anyways, if you go into any of those, you’ll find Olbas. They now have a bunch of different things. Just get the essential oil, just get the actual drops, not anything with a carrier. I like putting three drops in a big bowl of steaming hot water, then you put a towel over your head, you lean over and make like a tent, and breathe in the vapors. Oh, it’s so great. It opens up all the sinuses. That’s my favorite synergy for essential oils for breathing.   [01:06:46] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely, yeah. I’m looking at it right now. It’s got peppermint, eucalyptus—I do not know how to say that word—cajeput. Don’t know that one. Wintergreen, juniper, clove, all amazing stuff. What you just described, a steam inhalation, would be a great therapy. In fact, I just talked to somebody the other day about bringing back the steam inhalation therapy—as a breathing treatment—to help open those sinuses.   [01:07:11] Ashley James: And then I love doing colloidal silver nasal spray. Colloidal silver is really good for helping prevent viruses from taking hold. Can you tell us a bit about that?   [01:07:21] Dr. Jannine Krause: Oh, yeah. I love any type of nanosilver products because what they’re doing is they’re a great scrubber of your gut lining too. So when taken internally in the gut, they are much like the effects that you’ll see with n-acetylcysteine. They just scrub the lining. So not only do they kind of cleanse out anything that’s non-beneficial, they do the same when you do the spray in the nose, the throat. It’s just kind of wipes stuff out. I like to use colloidal. I like to use them combined with dead sea salt. I have a thing for the two of them because I like the combination because the spray will just cleanse things and wipe out when you see it wiped out, and then the salt kind of regulates. It’s like the regulator in there. I like using both of them together and neti pots. I don’t use the silver in the neti pot, just to be clear, but I do use sea salt too in neti pots and then follow with a spray because I think it’s a great way to even things out a little bit. I think that could definitely be something that folks could add to their regimen. It kind of helps the headaches, help with preventing hypoxia, but also the side effects of having these masks on for so long.   [01:08:39] Ashley James: I wish people would not have the mask on their nose and just breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. I mean what they’re trying to have everyone do is prevent the droplets from coming out of your mouth, but if you breathe in through your nose you’re getting fresh air and then you’re breathing out the mask is no problem. I’ve seen a lot of angry people. Put your mask back on. Anyway. We’ll get through it, we’ll get through it. I want everyone to know that if they start having headaches or feel dizzy then that’s a sign that they’re oxygen-deprived and we’ve got to focus on the breathing. As you mentioned how important breathing is to staying alive and staying healthy.   [01:09:30] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely.   [01:09:33] Ashley James: Let’s see. We’ve talked about—oh, mold. Let’s go back to mold for a sec. How could someone identify that mold is in their house? I’ve had a few actually really good episodes on mold. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com and type mold in. I have two episodes on natural mold mitigation, and it’s quite interesting, by a company called Green Home Solutions. I think they might have a branch in your area, but they use an enzyme. It’s a patented enzyme that actually digests mold, so not only does it kill it but it breaks it down so that it becomes inert and doesn’t harm you anymore. Because if you just bleach mold, it still is harmful to the body. The mold is dead, but it still releases the spores which harm us. So we have to be careful with how we treat mold. Maybe talk about how do we know we have mold? What are the physical symptoms that there’s mold in the houses that are harming us?   [01:10:26] Dr. Jannine Krause: One of the big things that folks will notice is they’ll start to have more sinus issues. I mean headaches and sinus issues are usually the number one. Chronic fatigue like starting to really be exhausted. Sometimes a cough can also be a big sign that something’s not right. I’ve even had people with wheezing and they’re like I never wheezed before and now I have asthma and then we’re like hmm, yeah, that seems odd. Asthma kind of symptoms. Things of that nature can definitely be a big sign that something is not right. Ways to actually test it, there’s a couple of different ways. You can run through regular labs IgE, which is an immediate sensitivity reaction, just to see if you’ve been exposed more or less. And sometimes it shows up, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not a foolproof plan but because it goes through insurance, I like to test it just to see what we get. Just drag on that and see what happens. If we’re really serious about going okay, we know someone has mold. We’ve seen it in the home. If we absolutely have seen the mold in the home and oftentimes what happens and I encourage everybody to check this out. Look at your mattresses, look behind your bed. That seems to be the hidden area for a lot of molds to hang out for some reason. Most of the time, what I find is that because the bed sometimes always ends up against the wall that is connected to a bathroom if you have a master suite kind of thing going on. But taking a look at that and then taking a look in your closet. If you can, if you have carpet, peel up the carpet in your closet see what’s going on in there because I have seen some issues there for folks. Around the windows we all kind of know but still taking looks there. If you do have smoke going on, it’s possible that you could have it in your body as well. A really great test is a test by—I can’t remember—I think they might be Genova. For some reason, my mind just went blank on me but MycoTOX is the name of the tests. Either them or Great Plains. I can’t remember. Anyway, don’t quote me on that one folks because I am losing train of thought at the moment on that. But it’s called MycoTOX. You can Google that and it’ll come up what the brand is. That test can tell you what toxins you have in your body that are being produced by mold. You can basically take it and look back at okay it’s this particular mold based on the toxins that are produced, and that’s one of my best ways about going about it if nothing comes up from the immediate sensitivity reactions. You can’t get testing for mold through Alcat, which is Cell Science Systems. They also will do a delayed sensitivity mold test for you to see if there’s anything that pops up on that end. And then, like you said, Green Home Solutions. There are also some DIY mold tests that you can pick up on Amazon, through Home Depot, or Lowes and just get you a really good sense of what’s going on in your home because I do think that it is something to not overlook for sure.   [01:13:30] Ashley James: Absolutely. It’s so crucial. Going down your checklist, what else is really important? We’ve got the breathing as the number one. Drinking enough water. Obviously, eating a healthy diet and stress management. What are the impactful tweaks that are just small tweaks that make the biggest difference?   [01:14:00] Dr. Jannine Krause: We talked about mobility but another big one that I think can make a huge difference is looking at your mineral status. So many of us are deficient in magnesium and selenium. Molybdenum could be also an issue. I think looking at where your minerals are at can give you a really good sense of how is the body working on a baseline level, and do you need some foods that are either rich in those minerals or do we need to maybe have a little bit of some mineral supplementation for a little bit, retest, and see how things are going. I would say, probably 80%-90% of the patients that I have tested for magnesium deficiency came positive with magnesium deficiency. Vitamin D deficiency is another big one. I’m saying minerals, I would also say looking at some of the crucial vitamins too—vitamin C, vitamin D, and vitamin E, in particular, is a biggie. Genova has a test called NutrEval, and they have one now that you can do at home, Metabolomix I believe is how you say that one. And it looks for these things and tells us how are the mitochondria functioning. Because this is a nice little tweak that while not pro here’s your suitcase of supplements, I do think that tweaking what we might have some deficiencies in is key for helping ward off or manage what’s going on in our body at any given time. That would be something else that I would be really taking a look at. My other big thingy is looking at heart rate and heart rate variability, which can be tweaks that if you have a wearable that tells you where your heart rates out like a Fitbit or Apple Watch, you can see the actual reaction that your body has to stress and how high your heart rate goes up, but you can also attenuate it meaning breathing down your heart rate. But you can also use your heart rate variability to tell about workouts and if you’re pushing yourself too hard. In my practice, I do see a little bit more athletes and one of the big things is overtraining. The everyday exerciser might be overtraining themselves and burning themselves out and not know it. Paying attention to heart rate and how your heart rate changes over time can be a really big deal, plus paying attention to make sure that you are not redlining your heart rate with every single exercise because that’s at the point in which your exercising is not benefiting you. It’s actually pushing your cortisol levels up and you’re wondering like I’m working out so hard, why do I keep gaining weight, doc? Why do I keep being more tired? Because you’re redlining every single workout. That’s another big tweak is looking at your heart rate and breathing down your heart rate and keeping it at certain levels at certain times. Part of it’s called conditioning training and that’s one of my specialties here in the office as we work with heart rate variability and keeping people exercising, even though they might be fatigued and getting them watching their heart rate so that they don’t overdo it. Because most of the time, the reason we can’t exercise and feel so tired is because we jump into a workout right off the bat and wear ourselves out too quickly.   [01:17:25] Ashley James: What kind of tweaks make the biggest difference to someone’s diet?   [01:17:32] Dr. Jannine Krause: Fiber. Fiber foods. We have the whole should you eat Keto, should you eat paleo, should you eat this, or should you eat that? Really, I tell people you should eat your vegetables. It’s probably not the most popular answer that people want to hear because I know that a lot of people want to hear intermittent fasting. They want to hear this diet, that diet is the best way to go. And honestly, if I’ve looked over my 13 years of practice, what gets me the best results in lowering cholesterol, what gets me the best results in mineral status and just overall health and gut function, it’s eating your veggies. Of course, folks might argue, well I can’t tolerate this veggie. I can’t tolerate that one. Okay. So the other big game-changer tweak would be to cook your veggies, and I’m not talking nursing home style. Blanch them, sauté them lightly. Just something so that they’re a little predigested for you. If we’re talking about things that have lectins, then I’m going to say put them in the Instapot or pressure cook them so you can destroy the lectins, but veggies. I’m not saying be vegan. If you want to do that, great, but really five-plus cups a day, venture on the border of six to eight a day and you’re going to see some change in yourself—a lot of change.   [01:18:51] Ashley James: It is so true. Get in those vegetables. You had mentioned earlier about increasing circulation and increasing nitric oxide. I had Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn on the show, who is a cardiologist that heals heart disease naturally. I mean four clogs in the heart totally reversed with vegetables, basically. But he says drizzle your steamed vegetables with balsamic. That balsamic increases nitric oxide, which opens up the cardiovascular system, and it’s very healing for the endothelial lining of the cardiovascular system. He has people eat zero oil because oil is proinflammatory to the lining of the cardiovascular system, and he has them eating something like six servings a day, so six bowls, basically. Six times a day eating a big bowl of steamed greens with a bunch of balsamic on it, and it tastes amazing. I didn’t like balsamic, but I started experimenting and there’s so many different balsamic out there. I had this one that’s fig and maple, oh my gosh. It’s like eating candy. It tastes so good. The Kirkland brand at Costco, that’s a good one. I like it. But there are so many different balsamic out there. If think you don’t like balsamic, I would just explore the different balsamic because there are many different ones out there. And it’s so good for you. That and beets, right? Beets help the body with nitric oxide, so they’re also great. Any superfoods like saying have some beets every day? Any superfoods that are very healing for the body that people might not know about?   [01:20:37] Dr. Jannine Krause: I don’t know if there would be not that they know about but maybe not that they knew what they had in them. Celery has nitric oxide boosting abilities. Arugula also does. My favorite most bang for your buck veggies are microgreens because they have a ton, just packed with vitamin A, vitamin C, and a lot of folates in there because they’re like the little babies that have to grow up and get all that nutrients to a big plant, and why not eat them when they’re nice and densely packed full of nutrients. Microgreens are like my game changer solution for a lot of folks. I said arugula, spinach, as long as you don’t have a histamine issue or anything going on with oxalates and kidney stones you could be good with the spinach because that’s also in nitric booster. Five ounces of spinach boost your nitric oxide. Beets, like you had mentioned too, I can’t say enough about beets. If you don’t like them, play with trying to figure out a way that you might find them delicious. They’re not what you might have imagined. At least in my age range, I used to think that beets are just like the canned, gross, and slimy things. It’s not all like that. There’s so much more to them. And then I’m a big fan of sprouted seeds like sunflower seeds because of the progesterone boosting component for ladies in particular. I love just thinking about sprouted any type of like even pumpkin seeds. It’s got a good estrogenic effect. You can use it for balancing hormones. Those are my favorite go-to superfoods that I will typically use. Actually, one of my most favorite ones most recently, as long as you don’t have issues with the garlic family, is the black garlic. So delicious and so great for adding flavor, but also has a lot of the same properties that garlic has but without all of the pungence and the breath effect. I mean if you eat a lot of it.   [01:22:43] Ashley James: Awesome. Cool. What homework do you want to give us? Do you have any homework that you’d love to assign us that we can apply to our life today and start seeing a difference?   [01:22:53] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely. I would give three things and you can choose whether to do all three or you can choose to pick one. If I had to like put all of my little tweaks that give you the most bang for your buck in order of what I see affecting folks the most that I’m going to give them to you. Number one is breathing, but breathing fresh air. If you can get outside—and granted I know that there are smug and things of that nature, but sometimes, just getting out of your home, you actually might have more beneficial air for you. If you can get out by the trees and in a little bit of natural fresh air, so much better. Bonus point to that, take your shoes off and really get back in touch with feeling nature and experiencing nature. Then my next thing from there would definitely be going on the lines of working on finding out about your pain in terms of where does it feel stuck? Where do you feel like things aren’t moving well in your body, and either finding someone to help you with a little myofascial release, or even just starting with yourself and doing gentle massage to that area. Now, I am saying this and going I didn’t say anything about lymphatic drainage or lymphatic work, but that would be another thing for another day. But I do support it in terms of helping move your tissue. So get outside, breathe some fresh air, and while you’re outside breathing some fresh air, see where there’s something stuck in your body and give it a little love. Give it a little gentle massage. And while you’re breathing, hold on to that spot and try to imagine taking what’s stuck in that spot and pushing it out through your feet. And that’ll give you a little technique to manage stress, get some good air in, but also work on some stuck stuff in the body so we can improve circulation over time.   [01:24:52] Ashley James: Do you have any studies that you can cite where they have proven that visualization has a physiological effect on the body?   [01:25:04] Dr. Jannine Krause: You know what, yes. In terms of the detailed ones, I might have to give you some details after we’re off the call because I don’t think I’ll be able to pull up right at the moment. But Dr. Joe Dispenza, everyone’s familiar with him. He’s done a lot of work on visualization and change in terms of results that happen as a thought of visualization. It’s not 100% related to pain, but in some cases it is. We also have a lot of data on Qi Gong. A specific style of breathing-related visualizing while doing Qi Gong, that can help with change as well. I would probably say, and I’m quickly trying to put it in my computer really quickly here if I could find something briefly that would help you, so I don’t waste anybody’s time. We could probably give you some data afterward if you’re cool with that.   [01:26:06] Ashley James: Yeah. I could totally put the studies in the show notes. Off the top of your head, do you remember the results from reading any studies where they found that visualization actually opened up blood flow, for example?   [01:26:25] Dr. Jannine Krause: One of the studies that I’ve reviewed here is the Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine Journal article back from 2018. They were assessing acute physiological and psychological effects of Qi Gong in older practitioners. And what they found is that the heart rate variability, so the amount that the heart rate could be controlled over time improved. Because as I had mentioned before in the interview, heart rate variability is something that can tell us if we’re tapping into our parasympathetic rest, digest, and chill state. If we’re not getting into that state, our heart rate variability increases. How do we get our heart rate variability to keep it in check and manage it? We have to have proper circulation. This study was really awesome in that it looked at the correlation between the amount of times that someone was doing Qi Gong and their overall effect on heart rate variability. These folks were able to keep their heart rate in check much better by performing daily Qi Gong. We’ll have the link to this article so that you can see that Qi Gong does work. It’s not so woo-woo, and we’ve got some great data behind it. And why one of the things that I recommend for folks day in day out for helping with chronic pain and stress management.   [01:27:55] Ashley James: Awesome. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show today. Can you tell us how we can work with you?   [01:28:04] Dr. Jannine Krause: Sure. I am in Tacoma, Washington, so if anyone is local, you can come see me in person. I also offer programs online where we can do one-on-one coaching training, and I look at your labs. We go through all of that stuff to give you a great plan that helps address all of the issues that you’re dealing with. You can also find me on my podcast The Health Fix Podcast. That one is on every single area where you would find normal podcasts, and then my website is doctorjkrausend.com. You can find me over there, and I’ve got all kinds of info in terms of resources, blogs, and past podcasts. That’s a great way to get ahold of me. If you’re wanting to see my personality and a little bit more on me, you could head over to Instagram @drjanninekrause and you’ll find all kinds of fun stuff over there as well.   [01:29:01] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. You’re welcome back anytime. Always love to have a Naturopath on the show. Any last words of encouragement for those who are on the path to supporting their body’s ability to heal itself?   [01:29:18] Dr. Jannine Krause: Absolutely. Keep in mind that you have everything in you right now that you need to heal you. You just have to tap into it and work consistently. What happened to you didn’t happen overnight so it’s going to take some time to undo what’s happened, but you have everything there. It’s just a matter of practicing and working a little bit at it, and you can do it. You’ve got the tools right there. Just tap into them. Get an advisor, get a mentor, or somebody to help you with accountability such as Ashley or myself, and find someone who’s a really good fit for you and get that work done. You can do this.   [01:30:03] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much.   [01:30:05] Dr. Jannine Krause: You’re welcome. Thank you.   [01:30:07] Ashley James: 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. Jannine Krause! Website Podcast Facebook YouTube   Recommended Reading by Dr. Jannine Krause Joy From Fear by Dr. Carla Marie Manly  

Check out the supplements Ashley James recommends: takeyoursupplements.com Magnesium Soak: Use coupon code LTH at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount! Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coaching   Beating Type 2 Diabetes with Whole Foods https://www.learntruehealth.com/beating-type-2-diabetes-with-whole-foods   Highlights: How to reverse type 2 diabetes Importance of knowing the body well Recommended resources when starting a whole food plant-based diet   Some people have illnesses that they don’t know about until it has progressed to the late stages. In this episode, Eric Adams shares his story of how he got diagnosed with advanced stage type 2 diabetes and how his diabetes went in remission by changing his diet and lifestyle. His inspiring story shows that we can still turn our life around by making healthy choices.   Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love today’s interview. Please share it with all of your friends and family members who have diabetes—type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, or they’re worried about getting diabetes or their blood sugar. This is going to definitely help them. If you’re looking to learn how to cook and eat the way that this man did to reverse his diabetes and heal all of his health issues, please go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. My dear friend Naomi and I have created a wonderful course. We teach you how to cook whole food plant-based so the whole family will enjoy these dishes, and that you can use your kitchen, use your fridge, use your stove, and use the food that you eat every day to heal your body. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. Please also join our Facebook group. We have a wonderful Facebook community. You can go to learntruehealth.com/group or just search Learn True Health on Facebook. Come join our very supportive and wonderful Facebook community. If you’re looking for supplements, especially our wonderful mineral supplements, please go to takeyoursupplements.com. Fill out the form and a health coach, who has been trained by Naturopathic physicians, will reach out to you and help you get on the right supplements for you, especially the mineral supplements, which are so amazing for helping to restore the body especially when we’ve had problems with blood sugar issues. These supplements helped me along with a diet of very healthy foods, helped me to reverse my type-2 diabetes several years ago, and led me down the path of wanting to become a health coach and helping others do the same. For learning about the foods that you can use to heal your body and how to cook that way so that the food is delicious and healing, go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. For the Facebook group, search Learn True Health on Facebook. And for the supplements that I recommend that I’ve been working with since 2011 with all my clients the supplements, the supplements that are designed by Naturopathic physicians to support optimal health, go to takeyoursupplements.com. Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you love. Enjoy today’s interview. It’s such an inspiring one. I’m so happy that you’re here to listen to it.   [00:02:36] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 437. I am so excited to have on the show today a man who has such a wonderful history in helping the American population and helping the people of Brooklyn and also healing his own diabetes. I love your story, really excited to have you on the show today, Eric Adams. It’s such a pleasure to have you here. Now you’re president of Brooklyn. I’m originally from Canada so I don’t exactly understand all of the politics of the states. Although I live here now and I love living in America. Maybe you can just tell me what does it mean to be the president of Brooklyn.   [00:03:28] Eric Adams: That’s a great question. I don’t know if our founding fathers of the borough understood the complexity that they were going to create in history over this, but it would be equivalent to what many municipalities will call the county executive.   [00:03:48] Ashley James: Okay, got it.   [00:03:49] Eric Adams: Brooklyn is one of the counties in New York City. We have five counties and Brooklyn is the largest of the five counties. I am the president or county executive of Brooklyn, New York.   [00:04:06] Ashley James: It’s kind of like being the mayor of Brooklyn?   [00:04:09] Eric Adams: Exactly, exactly. You have to make sure all of our agencies are providing the necessary services for the residents as well as we put a large amount of money into various capital projects. It’s a very easy way for the people of the borough to be able to reach out to their borough-wide elected [inaudible 00:04:34] because New York is a very complicated place to govern, and this is a good way to do it.   [00:04:41] Ashley James: Absolutely. I love your history. I’m going to have the link to your bio in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com because the work that you’ve done through the years has been wonderful. You were a policeman in New York City. You helped co-found 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care—work that you’ve done in the past is really helping to pave the way for so many people. You also worked in the New York State Senate. Tell us a bit about your struggle with diabetes, though. When you look at your bio, you’re so busy. I’m sure many people who develop diabetes they’re so busy. I also had type 2 diabetes, so I know. I just didn’t take care of myself. I was so busy doing other things and all of a sudden I broke—my body broke. Tell us about your struggle with type 2 diabetes.   [00:05:37] Eric Adams: That’s a great point that you raised. I remember when I was told that I was type 2 diabetic, I remember my son saying to me, “Dad, you used to drive from service station to service station to get the best gas and oil to put in your car. You didn’t put the best food in your body?” That is our narrative. We pay more attention to the things in life—our jobs, our careers, our house, what color of paint in our rooms, and the type of clothing we wear. That which we have the most control over we really ignore for some reason and we turn it over to someone else to make a determination. That’s what happened to me four years ago when after years of just abusing my body, I was receiving pain in my stomach, discomfort. I knew it wasn’t gas. It was just really sitting still. I was out of the country and when I came back to New York, I went to my internist and told him about it. He sent me to have my stomach and my colon checked. At the time, when I came out of sedation, I was also experiencing a severe vision loss in my left eye, my right was also going as well, and tingling in my hands and feet. I learned later that I was at the late stages of diabetes, advanced stages of diabetes. It caused the vision loss and it caused the nerve damage in my hands and feet. I couldn’t even feel my right thigh.   [00:07:27] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [00:07:28] Eric Adams: It was only after that diagnosis that it just started me on a journey to figure this whole thing out.   [00:07:38] Ashley James: Did they have you on Metformin, insulin, or both?   [00:07:42] Eric Adams: It’s amazing that we all know the names.   [00:07:46] Ashley James: It’s kind of scary, isn’t it?   [00:07:49] Eric Adams: The doctor immediately told me he had to put me on insulin right away. He told me that I had to take two other medicines as well. I was given three medicines for my diabetes when I left the doctor’s office. I was given medicine for my vision loss, medicine for my ulcer—that was the original discomfort that I felt, medicine for my high blood pressure and cholesterol. I was just given so much medicine. I went in there with no medicine, I left out with a stack of medicines that I was going to have to take the rest of my life. He gave me a booklet, which was so significant that said living with diabetes. It gave me instructions on what to do, how to live with diabetes. I did something, I joke about this scientific. I went to Google and google reversing diabetes. That started me on a journey that I never looked at.   [00:08:54] Ashley James: Why didn’t you believe the doctor when the doctor said you had to have diabetes for the rest of your life and you had to be on this medication for the rest of your life? What kind of hubris did you have to go against the doctor to think that you could reverse diabetes?   [00:09:10] Eric Adams: That’s a great question. I think that there is something inside us that speaks to us but we ignore it too often because of the distractions in our lives. If we take a moment to sit down and allow our soul and spirit to speak to us, I think we’ll find more answers than we think because I could have easily typed living with diabetes, but that one word of living I reversed to reversing and it took me down a different road.   [00:09:45] Ashley James: Yes. I love it. I love it. When you think back, how long do you think you actually had type 2 diabetes undiagnosed? Can you look back and see the signs that you had diabetes for a long time and there’s a lot of signs that you ignored?   [00:10:05] Eric Adams: That’s a great question because the numbers are clear that there’s a substantial number of New Yorkers and Americans who go undiagnosed. It is quite possible because I was really at the last, the extreme advanced stages. When you reach the point of vision loss, nerve damage in all those other areas, I was at the advanced stages. I was probably diabetic for a good while. I would say three years probably. My body was just addressing it and fighting it. When you start getting those symptoms that means your body can no longer manage the high level of insulin resistance and it starts breaking down on you.   [00:10:58] Ashley James: You’re a very intelligent man. Looking at your bio, you’ve always been someone who takes action. You went home that day with a bag full of pills. With the news that your doctor says you’ll always have this condition, you have to manage the condition, and you have to live with the condition. That voice inside you said reverse instead of live with. What happened next? You’re googling, you’re starting to read, what happened next?   [00:11:32] Eric Adams: I’m just blown away when I started reading Dr. Esselstyn, Dr. Greger, Dr. Bonner, and other research. I’m like is this for real? Did I stumble on the National Enquirer or something and somebody’s going to tell me they found mineral on Mars. It’s just so bizarre. People don’t realize how bizarre it is to have your foundational understanding of a particular item shattered. That’s what I was going through. I was all of a sudden being faced with the foundation of understanding of life. The concept of disease reversal does not exist in our thought process in America. It is basically you get to a certain age, you’re going to get this. Because there was a moment in the doctor’s office that when he said it I said, “Well, you knew it was coming. Your mother’s diabetic, your uncles, and others.” We in the black community we use the term that she has a little sugar. We sweeten what diabetes is. In reality, there was a brief moment that I said, “Well, you knew it was coming.” It wasn’t until he said, “You know what, you’re going to lose your vision.” I was like wait a minute, I didn’t sign up for this. That became a motivator to find the truth. I just didn’t want to be in prison for the rest of my life with knowing I have to make sure I carried my insulin, make sure I carried my pills, and live through and benchmark my life through did you take your insulin shots before your meals. That’s not the life I wanted to live. I said, “I’m going to do whatever I could possibly do to turn that around.” I wasn’t a doctor, but I was a former cop so I knew how to do investigations, and darn it, I knew how to read. I was going to use those two assets to help me find some type of answers to the question. I was not going to be blamed for not trying.   [00:13:55] Ashley James: You start reading these doctors that layout how to reverse type 2 diabetes. Those have type 1, it’s a totally different disease. The body doesn’t produce enough insulin for type 1 so they are insulin-dependent, but according to these doctors, even type 1 diabetic can significantly improve their insulin sensitivity using this diet, this healing diet, so that their body requires less injected insulin. Type 1 diabetics who follow this protocol have seen great results and type 2 diabetics have reversed their diabetes under this way of eating that these doctors have laid out. You start to see that these doctors are saying that you can reverse type 2 diabetes. Do you start the next day? Walk us through how long does it take for you to start eating the way they tell you to eat?   [00:14:49] Eric Adams: I called Dr. Esselstyn and told him who I was and asked if could I see him. He said, “Yes, I’m in Ohio. If you can make it down to see me I would love to.” I flew to Ohio about a week later and met with him. I was extremely excited. I remember him telling me that if I eat certain foods and do certain things that I can actually reverse my diabetes. I remember laughing and saying this guy is some type of nut. I’m going blind he’s telling me to stop eating steak. What kind of madness is this? When I returned to the city, I started looking through my cupboard, my cabinets, and my pantry and I realized that all the food was processed. It was high in salt, high in sugar, and high in fat and oils. I was like wow. I said I have nothing to lose. After coming back to New York, I immediately turned to a whole food plant-based diet. Within three weeks my vision returned. Within three months my nerve damage went away, my diabetes went in remission, my cholesterol normalized, and my blood pressure normalized. The reason I went to the doctor in the first place, that ulcer, that ulcer went away.   [00:16:26] Ashley James: Was the last thing to go the ulcer? When did they also go away? How quickly did it go away?   [00:16:34] Eric Adams: That’s a great question because I don’t know when it went away because all of a sudden, one day, I said whatever happened to that ulcer? I don’t know if it was in three weeks, I don’t know if it was in a week, but I just remembered that just one day I just said hey, whatever happened to that ulcer?   [00:16:57] Ashley James: Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, and I’ve had him on the show before. I love my interview with him. He’s a cardiologist who published the world’s longest study on reversing heart disease using diet. His book is How to Reverse and Prevent Heart Disease. It’s a fantastic book. I definitely encourage listeners to listen to my interview with him. There’s a direct correlation between heart disease and diabetes. Those who have diabetes, and I don’t remember the exact statistic but it’s a statistic that will scare you, are most likely to die of heart disease. That diabetes causes heart disease. Maybe the diet that causes diabetes is also the same diet that causes heart disease, but they see that those who have diabetes are much more likely to die of heart disease. You said that you had cholesterol problems and blood pressure problems, that’s leading towards heart disease. Seeing Dr. Esselstyn, what were some things that you learned from him that you applied immediately? You mentioned that you ate a whole food plant-based diet, but what specifically did he have you do?   [00:18:08] Eric Adams: The oil content, particularly saturated fat. He really had me zero in on oil. Didn’t offer meat all together particularly red meat, understanding the power of that, understanding the power of green leafy vegetables—cruciferous vegetables, understanding the power of that. For the first time, it’s just what’s unimaginable as I think back on this. Here I am, 55 years old, and for the first time, I was learning how my body operates. I could tell you everything about my BMW. I could tell you the fuel injections, the exhaust system, the engine, and everything about it, but I knew nothing about my body, nothing about the importance of nutrients and how it plays a major role. It was through that visit that I started to listen to the foods he talked about. The power of beans and lentils. The power of different vegetables and what they do. He really started the process for me of learning of what we put in our mouths and how what we put in will impact how your body operates. Our bodies are machines and if you do not put in the right items it needs to fuel itself, then it’s not going to function. It’s almost like a car. You could put it in bad gas, watered-down gas. It will chunk along for years, but eventually, that engine, which is the heart, is going to break down. Eventually, the exhaust system, which is your colon, it’s going to break down. Eventually, your knees, which are the wheels, it’s going to break down. People who say well I’ve been eating this for years, yes, your car will run on bad gas for years, but when it breaks down it breaks down.   [00:20:22] Ashley James: Exactly. I love the car analogy because like you said, we will take better care of our car than our body. The fuel you put into your car, the work you put into your car to maintain, to prevent problems really does save your car and give your car life. We actually have in our garage a 1984 BMW 633CSi. We’ve had it for years. My husband takes care of it. He babies it. He replaced the engine in it. He’s about to replace the suspension. He babies it. What’s cool is that was the car I grew up in. My dad had that car back when I was a kid. I get to sit in the same car I grew up in, not the exact same but the same model. It’s so neat to have that. Because we maintain it so well, it’s in the same running state that it was over 30 years ago. How cool is that, right? That’s the same with our body. You really take care—we have 37.2 trillion cells in our body that require thousands of nutrients and phytochemicals every day to fully function. Sometimes people just eat crap food and their car is going to break down faster. But you’re saying we choose the right fuel for the body. How do we know that the whole food plant-based diet is the right fuel for everyone? You were able to go on a whole food plant-based diet and reverse all your health problems. I’ve seen so many people do the same. If I were to talk to the Eric Adams 10 years ago though and say you’ve got to give up steak, you got to give up oil, processed food, and sugar, that would seem impossible. I think to a lot of people who are listening, it seems impossible, but you had a paradigm shift. You had a breakthrough in your life. A breakthrough is when what you imagine is impossible all of a sudden becomes possible. You had that breakthrough and you said I have nothing to lose, I’m going to do it. You started eating fruits, vegetables, nuts seeds, whole grains, beans, legumes, and lots and lots of vegetables, and more vegetables, and more vegetables every day. Then you started to see the results come pouring in. What kind of advice can you give for people who think that would be too hard or impossible to give up some of the foods they’ve been eating their whole life and transition to a whole food plant-based diet in order to heal their body?   [00:22:52] Eric Adams: That’s such a great question because you’re right, if you would have come to me as a 30, 40, and probably even 50 years old, I would not have heard you. I would not have heard this message. Some people are much smarter than I. They can hear something important and automatically make a shift. Others, like myself, we don’t make those major shifts and what we’re doing and thinking until we reach a very dark period. Losing your sight and having the thoughts of losing your limbs is a wake-up call. Some people don’t wake at wakeup at all. They just keep hitting the snooze button. Different people are at different places. What we must do now is to demystify what a whole food plant-based diet is. Because if you were to rattle off to the list of things that I eat, one would automatically say wait a minute those are boring foods, those are not fun foods when it’s just the opposite. The variations of my meals, of my introductions of different spices in my life, and of the way I prepare my meals, I enjoy my food better than I ever did before. You can get the sweet taste that you’re looking for. You can get a salty taste mixing in lemon and vinegar together. You could use dates to give you a wonderful sweet taste. Fruits have natural sugars that won’t harm your body. It is about rethinking our relationship with food and then finding the entry points for people. What I found throughout this journey is showing parents how important it is to eat, to enjoy a healthy life with your children, and so your children could have a healthy life. It is alarming to know that 70% of 12-year-olds have early signs of heart disease. That’s the number one killer in America. We send up our children up for failure. I think those are the entry points that we need to find. Each of us, we all have different entry points. Some people eat healthily for their grandchildren, some people eat healthily because they’re going through a personal experience, and some people change what they doing because they just feel it’s the right thing to do for the environment. But we need to be there to show people how they can make the transition to one, food should look good, it should be good, but darn it, it should taste good. That’s how we stay connected to a good lifestyle change.   [00:25:45] Ashley James: It’s so true. I had that fear like oh vegetables don’t taste good, and then I decided to just try broccoli. I made broccoli. I love making steamed broccoli. I just steamed broccoli and I just ate a bowl full of broccoli. I sat there and I decided to just focus on how many flavors I could experience because I was so used to oily, salty, highly processed, and hyper-palatable foods. So just getting back to what is actually broccoli with nothing on it tastes like, and by the end of the meal, I could identify at least 10 different flavors. There’s a bit of salt in broccoli, there’s a bit of sweetness, and there are layers of flavor. If you just eat one food like just a potato with nothing on it—a yellow potato is my favorite thing in the world. You bake a yellow potato; it’s got the most delicious flavor profile. Just getting back to what does a red pepper tastes like with nothing on it, eating a mono food, just one food and trying to experience all the flavors in that food really makes you realize you don’t need to add oil, salt, and sugar to mask the flavor of these beautiful foods. I love that you added adding lemon, lime, or balsamic. Balsamic is something that Dr. Esselstyn says to add to your food often because it is really healing for the cardiovascular system because it increases the nitric oxide. I know that you have to go so I want to honor your time. What resources do you have? Do you want to plug any websites or books? Do you have any resources that you want to recommend?   [00:27:28] Eric Adams: The starting point is really Dr. Greger’s book How Not to Die. An amazing book that really is a starting point to allow people to become smarter around food. The second favorite of mine is Forks Over Knives Meal Plan because it’s a step-by-step, day-by-day, seven-week meal plan starting with one meal of a day of what you take out and make it into a whole food, healthy, and good tasting meal. The recipes are amazing inside the book. People who like pancakes, you can make healthy pancakes. People who like rice, you can use instead of white rice, brown rice. It’s just a great meal plan that could be extremely helpful. The combination of those two books really sets the tone of what I believe is a good first step and a first start. You can start with just meatless Mondays. If you didn’t die because you didn’t have meat, you’ll see that it is possible eating a healthy life.   [00:28:41] Ashley James: I totally agree with you. Meatless Mondays is a great idea or there’s another one where you don’t eat meat until dinnertime or something like that where you try a few meals without meat. That was the first step for me because I had never had a meal without meat. It wouldn’t even be a meal to me if it didn’t have meat in it. To have meatless meals and then go whoa, I feel full, I feel good, this is great. You said in your story you very quickly saw changes. I really want to challenge people to try it for seven days. To go eliminate oil, salt, and sugar and to eat nuts, seeds, whole grains, legumes, beans, and tons of a variety of fruits and vegetables. Just try that. Just eat those whole foods that are obviously plants that’s why it’s whole food plant-based. Eat those foods for seven days. In your first seven days, what did you notice? Now I noticed that I woke up hours earlier. I was not groggy in the morning, I had way more energy, especially when I incorporated more potatoes. Because I was afraid of carbs, afraid of potatoes, but when I took out the fat and the meat and I added more carbohydrates—more potatoes, my blood sugar went down and stabilized. That freaked me out because I was eating more carbs than ever, but my blood sugar became better and I had more energy. I noticed throughout the day I had sustainable energy whereas when I ate meat, I was falling asleep all the time. We are told to be afraid of potatoes and afraid of carbs but it was the opposite. In the first seven days of you eating whole food plant-based, what did you notice? When people set out to do a seven-day challenge, what are they excited to notice in their bodies?   [00:30:31] Eric Adams: Definitely the weight loss. I started to feel as though I was not as bloated, not as constipated, and not as gassy. The lethargic feeling that used to accompany me throughout the day—my day is extremely full and busy. I would have to continuously take the sugar boost, eating some type of pastry, cake, or something that would boost my energy. Waking up in the morning just really energetic, ready to take on a day. I have a full day and I start extremely early. Being able to wake up with the right level of energy is so important because you’re interacting with people in the public, and they feed off your energy. It was just a combination of just feeling different. I don’t even recall, when I was 21, feeling the way I feel now. My body and my mind, the clarity of mind. But within the first seven days, you’re going to notice a difference in how you wake up, how you feel, and how your body feels. That your body no longer feels sluggish and weighted down.   [00:31:47] Ashley James: Amazing. I love it. It’s so true. Thank you so much, Eric Adams, for coming on the show today.   [00:31:51] Eric Adams: Thank you.   [00:31:52] Ashley James: It’s been such a pleasure. I’ll make sure all your links are in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Your message is inspiring and I love the work that you do. It’s been such a pleasure talking to you today.   [00:32:03] Eric Adams: Thank you. Have a good day.   [00:32:04] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Check out episode 232. It’s my interview with Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. Although the title is about heart disease, it’s the same diet that is used to reverse diabetes. In fact, it is used to help the body heal itself from many issues. Episode 232, my interview with Caldwell Esselstyn. I highly recommend you listen to it if you haven’t already. 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. 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 Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams!  Website Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube   Recommended Reading by Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams How Not To Die by Dr. Michael Greger

Contact Sunlighten Saunas for their Special Listener Sale during the month of June for Father's Day! Call 877-292-0020 Check out the supplements Ashley James recommends: takeyoursupplements.com Magnesium Soak: Use coupon code LTH at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount! Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coaching   Dr. Judy Mikovits’ Plague of Corruption https://www.learntruehealth.com/dr-judy-mikovits-plague-of-corruption   Highlights: Genetically modified foods cause different diseases such as cancer Vaccines are manufactured as one size fits all and are injuring some people Vaccines contaminated with lots of viruses Wearing a mask causes oxidative stress after some time   Is wearing a mask necessary to prevent you from getting COVID-19? Or is it doing more harm to the body than good? In this episode, Dr. Judy Mikovits uncovers some things that the mainstream media is not reporting. She talks about vaccinations, coronavirus, and wearing a mask. She also enumerates the things we should be doing to have a healthy immune system.   [00:00:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 436. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us, for me, this is like having a celebrity on the show, Dr. Judy Mikovits. I heard your interview with Robyn Openshaw, whom I’ve had on the show before. Then I started hearing you pop up in other places and many other alternative health interviews. The information you have to share is amazing, but what I’ve been equally as surprised is the pushback from the mainstream media, how they are trying to discredit you. You have such a strong background in science, and they’re trying to discredit you. That makes me feel like you’re on to something. They don’t want people to know your information. You came out with a book called Plague: One Scientist’s Intrepid Search for the Truth about Human Retroviruses and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and that is fascinating. So many people suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome that would love to know more about how they could support their body’s ability to heal itself and come back into balance. Recently, in April, you released with your co-author Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science. I’d love to talk about both your books today, and I’d also love to talk about wearing masks, about the coronavirus, and also about the background that you have that educates you in your interpretation of the current events that are going on. Welcome to the show.   [00:01:47] Dr. Judy Mikovits: Thanks so much, Ashley. It’s a delight to be here.   [00:01:51] Ashley James: Absolutely, yes.   [00:01:52] Dr. Judy Mikovits: In fact, our first book Plague, Kent Heckenlively co-authored that with me, it actually came out in November of 2014 and the paperback came out in 2017. What’s interesting about that is the paperback has new material in the front of the look all about what I didn’t know about the Plague of Corruption surrounding what happened to me about the events in Plague. We called it Plague because we associated a new family of AIDS-like viruses with contagious retroviruses from mice, not only with chronic fatigue syndrome. After our first paper was published about chronic fatigue syndrome, it became clear that these viruses, there was a large family of viruses, not only from mice, but from monkeys and other things that had heavily contaminated the blood supply then were associated with not only chronic fatigue syndrome but cancers, autism, autoimmune disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and multiple sclerosis—just a nightmare.   [00:03:12] Ashley James: Oh my goodness. That is revolutionary to be able to see that viruses could be the contributor of or the trigger for those illnesses. Why isn’t this more widespread? Why isn’t this information being more widely accepted?   [00:03:30] Dr. Judy Mikovits: Obviously, the problem is that the government caused it. The paper was celebrated when it came out because doctors everywhere saw it because it was published on October 8th in our science paper of the discovery of this new family of human retrovirus. What I should say is we didn’t necessarily discover it, the sequences, parts of those viruses had been described about two, three years earlier in men with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that was really not familial that appeared to be infectious. My background is cancer research, drug development, and immune therapy. That’s what I did at the National Cancer Institute for 22 years including my last job. From 1999 to 2001, before I left to go to industry, was the lab of antiviral drug mechanism. My job, in that job at the National Cancer Institute as a director of an internationally recognized program, was to understand how HIV/AIDS-associated cancers. How to cure them? What were biomarkers? What was driving cancer in some people with HIV like Kaposi sarcoma will remember, brain cancers, some kinds of lung cancers, or leukemia? There were other viruses associated. We learned that Kaposi sarcoma, which ended up being a herpes virus, collaborating with the HIV and so you could target both. We’ve made great strides since 1999 in curing HIV/AIDS-associated, not only malignancies but other diseases such that we now know quite well, we see it on TV every day, you can have HIV and never get AIDS. This was my background that you asked for. It’s experience started with a biochemistry degree from the University of Virginia, started to develop immune therapies. Remember, vaccines are immune therapies. What that means is my entire life’s work is based on the idea, the hypothesis, the fact now that we know is the fact that you can educate the immune system to prevent and treat infectious and chronic diseases including cancer. My first job was to purify type 1 interferon and that interferon was the first immune therapy used. It’s actually, still to this day, a fabulous prevention strategy for even coronaviruses and other retroviruses and would have been a treatment for AIDS. But the Plague of Corruption, the reason we wrote the second book, is what we realized in August of 2014 when our first book was impressed. What I realized when I first met one of my heroes Dr. Brian Hooker who uncovered, who dogged criminal scientist William Thompson of the CDC who admitted their studies were fraud, who admitted they covered up the fact that if you gave vaccines to black boys MMR in that particular study if you gave MMR to black boys before they were three years old, they had a four-fold higher risk of developing autism and even being killed by those vaccines by SIDS. Here in 2020, nobody seems to recognize that for 20 years from 2001 when they covered up the data in a paper that William Thompson was an author on and then they had a date a burning party, this is what Dr. Brian Hooker uncovered. He’s really the hero in all of this because had I never met him on August 31, 2014, we would have never realized that the Plague of Disease is this explosion in cancer and chronic diseases that we see today was in fact caused by heavily contaminated blood supply since the 80s, since the earliest days of HIV/AIDS through vaccines, which all liability had been removed from in 1986. They were heavily contaminated by lots of viruses, not just the family we discovered—mycoplasma, mold, think of chronic Lyme disease, and Borrelia. You don’t get a bull’s-eye, why? Because you injected it, you weren’t infected with it.   [00:08:58] Ashley James: I watched the Vaxxed documentary and that’s something I think everyone should watch no matter where they stand on vaccines. I think we need to step back and just be okay with taking in information that may go against our current belief system. If we’re holding so firmly onto our belief system that it becomes dogma, then we blind ourselves to a new truth that may arise. I’m not asking anyone to be in anti-vaxxer or a pro-vaxxer or whatever. I’m just asking people to open their minds enough to let new information in. I wasn’t expecting to actually receive much new information going into watching the documentary Vaxxed, but it absolutely floored me when I learned about what you just talked about where you can look at the numbers and clearly see that African-American children have a huge disadvantage when given the MMR vaccine over other people with different genetics. Genetics come into play. Can you explain that a bit further? How certain people with different genetics are affected by vaccines, and why are we giving the same vaccines to all children across the board if we’re seeing that there’s more damage being done to certain people of genetic makeup?   [00:10:31] Dr. Judy Mikovits: There are genetic and epigenetic. That means environmental susceptibilities and that’s one of the saddest parts about the story Vaxxed. I appreciate you saying to watch that because, in fact, there’s a second movie called Vaxxed 2: The People’s Truth. Polly Tommey, who was in the first movie and her son severely injured by a vaccine. He was an African-American. One of the things I should clarify is that white boys had two-fold, a higher fold risk if given the vaccine before a certain age. One of the reasons goes back to those cancer-causing viruses and the susceptibilities for the prostate cancer because what happens is, genetically, we have a lot of different enzymes in our immune systems that degrade RNA viruses. This is what MMR. Those are three different RNA viruses. We inject them in a single shot along with, for a while, mercury but certainly other contaminants, which we’ve uncovered over the last few years since there’s no liability now for 30 years and no safety testing has been done. This is another thing that people don’t realize. Anyway, your detox machinery—your liver, your kidneys, and your immune system—doesn’t fully develop until you’re at least three or four years old. As people think back, I’m 62 years old and I didn’t get a measles vaccine because I had a measles infection. I had the disease and therefore I had immunity from life. I would never, even if exposed, have an issue again. That remains true to this day. In fact, MMR, it’s not only blacks but it’s dark-skinned—Mexican, people around the equator—they have different responses to the pathogens in their environment. They have a single nucleotide difference in one of the key degradation, so it breaks down. It’s an enzyme that when it sees RNA or RNA viruses in the blood, it just acts like a Pac-Man because RNA in the blood is a very bad thing. You want RNA in your nucleus. You don’t [love 00:13:07] your cell and it’s protected by two membranes the nuclear membrane and the cellular membrane. When RNA and DNA, your blueprints for making proteins and regulating all of your gene expression, end up in the blood and in the cytoplasm of your body, it says uh-oh, that’s a danger-associated molecular pattern—remember, I’m a molecular biologist—or a pathogen-associated molecular pattern. It goes and uses different kinds of enzymes that recognize those different patterns and it just chews it all up like a Pac-Man. There’s a single change that makes the enzymes in blacks, Mexicans, and people near the equator have 50% less activity. That is they don’t chew up those RNA viruses as quickly. We don’t really know why. Nobody really knows why. In fact, if those data hadn’t been covered up for political reasons in 2001, we in the Cancer Institute who knew nothing about autism, which was 1 in 10,000 kids and when I graduated from the University of Virginia in 1980. My minor was in children retardation, that kind of thing, for children and looking at those kinds of things to try and understand exactly the questions you’re asking. It was educational. Why are some kids sick, developmental disorders, and things like that? Autism wasn’t even in those books in 1976 to 1980, in our textbooks. What we learn, if we don’t cover up data that reveal inconvenient truth, is we could actually prevent so much injury. That was what was so devastating to me. The realization in 2014 is oh my God, you covered up that those data for 20 years. We didn’t understand why there were differences because we didn’t even understand RNA cells and the immune system or these pathways. New technology, new data, and new opportunities for healing diseases, and understanding the causes. We thought there was no problem with GMOs and it sounds like a good idea. We can feed the world, but in fact, you can’t genetically modify organisms without having them harm other organisms because they are they harm the gene regulation of the entire, whether it be plant or an animal. These are things that are designed by God for a purpose to be used as food. Now we know GMOs can actually contribute and cause cancer and all of the diseases we’re talking about and this is the problem. If all you had to do was wait until black boys were three years old and wait to administer that shot, well nobody administered a single shot anywhere to me until I was five years old. I think I got the oral polio vaccine in kindergarten and of course, we got smallpox, which was then cowpox under the arm. That’s all we got in my life. We got nothing at puberty. We got nothing in 7th grade. We got nothing to go to college. We got nothing at all. I didn’t get another vaccine until I was working with AIDS patients. I was encouraged to get a hepatitis B vaccine, which I did because I was of childbearing age but my boss at the time who was 46 or 50, he said, “No, thanks. I don’t need it. I’m not going to have any more kids. I don’t need to worry about these things.” It’s very interesting how our world has changed. This is why I really appreciate you encouraging people to watch these movies and read these books. There is no such thing as an anti-vaxxer. Every one that is called an anti-vaxxer now is an ex-vaxxer because they were injured and the government didn’t take care of them as the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program of 1986. What that did was remove all liability from pharmaceutical manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, from doctors, and from anybody giving vaccine saying hey, we don’t understand those genetic and epigenetic susceptibilities. Vaccines are unavoidably unsafe, so for the greater good, we’re going to remove all liability. But the government is going to compensate the injured. That program has been so corrupted over the last 30 years. As a part of that program, the government—the HHS, NIH, NIAID, we hear National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease—they were told it was their job to make them safe. To do the safety testing, to see if the combinations, to see if the age ranges, and to do the safety studies in the appropriate populations you were giving the vaccines. We learned only last year by dog at work by Bobby Kennedy in the Children’s Health Defense organization and Del Bigtree of the ICAN decide, that not a single safety test has been done. Not a single safety test or efficacy test has been done. The vaccines aren’t looked at in any way. Every year they roll out a flu vaccine. They don’t look at it at all. They don’t do any safety testing. They don’t do any testing to see if these mouse viruses, monkey viruses, or coronaviruses. The flu vaccine they rolled out on Italy in 2019 had four different live attenuated that means weakened strain. Live attenuated, that means they make a virus, that means you make a virus, that means you’re being injected with four different strains of influenza, and they grow they manufacture the little virus factory are dog kidney cells. Dog kidney cells have lots of coronaviruses. Dogs, all animals, even a flu vaccine grown in chicken eggs have coronaviruses. Here, we don’t look at them at all. We’re talking about a coronavirus that somehow escaped and one person traveled around the globe and hit 190 countries overnight in what really appears to be what drove this plandemic, and I’m just going to keep calling it that because it has little to do with an infectious virus that we’re exposed to by the natural route. It probably has everything to do with a coronavirus, a novel engineered virus from Wuhan, China as we all clearly know now that has in the cell line it was grown in. It was the Vero E6 kidney cells. They were manufacturing growing that virus up in large stocks and shipping it around the world to other investigators in Switzerland, in North Carolina, in Wuhan, and at Fort Detrick. All of this is funded by Tony Fauci and NIAID. Here, you’re manufacturing that in monkey kidney cells. Well, that’s where we get HIV. That’s simian immune deficiency virus is the ancestor of humans. How do animal viruses jump into humans? That’s the big question. Our studies in 2011 said the most likely way mouse cancer-causing and neuro-immune disease-causing retrovirus contagious jumped into humans was by vaccines. Because we’re injecting them. You don’t need to be exposed if you’ve injected them. This is the problem. Nobody’s shown one piece of evidence that said the flu vaccines, particularly, in Italy and here in the United States that the program, over the last four years with contaminated while they were doing that research. Remember, they were doing that research in the same facilities where they’re manufacturing vaccines— polio vaccines. Vero monkey kidney cells are what we grow polio vaccines in. MMR and live attenuated viral vaccines hepatitis, chickenpox, these vaccines are grown in animal tissue. What our book, Plague of Corruption, raised the horrible question. The whole thing about mixing animal tissues and injecting them into immune incompetent, meaning you’re compromised because you’re very young and you haven’t developed that machinery as I just said. You’re compromised because you’re very old and your immune system has been cleaning up these things forever and it gets overwhelmed. What are we doing is we’re taking the most vulnerable parts of our society and we’re injecting them with animal tissues and we’re driving these pandemics literally around the world. This knowledge, all while we were doing these flu vaccines in 2012 through 2018, we were doing these studies with China in the US, in China, at Harvard, and in Switzerland and sending these cell lines, these little virus factories, containing these coronaviruses, these bat viruses, and these monkey viruses and they were recombining. Things got unleashed in contaminated water supplies, feces of animals. We don’t realize we don’t only vaccinate humans, we vaccinate our food, we vaccinate our animals, we vaccinate our herds, and their viromes then wake up and can infect humans in the form of GMOs like bovine growth hormone. There’s a whole chapter in our book about my work in pharmaceuticals on the GMOs and how they were damaging human cells. It’s just the explosion of disease is because this has been covered up now for at least two decades.   [00:24:27] Ashley James: This cover-up must be global. I’m just thinking back to what you said about when looking at the results with those people of color that when they’re vaccinated with the MMR before the age of three, if you look at the raw data, people can see that statistically, they suffer a greater vaccine injury like autism than those who are not from the equator or they’re genetic, their ancestors aren’t from the equator or near the equator. That’s been covered up for 20 years. My question was going to be like who in the United States covered it up? But it’s not just the United States. It’s every country around the world has been using these vaccines and every country must also have been covering it up. That’s just as a global cover-up.   [00:25:29] Dr. Judy Mikovits: Think about what we’re doing right now. The WHO, sure it is a global cover-up. There have been groups in Sweden and in Somalia with the Gardasil injury and this fraud by Merck. These immune mechanisms don’t just go that way. We see a lot of people in the UK, Ireland, and Sweden because they don’t get a lot of sunlight. Vitamin D receptors are quite different, vitamin D signaling is quite different in people from the equator and people in Minnesota or Sweden because you don’t get a lot of sunlight. Vitamin D receptors have to act like amplifiers if you don’t get much sunlight because that’s how we convert vitamin D into the active form that controls more than 300 immune reactions and counting. Yet if you’re near the equator where you get a lot of sun, your vitamin D receptors have to act as resistors. One is amplifiers, one resistor. One molecule looks like 1000 if your genetics are from certain countries, and one molecule looks like 1/1000 if you’re from near the equator. These are things we just simply don’t know about. What we do with vaccines is say one size fits all. It doesn’t fit all and we give the same. Why would we give we didn’t develop? This is always the royal we. The guy who discovered and made the hepatitis B vaccine, a scientist doctor, was horrified when he learned we gave it to hours old babies. That’s not what he intended that work to be done for. This is the big problem is the scientists like me, the rank and file, we’re doing this to cure cancer. My whole life was to use natural products, use plants, educate the immune system, eat healthily, don’t get yourself any toxins, stay out of the way, and we’ll save everything. I helped work on those immune therapies. I developed those things. I encouraged my own family to get the Gardasil shot because we thought they’d done the right studies. We thought they’d done a saline control. They didn’t do anything at all. Worse than that, they covered up the damage done by these things. Yes, it’s a worldwide global—most of the vaccine manufacturers aren’t in the US. They’re in Europe, they’re in China. Think about the garbage that’s coming into this country and yet nobody ever looks at what’s being injected and forced into your arm or you don’t get an education. Now they hit the big detonates switch. I believe it’s because the royal we, these groups, we’ve been fighting for decades. Brian Hooker spent 15 years dogging William Thompson—tell the truth, tell the truth. How can anybody call me an anti-vaxxer? Really? We discovered half of the immune system in the therapies. We saved millions from HIV by our discoveries on how HIV can cause disease. We have TV commercials for HIV prophylaxis. That means pre-exposure prophylaxis. You can live your lifestyle any way you want and should you come in contact with somebody with HIV, we have therapies, we have prevention strategies. We have those same prevention strategies for coronavirus like 70-year old drug hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drugs that we know low dose is fabulous for anti-inflammatory diseases. Coronaviruses don’t hurt you by themselves. It’s the inflammation, it’s the fire. We know those mechanisms. That’s what we’ve been doing. That’s what I’ve been doing for 40 years and probably closer to 50 years because I started doing it when I was 12 years old. I never looked back from junior high school when my grandfather died of lung cancer. I’m thinking, why don’t we save somebody. Cancer was a closet disease. Okay, you don’t smoke; okay, you don’t expose yourself to asbestos. Now we learned that they injected in the polio vaccines knowingly from 55-65, gave millions of people simian virus 40, which is lung cancer, mesothelioma, a cancer-causing virus, and many different kinds of cancers. We isolated in 2009 mouse viruses, monkey viruses, and bird gamma retroviruses. In MMR 5, a study was done in 2019 by an independent group called Corvelva in Italy. They showed dozens of human viruses, dozens of horse viruses, and dozens of other viruses. You don’t need an infectious virus if you injected it. This is why I particularly wanted to come onto your show today because if we don’t want to see round two, three, four, or five of your COVIDS, the worst thing any person can do is get a flu shot, a pneumonia shot, or a Prevnar shot. If we get those shots this year if people don’t wake up and they say I’m going to get my shot to prevent—no. When that sign, as we drive by on the highway here in California, says save lives, act responsibly. Yes, act responsibly. Do not get a vaccine. Do not wear a mask. The mask is immune-suppressing you. The mask is causing you to activate your latent, you’re silenced, your immune system has degraded those viruses. You wake them up. You get oxygen-depleted. You make yourself sick. Every one of those viruses goes right through any one of those masks and you’re making people sick and thinking you’re helping them, but most importantly, you’re killing yourself. If you get a flu shot or Prevnar, they give them on the same day and they act like they only gave you the flu shot, Prevnar right now is 23 different microbial antigens with a screamingly heavy dose of microbial upper respiratory infection causing pneumonia, causing antigens with a heavy dose of aluminum. You inject that in one arm, in the other arm you give those live attenuated flu cause that kind of upper respiratory infection, that cough in an immune-compromised person, in somebody, an old person who’s already on all kinds of drugs. We have no idea how much garbage is in those needles. Nobody knows what’s in those needles because nobody’s been allowed to test them, but Corvelva in Italy in 19, in 18 got samples of these vaccines and did the kinds of studies with the technologies and showed how many heavy metals. That stuff is so caustic. They found the metal from the needle in the people’s blood. You could see red blood cells from other animals in the people in the Gardasil shot in the [inaudible 00:33:36] paper of 2017. I can provide these to you so you can post them for all the world to see, but it’s absolutely horrific what’s being done. This is why we need to talk right now and we need to tell everybody to wake up. If you’ve ever had the flu or you’ve ever had the flu vaccine, you’re as protected from getting a bad disease as you’re ever going to get. We know that the coronavirus, even this engineered SARS-CoV-2 with HIV sequences in it from that cell line they grew it in, even with that, most people are healthy. Healthy people don’t spread disease. There’s no such thing as an asymptomatic carrier. Just as you said, yeah, it’s a worldwide effort. If your listeners, watch thehighwire.com with Del Bigtree from last Thursday, you will see the World Health Organization official who said, “Oh, wait a minute, we made a mistake. Oh, yeah, it’s very rare that an asymptomatic person will spread disease so you don’t have to wear the mask. We know that every single thing Fauci says and the Deborah Birx and Robert Redfield, they’ve gone back on and shown to be wrong. Robert Redfield said, “Well, the mask and the distancing, that stopped influenza this year.” No, it didn’t. No, it didn’t. The people that got the flu vaccine and wore the mask died and they called it COVID-19. When you watch those two shows, you’ll watch how the brave nurses and doctors undercover are realizing they’re killing the people in the hospitals. They’re killing them with the protocols that have nothing to do with the coronavirus, with ventilators that have nothing to do with what the person is presenting with. You’re walking and then your relatives can’t see you. They cremate you. They don’t do an autopsy. It’s all a big cover-up. It’s a plandemic and a Plague of Corruption. The single most important thing we can all do to prevent round two is never get another vaccine until they do the studies and they prove everything we’re saying is wrong. That’ll take a few years and then we’ll realize we can regain our health. That’s the only thing. I can guarantee you, I do these cases in vaccine court. The flu vaccine killed far more people this year than the coronavirus, than COVID-19. It’s difficult to sit here as a scientist. Hey, they’ll take this down as soon as I put it up. We’ve offered. I’ve sat here for the last three months and said I’ll talk to anybody, Here, show me the data. What did that WHO official do? See the data keep revealing. It’s not just my data. I don’t do any data. Hey, I lost my job a long time ago. I haven’t worked in a lab in a decade. All you have to do is read the literature. All you have to do is look around. Wait a minute, the WHO stopped hydroxychloroquine based on two fraudulent papers in Lancet. We commissioned fraud and really quickly, a whole bunch of papers come out so you mass prevent this. What about the four decades of research, the OSHA, and the federal regulations that say don’t wear a mask if your oxygen drops from 23%, which is what’s in the air or something close to that to 17%—you do brain damage. That’s 15 minutes in a mask, or if you’re an old person, this is Peggy Hall, thehealthyamerican.org. I’m saying things that your listeners can look up. Lookup The Highwire show. This isn’t me talking. This is all of us doing every we can to save humanity and our way of life. Every measure they’ve made is based on a model that didn’t turn out to work out, and every word I’ve said for four decades is based only on data. I show you the data. I’ve shown you the data in our papers. I’ve heavily referenced, we have heavily referenced both books, not one word from Fauci. Answer it. Don’t take science the journal and say Judy Mikovits is now a bartender because she couldn’t get a job. Yeah, I’m a chemist and yeah, I make a great drink. I’m a Staff Commodore and a volunteer at a yacht club in Ventura, California where I joined in 2000. I was the Commodore in 2006. Yeah, it’s volunteer so I make an occasional drink, but the way it’s spun is Judy Mikovits is the person who never did anything. The data don’t show that. I don’t care what you say about me, just show the data. They won’t show the data and the news will censor everything. Show us. Your audience can think well, wait a minute, she’s right. We never wore a mask before. Why would you immune suppress? Dr. Russell Blaylock, a fabulous clinician, probably a little my age or a little older, wrote a very beautiful paper about all the immune suppression with masks. That very memory immune, CD4 memory response you need to remember you saw a pathogen before that pathogen-associated molecular pattern. That is quickly extinguished with a mask.   [00:39:29] Ashley James: Can you explain that? Can you just dive into that a little bit and explain it? Explain why wearing a mask is harmful? You’ve talked about the lower oxygen, but how does it actually negatively affect the immune system?   [00:39:43] Dr. Judy Mikovits: Because the immune system, we’re meant to live with it at a certain level of oxygen. Oxidative stress, we have lots of antioxidants in healing plants, right? When inflammation, white blood cells go off in inflammation because there’s a problem, it’s like sending fire trucks to the fire. When you’re inflamed, when you’ve seen a toxin or a pathogen, your white blood cells wake up and you go to the site of tissue injury. The major antioxidant intracellularly in between your nucleus and your cellular membrane is glutathione. Glutathione is quickly taken up when you aren’t breathing enough oxygen because you’ve created oxidative stress so now you need more of your most potent antioxidant glutathione. You make that out of three amino acids and glycine is the critical one because glyphosate, which is Roundup, now all our food is poisoned with glyphosate. We don’t get as much healthy building blocks of those three amino acids to make up glutathione for your cells. You’re crippling your antioxidant in your cells and all of a sudden, pathogens get in. If you don’t get vitamin D and vitamin C those are your extracellular and those stimulates. When you’re wearing a mask you’re depleting your oxygen, your alarm signal goes off and says oxidative stress. You’ll get dizzy, you’ll get migraines. What is pain? Pain is inflammation. Pain is dysregulation of your endocannabinoid in your immune system so it says hey we got a really big problem over here, send out more troops. You deplete your CD4 T-cells. I’m telling you the way I hope you can see it visually and not as a chemist. You deplete the CD4 T-cells because you exhaust them. You say I’m under siege. No, you’re not under siege, you’re just not breathing air. It goes into something called lactic acidosis so your mitochondria take oxygen in the respiratory chain through the eight different complexes in your mitochondria. The powerhouses in the cytoplasm cell that’s what makes ATP, that’s what makes energy. You’re getting less if you’re not breathing air. If you’re compromised anyway because you’re inflamed because you’ve gotten a vaccine, vaccines are made to inflame. Turn on the immune system to fight the invader they’re injecting, the antigen they’re injecting. That gives you a memory response. If you’re compromised you can’t clear it, you can’t make enough as we’ve been talking. We’re not plants. We don’t do photosynthesis for energy. There are many, many more than one mechanism, but the point with OSHA’s safeguarding and Peggy Hall and thehealthyamerican.org will show this in Orange County, she won. She won the OSHA federal safeguards—says if you wear a mask, regardless of who you are, your oxygen blood drops below 17. You can put a little measuring thing in there and everybody’s going to be different. My husband and I have lung diseases that he’s had for years and I was born with. That’s why my voice sounds like this. I have a deviated septum, which means I can’t breathe through my nose at all. If you drop below 17, the little alarm will go off and that’s doing brain damage. That’s going to make you dizzy. If you wear a mask sitting in a closed car, what exactly are you going to get sitting in a closed car with the person you shared spit with for 20 years? That doesn’t make any sense. That’s like driving drunk because you’ve inflamed yourself. It’s called acidosis at a point 15, 20 minutes, you’re dizzy, you’re confused, you go over the lane. You’re already 90-year-old going over the lane. I know my husband’s 82, he drives badly. It’s like really? If you have a car crash, whose fault is it? Is it the government or did you die of COVID-19? No, you don’t wear a mask in a car with all the windows rolled up getting pollution from the car. It’s sitting in traffic in LA in the heat or think of even a healthy young man. We know people and they talk to me because I’m me, but we know people who work in your local Lowe’s store. They climb up ladders all day long and they wear that mask. They get a headache and by the time they get home at night, they’re in pain, they feel horrible, they have migraines, they can’t breathe, and they’re exhausted. The next day they go back to work and they fall off the ladder. I can’t even imagine putting a construction worker at the top of a ladder on a building and leaving him in the hot sun here in California. No, this has nothing to do with human health. You don’t walk down a beach. You breathe air. You ground your feet in the soil, in the microbe, all those nice microbial sequences in the soil from things that naturally degrade—marine biomes, plants naturally degrade. That’s natural immune-boosting through your skin, your immune system. You don’t hide in your house with Clorox, those spray cleaners. I sat at a coffee shop where all the employees this morning had masks on because they’re required by law. In comes the Terminix guy to spray. I’m like oh no. I just pointed to a couple of doctors who were with me and I pointed at him. I could cry looking at this. I see people spraying baseball stadiums to let everybody in and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. What’s in those toxic cleaners? You’re going to concentrate that on your mask. That’s going to further inflame your throat. People ask me, do you wear a mask? Yeah, I wore masks in my life. I wore masks in 2017 when I lived in Ventura, California, as I do now, and the Thomas fires. The smoke was so heavy that you couldn’t breathe for days. Yeah, we had lung diseases and we got those exact N95 masks to stop the smoke. You stop other things from damaging your lungs. People say well they wear them in China. Yeah, it’s heavily polluted. Yeah, they wear them in China. Places where they’re heavily polluted. Places where they’re heavily concentrated. There are a lot of people with a lot of different things in pollution. It’s not drive yourself and drive the inflammation in your throat. I couldn’t wear a mask 10 seconds before that ringer would go off and I don’t wear one. I didn’t wear one. I worked for 25 years, in fact, it’s probably closer to 40 years, isolating those very retroviruses I mentioned. Those cancer-causing and AIDS-causing viruses from sick people. We wear masks in surgery situations to keep everything sterile, but you don’t wear them in the hallways of the hospital. You don’t compromise your own immune system. I never wore a mask working with a patient ever and I isolated HIV. I never got it either because the last thing I wanted to do was immune suppress myself.   [00:47:42] Ashley James: I felt like people were being a little sensitive when it came to masks. I kind of was like oh, masks aren’t a problem. They’re not going to lower my oxygen levels. I had this little medical mask. The kind that like dental hygienists would wear. I used it to go into Whole Foods. I’ve only been wearing it quickly, get some groceries, get out because they have signs everywhere. The times I went to the grocery store and refused to mask I would just get dirty looks the whole time. I don’t need that. I’m going to just blend into the crowd, wear a mask, and get out. The last time I did, this was a few weeks ago, I nearly collapsed. It was really scary because I didn’t really believe that a mask could make me faint. I’m not sick, I’m a healthy person. But standing in line, I’ve been wearing it for maybe 15 minutes, I started to blackout. I couldn’t see anymore. I was fainting, basically. I tore the mask off and it took me hours to recover. My heart was racing, I was so terrified. I was just absolutely terrified. I can’t imagine what the workers who are being forced to wear a mask eight, nine hours a day are going through. Now to hear what you say that it really does lower the oxygen levels in our blood and cause inflammation, cause the body to have to eat up our glutathione, which is a very costly thing for the body to make, especially if someone’s nutrient-deficient like selenium, for example, recycles the body’s glutathione. Most people are deficient in that mineral. Someone who may be nutrient to deplete in certain nutrients, it would cause them quickly to have ill health even further. Right now, we’re so focused on keeping the immune system healthy. If we watch the mainstream media it’s like Armageddon out there. If we follow the mainstream media we are terrified for our lives. Then we listen to doctors and PhDs like yourself who have been in this world from a scientist’s perspective for years and you’re saying masks are harmful in terms of how they’re being recommended to be used right now, that it is actually not helping us, and that we should be focusing on making sure we have our vitamin D and our vitamin C, making sure we’re eating organic non-GMO foods, making sure we’re getting out in the sunlight and fresh air.   [00:50:28] Dr. Judy Mikovits: Correct.   [00:50:30] Ashley James: What other things can we do to boost our immune system and stay healthy from the scientist’s perspective, from your perspective since you have studied the immune system for so many years?   [00:50:43] Dr. Judy Mikovits: A critical thing you just mentioned—minerals. We’re so mineral-depleted in zinc, magnesium, and manganese. Our soil has been heavily depleted. It’s contaminated with glyphosate. What you want to do more than anything is I would encourage a mineral supplement. I use products from different places but my mineral supplements are Quinton minerals and one other, I forget the name of them. You just get a really good, and I don’t just mean magnesium or manganese because you throw the balance of all of them. You want 97 different minerals mixed together just like nature in seawater. You want iodine with kelp because radiation is a huge issue in our inner health anyway, so all of these things are contributing to us being sicker, being susceptible, and being immune suppressed immune-compromised because our Earth’s been getting more polluted. With kelp that you can buy in your health food store. Things like liver bitters and detox for your liver. Keep your liver healthy, keep your kidneys healthy, so get a good mineral supplement. I’m looking through here to see what I usually take. The best precursor to glutathione supplement I know is called ProImmune. That’s Ted Fogarty MD product HBOT, a hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Saunas to detox. Detox all you can. You mentioned a lot of simple things. Just get out in the sunshine and take a walk. Don’t over-exercise because that becomes stress. When you’re sick, certainly, stay home. I use cannabinoids to calm the flames. I call that the dimmer switch on the immune system. I get a lot of things from quicksilverscientific.com. That’s Chris Shade’s company.   [00:53:14] Ashley James: I’ve had him on the show. He’s got a glutathione as well—oral glutathione.   [00:53:21] Dr. Judy Mikovits: That’s what I was going to say. He’s got a new product that he just gave A, D, K, and E because usually you can’t get vitamins A, D, K, and E except from fats, except from meats because you’ll be deficient in those if your food is contaminated. We eat healthy farm-grown. I mean all the way from eggs and meat we know our farmer. My friend, Dr. Zach Bush, said a few years ago on a Del Bigtree show, he said, “Forget your doctor, know your farmer.” Get good healthy eggs. It’s difficult in this world to be vegan because you need A, D, K, and E, but I do know that Chris Shade just came out with a new product that has those. He has a liposomal vitamin C. I’m not encouraging that we just supplement, supplement, supplement, just eat healthy food, but here in this day and age, we really do need to supplement glutathione. It’s from Quicksilver Scientific. They have something called ultra-binder. It’s charcoal, it’s a fulvic humic charcoal blend that I just shake. One little packet a day I think it cost, I don’t know. It can’t cost 50 cents. Maybe $1, who knows. I shake it up in the morning and I simply just take the ultra-binder in good clean water. We’ve got to have good clean filtered water. Fiji water, the brand name Fiji is great for removing aluminum. It’s a little bit of everything. That ultra-binder will even take out mercury and vaccine contaminants in things that we’ve been talking about and you can begin to detox. Just the most important thing is to keep away from inflammation. That by definition means I don’t care if the vaccine is the cleanest thing in the world, it’s intended to inflame. See, the way coronaviruses, let’s just say if that really had anything to do with COVID-19, which I don’t believe for a minute, the way coronaviruses cause damage is first they deplete your antioxidants. Antioxidant-rich foods like we’ve just mentioned—vitamin c. I have a cup of hot lemon water every day. Make sure your food is non-GMO and organic as possible because the soil becomes contaminated with glyphosate. I use ultra-binder. Just to eat as clean as you can so that ultra-binder will take out yesterday’s toxins. Even if you can’t eat clean—most processed foods and things you’re getting from the grocery store are loaded with glyphosate. The less processed food you can eat, the more fresh vegetables, fruits, blueberries, rich in antioxidants, the colors, the cyan, and the phytonutrients. This is the best we could do, but it’ll make you healthy. No such thing as social distancing. Please, hug people. Think of isolated babies. Think of the boy in the bubble, the those with primary immune deficiencies. Think of orphanages that we used to see visions of in Russia and things like that. They’re profoundly diseased and compromised because of a lack of touch. We’re human beings, and this is the worst thing about those face masks. No cloth face coverings. That just stops you from smiling, stops you from loving. Like you said, you get dirty looks. We’re made to smile. Anger is immunosuppressive. Fear is immunosuppressive. They’re not immune boosting. Those are horrible emotions. We’re generating this hate and it’s driving the compromising of our own immune system such that when they release the next thing on us, we will be susceptible. Hopefully, we won’t. I could say this from a lot of experience because it really doesn’t matter what they release. I’ve worked with everything. I’ve worked with Ebola. I’ve worked with the XMRVs. When your audience reads our two books, you’ll see from the first book Plague that the lab workers got infected. In 2011, we realized these cancer-causing viruses and neuro-immune disease-causing viruses, Lou Gehrig’s, Parkinson’s, chronic Lyme disease, and other things. These viruses and ME/CFS release devastating diseases were contagious that you could literally cough them on somebody, that you could get them from the air. I was the one in my laboratory, I made sure my students, the young people, didn’t get anywhere near the blood samples, didn’t do the work that generated aerosols that spread aerosols around. I did all the work and I got a boatload. I zero converted. I got a ton of XMRVs of these viruses in my body, in my blood. What measures do I take to keep myself well? I am not sick, I zero converted a decade ago, and I wouldn’t dare put on a mask. I hate to say it but I’m the people they want to kill. The people that they have liability for that they knowingly injected for decades with cancer-causing viruses, and I mean injected. If you think about it rationally, yeah, if I haven’t been on a plane, if I’ve been nowhere close to somebody in China, I didn’t go to a seafood market, I never went to one of the clusters of diseases—let’s just say New York City or Seattle where there were a few ground zero. I never went anywhere near any of those people. How exactly did I get exposed? When exactly? We didn’t do this with HIV. We did tell people don’t touch them, and that hurt them a great deal, injured their disease, and immune-compromised them. I didn’t obey that then either and I’m just fine, aren’t I? This is the point. We didn’t shut down the world. There are all the data that this coronavirus—yes, it caused a dangerous cost. Yes, there are compromised people who did die from exposure to it, but when you go watch those two shows I mentioned to you, The Highwire last week, in particular, they put the compromised in hospital wings who were clearly COVID negative in positive wings and then they stopped them from getting oxygen. You remember the cannula of oxygen you put in your nose when somebody needs oxygen or you put when you’re in an ambulance? What do they give you? They give you that little thing to breathe oxygen. They don’t intubate you. They don’t paralyze your breathing apparatus input. You can easily look at desaturation. All these things that oxygen desaturates. Just put the little thing on your finger and you can see how much oxygen you’re getting. You can see if you’re being compromised. Why aren’t we doing any of that? Why aren’t we taking care?  Type I interferon 50-200 units. Type I interferon in a spray form, 50 to a couple hundred. Literally, a couple of hundred units a day sprayed in your nasal passages just like you would do a saline nasal spray will prevent anything that gets into your nasopharyngeal cavity from replicating any coronavirus.   [01:01:52] Ashley James: Thank you so much for your time. I know you have to go. I am, of course, left with more questions.   [01:01:59] Dr. Judy Mikovits: I’d be happy to talk to you again. You can tap Kent and talk to him a little bit to round out this one and then we’ll talk again, no problem. We can even take questions from your audience and go again.   [01:02:09] Ashley James: That would be great. I’d love that. Yes, I definitely have more questions. I have them written down. And I know my listeners would have questions for you. I can’t wait to interview your co-author, Kent. It sounds wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time today to educate us. We have to open our minds. I love the saying open your mind so much that your brain could fall out. Just open your mind and take in new information because that’s how we’re going to figure out how to best support our body’s ability to heal itself. The problem is when we listen to the mainstream there’s always an agenda. We have to protect ourselves from fear-mongering, but also stay safe. We want to stay safe, but we have to support our body’s ability to be healthy. You have so much great information. You have two books I highly recommend. The links to both your books, Plague and Plague of Corruption, will be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Do you have anything you’d like to say to the listeners? Maybe homework to give them to wrap up today’s interview.   [01:03:09] Dr. Judy Mikovits: Think about it really in a calm way and think about what I was saying as far as what do you do when you feel good? You go out to the ocean; you go out to the sand. You get tired, you get a little sunburned, you get a little exhausted, and you sleep really well. Those things that make you feel good. Just think, we never had to wear a mask in public. The silliness of you have to wear a mask when you enter here but as soon as you turn around and sit down, you don’t need one. That’s a control issue. That’s fear and anger. That’s intended to generate an emotional response. We don’t have to be emotional. We love each other. Nobody wants anybody to get sick. We want to spend our lives trying to heal people, that’s what we do. We just want to love each other. That’s how we stay well as a society and as families and individuals   [01:04:10] Ashley James: Beautiful. Thank you so much. I can’t wait to have you back on the show. It’s been such a pleasure to have you here today.   [01:04:16] Dr. Judy Mikovits: Thanks, Ashley.   Get Connected With Dr. Judy Mikovits! Plague The Book Website Twitter   Books by Dr. Judy Mikovits Plague   Plague of Corruption

Check out Dr. Wallach's Supplements: TakeYourSupplements.com   The 90 Essential Nutrients by Dr. Joel Wallach https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-90-essential-nutrients-by-dr-joel-wallach   Highlights: Diseases that are a result of nutrient deficiency The commonality of those living in the blue zones Why we need to stop eating barley, wheat, rye, and oats Why we need to avoid oil   Is eating fruits and vegetables enough to get all the nutrients needed by our bodies? In this episode, Dr. Joel Wallach talks about different diseases that were thought of as genetically transmitted but were actually nutrient deficiencies. He also shares success stories of patients that got healed from their diseases by being on his protocol.   Intro: Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today I’m interviewing my hero, Dr. Joel Wallach. He is the reason why I no longer have type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and infertility and why my husband and I naturally conceived our son after six years of trying. His approach to natural medicine and healing the body with the 90 essential nutrients is absolutely revolutionary but also comes from years and years of research. I’m so excited for you to hear his information. Every time I hear him, I learn more and more. I’ve been following him. He’s been mentoring me since 2011. Learning from him, it is such a trip because he regularly helps people reverse diseases even to the point where they’re on heart transplant list, kidney transplant list, or they’re on their deathbed. I’ve seen him help people who were told by their doctors that they just needed to go home and die, that there was nothing left for them. I’ve seen him reverse so many diseases and help people get back to 100% health, so I’m very excited for you to learn from him today. As you’re listening, if you’d like to buy the supplements that he has developed and he recommends, please go to takeyoursupplements.com, that’s takeyoursupplements.com. You fill out the form and a health coach that’s trained in Dr. Wallach’s protocols will help you pick out the right supplements for you based on your symptoms, your nutritional needs, and based on the Dr. Wallach protocol that would best suit you. The body responds so quickly when you fill in the nutrient deficiencies, when you fill in those gaps where your diet has been missing certain key minerals especially trace minerals because it’s so hard to secure all of the 90 essential nutrients in a diet, no matter how healthy we eat. That’s something that Dr. Wallach addresses in today’s interview. Go to takeyoursupplements.com and try Dr. Wallach’s protocol. I have seen the most amazing results. In less than 30 days, people say they have better energy, more mental clarity, and better sleep, but beyond that, people’s blood sugar stabilizes, their mood stabilizes, and blood pressure stabilizes. I have seen people reverse conditions. I had a friend who had essential tremor, his hands shook his entire life, and that went away within days. I had another friend who had skin tags over his whole body. The skin tags fell off. I have known several men reverse erectile dysfunction with his protocol. He has protocols for filling in the nutrient deficiencies, filling in those nutrient gaps in our diet, supporting every cell in the body with 90 essential nutrients, and eliminating certain foods that harm the body so that we can optimize health at any age and at any weight. The whole program is actually designed based on body weight so you’re making sure you’re getting the right supplements for you at the right dosage for what your body needs. I really look forward to hearing from you. As you’re on the protocol, if you’d like to share with me how it’s going for you, you can email me ashley@learntruehealth.com. You can also join the Facebook group and share with us there. There are already some listeners who have shared their incredible experiences by adding these supplements to their life. You can’t out-supplement a bad diet. You can’t out-supplement unhealthy habits. We have to focus on a holistic way of life meaning you have to look at every aspect of life, but we also can’t exercise and eat healthy and only do those two things and expect optimal health because if we have a nutrient deficiency, even in a healthy diet, our body is still missing something. This is one of the key components to optimal health is supplementing to make sure that we don’t have nutrient deficiency. We have to make sure that our supplements are high quality, that they’re bioavailable, the body can absorb them and utilize them, and that they’re plant-derived. That they’re not chemically man-made. That’s all the things that takeyoursupplements.com provides. Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. I’m really excited for you to hear today’s interview especially because Dr. Wallach is my hero. I’ve been wanting to interview him for years and our schedules aligned, so it just became the perfect time for me to have him on the show. I hope to have him on the show again in the future. I also recommend reading his books. They’re amazing. Please check out his books. The links to his books will be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Awesome. Have yourself an excellent rest of your day and enjoy today’s interview.   [00:04:53] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 435. I am so excited to have Dr. Wallach on the show today. You have been my biggest hero in the holistic health space. Because of you I no longer suffer from diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and infertility. Because of you, I was able to conceive naturally our son who’s healthy and he’s five years old. You’re the one that got me so excited about health that I started my podcast four years ago. We have over seven million downloads and over 430 interviews.   [00:05:38] Dr. Joel Wallach: Well, thank you for the kind testimony.   [00:05:40] Ashley James: What I’m excited about is that you’re here today to share with all of my listeners that are wanting to seek true health and you’re here to share with them what I learned from you to end disease in my life. I’m so excited that they’re going to learn from you today how they can end disease and how they can reverse and prevent disease. Welcome to the show.   [00:06:01] Dr. Joel Wallach: Again, thank you so very, very much, Ashley. I appreciate your hospitality.   [00:06:05] Ashley James: Dr. Wallach, I love your story. Can you tell us a little bit about your research that led you to discover the cause and cure for 900 diseases?   [00:06:13] Dr. Joel Wallach: To make a long story short, when I graduated high school—I’m leaving out my personal stuff, which will take 15-20 minutes. When I graduated high school in 1958, I already knew that the medical system was in the wrong direction because I grew up on a farm. We didn’t have any of the diseases in the farm animals that people had because we were giving supplements to animals that prevented and reversed those diseases. We didn’t have any health insurance for them so it was much more economical to prevent and reverse them with supplements than it was to wait until they got sick and then call a veterinarian, pay a veterinarian, go broke, and sell your farm. When I graduated from high school in 1958, I went to an agricultural school because I wanted to get a degree in agriculture. Halfway through that tried preventive medicine so got into veterinary school. I was working part-time because I had to work my way through, didn’t have a lot of money so I had to work my way through and I was working part-time for the pathology department. I realized there were so many, many things that were so simple but people weren’t being told the whole truth. In 1964, I graduated in the University of Missouri. I had my degree in agriculture, my major was an animal husbandry nutrition. My minor is in field crops and soils. I had my veterinary degree at the time. I was halfway through my degree in pathology so I was going to Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa to finish my degree in pathology. As a high school kid, I had worked with Marlin Perkins the old Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom show because I was a farm kid and didn’t mind throwing manure out of stalls of animals in the zoo and stuff like that. He kind of followed me a little bit. He wrote me a letter and said, “Look, Wallach, I need you to go to Africa for a couple of years and work on the white rhino conservation project. When it’s over, you come back. I can get you back into graduate school if that’s what you wanted. I can get you a job in the zoo whatever you.” You can’t refuse Marlin Perkins from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. I went to Africa and two years into it, I had caught 200 white rhino and shipped them back here. If you see a white rhino in a wild animal park or zoo, it’s either one that I caught her offsprings or the ones that I caught. At the time, there was only 470 left of the southern raised white rhino south of the Zambezi River. Today there’s 25,000 because of the game parks we established, trained people, caught the animals up north, brought them and put them in the Ranger parks, and stuff like that. I’m very, very proud of that. Two years into that, I was prepared to stay in Africa forever, Ashley. I was having the time of my life living out in the bush, eating wild antelope and stuff like that, and fish and just working on conservation projects, but I came back here at again, Perkin’s invitation. He says, “Look, Wallach, your work when you were doing your pathology stuff I got a $25 million grant using your research papers. I want you to come back and be the pathologist on this project. We got this $25 million grant. This was April of 1967. I don’t know if it’ll be two years, five years, ten years or what, but I needed you to be a pathologist. I want you to find the diseases that are caused by pollution that zoo animals are sensitive to in the big cities and people who live around the zoos are sensitive to. When the zoo animals start dying from the pollution we know to evacuate the city, so I want you to do it.” You can’t refuse Marlin Perkins. I came back in April 1967 to be his pathologist on the project. To make a long story short, a 10-year project, I did 20,000 autopsies. It was 17,000 some change of over 454 species of zoo animals, 3,000 humans, and 20 million chemistries. I learned and published in a book, which is my thesis of this whole project. The thesis represents the 17,000 autopsies in these 454 species of animals, 8,000 human autopsies. They’re in another book called Epigenetics. Anyway, to make a long story short, what I found out was none of the zoo animals died of pollution, none of the human beings living within a 10-mile radius of the zoos died of pollution, there were no genetically transmitted diseases, and there were no genetically transmitted birth defects. It was driving everybody crazy. That’s how all of this started. When that was over, I went to work at Yerkes Primate Center with NASA in Atlanta, Georgia and worked at the medical school there as a pathologist at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. I ran into the first non-human case of cystic fibrosis, proved it was not genetic, got it published, and they fired me because everybody knew psittacosis was the disease that’s a classic example of a genetically transmitted disease. I purposely saved tissue, blood, and all kinds of stuff so you can do your own look yourself and see if your results match mine. No, you’re fired. That’s when I went back to school and became a Naturopathic physician in Portland, Oregon 1978. I was teaching for seven years pathology and clinical medicine. I graduated in 1982 and been treating people nutritionally for something like 900 different diseases using nutrients for 72 years.   [00:11:37] Ashley James: When you discovered that cystic fibrosis in the rhesus monkey was not genetically transferred but it was caused by something else, what was it caused by and why were you fired?   [00:11:52] Dr. Joel Wallach: First of all, I sent tissues on the slide, delivering the pancreas in the lungs, to experts in cystic fibrosis in the big children’s hospitals around the world, 10 of them. They all sent back with a little note saying this is a perfect example of cystic fibrosis. Thank you. I didn’t tell them it was from a monkey, but I had it all on their letterhead. I then put together my paper and brought it to the [inaudible 00:12:17] at Yerkes Primate Center and also at the medical school in Atlanta, Georgia. They were so, which I say, involved with genetics. They still are. Medical doctors, everything’s a genetic disease, right? Back then they didn’t want to be embarrassed and so they fired. It was easier to fire me because I was just a veterinarian at the time, I wasn’t a Naturopathic physician yet. I was just a veterinarian, so they fired me to save their faces is what it amounted to. A couple of years later I found the contravention cure of muscular dystrophy, gave that to Jerry Lewis and he got so excited because I gave him 100 charts of kids that I had cured with muscular dystrophy, proven it wasn’t genetics—simple nutritional deficiency. He took it to the Muscular Dystrophy Association, they fired him and stopped the telethon. That’s why you haven’t heard anything about muscular dystrophy or cystic fibrosis since 1978. My most recent thing, April 16, 2013, a federal judge ruled because we kept pushing the federal courts to put this nutrient in the baby formula because sudden infant death syndrome, it was a big lie. Only 2% of the babies that died of sudden infant death syndrome were in bed with their mothers when they died, 90% were not. None of them suffocated. When you redo the autopsy you could tell they didn’t suffocate. They died from what we call hypertrophic cardiomyopathy heart disease. I have done 1,700 autopsies on kids under the age of 10 that died of that one in Keshan province China. It’s called Keshan disease, the deficiency of a single nutrient cause a sudden heart attack in these kids. I did 1,700 autopsies in six weeks, so I’m an expert in that. I knew that was causing because 200 of them would have been diagnosed with sudden infant death syndrome here in the United States. Got it all written up, the usual process. Nobody wanted it, nobody would publish it, and so I went to the federal courts and said, “Look, here’s 1,700 autopsies proving what I’m saying.” They couldn’t resist the evidence of 1,700 autopsy—all the slides, all the blood. They ruled that every manufacturer of baby formula had to put this nutrient in the baby formulas. A year later, it was September 13, 2014, just about a year later, the Charlotte Observer, which is the big newspaper in Charlotte North Carolina kind of like the New York Times for New York, front-page story—I mean this is a front-page story, big bold letters like third world war starting. It said we don’t know why but sudden infant death syndrome has vanished in North Carolina.   [00:15:04] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [00:15:06] Dr. Joel Wallach: Three months later, the state of Missouri did the same thing in their headlines in their newspapers. Three months later every newspaper in America said we don’t know why but the death rate from sudden infant death syndrome has dropped significantly by 85%-95% in all states because we put that one nutrient in the baby formula. You haven’t heard any more about sudden infant death syndrome because it’s gone. It was a deficiency of a single nutrient. I’m the guy who figured out the cause, prevention, and cure of cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, and I’m the guy that figured out the cause and prevention of crib death.   [00:15:36] Ashley James: Have you experienced pushback from the pharmaceutical industry? This is obviously going to affect their profits.   [00:15:42] Dr. Joel Wallach: What happens is, every time I get interviewed, they come along and want to have their words, say that I’m a quack, and all this kind of stuff—there’s no proof. I don’t know, 1,700 autopsies published through all these slides, lab data, and everything that seems pretty much like a hard proof to me. When I was working at the Yerkes Primate Center for NASA, when I got confirmation that that one monkey had the classic symptoms of cystic fibrosis, most people don’t know this but I got permission to do biopsies of liver, pancreas, and lungs of the 34 other baby monkeys in the same colony. All different mothers and fathers, not related in any way shape or form other than they were monkeys. They all were positive for cystic fibrosis. I knew it was an environmental thing. It turned out that the gal who is in charge of that colony, she was a psychiatrist and she was doing nutritional studies in that colony where all 25 or 30 pairs of these monkeys, unrelated to each other, we’re having babies for her research. She was giving them different nutrients and she wasn’t giving them the standard monkey pellets. She was feeding them mixed grains and her idea of what vitamins and minerals were that’s why they all got cystic fibrosis.   [00:17:09] Ashley James: Because they had nutrient deficiency?   [00:17:12] Dr. Joel Wallach: That’s correct. It was just a simple nutritional deficiency artificially-created because they weren’t given the monkey pellets. Of course, her husband was in charge of the facility so he’s the guy who fired me because he didn’t want her embarrassed.   [00:17:26] Ashley James: What in humans in utero, what diseases are nutrient deficiencies? Everyone knows that folic acid or folate causes neuro tube defects.   [00:17:37] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yes. Here’s the deal, there are some birth defects that are caused by measles in the embryo early on, right? Thalidomide, which was a prescription drug for morning sickness would be given to women early in pregnancy and that caused 10,000 American babies to be born without arms and legs. There’s that but there are no genetic defects anymore because they aren’t any genetic defects. Here’s the experiment that proved it to most people. When I was working at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, a pair of wild-caught arctic foxes, they weren’t related, from two different parts of the Arctic but they were put together as a pair in the Brookfield Zoo. When they got to be a little rare of age they went into season and they got pregnant and had 10 babies. All ten babies were born with cleft palates. The keepers called me because I’m doing the pathology up at the zoo hospital. They said, “Look, we’ve got 10 baby foxes with a genetic defect. I said uh-oh to myself, “Yeah, what is it?” “They all are born with the cleft palate the mothers and fathers. We want you to give them the needle with a drug to kill them because we can’t have animals or babies in the zoo that have genetic defects. They can only be perfect in a zoo.” I said, “Bring them up. Let me see them.” They brought me the babies and I say, “Okay, look, we’re not going to kill these babies because this is not a genetic defect. It is a simple nutritional deficiency during pregnancy. What did you feed the mother and father?” “They’re meat eaters so we gave them horse meat.” I said, “Okay, did you give them any vitamins and minerals?” “No, they’re meat-eaters. We gave them horse meat.” I said, “That’s why they got this cleft palate because this is a defect of a single mineral. which is not found in horse meat. If you gave them the horse’s livers it would be okay but not the horse meat. What I want you to do is feed these babies with a puppy formula spent for [inaudible 00:19:29] puppies. I want you to give the mother and father just dog food. In six months’ time when these babies all come into heat and season, all that kind of stuff at six months of age, I want you to put one son with the mother, one daughter with the father, and the other brothers and sisters match them up. We’re going to really do some super inbreeding here. I want the mothers and fathers right now to start getting dog food, the babies are going to get this infant formula for milk replacer for puppies that are orphans. When they get to be six weeks you’re going to want solid food give them dog food. A year later they call me up and said, “Okay doc. Between all these things we put together here, we have 100 babies from these two foxes.” “Are any of them have cleft palate?” “Nope, they’re all perfect.” I said, “I proved my point, didn’t I? They say, “Yes, you did.” I said, “I don’t want any more of these animals out there being fed just horse meat. They got to get vitamins and minerals. If it’s appropriate, wolves, coyotes, and foxes they need dog food and then there’s cat food for the small cats. We’ll figure out a diet and supplement program for the big cats, okay?” That was published in scientific journals. It’s a big story in the book Rare Earth: Forbidden Cures. It’s the biggest story in the book Dead Doctors Don’t Lie. It’s the biggest story in several of my books with the pictures of many of these baby foxes with the cleft palates. All along the way, I’ve been able to prove what I’m saying. Now, when I go on an interview someplace, the doctors will call up and make a big hoo-ha. This guy’s a quack and you can’t prove what he’s saying. How come his thesis is in the Smithsonian Institute, is a national treasure? They hang up. They can’t even respond to that.   [00:21:16] Ashley James: You talked about curing Keshan’s disease in China. Can you tell us the story of Keshan’s disease and how you came to cure it?   [00:21:24] Dr. Joel Wallach: Keshan disease is again a deficiency of the single mineral. It causes sudden hypertrophic cardiomyopathy heart disease. 25,000 American kids died of that every year here under the age of 20. It’s the sudden heart death that afflicts young athletes in their teens and early 20s. You hear about this all the time, this teenager played football, played soccer, played baseball, hockey, rugby, whatever it was, or basketball and drops dead, that’s Keshan disease. It’s not some mystery. If they would be giving these kids my sports drink, which has 100 nutrients in it including that one mineral and give them the 90 essential nutrients, guess what, none of these 25,000 kids would die anymore. But doctors on the sports medicine doctor here and we’re going to give them one of these things that have complete nutrition. You got 27 nutrients in it and it doesn’t have that nutrient it. It turns out that my wife, Dr. Ma Lan, who is a medical doctor from China, I’m telling her about all the sudden heart deaths and she says, “That sounds like Keshan disease.” I said, “What’s that?” She got me all the English versions of publications of Keshan’s disease. Looking at the slides and everything, “Yeah, this is it.” She and her family, even yet today have a lot of power in China. This was published in scientific journals in three languages in 1990. They did the work in 1989 and it was published in 1990 in three scientific journals, two in Chinese, one in Mandarin, the other in Cantonese, the third one is in English is called the Journal of Trace Element Research. If anybody wants to check it out and see if I’m lying they can check it out. 1,700 autopsies have caused Keshan disease aka hypertrophic cardiomyopathy heart disease. In fact, there was some famous athlete that just died here and he was in his 20s. He just died a couple of days ago from a heart attack. He was a basketball player or soccer player or whatever he just died due to the deficiency of a single mineral. I have people say, “Tell me what it is, tell me what it is.” I said, “No. You can’t run to Walgreens anymore because they’re shutting down, but you will run to someplace and try and buy it. You’ll give it to somebody and they’ll die. You’ll say Wallach lied.” No, because there are cofactors necessary for that one nutrient to work. Just like when people get osteoporosis the doctor says you have a calcium deficiency, take some Tums. That’s the doctor’s way to deal with osteoporosis is take Tums because it has some calcium carbonate in it. Let’s see what else does your bones need besides calcium—vitamin D3, sulfur, magnesium, copper, phosphorus, are you getting the picture?   [00:24:11] Ashley James: Definitely. You need the full complement of all the co-factors.   [00:24:17] Dr. Joel Wallach: Exactly. Ashley, do you know there’s only one class of prescription drugs that cures anything and that’s antibiotics. Antibiotics will kill bacteria and some fungus but guess what, all other prescription drugs are purposely designed to treat symptoms. I had so much pain from my arthritis for 10 years my doctor gave me the opioids in three minutes time my pain was going. I just love my doctor. Then two years later, sorry Francine, your disease kept progressing here even though you don’t have any pain. Now it’s time you have to have a double knee replacement, which is going to cost $50,000 per knee, it’s a good thing you have insurance. The doctor is able to send his two kids to college.   [00:25:07] Ashley James: But that mineral deficiency that led to the osteoporosis is affecting every soft tissue as well in all other organs and creating all kinds of symptoms as well. Symptoms that doctors will write off as normal. You have sleep problems, you have restless legs, that’s normal. Here, let me give you a drug for that.   [00:25:26] Dr. Joel Wallach: That’s correct. They send their kid to college with the money.   [00:25:31] Ashley James: But there are a lot of good MDs out there with really big hearts that really do want to help people. The problem is they’re not trained in anything that you’ve discovered. You discovered that these nutrient deficiencies are the cause of these diseases and that you’ve published this. I’ve seen you regularly reverse diseases even to the point where you’ve saved people from amputation and save people from being on the heart transplant list and kidney transplant list. You’ve reversed heart disease, kidney disease. You’ve reversed diabetes and save people from imputation.   [00:26:06] Dr. Joel Wallach: All of that. Ashley, we do this all the time. We take people who have been a diabetic for 30 years, in 30 days they’re not a diabetic. We take people who have been on kidney dialysis, six days a week they have not urinated in 10 years, in two weeks’ time they’re urinating, and six weeks’ time they’re off of dialysis because these are all simple nutritional deficiency disease. We change their diet, we put them on the 90 essential nutrients with the secret sauces for their particular disease and it all goes away. I have a new book out it’s on the 25 diseases of the skull. When you have osteoporosis in the skull there are 25 different diseases that you would go to a neurologist for and have surgery to put implants in your middle ear and you have all kinds of eye surgeries, back surgeries, neck surgeries, arm surgeries, and all kinds of stuff. In fact, osteoporosis to the skull causes atrial fibrillation. Have you ever heard of atrial fibrillation?   [00:26:59] Ashley James: Yes.   [00:27:00] Dr. Joel Wallach: It’s the squeezing of the tenth cranial nerve, the vagus nerve which controls the rate and rhythm of the heart. You can also have degenerative disk disease and the first four thoracic vertebrae squeeze the vital nerves that control the rate and rhythm of the heart. There are two possibilities. I always speak for both of those and people who have afib. I’m going to tell you about a congressman from Baltimore Maryland, Elijah Cummings. Have you ever hear him?   [00:27:21] Ashley James: I have not.   [00:27:23] Dr. Joel Wallach: He was a black congressman from Baltimore, Maryland for 20 years, a very famous guy. A leader in the black caucuses everything else in Congress, 20 years. He gets afib, the cardiologists take him in, anesthetized him, cut him open, take a soldering iron, heat it up, and they were trying to kill the part of his heart muscle that was running away—setting off these irregular heartbeats. They killed him by doing what is called an ablation trying to kill a part of his heart muscle that causes the heart to beat irregularly. If he had come to me he would still be alive because all I would do was fix the osteoporosis of the skull, take the pressure off that tenth cranial nerve, and he wouldn’t have had the atrial fibrillation anymore.   [00:28:13] Ashley James: You’re the one that cured my husband’s afib. He was a candidate with a pacemaker. He has an acute afib for the third time, and you said put CM cream on his back. Obviously, continue taking the supplements, the minerals especially, hang upside down an inversion table and go to see your chiropractor. We followed your instructions to a tee. We also did ice packs on his back and his acute afib went away. What we figured out was anytime he lifts heavy weights it would compress his thoracic spine and he’d develop afib. It’s like clockwork.   [00:28:49] Dr. Joel Wallach: What happened was as his vertebrae get closer together compressing them, they smashed the roots of those spinal nerves that control the rate and rhythm of the heart.   [00:28:59] Ashley James: The cardiologist wanted to put him under and give him a peacemaker.   [00:29:04] Dr. Joel Wallach: Believe me, they would have done an ablation before they put in the pacemaker, which means kill part of the heart muscle. What did the doctors say when he didn’t have afib anymore?   [00:29:12] Ashley James: We didn’t go back to them.   [00:29:16] Dr. Joel Wallach: That’s why your husband is still alive. See, you’re not only beautiful, you’re smart.   [00:29:20] Ashley James: We listened to you because we’ve seen you help so many people. We’re just so grateful that we keep listening to you and learning from you.   [00:29:30] Dr. Joel Wallach: Thank you for passing on the information.   [00:29:32] Ashley James: Absolutely. It blows my mind. One client I had a few years ago she came to me for weight loss. She goes, “I’m sick. I’m 25 pounds overweight. I hate being overweight.” I said. “What happened? Tell me.” She goes, “Well, my doctor who’s my boss because I work at a clinic, and I’ve worked there for 20 years. My doctor has me on these steroids for my adult-onset asthma. The asthma is so bad I have to be on all these steroids and these steroids cause me to gain weight.” I said, “Wait a second, let’s back up. Dr. Wallach says this, this, and this about asthma.” We got her on the 90 central nutrients with extra the EFAs. One month later she calls me up she goes, “My doctor took me off of all the meds. I don’t have any more asthma, but I’m calling because I want to help my niece who has ADD, my other family member who has this, and my other family member who has that.” I said, “Wait a second, you are off all your meds? You’ve known your doctor for 20 years because he’s also your boss. You’re off all your meds in one month and did he want to know why? Did he want to know how?” She said, “No.” That’s happened over and over again. I’ve helped other people. You helped me reverse my type-2 diabetes. I’ve helped other people do the same and none of their doctors want to know how. They’ve had them on medicine for years like Metformin or insulin and then they finally get off of it because they’re healthy and the doctors don’t want to know. It’s so outside their realm. It’s so frustrating.   [00:30:58] Dr. Joel Wallach: See it’s not that simple. It’s a criminal act they’re doing because they don’t want to say no, it’s all my patients you get the same result that you did their income stream would stop. Their beautiful wife would divorce them, all their kids would get kicked out of school because they can’t pay their tuition anymore, and their dog would eat them.    [00:31:22] Ashley James: They’re just stuck in this mentality of their training. Luckily, there are doctors who are breaking free from those who are becoming functional medicine practitioners, becoming Naturopaths, and focusing on nutrition.   [00:31:34] Dr. Joel Wallach: We’re keeping our fingers crossed. That’s why I started Youngevity because I knew that by myself I would not be able to have a major impact on the world, but this was too much good for too many people. We started a system—books and things, CDs, DVDs and so forth. When the audio cassette tapes first came out, my audio cassette tape Dead Doctors Don’t Lie was the first audio cassette tape to go viral.   [00:32:04] Ashley James: It did, it did. I was sitting in the backseat of my mother’s car when I was about 11 years old in 1991. My mom popped it in. I think I was at 11 or 12. My mom popped it in the tape player of the car, and I listened to your lecture over and over again. It completely changed my thinking. My parents had me see a Naturopath. I didn’t know what your name was but I heard your lecture, and I heard how important all these different nutrients were. Then I found you again back in 2011, I found you again. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is the doctor I was listening to back when I was a kid that talked about the importance of nutrients.” I’m sure the questions come up in listeners’ minds, why can’t I get all of my vitamins and minerals from food? I eat so healthily, I eat all kinds of fruits and vegetables, and I don’t eat junk food. Why can’t I get all my minerals from food? Why can’t I get all my vitamins from food?   [00:33:02] Dr. Joel Wallach: Okay. What if a mechanic were to say to you don’t waste your money by putting oil in your car? Put dirt from Texas or Oklahoma in your car. It’s only ten cents a quart, there’s bound to be some oil in it.   [00:33:12] Ashley James: Are we designed to get nutrients from food? Why are we getting nutrient deficient diseases?   [00:33:19] Dr. Joel Wallach: Where did God put the first human being?   [00:33:21] Ashley James: In the Garden of Eden?   [00:33:24] Dr. Joel Wallach: Eden. Why did God pick the Garden of Eden? Why didn’t he pick Oklahoma? Why didn’t he pick Maryland? Why didn’t he pick London? Here’s the deal. That’s the ultimate question. You asked the ultimate question, Ashley. I’m very proud of you. This is what we learned in the animal industry because we don’t have health insurance for animals. Here’s what we learned. I’ll ask you one more question, you’ll know the answer when I ask you this question. Is gold found equally all over the world?   [00:33:54] Ashley James: No. It’s in veins, it’s in ripples spread out unevenly.   [00:34:00] Dr. Joel Wallach: Okay, it’s found in veins. What about silver?   [00:34:05] Ashley James: It’s found in veins. It’s very hard to find these precious metals.   [00:34:10] Dr. Joel Wallach: What about iron?   [00:34:12] Ashley James: I love it. If you’re up in a plane and you’re flying across the country you can see sometimes their soil rich in iron and sometimes there isn’t. You can see the different colors.   [00:34:22] Dr. Joel Wallach: Okay. What about sulfur?   [00:34:31] Ashley James: I don’t know. I think sulfur is yellow. I think that creates a yellow tint to the earth. There’s nothing that’s equally or evenly distributed.   [00:34:41] Dr. Joel Wallach: You hit it right on the head there. Nutritional minerals, there’s not a single one of them that occurs in a uniform blanket across the earth. They all occur in veins like chocolate in chocolate [inaudible 00:34:52] ice cream. They all occur in veins like gold and silver. There are places where people live the longest. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that book and the movie Lost Horizon. The original book was written by James Hilton. He was a New York Times investigative reporter. New York Times sent him in the early 1930s, like 1930-1931. They sent him to China. He went to the Giltar Glacier in the Hunza district of China, which is halfway between mainland China and also Pakistan. The longest-lived people and it was a debate whether they were 250 years of age or 361 years of age.   [00:35:39] Ashley James: Wow.   [00:35:41] Dr. Joel Wallach: New York Times sent these guys, they got to be lying. There’s no way. They get their most vicious aggressive investigative reporter by the name of James Hilton. They send him there to investigate these people. He was able to document these ages. He wrote a report. It was such a response to the report when the New York Times published it, he wrote a novel called Lost Horizon. He invented the term Shangri-La for this mythical place where people lived forever. It was based on the true thing from the Hunza people in the Giltar glacier. Then they made a movie out of it. It got more awards than any other movie ever. That book, Lost Horizon, is still the best-selling book ever with the number copies of the book. They made a movie that’s got the same title, Lost Horizon. The movie’s about an airplane crash of tourists in this place. Everybody is over 200 years of age and so forth. They figured out it has something to do with the soil, the water, and this and the other and so forth. That’s the whole gist of the story.   [00:36:49] Ashley James: Who figured out? Did you figure it out that they were getting minerals in their water from the glacier or the soil?   [00:36:55] Dr. Joel Wallach: They figured that out in 1933.   [00:36:57] Ashley James: Of course, there’s been talk of Blue Zones. I know you wrote a book about longevity that there are certain zones in the world like the Hunzas that live regularly past 100. They’re active, they’re working their farms, they’re fishing and they’re walking.   [00:37:12] Dr. Joel Wallach: They’re still working in the garden at 150, 160, and 170 years of age. There were all these newspaper releases in Europe and the United States. I have them in my book Rare Earth: Forbidden Cures with these guys in Hunza. They’re 168 years old, they’re out there still working in their garden, and don’t have any health problems at all. Well-documented by all the medical hospitals there in the regions and so forth. It’s like the gold of mind of nutritional minerals in those locations. Do you understand what I’m saying?   [00:37:43] Ashley James: Yeah. There’s a lot of talk about, for example, olive oil being the reason why those in Italy live so long. There’s a lot of authors out there that write books on longevity. They’ve decided the Mediterranean diet causes people to live a long life. Most of these places like the Okinawans eat a diet that contains less animal meat, for example. Then they’re saying maybe it’s less animal meat. They’re trying to make correlations, but what is the commonality between all the blue zones that really make the difference when it comes to stave off disease?   [00:38:25] Dr. Joel Wallach: Volcanic ash.   [00:38:27] Ashley James: Volcanic ash. Interesting.   [00:38:30] Dr. Joel Wallach: All these places where people live a long time, their water sources and their fields where they grow their crops are 20 feet deep volcanic ash since the beginning of time. All of these reefs are attached to volcanic island chains. Why do the reefs all start dying? Because we dammed up the rivers for electricity—hydroelectric. We blocked the volcanic ash from going down the rivers and feeding the algae, which the polyps that make the reefs ate, no more minerals, and that’s why the reefs died. Electricity is the reason that the reefs all died because they dammed up. Ashley, we have 1 million hydroelectric plants making electricity. All of them shut off the food supply to the reefs, and that’s why the reefs died. It is not carbon dioxide from fossil fuel.   [00:39:31] Ashley James: Some propose that it’s all of the pesticides or the herbicides that were—   [00:39:35] Dr. Joel Wallach: Because the environmentalists have an agenda. They will say anything they have to do to get a grant. But have you ever heard the scientific term crapola?   [00:39:49] Ashley James: I have not.   [00:39:51] Dr. Joel Wallach: Okay. Every place that there was a successful reef, it was always a reef that was attached to a volcanic island chain. Japan, Hawaii, Malaysia, and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia because all the water that came off that coast to feed the algae between the coast and the Great Barrier Reef were from the volcanic mountain chain right there in Queensland. When they put up the hydroelectric plants there to make electricity in the three rivers, there are three different rivers they put the dams in, they cut off the food supply to the Great Barrier Reef and that’s why the Great Barrier Reef is dying. If they will listen to me, in six weeks’ time the Great Barrier Reef will be back flourishing.   [00:40:35] Ashley James: We’re basically giving it a mineral deficiency because we’re taking away those minerals from that area?   [00:40:42] Dr. Joel Wallach: We’ve shut off the food supply to the algae, which the reefs ate. The reason why carbon dioxide is going up is because the algae are the things that ate the carbon dioxide, turn it into oxygen and carbon chains. Turn carbon dioxide into oxygen-carbon chains. Why aren’t the algae doing it now? The reason is, Ashley, those algae require 20 nutrients, 17 of which are minerals from the volcanic ash, and we shut off the food supply to those algae. They have enough nutrition to live, but they don’t have any nutrition to convert the carbon dioxide to oxygen and carbon chain. That piece is missing because they cut off that food supply from the volcanic ash. I have a process. In fact, we actually have patents on now, we’ve been working on it, where we have augers that will auger the silt from behind the dams, around the dams, over the dams, or through the dams. They will dump that silt back in the water on the other side of the dam. We don’t have to destroy their electricity. We’ll just auger it on the other side of the dam, it’ll go down and feed the algae, and the reefs will come back.   [00:42:04] Ashley James: That’s amazing. That mirrors what’s happening with us, with our own bodies because you said the algae can live but they’re mineral deficient. They’re missing that silt because of the dams. They’re running only at like half 50% function, which is a lot of people are walking around mineral deficient and not fully functioning. Then they’re taking medication for the symptoms of mineral deficiency. It drives me crazy when people say they have restless leg syndrome because that’s a mineral deficiency. I get them on your minerals and within days they’re completely free of those symptoms and about 12 other symptoms they didn’t even realize they were mineral deficiencies. Yet their doctor had them on a ton of different drugs to mask these symptoms. The body is crying.   [00:42:55] Dr. Joel Wallach: He has his kids. He had to pay for their tuition for college.   [00:43:01] Ashley James: You helped a very famous athlete, Theo Ratliff. You helped him to get his career back. Because of that, you developed your sports drink, which I love your sports drink. It’s amazing. It’s full of nutrients. It’s not like just that sugary water that is sold in the grocery.   [00:43:18] Dr. Joel Wallach: Ashley, 100 nutrients. All other sports drinks are primarily caffeine and sugars. Energy drinks like Red Bull and all the other sports drink are just—   [00:43:28] Ashley James: Monster, Gatorade. They’re just sugar water with coloring. Yours is actually a healthy holistic sports drink.   [00:43:37] Dr. Joel Wallach: We have 100 nutrients in there—100 nutrients, Ashley. 78 minerals. No athlete who takes our sports drink is going to die from that Keshan disease, that hypertrophic cardiomyopathy heart disease.   [00:43:48] Ashley James: Your story of Theo Ratliff inspires me so much. Because of you, I’ve got to meet Theo and his beautiful wife, they’re amazing people.   [00:43:56] Dr. Joel Wallach: Wonderful couple.   [00:43:57] Ashley James: Yeah, they are. Can you tell us a bit about his story? Because of your supplements and your program, your protocol, you helped him to get his health back, end up being the famous Theo Ratliff that we know.   [00:44:12] Dr. Joel Wallach: He was in his early 20s and he had bone-on-bone arthritis in both knees arthritis. His cartilage popped off his right hip. He was playing for the Atlanta Hawks. Apparently, he pops off his right hip and he had surgically tacked down again. He also had a fracture in his left arm. They said, “Look, this guy’s too fragile to play ball. He’s got shooting skills but he’s too fragile to play pro ball.” They took his contract away from him. It was all in the newspaper and everything. We had one of our distributors there in Atlanta, Georgia contact him and said, “Hey, you need to let Dr. Wallach talk to you.” We talked over the phone. He said, “I’ll try anything.” To make a long story short, we put him on our Healthy Bone and Joint Pack, but we also came up with our Rebounders for strength for him with all these 100 nutrients in it. Got him on a diet, cut him off all the bad foods including gluten, wheat, barley, rye, and oats to maximize absorption. In six months’ time, all his problems were gone, and he got his job back at the Atlanta Hawks. He made $30 million from the Atlanta Hawks before he moved on and made another $100 million with the other teams.   [00:45:10] Ashley James: Amazing, amazing. I heard a rumor that other very famous basketball players were drinking your sports drink even though they were being sponsored by Gatorade and other sports drink companies.   [00:45:25] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah, that happens.   [00:45:26] Ashley James: The fans started to notice, hey, Gatorade doesn’t have a color like that. They wanted to know what these sports teams were drinking. Do you know what sports teams are now using your supplements, do you know?   [00:45:39] Dr. Joel Wallach: There are players in all professional sports teams, all Olympic teams. There are players, maybe in some cases, not the whole team is drinking our sports drink, but there’s just about every serious athlete whether they’re semi-pro, Olympic, university, or professional they’re using our sports drink.   [00:45:59] Ashley James: Because you have such a deep understanding of where food comes from—the farm, understanding soil. Can you explain why is that soil is depleted of nutrients even more now than it has ever been?   [00:46:12] Dr. Joel Wallach: In some places, the nutrients have never been there at all. They’re not depleted, they just were never there. We have fertile ground and of course, the most expensive land and the land that people love to will to their kids and so forth was floodplains because these hilt from the runoff in the mountains, the minerals, would be reintroduced every spring during the floods to the land. But people who owned bottomland always had healthier cattle, healthier lambs, healthier pigs, healthier chickens, healthier kids, and they were more successful farmers because their yields were 50% or 75% higher than those trying to grow food out in the desert. Got it? It was the re-introduction from the floods every year of those minerals in the silt. What dammed up the rivers? Hydroelectric plants shut off the food supply to these lands that get flooded every spring.   [00:47:15] Ashley James: The soil doesn’t get the remineralization every year. The Nile is a great example of that.   [00:47:23] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah. I don’t know how many dams are on the Nile. Just like the reefs, when you dam up the rivers for electricity—there are 1 million hydroelectric plants in the world, Ashley, 1 million. There are 2 million other dams that are for water conservation and irrigation. 3 million dams damming up the water. Guess what, they shut off the food supply to the land, they shut off the food supply to the ocean. That’s why the ocean is dying because 3 million dams damming up the rivers so the food supply is shut off to the ocean, the reefs, and the old bottomland that used to be the richest soil on earth.   [00:48:00] Ashley James: You have a product that farmers can use to remineralize their soil, and you’ve seen amazing results. I’ve seen amazing results. Even those who add the minerals to their chickens, for example, or add them to their cows. I’ve heard some amazing stories. Of course, the farmlands, crops grow stronger, healthier, and pest resistant because of the minerals in the soil.   [00:48:26] Dr. Joel Wallach: That’s correct. Of course, when they give our minerals, it has 78 minerals in there, the cows produce more milk—the same amount of grains are being fed. Of course, the chicken eggs are like 50% percent bigger. The hens their eyes get really big when they lay those eggs.   [00:48:48] Ashley James:  I love the minerals. I put it in my vegetable garden and I see great results, but I’ve also met some farmers who have used it. They’ve done experiments where they put it in one field but not in the other and you can see the difference. You can see right where they stopped laying down the minerals. Maybe you can explain it that the crops grow stronger but their pest-resistant because they’re stronger. Can you explain why is that?   [00:49:15] Dr. Joel Wallach: Ashley, not only pest resistant. Let’s say you have a nice couple. They live in Missouri and they have a kid. This kid he’s 22 years old and he’s 5’6”. His thing is playing pool on Friday nights at the bar, but they moved to Colorado. They live downstream from the mountains and their next son is 6’7” and plays basketball. One kid is 5’6” and the other kid is 6’7”, the same mom and dad.   [00:49:43] Ashley James: And that’s not genetics.   [00:49:45] Dr. Joel Wallach: No, that’s not genetics. That’s an embryo thing, the embryo got more nutrition. Also, as the kid was born, as he was growing up, he got more nutrition growing up because the food there had more minerals in it than this kid that was raised in Central Missouri.   [00:50:01] Ashley James: Can you see that there are parts of the country where people are taller because of the nutrients they had access to?   [00:50:10] Dr. Joel Wallach: Of course. You have to see where are some of the tallest people in America from? They’re from around Denver, Colorado in the mountains. They’re from Phoenix, Arizona down in the valleys from the mountains. Even Texas is famous for tall handsome cowboys.   [00:50:28] Ashley James: Very interesting.   [00:50:30] Dr. Joel Wallach: There’s also a lot of oil, gold, and silver in Texas too.   [00:50:36] Ashley James: You mean the soil is more mineral-rich?   [00:50:39] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah, because it’s all from volcanic stuff in Texas, all the mountain ranges in Texas.   [00:50:45] Ashley James: You’ve talked about how we can prevent and reverse disease by making sure that we have the 90 essential nutrients. The majority of that is minerals. What are the common symptoms of mineral deficiency? The people that are walking around right now that they have a mineral deficiency and they don’t even know it.   [00:51:04] Dr. Joel Wallach: I give a lecture. I’m lecturing to say 500, 600 people in a room. Out of the five hundred people, 20 of them will have gray hair or white hair. I know those people have varicose veins, they even have aneurysms, they have all kinds of weird stuff going on in their tendons and ligaments because the same nutritional deficiency that causes white hair causes these other diseases. You get a breakdown of the elastic fibers in veins, you have varicose veins. You get a breakdown of the elastic fibers and arteries, you get aneurysms. These things don’t just happen. Our whole families died of aneurysms. Yeah. You’ve got five generations living on the same farm. Does anybody supplement? No, no, no. They’d laugh at you if you took supplements. We just eat well because we grow our own food. There you go. Our grandma, in the old days, when she felt like she was having cravings whether it was during pregnancy or they just would have cravings, they didn’t have pretzels, potato chips, chocolate bars, and stuff like that 100 years ago. What did grandma eat when she had cravings? Wood ashes out of the woodstove.   [00:52:21] Ashley James: Oh, yes.   [00:52:23] Dr. Joel Wallach: What are wood ashes? They’re minerals. Little kids would eat wood ashes out of the woodstove. Little kids would go eat dirt out of the backyard. The little ones before they were let loose on their own in the backyard, they were in their cribs they would chew on that rail in the crib. When they chewed on the crib they called it cribbing. When the horses were mineral deficient, they’d chew on the top rail of their stall. Because they were doing what the little kids would do they called it cribbing just like the little kids would do. Since I put those minerals in the baby formulas, they don’t have to put the fiberglass shield on the crib rails anymore because kids aren’t eating the rails anymore since they have our minerals in all the baby formulas.   [00:53:05] Ashley James: Can you explain why type-2 diabetes is a mineral deficiency?   [00:53:09] Dr. Joel Wallach: Sure. Because the people who have type 2 diabetes are deficient of a single mineral. Because that mineral does not occur in a uniform blanket around across the earth. It occurs in veins like chocolate in chocolate [inaudible 00:53:20] ice cream. It occurs in veins like gold and silver. Here’s the deal, why does one neighbor not get diabetes and the other neighbor get diabetes? Where are they getting their food from? One gets it from the A&P and the other one gets it from Costco. They have different sources of those nutrients, or maybe they have a brother who has a farm 100 miles away and that brothers bring them bushels of food every week. People who are getting a source of those minerals naturally in their food don’t get those diseases. If they move away from there to another place where that mineral is not there, it’s not in the food in the grocery stores, your kids will get those diseases. You might hear doctors say it’s delayed genetics. It had to be back in her family somewhere.   [00:54:04] Ashley James: When I got on your supplements, I had taken supplements before. I bought it at the grocery store. I remember I bought supplements at Trader Joe’s and I didn’t notice the difference. I was very reluctant because I thought I’ve spent money before on supplements and it didn’t work. Why is this going to be different? But there is a voice in me that said just go for it, just try this. I had hope in me. At the time, I had out of control blood sugar. Just raging out of control blood sugar. I was hungry all of the time. When we were driving somewhere going on an errand on the other side of town, I would say to my husband pull over at the next exit and go to the first drive-thru. I have to eat now. I cried. I would burst into tears. I’d feel like a prisoner of my own body. I was always hungry. My blood sugar was out of control. I also had chronic fatigue. I was exhausted all the time. The first thing I did was I got on your trace mineral, your liquid trace mineral, and I got on the supplement that helps stabilize blood sugar because it has the minerals in it for that. That day, I had just taken a few shots of the liquid mineral. It was 2 PM and my husband turns to me and said, “You haven’t eaten anything yet today.” I burst into tears because I checked in with my body and I realized I wasn’t hungry. Because I was always waiting for hunger to eat because I was constantly hungry. After just taking a few shots of the minerals I didn’t have any hunger and it was 2 PM. I couldn’t believe it. I was bawling my eyes out. I thought there’s something to this, there’s something to this. I kept taking it and on day five, now I normally couldn’t wake up until about 11:00 in the morning. I’d be so exhausted all day. I woke up on the fifth day on your liquid mineral supplements, I woke up at 5:00 in the morning fully wide-awake, bright-eyed, and bushy-tailed. I jumped on top of my husband, I looked him in the eyes and he says, “I don’t know who you are. You’re not the woman I married, but I’m keeping you.” I knew that there was something to this. We called our two best friends, one lives in Toronto. You were giving a lecture that same day. I really believe it’s God’s divine intervention. God and came to help because that exact same day I called her up and I said, “Katherine Ann, I have to tell you about something. It’s amazing that’s happened to me this week. You have to go see Dr. Wallach.” She was in her 50s at the time, she had taken supplements her whole life. She had eaten healthy her whole life, but she was born with ichthyosis.   [00:56:45] Dr. Joel Wallach: Do you know what causes ichthyosis?   [00:56:47] Ashley James: I do now, but back then she was told it was genetic. She raised her hand and you said, “I bet you were told it was genetic.” She said, “Yes because my father has it and my niece has it.” You said, “The doctors were wrong,” and you told her exactly what to take. This is back in 2011, you told her exactly what to take. Three years later she has zero ichthyoses, and now, the only remnants are sometimes she gets slightly dry skin. That’s it, that’s it. Her body was covered in these giant chunks that would just fall off her and bleed and that was the ichthyosis, which means fish scales, but you reversed it. That was the most amazing thing because you proved, right there to us, that it wasn’t genetic but that her family, the whole family had a specific nutrient deficiency, it would express in that way. You wrote a book called Epigenetics sharing that one family. If they had vitamin A deficiency, for example, would express in this way but a different family with different genetics, the genetics would express in maybe issues with the lungs, for example. You’ve shared that the root is nutrient deficiency, not genetics, but genetics express in different ways when you have nutrient deficiency.   [00:58:16] Dr. Joel Wallach: Okay. Here’s another piece to that. There’s a bottom line here, the thing that all the family members have a gluten problem. They’re eating gluten, oatmeal for breakfast so they couldn’t absorb the nutrient even if they were supplementing with that nutrient they’re going to be slow to respond, whereas if they were to get off of gluten and two weeks’ time it would be gone. Ichthyosis, psoriasis, eczema, dermatitis, rosacea, and asthma are all caused by the same deficiency. When you have a gluten problem, wheat, barley, rye, oats, that nutrient is extremely difficult to absorb. That’s why you see little kids with asthma, they got skin problems, they got eczema, dermatitis, and psoriasis. They’ll also have a bowel problem. These same people will have bowel problems. Will have irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease, diverticulitis, appendicitis, they’ll have things like colitis, and ileitis. You got it? All those are the same disease when you look at them under the microscope. They’re only given different names because of different locations of major pain. They’re named by the location of the pain as opposed to what it looks like under the microscope because all those bowel diseases look the same under the microscope. They’re all the same. They’re the results of gluten consumption. You lose 97%, 98%, or 99% percent of the absorbent surface in your small intestines. So even if you supplement with that nutrient, you’re not going to get a full response or it’s going to take you three years to get a response that should take you only two weeks to get a response.   [00:59:55] Ashley James: Do you believe 100% of the world should avoid barley, wheat, rye, and oats?   [00:59:59] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah, wheat, barley, rye, and oats—the whole world should avoid it because that’s why 20 million people died in India 100 years ago from the Spanish flu. That’s why right now, Brazil got the worst cases of COVID-19. They had 1,000 people die last night in 26,000 new cases in Brazil last night because they’re all eating wheat.   [01:00:30] Ashley James: There’s a link between eating these grains and our immune health?   [01:00:36] Dr. Joel Wallach: Of course. You have to appreciate that you cannot absorb nutrients. Say you’re a three-year-old kid and you get the COVID-19 virus, you get minor common cold symptoms. After 50, 60, 70 years of eating wheat, barley, rye, and oats and now you’re, 65, 75, 85, and 90, you get the COVID you get really severe manifestations and even death. What’s the difference? The difference is over 30, 40, 50 years the people have been eating gluten—wheat, barley, rye, and oats—our intestinal lining disappeared. Even if they’re supplementing, they can’t absorb nutrients. Do you know what the immune system is, Ashley? Do you know what the immune system is made out of?   [01:01:20] Ashley James: White blood cells?   [01:01:22] Dr. Joel Wallach: White blood cells, right or the product of the immune system. The immune system is your bone marrow. When people, get to be 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90 years old, they have what’s called Wallach’s fibrous dysplasia. It used to be just called fibrous dysplasia, which doctors said was genetic. No, we’re calling it Wallach’s fibrous dysplasia because it’s not genetic. It’s a simple nutritional deficiency caused by gluten damaging the small intestine. It’s not able to absorb the nutrients so the bone marrow dies, can’t make white blood cells anymore to go kill and eat the virus, can’t make antibodies to go kill the virus, and can’t make red blood cells so these people are constantly anemic. They have to have transfusions all the time and B12 injections. They bleed to death because they can’t make platelets. When the 20 million people in India died from the Spanish flu, they all died from hemorrhaging. They didn’t die from pneumonia. They all hemorrhaged to death because all their bone marrow was dead when the virus got them and they couldn’t make platelets, so they all bled to death. 20 million in six months.   [01:02:41] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [01:02:42] Dr. Joel Wallach: It took me a lot of redoing all those autopsies to figure it out.   [01:02:45] Ashley James: That’s fascinating. Are there cultures that don’t eat barley, wheat, rye, and oats and they have stronger immune systems?   [01:02:53] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yes, they’re called Asians. They eat rice and sweet potatoes. Taiwan only has 23 deaths from COVID-19.   [01:03:04] Ashley James: That is fascinating. When I learned from you to remove barley, wheat, rye, and oats from our diet back in 2011, we did. We listened to you, we did exactly what you said although I don’t have celiac. A lot of people say oh I don’t have celiac, I don’t need to do that. I don’t have celiac either and I’ve taken allergy tests. I’m not allergic to it according to an allergy test, but when I removed barley, wheat, rye, and oats from my diet, I lost 25 pounds of water weight. My husband lost several as well. He went down two ring sizes and I went down one and a half ring sizes. Our ring started flying off. We had our wedding rings custom-made for us and they started flying off our hands. We had to go get them resized back in 2011 and they’re still fitting perfectly. We had to go down that many ring sizes from cutting out barley, wheat, rye, and oats. It caused that much inflammation. We have pictures of us before and after going gluten-free but beyond that going oat-free as well. We don’t need those four grains because of everything we learned from you. Again, you don’t have to be allergic.   [01:04:14] Dr. Joel Wallach: Not an allergy.   [01:04:15] Ashley James: It’s not an allergy.   [01:04:16] Dr. Joel Wallach: It’s not an allergy. No. What I want everybody to do if they have any wheat, barley, rye, and oats in their house they need to package it up in a very nice package and drop it off as a present for their doctor.   [01:04:28] Ashley James: You are so funny. Why does barley, wheat, rye, and oats cause damage to the gut? Why does it mechanically cause damage to the gut?   [01:04:41] Dr. Joel Wallach: It’s actually chemical damage. It’s chemical damage because of the chemical makeup of the proteins in those grains. Rice does not have those, buckwheat does not have those, and millet does not have those, so those grains are all safe. It’s interesting too when you look at COVID-19 infections women have the same infection rate up until about 25 years of age as men. After 25 years of age women almost don’t get COVID infections at all and men go up.   [01:05:16] Ashley James: Is it because of beer drinking?   [01:05:19] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah, men drink beer. Women drink beer in college, but once they get over 35 years of age they get a little more sophisticated and they start drinking vodka, they start drinking wine, and that kind of stuff, right?   [01:05:35] Ashley James: That’s too funny. That’s true. A lot of women are avoiding those carbs because they’re afraid of carbs.   [01:05:41] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah. They have a reason. The men they like their beer, but if you want to drink beer drink Asian beer—Japanese and Chinese beer made from rice.   [01:05:50] Ashley James: The most important foods to avoid are barley, wheat, rye, and oats. What other foods have you found that are very detrimental to our health?   [01:05:59] Dr. Joel Wallach: Fried foods turn into trans fats, heterocyclic amines, it causes cancer, and it cause plaque in your arteries. Cholesterol is your best friend. Cholesterol does not cause plaque in your arteries or heart disease. Cholesterol is your best friend. Again, if you’re doctor wrote you prescriptions for cholesterol-lowering drugs, package them up and send them to your doctor. I love you so much. I don’t want to take these anymore [inaudible 01:06:20] throw away. I’m going to give them to you. Please use them. I just am not interested in those drugs. Alzheimer’s disease is cholesterol deficiency. Cholesterol deficiency did not occur before the 1930s and 1940s. Prior to that time, there was no such thing as Alzheimer’s disease. There were dementia, but there are eight different dimensions doctors tend to call them all Alzheimer’s disease because insurance pays the most money to treat Alzheimer’s disease, so they call all eight dementias as Alzheimer’s disease so they get the bit maximum pay. Let me tell you a great story. The guy’s name is Ray McGregor. He’s still alive and he’s kicking butt. I was actually in Texas at that time. This Ray McGregor had been in a coma. He had “Alzheimer’s disease” for three years, he goes into a coma, and he’d been in a coma for eight years in a nursing home being fed through a G-tube. He’s in a coma for eight years with “Alzheimer’s disease.” I put him on our program for anti-dementia including three eggs twice a day with soft yolks and our D-Stress capsules, Ultimate Niacin Plus, and Healthy Brain and Heart Pack. Grinding everything up twice a day and putting it all through his G-tube. His daughter did this for him. In three days’ time, he gets up. He thought he was only asleep one day. He gets dressed, goes back to work at the bank. He was vice president of the bank. It’s been eight years. Nobody knew who the heck. They said who are you? They thought this guy is trying to figure out a weird way to rob the bank. He was perfectly normal after just three days on my program after being three years cholesterol-lowering drugs of statin drugs. Then eight years in a coma being fed just these liquid food replacers getting slowly worse and worse and worse and worse. They thought his end was coming. That’s why his daughter contacted me, is there anything we could do? I said, “Try this.” In three days’ time, she calls me screaming, “He’s back at work at the bank.”   [01:08:29] Ashley James: I love listening to your radio show because I hear these stories. Because people call in, you tell them what to do, and then they call in three months later. They tell you this is what happened. You’re like, “Yeah. You had followed what I said, good. Keep doing it.” But you hear these amazing stories. I believe twice I have heard of senior citizens growing back the second set of adult teeth. They lost their teeth. They’re wearing dentures for a long time and after getting on your supplements, in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, they regrew new teeth. That’s because the body now finally had enough minerals to do that. That blows my mind what the body can accomplish. I love following you and listening to everything you do. A few years ago, when you were here in my town, a woman stood up crying and said, “I’m a nurse and a month ago I was in a wheelchair. I thought I would have to give up nursing because I have MS. I have a progressive form of MS. It doesn’t come and go, it just goes. I just was on my way out the door and I had to give up nursing and then I found Dr. Wallach. I got on his protocol, and I’m standing here today. 30 days ago I was in a wheelchair and now I’m standing here because of everything he does.” You had said that MS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease that they’re all the same disease but just presenting in different parts of the nervous system. Can you explain what you meant by that?   [01:10:03] Dr. Joel Wallach: Different parts of the nervous is do different things, Ashley. When you shut one of these different areas down you get different symptoms. That’s just a simple answer because each of those areas does different things. You shut down the one that causes you to start shaking, you start shaking. You shut down a different one, you lose your memory. You shut down a different one, you get ringing in the ears. You shut down a different one, you lose all your strength. You start eating three eggs three times a day with soft yolks, you take your Healthy Brain and Heart Pack and throw in the D-Stress capsules, and the Ultimate Niacin Plus, Synaptiv and stay away from all the bad stuff. All this stuff is in this book It’s All in Your Head! Because there are 25 different diseases that go away when you do what I tell you to do. I figure I might as well put all these head things in one book.   [01:10:59] Ashley James: I love it. I’m so excited for your new book. Is it out yet? When is it coming out?   [01:11:03] Dr. Joel Wallach: Oh, yeah. You can buy them today.   [01:11:06] Ashley James: Okay, great.   [01:11:07] Dr. Joel Wallach: This little book is going to change America. I’d say within one year’s time, this little book will change America because all these diseases that neurologists make their living off of and send their kids to college on are not going to be here anymore.   [01:11:24] Ashley James: Fascinating. I’m just so excited. I love that because of you these minerals and nutrients are now in the baby formula that wasn’t in baby formula. Because of you, we are reducing sudden infant death syndrome and we’re reducing these nutrient deficiencies caused diseases as people are waking up. One thing you say is to avoid oil and this is so controversial. So many doctors believe that we should be drinking liters of virgin pressed olive oil. Why is oil bad for us?   [01:11:57] Dr. Joel Wallach: Because they are chemical structures. They have what’s called double bonds, which are very, very fragile connections between one carbon and another. When you leave them to sit out at room temperature for a couple of weeks like salad dressing on the tables and restaurants or maybe in one of these places where you go through a line and they have the salad dressings on there. You fry in oils, you baste in oils, you cook in oils, you simmer in oils, you grill in oils, and you’re oxidizing those double bonds in the oil turning them into what’s called trans fats, heterocyclic amines, and acrylamides, which are one of the most potent poisons on earth. They cause cancer, they cause plaque in your arteries. Cholesterol does not cause plaque in the arteries, cholesterol does not cause heart disease. It’s oil, the oxidized oil it’s either just so you could keep your salad dressing sitting on your kitchen table all the time. It will take a couple of months for you to oxidize it, but if you heat it for frying or just sautéing whether it’s fish, fried potatoes, chicken, hamburgers, or whatever it is you’re putting the oil in, you cause inflammation in the arteries and it causes plaque in the arteries. It’s the heated oils or oxidized oils that cause plaque in the arteries, not cholesterol. It’s just like when people were told Alzheimer’s disease and there’s nothing to do about it. It’s the same principle.   [01:13:22] Ashley James: Have you been able to reverse heart disease? People come to you with four clogs in the heart, for example, or they’re on a heart transplant list. Have you been able to reverse heart disease?   [01:13:30] Dr. Joel Wallach: Thousands, thousands every day. Thousands every day around the world. One of the first recognized heart diseases is congestive heart failure. Ashely, the terminal event, that beriberi. One of those diseases that the old sailors used to die from is caused by a deficiency of a single vitamin. Congestive heart failure because doctors want to give you a heart transplant for, is a simple deficiency of one vitamin. Atrial fibrillation is caused either by osteoporosis to the skull squeezing the tenth cranial nerve, you get degenerate disc disease, and the vertebrae—first four thoracic vertebrae—is squeezing the first four thoracic nerves from your spinal cord that control your rate and rhythm of your heart. These hypertrophic cardiomyopathy heart disease, this Keshan disease. It’s the sudden heart death in these young athletes and sudden infant death syndrome all the same thing, are caused by a deficiency of a single nutrient.   [01:14:22] Ashley James: In terms of deposits built up where doctors say it’s cholesterol.   [01:14:26] Dr. Joel Wallach: There’s no cholesterol and plaque in your arteries. There is no cholesterol in your arteries. That was the biggest lie that medical doctors have told the world. They should all be put in jail for that. Every cardiologist should be put in jail. There is no cholesterol and plaque in your arteries. Cholesterol has nothing to do with plaque in your arteries. Cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease. It’s oils.   [01:14:53] Ashley James: I love it. What book of yours could someone read if they want to understand more about this?   [01:14:57] Dr. Joel Wallach: Epigenetics.   [01:14:59] Ashley James: Great. It’s so exciting to share this information because I’ve seen it work. You recently had sustained an injury that the doctors wanted to amputate your foot or they were entertaining the idea and you were able to save your foot. Can you tell us what happened?   [01:15:18] Dr. Joel Wallach: I was up in Canada. I was in Toronto and we had just finished one of these shows. It was late at night, dark, and we’re going to cross this field. There has been construction out there and they created a sinkhole in this field, which we had crossed hundreds and hundreds of times over the years and was just like a golf course, no holes nothing like that. There are seven of us, me in the middle, three beautiful women on one side, and three beautiful women on the other side. We’re walking because they’re rolling up the asphalt in the parking lot so you couldn’t park next to the meeting place. We had to walk across this field to get to the parking lot. I stepped in this eight-foot deep hole and there’s rebar in there. This one foot was all punctured with rebar and it dislocated the SI joint on the right side and punctured my left foot. In three days’ time, that foot looked like a hamburger and everybody made me go to the emergency room. I go to the emergency room and they said, “Oh my god, we’re going to cut your foot off.” I said, “No, you’re not.” I got dressed and got out of there. My left foot, which had the gangrene in it and looked like hamburger, rotten hamburger, and they were going to amputate it, is perfectly 100% normal. My right leg, which I had the dislocated SI joint in is still a half-ounce shorter than the left leg, but there’s no pain. There’s nothing wrong with it. I use a walker for balance, but I don’t need it. I walk around the house 14 times twice a day just for exercise. I can load and unload trucks and stand up behind the counter and deal with people all day just standing. No problem. I’ll have both legs when I die at 300.   [01:17:12] Ashley James: You better. Absolutely. But you healed so quickly. Did you change anything? Did you just continue on the supplements you always take and the diet you always eat or did you change anything?   [01:17:24] Dr. Joel Wallach: No, the only thing I did was I use our colloidal silver and squirted colloidal silver up the puncture wounds in the foot that I’d stepped on the rebar and had the gangrene. I just squirted colloidal silver up in the holes and sprayed it all over the outside of the foot. In 10 days’ time, it was all healed.   [01:17:40] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. I’ve seen that before where people who are on your supplements who are fully nitrified. They go in for a surgery, they heal much, much, much faster than any of the doctors expected because the body can heal itself when it has all of its resources.   [01:18:00] Dr. Joel Wallach: Ashley, doctors make their money when you have a complication from surgery.   [01:18:08] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [01:18:12] Dr. Joel Wallach: Why would they want to avoid complications? That’s where they make their most money.   [01:18:20] Ashley James: It’s so disheartening and so frustrating. That’s why I do the work I do to spread this information so that we can help people.   [01:18:27] Dr. Joel Wallach: That’s why we love you. We appreciate it.   [01:18:30] Ashley James: My dear friend Jennifer who has healed some amazing things herself using your supplements and I have healed like I’ve shared. We started a website called takeyoursupplements.com. We help people to get on your protocols and follow your protocols to prevent and reverse disease and become incredibly healthy. Like I said, I reversed major issues. I was told I’d never have kids. I was able to conceive naturally, and we attributed all to the work that you do. Thank you so much. A dear friend of mine, the second person I called to get on these supplements back in 2011 was my friend Forrest, who had chronic kidney stones. He was in his early 30s and he was urinating kidney stones for five months straight, unable to leave the house, he was in so much pain. We got him on your protocol and the kidney stones immediately stopped and they’ve never come back. You explained it was a mineral deficiency.  I’ve seen this over and over and over again that you regularly reverse issues. Why is it that someone can’t just go to the grocery store and buy some generic supplements? Why is it that your supplements are unique and that your supplements are the most bioavailable that the body can absorb and utilize the best?   [01:19:42] Dr. Joel Wallach: Two reasons. Number one, they contain all 90 essential nutrients. Actually, more than that. 220 nutrients many of which will be deemed to be essential later on, but they certainly are in all our programs. We have programs for 900 different diseases. They all contain 200 plus nutrients 90 of which are universally agreed upon as essential. You see these advertisements on TV for these vitamins and minerals and these multiples. Some of them have been around since the Second World War. In fact, I used to take them as a kid. They say complete nutrition. Order today. Complete nutrition. 20% discount because of all the COVID stuff. 20% discount, complete nutrition. You get all 27 nutrients. That’s not even 1/3 of the 90. 27 isn’t even 30. The 27 nutrients, I think 14 of them are vitamins and the others are minerals. They don’t have anywhere near the 60 essential minerals that you need. They get 7, 6, 12, or whatever it is. There you go. It’s just because their idea of complete nutrition is totally crazy.   [01:20:58] Ashley James: Your protocol has the 90 essential nutrients, but you also formulate it in the way the body can absorb readily.   [01:21:05] Dr. Joel Wallach: Yeah. We use very unique sources of these minerals, very unique sources of the vitamins, and very unique sources of the omega-3 essential fatty acids. None of our stuff is the same place any of these other companies get their nutrients from. Most of their nutrients are manufactured. The vitamins are manufactured. We have more natural nutrition than anybody else, but also, there are certain places on earth where these types of minerals occur. We’re talking about one deposit and these are places where everybody lives a long time. These are places where there are volcanic histories, so the volcanic ash is a 1000-feet deep here. We buy the property, we mine this stuff, and is still in the plant farm. Repeat that, it’s still on the plant farm. These minerals are in plant cells. They’re organically bound as opposed to just ground-up limestone. That’s why ours are so absorbable because they’re attached to an organic molecule.   [01:22:11] Ashley James: Proof of the pudding’s in the eating by taking your supplements. I’ve worked with thousands of people since 2011 and they all noticed a difference. Everyone within days has more mental clarity, better sleep, better energy, and then they start to see those symptoms go away. The unwanted symptoms go away and they start to see better health just over and over and over again. I definitely encourage listeners to read your books. I’m going to have all the links to all your books in the show notes of the podcast so that they can read your books. Your information is phenomenal. I love that you go against the grain. You go against the status quo because you’re showing people the truth. You’re not afraid to show people the truth. That’s why you’re my biggest hero in the health space. Thank you so much for coming today and sharing. It’s been amazing.   [01:22:59] Dr. Joel Wallach: Ashley, you are one of the greatest angels of God because you’re His work. I’ve worked with so many pastors. Actually, I have a wonderful DVD and a CD set called Praise The Lord And Pass The 90. Just a 30-second story. This pastor, Mike Freeman, up in Baltimore, Maryland. He went into a coma when the bird flu went through five or six years ago up on the East Coast. He was put into one of these terminal wards with 10 other people who were all supposed to be dead before morning. Ms. Linda, one of his great gals who does all his technical stuff, calls me and says, “Is there anything we can do for him?” I said, “Yeah. Just take our plant minerals, just plant minerals not the flavored ones, just the plant minerals. Put a face cloth on both his legs below his knees. Every 15 minutes soak them. Take a Bible in there, read the Bible to him. He’s in a coma. In the morning she calls me crying. I said, “How is Pastor Mike doing?” She says, “Well, as predicted. 10 out of 11 were dead before morning.” She says, “Pastor Mike got up, shaved, and he’s down in his TV studio telling the world how God’s minerals saved his life.”   [01:24:07] Ashley James: I love that. I’ve heard that before that putting the minerals on the skin of people who couldn’t take it orally in order to absorb it. I love that. I’ve had experiences where I had a really, really bad sunburn to the point where blisters are coming up. I take your minerals and I spray it on. I put it on one side of my body, not the other, just to prove how quickly it’ll heal. The next day the sunburn where I put the minerals on is gone and the other side is still burnt. It just works. It really works.   [01:24:38] Dr. Joel Wallach: I remember you sharing that with me before. I want to thank you. Praise the Lord and pass the 90. Let’s do more great things together. Love you, dear. Bye-bye.   [01:24:44] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. Wallach. It’s such a pleasure. You’re welcome back anytime.   [01:24:49] Dr. Joel Wallach: Okay. Thank you so much.   [01:24:50] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Joel Wallach, one of my biggest heroes in the holistic health space and certainly my favorite Naturopathic physician. Please go to takeyoursupplements.com and speak with us about what supplements are right for you. The trace minerals, their one bottle of it is about $24. It’s a liquid form of 77 trace minerals and elements. Everyone can take it. It’s affordable for everyone. Of course, to get all 90 essential nutrients that are right for you. As he mentioned, the secret sauce. Depending on your symptoms, your health concerns, and your health goals, there are certain packages that he’s created. Certain protocols and programs that he’s created for everyone depending on their needs. We’ll help you with that. Go to takeyoursupplements.com. We really look forward to helping you. I’ve been working with everyone there at takeyoursupplements.com. I’m so excited that you can be part of it, part of helping get your health back. If you’re a health coach and you’re interested in learning how to help people with supplements, we can also help you there. There’s a whole training program for health coaches to learn how to utilize Dr. Wallach’s protocols to help their clients. We can help you with that as well. Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you love. Remember, go to takeyoursupplements.com and have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.   Get Connected with Dr. Joel Wallach! 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Contact Sunlighten Saunas for their Special Listener Sale during the month of June for Father's Day! Call 877-292-0020 Check out the supplements Ashley James recommends: takeyoursupplements.com Magnesium Soak: Use coupon code LTH at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount! Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coaching   Naturopathy For Kidney Health https://www.learntruehealth.com/naturopathy-for-kidney-health   Highlights: Difference between MDs and NDs Different types of kidney stones Magnesium and potassium can be helpful to calcium oxalate kidney stones Herbs that maintain kidney function and helps treat kidney disease 3 alkalizing foods: pomegranate juice, cantaloupe, and pinto beans   Most people think that if you have kidney disease, it can’t be reversed anymore, but that is not always the case. Dr. Devin Miles, a Naturopathic Physician specializing in gastrointestinal disorders and kidney disease, joins us to share more information about kidney health. She enumerates different types of kidney stones and provides information on how to prevent kidney stone formation as well as how to treat kidney stones. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I can’t believe it’s already June. Can you believe that? Time really flies. I’m so excited for you to listen to today’s episode because we focus on kidney health. Prevention is the most important thing, so if we can adjust our lifestyle and diet now to support kidney health, we can encourage our body to have a longer, healthier life. By supporting healthy kidneys, as what’s discussed in today’s episode, you’re actually supporting every organ of the body, so prevention is one thing. But if you have kidney disease right now, regardless of what stage you’re in, you can do things to support optimal health. No matter what, you can do things naturally to support yourself in achieving optimal health, and we discuss that in today’s interview. There are a few exciting things happening this month because Father’s Day is coming up. I’ve talked to my favorite health companies, and we have some really exciting sales for you for Father’s Day. One really exciting sale is from my favorite sauna company, Sunlighten. I talked to them and talked to them and talked to them and whittled down a really, really great deal, so I’m very excited for you. For the month of June, right now they’re running some kind of special sale, but for Learn True Health listeners, on top of their already current sale price for their saunas and their solo systems, you’re going to get as a Learn True Health listener $200 off your sauna and free shipping. Shipping for a sauna system like a big wooden sauna system is over $500. They’re going to give you free shipping, and they’re going to take $200 off. If you get a solo system, they’re going to take $100 off. Usually, in addition to that, for the Learn Truth Health listeners, they throw in some things like their bamboo towels and stuff like that. I really like the special, non-toxic pad that you sit on in the wooden sauna. I love their 3-in-1 system. I’ve had several episodes about it. I’ve interviewed a cardiologist that uses saunas for heart health. I’ve interviewed the founder of Sunlighten. She talks about why she started the company. I’ve interviewed an employee of theirs that shares some really cool stories of success. The reason why I chose Sunlighten out of all the other sauna companies in the world, for me to buy my own personal sauna from them, is because they have a 3-in-1. It’s a full spectrum of light whereas most saunas are just the far-infrared. The Sunlighten is the near-infrared, the mid-infrared, and the far-infrared. There are benefits to healing the skin and actually reducing wrinkles, reducing scar tissue, decrease in chronic pain, and decrease in inflammation on all layers through the skin and into the soft tissue. You can sit in it at a lower temperature and get a really great sweat, so it increases your core temperature while still breathing comfortable air instead of breathing stuffy hot air. There are general benefits that everyone gains from using sauna therapy such as decreasing stress, decreasing inflammation and pain, and stabilizing blood pressure into a more normal range. All these things are great for overall health, but specifically about the kidneys. There are many articles in PubMed and other studies that you can find that healthfully using sauna therapy can benefit those with liver and kidney disease. One particular study showed that the concentration of ammonia in the body was released through sweat. That we also release urea through sweat as well as high levels of nitrogen. Using sauna therapy in the study, they were able to take the load off the kidneys by allowing us to sweat through the skin instead of having to have the kidneys do all the work. The reason why I bought a Sunlighten two years ago is because my doctor told me to. She said that my liver was having problems and that I should support my body in detoxifying, especially heavy metals. I’ve been using a Sunlighten to detoxify heavy metals, but also support my body in releasing these metabolites like ammonia and urea through my sweat. Lots of nasty byproducts of our metabolism can sweat it out, and then we’re giving our kidneys in our liver a break. Of course, if you’re under the care of a physician for a disease like a kidney disease, you should definitely work with your doctor, but add to your team. Find a naturopathic physician, find a functional medicine practitioner, and find more doctors and experts to add to your team to give you different opinions and of course all science-based. Dr. Andrew Weil, who’s a very famous medical doctor that specializes in holistic medicine, is quoted as saying that he regularly tells his patients with liver and kidney disease to sweat in a sauna two to three times a week. That the increase in blood flow is so good for those organs—the detoxification that happens in the sauna but also that it lowers blood pressure and that’s really great for the kidneys as well. There are several reasons why sauna therapy is great for the kidneys. I love the Sunlighten is a very gentle form of sauna therapy. But of course, work with your doctor and make sure that sauna therapy is right for you if you have a disease. There are some cases where sauna therapy is incredibly beneficial, and there are some cases where it’s not recommended, so make sure it’s right for you. There are many reasons why I love Sunlighten. If you go to learntruehealth.com and type Sunlighten or type sauna into the search bar, you’ll find several episodes where we’ve gone in greater detail but why I love Sunlighten. I wanted to let you know that this Father’s Day sale is going on right now, and it’s such a perfect gift to give to your whole family, but especially give to your father or your husband for Father’s Day. The smallest wooden system is like a phone booth. It looks quite small on the outside, but you can actually sit in it with your spouse. My husband and I can sit in it comfortably and then our five-year-old comes running in sometimes. He likes to be in there for a few minutes, and it’s safe for a few minutes for children to be in there. Typically, it’s one minute for every year of age. He gets to be in there for about five minutes and then he jumps out, but my husband and I can sit in there comfortably together. It fits in the corner of one of our rooms. You can get the wooden system, but if you don’t have a lot of space, you get the solo system. The solo system is ultra-low EMF and non-toxic. It’s very comfortable to lie on. Then you wipe it up and put it away in the closet when you’re not using it, so that’s very exciting that you have those two options. Then of course they have larger systems and they have different kinds of wood. I got the cedar because I love the smell of cedar, but if you’re hypersensitive to smell they have different types of wood depending on that. Give them a call. Just google Sunlighten and give them a call. Mention Learn True Health with Ashley James and they will give you that discount. They know that this discount is for you guys, the Learn True Health listeners, and they’re more than happy to answer your questions. It’s a wonderful company that’s based in the United States. I just really, really love the quality of their products and their customer care. If you have any questions for me about my experience with them, I’ve been working with them and using their system for about two years now, you can always reach out to me in Facebook or you can email me ashley@learntruehealth.com. Stay tuned for the other Father’s Day sales that I’m going to be letting you guys know about. Medterra CBD, which is my favorite CBD company because of the quality of their CBD. I’ve had them on the show twice to talk about that. Of course, my favorite magnesium soak and there’s going to be others that I will be letting you guys know about. I’m going to let you know about it in the intros of the next few episodes, but I’ll also be letting you know more details in the Learn True Health Facebook group. Go ahead and join the Facebook group by going to Facebook and searching Learn True Health, or you can go to learntruehealth.com/group and that’ll take you straight to the Facebook group. Thank you so much for being a listener. I’m so excited that you get to learn more about how you can reverse and prevent kidney disease. That includes kidney stones. That includes even if you have scar tissue in the kidneys, we talk about how to reverse that, which is really exciting. Please share this episode with those you love especially those you know who have high blood pressure, have diabetes. These are conditions that harm the kidneys and that could lead to kidney disease later on. We really want to do everything we can to support our kidney health as much as possible. If you’re healthy now let’s stay healthy, and if you have some health problems now, if you have symptoms now, let’s get you back on the road to health. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and enjoy today’s interview.   [00:10:01] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 434. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Dr. Devin Miles on the show who is a Naturopathic physician that specializes in gastrointestinal disorders and kidney disease. I’m really excited actually to talk about kidney disease today. Out of the 400 and something episodes we’ve had, we’ve never done a whole episode on kidney health, and that’s something I’ve been really excited to discuss. I’m very excited to have you on the show today. So many people are on dialysis needlessly that we could support everyone’s kidneys now to prevent dialysis. I have heard Naturopaths helped people get so healthy that they no longer need dialysis. I’m very excited to have you on the show. Welcome.   [00:10:57] Dr. Devin Miles: Thank you, thank you. Good to be here.   [00:11:00] Ashley James: This is going to be a lot of fun. Before we jump into kidney health, how to reverse kidney stones, and prevent them and all the different kinds of kidney disease that we can reverse and prevent, I’d like to get to know you a little bit. What happened in your life that made you want to become a Naturopathic physician?   [00:11:16] Dr. Devin Miles: I started having digestive issues in my senior year of college, I was 21 years old. For me, it was just out of the blue. I had not had any digestive issues. Just one day, I noticed my lower abdomen was just bloated, then I had constipation, then I had more constipation, more bloating, more gas, and then it was foul gas. I started noticing I was having food sensitivities that I never had before. Fast forward, I was diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome. There wasn’t much of a resolution in terms of cure or even understanding what it was. I was introduced to this health food store in my neighborhood at the time and told the guy what I got diagnosed with and he had had the same thing. He was the first person that really gave me hope about what to do about it. It really started as trying to figure out things for me. Then I started to realize that I was way more into researching about health than I was at my job at the time. I was like okay I think I want to make a career out of this. Eventually, I found naturopathic medicine. That’s when I was like yeah that’s it, that’s what I’m going to do. Then I went for it.   [00:12:55] Ashley James: I love it. You just dove right in and never looked back.   [00:13:00] Dr. Devin Miles: My body spoke to me in such a way that I had to listen. It was too much. When I found out about Naturopathic medicine, it was from a book that my parents gave me that they were reading at the time. That was significant because that was the first book, probably since the first grade, that I wanted to come home and read every evening. Outside of that, I was not somebody who read for leisure. My only time of reading was for educational and work purposes, that was more than enough. The fact that I actually wanted to come home and read that book every night, that really spoke to me.   [00:13:43] Ashley James: That’s so cool. I know exactly what you mean. I’ve got one right here I can’t put down. It’s called the Encyclopedia of Healing Juices. That’s not like a book you’d read like a novel but it does. I can’t put it down. Like you said, when your body speaks to you and when you’re really into health, when you’re really on the right path everything aligns. I just love that you couldn’t put that book down. What was the book?   [00:14:14] Dr. Devin Miles: It was called 21 Pounds in 21 Days. That was written by Roni DeLuz. She is actually on Martha’s Vineyard. She has her own retreat up there, which actually does incorporate a lot of juicing. She’s a Naturopath as well.   [00:14:35] Ashley James: I imagine her program isn’t about just losing weight but about losing the inflammation.   [00:14:41] Dr. Devin Miles: Yeah. It really can apply to everyone. My mom picked it up of course because she was trying to lose weight. Dr. DeLuz’s people from all walks of life are not just weight loss.   [00:14:54] Ashley James: Very cool. As you went to the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine, what times blew your mind? As you’re going through it, did you have these aha moments? Like oh my gosh, I couldn’t believe that we can reverse this disease or we can reverse this. Because we’re raised to believe, if our family traditionally went to an MD, we’re given drugs, we saw our family members given drugs for diseases and told that they’re just going to have them for the rest of their life. That’s just the way it is.  We’ve watched Hollywood and mainstream media and we’re told this is just the way it is. Then you go to a Naturopathic school and you realize my gosh, we can reverse these diseases naturally? Did you have any of those aha moments?   [00:15:45] Dr. Devin Miles: I’m guessing that whatever I read prior to going to school made me walk into school with the expectation that I would find out how to reverse those. It wasn’t so much an aha. Reading Dr. Roni’s book, going to see her, and talking with her was very pivotal for me to believe that I could probably find the solution to anything. It was more so an expectation, but I will say the first quarter of school was very majestic for me. I was very much like ohh, wow, ahh type of thing. It wasn’t an aha moment, but I was just enjoying what I was learning that first quarter.   [00:16:39] Ashley James: Can you share with us something that you just really, really, really enjoyed learning in Naturopathic school?   [00:16:46] Dr. Devin Miles: I feel like the philosophy of Naturopathic medicine. I feel like that first quarter we went into that quite a bit. Just understanding how the body works and how connected it is, I really started to harness that mindset when I was in school. I realized that what we have is we’re trained to have a certain mindset that is understanding that the body is connected, that it works as a whole, but it’s not a rigid framework.  I was recently quoted by the Institute of Natural Medicine about that that I have, what I consider, an open-minded framework. There’s some structure but there’s a way for you to be open to other things that you may learn that could also be pieces of the puzzle. I think it helps you to know where to put those pieces. First, you can accept them, and then second, you can figure out where to put them in the puzzle that you have already started to create. For instance with carpal tunnel syndrome. I remember learning that, I think it was, vitamin B6 was helpful for that. Then there was something within acupuncture that was also really helpful for carpal tunnel, and I linked those two things together in such a way that I understood why both of them worked for a carpal tunnel because I knew one and then I could put in the other one after that. Just being able to link things like that and be open to how it works and that it does work I think is what’s been really, really nice.   [00:18:45] Ashley James: Awesome. I also know that there are certain minerals that when we’re deficient in can exacerbate carpal tunnel, can help when we supplement with certain trace minerals, and can help to alleviate, I’ve seen that before. The fact that you are not closed off like this is the only way. What’s the difference in terms of philosophy? Because this is really the key to healing our bodies is our mindset about what direction we’re going to take when it comes to our health protocol. What’s the difference between seeing an MD, a medical doctor, and seeing an ND, a Naturopathic doctor? What’s the difference in the philosophy of healing?   [00:19:30] Dr. Devin Miles: Medical doctors, MDs, have a standard of care that is I think quite rigid.  It’s more rigid, it’s more strict than a Naturopathic doctor. Naturopathic doctors have standards, but as I mentioned before, they have a framework that they can really build upon and branch out from. It allows them to be more receptive to learning new things, in my opinion.  There are more tools in our toolkit for addressing different things. When you go to a Naturopathic doctor, if you go to one and then another you might notice that they use different approaches to get to the same result. That’s really why I think Naturopathic medicine came about because this German guy named Benedict Lust who put all of these pre-existing therapies together because he saw the synergy of them being put together. In other words, these therapies were around because he saw that they were effective, but they may not always be effective by themselves and different people need different things. I think naturopathic medicine allows you to have a broader framework from which to choose what is going to work for that person. It helps you to figure them out better. We use things that the body better understands them. We as human beings are of nature. When we use things that are from nature, the body understands that better because it works with it versus if it’s something synthetic, the body knows it’s synthetic. The body is probably missing something that it needs for that to fully work. When we use things in Naturopathic medicine, we’re helping to resolve the issue versus forcing one piece of it to just work better. For instance, if it’s hypertension, if I put somebody on hypertensive medication yeah their blood pressure would probably come down right, but if you take that person off of a blood pressure medication, the blood pressure’s going to go right back up. Versus if you adopt a lifestyle that is conducive to reducing hypertension and you use different herbs, homeopathy, and some other nutrients that can keep the blood pressure down, the body is very understanding of that and it’s getting what it needs to keep the blood pressure low. You could say well if you get off of all those things of course the blood pressure comes back too. That can be true, but the reality is the difference is that your body has what it needs to be in balance. It’s not that the drug is restoring total balance to your body, it’s balancing you for the sake of your blood pressure. But is your whole body in balance? Probably not.  That is the difference when we are working with a Naturopathic doctor. It’s not just about your blood pressure, it’s also about getting your whole body in balance. If you come to me with one condition, you probably have eight other symptoms that you may or may not be telling me that you might notice go away when you start to work with me because I work on the body as a whole.   [00:23:21] Ashley James: I love how you put that restoring total balance. Using the example of high blood pressure, the body is speaking to us in symptoms. So many Naturopaths who have come on the show have said that we need to listen to the language of the body, and the body is speaking and symptoms. If someone has high blood pressure and they just take medication for it, it’s kind of like if your car was making a really loud noise like maybe a belt is about to go or something and your mechanic gives you earplugs. You’re like here this is going to stop the noise. You put these earplugs in and then you’re not going to hear that noise. The car is still going to break down.  I believe there are statistics, and maybe you could speak to this, but there are statistics that for people who are on high blood pressure medication long-term they have shorter lifespans. All cause mortality. For those on high blood pressure meds will not live as long as those who figured out how to naturally support the body’s ability to heal itself and maintain optimal blood pressure.   [00:24:31] Dr. Devin Miles: I was going to say I think that applies to a lot of different medications even outside of blood pressure.   [00:24:36] Ashley James: Right. There are certain medications. We always have to say this, certain medications save people’s lives, certain medications are really necessary. I’ve even talked to Naturopaths who say they would prescribe blood pressure medication in the short-term while they’re helping the person to make lifestyle changes, nutrient changes, and figure out more in-depth. My husband had out-of-control high blood pressure a few years ago. He’d always had borderline high blood pressure but then it went through the roof. We figured out it was—and this is going to lead to kidney issues.  We had done the ketogenic diet under a Naturopath’s care for three months. After that, we did blood work and my liver was very damaged. It took me years to recover and my husband’s kidneys were incredibly damaged. We had to do several tests to find out. As a result, we ended up going whole food plant-based and focusing on herbs and supplements to support his kidneys. He was temporarily put on two blood pressure medications. It was a water pill and a blood pressure medication in order just to bring it down, but it only brought it down eight, nine points.  Then the Naturopath worked with him. At that time, we were seeing one that specialized in cardiology, a very interesting guy. He figured out that my husband just runs in stress mode. He’s always stressed out. He had him on Carditone and that immediately dropped his blood pressure, which is really interesting. By that time, his kidneys were healed, he got off of his blood pressure meds very quickly. Everything’s good now. His blood pressure is totally fine. But it’s interesting though if he gets stressed out or starts worrying about something he can raise his blood pressure. For him, even though yes he has to eat a healthy diet that’s conducive to kidney health and heart health. It’s just as important as his diet to lower his stress levels and to do that internal work to not work himself up, so it’s interesting to see. If we had gone to just an MD then he would have just put him on meds. Whereas the Naturopaths we went to address his stress levels, his lifestyle, his emotional mental health, his sleep, his energy, his kidney health, his heart health, and his diet. There are so many more facets of his life that have been enriched by Naturopath care than an MD would have.  MDs have their place, they’re one piece of the pie of medicine, but they’re not the whole pie. In the mainstream media, we’re taught that MDs are the whole pie, that allopathic medicine is the whole pie, and everything else is like this alternative dessert. It’s not the case, right? It’s not the case. One Naturopath I’ve worked with calls it allopathic reductionism. He says that MDs are trained in philosophy as reductionistic thinking. If you come to them with a kidney problem, they’re just going to look at the kidneys and focus down on that, reduce it to that, and not look at all the other symptoms of the body. Whereas a Naturopath, like you said, you’re looking at all the other symptoms.  When you’re supporting someone in that vitamin deficiency they might have had for their carpal tunnel, you’re actually supporting them in their sleep, in their energy, in their mood, and their stress. You’re supporting them in all those other areas of their life because a mineral, a nutrient, or a vitamin deficiency will create hundreds of potential symptoms. You’re not treating a symptom, you’re treating the body as a whole and what the body needed. I I feel like Naturopathic medicine should be the main medicine that we go to, and we should go to MDs for emergency medicine because that’s where they shine. Go to Naturopaths for prevention and for chronic illness because that’s where you guys shine.   [00:28:59] Dr. Devin Miles: Right. I am in full agreement with you that yes, sometimes medications are helpful. Sometimes Naturopathic medicine and conventional medicine do need to get used at the same time. It also depends on their stage of life, what they know, what they’re exposed to, and what answers they have. That’s also why I like to be on different media platforms so that I can expose people to what is out there, to what is possible. I know what it feels like to be on a journey of knowledge. You’re doing the best that you can at each point. There was one guy, when I was in clinical rotations, who had schizophrenia. He was better managed, not just on his medications, but on medications plus acupuncture. That is what finally got him to a much more stable space. Even with my clients, I would say maybe half of them are on medications. I don’t tend to touch the medications.  On top of that, I am in a state where—there’s about 22 states that are licensed where Naturopathic physicians can practice medicine. I’m in a state that is not that. It’s pre-license. I definitely don’t touch their medications, but I tell them that—especially if it’s something like blood pressure—you need to be taking your blood pressure every day. Being mindful of that, what I’m doing may drop your blood pressure further. We have to be mindful of episodes of hypotension because you can get symptomatic of course if you have hypotension.  These are times when you need to start going back to your physician to be like hey, can we reduce the dose? The goal, of course, is for you to eventually not need the medication, right? Everybody’s in their own path and they got to find what works for them, what keeps them stable, and all of that. I respect that.   [00:31:13] Ashley James: That’s actually progress because when I first got into working with Naturopathic doctors, I was being mentored by Naturopath as a health coach. Back in 2011, only 17 states were licensed. I know that Naturopaths have been fighting for being able to be licensed in other states. That’s great, that’s progress to go from 17 to 22 in the last few years. That’s great. I’d like to see, obviously, all 50 states. I’d like to see all the provinces of Canada. I’d like to see every country in the world recognize Naturopathic medicine. It’s going to be one state at a time. The fact that there are 22 states that recognize Naturopathic physicians as doctors that could prescribe drugs and are at the same level and be able to use insurance with Naturopaths for those states. It’s good. It’s growing, it’s growing. This is what we want. Absolutely.   [00:32:15] Dr. Devin Miles: I enjoy what I do here in—I’m in Texas right now. Austin, of course, is a city that I think is much more receptive. That’s where most of the Naturopathic doctors. I am in Houston at the moment. So It’s a different dynamic, but I enjoy it when I get to educate people. When I first got here most people were like what? Wait, what’s the word again, Naturopath? I feel like now, for whatever reason, not as many people are responding in that way. They’re like oh, okay, okay. Cool. That’s good.   [00:32:59] Ashley James: Very cool. Back in 2011, I started working with a Naturopathic doctor and he was training me. One of my friends, who is in his early 30s, had kidney stones—chronic. He, for five months straight, was urinating kidney stones, passing kidney stones. For a man, that’s more painful for a woman just because they have a little longer urethra, so he was in agony. He couldn’t leave his house. He said the only thing that helped was to sit in the shower with the hot water beating down on him, and that’s just what he did all day for five months.  I called him up and I said, “I am working with this Naturopath. He has a protocol for kidney stones.” My friend said, “Sign me up.” He got on these supplements, specifically very bioavailable minerals including bioavailable calcium, and his kidney stones immediately stopped and they have not come back. The Naturopath that I worked with explained that, and of course, there are different kinds of kidney stones and you’re going to go into this today that there’s not just one kind. This Naturopath, actually, he’s 80 years old now and he’s still practicing. He’s really cool. I just had him on the show, Dr. Joel Wallach. He said that when we are deficient in calcium in our diet our parathyroid glands, which are the four little dots in the thyroid, the parathyroid glands will continue to release this hormone telling our bones to release minerals, like calcium, to the soft tissue.  Over time, those will just do too much because we’re not getting enough from our diet and then it would collect in the kidneys. By supplementing with a bioavailable calcium that has all the other mineral cofactors, then the parathyroid gland stops doing that. That supplementation satisfies the soft tissue—the calcium and all the minerals the soft tissue needs. The kidneys stop creating the stones. I know this is very simplified—what I’ve said is very simplified. I’m sure he has a more medical explanation.  It worked. My friend never had kidney stones again, and I’ve since heard many other stories of people who have had the same result. But if you go to an MD, if my friend had gone to an MD at the time, the MD might have checked his calcium levels in his blood, seen that it was high, and would have told him to stop eating things that contain calcium because he has too much calcium. The MD sees it under the reductionistic lens and says you have too much calcium, not looking at the whole picture. Whereas the Naturopath understands the whole picture and would say, no, you actually need more calcium.  There’s a big difference. If he had gone to an MD, he might have gone on drugs, and surgery whereas the body was crying out for a balance of nutrients, and that’s what it needed. Have you experienced that? Obviously, you had great success with reversing kidney stones, but I’d love for you to dive in and explain the different kinds of kidney stones and speak maybe about my experience with my friend and his kidney stones that were actually a mineral deficiency.   [00:36:28] Dr. Devin Miles: I haven’t seen that particular story but it brings to mind something that I have seen in a different form. I won’t go too in-depth because we’re talking about kidneys and that’s digestive issues, but the theme of deficiency and overcompensation due to deficiency. I’ve seen that in different walks of life in different behaviors. That’s the theme that I pick up from that if you have a deficiency of calcium and then the parasite just over supplies calcium because of that.  I would love to get into the kidney stones and talk a little bit more about some of the different types. It sounds like that might have been, of course, coming from too much calcium in the body from the parathyroid. I want to talk about what a kidney stone feels like first. You talked about it a little bit but I wanted to mention that a kidney stone is going to feel like back or loin pain radiating down into the groin or the side. It’s excruciating pain. You would probably know that it was a kidney stone because it’s that type of picture that goes with it.  You can also have blood in the urine as well as an urgency to urinate. The way that this can be discovered is through an ultrasound. Your story that you mentioned before about the guy that was dealing with for five months, anyone who’s listening I would definitely urge not to wait that long. I’m glad he didn’t have complications from it but you can definitely have complications from having a kidney stone. You can definitely have a blockage of urine and that could of course go further up and cause problems. Anyone who is listening and is thinking that they may in fact have a kidney stone, please go get that checked out right away.  Some risk factors for having kidney stones. There could be a bone disease as you mentioned with the one guy, hyperparathyroidism, there could be hypercalcemia. That’s of course too much calcium in the urine. You could have too much cystine in the urine. There could be some sort of low-grade infection and I’ll talk about that in a little bit. There could be some abnormalities in terms of the structure of your body that creates poor urine flow. Then there could be different components that are in the urine that are in larger amounts in it that they should be. It creates a supersaturated urine and that can form crystals, and that can form kidney stones. A couple of ways that this might happen could be changes in your urinary pH. If you have acidic urine, and we’ll talk about that more, that could be a reason why you create kidney stones. Decrease urine volume. This is why if you are prone to having kidney stones you want to drink a lot of water on a daily basis to keep the urine from getting too saturated to where it would form crystals. If you think about salt for instance, if you put a lot of water in the salt and you stir it up it dissolves, but if you only put a few drops and water in the salt it’s going to mainly just stay crystallized.  That’s a good analogy for understanding why you need water to keep things dissolved so that they can pass instead of forming a crystal. Again, if you only put like a few drops in that salt, you can easily make a clump of salt because you’d only have enough water. Bacteria could also form it. Inflammation or scarring within the urinary system. Another risk factor is being elderly, being sedentary. Sedentary, of course, can apply to any age, it’s not just the elderly. Cadmium exposure. One of the top reasons someone might be exposed to cadmium is through smoking. High intake of alcohol, oral contraceptives, and then long-term use of diuretics. Diuretics is any substance that can make you have to go to the bathroom more.  Some medications are considered diuretics especially if you just have a lot of water on your body that’s not supposed to be there. A diuretic is what would be used to get the water off. Of course, going back to hypertension, some of those are in fact diuretics too. Not all of them but certain classes are diuretic medications. Calcium oxalate stone contributors. This is one type of kidney stone—it’s calcium oxalate. This is the one that I think is more well known by the public is calcium oxalate stones. That can come from when your body is in a state of hypercalcemia, so there’s a lot of calcium in the blood. This could be from a bone disease, as well as sarcoidosis, and tuberculosis. This is called primary/enteric hyperoxaluria secondary to bone disease. Because of the bone disease, you can have too many oxalates within the body. When they say enteric they’re talking about the intestine. It could also be high calcium in the urine without high calcium in the blood. This could be a hyper absorption, so too much absorption of calcium happening in the intestines. There is a compromise in the amount of calcium that the kidneys absorb. Your kidneys are filters and they’re also absorbers of certain things at different processes along with their function. There could be an issue in terms of how the calcium gets reabsorbed. Also, increased uric acid excretion. The uric acid crystals themselves can form different calcium oxalate compounds. That could happen within what’s called the collecting ducts of the kidneys. There could also be more oxalates in the urine. This could either be genetic or caused by enteric or intestinal diseases resulting from intestinal over-absorption of oxalate. There is in fact a link between the gastrointestinal system and how well your kidneys function. I think sometimes this can be missed again when you’re only looking at the reductionism factor. There’s a particular test that I run on my clients with digestive issues. It’s a urine metabolite test. Within that test, you may see that you have a high oxalate count. It doesn’t mean that you have kidney stones but there’s something about your body that is producing a very, very high oxalate count. In that case, it can be important to address that then before you even have something like an oxalate kidney stone. Actually, I have noticed that people with autism can also have very high oxalate counts. Hypocitraturia is also a cause and that can come from chronic diarrhea as well. That’s considered idiopathic. For me, as someone who focuses on digestive health, I’ve had clients come to me with chronic diarrhea. That will be also in the setting of bloating, food sensitivities, and all of that. When we work on those things diarrhea can slow down and they can have better-formed stools.  I’ll probably say this later but I’ll say it also now, one of the things that I hope you’re that you’re picking up as you’re listening is the fact that it is important to figure out why you are in fact forming kidney stones. This is like Dr. Wallach did with the guy that you mentioned. He figured out it had to do with the deficiency of calcium and it was causing hyperparathyroidism. You have to figure out what type of stone it is and then why you’re creating that stone to be able to get to a solution that works for that person. On to the next type of stone is the uric acid stones. That essentially, going back to what I said before with the crystals, it’s because you have high uric acid in the blood. That can prosper of course in acidic urine. Lastly, there are the ones but I just wanted to focus on a couple, cystine stones. This is more genetic and it also forms in acidic urine. The first client I had with kidney disease he has cystine kidney stones. That’s actually a more rare type. Most people, as I mentioned before, have the oxalate type of kidney stones. For cystine kidney stones, what can be really helpful is alkalinizing the urine, but we’ll go into that as well. In general, when you’re dealing with kidney stones, the pain treatments that are usually prescribed by physicians in terms of medication would be antispasmodics. That is designed to help keep you from spasming. When a kidney stone is in there you want to try to loosen up everything so that it will be able to pass better. The antispasmodics can be helpful in that regard. Hemostatic is another type of medication that’s designed to help stop the blood.  A hot soak bath, as you mentioned with your friend, is that the hot soak baths may be also helpful for pain. A few other things to keep in mind, going the more Naturopathic route, is to reduce large amounts of meat. If you’re having a lot of meat, it can create a very acidic environment. If you’re having way too much of it can cause a lot of problems and it’s not the best thing for your kidneys, especially if you already are having kidney disease, that is a very common thing for me to tell someone is you definitely need to reduce your protein. Particularly animal protein, in large amounts, can be quite damaging for kidneys. If it’s already damaged, it’s even more important for you to reduce it, but if they’re not damaged you want to only have a moderate amount. You can’t be meat, meat, meat all day long.   [00:48:10] Ashley James: It also depends on the type of meat. Dr. Wallach was a pathologist. He was given diseased kidneys after they were removed for patients who had kidney transplants. He looked at the kidneys and said why did you send me a healthy kidney? The doctor said what are you talking about? I removed the diseased kidney. He said there’s nothing. I can’t find anything wrong with this. He ended up getting the strongest microscope he could and looking at the nephrons of the kidney. What he figured out was that the kidneys were being clogged by nitrates and nitrites. These preservatives that are in deli meats and smoked meats—the molecules are large enough that they actually clog the kidneys, the nephrons in the kidneys. The kidneys are kind of similar to the eyes in that they’re incredibly vascular. Kidneys and eyes are the first to go. If we have a vascular breakdown, people will lose their eyesight, they’ll start losing their night vision, or they’ll need stronger glasses. Same with the kidneys because they’re very vascular. So vascular that only one blood cell can pass through at a time. That’s how narrow it is. If those passageways are inflamed or damaged by certain chemicals like sodium nitrite, potassium nitrate, or however—it’s the nitrates and the nitrites. The bacon is the most common example but hotdogs and any kind of smoked meat, that, Dr. Wallach found, will absolutely over time, not only damage the eyes but will damage the kidneys and damage the vasculature in the body where the capillaries are so thin that only like one blood cell pass through at a time.  That’s where the nitrates and the nitrites do their damage to us. They’re not needed for preserving meat, they actually just prevent the meat from looking gray. When someone goes to buy hotdogs or bacon, if they see the hotdogs are gray, we think oh it’s gone bad. That’s actually what meat normally looks like if it’s sitting there for a few days or if it hasn’t been frozen. So many meats have been preserved with these chemicals that are harmful to the body to make them look appetizing. That’s what Dr. Wallach does. The first thing he does with someone who has kidney disease is he says no nitrates or nitrites, no fried food at all, 100% remove fried food. There are about 12 foods that he removes from the diet that cause damage to the vasculature of, not only the kidneys but the whole body, but it’s most important in the kidneys because of the concentration of vasculature. Then he focuses on high amounts of antioxidants and then he gets them on certain nutrients to make sure that they get the 90 essential nutrients—all vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids. That’s his protocol no matter what. No matter what kind of kidney stone the person has, no matter what kind of kidney disease because he’s looking at supporting the kidney’s health overall. It’s very interesting when you start to see how an experienced Naturopath treats someone’s kidney disease versus how an experienced medical doctor would treat someone’s kidney disease because the medical doctor is not trained to heal the person to the point where they no longer need medication. The medical doctor is trained to manage someone’s disease state. Manage them, make them comfortable, obviously, make sure they don’t die and get them on dialysis that kind of thing. But a Naturopath’s goal is to get them to the point where they’re disease-free. It’s a totally different philosophy. It’s very interesting. I like that you brought up alkalizing the body, drinking plenty of water. Depending on which kind of kidney stone or kidney disease they’re going to see more benefit, but in general, wouldn’t everyone across the board, wouldn’t all kidneys benefit from a more alkalized urine or alkalized diet and drinking enough water? Is there a time when a kidney wouldn’t benefit from that?   [00:53:02] Dr. Devin Miles: In general, the body does better when it’s—I wouldn’t say just so far alkaline. At one point I saw alkaline urine but the person was still having a lot of problems. I wouldn’t use the urine as a marker to say everything’s good because my urine is alkaline. There are other things that can be out of balance. It depends on what the person is dealing with, but yes, in general, if you stay in a more alkalinized way of life compared to what the standard American diet is, you’re bound to see some improvements in your health. Because the standard American diet is very, very acidic. That’s why this push into a more alkaline diet can bring you back to the balance that you need to be at.   [00:53:58] Ashley James: We have to understand that kidney disease or kidney stones is actually a symptom and not the problem. It is a problem but it’s not a problem. All the symptoms we’re experiencing are not the root cause. The body is speaking to us, my body is out of balance, something’s going on. We have to go deeper and find the root cause and the root cause is always going to be how do I support the body to balance itself out? Because the body knows how to heal itself when we remove the things that are hurting it, give it the nutrients it needs and it’s important needs so that it can do its own work the body does its own healing. We have to figure out what we’re doing to hinder that healing and how we can support that healing. That’s why I love how flexible Naturopaths are because that’s what you’re looking for. How can I support this body to heal itself?   [00:54:53] Dr. Devin Miles: Yeah. Going back to what you said about the nitrates and nitrites, chemical and heavy metal toxicity is a significant obstacle that needs to be removed. That I think is a huge piece as to why Americans and I suppose Canadians as well, I can’t speak to Canadians, but in general, I think why our world is getting sicker and sicker. Because it’s in addition to I talked about with medications being synthetic, chemicals themselves are foreign to the body. They’re not supposed to be there. When we’re consuming them through our food, our water, and our air all of these things also need to be looked at.  Not too long into when I started my business, I’m on Instagram @drdevinmiles, and another organization reached out to me. They were advocating for farmers. I think it was Central America, but apparently, there was something about the practices that were going on down there that was giving people kidney disease. It was a chemical within the crop that they were farming.   [00:56:15] Ashley James: It was probably glyphosate which is in Roundup. I’m only saying this because in Sri Lanka, the whole country banned glyphosate which is in Roundup. At the time it was Monsanto, they banned Monsanto’s Roundup because the farmers who are working in the rice paddy field so if you’ve ever seen rice fields it’s like a marsh and the farmers— their skin is exposed to the water. Before they used Roundup they were using arsenic as a way to combat pests. That was working, I guess. I don’t know how they didn’t have arsenic poisoning but that was working, and then they used glyphosate.  The problem with glyphosate is that it’s a chelator. It binds to certain heavy metals and then it will release them when pH changes in the body. When pH changes in the body it’s when fluids change from one to another so blood to cerebral spinal fluid, blood to urine. That’s why, all of a sudden, all farmers in Sri Lanka developed kidney disease because the glyphosate which had bound to the, I believe it was arsenic, metals in the water and then was releasing them quickly into the kidneys. If you can imagine running a country and all of your farmers who are working in the rice fields become sick you want to take action.  Luckily, they detected it was that and they got rid of it. Unfortunately, Monsanto or now Bayer has been pressuring the country to let them use it again. I don’t know where that stands, but that’s the problem with glyphosate. I’m sure there are other ones but glyphosate in particular is a nasty chemical that is put into our crops because it is a chelator that will bind to heavy metals and then deposit them into our brain and into our kidneys. Kidneys more so than the brain, from what I’ve heard. I’m imagining that’s what it is. Like you said, chemicals are man-made are foreign to the body. We did not evolve for hundreds of thousands of years with these chemicals.   [00:58:36] Dr. Devin Miles: Right. I would just like to also say when it came to these farmers these are like 28-year-old men. Sometimes we look at kidney disease as something that may happen to people later, and that’s not necessarily the case. It is important to keep a diet that is conducive to kidney health and also to be mindful of the different chemicals like the nitrates, the nitrates, and glyphosate to make sure that you’re avoiding those things as much as possible.  Of course, if you can have more of an organic diet you’re going to reduce the amount of chemicals that you’re exposed to even through eating things that are per se from scratch or fresh produce. Because, of course, there’s going to be higher amounts of pesticides, fungicides, and all of these, there’s going to be higher amounts if you are in fact eating non-organic produce. I particularly tell people who like to juice, when you’re juicing juice organic because you’re getting a higher amount of everything—the good and the bad. Just make sure when you’re juicing that you’re juicing organic.   [00:59:48] Ashley James: Absolutely. That’s very important. Even go so far as to grow your own produce and juice it or a friend or a farmer locally that you know that you can get to know the quality of the produce. That’s awesome. Are there any other? I know we got side-tracked there. You’ve got a list, you’ve got a list. Okay, let’s continue on your list.   [01:00:15] Dr. Devin Miles: In addition to large amounts of meat, restricting alcohol, coffee, and black tea. One thing that I would say about coffee is that coffee is in fact a diuretic. When you drink coffee, you have to make sure that you’re balancing it out with even more water because coffee is going to make you lose water. If you’re trying to protect your kidneys and you’re trying to avoid kidney stones you have to compensate with drinking more water if you’re in fact going to drink coffee. But in general, it’s better to get off of having too much coffee in your life. Again, you would have to figure out why someone’s drinking. I’ve seen some clients drink like half a pot of coffee, that’s way too much. Helping you to get off of coffee is going to be really important for you, as well as black tea. One of the things that can be helpful for calcium oxalate stones is magnesium, and the reason for that is because it increases what’s called the solubility of it. Getting back to making sure that it does not clump and form a crystal in the urine. Magnesium helps to decrease that chance of that happening. Also, potassium can do essentially the same thing. It helps to reduce the saturation of calcium oxalate and it helps to decrease crystal formation.  Stopping smoking. As I mentioned before, if you are a smoker you’re getting in more cadmium and that can increase your chances of forming stones. Of course, that’s easier said than done but starting that path. This is another reason why it would be worth starting that path. Reducing caffeine intake and in general, hydrating to the point of two liters per day of output. That’s what I mean when I’m saying drinking a lot of water. I have a lot of clients who when they first start coming to me they’re only drinking about two glasses a day. You hear everybody say drink water, make sure you hydrate yourself, but there’s a lot of people on a day-to-day basis who are not doing that. I would just encourage everyone, not just people who have kidney stones or kidney disease, to drink a good amount of water every day. I try to make sure people are getting at least eight glasses a day, it just depends on what they’re coming in for, but particularly for kidney stones, kidney disease you need to be drinking a lot more water.   [01:02:45] Ashley James: Could we stop there for a sec? How much is enough? I’ve heard drink ½ of your body weight in ounces. If you’re 200 pounds you should drink 100 ounces a day. I’ve also heard you could drink 1/3 of your body weight in ounces but then add 8 ounces for every vice. Every time you’re stressed out, exercise, smoke, or drink caffeine or alcohol. What’s your philosophy on how much water we should drink?   [01:03:17] Dr. Devin Miles: I usually try to get people to do half their body weight in ounces. If it’s somebody who’s overweight, that can be an astronomical number for them. I just try to get them to drink as much as possible. When I say half your body weight in ounces, I find that to be something that has to be worked up to. I’m always just trying to get my clients to get to that level. I mainly just keep it at half your body weight in ounces. I try to talk to them about the type of water that I would like them to drink.  If they have like a reverse osmosis filtration system I’m going to suggest adding more minerals, or at the very least, adding some sea salt to the water you drink or some lemon juice, cucumber, or lime juice to put minerals back in the water. Because when you drink just water that is reverse osmosis, it’s less nourishing to your system because water is not just something to help with solubility and increasing filtration, it’s also supposed to be very nourishing to the body. It supplies some of these minerals, right? Having something like spring water, alkaline water, or putting things in your water to increase the mineral content is something that I do suggest and just making sure that they’re drinking half their body weight in ounces. At a minimum, eight glasses a day. I’m somebody who needs about eight glasses or so in terms of my body weight, I’m a smaller person. When I put that rule out there, I know that that’s roughly the minimum. That’s why I’m always trying to just get people even to that point.   [01:04:59] Ashley James: It also depends on someone’s diet. Someone who eats a carnivore diet versus a paleo diet versus a whole food plant-based diet, it’s going to get different levels of fiber. I’ve known people who’ve switched over to eating more fiber and all of a sudden they became more dehydrated because they didn’t realize that fiber binds to the moisture. If you’re going to start eating more fiber eating more fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. Especially chia or flax, you definitely want to add a lot more water to it.  If you don’t get enough fiber, there’s a whole separate discussion on the long term damages that the body will undergo if we don’t get enough fiber. Of course, not enough fiber and not enough water combined—you’re setting your body up for disease. We want to increase fiber and increase water. If you increase fiber you’ve got to increase water even more.   [01:06:00] Dr. Devin Miles: Another way that some men might be able to gauge their water intake is by their ejaculation fluids. Sometimes it can be very, very clumpy if they’re not drinking enough water, and other times it’s more fluid if they’re drinking enough. That could be another quick way to tell.   [01:06:24] Ashley James: That’s interesting. I didn’t know that. I learned something new.   [01:06:31] Dr. Devin Miles: The other thing that I wanted to mention was some things that can be helpful for the cystine stones because that is more rare, as I mentioned before, alkalinizing the urine is important. I had a client who was forming kidney stones every single year for the past 30-something years. He had to get lithotripsy to dissolve them and break them up. That’s a procedure you would go in the office to get the skinny stones broken up.  He would notice that every time he would get those procedures done his kidney function would go down. Now that he’s very focused on keeping his urine alkaline, which he does test through the pH strips, through his diet he does this. Ever since he’s done that he has significantly reduced how often he gets kidney stones. At one point he was not getting them at all. Just recently he had a little pinch of something but nothing compared to what he used to get every single year. For people with kidney stones that are cystine, just know that if you are very committed to alkalinizing the urine you can see some results that way from preventing the formation of kidney stones. Of course, just restricting the amount of sodium that’s less formation of different crystals within the body as well. I was just going to talk about a few herbs that can be helpful for kidney function as well, is that where you like me to go next?   [01:08:22] Ashley James: Yeah.   [01:08:23] Dr. Devin Miles: Okay. All right. Cool. Of course, the next step is how are your kidneys in general? If you’re somebody who’s forming kidney stones a lot there may be a propensity to do kidney damage. One of the things that I implement with my clients who have high-risk factors for kidney disease and then I also would implement it for clients who also have kidney disease are herbs that can be protective of the kidneys and also help to restore function to the kidneys.  When I said to address the cause, hypertension and diabetes are two top reasons that people might have kidney disease or get kidney disease in the United States. Just remember that, in general, you have to look at the cause of kidney disease. Kidney disease usually happens because of something else going on in the body. Even if it’s very much kidney related, there’s some sort of imbalance going on in the body that needs to be addressed. Milk thistle is an herb that most people know about for the liver, but milk thistle is also very beneficial for the kidneys. It helps to reduce blood glucose. It also helps to reduce your HbA1c as well as serum creatinine. Creatinine is a marker that you can look at to assess kidney function. It’s often looked at when you get routine blood work. It could also reduce uric acid in urine volume, and it does help to regenerate the kidneys. Milk thistle itself is an antioxidant. I do want to mention what you said about what Dr. Wallach said about increasing antioxidants. In my studies of kidney disease, the main theme that I pulled from that was you have to reduce the inflammation and you have to improve the antioxidant status of the person’s body. Inflammation can feed free radical damage, free radical damage can feed inflammation. It’s important to reduce the inflammation and boost the antioxidants at the same time. Milk thistle can be helpful with improving antioxidant status within the body. Secondly would be cordyceps. Cordyceps isn’t actually an herb, it’s more like a fungus but it could also help to reduce blood urine nitrogen.  Again, another marker that is often used to assess the kidney function, reduces creatinine, and increases protein in the urine. Protein in the urine is a common sign that people look forward to assess if the kidneys are damaged. When I talked about kidneys being a filtration system, the kidneys are not supposed to be filtering out protein in such a way that it would be picked up on a urinalysis. If there’s protein in your urine, there’s some sort of compromise going on with the kidneys. Cordyceps also, just overall, improves the immune system, it can help with improvement in anemia, and also is good for kidney regeneration. When we talk about kidney regeneration I highlight that on purpose because in conventional medicine, if there’s not that idea that the kidneys can regenerate themselves is non-existent. The liver is very well-known to regenerate. It has the capability to regenerate itself.  In modern conventional medicine, that belief system is not there unless you’re at extremely early stages of kidney disease. They may see that oh you’re having some protein in your urine. It may be something having to do with your blood pressure is too high. If you start to correct things very quickly in that moment like an MD, you can see some reversal and get out of kidney disease. But if you’re at kidney disease stage 3, they’re not trying to tell you that we can get you out of kidney disease because they have this idea that the kidneys cannot regenerate. This is where Naturopathic medicine can come in and help to start to bring back function to the kidneys. A lot of people do call me when they’re at kidney disease stage 4 or stage 5. I want to bring that to people’s attention as well. I launched a free ebook for people to start to learn how to monitor their own kidney function because it’s like there’s some sort of disconnect between the position telling them hey you’re at kidney disease stage 1, 2, or 3. It’s like they don’t really tell them until they’re at stage 4 or stage 5. Even before that, even if they know they have kidney disease, the physicians are saying things like oh you’re fine, it’s not that bad.  Around stage 4 or stage 5 they’re like hey you’re at stage 4 or stage 5, you need to be considering dialysis. I think that the educational piece is not there. I find it important to put that back on the public to be like hey this is what you need to be looking at when you get your routine blood work and it’s only a few markers that I educate people on to look at and to look at it regularly, especially if you are at higher risk for getting kidney disease [inaudible 01:14:13] thing because you have something like hypertension, lupus, or diabetes so that you can bring that to your physician and be like hey what do we need to do about this? This is what’s going on. That’s really important. The milk thistle can be helpful, cordyceps can be helpful, and then flaxseed can also be helpful as well. It helps to reduce the inflammation and can be very helpful in the case of lupus nephritis. Any other questions you have, Ashley?   [01:14:47] Ashley James: Yeah. I’ve definitely heard of herbs being used to soften the kidney stones and herbs used to support the kidney function and decrease inflammation. These are all tools that MDs have no training in. Of course, Naturopaths, this is where you guys shine. What about homeopathy or other forms of therapies or therapeutic interventions to support kidneys? Have you seen homeopathy be successfully used?   [01:15:19] Dr. Devin Miles: I have not used homeopathy for kidney disease. I’m aware that it has been used, I just haven’t used it myself yet. I’ve been more focused on the herbs for helping with kidney disease. Unfortunately, I can’t speak too much to that, but I do know that in some cases like homeopathic mustard seed might be helpful for kidney disease.   [01:15:43] Ashley James: Interesting. That’s cool. Awesome. Do you have any stories of success you’d like to share?   [01:15:53] Dr. Devin Miles: The main one is the guy with the cystine kidney stones. As I mentioned before, when we alkalinized his urine, he stopped having kidney stones. In addition to that though, when he did start to have more of an alkalized diet, he also was someone who was dealing with hypertension and high uric acid. He has not had to take as much hypertensive medication. His uric acid also went down. Of course, by the time I started working with him he was already at like stage 4 kidney disease. I did put him on a blend of herbs that also included cordyceps. Another one that can be helpful is nettle seed. We hear about nettles more so from the standpoint of seasonal allergies but that is nettle’s leaf. When it comes to herbs, you have to also know what part of the herb that you need to bring about the result that you’re looking for. Nettle seed is also helpful for improving the function of the kidneys. It was that as well as gotu kola can also be helpful for reducing the scarring of the kidneys. That’s something else to keep in mind is that when the kidneys are scarred, that is another area where conventional medicine does not have a solution for. Once it’s scarred it’s scarred. But with herbal medicine, you can in fact start to see a reduction of scarring within the kidneys.   [01:17:44] Ashley James: Gotu kola is not a type of soda pop.   [01:17:48] Dr. Devin Miles: No, no. It is not a type of soda pop.   [01:17:50] Ashley James: It sounds like a delicious drink, gotu kola. It’s an herb, right?   [01:17:57] Dr. Devin Miles: Yes, it’s an herb. Kola is spelled K-O-L-A. This is an herb with multiple benefits—as most herbs are. Most herbs have multiple different things that they are capable of doing. In school, we had a garden of herbs in the back. Some of the students would just chew some of the gotu kola leaves before they went for an exam because it can be helpful with cognitive function. It’s also helpful for situations like venous insufficiency. It’s a good toner for the vessels. When we’re talking about kidney disease, of course, we’re also talking about the blood vessels as well. It may be indicated in that way as well, but I particularly use it if I am looking to help reduce the scarring of the kidneys.  That would be my main one where I saw not just the blend of herbs that I used on that client did help to increase kidney function. It was at a point where he was very concerned about going on dialysis. This was somebody who really wanted to avoid dialysis. He had a commitment to staying on the herbs, sticking to his diet. That would be a big thing that I would tell people with kidney disease is that you have to be very, very proactive about it because, for years, this client was not.  He ate a lot of meat. He took his blood pressure medication but at one point he wasn’t taking it the way he should and all of these things. You just have to make sure that you’re very committed to helping make sure that your body stays in balance and taking the different herbs that people are suggesting or the different minerals and being consistent with that. Just speaking up, if for some reason something is not working for you, particularly with men. I have noticed that sometimes they will stop taking something and not tell you something about it—I felt sick or something like that. You have to be able to voice that so that the doctor can adjust things because there’s a lot of different herbs that can be helpful for kidney disease. It’s not like I’m just sticking with just one. It’s just important that you are very much communicating what you need with your doctor so that you can get to the goal of restoring kidney function.   [01:20:27] Ashley James: I love it. It is possible. It’s possible to support the body’s ability in healing itself. Just to come at it from a different angle, my cat who is 16 years old has kidney disease. I was seeing a traditional vet and there were very little resources she had. Then I went to a holistic vet. I guess this is kind of like the Naturopath of vets. He’s been a vet for over 30 years, and he uses natural medicine for animals. I know him because a friend of mine, he reversed a chronic disease in her cat. Her cat lived, I think something like 21, very healthfully.  I brought my cat to him and he immediately found so many issues. He found a parasite that was actually never seen in cats, it’s only ever seen in dogs, so we treated that. He adjusted our cat’s food and gave him a supplement. He said I don’t expect it to completely go away, but I definitely expect us to go back to like early, early stage. That’s what’s happened for our cat, who’s a senior—as a 16-year-old, he went from almost end-stage kidney disease to very, very beginning kidney disease. Our vet believes that now he’s going to live a very long and healthy life. We are animals. Our bodies are just like animals. If we can do that, if we can reverse and prevent disease in animals, we can do it to our own body. Bringing back up Dr. Wallach, his background is on a farm. He was raised on a farm. He saw as a child, he asked his parents why do we give supplements to the cows but we don’t take supplements. Our cows don’t wait to get sick and then go to a doctor and then get put on a bunch of medication. His farm wasn’t like a factory farmer; those cows got to go outside, get exercise, and eat grass.  They were also given supplements. He read the ingredients and he saw well there are vitamins, there are minerals in here. They make sure the calves are given all these pellets with all these minerals. He thought it was really odd that the system of medicine for animals was to prevent disease because preventing disease is cheaper than waiting to get sick and then having to pay for medication. Can you imagine if our animals were in the same medical system as all of us, right? A burger would be $5,000 because the animal would have to wait to get sick and then be put on all these medications and have all these surgeries. It’s kind of ridiculous but it’s because it’s for-profit. Because it’s for-profit, it benefits the farmer to make sure they prevent disease in animals. Why isn’t our focus in medicine to prevent disease in humans? Because it’s for profit.  We have to remember that the funding that these universities have, and have had for over 100 years, are from the pharmaceutical industry. That there’s a lot going on in the background that has the system set up in a way that is for-profit. I’m not saying that individual doctors are evil and looking to profit from our sickness, but that the system as a whole is set up to profit from people being sick and not profit from preventing illness. If we can look at that, how do farmers keep healthcare costs down on the farm? Again, I’m not saying factory farms because those are incredibly sick and damaged animals, but the farms where the animals roam free. What are the farmers doing to keep animals healthy and prevent disease, and why don’t we adopt the exact same philosophy? Have access to clean water, get plenty of outdoor exercise, get really healthy, eat lots of plants, and also take supplements when needed to fill in those nutrient gaps.  That’s what farmers do to prevent disease on the farm is to make sure that there are no nutrient deficiencies in the animals. When there is, there are documented cases of the disease. That’s the same as humans. It’s very clear that the philosophy of health and medicine make a difference when it comes to seeing a Naturopath versus any other kind of practitioner.   [01:25:23] Dr. Devin Miles: Just kind of an overall thing that I think our society, the way that it’s built, is that there were things built upon that needed adjustment. When you build something and you’re not flexible in the building of it to create an environment that allows for adjustment, I think that is maybe where some of the problem lies especially if it’s lucrative in how it’s built. When we’re talking about the system of health in this country is not what it should be, it’s a system that was built. You have to be able to break that down and to adjust it. When people are finally willing to break it down and do it again, I think that’s when you’re going to really see some change.   [01:26:22] Ashley James: Those that are listening right are those who their thinking is in the right place. They want to do everything they can to support their body’s ability to heal itself, they want to nutrify their body. The 37.2 trillion cells in their body are crying out to be detoxified, filled with nutrients, hydrated, and treated with love. That’s what we want to do, it’s what our listeners want to do. They’ve learned so much from you today. I’d love for you to give us some homework. Set us up with some homework that we can do every day to optimize our kidney health and prevent kidney disease.   [01:26:59] Dr. Devin Miles: A few things that have been helpful for alkalinizing the urine—one of them is pomegranate juice. Making sure that you’re getting a very high-quality pomegranate juice is where you’ll see the most benefit from that. Cantaloupe is another one. Pinto beans, which was like oh really. Pinto beans can also be another one that can be helpful for alkalinizing the urine. Getting pH strips if in fact you do have kidney stones or kidney disease and regularly testing your urine to make sure that it’s staying in the alkaline range.  You will be able to start to notice what acidifies your urine, what makes it more alkaline. Through that process, you’ll be able to have a more balanced diet. I’m not saying that you can’t eat meat, but it needs to be most likely more moderate if you have very acidic urine. That’s the same with, of course, coffee, which is in addition to being a diuretic it’s also very highly acidic. Looking at the things that cause acidity, it’s not just about knowing what alkalinizes the body, it’s also about knowing what makes it acidic and having a better balance between those. Pomegranate juice, cantaloupe, and pinto beans are three foods that you can start incorporating more to achieve better alkalinity. Water, water, water. I cannot stress that enough because I really feel like most people take that part for granted like it’s not that important but it is very, very important. Just remembering that magnesium can also help increase the solubility of these different compounds that can form crystals.  Magnesium can be helpful for constipation. It’s also helpful for reducing muscle spasms. When we were talking about the prescription medications that are called antispasmodics, magnesium can also help to be an antispasmodic. The three alkalizing foods: pomegranate, juice cantaloupe, pinto beans. Remember to drink half your body weight in ounces with water, and then keeping in mind that magnesium can be very helpful if in fact you have a kidney stone, or if in fact you have constipation. Again, remembering if you have a digestive issue you have some sort of intestinal problem, that also needs to be addressed so that you can reduce forming different types of kidney stones.   [01:29:47] Ashley James: Before we hit record, you had alluded that there’s a connection between gut health, maybe in the microbiome, and kidney health. Can you go into that a bit?   [01:29:58] Dr. Devin Miles: If there is an imbalance within the intestinal tract, sometimes you can have increased absorption of certain compounds like intestinal over-absorption of oxalates. When you have that happening, then the kidneys have to filter that out. If you’re putting too much in the kidneys in terms of different compounds that are conducive to forming kidney stones, again, that’s another situation where it’s too saturated. It’s important from that standpoint, in terms of understanding where this excess amount of compounds going to the kidneys is coming from, it may in fact be coming from a compromised intestinal mucosal layer.  In that case, I would be concerned about okay, do you have good digestive health? What’s your secretory IgA levels? Do you have food sensitivities? Do you have gas and bloating? What’s your mental health like? If clinically, something is a little bit imbalanced mentally, that could also be something simple as you need to stop eating gluten because gluten and mental health have been very much linked, and of course gluten and digestive issues have been very much linked. It’s about figuring out okay do you have a digestive component to kidney stones? Do you have a digestive component to kidney disease?   [01:31:37] Ashley James: You mentioned earlier oxalates, should everyone monitor their oxalates and reduce them, or only those with kidney disease? Do oxalates cause kidney disease? How can some people eat pounds of spinach and be totally fine, and other people barely look at spinach and get a kidney stone?   [01:32:02] Dr. Devin Miles: I think some of that could in fact be genetic. Going back to maybe someone has a deficiency of the calcium and so they’re forming calcium oxalate stones. Maybe it has more to do with the calcium versus the oxalate. If they have digestive issues, I do think getting tested to see if you have high oxalate amounts could be a good idea, especially if kidney stones were running in your family, there’s a chance that you might be more prone to making them.  So no, I don’t think everyone needs to be monitoring their oxalate levels, but I think people who might have conditions where there’s a propensity to monitor oxalates, then yes, it would be a good idea for you to monitor them. As I mentioned before, if it’s increased uric acid excretion that’s forming the calcium oxalate stones, then decreasing the uric acid would be really important as well. B6 is another vitamin that can be helpful for reducing calcium oxalates as well.   [01:33:15] Ashley James: Excellent. You mentioned magnesium and I got to say, my favorite magnesium—my favorite source, is Kristen Bowen. I’ve had her on the show a few times. She has a magnesium soak that is from the Zechstein Sea and it also has other cofactors in it. You absorb 20 grams of magnesium when you soak in it for an hour.  The first time I soaked in it I felt drunk. I actually felt like I was getting a Myers push. I felt like I was getting IV magnesium, and I couldn’t believe it. I felt it in my body. I’m like whoa, this is amazing. If anyone’s ever had like a Myers push or had like an IV magnesium, you kind of feel drunk. You feel high, you feel very happy, and very relaxed. That’s exactly how I felt in my first time doing her foot. It’s easy just to put your feet in it and soak, but you can also soak in a whole bath. That was probably about two years ago. I’ve had her on the show.  It’s very interesting, she’s done thousands of labs with her customers over the years, over the last I think 13-14 years, and she has people test their magnesium RBC levels before starting and then they do a 30-day challenge where they soak every day for 30 days in the magnesium and then they test their magnesium RBC levels again. 76% of people reach full cell saturation of 5.0, which that’s not the ideal number. Ideally, you want to be more closer to 7.0, but being at 5.0 is good. We’re out of the deficiency. We’re no longer magnesium deficient. The other percentage just takes longer and take more time in soaking.  What she finds is that then when people—through the skin, when you’re absorbing through the skin, they’re obviously bypassing any digestive issues with absorption. Those people then, they’re sort of burning their magnesium faster than they can absorb either through chronic fatigue, or there are other things going on that their body’s sort of using up more magnesium than it can take in and it just takes them longer to soak in it to get to full cell saturation. It helps them to understand underlying issues.  That’s been my favorite source of magnesium. If you want, I’ll send you some information on it. I’ve had over 2,000 listeners use her magnesium soak and absolutely love it. Many of them have shared in the Learn True Health Facebook group their experiences with it, that it’s been life-changing. My whole family, including our son, loves it. It really helped him with his sleep because we had a really hard time getting him to sleep until he started soaking and putting the magnesium in his bath. He now goes to sleep much easier, which is great. Any parent who struggles with a child that won’t go to sleep it’s like a lifesaver. It’s a magnesium soak and it can be found at livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and then use coupon code LTH for the listener discount. I know that’s like the world’s longest URL, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. Coupon code LTH. Your website is easy to remember, however. It’s drdevinmiles.com. Of course, the links to everything you do—your Twitter, your Instagram, your Facebook, and your YouTube—it’s all going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com.  It’s been great talking to you about kidney health. Everything that you talked about, in terms of supporting kidneys would support the whole body. Drinking more water supports the whole body. Focusing on making sure digestion is optimal. Making sure we’ve got the right vitamins, the right minerals. Making sure that we’re adjusting the diet to include more plants, more fiber. Taking some herbs that not only support the kidneys but support other functions of the body.  In terms of taking those herbs, I would hate for someone to take too much of it. Is there a dosage or a way? Would you rather have them take it as a tea, a tincture, or a dried herb in a capsule? Could you get into that?   [01:37:43] Dr. Devin Miles: That’s varied per person, to be honest. There’s definitely such a thing as too much of an herb. When it comes to dosages, it really is dependent. It’s like what you were saying before with people with digestive issues, they sometimes may need more, sometimes they may need less. It really does depend. When you’re talking about the magnesium, one thing that can be helpful for people with digestive issues is instead of a tablet, having more of a capsule, a powder, or a liquid [inaudible 01:38:18] so much further with them versus something that’s like one more thing that’s hard for them to digest because the powder or the liquids are going to get into their system much quicker.  But when it comes to kidney disease, usually what I try to do is the tinctures, which is a liquid so that it can get into their system much quicker. Especially when you’re doing herbal combinations and you’re doing at least five herbs, doing it in the liquid form is going to be much easier for them to take versus five different capsules of herbs. It just depends on the person though because I could say that and then they may be like no, I’d rather capsules. It’s also about listening to the person in what they need. In terms of dosages, it really just depends on the person.   [01:39:10] Ashley James: Got it. It’s best to work with a Naturopathic physician who’s experienced in working with supporting the kidneys.   [01:39:18] Dr. Devin Miles: Yes, yes, yes.   [01:39:20] Ashley James: Like yourself.   [01:39:21] Dr. Devin Miles: Yes, you know what I mean? It brings to light the hope that things can change. We’re more educated in this realm of possibility. It’s that yes, these things can in fact help your kidneys. You don’t have to just wait until dialysis happens. You can be doing something in the interim to support kidney health.  That’s one thing that I’m always trying to help people to understand is that what I do is empowering. I’m not just here to help per se fix you. It’s not just about that. It’s about teaching you how to help yourself, and that’s really what I’m doing. I’m a teacher, and I like being able to teach people.   [01:40:10] Ashley James: Right. The root for doctor is doceri, which means teacher, so you take that very seriously. You can’t come home with us, make us take our supplements, cook our food for us, make us go for walks, and make us drink our water. You have to teach us so that we go do it ourselves. The hope needs to be installed, needs to be shared. We really need to believe. The first thing we need to do is believe the body can heal itself.  The things I’ve seen the body heal are so miraculous. Using Dr. Wallach as an example, he has helped thousands of people get off of dialysis—no longer need dialysis when they were told they would be on dialysis for the rest of their very short life. We can heal our body to the point where it recovers even when we’ve told it won’t ever recover. So who are they to say you can’t heal yourself. We first have to decide that yes, there’s always a point of bifurcation, there’s always a point of no return, right? There’s always that, but are you there yet, and who’s to say that you’re at that point? We should never give our personal power over like that. We need to fight right to the very end. Doing things like supporting the body’s ability to heal itself, even if you’re on dialysis, change your diet. Work with a doctor that knows kidneys and know dialysis and so that you can take the supplements that are in alignment with you right now, but take the herbs. Change the diet, change the lifestyle, and do it in a way to support your kidneys. Maybe your body will get so healthy you no longer need dialysis, or maybe you get so healthy your dialysis gets cut in half. Either way, you’re supporting the body as a whole. It’s just so important that we don’t give up and give our personal power over to someone and just say okay whatever this doctor says this is just the way it’s going to be. It’s ludicrous. We’re giving over our personal power when we do that. We need to fight, keep educating ourselves, and keep learning from doctors like you who have alternative information that is science-based and that empowers us.  We have to question, why is it that not all doctors have this information? We have to advocate for ourselves and go to different doctors. Go to different holistic doctors, go to all sorts of different professionals who have different perspectives and different pieces of the pie so that we can help our body heal, but never, never take no as an answer. Never believe that our body is just breaking down and we’re done. It upsets me when I hear someone with type 2 diabetes was told they’ll always have type 2 diabetes. They just have to be on this medication for the rest of their life, they’ll always have it. That should be a crime. It should honestly be a crime to be told that when it’s reversible and easily reversed all the time under the care of the right physician, under the care of a Naturopath or under the care of a doctor that practices holistic medicine. Under your care, you’re supporting your clients and your patients in having optimal kidney function at any stage.   [01:43:40] Dr. Devin Miles: To second what you just said, the theme that I want the listeners to keep in their minds is stay curious. If somebody says no this is not possible—just stay curious and go look somewhere else because you’ll probably find the answer that you’re looking for. This world is a very, very large world with a lot of different opinions.  The US is not God when it comes to healing information, they’re certainly not. There are different things that are great here, but if you’re not finding the answers that you’re looking for—stay curious. That would be the thing I would definitely want you to keep in mind because that has really been helpful for me. I think a lot, and I was curious, and so I just went for it. I didn’t even think about it, honestly. When I was doing all these things in my 20s, I just did them because I saw the possibility. As I learned more, I realized there’s more and there’s more. Just stay curious.   [01:44:51] Ashley James: Stay curious. I love it. Awesome. Thank you so much Dr. Devin Miles for coming on the show today. It’s been such a pleasure having you here.   [01:44:59] Dr. Devin Miles: You’re welcome. Thank you for inviting me to be on the show. I just want to mention to everyone that I am doing telehealth consultations. Even if you’re not right here in Texas I am reachable.   [01:45:15] Ashley James: Fantastic. That’s great information especially nowadays when we can’t even see our doctor in person. Might as well call you up.   [01:45:25] Dr. Devin Miles: That’s what I mean. Go find the answers that you need even if they’re not right in your neighborhood, they’re somewhere else.   [01:45:35] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Devin Miles, holistic Naturopathic physician, and how you can support your overall kidney health. I did mention the supplements that Dr. Wallach created. The mineral supplements that have the very bioavailable form of calcium that’s really supportive of the kidneys, and in some cases, helps to even prevent stones especially when the person has a mineral deficiency. If you’d like to try those supplements and talk to an expert on them please go to takeyoursupplements.com. You will definitely love those supplements. I’ve been on them since 2011, and they have helped me to reverse my health issues and conceive our child naturally. I have a whole story I’ve shared in the past.  I’m going to be publishing very soon my interview with Dr. Wallach who just turned 80 years old and is still a very active and practicing Naturopathic physician. He is my hero, he’s my mentor, and he is the creator of the supplements that I take and the supplements that we sell at takeyoursupplements.com. Please go to takeyoursupplements.com and check them out. I absolutely love them. I highly recommend them. They are bioavailable, all-natural supplements so that we can make sure that you have all 60 minerals in your life, in your body so you don’t have a mineral deficiency. Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener and sharing this episode with those you care about. Let’s help as many people as possible to learn true health.   Get Connected with Dr. Devin Miles! Website Facebook Instagram Twitter YouTube Recommended Reading by Dr. Devin Miles Practically Healthy: Step-by-step Guide To Better Health

Dr. Greger's site NutritionFacts.org IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount! Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coaching   How Not To Die https://www.learntruehealth.com/how-not-to-die-dr-michael-greger   Highlights: Foods that we should be adding to our daily diet Benefits of whole food plant-based diet Diseases reversed by whole food plant-based diet What people in Blue Zones share in common   What is the best diet that provides the best outcome for everybody? Dr. Michael Greger, author of books How Not to Die, How Not to Diet, and How to Survive a Pandemic, shares with us the best diet for everybody. He also talks about some of the foods we should eat on a daily basis and what lifestyle changes we need to do. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I’m so excited for you to listen to today’s interview with Dr. Greger. He only does half-an-hour interviews so I had to be very on point with my questions, to get as much information out of him as possible. One big message that he brings is how you can heal your body and prevent disease with food. If you have a disease, you can actually reverse it with nutrition. If you’d like to learn how to cook in a way that heals the body that is in alignment with how Dr. Greger teaches, please join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. I designed a membership where I teach with my friend Naomi how to cook food that is delicious, that’s healing for the body, and that your whole family will love. Come join the membership and check it out. You’ll also be supporting the Learn True Health podcast and helping me to continue to produce interviews like this when you join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. Go to learn to your learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. Come check it out and just learn how to bring more nutrient-dense foods into your diet to heal your body and support your body’s ability to prevent and reverse disease. Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you love. Enjoy today’s interview.   [00:01:32] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 433. I am very excited for today’s guest. Dr. Greger, you are quite an honored guest to have here today. My best friend and I are both whole food plant-based. She just wants you to know that if you ever become single she would leave her husband for you. You’ve got a lot of fans. You’ve got a lot of fans here. We’re big admirers of your work, your books—How Not to Die, How Not to Diet—and then you have the latest one, How to Survive a Pandemic. I can’t wait to talk about that. Your website nutritionfacts.org is fascinating. I highly recommend everyone go to it and use it. How do you do everything you do? You’re constantly pumping out books, articles, and videos. You must have a huge team to support you. You either that or you have a troubling meth problem. I don’t know. You’re just always producing amazing things. We’re really in awe of you.   [00:02:43] Dr. Michael Greger: That’s very sweet. I do indeed have this fantastic staff, not only 14 folks on staff in the non-profit Nutrition Facts, but we have about 200 active volunteers at any one time. We have this tremendous team of folks—all churning out wonderful life-changing, life-saving information. That’s what it’s all about.   [00:03:09] Ashley James: Absolutely. It’s quite controversial asking people to change their diet to reverse and prevent disease especially since the government puts out their recommendations. According to what they put out, that’s a disease-causing diet. There’s so much controversy. MDs are not trained in nutrition. You have to go above and beyond as an MD to learn how to heal with food. Can you tell us about what happened in your life that made you want to help people heal with food?   [00:03:41] Dr. Michael Greger: Sure. It was really all thanks to my grandmother. I was just a kid when the doctor sent my grandma home in the wheelchair to die. She was diagnosed with end-stage heart disease. She basically already had so many bypass operations. The surgeons basically run out of plumbing at some point, confined in the wheelchair, crushing chest pain, and her life was over at age 65. Pretty sure you’ve heard about this guy Nathan Pritikin, one of our early lifestyle medicine pioneers. What happened next is actually detailed in Pritikin’s biography. He talks about Frances Greger, my grandmother. They wheeled her in and she walked out. In fact, within a few weeks, she was walking 10 miles a day. Thanks to [inaudible 00:04:22] though she was given a medical death sentence at age 65, thanks to a healthy diet she went on to live another 31 years till age 96 to continue to enjoy her six grandkids including me. That’s why I went into medicine. That’s why I started nutritionfacts.org. That’s why I wrote the book How Not to Die and why 100% of the proceeds I get from all my books are donated to charity. I just want to do for everyone’s family what Pritikin did for my family.   [00:04:49] Ashley James: How do you make an income then if everything you do seems to fund amazing charities?   [00:04:54] Dr. Michael Greger: I’m on staff at nutritionfacts.org. I’m the Chief Science Officer. Those who make donations to the 501(c)(3) non-profit Nutrition Facts, they are helping me put kale on the table.   [00:05:14] Ashley James: I love it. Speaking of kale, you’ve mentioned kale as being one of your favorite superfoods, what other foods should we eat every day or at least every week and why?   [00:05:24] Dr. Michael Greger: That’s the second half of my book How Not to Die. The first half is just 15 chapters and each of the 15 leading causes of death talking about the role of diet. [Inaudible 00:05:32] preventing, resting, and reversing each of our top 15 killers, but I didn’t want it to just be a reference book. I wanted it to be a practical guide. I’m translating this mountain of data into day-to-day grocery store type decisions. To that end, the second half of the book centers around my recommendations wherein a daily dozen checklist of all the things that try to fit into my daily routine. For example, berries every day the healthiest types of fruits, greens every day the healthiest types of vegetables, 1 tablespoon of flaxseed, and ¼ teaspoon turmeric. The best beverages, best sweeteners, and how much exercise to get. Basically, just try to motivate people to include some of the healthiest of healthy foods into their daily diet.   [00:06:13] Ashley James: You discuss Blue Zones or at least we see that there’s so much information coming out of Blue Zones and there’s a controversy because some Blue Zones consume meat, there’s one that doesn’t. The one in Italy is all about olive oil. Apparently, olive oil is the cure and the best thing we could ever do. We don’t know what the driver is. We have to look at the similarities. Obviously, you pore through the science. You’re all about science-based nutrition. What is the commonality in all the Blue Zones that really make the difference that if we applied the same principles to our lifestyle and diet we would get the same result?   [00:06:51] Dr. Michael Greger: What they all share in common, again, Blue Zones are areas with the greatest long human longevity, the most centenarians per capita. For example, the people who live over 100 years old. What does every single one of them share in common? They eat a diet centered around whole plant foods and their primary source of protein is some form of legume: beans, split peas, chickpeas, or lentils. For example, the Okinawan Japanese, the second-longest living population in the world, it’s about a 97% plant-based diet. Actually, 70% of the calories of sweet potatoes, basically a vegetable centered diet. The only formally studied population that lives longer is the Seventh-day Adventist vegetarians in Loma Linda California. They live longer than anybody else, and they don’t eat any meat at all.   [00:07:45] Ashley James: I just heard a really troubling statistic. I was listening to a White House presentation this week about lowering the cost of insulin. I heard that one in three senior citizens are on insulin. That really disturbed me that the level of insulin use is that high. The level of type 2 diabetes continues to rise. Now there’s so much controversy because, in the mainstream sugar, carbs, and sweet potatoes would be the cause of insulin issues or needing insulin in diabetes, but you propose that a plant-centered diet would actually help to reverse diabetes. Can you explain why?   [00:08:26] Dr. Michael Greger: It’s not controversial in the medical literature. It’s just controversial in internet land where even the roundness of the earth is in question. But no, the science is very clear. Type-2 diabetes and pre-diabetes is caused by insulin resistance. Your body’s resistant to the effects of the insulin that your body produces. What’s that caused by? This is not controversial. If you look at the peer-reviewed medical literature, it’s caused by what is called an intramyocellular lipid. This is fat that’s stuck inside your muscle cells and inside the liver cells in the context of excess calories so it’s caused by fat. Now that can be fat in your mouth that’s going in your mouth, or it can be excess fat that’s on your body. Either way, we have high levels of free-floating fat in the bloodstream, which clogs up your muscle and liver cells, impairs their ability to respond to insulin, and you can end up with type 2 diabetes, which is the leading cause of adult-onset blindness, amputations, and kidney failure. It’s no good. Now, we have two pandemics colliding. A pandemic of obesity and diabetes colliding with an infectious disease pandemic. It’s important to realize that the underlying risk factors for COVID-19’s severity and death are obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes all of which can be controlled or even reversed with a healthy enough plant-based diet and lifestyle.   [00:09:59] Ashley James: What about this keto phenomenon? It used to be Atkins back in the day, right? Then it was paleo and now it’s keto. I think people like to think that they can reverse disease if they eat a bunch of meat and fat and avoid those really evil carbohydrates. People see really good results in the short-term with keto, but that’s increasing fat. According to what you just said, wouldn’t that increase insulin resistance and have poor outcomes in the long term?   [00:10:30] Dr. Michael Greger: Within the short-term, within days you increase insulin resistance with a ketogenic diet. In fact, the largest chapter in my book How Not to Diet I talk about the ketogenic diet. The data is very clear. People love hearing good news about their bad habits so any book that comes out and tells people to eat bacon and butter, obviously, are just going to sell better than those that come out and tell people to eat broccoli, but the science is very clear. In fact, switching to a ketogenic diet actually cuts the rate of fat loss in half after switching to a ketogenic diet because you’re actually cannibalizing your own protein, but you get the loss in water weight, which flushes out the ketones. Looking at the bathroom scale, the ketogenic diet seems like a smashing success, but what we care about is not a loss of water or protein. What we care about is the loss of body fat. Actually, body fat loss slows down. That’s why CrossFit trainees placed on a ketogenic diet, their leg muscles shrink as much as [80%] within 2 months. Exercise is supposed to make your muscles bigger, not smaller but that’s what happens when you’re on a ketogenic diet, not a good idea.   [00:11:56] Ashley James: Originally, the ketogenic diet was created to mimic fasting so that children with epilepsy could stay on it long term. What about fasting? There are so many health benefits to fasting being promoted out there. What are your thoughts on fasting and should we do it on a regular basis?   [00:12:12] Dr. Michael Greger: I talk about all types of fasting: alternate-day fasting, intermittent fasting, 55-2 fasting, 25-5 fasting, fasting-mimicking diet, and time-restricted feeding. Bottom line, there are benefits from early time-restricted feeding meaning narrowing your eating window 12 hours or less, but critically, that’s in the morning rather than the evening. If anything, you skip supper not breakfast. That has a variety of benefits both chrono biologically based on our circadian rhythms as well as metabolically. We talked about all the benefits. It’s really quite extraordinary. We should not be eating after sundown. I encourage people to fast after 7:00 PM and try to wait for their greatest caloric intake towards the beginning of the day.   [00:13:03] Ashley James: You have a book How to Survive a Pandemic, is it out already or are you still releasing it?   [00:13:09] Dr. Michael Greger: It is out as of Tuesday, May 26.   [00:13:13] Ashley James: Very cool. Tell us about How to Survive a Pandemic and why should we read it.   [00:13:18] Dr. Michael Greger: I try to cover everything there is to know to protect ourselves and our families from the coronavirus. Everything from optimal [inaudible 00:13:26] and hand hygiene, surface disinfection, masks, and how to make your own and hand sanitizer, but the best way to survive a pandemic is to prevent it in the first place. The bulk of the book actually centers around tracing the origins of the COVID coronavirus and what we can do to prevent even greater infectious disease threats in the future.   [00:13:45] Ashley James: Based on your research, because you love to look at the science and then decide what is the best route based on the results, you’re not choosing diet dogma. I think that doctors who like to share that a plant-based diet is healing for the body tend to get criticized because those who see that there’s look, there’s a study that says that this meat is healthier, this fish is healthier, this dairy is healthy, and then they like to discredit them. But you like to look at the science and the results and go and then share that and go listen, don’t listen to me listen to the results, listen to the science. But based on your research, is there a one diet fits all? If we put 100% of the population on one way of eating, would we be able to reverse all disease, or do there need to be certain tweaks? Let’s say, someone who’s a bodybuilder versus a 90-year-old grandmother versus someone with fatty liver disease, should they all be on slightly different diets based on their nutritional needs?   [00:14:46] Dr. Michael Greger: The good news is that we have a tremendous power of our health, destiny, and longevity. The vast majority of premature death and disability are preventable with a plant-based diet and other healthy lifestyle behaviors just like smoking is bad for everybody. It’s not some people that smoking is good for. Eating a healthy diet is good for everybody. There are things that are good for your body and bad for your body. Some people have allergies to a specific food. Are peanuts bad for you? If you have a peanut allergy, it could kill you, but otherwise no. The same kind of thing. The people that are lactose intolerant that would affect some people will have different caffeine metabolism rates, so coffee affects them a little differently. But it’s not like there are people out there where hotdogs are good for them or broccoli is bad for them.  If you go to truehealthinitiative.org, this is an initiative set forth by Yale’s Prevention Research Center which asks hundreds of the top nutrition scientists in the world to agree on a consensus statement as to what the healthiest diet is. Just like you want to know about climate change, you go to the IPCC. What do climate change scientists have to say, right? So the same thing. You can see that there’s a consensus as to the core tenants of healthy eating and living going back decades, and that is centering one’s diet around whole healthy plant foods.    [00:16:18] Ashley James: You have given many video talks and lessons on your website nutritionfacts.org, which one of all of them are you the most proud of?   [00:16:30] Dr. Michael Greger: Oh, wow. What a great question. Thousands of videos. If I can remember half of them that would be… Every time I put out a book I do a new talk, an hour-long presentation where I pick all the most akin of practical, groundbreaking, interesting bits together. Then it gives you this broad overview. Those are probably my favorite talks. I have one for How Not to Diet. I have one for How Not to Die. Those are probably the talks I’m most proud of. Though I yet have to have an hour-long presentation about How to Survive a Pandemic, but I do have about three hours’ worth of videos coming up—17 videos starting at the end of May running through July on nutritionfacts.org.   [00:17:36] Ashley James: We’ll look out for them for sure. As a doctor, as you’ve been taking your own initiative to study nutrition outside of school, because that’s what doctors have to do in order to really, really learn the truth, and as you’ve been helping people, what one story stands out for you? What healing story surprised you? Someone who actually healed their body that you were really surprised that they were able to heal using nutrition.   [00:18:05] Dr. Michael Greger: Those diseases for which we didn’t think that they were reversible. For example, we didn’t think heart disease was reversible until Pritikin came along and showed that was indeed the case. Diabetic retinopathy, diabetic blindness, we thought that was irreversible you go worse, worse, worse and you go blind. No, that can be reversed with a healthy diet. There are two case reports that just came out suggesting that, caught early enough, even type one diabetes may be able to help with a healthy diet. There was the first case report in enclosing spondylitis, this horrible autoimmune condition attacking the spine. Never had any data on that, but no, plant-based diet helps with that too. No surprise an anti-inflammatory diet helps an inflammatory condition. Those are the most exciting things, these kinds of reversal. We have new data on lupus, which is another autoimmune condition with beneficial effects not just for kidney function, which we had already known, but for other symptoms as well. Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, these are just really exciting to see diseases for which there were no good options. Where the traditional approaches have such downsides in terms of adverse effects. That’s really the most exciting work out there.   [00:19:30] Ashley James: What question am I not asking that you would love to answer?   [00:19:34] Dr. Michael Greger: I don’t know. What’s nutrition facts? Nutrition facts is a free, non-profit, science-based public service providing daily updates in the latest nutritional research via bite-sized videos—more than 1000 videos. Nearly every aspect of healthy eating with new videos and articles uploaded every day—are the latest in evidence-based nutrition. What a concept—nutritionfacts.org.   [00:20:00] Ashley James: For those who are not used to the whole food plant-based diet but are intrigued, can you share what do you eat? What do you eat? What have you eaten in the last 24 hours? What do you eat? Maybe you could share a recipe, one of your favorite recipes that would get people excited about trying to eat more plants.   [00:20:22] Dr. Michael Greger: The daily dozen is what I eat. That’s the reason the Daily Dozen came around because I wanted to eat an evidence-based diet and so I’m just sharing that with everybody. In terms of what I eat in 24 hours, I had a big bowl of miso soup for lunch and some cherries. It’s cherry season and oh my god they’re delicious. Then this morning I had my prebiotic mix, which is a combination of oat groats, purple barley, rye berries, and Beluga lentils mixed with cocoa powder, dark sweet frozen cherries. It was kind of like choco berry cherry action with some nuts and seeds. That was delicious. What did I have last night? Last night I had these blue corn tortillas, which I toasted mixed with a fajita mix, which was onions, peppers, black beans, salsa, and some hummus to make it kind of creamy with some adobo sauce, and some smoked jalapeno peppers. It was nice and spicy. Threw a whole bunch of greens in there. A tortilla kind of action. In terms of what might be particularly motivating, I think it’s important to realize there’s only one diet ever proven to reverse heart disease in the majority of patients—it’s a plant-based diet. Anytime anyone tries to sell you on some new diet, do me a favor, just ask them a simple question. Wait a second, is this new diet improving to reverse heart disease, the number one reason me and all my loved ones will die? If the answer is no, why would you even consider it? If that’s all a plant-based diet could do—reverse the number one killer of men and women. Isn’t that going to be the default diet to be proven otherwise? In fact, that can also be so effective in preventing resting reversing other leading killers like high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. It would seem to make the case for plant-based eating simply overwhelming.   [00:22:46] Ashley James: I love that you mentioned your app, Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen. I have that on my phone. I think it’s a really cool app and I definitely recommend it. I’ve had Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn on the show. I just love, love that he so clearly says here’s the way to eat to reverse heart disease—being a cardiologist still practicing. I think he’s 86. I’m sure you guys are friends. But what’s really frustrating is I’ve had other cardiologists on the show who say we should drink a liter of olive oil a week, that it’s the most healthy thing we could possibly do for our heart. I’m really frustrated because when I learned the damages that oil can have on the body, can you just talk about is oil healthy, is it not healthy? How do we get healthy fats? Could we become fat-deprived by not eating fat? Can you just demystify fat and oil for us?   [00:23:37] Dr. Michael Greger: Oil is kind of the white sugar of the fat kingdom. You take something like a sugar beet, which is really healthy. You remove all the nutrition and you’re left with just sugar, so it’s empty calories. Same thing. You take a walnut, remove all the nutrition, you’re left with walnut oil, and it’s just empty calories. There are a few fat-soluble nutrients like vitamin E, but basically, just throw a lot of fiber, throw out the minerals, and throw out the rest of the nutrition. It’s like why would you do that? If you want to eat olive oil, fine, eat an olive. The problem is, there’s too much sodium in it, so eat an avocado, eat nuts and seeds, or eat whole food sources. How are we going to get carbohydrates? Whole plant food sources. How are we going to get proteins? Whole food plant source. How are we going to get fat? Whole food plant sources. Are these the healthiest? Not only because the stuff that doesn’t have cholesterol, saturated fat, and hormones—all that blah, blah, blah, blah. There are all the beneficial things that you want like antioxidants, fiber, and vital nutrients. There are some essential fats: omega 3s, omega 6s, but that’s one of the reasons I recommend people to eat a tablespoon of ground flax seeds today to get their alpha-lipoic acid and omega-3 fatty acid, which is important for protecting against cardiovascular disease.   [00:24:51] Ashley James: My dad died of obesity and heart disease, but he survived my mother who was seemingly healthier—died of cancer at age 55. That was the shocker in our family. She died very quickly of liver cancer because she was very healthy on the outside. We want to obviously probably prevent heart disease—being the number one killer. We obviously want to prevent infection. That’s the big focus right now. Many people are turning to comfort foods and alcohol to just get through this crazy time, which in turn is actually hurting them more. Cancer is one of those big things that looms over us, at least over me. Something even scarier than heart disease. What can we do to reverse cancer? If someone has cancer, what evidence-based nutrition should they do to reverse cancer?   [00:25:47] Dr. Michael Greger: After Dr. Dean Ornish conquered our number one killer, heart disease, he moved on to killer number two, cancer. Took a group of men with early-stage prostate cancer, put them on the same kind of diet that reversed heart disease. For the first time ever showed that diet and lifestyle intervention could reverse the progression of cancer as measured by PSA levels, which is a proxy for tumor volume. In the control group that was told to just eat whatever your doctor was telling you, the tumors continued to grow. Whereas in the group that was randomized to a plant-based diet and lifestyle program, the tumor shrank on average— first men ever shown. The nice thing about diet is regardless of what other choices you make in terms of whether you are doing radiotherapy or chemotherapy, you can always eat healthier.   [00:26:37] Ashley James: Very interesting. Should we limit the amount of nuts and seeds like the plant-based fats or could someone go eat as many peanuts, for example, as they want to? Even though it’s plant-based, is there a ratio of carbs to fat to protein that is optimal?   [00:26:56] Dr. Michael Greger: The most important thing is a source, not the quantity. As long as you’re getting your macronutrients from whole plant sources, that’s the most important thing. I mean the only way you could overeat nuts is if that’s all you ate. Obviously, that wouldn’t be a good thing. But I encourage people to eat an ounce of it a day. It’s like a palm-full of nuts. A critically important one of the few foods along with dark and leafy from vegetables associated with literally years of an extended lifespan.   [00:27:28] Ashley James: Peanuts are not nuts, they’re legumes, right?   [00:27:31] Dr. Michael Greger: That’s true but they’re nutritionally similar enough that they actually have the same type benefits. The downside is that when we expose nuts and seeds to high dry heat, it produces these advanced glycation end-products. When you expose high protein fat foods to high heats, you get these AGEs, which we want to minimize. That’s why I encourage people to eat their nuts and seeds raw, but you can’t really find raw peanut butter, for example. But you can find raw almond butter, so that would be a better choice.   [00:28:00] Ashley James: You can make your own if you have a Vitamix or something.   [00:28:03] Dr. Michael Greger: You can make your own, exactly.   [00:28:05] Ashley James: That was my question was the high heat or the roasted nuts. We just need to basically eat the raw ones to preserve healthy fats. My last question, because I know you have to go, autoimmune disease is on the rise. Some autoimmune conditions are exacerbated by nightshades and some grains. What do we do to help people with autoimmune disease to recover?   [00:28:28] Dr. Michael Greger: You put them on a whole food plant-based diet. The most powerful intervention that’s ever been published in the peer-reviewed medical literature for multiple sclerosis and autoimmune disease where you take your own nerves. The most powerful intervention for Crohn’s disease, an autoimmune inflammatory bowel disease. We now have data for benefits for ulcerative colitis, lupus ankylosing spondylitis, rheumatoid arthritis. You name the autoimmune condition and the odds are, we have data supporting an anti-inflammatory diet, which is essentially synonymous with a plant-based diet. It’s true, there’s an autoimmune disease known as the celiac disease for which gluten can be an inflammatory trigger. For those rare 1 in 140 or so people, need to stay away from gluten-containing grains like wheat, barley, and rye, but those are healthy foods for the vast majority of people. People with joint pain, about 1 in 20, feel better after cutting nightshades out. So hey, might as well worth a try, but if it doesn’t help your joint pain, I would put those super healthy foods back into one’s diet.   [00:29:51] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. Greger, for coming on the show today. It has been such a pleasure to have you here. Leave us with some homework. Leave us with some actionable steps we can take today to improve our health.   [00:30:01] Dr. Michael Greger: Oh my God. You should go to your local public library get How Not to Die, How Not to Diet, and How to Survive a Pandemic.   [00:30:10] Ashley James: And go to nutritionfacts.org and pour through your thousands of videos.   [00:30:14] Dr. Michael Greger: Do it.   [00:30:16] Ashley James: Thank you so much. It has been such a pleasure having on the show today. You’re welcome back anytime.   [00:30:21] Dr. Michael Greger: Keep up the good work.   [00:30:25] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Li. Please share it with those you care about. Let’s get this information out to help as many people as possible to learn true health. Come join the Facebook group. Search Learn True Health on Facebook or go to learntruehealth.com/group and join the Facebook group. It’s a wonderfully supportive community. We’re all in this together to learn what we can do to tweak our diet, our lifestyle, supplements whatever we can do to just switch it over to build the body into a place that develops health instead of disease. We can heal the body. The body has an amazing ability to heal itself. Even if you’ve been told you’re going to have this for the rest of your life, I have met so many people, myself included, who have reversed diseases and illnesses that they were told by doctors they’d always have for the rest of their life. So don’t give up hope. Instead, dive in, listen to more episodes of the Learn True Health podcast, and come join the Facebook group. There is hope. As long as you’re living and breathing, as long as you have a pulse, your body can heal itself. You can do many things to support your body’s ability to heal itself. I’m so happy that you’re here to learn how you can optimize your health through every meal, through every breath. There are so many things you can do mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, and energetically. That’s exactly what this podcast is here to help you with. So please, dive in, keep listening, and make sure that you share this episode and share the podcast with those you love so we can help as many people as possible, and come join the Facebook group so that you can keep learning and keep asking questions and keep growing. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.   Get Connected with Dr. Michael Greger! Website Facebook Instagram Twitter Books by Dr. Michael Greger How Not To Die The How Not To Die Cookbook How To Survive A Pandemic How Not To Diet

Check out Dr. Li's book: https://amzn.to/36AN9Mu IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount! Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coaching   Eat To Beat Disease https://www.learntruehealth.com/eat-to-beat-disease-dr-william-li   Highlights: What holobiont is Five defense systems: angiogenesis, stem cells, microbiome, DNA repair, and immunity Akkermansia muciniphila Soy can help to prevent cancer and can also help people fight cancer Organic foods have more bio-actives   Can food really be used as medicine? In this episode, Dr. William Li, author of Eat to Beat Disease, shares some interesting research about how foods have helped to beat different diseases. The key is eating whole foods rather than processed and fast food and also eating in moderation. He also talks about the things he’s been eating and taking during this COVID-19 era to ensure that he mounts a healthy immune response to any viruses.   Intro: Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am so excited for you to hear today’s interview with Dr. Li. He has some wonderful information about healing the body with food from a medical standpoint. I know you’re going to love it.  If you want to learn how to cook really healthy delicious healing foods, come join my membership. You’ll also be supporting the Learn True Health podcast and you’ll be learning from me and my friend Naomi. We’re all really great in the kitchen, focusing on using foods that heal the body and integrating them into your diet. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. Enjoy all the wonderful and delicious videos, recipes, and lessons there because we love to use the kitchen as our pharmacy to heal the body and prevent disease. I know you’re going to love learning some great tips today on the foods that you can eat and drink to support your overall health with Dr. Li. Enjoy today’s interview.   [00:01:06] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 432. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Dr. William Li on the show, best-selling author of Eat to Beat Disease. He has an amazing TED Talk, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer? I love it. It has over 11 million views. You are a scientist first and a doctor. We’ve had a wonderful discussion before we hit record on COVID-19, so I’m interested in everything that all the science that you’ve been poring through, any advice that you can give to us on staving off disease, which is what your specialty is. Welcome to the show. This is going to be a really interesting discussion.   [00:02:03] Dr. William Li: Thank you, Ashley. It’s really a pleasure to be here, and certainly an interesting time in history. Generations from now, people will be referring back to 2020 at that time. The difference between now, that time, and the medieval ages where people were running from the plague and other deadly health scare is that we really have a lot of science to put wind in our sails. I think that’s really how we’re going to dig our way out of the mess we’re in right now, which is to use science to find the way.   [00:02:43] Ashley James: We need to find the science and look at that. I think what’s going on is we’re listening to the interpretations of the science and the predictions. We’re listening to a lot of predictions. I don’t know what’s going on, but there’s a lot of fear-mongering. I would love for people to be grounded in science instead of grounded in their fear. Because we want to empower people to take appropriate steps to remain healthy, but being in fear mode is actually harmful to the immune system. That’s the thing we have to avoid is staying in that fear mode.   [00:03:22] Dr. William Li: That’s right. I’m a physician—internal medicine, I’m a scientist, I study blood vessels, I’m a vascular biologist, and an author. I wrote a book called Eat to Beat Disease. One of the things that I started my career doing is, like every other medical researcher, studying disease, and trying to understand what makes diseases similar, different from one another. Then I started to realize that studying common denominators that united different diseases could be really a powerful way to really make advances because if we could pull the bow back and send a single arrow through the common denominators of disease and of health, we could actually make a lot more progress. What you’re talking about which is that fear with which is a really primitive response, it’s hardwired in our brain. Whether it’s a spider, a rattlesnake, or a saber-toothed tiger our fear nerve endings allow us to actually react smartly to get out of the way of something that could be damaging. But the problem that we’re all having right now with COVID-19 is that there’s really no break from this right now.   [00:04:47] Ashley James: It’s constant.   [00:04:48] Dr. William Li: This virus came out of the blue, took everybody by surprise, and put an entire civilization down on its knees. Every country, more than 180 different countries, have been affected. Pretty much organized economies around the world. There might be some aboriginals and the jungles of Borneo or Brazil that are actually just going about their way, but I think every other organized modern society has had to pause. When you pause, you’re actually more heightened to your emotions. Emotions of fear really have to do with uncertainty, lack of knowledge, and the feeling of lack of control. That’s really where science helps us because the more we study something we don’t know the more confident we are that we can actually navigate our own position with that threat that we are just starting to understand. I think that’s coming through with COVID-19 as well. What started as this mystery illness from bat to wet market to human to air passenger and around the world, we’re beginning to really throw down the tools of biotechnology and medical research to understand, not only what is the virus like, but what does it do in our body. As we’re beginning to understand that we started to realize some interesting things. First of all, COVID-19 is a coronavirus, and coronavirus is the same kind of virus that causes the common cold. It’s very different from the influenza virus, which causes the flu. Lots of misconceptions out there that this is just like a bad flu. In fact, this is not even related to the flu. It’s more related to the common cold. Imagine if a common cold were potentially lethal, that’s really what we’re dealing with. Again, even that piece of understanding allows us to actually put pieces into their place as we start getting deeper and deeper. One of the things that I am doing as a COVID-19 researcher is trying to get to the bottom of what do we know, what are the facts about this disease, and what possible ways do we have to protect ourselves to fort the damage it can cause. For people that are actually sick and maybe have recovered, how do we actually repair and heal ourselves more quickly?   [00:07:35] Ashley James: I’m really looking forward to you diving into that and sharing with us how we can prevent it, what we can do to support the body in mounting a healthy response, if we do come in contact with it, and how to then recover quickly. What I’ve seen in the last week is interesting information coming out of Italy. A pathologist was doing autopsies on over 20 people who passed away in the hospital—of COVID. They saw that there was a similarity that they all had blood clots in the lungs. He says that it’s not pneumonia that is causing blood clots in the lungs, and so our approach to treating it is all wrong. That we should be treating it with blood thinners, antiviral, and anti-inflammatories. Have you seen this? Have you seen any science to support this? What are your thoughts on that?   [00:08:35] Dr. William Li: Yeah. I actually know a lot about this because that’s exactly in my wheelhouse. My background is in vascular biology. I study blood vessels, which allow blood to flow or—when they’re damaged—blood to clot, which clotting is a good thing. If you’re wounded, you want the bleeding to stop. It’s a bad thing if you are not wounded and blood clots in your body and then you can’t get oxygen or nutrients to the rest of your cells in your body and then you wind up having big problems. That’s something that I have studied a lot. Here’s the picture of what we’re putting together. It’s not black or white, either-or, one person’s right, and one person’s wrong. What I would tell you is that COVID-19 is a coronavirus. Like the cold virus, it’s a respiratory virus. We become infected by breathing it in. If you think about breathing in a virus and how easy it is to catch a cold, you can see how infectious this COVID-19 can be, which is one of the reasons of trying to wear masks is because if everybody wore a mask, then we would be cutting down the likelihood that the droplets—the water droplets that the virus hangs out in—would actually leave our mouths, and that would be yours and mine if we were in the same place at the same time, so we would be less likely to infect each other. Mask-wearing actually, which was really confusing for a while, is now becoming so obvious how important it actually is. Most of the countries like Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, or Hong Kong are now beginning to demonstrate with real scientific evidence that wearing masks is not lip service, so to speak. It’s actually cutting down the risk of transmission. This airborne virus we breathe in can block with a mask, but if you breathe it in where does the virus go? Like a cold virus, it actually goes into the mucus in your nose. That mucus is what you blow into a handkerchief or a Kleenex. Our mucus in our nose is full of antibodies. We actually—what we call IgA—it’s like the nonspecific defense antibody line of first defense. If it probably weren’t for COVID, a lot of the battle is fought and won right there in your nose just like the regular cold virus, but this thing is sneaky and it’s pretty aggressive. If it manages to get through your mucus and into your mucous membranes, the cells in your nose, it starts to be able to track into your body. We do know that it goes down to your lungs. When it’s in your lungs, let me be very clear, we do know that it causes pneumonia. Although it’s not the classic pneumonia you would get with a bacteria, it’s a viral pneumonia. That basically means an organism is causing massive inflammation and response and causing an interruption of your airflow. There’s no question this thing actually causes pneumonia. When it actually causes pneumonia, most people get over it but some people actually succumb or their breathing gets worse and worse. For the people that are unable to make it back home make it at home, they have to be admitted as a hospital. Some percentage of those people actually wind up really crashing and they need to go on a ventilator to have artificial support or their breathing hopefully until their body actually is able to overcome the attack of the virus. This is an epic battle between the virus and our bodies. When our bodies start to win, we can get off the ventilator, we can leave the hospital, and we can go back home. Hopefully, if we win early enough meaning the security in our host is really, really solid, we won’t even go to the hospital at all. We might have something even as mild as a cold or a little bit of a viral syndrome and not downright crash. What you’re hearing from Italy is now being seen around the world and verified by the research I’m actually doing. I’ve also looked at autopsy tissue from people who have died of COVID-19 and gone way deep to take a look at what is actually going on. What we are seeing is something really amazing. When the virus gets into your lungs, in addition to causing pneumonia, one of the first things it does is it makes a beeline for the blood vessels in your lungs. When it gets into the blood vessel lining, it causes that lining to be damaged. It damages that lining. Anytime a blood vessel has damaged lining it becomes what we call prothrombotic or more likely to clot. Then the blood vessels kind of go into a tizzy trying to recover from the blood clot and they start to respond in ways that make the blood more sluggish, the immune response tries to clear out the virus and the blood vessels, and the blood vessels get damaged kind of a collateral response. Think about the SWAT team trying to rescue some hostages in a bank. There’s a lot of bank robbers there and when you’re trying to rush the bank, some of the hostages wind up getting killed. This is the thing that also happens with our immune system. It’s not that we have an autoimmune response. It’s that we have the right immune response, it’s just that it takes out a lot of healthy tissue along the way. We think that that contributes to even further likelihood of blood clotting. When blood clots in your lungs in small blood vessels, which is what you’re seeing, it becomes a problem because even if you’re moving air in and out, you’re not getting that oxygen from the air into your blood vessels to deliver to the rest of your body. We’re beginning to see how these clots are actually responsible for some of the problems of breathing and circulation that we’ve observed. Of course, now we’re seeing blood clots in the lung, the brain, and other parts of your body as well. This respiratory virus does cause respiratory infection, that’s for sure, but what we now know is that this respiratory infection—the virus goes further to cause a whole-body—a systemic illness. That’s really where we are right now. That takes the research to present-day where we’re now diving even deeper into understanding what’s actually happening in all these other different parts and organs of the body including the blood vessels.   [00:15:59] Ashley James: If a patient has the infection, should they be put on a blood clotting drug to prevent the clot? Should anticoagulants be used preventively as their body’s fighting this virus?   [00:16:21] Dr. William Li: An article came out in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology two weeks ago showing that people who were in the hospital who are on anticoagulants and in fact with COVID-19 definitely had a better outcome. Now, based on that observation, which makes sense with the research that we were just talking about how the virus causes blood clotting, now the studies are being done to actually put people proactively on blood thinners to protect them. An interesting question is if you’re infected at home, should you be taking a blood thinner like an aspirin? Obviously, that’s an over-the-counter medicine. Anybody can go to a drugstore to pick up an aspirin, but like anything, medicines can have effects and side effects. One of the things that’s happening in this pandemic of the virus that’s leading to a pandemic of fear is leading people to actually just knee-jerk and try to go out to buy everything they can and try to self-minister. Again, this is where teaming up with your doctor, and having medical researchers work on this is really important. Even something as simple as aspirin, which may indeed be life-saving in this particular case with COVID, can cause stomach bleeding, can cause other side effects. I’m one of the doctors that basically I don’t discourage my patients, people that I know, from taking their health into their own hands with things that are as safe as food for example, or even dietary supplements. But when it comes to medicines, really, I think it’s important to track along, follow along with real medical researchers. Because it’s only through the data that we get from science that we can actually know if what we’re doing has more benefits than risks.   [00:18:15] Ashley James: The people that were in the hospital that the journal wrote about, were they already on blood thinners, or were they put on blood thinners because they were infected?   [00:18:27] Dr. William Li: Most of the first reports were basically for people that were already on blood thinners. There’s a lot of people that are already on blood thinners. For example, if you had a heart condition like atrial fibrillation or if you had a valve replaced where you need your blood to be thin, many of those people are walking around on blood thinners all the time. If you’ve ever had a stroke in the past you probably were put on a blood thinner. Lots of reasons that people actually are on blood thinners. Of course, there are some genetic conditions where people are extra clotty so they wind up on blood thinners as well. I think this is where the science of observation—even observation can be a science, but the science of observation is really picking up patterns. I think that this is where being alert in a situation that is foreign to us—this is called a novel coronavirus because humans have been walking around for 200,000 years and we’ve never encountered something like this. There’s no way you can Google all the answers. There’s no Wikipedia page that tells us everything. We’re learning as we go along—making observations, doing the research, going to the deep dive, we’re much better now than we were a month ago, and definitely much better than we were four months ago when all this started to break. I think it’s a very, very important advance to understand the importance of making sure blood doesn’t clot in people who are infected with COVID-19.   [00:20:16] Ashley James: My friend’s father is in the hospital currently. He’s had four brain surgeries because unfortunately, his doctor had him on aspirin and a blood thinner after a heart surgery he had for a valve a year ago. He had massive headaches a few months ago, went into the ER, and the ER doctor said, “You’re having a brain bleed. We have to get you into the emergency surgery right now.” That doctor said, “I can’t believe your cardiologist has you on this amount of blood there and an aspirin. This is what caused your brain bleed.” They took him off of the aspirin, they reduced his blood thinners after retesting his clotting factors, and he is still having brain bleeds, so they’re chasing with several procedures. That’s an example of if you’re on too much of a blood thinner, you can have a major problem. We wouldn’t want to just arbitrarily get on a blood thinner like you said. You definitely want to work closely with a doctor. I’m wondering though if someone who has COVID could then be given a blood thinner if that would be fast enough to kick in, and if there’s any evidence to show that as of yet?   [00:21:35] Dr. William Li: I think that’s what’s going on right now. We don’t know yet. I would tell you that if you were concerned about it to talk to your doctor. I imagine that this is going to be one of the recommendations in the future. If you can document that you’ve got the infection and you have risks that might set up for a blood clot that the medical community will recommend that you go on a blood thinner. That’s probably right around the corner. What’s interesting when it comes to diet and lifestyle, there’s a school of thought that foods that contain vitamin K like spinach, kale, and many other greens that can thin the blood might not be good for all people to take. But here’s a situation where it might be actually beneficial to eat more foods, more whole green plant-based foods that actually contain vitamin K to keep you, not only healthier from all the other good stuff—the bio-actives that plants have, but also as an additional benefit that they might be able to keep our blood a little bit thinner.   [00:22:46] Ashley James: This is the funny part is he eats a whole food plant-based diet. He eats tons of vegetables, tons of leafy greens, and they brought this up to his cardiologist and his neurosurgeon or vascular surgeon. I’m not sure what the classification is for the person who’s working on closing up the vessels that are bleeding in his brain. They brought this up to his doctors and they said listen, he eats a whole food plant-based diet. They had never heard of that. They didn’t know what that was. They had to explain how he ate and they said that just sounds like eating healthy. His family said this is a diet that thins the blood naturally. His doctors said diet has nothing to do with this. You can’t affect the body with food. You can’t affect blood vessels with food. I was just floored, but so many doctors think this way that you can’t affect blood clotting or even the health of the brain or the blood vessels with eating.   [00:23:48] Dr. William Li: To some extent, you can’t blame doctors who haven’t been educated. Nutrition has really, until recently, not been a part of medical education or not adequately part of it. One of the reasons that I got into food as medicine, and I’m one of the people that are actually doing the research to study foods just the same way that we would study medicine with a lot of rigor and using the same type of testing systems is because—look, I was taking care of patients at a Veterans Hospital. Some of my favorite patients were people that used to serve the country in the Armed Services. They would receive these really terrible diagnoses from me. They were in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. Many of them were overweight, had cancer, heart disease, or diabetes. All kinds of problems. After I gave them the diagnosis, wrote the prescriptions, and gave them referrals to the other specialists, a lot of these guys would put on their jacket and walk out the door. I would turn around to do my notes. They would turn back and come and pop their head in the door and say, hey doc, one more thing. What should I eat? Is there something I can do for myself? At that moment, I started realizing that I didn’t have the answer to that because I was never taught that. That just seemed wrong to me and that sent me really on this journey to understand how does diet actually works and what answers could we be giving people when they need to know. The other thing that was interesting I thought from my experience that the Veterans Administration is some of these people that were in terrible shape—out of shape and in terrible shape—they might be morbidly obese, and really their bodies were a wreck let’s say in their 60s or 70s. I realized when they were in their 20s, they were the cut, fit buffs, perfect specimens that they couldn’t even get into armed services in the military unless they were in perfect shape. What the heck happened between the time of 18, 20, and the age 60 really are diet and lifestyle. That really only underscored for me the importance to really dig deeper and try to answer that. Not surprisingly, this is not the typical experience of most medical doctors. I really believe that food as medicine is a concept whose time has come. I think more and more, the medical community realizes how important it is. The older doctors who’ve been out there longer who definitely weren’t taught this in the 70s, 80s, and even 90s, they’re struggling with the idea even though each of them do know, on a personal level, how important diet could be. They just don’t have the intellectual framework to know what to do with their own instincts. This is getting back to basics in some ways, but now applying science to it, we ought to be able to make people more confident in understanding how food can be medicine.   [00:27:02] Ashley James: I love it. How have you changed your lifestyle? How have you changed your diet after diving into all the research?   [00:27:13] Dr. William Li: I’m a little bit of an unusual creature because between college and medical school, I did a gap year. In my gap year, I went to the Mediterranean long before the Mediterranean diet was popular. What I was interested in was the Mediterranean diet. I was interested in how foods in a particular part of the world shaped culture, and how that culture actually helped to inform the way that arts and sciences emerged from history. I was always interested in the history of regions. I was interested in the history of the Mediterranean and of Asia and trying to understand how do these old, old cultures, how did people live in the land, grow and assemble their foods into meals that today are regarded as amazingly delicious combinations and healthy to boot? How did that kind of life and lifestyle help shape things like painting, drawing, sculpture, mathematics, physics, and biology? It was an interesting thing. I went to Europe. I lived there in Italy and in Greece. I was exploring diets. Again, this is long before anybody really knew what a Mediterranean diet was. I was living it. I wasn’t talking the talk, I was just walking the walk back then. For decades, I’ve actually lived a pretty Mediterranean style life. I have an Asian background so I grew up eating a lot of Asian-inspired cuisines. I’ll tell you what the common denominator of these old ancient healthy cuisines. They all tend to rely mostly on whole plant-based foods as their backbone. They tend to use fresh foods as opposed to a lot of prepared foods. There are very few ultra-processed foods involved in their diet.  Fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and seeds are common. Fish, not just salmon, but all kinds of fish—mostly seafood. Fish and shellfish also are common along the coastline, as you might expect, and very little meat. Not the absence of meat. Some people don’t realize this but the Sardinians, which is one of the blue zones where people routinely live to above a hundred, the villages of the Sardinian Blue Zone are in the mountains were nowhere near the sea. They need a fair amount of meat too, I mean they eat meat. One of the things is that it’s a very naturalistic integration of plants that are easy to grow, seasonal, eaten fresh, cooked in combinations, incorporating different ingredients that are tasty, making you want to eat more, and diversity of cuisine. I would say between the Mediterranean and Asia, those are the common denominators. I’ve really just embarked on that type of a lifestyle for the last 20, 30 years. It makes me feel great.   [00:30:50] Ashley James: What isn’t in your diet that’s in the standard American diet?   [00:30:55] Dr. William Li: Look, I grew up in America. I grew up probably eating the same stuff that everyone has eaten—the stuff out of boxes. I’ve had a Twinkie, I’m not ashamed to say, when I was a kid, right? I wouldn’t have one now, but I certainly had them when I was growing up. I would tell you what I’m very careful to avoid—I don’t eat a lot of meat. I try to cut down or cut out red meat. I try to stay away from processed meats of any sort. I try not to eat foods that come out of boxes. I do look at ingredients when I shop for things. If I see a whole bunch of Greek and Latin words that refer to chemicals, I try to stay away from the ultra process stuff. If I have a choice between having something that is pre-made versus freshly made, I will go hands-down for the fresh stuff. By the way, I would say the other thing that I tend not to do is really do a lot of errant snacking is what I call it. We know that actually restricting your calories is actually healthy. It re-primes your immune system. It actually slows down your cellular aging, it lowers inflammation and helps fight cancer by cutting off the blood supply. Lots of things that caloric restriction does. That’s the opposite of let’s call it the Vegas buffet mindset. Let’s go in there and stuff our face. The other thing I don’t do is I live a life where if I miss a meal or two because I’m busy or I’m doing something else, I’m okay with that. I don’t try to make it up by stuffing my face. Those are some of the things that I don’t do. I really don’t do fast food. Like I said, I grew up doing that kind of stuff, but I can’t remember the last time that I went to a drive-thru or picked up fast food. I would rather not eat, and I’m okay with that. I’ll find something healthier when I get home.   [00:33:11] Ashley James: Your mission is to teach people how to use food as medicine. The number one killer is heart disease. That’s number one. Heart disease is going to kill more people than all infections combined and yet we focus so much on worrying about infection when most people statistically will die of heart disease. What can we do to prevent heart disease?   [00:33:37] Dr. William Li: Heart disease is really interesting because it’s really not just about the heart, it’s about the blood vessels supplying the heart. That comes from my field of angiogenesis or how the body grows healthy blood vessels. The heart, of course, is part of the circuitry, part of the plumbing of our blood vessels, but most people don’t know that there are 60,000 miles where the blood vessels are packed inside our bodies. Think about a ball of yarn that’s 60,000 miles long. Literally, if you unspool that yarn, you could have a string that would wrap around the earth twice, right? That’s your blood vessels. That’s your garden hose in your body. Our heart, which is the pumping machine, actually just really jets out oxygen and nutrients through our blood to every single cell in our body. If it has any problem sending out that oxygen and nutrients, then the heart winds up struggling. If it can’t pump, you wind up having heart disease. There’s a lot of ways that the heart can have trouble. For example, the muscle can get weakened by itself. The blood vessels feeding the heart can get clogged. Then the vessels, the circulation that the heart pumps blood into can go from being kind of soft and elastic to being really hard and rigid. Imagine trying to blow into a long metal pipe, you know how hard that is. If your blood vessels are really hardened, the heart has to work really, really hard, which tires it out, wears it down, and causes it to actually eventually fail.  All that means that to prevent heart disease we need to take good care of our blood vessels, prevent them from actually getting hard hardened, prevent them from clogging up, and make sure that these cells lining our blood vessels are as healthy as possible. Sleep, exercise, lowering stress, staying away from smoking, not drinking in excess, and physical activity. All those things are common-sense things. When it comes to food, here’s really where some really interesting research is happening. We used to think about heart health in our diet as cutting things out—no butter, no meat, no this, no that. You’re a bad person if you eat that. If you’ve got heart disease you got to cut out everything right away. It was really like guilt, fear, and shame mindset, an elimination program if you wanted to avoid heart disease.  Now what we know with science is that if you want to protect your heart and you want to avoid heart disease, you should be adding things to your diet. Yeah, sure, stay away from the bad stuff but really focus on the good stuff. We want to have good fiber in our diet because good fiber feeds our gut microbiome and our gut bacteria actually helps. When our gut bacteria are healthy because we’re feeding it fiber, those bacteria digest the fiber. As part of the byproducts of the bacteria’s own digestion—the metabolites—they create particles that actually lower our cholesterol, which then prevents our blood vessels from getting hardened.  They actually help our body metabolize cholesterol and sugar better so we can be able to use our blood glucose better. It’s like our bacteria is like our diabetes for better. Eating plant-based foods with a lot of fiber is super healthy for your heart. We also know that there are foods that, believe it or not, can actually help the lining of our blood vessels regenerate themselves and continuously repair themselves so they’re not quite as clotty. They don’t clog up or they don’t clot up quite as much. Some of these things are, for example, omega-3 fatty acids, which you can find in nuts. You can find them in seafood, but you can also find them in nuts. You can also take it as a dietary supplement. A surprise would be cacao—dark chocolate. The cocoa bean actually can is used to make cacao. Cacao is the basis for making chocolate. Dark chocolate is where you have mostly cacao. That’s Mother Nature’s blood vessel helper. What’s amazing is there’s been a study that was done in individuals who had heart disease, this was out of UCSF, where they gave two groups either a placebo drink or they gave people hot chocolate made with dark chocolate—dark cacao. The placebo, by the way, had the flavonoids and polyphenols were low, so it’s got low versus high. Then they fed the people we’ve known heart disease just two cups of hot chocolate a day for 30 days. Then they measured the number of stem cells in their bloodstream at baseline and compared it to the end of 30 days of drinking two cups of hot cocoa made with dark cocoa. They found that the people who had the dark chocolate version of hot cocoa had doubled the number of regenerating blood vessel cells, stem cells, in their bloodstream. They had better blood flow as well. Again, human studies, plant-based foods, heart-healthy, these are the kinds of things that we should be leaning into and embracing. Now, for heart health, it’s all about leaning into the good stuff while, keeping in mind, we need to kind of cut down on the bad stuff as well.   [00:39:41] Ashley James: I love it. There’s a school of thought that consuming mass amounts of virgin olive oil is very, very healthy for the body, and just like the Mediterranean diet, every time I think of the Mediterranean diet we think of drinking gallons a year of olive oil. Then there’s a school of thought that we should not consume any oil once it’s been processed away from the plant, so we should eat olives not olive oil. For example, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, who’s a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, says that oil harms the endothelial lining, which is the skin on the inside of the blood vessels. He sees that consuming oil and animal fat harms it, inflames it, and that we should eat our fat from a whole food source and not from the processed source. Have you sided with either side? What does science say for you?   [00:40:43] Dr. William Li: There’s a couple of ways to look at this. First of all, consuming anything in gallon form is probably not good for you. My first position on most things when it comes to food is that more is not necessarily more. There’s actually a biological concept called hormesis, which describes this which is that a little but isn’t enough, a little bit more is good for you, even more is even better, and then a little bit more than that gives you the optimal amount. But then if you keep on adding more, you start losing the benefits. You keep on adding more, even more than that, you start losing it. It’s the classic upside-down u-shaped curve where there’s an optimum amount where you get the optimum benefit, but if you keep on going beyond that you actually lose it. I know Caldwell Esselstyn. He’s an amazing guy—a friend. We worked together on a couple of projects. Really smart, and I think he’s right. You do not want to damage the lining of your blood vessels. That’s my field of angiogenesis as well, but here’s what I will tell you. Not all oils are created equal. Saturated fats are clearly more damaging to the blood vessel lining—the endothelial lining of our blood vessels. Polyunsaturated fats have less damage. Obviously, if you go too high in concentrations, I mean anything is bad for you in excess. But olive oils are polyunsaturated, for the most part. It has less to do with the processing. If you think about it, eating an olive out of a barrel is a plant-based food. That is packed with olive oil, right? A little bit of olive oil such as you would use in a dressing or use for in cooking, not bad for you. Actually, most of the study has shown that if you actually have up to about three tablespoons of olive oil a day, that’s probably okay—and or less. If you use olive oil in cooking, you’re probably in good shape. Don’t forget, it’s not about the fat that’s the good stuff in olive oil. The fat of olive oil is less bad for you, but in fact, olive oil has these bioactive compounds like oleic acid and hydroxytyrosol. These are some of Mother Nature’s secret weapons that happen to be found in plant-based foods. For example, hydroxytyrosol has been shown to be one of those olive oil-derived substances that can actually improve your immune response.  In this COVID-19 era, we pay attention to things like that when we hear something is good. The next time you’re actually sautéing something I would say it’s okay to use a little bit of olive oil, don’t take too much of it. Never have gallons of anything.   [00:43:54] Ashley James: You said someone could be safe taking up to three tablespoons a day, what if someone does more than that? Could they be damaging their blood vessels, and is there a way to get all those great nutrients in a different form? Because you’re saying olive oil really isn’t a great way to get fat. You’re not actually taking the olive oil for the fat, you’re taking it for the medicinal extracts from olives. Whereas it would be more concentrated in an olive itself, wouldn’t it?   [00:44:21] Dr. William Li: It could be. By the way, a lot of the good stuff in olive oil, in olives, actually is not the oily part of it, it’s in the liquid part of it, which when you press an olive to make olive oil what comes out of olive is a liquid, which then is drained away, but the fat actually floats to the top and that’s what’s collected. In fact, there’s a lot of really great stuff in the olive water that gets drained away. That’s a whole other sustainability issue.   [00:44:47] Ashley James: Olive juice.   [00:44:48] Dr. William Li: Yeah, exactly.   [00:44:49] Ashley James: Why aren’t we drinking olive juice by the gallon?   [00:44:52] Dr. William Li: I love olive juice. Have you ever had it by the way? It’s just fantastic. It’s super concentrated olives. It’s like all the goodness of olive without the fat.   [00:45:02] Ashley James: Oh my Gosh.   [00:45:04] Dr. William Li: I’m actually not saying that olive oil is a bad fat. What I’m saying is that it’s actually a pretty decent fat, all things considered. By the way, if you look at clinical trials and if you look at population studies, people who live in regions where olive oil tends to be the predominant fat tend to be a little bit healthier. The [correlate] between consuming olive oil is healthier than not consuming olive oil. You’re asking though are there any other ways of getting healthy fats? I mean look, many nuts and flax seeds all contain healthy fats.  We probably shouldn’t be having a ton of fasts to begin with. There’s no food that is really just only the fat, right? There are other things that are good with it. We have to take a more considered approach to what we’re putting in. For example, if you’re having olive oil, it’s not just the polyunsaturated fats you’re having, you’re also getting all these other bio-actives. If you’re having a saturated fat, there’s probably nothing good that you’re taking in with it.   [00:46:15] Ashley James: Got it. This olive juice, this olive water, the extract that’s not the fat, that’s where all the polyphenols are, all these chemicals that you’re talking about. How would one go about getting this into their life? Just by eating olives or is there a place to buy olive juice?   [00:46:38] Dr. William Li: It’s a great question. I know that I was traveling once in the Mediterranean. There was, for the lack of a better word, an olive bar. I’m trying to remember where it was, but it was amazing. You could get little shots of pure olive juice from different types of olives. I’ll tell you, it was just such an amazing treat to sample that. Be on the lookout. I suppose, if you have time in a lockdown mode to actually try out different baking recipes, maybe we should try to make our own olive juice. I’m sure there’s a way of actually doing it.   [00:47:23] Ashley James: There’s a ton of people baking right now. We should be cold pressing olives and drinking the juice instead. That sounds delicious and so nutritious. I’m predicting in the next 20 years that’s going to be a big health trend like goji berries and kale. We’re going to have little bottles of olive juice. That’s really cool. You focus on food as medicine, you focus on preventing disease because it’s more important to prevent a disease than treat it. At least, we have more tools to prevent a disease than we do to have to treat it because by the time someone is so sick that they have the disease it’s much harder to reverse it. What actionable steps could we take today? What specific steps would you tell us to start doing today to prevent disease?   [00:48:19] Dr. William Li: The one thing that everyone needs to know is that we actually have, from the time we’re born, all the defensive weapons we need to stay to live long healthy lives. Our body really craves health. Health is not just the absence of disease, it’s really a result of our own bodies—hard-wired health defense system—working as hard as it can—I call it firing on all cylinders—from the time we’re born until our very last breath. Some people say I know somebody who developed cancer or heart disease, why did they develop that? I would turn it around to say why don’t more people develop cancer, and why don’t more people develop diabetes or heart disease? It’s because when our body’s defenses are working at full capacity, full throttle, they naturally resist cancer growth, metabolism going on haywire, blood vessels clogging up causing heart disease. Actually, even fat cells growing to ridiculous sizes our body kind of knows how to do what it wants to do. The problem is that once we’re born and we’re living on planet earth, life itself exacts a toll like the tax we pay for living on this planet is that we’re continuously assaulted by ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Modern life, we’re surrounded by off-gassing from furniture and carpets. I always tell these damages our DNA and cause all kinds of problems.  I always tell people if you still drive a car that uses petrol or uses gasoline and you get to fill your tank, do you stand upwind or downwind? A lot of people go I haven’t even thought about that. How about you, Ashley? Do you actually stand upwind or downwind when filling up your tank?   [00:50:16] Ashley James: I sit in the car while my husband does it.   [00:50:19] Dr. William Li: All right, the smartest one of them all. I’ll tell you what I do. I stand upwind because I realize that if I stand downwind and I can smell that gas, those solvents are actually going into my lung damaging my own DNA. Something like that, just even a small thing like that, is an assault on your body. The question is, how come we don’t have lung cancer every day, the next day, or the next week after we fill up a tank of gas? Because our body fixes itself.  The number one thing I think is super important is that our body already has the secret to actually stay healthy. Number two is that those defenses have to work harder and harder as we get older because there are so many cumulative stresses that we’re subjected to, our body’s defenses have to work harder and sometimes they can break down. The third thing I would tell you, so you want to sort of stay away from those dangers. This is like wear sunscreen, stay physically active, avoid solvents and toxins, but there’s even more which is that we can actually do our health defenses a favor by feeding them because foods can activate, support, and even enhance our health defense system. What are those health defense systems? I wrote about five of them in my book Eat to Beat Disease. There’s angiogenesis, our circulation, that’s 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels that deliver oxygen to all of our cells. There’s our stem cells, the regeneration. We talked about regeneration a little bit. Our stem cells are actually found in our bone marrow. We got tons of them even as adults. When we were kids, we were told that starfish and salamanders regenerate but people don’t, humans don’t. Well, that playbook’s been thrown out. We have a new chapter written. We know that humans do generate very, very slowly. Foods can actually make that regeneration happen from the inside out, and we can speed it up and make it more efficient. Our microbiome, gut bacteria, we got 37 trillion bacteria in our bodies and most of it’s in our gut.  When I was in medical school I was told bacteria are bad, kill the bacteria, prescribe antibiotics, and now we know, in fact, most of the bacteria in our body is good. Occasionally, there’s a bad actor that calls itself out. Sometimes, you need to actually bust out the pharmaceutical police to take care of that, but for the most part, we have a good ecosystem of healthy good bacteria. By feeding our good bacteria, it affects our mood, our brain, our emotions, our immune system, how good our skin looks, how fast we heal, whether or not we’ve got inflammation, our metabolism.  It’s so important, our bacteria, that we actually realize that we’re not even fully human anymore because we’ve got 39 trillion human cells, we’ve got 37 trillion bacteria, so we’re like 50-50. Half of us isn’t even human. By the way, Ashley, the term for an organism that’s made up of different species like we are, humans and bacteria, is called a holobiont. That’s what you and I are. We’re all holobionts. We’re an ecosystem walking around. The bacteria are just walking around inside our human shell. That’s really important and foods can actually boost that. DNA is another defense system. We’re all taught that DNA is our genetic code, and it makes proteins, absolutely. That’s true, there’s no quarrel about that, but many people do not realize that our DNA is a defense mechanism that protects us against environmental damage. For example, we know that if you go out to the beach and lay out you’ll get tan and you’ll get burned if you stay out too long. If you get burned that can actually lead to skin cancer because it damages our DNA. We know if you want to speed up that damage you should go into a sun tanning booth and bingo, in an hour you’ll have done 20 years of damage to your skin—really a bad thing to do.  Did you know that actually even sitting in a car stuck in traffic on a beautiful day with the sun shining in through the windshield or with your arm out the window coming in stuck in traffic that also causes damage. Being in an airplane. Pilots receive huge amounts of ultraviolet damaging radiation just by sitting in a cockpit flying the plane. As do the passengers. The fact of the matter is our DNA knows how to fix itself. It repairs itself, it can rebuild itself when it’s damaged, and our DNA is kind of a fuse like, a life fuse, that burns itself down in our cells so that the longer the fuse is the healthier and longer-lived we are. When our fuse burns down really short, they call these the telomeres that are protective they’re like the caps of a shoelace at the very end—the plastic tips. What happens when your shoelace loses the cap? Your shoelace frays open and immediately it starts to fall apart. That can happen to our DNA. Our DNA protects ourselves against damage including aging. Then finally, our immune system. Everybody now thinks about immunity as one of the most important defenses against COVID-19, but listen, we’re surrounded by viruses, bacteria, molds, and fungi all the time. Our immune system does more than resist attacks from the outside, which is what we’re thinking about with COVID. Our immune system prevents us from being attacked from the inside by cancer cells. In fact, we know that the immune system is so powerful that even if you were in your 80s or 90s, like an elderly person, their immune system is powerful enough to completely wipe out cancer even if it’s spread if you give it a chance. We figured this out through one of the biggest breakthroughs in medicine in the last couple of decades, which was immunotherapy for cancer where you can now treat cancer some cancers with medicines that don’t actually kill the cancer cells directly. Instead, what they do is they actually help the immune system discover cancer and get rid of it by itself. A great example is President Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States and one of the oldest living presidents now. He actually had melanoma.  He was one of the most amazing people that after his presidency dedicated himself to building homes for people that needed to have homes constructed. He and his wife Rosalynn would go out and build houses in Habitat for Humanity. A lot of sunshine in the state of Georgia. Got a melanoma, spread to his liver and his brain. It was thought that someone in their 90s would never survive a melanoma that spread to the brain, but he got immunotherapy in the 90s that didn’t kill the cancer cells. All they did was rip open the cloak that cancers try to hide from your immune system. His 90-year-old immune system said aha, I see you, I’m going to get rid of you. His own immune system wiped out all visible traces of cancer. Amazing. I never thought we’d see that happen, not in my career, but here we are. Five defense systems: angiogenesis, stem cells, microbiome, DNA repair, and immunity. The great news is that our diet can be used to activate these, so you can, in fact, Eat to Beat Disease.   [00:58:28] Ashley James: I love it. Your book is just full of the science-based evidence showing us that every single time we walk into the kitchen we’re walking into our pharmacy. That every time we put something in our mouth we can be healing our body or we could be harming our body. We really want to maximize the nutrition, the nutrient density of every meal to support the body’s ability to heal itself and maintain optimal health no matter what our age is. The more you dive into this and help people to shape their diet to support their overall health, what illnesses have you been surprised that were able to be reversed with diet?   [00:59:17] Dr. William Li: One of the most surprising is in fact cancer. We talked a little bit about this earlier. I’ll tell you about the experience. This immunotherapy that I told you about there’s a bunch of different treatments that are out there like this. Even the best ones sometimes aren’t effective, and we don’t know why. Some people who actually wind up getting immunotherapy will have this incredible, amazing, and complete response. Back to baseline—they just regain their health back even after cancer has spread. On the other hand, some people don’t respond at all. Getting the treatment doesn’t do them squat—diddly-squat. What’s going on? My colleague, Dr. Laurence Zitvogel in Paris did this amazing important study. She took 200 cancer patients who were being treated with the immunotherapies. She just separated them out into people that actually had a good response and people who didn’t respond. Then she dove deeply to figure out what the differences were between the people who are responders and non-responders. It seems like a really simple logical thing to do, but in fact, it’s quite a complicated thing if you really wanted to look for differences. What she found, when you accounted for sex, age, comorbidities, medications, other risk factors, diet, lifestyle, and all kinds of other things, the only difference between someone who responded and didn’t respond is one bacteria in their gut—one bacteria. If you had that bacteria, you responded. If you didn’t have that bacteria, you didn’t respond. That bacteria is called akkermansia muciniphila. It’s a normal healthy gut bacteria that we now are beginning to realize it actually governs and helps to control. It’s like air traffic control for our immune system—it conducts surveillance. Here’s the amazing thing about that bacteria, when she took out the bacteria from patients who were responders to the treatment and went to the lab to figure out—she took lab animals, mice, who actually didn’t have any bacteria and put them in there—if she put a tumor on there and then treated them, the same thing that you saw in patients. The immunotherapy would allow the mouse’s immune system to completely wipe out cancer. If on the other hand, she put the bacteria in there, the animal had a tumor and she gave an antibiotic and wiped out that bacteria, no effect of the immunotherapy. Powerful, powerful concept of a single bacteria helping your immune system function, but where the surprise is for me when it comes to diet has to do with the fact that you cannot actually eat this bacteria. There’s no probiotic for akkermansia. The only thing you can do is to eat foods that actually cause your own gut, your own intestines to secrete the mucus that this bacteria love to grow in. By the way, what is the food? Pomegranate juice, cranberry juice, and Concord grape juice. They cause our colons to secrete mucus. When that mucus is secreted, the akkermansia loves to grow. It’s like putting fertilizer into your garden. The flowers start blooming, and you can actually put yourself into a situation where you can then have the best possible chances of responding. This isn’t a food versus medicine. This is food and medicine. To be able to get that kind of impact from diet, life, and that situation to me was a delightful surprise.   [01:03:13] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. That makes all the difference. It’s funny, I googled akkermansia muciniphila. Is that how you say it?   [01:03:22] Dr. William Li: Exactly.   [01:03:23] Ashley James: I googled it and the first thing that comes up is a bunch of probiotics, but as you’re saying, you don’t want to take a probiotic. You want to eat food to support the gut in creating the environment that then this bacteria comes and lives. Does it have to be grape juice? Can you eat grapes or grape juice is the best way to do?   [01:03:48] Dr. William Li: The studies have been done so far with grape juice, but obviously, the juice is just coming from the grapes so you might as well eat the grape too and you get all the other good stuff that’s good for other parts of your body including your blood vessel health and metabolism. I always go for the whole food if you can get it, if you can eat it, but the juice isn’t a problem either. I would say many people are concerned about the amount of sugar that’s found in fruit juices. What I would say is that number one yes, sugar is found in some fruit juices, and yes, having too much sugar, from any source, is bad. But sugar in a natural fruit juice is better than added sugar in a soda or in a cup of coffee. You choose your weapons, you choose your sugar wisely. The good thing about fruit is that you actually wind up having a lot of other good stuff that comes along with it. If the sweetness of the fruit makes your mouth water and it makes you want to eat more of it, that’s not a bad thing necessarily. Again, moderation.   [01:05:02] Ashley James: Moderation is key. It’s interesting to know that fructose is the only carbohydrate, I believe, that will not trigger satiation. That’s why an 18-year-old could consider drinking two liters of Coke, but they would never drink two liters of milk in one sitting. The fructose does not trigger that satiation, so people tend to want to binge on or the brain wants to binge on fructose. It’s part of our mechanism for when we were hunter-gatherers. It’s just good to know for people who maybe have addictive tendencies that when they start drinking juice or start eating even just fruit or any form of fructose, it can help to trigger more of their addictive tendencies. But if you stay in moderation, like you said, everything in moderation, you have someone drank a few ounces a day of cranberry juice, which is very tart, I can’t see anyone wanting to over-consume that. You said concord grapes, pomegranate juice, or cranberry juice, or someone could eat pomegranates. It’s kind of hard to eat cranberries. I actually have made a really delicious cranberry relish that didn’t have any sugar in it. It was raw cranberries diced in a food processor with a bunch of orange and orange zest. It’s very delicious.   [01:06:36] Dr. William Li: If you were to put cranberries with some mango, or cranberries some banana—I’m trying to think of other things you could actually blend with cranberries. I think you could actually find other ways to sweeten it. You don’t have to just do the old Thanksgiving recipe of dumping a cup of sugar with a cup of cranberries, as tasty as that might have been when you were a kid. Maple syrup is another kinder, gentler way of actually putting a little bit of sugar in something. I know you’re from Canada originally. It’s the home of maple syrup.   [01:07:13] Ashley James: Maple syrup courses through our veins.   [01:07:17] Dr. William Li: Exactly. I think it’s all about moderation.   [01:07:24] Ashley James: Right. That’s amazing. You’ve seen people reverse cancer with diet, but just understanding that those who consumed those foods so that their gut could have that bacteria made all the difference to them. Are there any other keys that you were really surprised to uncover?   [01:07:47] Dr. William Li: What was really amazing to me is that if you were to compare the potency of food side-by-side with a cancer drug or even a non-cancer drug, you can really get the sense of how powerful foods are. We did this actually with green tea where we tested green tea in the same system for doing cancer drug development. We found that it was at least as active as about half the cancer treatments that we had tested. What was also interesting, that was kind of a surprise to me, is when it comes to food and health, there’s a lot of science—more science to be done—but there’s also a lot of ideology, there’s a lot of belief system, there’s a lot of pride of thinking that’s out there. Sometimes that’s confusing with science. What’s interesting is most people would say that tea is good for you and that green tea is really good for you and that black tea might not be so good for you because it’s been fermented and a lot of the polyphenols have been destroyed, but actually, we found in angiogenesis assays would say that in fact—and then people will say with green tea, that Japanese tea, is the best. When we actually were agnostic like we had no ideology. We said let’s just test some green tea from Japan and other places like China. Let’s test some black tea as well.  A big surprise for me was we found that jasmine tea from China actually was more powerful in an angiogenesis assay for blood vessel health than Japanese tea. But even more surprising was that a black tea, Earl Grey, which is black tea with bergamot which is kind of a citrus type of citrus peel was more potent than any of the green teas. What was even more surprising is when we did something unthinkable culturally, which is to mix, blend Japanese and Chinese tea together, we actually found that when you tested that combination that was even more powerful than any of the teas. So it opened their ideas of food synergies, right? Because nobody eats food by itself. We really tend to mix things together. What don’t we know? I mean we know tomatoes are good for you, we know that olives are good for you, and we know that some spices or herbs are good for you, but do we know what happens if you mix them together? Does 1 plus 1 equal 10? That’s the kind of research that lies ahead that I’m super excited to be doing.   [01:10:48] Ashley James: Absolutely. What was the Japanese and Chinese combination that made the biggest difference?   [01:10:53] Dr. William Li: It was a Japanese Sencha, which most people revere. I mean it’s got a great taste, I love Sencha. Then we tested it against Chinese jasmine tea, which they call Dragon Balls. Teas rolled together with jasmine flowers. We tested either those, side-by-side, in an angiogenesis assay. A big surprise to me was that the Chinese tea was more powerful and potent than the Japanese tea, but then when we actually mixed the two together we got actually an effect that was more powerful than either, and even more powerful than the black tea. If you counted the potency, it was definitely synergy. They were more than additive. They actually did something yet different again. What’s the impact on the growing conditions, the soil from which they came, or the age or the season in which the leaves are picked. All these are amazing questions that need to be asked.   [01:11:57] Ashley James: When you did this study, did you figure out how much? What was the optimal brewing and consistency of the tea and how much someone would need to drink every day to maximize the benefits of drinking it?   [01:12:14] Dr. William Li: The way I do food as medicine research is by looking at lots of different types of data and lots of different types of studies. The reason that’s important is that you can’t really study food in the exact same way you’d study a drug. You study a drug like a pharmaceutical, what do you do? You give 1,000 patients the drug and you give another thousand patients a sugar pill or a placebo. Then you make them take that drug X number of times a day for a few months or maybe a year and then you measure the outcome. You can’t make anybody just eat only tomatoes, and you can’t make the other people not eat tomatoes for a year. The way that I approach the research is number one, we look in the lab. We see in cells and looking at the genetics and molecular biology, what does the food actually do or the substance within the food? This can be done in tissue culture and genetic studies. It could be done with lab animals, animal models. All the standard stuff. Then you can go to clinicals in humans. For humans, you can actually do a clinical trial. The cacao, the hot chocolate study I told you about—regenerative blood vessel cells, stem cells—was actually a human’s trial done with people. Small studies because it’s really difficult to do long term studies like this. But then you have population studies where you cannot just do a couple of dozen people, you can do hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people. In fact, some of the largest epidemiological studies, they call them population studies, can involve hundreds of thousands of people. There’s a gigantic study in Europe that is looking at 500,000 people across a dozen European countries and studying them over the course of their lifetime. The conclusions that you get are really by converging all that data, and then figure out what does the data tell you. When we were talking about tea earlier when you were asking about the right dose, well, many of the studies have been done in humans have shown that tea benefits that protect the heart, to protect against cancer, even protect against dementia, any range, anywhere from two to four cups of green tea a day, most of the studies have been done in green tea. So that would be the dose. The question is, how long would you need to take it? Many of these studies are conducted over a period of years, looking at people’s intake over the course of years. This is, again, food isn’t like a drug. You just go out to the drugstore and you pop a pill and you’re done or pop it once a day for seven to ten days like an antibiotic. This is why having a great habit when you’re young can pay off later on in life, but it’s never too late. You’re never too old to actually shape-shift a little bit and lean towards what I like to say, a delicious healthy diet that pleases you that you love. In my book, I write about more than 200 foods. They all activate one or more of the body’s health defense systems. Everyone can find something that they love in that list of 200 plus foods. If you start with the foods that you love as healthy choices, you’re already way ahead of the game because you’re not about cutting out things you love, you’re adding things to your diet that you love.   [01:16:07] Ashley James: That makes total sense. I was amazed to learn about—I’m not going to say this right—anti-angiogenesis or the compounds that prevent new blood vessels growing to cancer.   [01:16:26] Dr. William Li: That’s anti-angiogenic foods.   [01:16:28] Ashley James: Right.   [01:16:30] Dr. William Li: Some of the really interesting ones are also surprises. I got involved in this many, many years ago. When there was a research paper that came out, I spied. It was a Greek researcher doing research in Germany. The lab had vials and vials and vials of frozen urine from Japanese villagers outside of Kyoto who all ate vegetarian diets, mostly soybean products. The laboratory was studying female hormones. Obviously, during menstruation, there are female hormones found in urine. That’s what the lab is originally doing. They had all this extra frozen urine around, and they were trying to figure out what type of experiments would be useful to do. They decided they would just see what’s in the urine and not be biased. They looked at everything that was in the urine, and they found a couple of really interesting surprising peaks. Think about urine, you put it into a device that can measure all the chemicals. If there’s a chemical, the needle jumps and you get a little spike in the readout. There’s a sticker tape that comes out and the readout there. They found a couple of gigantic spikes. They’re like what the heck is this? It turns out they were not female hormones, but they were homormoneish-like. They found that it was a phytoestrogen that comes from soy. We now know this. Soy is a phytoestrogen. What they did though is they tested the chemical from the urine. They tested it on blood vessel cells and they found that it potently shut down the blood vessels that tumors would grow to try to feed themselves. It was anti-angiogenic cancer starving. You say, wait a minute, we know that women are often told to stay away from soy products because these phytoestrogens are dangerous for breast cancer, right? That’s an urban legend. The urban legend is from well-intentioned people trying to interpret the information is that soy estrogen, plant estrogens look nothing like human estrogens. They’re called estrogens but they actually don’t do the same thing. In fact, plant estrogens block human estrogens. We know that human estrogens can be responsible for some types of breast cancer, and in fact, we give blockers of human estrogen to treat those cancers. Turns out, soy estrogens—phytoestrogens—do the same thing as those pharmaceuticals. They block the human estrogen. How do we know that soy is safe to take? A study of 5000 women who already had breast cancer, so the highest risk women were studied and this was a study done out of Shanghai called the Shanghai women’s breast cancer study. They found that those women with breast cancer diagnosis who ate more soy had better outcomes, less mortality, and less chance of cancer coming back the more they ate. How much soy do they need to have? About 10 grams of soy protein a day. That’s the amount of soy you would get in about a glass of soy milk per day, not that much. Again, go to the lab, look at what’s in there, look at human samples and human trials, then look at big populations and see. A study of 5000 women is pretty convincing. You would think that if it’s dangerous you would see it right there. Then there was a meta-analysis of 14 different studies of women with breast cancer and studying the effects of soy. In every single case of these 14 clinical trials, the intake of soy was associated with better survival and in no case was the intake of soy associated with more mortality. I think that’s a case closed kind of thing.   [01:20:51] Ashley James: Do you know, in those studies, did they choose non-GMO soy or organic soy, or did they differentiate what kind of soy they were using?   [01:21:02] Dr. William Li: That’s a good question. In those big studies, they haven’t really differentiated those. Some of these studies were coming out of Asia, some of them were coming out of Europe. The big concern about GMO—the debate, the controversy about GMO—is something that’s really worthwhile studying. I’ll tell you something interesting that came out recently that I discovered about GMO and about organic. A lot of concepts of GMO being worse and organic being better are all based on the principles that they should be better or should be worse. The real question is how would you actually know? You’d have to do human studies, which some of which are underway right now, so we have to wait and see what those research studies show. So far, what I would say is that for GMO, it’s very, very difficult to avoid GMO anything because the seeds are out there, butterflies and bees take them everywhere. Even if you think something is not GMO, it may wind up being that the pollination has contaminated a non-GMO with GMOs. That the seeds that they started them with weren’t that way—really, really difficult studies. The other thing that I got surprised with was organic. I mean organic supposedly better, and of course, nobody wants pesticides in their foods. Recently, there was a paper study published showing that strawberries that are grown in an organic fashion, meaning without pesticides, actually have more healthful properties in the berry. That’s the reason is that when you don’t have pesticides used to grow the strawberries, bugs eat the strawberry leaves. That’s the whole point of pesticides to keep the pests away, but when insects eat at the leaves of the plant, the plant views it as a wound to the plant and it responds by actually healing itself. Part of the wound healing response is to put more bioactive stuff into the fruit. You actually get a more powerful fruit when it’s actually eaten, attacked by an insect.   [01:23:39] Ashley James: Interesting.   [01:23:40] Dr. William Li: Really interesting stuff, right?   [01:23:42] Ashley James: Also, when you’re eating food that isn’t sterile and been harmed by these chemicals, when you’re eating food like strawberries that have been grown in the most organic fashion—let’s say in your own backyard—when we eat the strawberry, we’re consuming bacteria that live on the strawberry. That bacteria helps our body to digest and assimilate the nutrients from that strawberry. I think that it’s really good to eat a variety of raw and cooked foods, if you can tolerate it. Some people with digestive problems can’t, but if you can eat a variety of fresh raw foods because it helps us to invite those good bacteria that are specific to those foods that help us to assimilate the nutrients. My biggest concern is glyphosate, which is Roundup. It’s known as a chelator. I’ve had a few people on the show about it. Dr. Stephanie Seneff has talked about how it binds to heavy metals and it releases the heavy metals when pH changes in the body like blood to urine or blood to the cerebral spinal fluid, and that they find that it deposits heavy metals into the tissue in the body. We want to avoid Roundup or glyphosate as much as possible. I also had Jeffrey Smith on the show who’s a producer of documentaries around GMO. He brought up a really interesting study. It’s been a few years since I interviewed him so I don’t remember the exact title of it. In Canada, they studied women and found that Bt toxin—that they actually had gut bacteria. They stopped eating GMO but that their gut bacteria, the DNA of their gut bacteria, had been hijacked by the Bt corn. They believe that the DNA, the genetically modified DNA of the corn then attacks and hijacks our gut biome. The gut biome was producing Bt toxin. We’re playing with the DNA of the foods we’re eating. We have to wonder about the effects it will have on our cells but also the effects it will have on the microbiome, which, as you pointed out, is so important. I totally agree with you. We can never be 100% sure if the soy we’re eating is non-GMO. If we could buy organic, hopefully, there’s no glyphosate in it. Very interesting what you’ve pointed out that consuming healthy amounts of soy can help to prevent cancer but also people with cancer benefit from it as well. Dr. Joel Fuhrman talks about the importance of eating even just a cup of mushrooms a day and something like maybe half a cup or a cup of onions a day, raw or cooked, can increase the ability to prevent vasculature growing to new cancer. Like you said, if you eat food that you like I love mushrooms and onions, so I make sure I eat them every day. If we can pick foods that we like that we enjoy that also nutrify the body, then go for it. Eat lots of variety of those healthy fruits and vegetables. I definitely want to make sure listeners get your book, Eat to Beat Disease. Your website is drwilliamli.com. Of course, the links to everything that Dr. Li does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Do you do telemedicine? Do you work with people? What are the other ways that listeners can follow you, learn from you, and work with you?   [01:27:40] Dr. William Li: One of the best ways is actually to sign up on my website at drwilliamli.com. Actually, I’m going to be unrolling a new program where I’m actually able to give out the breaking news information, news you can use, tips on how you can actually live a better lifestyle. One of the things that you can get, definitely just by signing up, is a free shopping list. Because I’ve taken the 200 foods from my book, and I’ve broken them down into, generally, the order that you might encounter them when you actually go into a grocery store. These days, you don’t want to waste any time in the grocery store. You want to get in there and get out like a SWAT team. The more you can actually take a look at what the healthy stuff is—mark it off, check it out, make a list, get it in your head, make a beeline for the parts that you want to get, and then get out of dodge that’s something that I really feel like a healthy food shopping list can be useful for. That’s how I encourage people to do it. I’m also on social @drwilliamli. Please follow along, like, and spread the word because this is something so important in the COVID era. This virus has been a big wake-up call for the entire human species that our health is no longer about juicing, jogging, and yoga. It’s about how we take care of ourselves every single day, and we make decisions when we eat that can really help make the difference between whether we can resist disease and whether we might succumb to it.   [01:29:26] Ashley James: If everyone did a little bit of juicing, jogging, and yoga I think this world would be a better place. Thank you so much for coming on the show. My last question for you is I know you already eat a very healthy diet and you focus on a healthy lifestyle because you see the science behind it in preventing disease, what did you change in your diet and lifestyle in the last few months? What did you encourage your family, your close loved ones to do because of the COVID pandemic.   [01:30:00] Dr. William Li: I’ll tell you, one of the things that I really wanted to make sure that we’re doing is getting enough vitamin C and vitamin D. Those are micronutrients that are found in many different types of foods like citrus or mushrooms that if you’re deficient in, your immune system is more likely to fail to detect viruses. I wanted to make sure that, at least for me, I’m actually getting up to snuff at the baseline. Then some of the other foods that I started eating that really can enhance our community are things like I mentioned pomegranate juice. I started to have more tomatoes, which are a great source of vitamin C. I started really making sure I was eating tree nuts like pecans, which I really love, olive oil, blueberries, and blackberries are really great. Actually, one of the things that I did is I actually did a little public service announcement on YouTube called 10 Things You Should Eat Right Now To Beat COVID-19 and put it out there. Immediately, it started to go viral because people were just looking for information of what I would do to actually eat and what I’ve done, so I put that out there—10 things that you can eat to be COVID-19 on YouTube, subscribe. Those are how I changed my life. I’m happy to continue to let people know what new things I’m actually doing as well.   [01:31:31] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you, Dr. William Li. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show. You are welcome back anytime you want to come and teach and share. We’d love to have you back.   [01:31:40] Dr. William Li: Thank you, Ashley. It’s a real pleasure to be with you.   [01:31:43] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Li. Please share it with those you care about. Let’s get this information out to help as many people as possible to learn true health. Come join the Facebook group. Search Learn True Health on Facebook or go to learntruehealth.com/group and join the Facebook group. It’s a wonderfully supportive community. We’re all in this together to learn what we can do to tweak our diet, our lifestyle, supplements whatever we can do to just switch it over to build the body into a place that develops health instead of disease. We can heal the body. The body has an amazing ability to heal itself. Even if you’ve been told you’re going to have this for the rest of your life, I have met so many people, myself included, who have reversed diseases and illnesses that they were told by doctors they’d always have for the rest of their life. So don’t give up hope. Instead, dive in, listen to more episodes of the Learn True Health podcast, and come join the Facebook group. There is hope. As long as you’re living and breathing, as long as you have a pulse, your body can heal itself. You can do many things to support your body’s ability to heal itself. I’m so happy that you’re here to learn how you can optimize your health through every meal, through every breath. There are so many things you can do mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, and energetically. That’s exactly what this podcast is here to help you with. So please, dive in, keep listening. Make sure that you share this episode and share the podcast with those you love so we can help as many people as possible. Come join the Facebook group so that you can keep learning, keep asking questions, and keep growing. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.   Get Connected With Dr. William Li Website Facebook Instagram YouTube   Book by Dr. William Li Eat To Beat Disease

IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount! Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coaching Dr. Gundry's site: www.drgundry.com   The Plant Paradox https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-plant-paradox-dr-steven-gundry   Highlights: Importance of removing lectins from beans Leaky gut causes leaky brain All diseases come from the gut Why nightshades are bad for us Why we should consume olive oil Go-to foods to eat that support our gut   Hippocrates mentioned thousands of years ago that all diseases start from the gut. Now we’re finding out that his statement is true based on different researches on health and nutrition. In this episode, Dr. Steven Gundry talks about which foods harm the gut and which foods heal the gut. He also shares why we need to remove lectins from our diet and how we can destroy lectins. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I’m so excited you’re here. Today is our interview with Dr. Gundry. He wrote the book The Plant Paradox, and I have to say, it was quite controversial. I know you’re going to love today’s interview. Dr. Gundry talks about removing anti-nutrients from your diet. If you, as you listen, want to learn how to do that, come join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. I’ve been filming for several months. There are many videos in there, and I teach you how to remove these anti-nutrients from your diet—the oxalates, the lectin, the gluten, and how to eat a whole foods diet filled with nutrient-dense foods that heal the gut, prevent heart disease, reverse disease, and nutrify the body. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen, sign up, and start cooking food that heals the body. Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you love. Enjoy today’s interview.   [00:01:06] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 431. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have, this is going to be such an interesting interview, Dr. Steven Gundry. Your book is The Plant Paradox, and from everything I’ve seen, people either love it or hate it. There’s no in-between. I’ve not met someone who’s lukewarm about your book. People are either passionately for what you do or passionately against what you do. I think it’s going to be fun to have you on the show today and share what happened for you to discover and create The Plant Paradox, and how your system is helping people reverse disease and heal their body. Welcome to the show.   [00:02:03] Dr. Steven Gundry: Thanks for having me.   [00:02:05] Ashley James: Absolutely. I have interviewed several whole food plant-based doctors that reversed disease with plants. They are up in arms about what you do. They say it’s just ridiculous that someone would cut out legumes, beans, and plants that contain lectins. They think that these are very healthy foods. I’d love for you to start by sharing. Obviously, there’s so much controversy around that, especially with doctors who claim that the opposite of what your diet is healthy. How do you handle that kind of criticism?   [00:02:50] Dr. Steven Gundry: I just show them the data that I show in my book and it’s subsequently published. There’s actually no getting around the fact that the harm of lectins has been known about for actually well over 100 years. In fact, just to use an example, there are three papers in the literature in monkeys showing that the lectin in peanut oil is a major cause of the hardening of the arteries—of coronary artery disease in monkeys. When you remove that lectin from peanut oil and give it to monkeys they don’t get coronary artery disease. Recently, I published a paper in circulation showing that lectins are a major cause of an autoimmune attack on the inside of blood vessels. That when you remove lectins from human’s diets, that they’re markers for an autoimmune attack on their blood vessels minimizes. We can say I’m telling people falsehoods but in fact, this is all published data that I write about.   [00:04:20] Ashley James: How does one go about removing lectins from their diet?   [00:04:25] Dr. Steven Gundry: That’s actually pretty easy. Recently, I had, on my podcast, Dr. Joel Fuhrman who actually I am a big fan of. A few years ago, when The Plant Paradox, came out, I believe he was pretty vocal that how dare I take beans away from people. I don’t take beings away from people, I merely ask them to destroy the lectins with the pressure cooker. While I had him on the podcast and we were chatting, it turns out that he actually pressure-cooks his beans. He does not eat his beans unpressured-cooked. Sometimes, the noise gets in the way. I had beans three times last week. Believe me, they were pressure cooked. I have nothing against beans, but we have to know our enemy, and we have to know how the plant decided to protect itself. The good news is, for the most part, you can neutralize the enemy by some simple tricks.   [00:05:41] Ashley James: You brought up a really good point that plant protects itself. Explain what lectins are. How does the plant create it, and how does our body react to lectin?   [00:05:51] Dr. Steven Gundry: Lectins actually were discovered almost 150 years ago now. We use lectins to blood type. There was a very famous lectin diet, it was well-hidden, called the Blood Type Diet. Lectins are used by plants as a defense mechanism—one of the defense mechanisms—against being eaten and of having their babies—their seeds—from being eaten. Lectins are proteins. They’re what are called sticky proteins because they actually look for sugar molecules to stick to—specific sugar molecules. Those sugar molecules line the inside of our gut, they line the inside of our blood vessels, they line the inside of our joints, and they line the space between our nerves. The theory is if lectins can break through the wall of the gut and they’re very good at this, Dr. Fasano from Johns Hopkins a few years ago proved that gluten, which is a lectin, causes leaky gut by binding to the sugar molecules in the gut and breaking the tight junctions. There’s no question that this happens. Why do they do that? Because quite frankly if you can cause an animal to not feel well, to not thrive, then a smart animal says every time I eat these particular plants or these plant babies I don’t do very well. I think I’ll go eat something else. The animal wins, the plant wins, and everybody’s happy. Then humans arrived. As most of us know, we’re not very smart. When we eat something that bothers us, let me give you an example, heartburn is caused by lectins. Instead of avoiding lectin-containing foods, like for instance, a hot pepper, which is loaded with lectins, we instead take Prilosec or Nexium and we keep eating these things. That’s really dumb because, actually, there’s a beautiful paper in humans that shows that in normal human beings who were asked to take one of these proton pump inhibitors for one week—one week only—they had dramatic changes in their ability to remember things, process—one week. I can’t believe Larry the Cable Guy thinks that not being very smart is worth a corndog.   [00:09:03] Ashley James: How do lectins cause heartburn?   [00:09:05] Dr. Steven Gundry: Lectins actually break down the mucus lining, that mucus is a mucopolysaccharide—a sugar molecule, and exposes the covering of our esophagus. The mucus is used up by a lectin attack and then the acid irritates it. I used to have horrible heartburn. I used to eat Tum’s left, right, and every day. I haven’t had heartburn in 20 years now.   [00:09:36] Ashley James: Amazing. Tell us a little bit about your story. Your background is so extensive. Reading your biography, it’s amazing what you’ve accomplished through the years and what you have given to the medical space. You have helped so many children and so many cardiac patients around the world, but you yourself had health issues. You uncovered this particular way of eating to heal yourself. Tell us a bit about your personal journey with recovering your health.   [00:10:15] Dr. Steven Gundry: I was a very famous heart surgeon, children’s heart surgeon, and transplant surgeon. Very famous for inventing devices to protect the heart during heart surgery, but I was 70 pounds overweight despite running 30 miles a week, going to the gym one hour a day, and eating a healthy low-fat, primarily, vegetarian diet. I had high cholesterol, pre-diabetes, and arthritis. I used to operate with migraine headaches doing baby heart transplants, I don’t recommend it, but somebody had to do it. I thought this was normal because I was assured it was normal because my father was very much the same way. It wasn’t until I met a fellow I described in my books by the name of Big Ed from Miami Florida who in six months’ time following a diet, very much like what I described and taking a bunch of supplements from a health food store, he cleaned out 50% of the blockages in his coronary arteries in six months’ time. He had inoperable coronary artery disease. I was totally shocked that that could happen. I was taught, as most doctors are taught, that coronary heart disease is progressive. Yes, we could maybe slow it down, but eventually, it’s going to get you. To watch an individual—now many individuals—reverse coronary artery disease with food and supplements changed my life. I was ready to discover this. Believe it or not, as an undergraduate at Yale, I had a special major in human evolutionary biology—basically epigenomics. I had a big thesis that my parents had. I’m actually staring at it in my bookcase right now. I actually put myself on my thesis and I lost 50 pounds in my first year, another 20, and kept it off for over 20 years. I started treating patients that I operated on with my program to try and keep them from visiting me again. Lo and behold, not only did they not visit me again, but their diabetes went away, their arthritis went away, their high blood pressure went away, and their autoimmune diseases went away. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years.   [00:13:10] Ashley James: I love it. Lectins, are they proteins?   [00:13:15] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yes, they’re proteins.   [00:13:16] Ashley James: They’re proteins. Everyone’s heard of gluten at this point. I’ve been gluten-free since 2011. So many people have heard that gluten can cause leaky gut. There’s also this new thing that we’re hearing about called leaky brain. Have you heard of this?   [00:13:37] Dr. Steven Gundry: Have I heard? What do you mean? I’ve been studying and writing about it.   [00:13:40] Ashley James: Tell us more about leaky brain.   [00:13:43] Dr. Steven Gundry: It turns out, there is an incredible gut-brain connection that is being elucidated, actually, with every passing day. I wrote quite a bit about it in The Longevity Paradox but my next book, which is entitled The Energy Paradox, gets even more into that. What we found, we now have some pretty nice sophisticated tests that look at the breakdown of the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier is basically a barrier that keeps everything out of the brain. For instance, if you had a malignant brain tumor, we can’t give you chemotherapy by swallowing it or through your veins because the chemotherapy won’t get past the blood-brain barrier. We actually have to inject chemotherapy into your spinal fluid. That’s how impenetrable the blood-brain barrier is. In people with leaky gut, a great number of people actually have a breakdown of that blood-brain barrier. There is more and more and more evidence that conditions like Parkinson’s, like Alzheimer’s, and like plain old everyday dementia is in large part coming from leaky gut and causing leaky brain. You don’t have to look very far to realize we have an epidemic of dementia, and we have an epidemic of leaky gut. In fact, this certainly was known for a very long time. Hippocrates 2,500 years ago, the father of medicine, said all disease begins in the gut. He didn’t have a human microbiome project, but he knew this. The fascinating thing he was absolutely right. All disease does begin in the gut, and the good news is, all disease can be reversed by reversing leaky gut.   [00:16:03] Ashley James: How do we heal the barrier for our brain? How do we heal leaky brain? By focusing on the gut?   [00:16:11] Dr. Steven Gundry: Correct. Leaky brain comes from leaky gut, not the other way around.   [00:16:15] Ashley James: Got it. How do we heal the gut? Is it as simple as removing lectins from our diet?   [00:16:20] Dr. Steven Gundry: It’s not as simple as that. For instance, I just gave a paper at the American Heart Association Lifestyle and Epidemiology meeting in March where we looked at people who were gluten intolerant, who did react to gluten. These people were gluten-free and yet they still had leaky gut. We found that 70% of people who are gluten-sensitive also react to corn vigorously. Sadly, most gluten-free products have corn in them. We also found that in this report, taking away other major lectin-containing foods like brown rice, like peas for instance, like legumes, like the nightshade family—tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and potatoes—then and only then did these people stop their leaky gut. It was not only just being gluten-free, but it was also actually being lectin-free. In fact, as I wrote about The Plant Paradox, you can take people with celiac disease, which is the extreme form of gluten intolerance, and you can put them on a gluten-free diet for a year and a half and 70% of those people on a gluten-free diet will still have celiac disease by biopsy, which is the gold standard, even though they’re on a gluten-free diet. My premise is it’s because most of the gluten-free foods that they’re eating have lectins other than gluten. This is what I just showed in that paper I gave in March.   [00:18:11] Ashley James: So many people who are gluten-free don’t avoid oats and oats getting gliadin, which is such a similar protein. I always tell people to try to avoid oats and then try to avoid them for a month. Avoid them for a month and then add them back and see what happens. Very quickly people notice a difference once they’ve been abstinent from it.   [00:18:31] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah, there’s no such thing as gluten-free oats because you’re right, they could cause reactivity of those proteins. As my daughter who’s a horsewoman always reminds me, the only purpose of oats is to fatten a horse for winter.   [00:18:50] Ashley James: Wow. That’s interesting. It reminds me of looking into the idea of eating chicken. People who want to bulk up at the gym are told to eat chicken. People who want to lose weight are told to eat chicken. That’s paradoxical in and of itself. It’s like wait a second, one person wants to bulk up and they’re told eat a bunch of chicken like the bodybuilders, and then people who are on Weight Watchers and stuff are told to just eat chicken, it’ll help you lose weight. But it doesn’t. That’s a paradox. There are foods that people think are really healthy, but they have to look deeper like you do. What about resistant starch? So many of these foods you’ve mentioned, which contain lectins, are also full of resistant starch, which helps to feed the good gut bacteria. This is the paradox. It’s something that could help us but also is harming us at the same time?   [00:19:45] Dr. Steven Gundry: The good news with most of these resistant starches is that you can destroy lectins with the pressure cooker. The only lectin that has not been capable of being destroyed is gluten. You can pressure cook gluten for an hour, two hours and it will not break. All the other lectins, in general, will break. Oats is also a problem. We’ve had a number of people try it and it won’t work, but there are two grains that don’t have lectins because they don’t have hulls and that’s sorghum and millet. I have a lot of sorghum of millet recipes. The other great news is that the best resistant starches are tubers like sweet potatoes, taro root, yucca, or green bananas. They’re fantastic sources of resistant starches, and they don’t have any lectins in them.   [00:20:47] Ashley James: I noticed that you didn’t mention any nightshades. What are nightshades, and why are they so bad for us?   [00:20:55] Dr. Steven Gundry: Two reasons, the nightshade family that we think of have pretty impressive lectins in their peel and their seeds, the flesh doesn’t. Traditional cultures have always peeled and deseeded tomatoes or peppers before they eat them. The nightshade family came from America and, believe it or not, even goji berries are nightshades. They actually came from America and were taken to China and trade. They were called wolfberries in America. Even goji berries are pretty nasty little lectin sources. If you go over to Italy and talk to chefs, which I do all the time, they will tell you that you cannot make tomato sauce without peeling and deseeding your tomatoes. If you go talk to the Southwest American Indians, you know that you have to peel and deseed peppers before you eat them or grind them in chili powder. In fact, what’s really hilarious, is those chili pepper flakes and seeds that we put on our pizzas we’re actually the byproduct of making peppers safe to eat.   [00:22:14] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [00:22:15] Dr. Steven Gundry: Oh, yeah. That’s why they exist because they were thrown away.   [00:22:19] Ashley James: That’s so funny. What about peeling a potato, just a regular Yukon potato, would that make it safe?   [00:22:27] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah but there has recently been discovered a new class of lectins, which are called aquaporins. There is an aquaporin in potatoes, there is an aquaporin in green bell peppers, there’s an aquaporin believe it or not in spinach. I have, sad to say, a number of, particularly, women who have autoimmune diseases and leaky gut who we’ve been befuddled as to why they get better but not all the way. These women, for the most part, react to the aquaporin lectin in spinach. When we take their spinach way, and they’re usually big spinach eaters, they finally get better. Why haven’t I had a podcast on that? Because I don’t want to have mass panic. Most people don’t react to the aquaporin in spinach, but those that do it’s pretty impressive.   [00:23:34] Ashley James: It’s like if you’ve tried everything and it’s not working, try this one thing, but not everyone. Does aquaporin become destroyed by pressure cooking it?   [00:23:47] Dr. Steven Gundry: Probably, nobody has actually done the experiment but I do have people that eat potatoes and I do ask them to pressure-cook it. So far so good.   [00:24:00] Ashley James: Because they’re discovering new lectins, what can we do to stay on top of this information? Is your book updated? Does your book have the aquaporin information in it, or should they follow your podcast? What’s the best way to make sure we stay on top of this information?   [00:24:21] Dr. Steven Gundry: My podcast covers these subjects. For instance, between my Plant Paradox book and The Plant Paradox Cookbook, it was discovered that pecans have a lectin that in some people it actually causes an autoimmune attack on the pancreas. We put that into The Plant Paradox Cookbook that probably pecans are not your best not to eat, particularly if you have an autoimmune disease or if there’s any question of diabetes.   [00:25:03] Ashley James: Are there any nuts or seeds that are safe?   [00:25:07] Dr. Steven Gundry: Oh, yeah. For instance, walnuts are quite safe, pistachios are safe, macadamia nuts are safe, for the most part, hazelnuts are safe, and Brazil nuts are safe. You notice I’m not mentioning almonds. There is a lectin in the peel of almonds that a number of my patients with rheumatoid arthritis react to. That’s why we recommend either blanched almond flour and/or Marcona almonds—the peeled almonds. Again, it’s very interesting that there are a number of cultures, particularly Spain and Portugal, where the mothers teach the daughters how to soak and peel almonds before they’re eaten. Again, you start looking at cultures and say why do they do this? Because it’s kind of a lot of work. Why not just eat the skin?   [00:26:13] Ashley James: When I was six years old my mom took me to a Naturopath. He put us on a specific diet, and it turned out that Naturopath was Dr. D’Adamo. I grew up on the O blood type diet. It changed my life. I was very sick. I was just sick all the time, and my mom was sick too. He had a practice in Toronto. Overnight, my life changed. It was phenomenal. One day I was sick, the next day I was healthy. That’s how quick it was shifting my diet to the O blood type diet. Then, of course, when I was 13 I got incredibly rebellious and started eating everything my mom didn’t want me to eat. I got to develop sickness again. Then through my 20s, I was very sick, and in my late 20s and through my 30s I spent trying to get my health back and reversing all the diseases I gave myself by eating the wrong foods. I’ve lived this several times. Eat the wrong foods, get sick. Eat the right foods, get healthy. The waters can be muddy for many of us especially those with autoimmune because, like you said, some people react to this but not to this, some people react to this, not to this. Where do we start? Should one do an elimination diet? What’s a good place to start? Because not everyone reacts to all the lectins like you mentioned.   [00:27:41] Dr. Steven Gundry: I’ve published a paper of 102 people with biomarker-proven autoimmune diseases whether they’re lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis, or MS who were put on my program for six months. At the end of six months, 95 out of 102 or 94% were biomarker negative and off of all immunosuppressive drugs. That’s not a bad result. My first principle, The Plant Paradox, is it’s not what I tell you to eat that matters, it’s what I tell you not to eat. It really is. That’s an elimination diet. Interestingly enough, the carnivore folks, have taken my recommendations to the extreme. Since all plants are out to get us one way or another, that total elimination of plants is a rather impressive elimination diet. I happen to think that they’re going to be sadly mistaken because there are some really great things, particularly the soluble fibers in plants that our gut microbiome is dependent on. As people found in The Longevity Paradox, and they’re going to learn more in The Energy Paradox, we are absolutely positively dependent on messages and transmitters that our gut microbiome makes that keeps our mitochondria working properly, that keeps our brain working properly. Taking away the known causes of leaky gut, and that includes more than just changing the type of plants you eat. It’s primarily trying to eliminate, for the most part, antibiotic overuse, which is rampant, not only in us but in the animals that we eat. Eliminating the non-steroidal anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen for instance like Naprosyn. One ibuprofen is literally like swallowing a hand grenade. Eliminating the antacid drugs like the proton pump inhibitors like we mentioned earlier. They totally changed the bacterial flora. Eliminating artificial sweeteners like Splenda, just as an example, completely changes your gut bacteria. Something that many of us are passionate about trying to get glyphosate roundup out of our lives. It’s probably not doable, but glyphosate is a major disruptor by itself of our gut ball—really good at causing leaky gut.   [00:30:59] Ashley James: You said that ibuprofen is like swallowing a grenade. Can you elaborate on that?   [00:31:06] Dr. Steven Gundry: I could give you an hour lecture. Long ago, the original nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory was aspirin. Aspirin was used extensively in our arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. Of course, people know that it cause stomach bleeding. A class of drugs in the same family were developed that wouldn’t cause stomach bleeding, but the drug companies knew that the bleeding wouldn’t actually be caused in the small intestine. You couldn’t see down into the small intestine with gastroscope so you would never know it was there. Believe it or not, when these drugs came out, they were prescription only. Things like Motrin was a prescription, things like Naprosyn was a prescription. There was an FDA black box warning that you could only use these for two weeks at a time because they were so dangerous. Now, of course, they are the largest over-the-counter drug there is. There is children’s Advil for instance. What these do, and this is documented and google it sometimes, great fun. These are drug company research that shows that these destroy the lining of the small intestine causing leaky gut. I can’t tell you the number of people that I see, young women and men who were athletes, who suffered an injury and were put on high-dose non-steroidal anti-inflammatories by very well-meaning orthopedic surgeons, and they, in turn, developed autoimmune diseases. I write about some of them in my books. When we stopped these medications and sealed their gut, lo and behold, their autoimmune disease went away.   [00:33:07] Ashley James: How quickly can one recover their gut? How quickly does it take to seal the gut once they have eliminated the foods that have been causing holes in it?   [00:33:22] Dr. Steven Gundry: Great question. We’ve seen it turn around as early as three months. One of my more troublesome patients with multiple autoimmune diseases all her life took about nine months, but there are other things that are part and partial with healing the gut. The vast majority of people have very low vitamin D levels. As I write about in The Longevity Paradox, vitamin D is essential to tell stem cells that help repopulate the gut to grow and divide. Without vitamin D, they just kind of sit there and twiddle their thumbs. The vast majority of people I see with autoimmune disease and/or leaky gut, they have very low vitamin Ds when I see them. I’ll give you an example of a woman I just saw today from Southern California. She’s in her 40s. She developed ulcerative colitis five years ago, out of the blue. We think we know why but she was put on an immunosuppressant and then came to see us a year ago. She was positive for antinuclear antibody, which is an autoimmune disease marker that most people associate with lupus—very positive form. She had a very low vitamin D. We’ve now been seeing her for a year. She stopped her immunosuppressant a year ago. She’s had no episodes of ulcerative colitis since. She is negative for antinuclear antibody and has been actually since we started the program. She’s a pretty happy camper.   [00:35:28] Ashley James: I love it. The idea, for those suffering from autoimmune, that they can completely go into remission—I mean, that’s a dream come true. There are so many people suffering. They’re told by the average doctor that they’re going to be on medication for the rest of their life and this is their new norm. It’s so frustrating that so many doctors are still in this old way of thinking that once you’re in a diseased state you’re going to always be in the diseased state. They don’t look to nurturing the body through food and shifting diet and lifestyle to heal the body. You must be really waking a lot of doctors up showing them that there’s a way to heal. You’ve obviously published so many articles on helping people to reverse autoimmune. Are you starting to see that doctors are listening and prescribing your diet?   [00:36:29] Dr. Steven Gundry: Particularly in functional medicine, I don’t do functional medicine, I do what I call a restorative medicine. I’m not quite sure what functional medicine means. I have good friends like Mark Hyman and Jeffrey Bland in functional medicine, and that’s fine. But I think there are more and more people interested in the fact that Hippocrates was right. That all disease comes from the gut, and that we really ought to be looking at the gut as to where we need to do our work. Somebody tell Kelly Clarkson that you can’t reverse Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Kelly found my book. She had Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, she was on thyroid medication, now she doesn’t have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and she’s off of medication. Her doctors told her hey, you’re going to be on thyroid for the rest of your life.   [00:37:35] Ashley James: I love it. I love hearing stories of success of people being able to reverse diseases and get off of medications.   [00:37:44] Dr. Steven Gundry: I’ll tell you another funny Hashimoto’s story. Usually, we’re so busy that the first visit in our office they see my PA and then the next visit they see me. That’s usually three months or six months after the first visit, depending on the severity. I’m seeing a woman in her late 50s for the first time after she had seen my PA. I say, “Why’d you come here? She said, “Well, I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis.” I said, “Oh is that a fact?” She said, “Yes, I’ve had it all my life.” I had seen her new results and when we first saw her she in fact did have both markers for anti-thyroid antibodies and Hashimoto’s. This time they were negative and I said, “Well, that’s interesting you should say that because you don’t have Hashimoto’s.” She said, “What kind of quack are you? Of course, I have Hashimoto’s that’s why I’m here.” I said, “Well, yeah. You used to Hashimoto’s but you don’t now.” I flipped her lab results open and she said, “Oh my God. It is true. You can get rid of this.” I said, “Yeah, look at that.”   [00:38:59] Ashley James: I love it. Once her antibodies go down do the hormones restore themselves? I know of some people who have completely eliminated—the antibodies are virtually non-existent in their labs but their thyroid is still not functioning optimally. Are the lectins causing harm still to their thyroid levels?   [00:39:24] Dr. Steven Gundry: A lot of times, people who have had it for a long time, they’re immune system has destroyed—their thyroid gland. For instance, type 1 diabetes, the immune system destroys the beta cells in the pancreas. But having said that, we always, once we get these antibodies turned off, start weaning off thyroid medication. We actually just started this weekend with a woman from San Francisco, a fairly young woman, who we now have negative for anti-thyroid antibodies and we’re starting to wean her thyroid know, and we’ll see. The good news about thyroid medication is that you can take both T4 and T3 and do a good job of replacing what the thyroid does, but that doesn’t mean we should actively allow Hashimoto’s thyroiditis to continue. Because one of the things that got me interested in this in the first place is this autoimmune attack takes many forms, and you could have multiple autoimmune diseases at the same time. Recently, there’s increasing evidence that Parkinson’s disease is actually an autoimmune disease, which to me makes a great deal of sense since I and others are convinced that Parkinson’s disease comes from the gut, not from the brain.   [00:41:05] Ashley James: Fascinating. I have heard there’s a relationship between MS and Parkinson’s and MS is autoimmune, so that doesn’t surprise me. Have you seen someone reverse Parkinson’s through healing their gut?   [00:41:19] Dr. Steven Gundry: We’ve seen it stop. My father had Parkinson’s for 20 years without changing his medication at all. If you know anything about Parkinson’s that’s impossible, but we got to him early. My mother was a very good person about denying him the foods that he loved. He made it to 91 and then actually died suddenly of a bladder infection. Getting to 91, 20 years with Parkinson’s pretty doggone good run.   [00:42:01] Ashley James: Very cool. We’ve talked about gluten and lectins, are phytates or phytic acid, I know they’re anti-nutrients, are they also lectins?   [00:42:11] Dr. Steven Gundry: No. Again, the plant has lots of tools to prevent itself from being eaten, or to warn the predator that you really don’t want to eat me, or try to make the predator not thrive. Phytates are one of these methods. I actually think and agree with some of my vegan colleagues that there’s a lot to like about phytates, but this is all part of the anti-nutrient system. One of the things that we have to realize, for instance, since lectins are proteins, rats and rodents are primarily grain predators. Rats and rodents have 10 times the amount of proteases that are enzymes that break down proteins than we have. They’re very well equipped to go after these lectin proteins in the food that they eat.  When people point out we look at these great rat and mice experiments where whole grains are really good for them. That’s great. They have a great protease system that breaks down these proteins, we don’t.   [00:43:50] Ashley James: Are you suggesting that we shouldn’t get our protein primarily from plants?   [00:43:58] Dr. Steven Gundry: Oh, no. Are you kidding? I am a plant predator. I tell my patients that we should actually be gorillas who live in Italy. By that I mean we should be eating huge amounts of leaves and pouring olive oil on them.   [00:44:21] Ashley James: Very interesting. Why consume olive oil?   [00:44:26] Dr. Steven Gundry: Great question. As I wrote in The Longevity Paradox, there are three groups of people who live in blue zones, and blue zones are those areas of the world that Dan Buettner, the journalist, described as having incredible longevity. I’m actually the only nutritionist who has ever spent most of his career living in a blue zone and that was Loma Linda, California where I was a professor. When people talk to me about blue zones and say I don’t know anything about blue zones, I said, “Well, I guess I didn’t live in one for most of my life.” Anyhow, three blue zones use a liter of olive oil per week. That’s about 10 to 12 tablespoons a day.  There are some fascinating head-to-head studies done in Spain called the PREDIMED study making 65-year-old people use a liter of olive oil per week versus a low-fat Mediterranean diet. Lo and behold, at the end of five years, people who used the olive oil had actually gained memory compared to when they aged 65, while the low-fat group lost memory, the people in the olive oil group had a reversal of our disease, whereas the low-fat diet group increased their heart disease, and we could go on and on.   [00:46:02] Ashley James: Could we gain the same benefit from eating olives instead of drinking or consuming olive oil?   [00:46:10] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah, and I actually ask people to do both. I actually have a product that I sell that is the combination of incredibly high polyphenol-rich olive oil, olive leaves, and olives that are pressed into little pearls that look like caviar. They’re called polyphenol olive oil pearls. It turns out, interesting fun fact, there are far more polyphenols in the leaves of fruiting plants than there are in the fruit. For instance, there are far more apple polyphenols in apple leaves than in apples, there are far more polyphenols in black raspberry leaves than there are in black raspberries, and so on.   [00:47:03] Ashley James: It’s nettle season right now so we can go out in nature and harvest nettles, which the leaves are rich in polyphenols. I learned recently that if you grow sweet potatoes or yams, you can harvest some of the leaves and eat them much like spinach. That is such a delicious thing to grow in your own backyard. I know a lot of people are looking into growing their own food given that they’re all at home and want a new hobby and that they’d like to have some sustainability and have some healthy food. I know you tell us what not to eat, what are some of your go-to foods to eat that are very supportive of our gut and just are very healthy overall?   [00:47:51] Dr. Steven Gundry: Great question. Avocados are a great choice to start with. The family of chicories: radicchio, chicory, Belgian endive, and curly endive are some of the best foods you can possibly eat to help your gut buds. Jerusalem artichokes and artichoke hearts are just loaded with a type of sugar molecule that we can’t digest called inulin but our gut buddies think it’s the best food that they could possibly eat. That along with the cruciferous vegetables: broccoli, cauliflower, arugula, bok choy, and Swiss chard. All of these actually have some pretty fascinating compounds that actually tell the immune system in your gut to calm down and relax a little bit. They’re called the AHR receptors if anybody wants to look them up, but pour olive oil on them, please.   [00:49:10] Ashley James: Interesting. I think the olive oil thing—it’s so controversial depending on who you talk to. There’s a handful of doctors that say that we shouldn’t consume any oil. That any oil, no matter what kind of oil, even if it’s cold-pressed virgin olive oil, raw cold-pressed coconut oil or all the kind you could buy in the supermarket, that they’re all bad for you and that they cause damage to the endothelial lining of the cardiovascular system. Once the oil is exposed to oxygen, it creates free radicals, so you’re actually absorbing free radicals into the body. What do you say to that? Are the benefits of olive oil outweigh those negatives?   [00:50:01] Dr. Steven Gundry: All I say is why don’t you look at the actual human controlled trials where that has been tested, and the results are exactly the opposite. One of the most famous trials was the Lyon Heart trial where they looked at a diet that was supplemented with alpha-linolenic acid oil from purslane and compared that to the low-fat American Heart diet. It was a 5-year study, it was randomized. They stopped the study at three years because the group given the Mediterranean diet with the alpha-linolenic acid oil, and large amounts of it, did so much better in new episodes of MIs and unstable angina that it was not fit to continue the trial.  Anybody can look it up—the lean Lyon Heart diet—and anybody can look up the PREDIMED trial and see a head-to-head of high-oil versus no-oil or low-oil and the results always come out that it wins. The olive oil wins, the alpha-linolenic acid wins. People say this becomes rancid. Yeah, olive oil could become rancid. That’s why you want to buy it from a high-volume source, and you want to use it quickly. Interestingly, olive oil is the least capable of oxidizing of any oil. It even beats coconut oil as not being oxidized with cooking. We’ve had two of the world’s oil experts on my podcast and they both confirm that olive oil is the safest cooking oil. People say no, no. It smokes and that means it’s oxidizing. That’s not true at all. It has a low smoke point but smoke has nothing to do with oxidation. People have been cooking with olive oil for over 5,000 years and the results speak for themselves.   [00:52:16] Ashley James: I don’t think when you burn olive oil it tastes that good anyway. If I were to eat olive oil, I’d eat it raw anyway. The idea of cooking with oil just concerns me, especially it doesn’t particularly taste good when you burn it. Very, very interesting. Where would one buy oil that is very high quality? Where’s the place to buy oil in the highest quality form?   [00:52:45] Dr. Steven Gundry: They can come to my website Gundry MD. We have an olive oil list that has 30 times more polyphenols than any oil that’s ever been tested. Having said that, you’re not all going to come to gundrymd.com. Believe it or not, Costco has an excellent olive oil. It comes in at a tall square bottle. It says Toscana on the label, and I use it as my everyday oil. That’s a good source. There’s another very good company out of California called Bariani. Again, I have no relationship with these companies. They just have a very high-quality oil. There’s a company out of Napa and Sonoma Valley called O, just a big O olive oil company. All small producers, all organic. Those are good choices.   [00:53:38] Ashley James: Very cool. You had touched on mitochondria. Obviously, you’re coming out with your book The Energy Paradox. Can you give us a little bit of preview into this book? How does your method help our mitochondrial health?   [00:53:55] Dr. Steven Gundry: Well, it turns out, we’ve done just the best job of destroying our mitochondrial function. You couldn’t design a better lifestyle, a better diet than the standard American diet for destroying mitochondria. In the book, I talk about how—and I talked about this actually in The Plant Paradox as well. Mitochondria are the energy-producing organelles in our cells. They’re actually ancient engulfed bacteria. They carry their own DNA, but they are bacteria that live inside our cells.  If you think of them as workers on an assembly line, they have periods of time where they’re going to do one shift, but currently, in the United States, we’re asking them to do three shifts with no time off. They actually produce a labor slowdown because they don’t want to work that hard. That labor slowdown is the cause of pre-diabetes, insulin resistance, and cancer. We got to have them have some time off. That’s why fasting, intermittent fasting time, restricted feeding actually gives our workers some much-needed rest and recreation. The more we do that the more work they’re able to do for us and do it better. That’s a little teaser.   [00:55:52] Ashley James: I am such a big fan of fasting, and I love that you brought that up. Since mitochondria are bacteria, when we take antibiotics, do antibiotics harm our mitochondria?   [00:56:11] Dr. Steven Gundry: Indirectly because it turns out, as I write about in The Longevity Paradox, that the bacteria in our gut actually talk to their sisters in the cells. They actually tell the mitochondria how things are going in the outside world. The more diverse those bacteria are and the happier those bacteria are, then the better the mitochondria function. We used to conjecture that there were text messages that we hadn’t been able to measure, but they had to be there. It turns out, we’ve discovered a large number of those text messages—they are real things that we can measure. The book is about we ought to have a diverse group of bacteria in our gut, we ought to give them what they want to eat, and they need to tell their mind everything’s great.   [00:57:21] Ashley James: Since researching and writing The Energy Paradox, what changes have you made to your lifestyle or diet?   [00:57:31] Dr. Steven Gundry: Actually not a whole lot because The Energy Paradox is where The Longevity Paradox would naturally take me. If you actually look at the people who enter my office, fascinatingly, fatigue is one of the biggest complaints. At least 50% of the people I see are fatigued for apparent no reason. The Energy Paradox grew out of that. Believe it or not, there are really good reasons why most normal people are fatigued.   [00:58:25] Ashley James: Since the last few months have been really crazy with the COVID-19, have you done anything to change your lifestyle or diet to give extra support to your immune function?   [00:58:41] Dr. Steven Gundry: As most people know, I’m a huge fan of vitamin D. I’ve never seen vitamin D toxicity, neither is my friend Dr. Mark Hyman. There are now four human papers showing that people with low vitamin D are much more susceptible to the COVID-19 virus and are likely to do poorly with it—that is die. Whereas if you have an adequate or high vitamin D level, you’re much likely not to contract it and/or much likely not to die. That’s number one. Number two, sugar dramatically suppresses our white cells’ ability to engulf bacteria and viruses. I’m releasing a podcast about that. The less sugar or things that we turn into sugar the better. What’s really fascinating is a paper from 1973 showed that white blood cell function dramatically increased daily during five-day water fast and that the longer you fast the better your white blood cells work and aggressively ate bacteria and viruses. Additionally, that same study showed that even orange juice, even fructose would dramatically suppress your white cells ability to engulf bacteria for up to six hours after you had that beverage—even orange juice. The idea that drinking orange juice right now is going to help you fight these viruses is actually exactly wrong.   [01:00:35] Ashley James: You said that foods that convert to sugar, which would be plants, would be carbohydrates. Are you saying that we should look at more of a low glycemic diet right now?   [01:00:48] Dr. Steven Gundry: Right. Here’s the problem with a lot of my well-meaning patients. You can take a resistant starch in its natural forms like say yucca, taro root, turnip, or even almonds for instance. You can grind it up into a fine powder and make a flour out of it. Unfortunately, and I’ve seen this much too much, those will rapidly turn into sugar even though what you originally started with isn’t sugar. For instance, I had Dr. David Kessler who was the head of the FDA when the food labeling law came into effect back in the Reagan era. The food labeling law was incorrectly made because of food lobbyists and not tell the truth about how much sugar.  One of the things I have people do is on the back of the label read total carbohydrates, subtract the fiber, and that will give you the amount of grams of sugar per serving in that product and it will shock you. It will have nothing to do with what they put has the sugar content on the label. For fun, since there are four grams of sugar per teaspoon of sugar, divide the number by four and you will see the teaspoons of sugar per serving. You will shudder when you see it.   [01:02:36] Ashley James: Right. You can take a healthy food, if you dehydrate it and turn it into flour, it reacts totally different with the body. You could eat chickpeas—pressure-cooked chickpeas—or you could eat something like a chickpea pasta. Chickpea pasta is going to convert much quicker to sugar, give you a larger sugar spike in the blood. Even for those who are not diabetic, they still will have that. Whereas if you ate pressure-cooked chickpeas, it’s a slow steady release of sugar.   [01:03:08] Dr. Steven Gundry: Covered in olive oil.   [01:03:10] Ashley James: Covered in olive oil.   [01:03:13] Dr. Steven Gundry: And throw some mushrooms in.   [01:03:15] Ashley James: Oh, man. Mushrooms are so great for the immune system. Get your vitamin D. Let’s just clarify that. What form of vitamin D is best, and how many international units should someone be taking a day?   [01:03:30] Dr. Steven Gundry: Vitamin D3. The bare minimum should be 5,000 IUs a day. For me, my 5.000 gets me vitamin D level above 120 nanograms per ml, but during this season, I’ve doubled my vitamin D to 10,000. If I think I’m coming down with something, and I’ve said this before, I actually take 150,000 international units of vitamin D3 three days in a row. Now I’m not telling people to do that. I’m telling people that’s what I do. For instance, when this all started and I decided to keep seeing patients, even though I wasn’t feeling anything, I took on a Sunday, 100,000 international units, on a Monday 5,000, on a Tuesday 25,000, and then I continued on 10,000. I just load up with it.  I just saw one of my patients in Santa Barbara last weekend. Her vitamin D level is 244. I assure you, she’s not vitamin D toxic, and she doesn’t have an elevated calcium level. I think we’ve underestimated what a normal vitamin D level is. The Cleveland Clinic Lab now says that a normal vitamin D level can be up to 150.   [01:05:08] Ashley James: Amazing, amazing. I know people whose vitamin D level is 10.   [01:05:15] Dr. Steven Gundry: I know, it’s really scary.   [01:05:17] Ashley James: I have known MDs to say they don’t want to see it above 30. They’re scared if you’re above 30. They want you to stop taking your supplements. Whereas NDs want you at least to be 60, but many NDs I’ve met don’t want you above 90. They’re afraid that if you get above 90 that that could cause toxicity. You’re saying that you’ve never seen toxic levels. Because of course, the worst-case scenario is vitamin D toxicity could cause kidney failure. At that point, it’s almost too late. We definitely don’t want to harm ourselves with supplements, but you’ve never seen that happen in prescribing large amounts of vitamin D.   [01:06:01] Dr. Steven Gundry: I measure vitamin Ds on people every three months. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years. I’ve never seen vitamin D toxicity. I have some patients who taught me in their late 70s they run their vitamin Ds in the high 200s and have all of their lives. When I first met these people I couldn’t believe they weren’t dead, they didn’t have kidney failure, or they didn’t have calcifications and kidney stones. They didn’t. When I was researching The Longevity Paradox, it turns out that people with the highest vitamin D levels have the longest telomeres. If you like the telomere theory of aging, and it’s a good one, why wouldn’t you want long telomeres?   [01:06:54] Ashley James: That’s exciting. What form of vitamin D is best? Obviously, you said D3, but I’ve seen supplements where it’s like a dry capsule, and then I’ve seen the liquid form as drops.   [01:07:06] Dr. Steven Gundry: Great question. Turns out that Dr. Michael Holick from Boston University, probably the most famous researcher in vitamin D, showed that vitamin D is absorbed whether or not there is any fat around. So a dry vitamin D is perfectly fine. Most vitamin Ds in capsules or gel caps. Interestingly, I see a number of people who use vitamin D drops. As a general rule, those people have much lower vitamin Ds than people who swallow the little gel caps. Most of my liquid folks I change over and I’m delighted to see that their vitamin D goes up.   [01:07:53] Ashley James: I was using a liquid and my vitamin D went down and down and down and I kept using more and more and more. I got so frustrated I switched to a capsule even though I heard from a Naturopath how could that work? There’s no fat in it. I was like well I’m going to try this now. My vitamin D went up. I was told it’s not going to work but my labs say it worked.   [01:08:18] Dr. Steven Gundry: Dr. Holick showed that it has nothing to do with fat even though it’s a fat-soluble vitamin.   [01:08:25] Ashley James: Should we take it on an empty stomach, with food, or does it not matter?   [01:08:28] Dr. Steven Gundry: It doesn’t matter.   [01:08:30] Ashley James: Love it. What did you eat in the last 24 hours?   [01:08:35] Dr. Steven Gundry: Let’s see. When did I eat? Last 24 hours I had nothing for breakfast, I had nothing for lunch, and I had some sautéed calamari and a Chinese cabbage salad with olive oil and rice vinegar on it. That’s what we had.   [01:09:08] Ashley James: Very interesting. Now your diet has helped people to reverse autoimmune conditions. You’ve also helped people to reverse cardiovascular issues and weight loss. Weight loss is the biggest industry out there. You look at all the diets and people are just yo-yoing. Every diet seems to work for a short amount of time. They blame themselves. The diet stops working, they blame themselves, they fall off the bandwagon, and they go back to eating the state American diet, but people are left feeling broken, right? They failed. What we’re looking at is it’s not their fault, it’s the diets fault because there are so many wrong diets out there. You’ve had great success in helping people with weight loss. Why does removing lectins help with weight loss?   [01:10:09] Dr. Steven Gundry: As I write about in The Plant Paradox, there are actually some very interesting data looking at one of the lectins called wheat germ agglutinin (WGA), which is present in whole grains, whole wheat. It binds to the insulin receptor on muscle cells and also on fat cells. In muscle cells, it actually blocks insulin from letting sugars and protein into the muscle cell, but in fat cells, it actually continues to pump sugar into fat cells. I go into more of this in The Energy Paradox. We’re set up with our diet to literally starve our muscle cells and feed our fat cells with lectins are a big chunk of that. Also, it turns out, that it starves the brain and so your brain is constantly hungry despite how much you eat or not eat.   [01:11:19] Ashley James: Wow. So when someone removes that, they’re all of a sudden not feeling so starved? They’re not feeling hungry all the time?   [01:11:28] Dr. Steven Gundry: Yeah.   [01:11:29] Ashley James: Very cool.   [01:11:31] Dr. Steven Gundry: The other thing that we have to make sure we understand is that we took over the world because of our ability to go prolonged periods of time without eating. Where the fat ate for a good reason. It is absolutely normal to go periods of time without eating. In fact, do you really think our ancestors crawled out of their cave and said what’s for breakfast? There wasn’t any. There was no storage system. We had to go find breakfast. If breakfast occurred at lunch, or breakfast occurred at dinner that’s when we found food. I actually tell my patients, when we get into this, to embrace the hunger. There is nothing horribly wrong with going a period of time without eating. In fact, just the opposite. It’s really one of the smartest things that we can do for long-term health.   [01:12:32] Ashley James: Actually, I haven’t eaten today, and I’m not going to eat today. I love fasting. Hunger is probably the hardest part about fasting, but hunger goes away.   [01:12:44] Dr. Steven Gundry: It goes away quickly, very quickly.   [01:12:45] Ashley James: It’s kind of like going to the gym. Just get your shoes on and go to the gym. The hardest part is actually getting your shoes on. Once you’re there, it’s easy. Starting a fast is the hardest part, and then following through is the easiest part. I love all the science that’s coming out about fasting. What resources could you point us to for those who haven’t really dived into fasting yet?   [01:13:14] Dr. Steven Gundry: There’s a lot of good ways to learn about it. I certainly spend a lot of time talking about it in The Longevity Paradox, one of my New York Times best-selling books. My friend Jason Fung has some good books about it. I think Dr. McCullough and I would agree that for most people who have been following the standard American diet that a prolonged water fast of 3 to 5 days is probably the dumbest thing to do because heavy metals and organic pesticides are stored in fat. They’re released into our circulation and we do not have a good detoxification system. I’ve got a lot of podcasts out on that, so please be cautious.   [01:14:05] Ashley James: Right. Always proceed with caution when fasting, especially if someone’s on medication. I agree. I like some of Jason Fung’s work—easy to digest. I particularly like—he has a video on YouTube called the 2 compartment syndrome. I think that’s a great place to start. Intermittent fasting is something where it’s gentle enough that people can ease into it. I actually did a whole series with a man who has invested his own personal money into labs doing fasting to show the heavy metals and pesticides being released in the body and how to best remove them while fasting. He found that, dramatically, if you were to use a sauna while fasting and also consume activated charcoal while fasting throughout the day, they saw a dramatic decrease in heavy metals and pesticides being released from the fatty tissue into the bloodstream. There are ways to combat it but we have to be aware of it. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been such a pleasure having you on. I definitely would love to have you back to talk more about your next book when it comes out. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show today.   [01:15:28] Dr. Steven Gundry: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.   [01:15:31] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure, and I can’t wait to read your new book when it comes out.   [01:15:37] Dr. Steven Gundry: All right. It’ll be out right after the first of the year, 2021.   [01:15:43] Ashley James: All right. Sounds great. Terrific. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Take care. Bye   [01:15:46] Dr. Steven Gundry: Take care.   [01:15:48] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Steven Gundry. Did you know that the Learn True Health podcast has a Facebook group? Come join us. It’s a very supportive community. Just search Learn True Health in Facebook. Come join the Facebook group, or you can go to learntruehealth.com/group. That’ll redirect you straight to our group. It’s a free group, a very supportive community to support you in your holistic health success, support you in your true health journey. Come join the Facebook group, and please, go to the website learntruehealth.com. You can find all my episodes there—all 431 of them now and counting. You can find free wonderful resources. You can find my course. I have a month-long program where I teach you all the techniques—the NLP techniques—for eliminating anxiety, decreasing stress, and increasing focus on productivity in your life. Go to learntruehealth.com, and on the menu, you’ll see where it says free your anxiety and click on that. There’s a great video there for you. Lots of resources to explore. I have a search function on my website. You can search for topics that you are interested in learning about. You can also go to the Facebook group and search for topics there. There’s a search function on Facebook as well. There are so many resources that I provide through my membership, the Learn True Health Home Kitchen membership, through my free your anxiety program, and free resources at learntruehealth.com. If you have any questions for me, please feel free to reach out to me. Just ask questions in the Facebook group. I love helping, I love supporting you guys in achieving optimal health. If you’re interested in becoming a health coach just like me, check out IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. That’s the program I took. I absolutely love it. It’s 100% online. If you’re quarantined at home right now you could be becoming a health coach. Go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach and there, it’ll give you access to a free module of IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition’s online programs so you could see if health coaching is right for you. It’s a free course so go ahead and take it and see what you think about it, experience it for yourself. Learntruehealth.com/coach. Awesome. Thank you so much. You are so wonderful, and you so deserve true health. I’m really glad that you took the time today to honor your body and honor your mission for achieving optimal health through learning more about what you can do naturally to support your body’s ability to heal itself. Have yourself a wonderful rest of your day.   Get Connected With Dr. Steven Gundry! Website Supplements Line The Gundry Podcast Twitter Facebook Instagram        

Check out Seth's Online Workshops: learntruehealth.com/calm IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount! Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coaching   Mindfulness & Cognitive Behavioral Therapy https://www.learntruehealth.com/mindfulness-cognitive-behavioral-therapy   Highlights: How CBT is different from other therapy What the Think Act Be approach is Mindfulness-centered CBT How to get rid of worrying Focus on what’s real Service is a crucial part of self-care   During this time of uncertainty, many people are always worrying. Constant worrying leads to anxiety and stress and doesn’t help us and our situation. Ph.D. Seth Gillihan joins us in this episode to talk about what mindfulness-centered CBT is and how it is different from traditional CBT as well as other forms of therapy. He tells us that we need to worry less and instead focus on what we have. He also gives some tips on how we can reduce stress in our lives. Intro: Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today’s guest is Ph.D. Seth Gillihan. He specializes in mindfulness and cognitive-behavioral therapy. He has some wonderful things to share today, and I’d love to make sure that you know the best link to go to to get access to all of his stuff including his online courses, which I just love, learntruehealth.com/calm. That’s learntruehealth.com/calm. If you find yourself in a bit of anxiety, panic, or worry these days, you’re going to love his training and his system because it’s going to bring you back to center, bring you back to a place of being grounded, peaceful, and focused, and give you a lot of clarity. Enjoy today’s episode, and please, share it with those you care about who also would love to master their brain, their heart, and their mind and increase their mindfulness. Have a wonderful rest of your day and enjoy today’s interview.   [00:01:06] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 430. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us Ph.D. Seth Gillihan I. You are a licensed psychologist, and you’re the host of the weekly podcast Think Act Be. I’m really excited to have you here because you specialize in cognitive-behavioral therapy, and that’s something that is so cool. To me, it’s one of the coolest things in the world. I know we were talking about how it might be really dry and boring, I don’t think it’s working at all. I think it’s so cool that you can help someone to shift their mind, their behavior, and their results in life. That we can reprogram ourselves and that cognitive-behavioral therapy is not painful. It’s not like Freudian where you sit and have to relive your childhood over and over again and cry. No, no. It’s actually just really quick. You get to the root of it and you shift your behavior, which shifts your results and you can shift your whole approach to life.  It’s really exciting that people can break free from phobias, anxiety, and issues that have plagued them their whole life. I love that you’re an expert in it, you’ve written several books in it, you have a wonderful online class so people can, right now in the comfort of their own home, start to shift their life. This is the perfect time to do it. I’m just so excited, Seth, to have you here today. Welcome to the show.   [00:02:45] Seth Gillihan: Thanks a lot, Ashley. Thanks for that warm introduction. Yeah, I think that is right about CBT. It does tend to have that reputation of being somewhat dry and maybe a kind of formulaic approach, but hopefully, by the end of our talk today, we’ll show that that doesn’t have to be the case. There really is a lot more to it, and the techniques can be very quick and effective, but can also be quite deep.   [00:03:13] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. Before we dive into learning from you today and learning tools for shifting our life, I want to learn a bit more about you. What happened in your life that had led you to want to become a psychologist that led you to want to help people in this way?   [00:03:33] Seth Gillihan: It’s an interesting question because the answer really has changed over the past couple of years. I’ve been doing cognitive-behavioral therapy and mindfulness related approaches for the past, gosh, I don’t know, 10, 15 years. Mindfulness really is in the past 10 years and CBT longer than that. I wasn’t prone to a lot of anxiety or depression growing up, so I wasn’t quite sure what drew me to it initially. In hindsight, some of it might have been seeing family members struggle with those things. Unconsciously, on my part, wanting to offer some kind of help and not really knowing what to do.  I was inspired by my grandfather’s life of service. He was a physician for over 50 years in rural Eastern Kentucky. I knew I wanted to do something some way of being of direct service to people, and I wanted to do it as effectively as possible, which got me into CBT and later into mindfulness. But it was only really through my own prolonged sickness that I’m actually still recovering from that. I really found what to me feels like a really holistic integration of mindfulness and CBT that I’ve started calling mindfulness-centered cognitive-behavioral therapy because it’s not about tacking on this third technique.  We can do cognitive stuff and behavioral stuff and here’s some mindfulness stuff if you need it, but viewing our spirits as central to who we are and to everything else that we experience. Putting mindfulness in that place really of priority within the approach and letting it lay the groundwork for everything else that we do. As we’ll talk more about it, it’s much more effective to address our thoughts and our actions when we’re coming from a place of really being centered within ourselves rather than being off-kilter and then that kind of frenzied chaos we often find ourselves from. It’s hard to make really positive changes from that place.   [00:06:14] Ashley James: What was the first aha moment that you had, your first experience with cognitive-behavioral therapy? What was the first oh my gosh, this is amazing—like body tingles amazing shift for you?   [00:06:30] Seth Gillihan: I still remember the first time reading about what cognitive therapy was. I was reading an interview with Dr. Aaron Beck, one of the founders of the CBT approach. This was probably around 1999 or so. I was in a master’s program at George Washington University. I was in the library late at night, I was reading this interview, and I thought wow, this just makes so much sense this idea that our thoughts—the things we tell ourselves—have so much to do with the way we experience the world, the emotions we experience, and how we interact with other people. I carried that with me and it was probably a few days later I was in the kitchen in our little apartment in Washington DC where my wife and I were living at the time. We hadn’t been married that long, and we’re probably arguing fairly often at that point. There was a good bit of tension in our relationship at times. For some reason, it stands out in my memory. I was in the kitchen and I was getting ready to bake a frozen pizza. I don’t remember what the specific thought was but some thought about my wife went through my mind. It was some kind of interpretation of like she thinks such and such or she’s treating me in some way, and I caught it at that moment. I was like oh wow, that’s an interpretation. The way that I am seeing my wife at this moment where the story that my mind is crafting about who my wife is or what her actions mean has everything to do with the way that I’m seeing her and the way that I feel about her because I recognize such a close link between that story—the kind of negative view of my wife—and this kind of feeling I had toward her of probably just feeling she wasn’t being very nice or wasn’t very generous. I realized, at that moment, wow, this really can revolutionize relationships, which obviously is such an important part of our experience and our well-being in life. From that moment, I think that’s when it really hooked me and I realized the power and the potential of it.   [00:08:59] Ashley James: How has this type of therapy helped you in your health?   [00:09:12] Seth Gillihan: I guess this goes back at least a couple of years now, maybe coming on three years when I realized. It turned out to be toxic mold poisoning my now former office, or my old office, or my mold office. I only got out of there a few months ago. So thankfully, since then, it’s been slow and uneven recovery, but the world’s better than it was two or three years ago. This has been going on probably at least for five years, really when the umbrella of this really began. Just the stress, the uncertainty, and all the unknowns and the questions about what is going on with my health? Why can no one figure out why I have no energy? I can’t sleep, my brain is fuzzy. All this wide range of nonspecific symptoms that wasn’t clear why they all should hang together. I ended up getting quite depressed through that. Actually, I had a podcast guest on. We talked about treating depression and the power of shaping our behavior in a way that boosts our mood. I looked at my life and I realized wow, my activities really have shrunk down to almost nothing. I mean, I spend a ton of time in the kitchen preparing food for these specialized diets that I was on. I wasn’t seeing anyone because the illness had led to a lot of vocal problems including growth. My vocal cords, I had to have surgery for it to have removed. My world has gotten quite small as it often does when we’re going through a chronic illness, and that tends to lead to depression. As I was reading this book in preparation for my interview with this guest who’s also a psychologist, I thought, you know what, I’m going to put this into action. I’m going to do CBT on myself. So that led me to really think about what are the life-giving activities that I can build back into my life that I’m actually able to do now even with the physical limitations that I have. That included building a pretty extensive garden in our backyard. In hindsight, I didn’t realize it at the time, Ashley, but it was kind of rebuilding me as much as I was building it. I felt just compelled almost not against my will, but more than I was willing myself to just throw myself into the work of building this garden. At a time when I had very little energy and I was in a building these eight raised garden beds and doing all this learning to figure out how and what to plant and figuring out the watering schedule and all that, that really was a big part I think of the process of beginning my healing. I still experience those benefits now as the crops are coming in again. It feels like there’s that resonance in the life in the garden and in the life within me.   [00:13:38] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. I love it. There are so many ways that nature or gardens metaphorically represent our life and our health. I think that’s so beautiful and healing that as you built that garden you also built that inner garden as well.   [00:14:05] Seth Gillihan: I remember the day. It was one of the first really warm days last year and the whole garden had grown. The way I’d built it was there were four beds on the outside part of the garden, and the inside was for triangular beds arranged in a way with the long edges facing in so it formed a kind of diamond on the inside. There’s an opening in the middle. I was working on that opening and I knelt down on both my knees to pull something out of the ground or something. It just hit me at that moment. It felt like an act of reference, it felt like an act of worship. I used it as exactly that to just say thank you, I can’t believe here I am, I’m feeling well. I’m surrounded by all this green and this energy. This is not Seth Gillihan who went to graduate school to become a psychologist and learn CBT, this was something different. It had a much more overtly spiritual feel to it then. I think I would have a little wigged out by me ten years earlier, but that’s what happened.   [00:15:26] Ashley James: I love it. We grow so much so we look back to ourselves 20 years ago. I’ve been thinking a lot about 1999 transitioning into the 2000s and that was 20 years ago. It just feels like yesterday but it also feels like a whole lifetime. I’ve had these thought exercises of what kind of conversations I’d have with my 19-year-old self back in 1999. What kind of conversations would I have, how different am I, and what’s the same? That thinking then in 20 years, what’s my life going to be like when I’m 60? Who am I going to be when I’m 60, and who’s still going to be me? What’s still going to be me and what’s going to be different? Because we are growing, and that’s good. That’s a good thing.  We want to grow and change. We want to shed what’s no longer serving us. We want to shed the anxiety or the habits that are no longer helping us whether it’s something obvious like alcoholism or smoking, or if it’s something less obvious like maybe quick to interpret things in a way that sets you up to feel like a victim, or not allowing you to quickly resolve issues and instead go to anger or other negative emotions. This is part of the wiring of the brain, and we can shift it. If we can look at our life like what’s no longer serving me and what can I shift? Maybe it would help if you could explain what cognitive-behavioral therapy is because a lot ­­of people who have not been to a therapist, we all think therapy is basically what Hollywood has portrayed for us.  There’s a stigma that only sick people go to therapy, and I don’t think that that’s the stigma for the millennials. I’ve seen more and more that in the millennial, in the younger generation, that therapy is seen as something that we go to to become even better or at least like for preventive medicine. I have a friend and I’ve told her story on the podcast before but I have a friend who is in her late 30s, she has a 5-year-old daughter, she has a wonderful boyfriend who’s the father of their child, and she is a personal chef for people—wealthy families in Seattle. She’s constantly traveling to these different houses and cooking for them and very, very busy.  She said on Facebook one day, “People ask me how I keep it all together,” because she’s constantly go-go-go between having a wonderful relationship with her boyfriend, being a great mom, being there for her daughter, and running her own business. How does she do it all? She says, “I see a therapist three times a week. Therapy for me is what allows me to keep my sanity, and it is something that people should do like they go to the gym. You take a shower, you should go to a therapist because if I didn’t go to therapy, I’d be blowing up at my daughter. I’d be putting my stress on to other people in my life instead of processing it. I don’t bring my work home. I don’t bring my stress work home. If I’m stressed about something I process it, I don’t project it onto other people, and that’s what therapy has done for me.”  She said that there are certain generations that still think that therapy is something that you have to wait to get sick and then it’s taboo. It’s like they’re touched with the plague or something if you’re going to go to therapy, whereas other people are beginning to see that therapy is something that you go to the gym for your physical body, you go to a therapist or a counselor for your mental and emotional body. Maybe if you could explain the different types of therapies. Cognitive therapy is so vastly different from Freudian, for example, which is the stereotypical therapy that we’ve been exposed to if we’ve followed Hollywood.   [00:20:02] Seth Gillihan: I love the comparison to the gym because we’re not surprised when someone who goes to the gym is in really good shape, but as the example you gave shows, we might be surprised when someone who’s really well-adjusted emotionally goes to therapy. But it could be that someone is able to cope with things because they go to therapy, not that everyone has to be in therapy. There’s certainly no shame in it. The way you describe it is how I tend to see it that it’s really for anyone at any level of things they want to work on whether for really debilitating issues or because they feel like they just want to get more out of life and live as fully as possible. The therapy we’re most used to seeing, if I ask someone to describe what happens in therapy, they’ll probably imagine someone comes in and maybe lies on a couch. Maybe some people still have that image from classic Freudian psychoanalysis where the analyst is sitting behind the person. Maybe they imagine sitting face-to-face, but the person who’s there for treatment does most of the talking and focus on issues with their mother or things from early in life. That is the kind of more traditional Freudian or the psychoanalytic or what’s now called psychodynamic approach. It’s influenced by Freud but not exactly the type of therapy that Freud delivered because the real analysis is four times a week and it was for many years. With Freudian or psychodynamic therapy, there is a lot of focus on the past and in talking about a person’s earliest relationships. The emphasis is on things that a person isn’t really aware of. These unconscious conflicts, so conflicts between different parts of my psyche. The part that I identify with that I’m aware of called ego and then the id, which is the more primitive drives like drives for sex, power, and domination. On the other hand, the super-ego, which is like our conscience. It’s sort of seen as a battle between these forces and most of the id and superego are said to be unconscious. They’re operating outside of our awareness. If that’s your model of what the human mind is, then it makes sense you need a therapist to walk you through that and help you to uncover these unconscious drives and motivations and to integrate them more so they’re not exerting these effects that we’re not aware of. A lot of what happens in the therapy relationship in Freudian therapy is about what takes place between the therapist and the client. People may have heard of this idea of transference that the way that I treat the therapist is going to be based on earlier relationships. For example, if I tend to see authority figures as overly controlling, then that’s how I might respond to the therapist, not because of anything the therapist is doing, but because I’m projecting those early experiences onto them, so a lot of the therapy is going to require understanding, identifying, and working through those transference reactions. That’s a very different set up from CBT where the emphasis is more on things that all of us can learn and observe within ourselves. That each of us is seen as the expert on who we are. That we know ourselves better than other people do, and then we can really become our own therapists. That’s done through really understanding the CBT model, which is about the relations between our thoughts, our emotions, and our actions. That there are links between those that we can recognize and start to shift in a way that serves us. A quick example is if I have a tendency, when someone doesn’t respond to my text messages, to think they don’t like me or they think I’m not you know worth their time, to first of all recognize that as the story that we’re telling ourselves. It may or may not be true like that story that I was telling myself about what my wife did as I was making that frozen pizza back in DC. Recognizing the stories we tell ourselves and then we can examine whether they’re true, or maybe there are alternative explanations. Is there any other reason why someone might not have texted or responded to my text? Maybe they didn’t get it, maybe they’re busy, maybe it got buried in other messages, maybe they’re homeschooling their kids in the middle of a pandemic. It could be anything. That’s something we can all learn to do. That’s one of the emphases within CBT, and it’s also highly collaborative. It’s not that I am, as the therapist, have this specialized knowledge that you’ll never have access to and you’ll require my input and interpretation to figure things out, but rather, I have some tools that I’ve been trained in that may be helpful to you. It really is going to take the two of us coming together to figure out what’s going to work for you through trial and error and through really this evidence-based approach of trying things out. See what works, keeping what does, and trying new things as we need to. The cognitive part is about our thoughts. The behavioral part is about becoming more aware of our actions and the things that influence our behavior and the effects of our behaviors. Again, an example might help. If I’m someone who has a lot of social anxiety and I also am dealing with a low mood, then I might pine on this choice where I can go to a party or I can stay at home. If I look at the different payoffs for those different choices, then I have a better chance of making one that’s going to really serve my longer-term goals. The short-term payoff for not going to a party that I know it’s going to make me feel socially awkward is I’ll get some relief. I don’t have to face that anxiety and so that avoidance will be rewarded in the short-term, but the downside is, I don’t have the eventual enjoyment of going to the party, I don’t feel a sense of accomplishment from facing that fear, and my mood is going to tend to be worse because I’m going to continue to be isolated and alone. By understanding those payoffs, I can choose the action that’s going to have the best long-term outcome. The cognitive-behavioral approaches are the first two waves of CBT and then mindfulness came along as a third wave. I’ll pause for breath there in case you have questions.   [00:28:06] Ashley James: With cognitive-behavioral therapy, the client is not seen as a victim or seen as broken. They’re seen as someone who’s the expert of their own person, and you are a collaborator with them as their therapist. You are a collaborator, you have tools, they’re the master of themselves, and you’re helping them master their inner world and then their effect on the outer world.   [00:28:37] Seth Gillihan: Yes. That’s a nice way of saying it. Yes, definitely not broken. I always ask in the first interview about a person’s strengths because those strengths are the things we’re going to emphasize that are going to help a person to address the things they want to change.   [00:28:58] Ashley James: Brilliant. I love it, I love it. I’m so passionate about cognitive-behavioral therapy because everyone can benefit from it. Is there anyone that shouldn’t do cognitive-behavioral therapy?   [00:29:13] Seth Gillihan: That’s a really good question. Going back to Aaron Beck, he was kind enough to write a blurb for my second book on CBT. He said something to the effect of these principles would be helpful basically for everyone. I tend to agree with him. We would need to tailor the approach for different people. Maybe a person needs a certain level of cognitive ability, I mean, minimal level, not like you have to be a Rhodes Scholar or something to do this because the approaches really are frightfully simple when you come down to it.   [00:30:01] Ashley James: They’d have to be able to follow directions, basically.   [00:30:04] Seth Gillihan: Yeah, they’ll be able to follow directions. I mean, there are definitely people who don’t want that kind of approach. They would rather be in a more exploratory therapy, or an insight, or in at one, or there are some people who come and they really don’t want to work on things between sessions. Maybe they want to but they know that there’s a really high likelihood that they’re not at a place where they’re going to follow through on an activity plan that they come up with the therapist and it’s going to end up being a punishing experience like all right, great. You go out to work on those things. I’ll see you next week. Then they come back and have to say, yeah, I didn’t do any of that stuff.  That may not be the best therapy for someone in that position. I should say, as much as I love CBT, I’ve also had major reservations about it over the years. I want to put that out there. I don’t think that everyone should do it or if someone’s doing different kinds of therapy they’re doing the wrong therapy. There are lots of types of therapy that could be effective, but if someone is interested in CBT, I can think of very few cases where it wouldn’t probably be helpful.   [00:31:34] Ashley James: You’ve taken CBT and you’ve shifted it. As you said, you had some reservations. You’ve seen where it could be improved upon and that you’ve brought in more mindfulness, more of a spiritual approach. Tell us about your approach to CBT.   [00:31:53] Seth Gillihan: That’s a really nicely worded question, Ashley, because you asked about the more spiritual aspect, and that’s really what I came to. This goes back to what you asked about my own experiences and developments along the way. Through that period of my illness, there were so many nights where my energy would just get worse and worse throughout the day and by the evening, I would just feel completely despondent and suicidal at times and just lying on the couch so many nights just despairing and feeling like I had reached the end of myself. Yet there was something in me that kept me going. I didn’t understand it because all I wanted to do was just stop, was just give up. I don’t know what that would have looked like, although, as I said, there are times when I thought I should just do everyone a favor and end my life. I realized in one of those moments when this phrase is going through my mind—I’ve just reached the end of myself. I’ve reached the end of myself. But I realized that that wasn’t the end. That there was something else there. It felt, at that moment, like I needed to come to that place in order to find what was next. What I found next was my spirit was there. My spirit was undiminished by anything that I’d been experiencing. That it was as big, as vibrant, and as alive as it had ever been. That it was unperturbed by anything that was happening on the surface of my life. I felt such strength coming from it. When I felt like I had nothing to give that it was this spirit within me that was me and yet was more than me that I was drawing strength from, that I was drawing sustenance from. I felt like it was that spirit that actually drew me back to CBT, which seems a little bit funny to me that that feeling of something eternal and grand drew me to such a mundane approach—something that is so concrete and nuts and bolts. What I love about it is that it feels very integrated. That the sacred in my life is intimately tied to something as simple as what I put on my calendar. That really is what led me to see. I understood as I realized the spirit within me in this connection to the spiritual, I realized that’s why mindfulness tends to be so effective. It’s not just a way of hacking our attention system and not focusing on the future because that makes us anxious, but that our spirit is like our bodies. It exists in the present. When we really come into the present moment, we open to our experience just as it is, we invite ourselves to connect with our spirits, and that is such a vital place. That’s a place of such vitality. I actually thought about calling the Think Act Be approach, that’s my shorthand for mindfulness-centered CBT. Think for cognitive, Act for behavior, and Be for mindful presence. I thought about calling it spirit-centered CBT, but I thought that might be a little less accessible for people. People might scratch their heads a little too much with that, but to me, it feels interchangeable. That really is what it’s about. It’s about operating from that spiritual connection. It’s why I think CBT is more effective when it comes to that deeply grounded place. I think that CBT can help us to move toward that place of connection with our spirits. It ends up being this really beautifully circular process, this virtuous circle of spiritual connection drawing us to right action, right thinking, which in turn reinforces our spiritual connection and really keeping us healthy and grounded and continuing in that direction. So much in my life has changed over these past few years as I’ve been drawn, not even really through. It hasn’t felt like all right, I made a decision. I’m going to start living a mindful CBT type of way, but it’s just what I’ve been drawn to. That’s really strongly affected my work and my approach with CBT because it felt superficial, it felt like it wasn’t really getting at the heart of what people were coming to me for. Yet there were times when so many people, I had seen in working with them, these really profound breakthroughs they had made just through mostly a cognitive and behavioral approach, but they really had been able to come home to themselves in a way that did feel deeply spiritual.   [00:38:22] Ashley James: I love it. I think we’re spiritual beings at our core. If you could remove the blocks to get us there, if you can remove any blocks to allow us to get back to being connected with the source, then that would just enhance all the quality of every part of your life.   [00:38:47] Seth Gillihan: Yes. That’s exactly how I think of it. That we are spiritual at our core. You were saying earlier it’ll be interesting to see in 20 years, when you’re 60 and I’m 65, who we are. I love thinking about that because I believe there is that core about us that will endure. So many things will change but something will be the same, and I think it is that eternal core within us—that spiritual core. Yes that we naturally tend toward that connection if only we remove the blocks that keep us from being there. That’s [you and I 00:39:30] right now about cognitive and behavioral approaches. That’s how I think about them. That the idea is we’re removing those things that are blocking us from our natural inclination towards spiritual connection. I used to be so self-conscious to talk about these kinds of things so explicitly. I have a very strong background in science. I moved away from a fundamentalist Christian upbringing after college. There’s kind of squeamishness about things that are overtly spiritual, but what I realized is that I guess I care less on the one hand, but also I think all of us are aware that we are something beyond these minds and these bodies. Whether we call it spirit or something else, there is something eternal about us.   [00:40:33] Ashley James: You said I care less and I think that’s interesting. I think it’s an interesting saying, but I don’t think it’s accurate. I think you care as much as you’ve always cared, but you don’t care about what other people think as much.   [00:40:50] Seth Gillihan: That’s right.   [00:40:51] Ashley James: Your care has shifted. You probably care in a different way. Something that we heard—my husband and I, followed this guy, it was pretty neat. He said a lot of very interesting Tao spiritual sayings, and we liked following him. This was like an online radio show 12 years ago. He said, “It’s none of your business what other people think of you.”   [00:41:24] Seth Gillihan: I love that.   [00:41:26] Ashley James: We had to hear it a few times and he said it over and over because, at the time, my husband was so self-conscious he wouldn’t hold my hand in public. I mean it was bizarre. Bizarre, right? I’m your wife, hold my hand. He got it. He was just so worried his whole life. He was so worried about what everyone thought of him, and he was constantly creating these alternate realities in his mind where people were judging him for things. It’s just made up, right? This is what we do. We’re meaning-making machines, but we typically like to go to the worst-case scenarios in our minds. When he heard that it hit him like he almost fell over. It’s none of your business what other people think of you. It just gave him so much freedom. After hearing that he just let it go. He stopped worrying as much about what other people thought of him or stopped caring as much about what other people thought. He’s a very caring person, but he stopped making up these realities in which people were judging him. I’ve had an experience in the last few months where I had a really good friend who I felt very close to. I’d known her for a long time and then I found out that she was telling lies about me—very horrible, nasty, and really hurtful lies. I had poured so much support into her over the years. I had helped her. I’d invested in her with a lot of money, a lot of time into her business, and any possible way I could help her. At one point she was living on our couch. For over the years, we helped her and helped her and helped her and helped her and helped her. We were doing nothing but just being supportive friends and then she turned around and she said these really, really nasty things to another friend about us that were not true. I mean, they’re all lies, but in her mind they were true. At first, obviously, I was very hurt. I was very angry, but then I sat back and I asked myself what reality does she live in in which she interpreted my kindness as evil or my support as a friend as that way? She must be living in such a sick world or such a warped reality to have interpreted my generosity as something other than just generosity. Then it hit me. I started laughing. I went from just being angry and so deeply hurt because someone I considered where my best friends betrayed me, but I didn’t make it about me. I was thinking about like wow, what’s going on in her life that that’s her reality? That’s really like a scary reality she’s invented for herself. Then I started laughing because I got that.  I spend so much of my time worrying about what other people think of me. I create, in my mind, like I’m worried that people are going to judge me because I didn’t pluck the chin hairs today. Oh gosh, I got out of the house without plucking these chin hairs. People are just going to be judging me. I left the house and there’s a tear in my pants or whatever. In my mind, I’m worrying about what other people think of me. I’ve decided that they’re going to worry about what I think they should worry about, but she created. What she made me realize is that there’s no use in investing your energy in inventing things for people to worry about because people are going to come up with their own stuff. They’re going to make up their stuff about you that is so wrong, that is so off-kilter that you would have never guessed, that you should have been worrying about that.  I laugh because why invest energy into worrying about what other people think when people are going to come up with their own stuff to judge you on, and you can’t control it no matter how virtuous you are, no matter how good of a person you are. I mean, even people interpreted Jesus the wrong way. No matter how good you are, there’s going to be people that don’t like you, but it’s not about you. It’s them and their life and their baggage. Don’t invest any of your energy in making up what to worry about because they’re off doing their own thing inventing their own stuff about you, and it’s not you, it’s them. It gave me a lot of freedom. It was a hard lesson to learn to lose that friendship, ultimately, but at the same time, it was a beautiful lesson she gave me. When I walk out of the house with my chin hairs unplugged, I rest assure that the people who love me will see past them no matter what, and the people who are judging me are going to invent their own things and probably not even see the chin hairs because they’re just going to be making up their own stuff. I can live my life just connecting with those who love me and moving on and letting go of the worry of judgments. When you said that, it reminded me that when we focus on worry, we’re self-creating so much anxiety and stress, and it doesn’t serve us. It’s actually really interesting, why is it that we have this mechanism? Because it doesn’t help our survival. In fact, it harms our physical health to have a mechanism in which we are constantly in anxiety and worry. That doesn’t actually help us survive anymore so why do we do it?   [00:47:31] Seth Gillihan: I think as best we know, it’s because when we were being selected for it was helpful. There was a time when your neighbors rejecting you could be a life or death matter. If you were excluded from the clan, then that could be a matter of survival. But, yes. Now, it’s completely counterproductive that we spend all our time worrying about things that don’t happen. As you pointed out, worrying about the wrong stuff. We get it wrong. We probably worry about dying from the wrong things. It’s probably not that thing we’re worried about that’s going to get us, it’ll be something else, but I love how you described it. It’s not like we have to trick ourselves into thinking no one’s ever going to think anything bad about you or you know you’re never going to get sick, but you don’t know what it’s going to be, so you may as well stop trying to figure it out. Just live what’s in front of you. I think so many of us are asking ourselves that question, Ashley. Why am I spending so much time unproductively in my head—doing things that aren’t helpful, thinking in ways that aren’t helpful? I think it does go back to that. Our minds are trying to do us a favor. They think they’re doing something positive for us. That they’re keeping us safe by warning us about all these potential disasters, and that’s why I think we really have to retrain our minds because our default is toward threat, danger, and insecurity.   [00:49:14] Ashley James: Yeah. How much are we still running on default? How much are we still running on the tools we had as a child where it’s that survival brain? At some point, we have to become our own parents. We have to raise ourselves. I’ve been looking at this a lot, thinking about this a lot, this idea that we are adults that are still children in many ways. We look to the government as our parents. Take care of me. Take care of us. I feel good that the government is going to take care of us. Some people give over their power to their doctors. It becomes a parental relationship where it’s like take care of me. I am helpless. I don’t know what to do. Take care of me. We revert back to becoming a child where someone else has the answers, and we can just go about our day because someone else is going to handle it. Being a parent now, we have a 5-year-old, and watching how to be a 5-year-old again where someone’s doing all of the major decision-making for you. Where someone is feeding you and putting a roof over your head and all you have to worry about is playing with your toys and having fun all day. Anytime something bad happens you look to your parents to solve it, right? At some point, we grow up, but even in my 20s, when I was looking at this recently I’m like, when did I stop blaming my parents? When did I stop? Something happened and I was like I can’t believe I spent my 20s still blaming my parents. If they only did this right then my life would be bettered. I was like wow. At what point did I figure out that it’s me, I’m responsible for it. No matter how good or bad your parents were as being parents, it’s not their fault your life is the way it is because you are the one who gets up every day and does what you do. Catching myself and going, what parts of me are still at the default setting where I haven’t grown up—I haven’t grown myself up—I haven’t gained the tools? Looking at what parts of me are still acting like a teenager—rebellious teenager still acting like a child, still handing over my power, and looking for someone else to solve my problems. I’ve been going through that mental exercise lately. It’s interesting that you say that. Cognitive therapy and especially your form of cognitive therapy that really includes mindfulness is also about helping us grow up. Grow up and grow up those parts of ourselves that are still acting like that survival mode, especially if anyone is running around feeling anxiety right now and running around in worry and feeling overly stressed out. That’s when they need your tools for sure. Can you teach us some things? I’d love for the listeners to learn especially since stress is so bad for our health. Are there any tools that you can teach us to help us decrease stress?   [00:52:38] Seth Gillihan: Yes. First of all, I’m glad that you saw through that idea that your parents were to blame for everything in your 20s because we can hold on to that belief well beyond in our 30s, 40s, 50s, or older. I think that’s a positive thing. I think I discovered some of that later in life, not blaming my parents, but looking to the medical establishment to fix me. When I’d exhausted what mainstream medicine could offer with tests, labs, and things. Then it’s going to be this practitioner, it’s going to be this type of therapy. I definitely got help through a lot of those, but I kept reminding myself it’s not going to be that one person that’s going to be the Savior that I’m looking for. I’m not going to find that one diet that’s going to tell me to eat this and don’t eat that. I’m going to have to figure these things out the best I can for myself through trial and error and just listening to my body. It is such a stressful time and such an anxious time for so many of us. The mindfulness-centered CBT approach that I use, the emphasis, it’s not on short-term like rescue fixes like a Pepto-Bismol for anxiety. If you’re anxious take this, this will knock it out. Try this trick or this technique. I think a lot of the practices that can be helpful in the middle of anxiety, but the most effective approach is to build the type of life where anxiety is not the dominant force or stress doesn’t have the upper hand. It starts with very basic wellness exercises like literally moving our bodies and attending to our sleep. Treating sleep as a sacred activity and honoring our bodies and our minds with the foods that we put in them and what and how much we drink. It starts there. My approach, to be honest, for my first few years of doing CBT, I really ignored those kinds of somewhat superfluous details. Maybe a person was drinking six bottles of Diet Coke a day then maybe they’d be a little jittery from anxiety, we could talk about that, but I wasn’t attending to just the overall wellness in the machine, so to speak, and attending to the machine of our bodies and how that affects our minds and our spirits. I think starting there or thinking about the way we treat our body as being as important as anything else in dealing with anxiety. But then in terms of more specific practices, obviously, the parenting idea made me think of an exercise that I often encourage people to do. Think about the bookends of your day from one being when you wake up and the other being as you’re going to sleep or preparing for bed. When we wake up in the morning, it’s common that we wake up with a lot of anxious arousal because our stress hormones, cortisol, and norepinephrine are going up during that time because we’re preparing to mobilize for the day. That can jolt us awake. That can launch us headlong into our day and our busyness. Going back to the premise of mindfulness-centered CBT, starting our day from that wobbly place of being out of balance, it’s not going to set us up for having the best kind of day. Even taking a few moments when we wake up just to say hello to ourselves. I’m thinking about the reparenting idea that you talked about. When a parent goes into their, let’s say, two-year-old’s bedroom in the morning and then your child wakes up, the parent doesn’t say, hey, you’re awake. All right, come on. Let’s go. They don’t grab them, bring them out of the crib, and overwhelm them. At least I hope not with a lot of energy and intensity, but they say, hey, good morning. How are? How did you sleep? Whatever questions you ask a two-year-old. Our kids are older than this now. I don’t know if we asked them how’d you sleep last night, but you greet them. You connect with them.  I think we can do that to ourselves, just say hello to yourself in the morning before you jump into your day. Maybe it involves taking five calming breaths in the morning can be a useful exercise—lying in bed, just feeling your body, and coming into your body as you emerge from sleep. Then asking ourselves what kind of day do I want to have rather than what our default question is something like how are things going to go today, or I wonder if there are going to be problems today, but those questions really make us feel like victims as we start our day. What is today going to do to me? I hope I can survive today versus what do I want to bring to this day? Who do I want to be? How do I want to serve today? Where can I find opportunities to show love? Where do I want to direct my attention today?  Those kinds of questions, it’s such a different emphasis. All these things, again, for me this is not an academic exercise. These things I rely on even as recently as this morning. I woke up and my first inclination was all right, got to get upstart that blog post that came to mind last night. I thought, no. Let me just yes spend a few moments here and see what it’s like to start the day that way. That’s number one. That’s a long explanation, but really, the beauty of most of these things is they take anywhere from a few minutes to a few seconds. It only takes a few seconds to say hello to yourself before you get up and do whatever is next.   [01:00:05] Ashley James: Would you recommend journaling or meditation, or do you have exercises for people to follow in the morning?   [01:00:14] Seth Gillihan: I do. I have a couple of decks that I’m excited about because I think they work. They’re card decks. They’re just literally a deck of cards with a practice on each card. The one that’s been out for I guess a couple of years now is more general CBT approaches for probably anyone could find helpful. Then I’ve got one coming out soon that’s focused on anxiety, rumination, and worry. Both of them have practices that can be and some of them are for any time of day, some of them are specific to morning—kind of setting your course in the morning, and some of them are useful at night. There are different types of meditative activities. One is called thank you goodnight where you do write down things you’re grateful for from that day, but I like a gratitude breath exercise that you can do anytime. I found it to be useful like if you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall asleep. It’s easy to turn to worries or frustrations like why am I not falling asleep? If I fall asleep now I’ll only get four and a half hours, come on. We can redirect that energy with every breath cycle. Bring to mind one thing, one good thing in your life. Inhale, exhale—at least I’ve got a bed. Inhale, exhale—some specific friend, I’ve got a refrigerator, or I’ve got a house. All these things and we don’t have to try to force ourselves to feel grateful, but just direct our attention to the things that we have. It’s a meditation, but it’s also training our attention to notice what’s going right in our lives instead of what’s going wrong.   [01:02:29] Ashley James: I love it. I had a man named Michael Weinberger on the show a few times. He has manic bipolar, has attempted suicide several times, and his life has been plagued with mental health issues. He found therapy to be essential. He got to a place where he needed tools in order to just not kill himself that day, basically. What he found that his morning routine was the difference between whether he was going to kill himself or not. His morning routine was—he would wake up and ask himself, on a scale of 1 to 10, where is my mood? Where am I on a scale of 1 to 10? Whether it’s happiness, sadness, or whatever. He might wake up and be like a three, and then he would write down or text or something—write it down in a journal three things he’s grateful for. Then ask himself again, on a scale of 1 to 10, where am I?  He’d notice that always, his mood would improve simply by taking the 90 seconds it takes to write down great things he’s grateful for. No matter what, no matter how bad he felt, he’d get out of bed and take a shower. That would shift his mood. But he had a certain routine in the morning in that there was an inward reflection, just checking in with yourself, how am I feeling? Not judging it, not making a story like because I feel this way my whole day’s going to be… No, just checking in like hey, how are you doing? Just like you said. Then he’d write down three things he’s grateful for and then he’d check in again.  Another thing he added to his routine was reaching out to someone, anyone, and just letting them know that you are thinking about them, you care about them, or thanking them for something. It could be someone professional like hey, when you helped me with that thing, I just want to let you know that it really meant a lot to me. Thank you. You could reach out to your wife, your husband, your kids, or your mom and say thank you, I love you, or I’m thinking about you. Just connect with someone. It could be a text, an email, phone call, or in person—every day. Basically, just get out of yourself and thank someone for the impact that they have had on your life. He ended up taking all these things and making an app so that people can log into the app, and the app also has reminders that you can set for medications. It’s like a mental health app that he created.   [01:05:26] Seth Gillihan: Oh, wow.   [01:05:27] Ashley James: In the morning you press the number, on a scale of 1 to 10, how are you doing? Then you type in the three things you’re grateful for, and then it has reminders set up for mindfulness, for connecting with others, and letting them know that you’re grateful for them. He created his app because those were his tools that helped him to like to stay alive and on track towards mental health. Now he’s much more stable. It’s just really neat that a lot of parallel with what he noticed really works. He was at a point where he was ready to break. Those tools really helped him, and then you’re saying these same things. It’s just really neat that there’s a lot of parallels there between the two. You really help people with anxiety, and you have this online course. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/calm, that’s learntruehealth.com/calm to gain access to your course. Tell us about your course. Also, I’d love for you to teach us something about eliminating anxiety.   [01:06:36] Seth Gillihan: Great. I’m really excited about this course. I’d wanted to do one for a while and finally did one this year. It’s a pretty deep dive into mindfulness-centered CBT for anxiety, stress, and worry. It’s 24 lessons. A person could do it over for weeks if they wanted, six lessons a day. I’m sorry, that would be ambitious. It’s six lessons a week. Or they can space it out longer than that. Really, it’s up to the person. Once they enroll they have lifetime access to the materials. Each lesson begins with a guided mindfulness exercise or 24 different mindfulness exercises. You were asking earlier about some specific practices, we offer a lot of different ones. A person can sample a lot of different approaches and find what works for them. Then there’s a video-based lesson for each day focusing on recognizing and reducing stress or finding cognitive tools or behavioral approaches that help us to deal with anxiety. Then I spend a full five lessons talking about worry because worry is such a common issue that so many of us struggle with and also a really difficult one to break out of because it’s mental. It’s easy for our minds to do it automatically. Worry actually is really interesting, and maybe I’ll focus here in terms of ways of reducing anxiety because worry, I think we often think of worry as I’m anxious and worried. Almost like worrying is something that happens to us. It is somewhat automatic, but it’s also something that we do. It’s a mental behavior that becomes a habit because it feels safer in a way to worry than not to worry. We will tell ourselves things like why I should worry because it shows that I care, or I can prevent bad things from happening if I worry. All these beliefs and assumptions that reinforce our tendency toward worry. The problem with worrying is that it’s self-reinforcing. If I’m worried about my plane, for example, and I’m thinking about is everything okay? Those sounds I’m hearing during the flight, is that a bad sign? I’m looking at all the faces of the crew and seeing are they worried? Imagining what I would do if the plane suddenly dropped in altitude. I’m suffering as all that’s happening, but when the plane lands, the lesson that my brain is going to take from that is not well that was silly, I shouldn’t have worried, but it’s going to be thank goodness you worried because you got the plane here safely. We don’t think that rationally, but when things go badly in our lives, our brains want to know why. They’re going to look to see what happened before things turned out okay. A lot of the time the answer is you worried. The lesson is we better worry next time because that’s how you keep the plane up, that’s how you keep people from thinking badly of you, right?   [01:10:31] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. There’s a payoff.   [01:10:34] Seth Gillihan: There’s a total payoff.   [01:10:35] Ashley James: We see that worrying gives us something because we’re still alive, we’re still safe, and so it must have been the worrying that got us there.   [01:10:41] Seth Gillihan: It must have been, yes. Thank goodness for that worrying. Imagine what might have happened if I hadn’t. It’s our magic feather. We believe that. Again, probably not consciously and cognitive therapists can believe in the unconscious mind. We want to break out of that cycle by not arguing with our worries, not getting into a back-and-forth with them. If the worried mind says what if the plane crashes? Then the most effective long-term response is to say that’s a possibility that could happen. That’s not going to lower anxiety immediately, most likely. No, I don’t want to crash.   [01:11:35] Ashley James: Because in our mind the plane is still crashing so the body is still reacting to it. The body is still in stress mode.   [01:11:40] Seth Gillihan: Yes, exactly. We can reassure ourselves and say there are 20,000 planes land safely every day in the United States alone. That might give a little bit of relief, but then the mind is going to come back with how do you know? How do you know your plane’s not going to be that one? Because it does happen. It’s not like it’s impossible for planes to crash. We can get out of that back and forth like what if. Okay, now it’s good, it’s probably not going to happen. It’s probably okay. Oh no, but what if? Saying, yup, that could happen. Treat worry like an annoying bully that keeps trying to get a rise out of you. Saying you’re stupid. No, I’m not. Then, of course, all you’ve done is guaranteed that the bully is going to keep teasing you. But if you say like yup, you’re right, I’m an idiot. The bully is going to be confounded. With worry, the same thing. You could say, yup, that’s a possibility. That’s not something that ultimately I control. But then we don’t have to stay there. We don’t stay there. Okay, this plane might crash. From there, we want to say what is in my control? What do I actually have power over? I can choose where I direct my thoughts, I can choose how I spend my time, I can choose whether I try to get engaged in conversation with the person I’m flying with versus I get annoyed with them because I’m trying to keep the plane up—even though I’m not to pilot.   [01:13:11] Ashley James: My worry is keeping this airplane in the air.   [01:13:16] Seth Gillihan: That’s right. Don’t break the spell. Are you insane? That’s where mindful presence comes in is using our senses then to focus on what’s real, to get out of that fantastical thinking about possible plane crashes. It’s all fantasy and telling myself the plane’s not going to crash. That’s also a fantasy, that’s also a made-up story of the mind. We can focus instead on what’s real. I think focusing on what’s real, again, it brings us into a real connection with ourselves, and it’s also where long-term peace can be found.   [01:13:58] Ashley James: For those who have anxiety about their future now because of the long-term effects of the COVID shutdown, people are worrying about their long-term security. Whether their job is at stake, or whether the food chain has been affected, or whether they’re schooling. I have a friend who is in school, in college. I was just talking to him last night. He graduated with his AA online. They had to transition to online classes, and then he’s going in to get his next level of education at another university. They’re considering having it be online even though he’s going in as a music major. These are classes that require me to be with someone. He goes, “I have to learn every instrument that an orchestra plays.” He knows how to play nine instruments professionally, but he has to learn the entire orchestra for his master’s, and he has to learn how to play quartets. It’s just he was telling me all about the different things that he’d had to do in person. He’s really concerned, again, it’s a genuine concern because this university, which is in California is like we’re not sure your next semester is going to be in person, and that’s months and months away. People have legitimate concerns, but as you said, it’s a fantasy. We can fantasize over the worst-case scenarios or we can fantasize over the best-case scenarios. Either one is a fantasy. Focusing on the worst-case scenarios induces anxiety, worry, panic, and stress. But how do we prepare? There’s a difference between lamenting and preparation. How do we prepare for our future even though it’s uncertain and take the actions we need to take now to be the most responsible we can be, but not give in to worry and anxiety?   [01:16:09] Seth Gillihan: Great question, Ashley. There are two things we need to prepare for. One is we can prepare for the unknown. We don’t know what it’s going to be, but we can prepare as best we can. I mean, to be honest, I’ve had some fears about getting coronavirus for one, but also the possible disruptions to the food supply chain. I found that’s kind of a hot button for me even though I’ve never really wanted for food, but that does trigger some anxiety in me. It’s not an unreasonable thing to do to prepare as best we can. I’m not renting a pod to stockpile food in. I think having a certain amount of food on hand is probably a good idea, but then also recognizing the limits of our control. If I try to guarantee that my family will never go hungry that there’s no way to guarantee that. That’s going to reinforce our anxiety because we’re going to be trying to control the uncontrollable. There are some good studies showing that the more we try to be certain about things that can’t be known, we actually increase our level of uncertainty and make ourselves more anxious in the process. It’s this double process of preparing realistically and also accepting the limits of what’s actually in our power. That goes for the virus too. None of us ultimately know or can completely control whether we contract the virus and how it turns out for us if we do. But that doesn’t mean we just throw up our hands and say whatever will be will be. I’m just going to let fate run its course because fate will depend, to some extent, on our actions, so we do what we can. We also need to ask not just how do I prepare for the outside world but how do I prepare my internal world for whatever comes? That to me actually is striking me as the more important question because there are going to be challenges that come, and we don’t know exactly what those are going to be, but we do know we’re going to need strength, we’re going to need courage, and we’re going to need grace to get through them. I would want each of us to be asking ourselves that question as much as anything else. Again, it’s a bigger version of that question we might ask ourselves first thing in the morning. Who do I want to be regardless of what happens with my courses, my career, my health, or my family situation? How do I want to respond to challenges? Where do I want to look for my strengths? How can I deepen my spiritual connection in a way that it’s available for me? What’s my mission and my purpose in life and how can I enact that regardless of what happens? I think that may be the best preparation we can make.   [01:19:59] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. That makes so much sense. Imagine six months ago everything seemed so certain, right? The economy was doing so well. The economy was great. Everything was great. We didn’t have the coronavirus, the murder hornets.   [01:20:22] Seth Gillihan: It was greater than we knew.   [01:20:24] Ashley James:  Exactly. It was great. We live in that idea that the parental figure is this certainty that we’ve invented in our minds, certainty that everything’s going to keep going the way it’s going, certainty that the future is going to be the same. We’re just going to keep going as status quo. I can plan out my life because it’s always going to be fairly the same. We, in our lifetime, have had several things shake that to our core like 9/11, right? Obviously, this virus is another example. We’ve had big events happen every twenty years or so that completely shake us to our core and make us realize that we cannot keep planning for everything’s always going to be certain to a certain extent. To a certain extent, everything’s going to be guaranteed like the sun’s always going to come up tomorrow. We always think that the library is going to be open. Just the amount of what we take for granted. That taking for granted is like this idea of the parental figure that we give over our power to in our thinking. Then, all of a sudden, now it’s not certain.  Our life is not certain and we have worry and fear because we’re constantly worrying about this fictitious future because we’re making up in our mind what if I don’t have any food? What if I’m homeless? What if this, what if that, what if this. We’re just imagining threat after threat after threat, which triggers the stress response in the body because the body goes into the fight-or-flight mode whenever we imagine worst-case scenarios. We’re actually feeling a physical—that’s why we have panic attacks. Physically in the now, our body’s having a real tangible physical reaction to a made-up future, to a fictitious future. We’re having a physical reaction which makes it feel even more real, so it doesn’t feel fictitious.  I’m imagining the grocery store is empty. Of course, not being able to feed my family, now I’m in stress mode. I go into anxiety, and now I’m having somewhat of a panic attack. I’m feeling the panic so now I’m actually feeling something in the now, which is real. Then it seems certain in my mind. It really all comes down to mindset because it’s not certain. We cannot live in that anything is certain in the future. As you said, we can only control who we are in the now. You said wake up and say who do I want to be right now? That’s what we can control. Never assume that the future is going to be any one way—good or bad. Now we could plan. We should always plan. I like the analogy of planning for an earthquake. I live in the Pacific Northwest, apparently, we’re going to get a really big earthquake one day, and people worry about it. They stress about it. They’re imagining these worst-case scenarios in their mind. That’s not actually preparing, that’s lamenting. Preparing is like let’s get together the family, create a family plan, have some seven days of storable food, or whatever, and have a first-aid kit. Have everything you need to have and prepared for these different possibilities. You’ve got the storable food, water, emergency kit, and everything that you should have. Then you move on with your life. You’re not waking up every morning living like the earthquake is today. I think that people who are in constant worry and anxiety wake up every morning imagining that their worst fears are going to come true. They’re just creating a fictitious reality, which we all do. We all imagine the future. Even making a grocery list is imagining a fictitious future because we haven’t done it yet. Anything that we’re planning to do in the future we haven’t done yet so it hasn’t happened so it’s fiction until we can do it and then it’s a fact. But what future are you imagining because that impacts your physical body right now?  Your stress levels are directly impacted by the fictitious future you’re imagining. So which one are you going to imagine? I’d like to prepare for the possibility that we might have a disruption in our food chain so I have a garden in the backyard, we’ve got storable food. Just that level of planning, but I don’t lament and I don’t let it affect my physical body right now. I don’t allow it to impact my stress levels right now in my body because I’m not going to constantly imagine a fictitious future in which I don’t have food for my family. That’s a big difference.   [01:26:02] Seth Gillihan: It’s a huge difference. What you’re suggesting is that by stepping out of worry, we actually get better at problem-solving.   [01:26:12] Ashley James: Yes.   [01:26:13] Seth Gillihan: We think we can solve problems in our heads, but we don’t take that what if question the right way. We said what if there’s an earthquake? We just think oh no, would that be bad? And just treat it like a mental issue. But if we treat it as a real question, what if there were an earthquake? Well, I would need X, Y, and Z and you prepare as best you can. Then the rest is fantasy. Yeah, we figure out what we can really act on and focus there.   [01:26:47] Ashley James: Do you have anything else you want to make sure that you teach us today or that you covered today? Was there anything else that you were really excited to share today?   [01:26:59] Seth Gillihan: I think we’ve touched on this to some extent. You had alluded to when you were talking about the morning routine for your guest. So much of our stress and our anxiety comes from and feeds a kind of self-focus. I know this so well, Ashley, from a lot of my life but most intensely from when I was really sick and our struggles really tended to focus our energy and attention inward. That makes sense on the one hand just like it’s completely understandable during really stressful times like now that we’re anxious, worried, and focused on our own well-being, but the more we can deliberately get out of our heads and direct our attention toward others, the better it is for all of us. Obviously, for the people that we’re attending to but also for ourselves. We end up swallowing our own tail in a way when we’re struggling and just burrowing deeper into our suffering, but if we can get out of ourselves it can be quite liberating.  Maybe it means asking if there’s someone who may also be struggling. That we can reach out to or just connecting with someone around us. It’s a way of showing ourselves that we can be of service to others even were not feeling 100%. Even if that doesn’t miraculously make us feel better, at least it might bring a greater sense of meaning into our lives at a time when it might feel like there’s not much point to us because we’re feeling so low. Service is something that I try to think more about and I want to emphasize too that it’s really a crucial part of self-care is asking how we can conserve others.   [01:29:20] Ashley James: I love it. Once we get outside of our own head and we focus on helping others there’s so much peace that comes with that. There are many studies that show that people who are depressed have the depression lift, that people who are in service in some way, volunteer in some way, they live happier longer lives.   [01:29:47] Seth Gillihan: Yes. I like this idea of even if all you feel like is you are a broken empty cup, to just offer that up, to offer up whatever you have in service.   [01:30:03] Ashley James: The links to everything that Seth does is going to be the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Tell us a little bit about your books. You have a few, and you’ve got your online course, which listeners could go to learntruehealth.com/calm to gain access to. Tell us about each of your books so that our listeners can know which one would be best for them.   [01:30:30] Seth Gillihan: Great. The two most recent CBT books aren’t actually books but they’re there card decks that people seem to find quite useful. One is just called the CBT deck. That’s for more general daily practices. Its 101 practices. So 1/3 of the deck—roughly 1/3—are more cognitive approaches, so there’s the Think cards. Then there are behavioral exercises that are the Act pile of cards, and then the Be cards are mindfulness-based practices. They’re brief things that a person can do each day. These are practical exercises for bringing mindfulness-centered CBT into our lives. To be honest, I’ve actually used the cards a lot myself because I depend on these types of exercises as much as anyone. Probably by the time this show comes out the CBT deck for anxiety, rumination, and worry will be available. That’s a few more practices—108—because I had more than would fit on 101, plus 108 is kind of an auspicious number in some traditions. Those practices are under the Think Act Be approach but really focused on dealing with an anxious mind or a mind that’s stuck in unproductive trains of thought like dwelling on regrets and things like that. For someone who’s dealing with a lot of anxiety, I think that the more recent deck may be the more useful one. Then I’ve got a couple of books for those of you who are interested in self-directed CBT in a book format. The earlier one came out in July 2016. It’s called Retrain Your Brain: Cognitive-behavioral Therapy in 7 Weeks, and that’s the workbook for managing anxiety and depression. As the title suggests, it’s divided into seven lessons across seven weeks, and it’s really my effort to make my therapy approach into a self-guided workbook format. There are worksheets, exercises, and things to go through there to bring the practices to life. I have a more recent book that came out of 2018, Cognitive-behavioral Therapy Made Simple. It’s not a workbook so it’s not a step-by-step approach, but it’s divided in chapters on mindfulness. It incorporates the Think Act Be approach. There’s a chapter on self-care. It’s really a broader approach to managing difficult emotions using mindfulness and CBT. For those who just want a daily short reading with an invitation at the end of each day’s reading—each day is about a page long—a really good friend of mine, fellow psychologist, Dr. Aria Campbell-Danesh and I wrote to each other every day for a year, go back and forth taking turns who wrote, just writing each other messages with reflections on a quote for the day, and an invitation to do some specific practice to bring mindfulness and CBT into our lives each day. That book is called A Mindful Year. That came out, I guess, in 2019. Those are the books. I hope people find them useful and get a lot out of them.   [01:34:38] Ashley James: That’s so cool. That book where you wrote each other letters, that’s really neat. Did you ever include any information? Do people feel like they’re reading your personal letters back and forth?   [01:34:52] Seth Gillihan: I appreciate that, no. It’s a good question. Our initial entries, there were a lot more. There were probably two or three times the length then we had to edit it down to because it would have been about 1,000-page book. Coincidentally, I just reread today’s entry, which I had written and I described briefly some of my wife’s and my struggles with conceiving, fertility, and having miscarriages along the way. We did try to incorporate things from our lives that would make it feel like really two human beings we’re writing to each other but also trying to keep it broad enough that people would find it applicable for their own lives. We’re getting nice feedback about that, that people are finding these surprising connections with the day’s entry and something that they’re dealing with that day. As I reread it, I also find wow, gosh, that’s really timely. I wrote this three years ago. So yeah, that’s that book.   [01:36:02] Ashley James: Very cool. Do you have any stories of success that you’d like to share either from people who’ve read your books, or worked with your decks, or even your podcast? Do you have any stories of success of specific people who have had some great results working with your content?   [01:36:25] Seth Gillihan: Yeah. I get a number of emails from people just out of the blue. People who have used the book or a deck and found it useful. I’m always touched because it’s the most, I think any self-help writer could hope for, is that people are actually not just reading what you write but finding it useful. There’s a young woman who just had a heartbreaking story about losing a family member recently and dealing with substance use issues and just overwhelming depression and anxiety. Having gone through one of the CBT books and just finding it comforting. I don’t mean this to sound self-congratulatory but just to describe what the person’s experiencing to be was not just that they were reading a how-to book but that there was a real voice on the other end, that there was a person who didn’t know them but understood somewhat intimately the kinds of things they were going through. I have to say, Ashley, thank God I’ve had some of the struggles that I’ve had because otherwise, I would know much less about what it actually means to struggle and to suffer and to be afraid and to feel lost. She just described—she was still working on things but said she no longer felt hopeless. She felt like she had hope, and she was going to get through it, and was grateful that she had tools to do that. I’m always touched by those kinds of stories.   [01:38:27] Ashley James: I love it. Do you have any other stories of success that you’d like to share in working with people?   [01:38:37] Seth Gillihan: I treated a man for— this was actually a longer course of CBT. It’s kind of slow going, and he was uneven at times. This was someone who had dealt with a lot of trauma and loss as a child and really despised himself, just was filled with self-loathing and he saw himself as pathetic and assumed other people did too and assumed that I would see him in that way. I think this was where a lot of the mindfulness was helpful. The behavioral things that we worked on and the cognitive techniques certainly played a part, but so much of it was just about staying present with someone, being witness to someone’s experience, and letting ongoing relationship with someone be direct evidence against their assumption that they would be despised and abandoned by everyone.  Over the course of a couple of years, and this was someone who actively and expressly wanted to die—wanted to end his own life—and saw that as an inevitability. It’s scary as a therapist when someone tells you that because suddenly it can feel like a liability, but if we focus on it as what’s my risk here, I think that people quickly detect that? And no, this is no longer about my well-being, this is about your legal defense. The person was not in immediate danger so it wasn’t like hospitalization was necessary, but by not making that the focus, by making it okay for a person to have thoughts of suicide at times and to have a part of him that sincerely wanted to die, I think there was a kind of mindful acceptance that had to be there to allow. That I had to bring to the therapy room to allow all that experience to be there in a way that helped this person to feel fully embraced exactly as he was even with his suicidal thoughts. That really became defining in a way of our relationship that that feeling of acceptance even of that perhaps most distressing part of his experience, I mean, from the point of view of a therapist. Through the course of our therapy, this person gradually was able to start to question the beliefs he had about himself about his own inadequacies, failures, and assumptions about how other people must see him. Eventually, this just broke my heart in the best possible way. This person told me that he actually cared about himself and he actually loved himself and I’m just blown away. I could not believe when he said this because that idea of loving himself, probably for a lot of us, just made him feel really squirmy for the longest time, ugh. Feeling of like loving myself, eek. I can’t possibly imagine directing that kind of regard toward this person. Eventually, he did. That goes back to the point you made early on, Ashley, about how we don’t come to therapy because we’re broken. I think we’re driven to therapy by the part of ourselves that’s whole, and that wholeness was still there. It was there the whole time, and it was finally able to express itself more fully across the course of therapy. It’s that kind of experience along with my own personal experience of spirit-centered CBT that restored my excitement about CBT. That it’s not a superficial approach, it’s not a collection of hacks. It’s not just a way of tinkering with thoughts and behaviors, but it’s as deep an experience as we’ll allow it to be.   [01:43:42] Ashley James: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Seth, for coming on the show today and sharing with us. I definitely urge listeners to check out your podcast Think Act Be, and also go to learntruehealth.com/calm to check out your membership. Of course, the links to everything that Seth does including the cards, the decks, and the books are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehalth.com.  It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. Mental health is just as important as physical health, and mental health impacts our physical health. We can’t separate our mind, our heart, and our body. We are one, and we need to take as much time to foster a healthy heart, a healthy mind, along with a healthy body. I’m glad that we got to spend time today really focusing on that. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show, and I’d love to have you back.   [01:44:48] Seth Gillihan: That’s beautifully said, Ashley, I really appreciate talking with you. Thank you for having me on your show. You really asked lovely questions and clearly know a lot in this area and care a lot, so thank you very much.   [01:45:04] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Seth Gillihan. Check out his online course. I think it’s such a valuable resource for us, especially in these trying times. Go to learntruehealth.com/calm to check out Seth’s online courses and all his materials—his resources. I know he’d love to see you there and love to see you join his online platform. If you have any questions, feel free to jump in to the Learn True Health Facebook group and share, or if you have any great insights from today’s interview or any interview that you listen to, start up a conversation in Learn True Health Facebook group. We’d love to see you there, we’d love to connect and communicate with you. Go to learntruehealth.com/calm for more of Seth’s information and access to his online course and materials. Then go to learntruehealth.com/group, or just go to Facebook and search Learn True Health and join the Facebook group, join the discussion, and join a community that wants to support you and your success. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.   Get Connected With Dr. Seth Gillihan! Website Facebook Twitter CBT Deck   Books by Dr. Seth Gillihan Retrain Your Brain   Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (Made Simple)      

Enter to win a copy of Rosalee's book! Join the Facebook group: LearnTrueHealth.com/group Check out Rosalee's books and courses: https://www.herbalremediesadvice.org IT'S HERE! Learntruehealth.com/homekitchen Use coupon code LTH for the listener discount! Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coaching   Wild Remedies https://www.learntruehealth.com/wild-remedies   Highlights: Benefits of taking in nettles Benefits of taking in dandelion Bitter deficiency syndrome Benefits of taking in or applying plantain herb Uses for mallow Know the poisonous plants such as death camas, poison hemlock, and water hemlock Astragalus and codonopsis strengthen lung function   Did you know that some of the weeds that grow in our gardens and parks have medicinal properties? In this episode, clinical herbalist Rosalee de la Foret enumerates some of these medicinal plants. She talks about what we can do with each weed and how they benefit us. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another episode of Learn True Health podcast. Clinical certified herbalist Rosalee de la Foret is here today to teach us all about wild-crafted herbs that are in our own backyard, and how we can utilize them for our health. She reversed an autoimmune condition that the doctor said would be impossible to reverse. In fact, she shouldn’t even be alive right now, and it’s all thanks to natural medicine that she is here today thriving healthy and teaching us how we can do the same. Rosalee wants to gift a copy of her book to one of our listeners, so please go to Learn True Health Facebook group and in the Learn True Health Facebook group, there’ll be a post, you can comment there, and one of the comments will be chosen at random. One person will be chosen at random to win a copy of Rosalee’s book, her Wild Remedies book, which is so exciting. So please go to the Learn True Health Facebook group. You can go to learntruehealth.com/group, that’ll take you straight to the Facebook group, or search Learn True Health on Facebook and join the group so you could potentially win a copy of her book. Join the Facebook group anyway because it’s a wonderful, healthy, and supportive community. I believe we’re about to hit 4,000 people. Everyone is so supportive and loving. I love how the community has grown together to help each other. There’s a great search function in the group, so if you’re looking for you could type the word asthma, allergies, or acne—it’s a lot of words I’m thinking of—shampoo, air purifier, and water purifier. We’ve had these so many great discussions about these kinds of topics—natural household cleaners, cosmetics, and everything that you can think of we’ve had great discussions. There are wonderful threads with lots of information where dozens of people have come together and share what they use, their experiences, and their reviews on different products, so you can get great insights into this holistic health world from this whole community, and it’s free. So come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. I’d love to see you there and potentially win a copy of Rosalee’s book. Awesome. Thank you so much for being a Learn True Health listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you love. Let’s help as many people as possible to learn true health.   [00:02:48] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 429. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have a wonderful woman on the show specializing in herbs, and what I love is that she’s going to teach us about how to explore our own backyard because remedies are right around the corner. Rosalee de la Foret, it is so wonderful to have you on the show today.   [00:03:19] Rosalee de la Foret: I’m so happy to be here, Ashley. Thanks for having me.   [00:03:21] Ashley James: Absolutely. Now your latest book is Wild Remedies: How to Forage Healing Foods and Craft Your Own Herbal Medicine. I think all listeners just got tingles. It’s so exciting especially in this era where we’re rediscovering what it means to be self-sustainable. To be able to go into our backyard and craft a remedy or craft something that is healing for the body is so wonderful. In fact, now, it’s nettles season—stinging nettles. I have a cooking membership called Learn True Health Home Kitchen, and we just filmed how to forage wild nettles and how to make delicious stinging nettle soup.   [00:04:08] Rosalee de la Foret: Oh, yum.   [00:04:09] Ashley James: Oh, it’s so, so, so, so good. That’s just one of the many things that people can go into their backyard or go into a park nearby and find these delicious herbs, not all of them are delicious, but these very healing herbs out there. You also specialize in mushrooms so we’re going to have a great conversation today, and listeners are going to really enjoy learning from you. Before we dive into that though, I want to learn a bit more about you. What happened in your life that had you want to teach people how to explore the world of herbalism?   [00:04:47] Rosalee de la Foret: Well, I have been interested in natural health for a very long time. I was kind of an odd teenager. When I got my driver’s license when I was 16, I remember thinking I was just so excited because now I could drive myself to the health food store. Not a lot of my friends were like that as you might imagine. I remember doing things like getting out Vitamins for Dummies at the library and making flashcards so I could learn what vitamin A is, where it’s found, and the deficiencies associated with it. I’ve long been interested in natural health in that way, and I just dabbled here and there as a teenager, early 20s using natural remedies and supplements for minor health conditions. It was when I was in my early 20s, I came down with a really mysterious illness. I had this crazy fever. I would get a fever at night only, and it’d be kind of low-grade, but it was very persistent. Actually, it would be high-grade at night, and then in the morning, it would be down to 99. At night, I would have this 103 degrees fever, and then in the morning it would be 99. I wouldn’t have a fever at all during the day, and I’d get this fever at night, it was so bizarre. I had these incredible aches and pains. I could barely move. I was in my bed for like a month. I was just in my young 20s, and I just thought I had a cold or the flu because I had a fever. At that time, that’s the only thing I thought you ever got a fever for was a cold or really the flu. I just thought I had the flu, I just stayed in bed, I was in a lot of pain, and didn’t get out of bed much. I had this rash that would move around my body too, so I’d have this rash on my legs, and then the next day it would be on my chest. It was very itchy and salmon-colored like it’s kind of bright orange color. Anyway, totally bizarre, and just for that whole month I just waited to get better. I didn’t get better and ended up going to the hospital. At the hospital, they kept me there for four days, and they took all sorts of blood samples. I had actually started going to a wilderness survival school prior to this, so they were testing me for all sorts of things because I just thought I must have caught some kind of weird disease from wildlife or something, so they tested me for all sorts of stuff. I couldn’t find anything wrong, sent me home, and then two weeks later, I remember I was in the grocery store and I got the phone call and they said that I had a whole team of people working on it. The person on the phone said, “Well, we figured out what it is. It’s a very rare autoimmune disease, and it’s called Still’s disease. You should come in.” I went in to see my doctor, and she said, “Well, I talked to your team of specialists. There was an immune specialist there, but really, there is nothing we know about this disease. There’s no cure for it. You can expect a steady decline in life with a life expectancy around 40,” and she gave me a brochure about it and told me that there was a Yahoo discussion group that I could talk to other people who had this disease because it’s very rare. But she basically said there’s nothing we can do for you. Obviously, that was a state of shock. I was this, what I had thought, healthy 22-year-old, and then I was just given this terminal illness diagnosis. For two days, I took it really hard and just kind of the pits of despair wondering why me? After two days, I just snapped out of it all of a sudden, and I was just like no this is not how this is going down. I got every book I could about rheumatoid arthritis because even though my disease was very rare, I knew it was very similar to rheumatoid arthritis. I just got all sorts of books, and I learned about things that are pretty well known now, but back in the early 2000s were not well-known. Things like intestinal permeability, how important vitamin D is, and overall diet. At the time, I was very interested in natural health, and I was eating what I thought was a very healthy diet, which was all organic, lots of wheat, lots of soy. That was the basis of my diet were those two things and vegetables, but obviously, lacking in so many ways. I learned all about this stuff. I totally overhauled my diets, got rid of wheat and soy. I slowly started working with other practitioners, acupuncturists, Naturopaths, herbalists. I drank a lot of really strange gross tasting Chinese herbal medicine teas. Those are not really designed to taste well, but I would drink them down dutifully, really studied up on vitamin D, and started supplementing. Anyway, I did all of these things, and six months later, I had no symptoms. It was a huge paradigm shift for me because, before this, I was already interested in natural health, but I thought it was for boo-boos, like minor things. If you had some serious condition, obviously, you would go to the doctor, but that’s what I did, and I got no health from this whole team of specialists at a hospital. That was just a huge paradigm shift for me. One thing that was really fascinating to me is I went to see all of these different practitioners and none of them said—and they’re also called alternative health realm—none of them said you have this named disease for which there is no cure therefore you are doomed. What they said was after a two-hour intake or all of that kind of stuff, they said who are you, and how can we better facilitate overall health? It was through all of that that I didn’t have any symptoms six months later. It was, obviously, so amazing to me on so many levels. I proudly went back to my doctor because, obviously, she would want to know about this. I basically single-handedly cured an autoimmune disease. I was in my young 20s, just very like, oh yeah I’m going to go tell her all about it. I went. I scheduled an appointment and I went. I was like, “I just thought you’d want to know that I no longer have debilitating pain in my joints, no longer have the fevers, I no longer have the rash, I have no symptoms, and I’m feeling great.” She asked what I did, and I said, “Well, I think it really revolved around the herbs I took, overhauling my diet, and really changing things.” I remember very clearly what she said. She said, “There is no scientific proof that your diet would affect an autoimmune disease.” She said, “Glad you’re better, you were probably misdiagnosed.” Even though I had all of the symptoms, how could I have been misdiagnosed? But that was all she had and she showed me the door, which I can understand looking back. I can see my 22-year-old self proudly walking in and claiming all these things.  As a doctor, she’s looking for evidence-based medicine and one person saying something didn’t really set off her bells in any good way, but I knew it in my heart. I knew that I was better, and it was so astounding to me. I really started to think about how many other people out there have my same experience whether it was Still’s disease or some other chronic illness and were just told that’s a name disease that we don’t have a pill for yet, so good luck. I wanted to help other people. As I mentioned, I was already in Wilderness School at the time, and I was studying plants. Through that school, I was studying them through the lens of ethnobotany, so doing a lot of fieldwork, and learning how to identify plants, learning how to harvest them sustainably, learning how to use them for food and basketry. But after that, I really sat into my calling and I knew I wanted to be a clinical herbalist.  I went to many different herb schools. I have done over 10 years at different schools and just learned everything I could about how to use plants as medicine. That’s how it all got started was with that one door being shut and deciding to walk through another.   [00:13:30] Ashley James: That is so cool. I’ve actually interviewed people and doctors on the show that have reversed their autoimmune conditions using diet, herbs, supplements, and supporting the body in its ability to heal itself. They’ve come up against the same resistance in the medical community. One of the doctors that I interviewed recently, she’s gone on to create studies where she’s getting whole groups of people with MS and reversing it, publishing her findings, and proving. We just need to get enough people with Still’s disease to copy what you did and then show that you can get the same results. It’s frustrating that the medical community pushes back so much when new discoveries are created. I actually interviewed a gastroenterologist Ph.D. He teaches medical doctors, and he specializes in doing surgeries of the intestines. He discovered and found a new illness, a new diagnosis, which is small intestinal fungal overgrowth. We never experienced that 50 years ago, that wasn’t even a thing, but it is a thing now. He tried to publish it, and there was a huge resistance. That the medical community didn’t want to accept his findings because it was new. It’s really interesting that he found how much resistance there is to anything new. We have to push back in big ways. We have to figure out how to get this information out there, and how to get studies together. As I mentioned, get a group of people with Still’s disease together, or get a group of people and then do a study, continue to prove and show that what you stumbled upon really works. I also have had many guests, listeners, and clients who have had type 2 diabetes reversed it with natural medicine and diet and then gone back to their doctors who are treating them for 10 or 20 years, continuing them on medication for many years, and the doctors don’t want to know how they reversed it. That blows my mind.  The doctors that these people have told me about that were their doctors. I know that not all doctors are like this, but so many of them who treat people for an illness, continuing to give them drugs year after year when there are ways to no longer have that illness. These doctors aren’t interested in learning how to heal the body naturally, that blows my mind too. That’s why I do this podcast, and that’s why you’re doing what you do, so we can help people to advocate for themselves. Obviously, you want people to have a good doctor. We can’t wait and just give our health over to the doctor, we have to educate ourselves.  I love what you do because what you’re teaching, especially in your latest book Wild Remedies, we can learn how to support our body’s ability to heal itself every day of the year. Go for your physical and see that you’re getting healthier and healthier, continue to work with good doctors, fire the bad ones, hire the good ones, and know that we have to take our health into our own hands.  There you were, you had reversed Still’s disease, a disease that has no cure and you’ll have it for the rest of your life and you’ll die in your 40s. Here you are, very healthy and vibrant. How old are you now?   [00:17:47] Rosalee de la Foret: I’m actually turning 40 this year.   [00:17:48] Ashley James: So you’re an 80s kid. Me too, I just turned 40. You’re vibrant and healthy and you’re still free of all the symptoms of Still’s disease?   [00:18:00] Rosalee de la Foret: Yeah. I’ve never had them since.   [00:18:02] Ashley James: I love it. That’s so cool. Yes, autoimmune conditions can be reversed. I’ve had so many guests on the show who have reversed their own, and it is so inspiring because people who are trapped in that vicious cycle of having autoimmune flare-ups, I’ve been told by so many specialists that this is their life, this is the new normal, and that they’ll never really get better, and then they believe them. So it takes people like you to share with them that there is a possibility, there is a way that they can escape that prison and have a body that’s healthy and vibrant. What had you want to write Wild Remedies?   [00:18:48] Rosalee de la Foret: It begins with a trip to Ireland, actually. In 2017, I’d published my first book Alchemy of Herbs. People had asked me—as soon as the first book was published—the question was, when are you going to write your second one? I was just so burnt out from that process. I was like never. I have no interest in that whatsoever, but I went to Ireland that year. I was visiting a friend. During that trip, I also got the chance to meet Tori Amos, who is my heroine. She’s a big influence in my life. She’s a piano composer, singer, and songwriter. I had the chance to meet her, and I gave her a copy of the book. She asked me, “How do you get the best results with herbs?” She went on to ask something about how do you take the herbs? At the time, I was totally like I’m meeting Tori Amos, she’s asking me a question, but I hope I said something semi-intelligent to her, something about bringing plants into our life, and then it’s not just the one thing we do but it’s all the things we do. We had that conversation, and days later, I just kept thinking about that question from her, how do you get the best results from herbs? I just really thought about it from so many different angles. It just hit me, it was one of those things that just landed in my lap. It was so clear, that’s what you will write a book about. Just after that, I thought I will write this book with Emily Han, who’s a colleague of mine and now a friend. I called her up and I said, “We need to write a book about this.” She was like, “Okay, you’re right.” She knew too. The book is really about—it’s kind of getting back to my herbal roots because as I mentioned, I first began learning in the field, learning with the plants themselves, nature connection, and observance was a really big part of my learnings. Then I steered off on to this clinical herbalist path where the focus was more on herbs that you buy and formulas, just kind of a different focus.  This book is coming back full round to really talk about the importance of nature connection. The healing that’s found there on a personal level as we get to interact with nature, looking at the ecology that’s outside of our doors beyond even just us and the plants, but also all of the creatures there and all of just the beauty and wonder that’s found within there, and being able to then participate in all of that, and recognizing that as humans, we are a part of this earth and not apart from it, and learning how to sink ourselves back into those rhythms. So living through the seasons, changing our habits or the things we do as the seasons change around us, and also learning to identify and recognize all of this plant medicine and plant foods that grow so abundantly around us.  A lot of the book focuses on weeds because (1) that’s what people find around them, but (2) it’s because I know that those weeds that show up so abundantly around us are the plans that can for so much profound healing. You mentioned stinging nettle earlier. That stinging nettle is in both of my books, and I was just thinking about that today because that’s one I would never want to be without. It has so many amazing healing properties and in many locales grows abundantly, and it’s just right out there waiting to be interacted with.   [00:22:32] Ashley James: Nice. I love it. That’s so cool. Since launching your book Wild Remedies, have you had any feedback from your readers?   [00:22:44] Rosalee de la Foret: Yes, absolutely. We’ve been doing a lot with the book. As far as we know, about 20,000 copies sold already. We have a Facebook group, and there is just so much interaction going on there. People are posting recipes, and I’m getting tagged on Instagram every day. Numerous times a day people are making the recipes, which is so much fun to see people getting out, people wondering what the plants are that are growing around them. We’ve had over 200 reviews so far on Amazon as well, so I’ve been getting lots of feedback, lots of emails. In fact, I spent this morning trying to go through my inbox again because I’m getting hundreds of emails every couple of days. It’s been really, really wonderful, and a lot to take in too.   [00:23:37] Ashley James: Very cool. Any specific feedback you’ve gotten from Wild Remedies that stands out? Any stories of success you’d like to share?   [00:23:45] Rosalee de la Foret: At this point, with the book being less than a month old, most of the feedback has come around the joy that people are experiencing of going outside. Right now a lot of people are still sheltering in place and practicing social distancing, which can feel isolating, which can be depressing on some level, and certainly just even anxiety about the state of the world we’re in. A big part of the book is about getting out and using awareness and observation to see all the beauty that’s out there, whether it’s beautiful flowering plants or the little snails that are sliding along the leaves. In general, that’s the biggest feedback that I’ve seen so far as people being able to set down their feelings of isolation, set down anxiety, set down the sadness, and take a step out into the world. When I say interacting with the plants around them, I happen to live in the wilderness, but my co-author, Emily, she lives in LA. We wanted the book to be very applicable to everybody, whether they’re in suburban, or urban, or rural environments. That’s what I’m hearing from people too. One of the exercises in the book is to find nature and unexpected places especially for those urban dwellers, and people finding beauty out there even if they live in a land that has a lot of concrete. Nature is always there, the plants are always there, and creatures are always there.  Being able to observe that and feel that that’s been definitely the biggest feedback. Because the book has been on my mind and something I’ve been really tapping into too is sometimes I don’t realize how anxious or worried I’ve become with everything that’s going on, or just even sadness, missing my friends, or plans that didn’t get to play out this year, or all of that, and worry for people on the front lines. I don’t even realize how much I’m holding that in until I go outside, take a walk, and I take time to slow down and see all of that. I feel that connection to nature, it’s something I’m sure so many of us are aware of but it’s so easy to just be like yeah, yeah, yeah nature connection, sure, sure, sure, but there are so many studies these days about showing how important being outside is and how that really plays a powerful role in our overall mental well-being. There’s been some popular headlines in the news from time to time, people showing doctors in certain countries are prescribing nature in order to help people, and it’s really based on studies. There was a 2015 Stanford University research study and it looked at the brain activity of people who went on a local nature walk and compared it with those who walked on a high-traffic street. The conclusion was that walking in nature could lead to a lower risk for depression and other mental illnesses. There’s another study that looked at 1000 residents in Sweden. In that study, the researchers concluded that the more often people visited urban green spaces, so again, it doesn’t have to be some idealistic mountaintop or anything but urban green spaces, the less often those people reported stress-related illnesses, they reported less burnout, less insomnia, fatigue, depression, and even feelings of panic. There is lots of information out there showing how important nature is in terms of that scientific realm. That’s so fascinating to look at. I like to talk about it, remind people about it, but I think when we get out there and have that moment of feeling more calm, more centered, more peaceful, feeling that in our bodies how joyful it can be, that is the biggest proof, right? We can look at the studies and find them interesting, but when we feel it in our bodies that’s the most profound. To have that joy and be able to say yes, I want more of this, and to make it a regular habit that becomes really, really important. There are so many studies looking at even stress hormones specifically and how you can reduce those. Even just 20 minutes outside can significantly reduce stress hormones. Tell you what, Ashley, I think a lot of people could use that right now.   [00:28:27] Ashley James: If we took your book, Wild Remedies, and we went outside—I could go in my backyard. I live on five acres out in the woods in Snohomish. This is just 30 minutes away from Seattle. Those who don’t have that luxury of being out in the woods like me could go to the local park, or just find trails, find places where there’s trees, grass, and nature and go for a walk and see if they could find. It’s like an adult scavenger hunt, like a holistic scavenger hunt—see how many wild remedies they can find in their neighborhood. What’s really exciting about stinging nettles is that they grow everywhere. I thought they only were in the Pacific Northwest until I started looking into them, and they’re everywhere. Let’s start with stinging nettles. Tell us about stinging nettles. Why would we want to forage for them and use them especially now since this is the time to harvest them?   [00:29:35] Rosalee de la Foret: Yeah, this is the time of stinging nettle. In fact, later today, that is what I’m going to be doing is harvesting stinging nettle myself. With nettle, the thing that just jumps out immediately with nettle is how nutrient-dense it is. Many of us know that our modern-day fruits and vegetables, ones that are commonly found in the grocery store, often have less nutrients or even missing nutrients from their former selves. We tend to breed out nutrients by making fruit sweeter or tastier in some way. If you think of the original tomato, it was not anything like what we know today. They were small, they had a very different taste, and over time, we bred them to be bigger and bigger and juicier and sweeter. But in that situation, we have also bred out a lot of the nutrients. We can also lose nutrients because of monoculture farming and growing crops in nutrient-depleted soils. If the nutrients aren’t in our soils they aren’t in our food. Whatever the reason, many of our foods just don’t contain the vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients that they once did. Stinging nettle is a great way to get those nutrients back into our lives because they are one of the most nutrient-dense plants out there. Just eating them, having them as teas, they are just so chock-full of minerals and vitamins. They bring us a lot in that regard. Because of that, getting that potent nutrient intake, especially if we are eating them or taking a strong tea regularly, they have a lot of vitamins and nutrients specifically for bones. I’ll often say there’s the side effect of eating nettles includes things like stronger more luxurious hair, stronger nails and teeth, and healthier bones. They really do affect that in a strong way. That deep nourishment is a really important reason to enjoy nettle and a reason why I think most people can really benefit from enjoying nettles. They are quite tasty too, so that’s a fun aspect of them to be able to enjoy those nutrients and this delicious green. They do not taste like kale and they do not taste like spinach, but it’s in that same genre of this dark leafy green that has just so many vitamins and minerals in there. Another reason that nettles is incredibly important for many of us today is that regularly using them can help us reduce or modulate inflammation. It can do that in a variety of ways. One way that I commonly recommend it to people is for seasonal allergies, which is this inflammatory response going on. Nettles can help modulate that response, and they do that in interesting ways. You could be drinking nettle tea whenever your allergy season starts. Many people report that when they do that their allergy symptoms that year are lessened. That’s one way to prevent that process from happening. I love that. I can only imagine all the processes that must be going on in the body to make that happen and just all the inflammation that’s being modulated. People are seeing results with their seasonal allergies but must be feeling it in their bodies on many different levels. You can also take something like freeze-dried nettle, and that can be used for acute allergy symptoms, again, modulating that inflammation. There has been a couple of really cool studies look at how a fresh alcohol extract of nettle leaves can reduce inflammation and blood glucose levels on people with type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance. I’m sure I don’t need to tell your listeners that there’s a whole approach to working with people and helping to reverse that process, so I don’t mean to say that nettles are the one quick stop solution, but they can be a part of an overall protocol. One of the studies that looked at that fresh alcohol extract for people with type 2 diabetes, they concluded that nettle may decrease risk factors for cardiovascular incidents and other complications in patients with type 2 diabetes. It can lower blood glucose but is seen in decreasing risk factors for cardiovascular health as well. Another way that it can help modulate inflammation is with musculoskeletal pain. It’s high in vitamins and nutrients and sometimes the depletion of those vitamins and nutrients can lead to musculoskeletal pain. By having that restored, that can affect things. It’s really high in magnesium, calcium and so that’s one way. There’s also another kind of strange way. If everyone knows what we’re talking about stinging nettles, they do sting, right? That’s where they get their name. If you brush up against them with your bare skin they will sting you. They have these little needle-like prickles all over them especially on the stems and underneath the leaves.  What those do is they’re these hollow point needles and when you brush up against them they actually inject your skin with their special little juice there, and you will have a mild reaction. It can be a little rash, and it could be a little painful, a little itchy. It’s very mild though. It’s not that big of a deal unless you really go for it. But we know that the sting of fresh nettle can actually bring blood flow to an area, can bring healing hormones, and will decrease pain.  That’s an old folkloric use of stories of women going off into the forest to harvest fresh stinging nettles to help with their arthritic hands. But that researchers have actually looked into this too, and there were two studies done showing that fresh nettle brushed up against: one study was the thumb and one study was the knees, and both showed that that can reduce pain and inflammation, which I just thought was kind of hilarious, Ashley. Can you imagine calling in for that to be a volunteer for that study? Yes, you can whip me with fresh nettles. Here’s my thumb, here’s my knee.  We do know from tradition and science that fresh nettles sting is actually therapeutic. People can get worried about getting that sting. For myself, I don’t have arthritis and stuff so I don’t necessarily go looking for that sting. When I harvest fresh nettles I do wear gloves and that sort of thing, but I often do get stung just because it would brush up against with my arms or something. It’s really not that big of a deal, but in terms of eating it just because I know people often wonder about this, when you eat the nettles you want to blanch them, which immediately gets rid of the sting with them. Eating them is not an unpleasant experience once you blanch them. They get rid of their sting.   [00:36:50] Ashley James: For those who don’t know what blanching is, you put them in hot water. That’s what blanching is. You can steam them, or you can put them in a soup, or you can put them in hot water to make a tea, and then they’re no longer stinging you. However many thousands of years ago, Roman soldiers used to rub their bodies with stinging nettles in order to stay warm at night. I thought that was interesting because that sting does bring blood to the surface, makes you feel warm, but I’m sure it would also help with their aches and pains from just being soldiers, which is really cool. I wonder if they also ate them—rub their bodies with them and then ate them.   [00:37:33] Rosalee de la Foret: It would not surprise me. I was in France a few years ago. My husband is French and we go to visit his family. We were in central France in the same area where the caves of Lascaux are, those very ancient caves and with all of the art there. We were walking around these caves and I found all of these stinging nettles there. They believe that people were living in the caves 35,000 years ago, and to find all of these nettles growing around the caves, it really made me think of like wow. It’s probably impossible to imagine how long nettles and humans have been interacting together.   [00:38:16] Ashley James: It’s considered a weed. It’s also high in K2, you mentioned the minerals. It really is great for joints and helping the body build healthy bones because the K2 is needed along with those minerals in order to lay new bone tissue, and then you’re out in the sun getting vitamin D. That completes the perfect picture. It’s high in antioxidants and polyphenols, so it’s just fantastic food all around, and it’s free. We just have to go outside and find it. It is in every area. I can’t think of an area it wouldn’t be other than the Antarctic. Stinging nettles, aren’t they in Asia, Africa, North America, and South America? Aren’t they everywhere?   [00:39:11] Rosalee de la Foret: They do grow in many places. I’m not sure about all of those areas. I’m not saying they don’t, I just don’t know about that myself, but it would not surprise me. There are several species of nettles as well. We have our native species and other species that have moved in. They find their niches wherever they like to grow. They like really protein-dense soils, and they do like a bit of shade, but they also like a little bit of sun. You can find them in forests, along the edge of meadows. Once they’ve settled themselves in their little niche, they can do quite well there.   [00:39:46] Ashley James: I interviewed Naturopathic physician Dr. Jenn Dazey who specializes in teaching botany at Bastyr University. She wrote a book called Naturopathic Gardening, and she has this theory about soil and weeds. Weeds are herbs and are just what you’re teaching. She says that when the earth is disrupted, it’s like a wound. Let’s say we scratched ourselves, our skin is broken, and we’re bleeding. That’s a wound. The body creates this scab over the top so that it can build new skin. When the earth is disrupted, the earth is like an open wound. The earth wants to immediately create a poultice and a scab to heal the exposed earth. It brings in fast-growing weeds as some of the first plants to heal that opened or disturbed soil much like our body would.  When she said that it changed my opinion about weeds. From being these pests to being the healers of the planet and our bodies also. Oftentimes, stinging nettles will grow where the earth has been disturbed as well or nearby, so I thought that was really neat. What other wild remedies are really common like dandelion? We could talk about dandelion, everyone knows dandelion. Let’s talk about dandelions, and then tell us more about ones that maybe we don’t know which are in our backyard.   [00:41:30] Rosalee de la Foret: Dandelion, it is one that I love to talk about. In terms of healing the earth, that is just the perfect example, so it’s a great segue herb there. Dandelion has this very deep taproot that goes into the earth. It pulls up nutrients and then brings those nutrients into the soil around it as well as the plant itself and then also helps to break up hard-packed soil as well. It can help aerate the soils, bring nutrients from deeper in the earth back up into the topsoil. It’s a wonderful healer in that regard. We have some lawn purists out there who tend to hate dandelion. I think many of us were just taught to. We didn’t question it. We were just told dandelion’s bad and they should be removed from lawns.  Billions of pounds of herbicides are poured onto dandelions every year mainly by homeowners in the attempt to find that perfect lawn, which is ironic on so many levels. Because one, we’ve been basically taught to poison the earth that we live on, which is just horrific to me. But also, so many of those chemicals that are used are known to be carcinogenic, can promote the growth of cancer, and increase the incidence of cancer. Whereas dandelion is a herb that is widely celebrated for helping people who do have cancer, so that’s an interesting thing there that so many people are poisoning a plant that so many of us could benefit from these days. Dandelion, like stinging nettle, is wonderful food as well as wonderful medicine. The first medicine I think it brings is joy. Personally, I would just see the dandelion coming out of a crack in a sidewalk, I just love that sign of resilience and this idea of finding beauty in all these places and that dandelion can take root there to grow. Right now on my lawn and around here—I live in an agricultural area and so there’s dandelions and lots of agricultural fields. Those yellow blossoms will just fill a whole area, and I just think that is so beautiful. It’s reminiscent of the tulip fields in Amsterdam. It’s that beautiful. They’re so prolific and so gorgeous. That’s really fun just that joy there. If we wait a little while, then of course those flowers will go to seed and then the plant gives us free wishes—another joyful thing. So many things to celebrate with dandelions.  As food, all parts of the plant can be used as food. The roots can be used as food. As I mentioned, they are nutrient-dense. They pulled up all those great riches from deep down in the earth. The roots have a bit of a bitter flavor to them. I like to pickle them or put them in stir-fries if I’m eating them as food. The roots are tremendous for the liver. That’s their claim to fame is that they really help the liver function well. I regularly enjoy dandelion roots, even though I don’t have known liver issues, just as a way of supporting my liver health because that little organ of ours does so much. The more that we can give it a little boost and support its healthy functions, the better. Eating the root is great, but probably my favorite thing to do with dandelion roots is to chop them up, roast them, then simmer them, and make what some people call dandelion coffee. It doesn’t really taste like coffee, but it does—because you roast the roots—have this rich roasted flavor that’s reminiscent of coffee. Essentially you’re making a tea, but it does have a little more of like an oomph to it. That’s one of my favorite ways to enjoy dandelion. It just tastes so delicious. That’s a great way to just enjoy it as food and as medicine and support for the liver. It’s also often added to bitters blends, and the leaves are used as bitters too, so might as well talk about bitters, which is one of my favorite topics. In herbal medicine, the bitter taste of herbs is really important. So many of our foods today, we’ve talked about this earlier with stinging nettle, we bred our foods to be sweeter oftentimes. This is what we’re going for. We’ve often removed the bitter flavor from food. You think about wild salad greens versus iceberg lettuce. There are so many salad greens out there that are making a comeback today that have that bitter flavor to them. I grew up eating iceberg lettuce. That was the salad that you ate was iceberg lettuce. Anyway, even romaine lettuce, which is a little bit better nutrient value than the iceberg lettuce, still does not have a lot of flavors. That bitter flavor is so incredibly important. It signals to our whole body that nutrients are along the way and we need to get started and ready for it. For example, if you can think of having something that’s bitter, and a great example is a dandelion leaf. If someone happens to have chewed on that, but any bitter flavor will do, what happens when you have the bitter flavor is that you immediately start to salivate more. That saliva then helps to break down carbohydrates, and it begins that whole digestive process. It creates this whole cascade of events that gets our digestive system up and moving: releases hydrochloric acid in the stomach, pancreatic enzymes are released, from that, peristalsis is stimulated. The bitter flavor also stimulates the release of bile from the gallbladder as well as the production of bile in the liver. The bitter taste is like 101 for our digestive system. Herbalists, we love to talk about how so many of our modern-day digestive issues could be traced back to a bitter deficiency syndrome, which is basically that we aren’t eating bitter things that helped to stimulate our appetite. Dandelion leaves are a great way to do that, as are the roots as I mentioned. This time of year with these greens in the springtime, those greens can be younger, fresh, and tender. They have a bitter taste, but it’s not overwhelming. It’s not take a bite and make a face kind of bitter. It’s more of a there’s kind of a spark to it almost. It’s definitely an enlivening taste because there is a little something there. Dandelion greens have been used as—some people call it—a bitter tonic but like a bitter springtime digestive aid for so many years. It’s a big tradition in Europe that goes back thousands of years undoubtedly. My husband, he says he remembers going out in the springtime with his mother to wild fields and harvesting dandelion leaves. That was just something you always did. Everybody knew to do that. His family is from the Alps, and in the Alps, they have really traditionally heavy foods in the wintertime: preserved meats, lots of cheeses, and potatoes—so really heavy foods. Eating bitters and drinking bitter drinks is a tradition that still lives on there. I can see why we just need to. You need that bitter oomph if you’re going to eat that really heavy food for a long period of time. This time of year, having those bitter greens is a great way to get digestion going. One of my favorite ways to do that is a dandelion pesto. You basically make a pesto-like you’d make a basil pesto but you make it with dandelions. It’s slightly bitter but you’ve added some lemon juice, some salt, some nuts, and it kind of tames it a little bit, but I often bring that to potlucks and share it with friends. It’s a great conversation starter because people are what is that? It’s always a crowd-pleaser, and you get to talk to people about how amazing dandelion is. Hopefully, if somebody’s there who is still spraying dandelions, you can open up a conversation that why people might want to stop doing that on so many different levels, but mainly the joy of having free food available to you like the dandelion pesto. The flowers, of course, are gorgeous too. They are high in lutein, beta carotene so they are also nutrient-dense. I didn’t mention that about the leaves, but the leaves are high in potassium, phosphorus, calcium, and also beta carotene. The leaves and roots are also really high in inulin, that prebiotic that is so wonderful for our healthy gut flora as well. There are so many reasons to enjoy those, but it’s the flowers, again, joyful. Those are edible too. I love this time of year when they’re so plentiful, I love adding them to salads. Yesterday I made a socca bread, which is chickpea flour-based bread. I decorated it with dandelion flowers, violet flowers, and dandelion leaves and made this pretty botanical scape on top of the bread. That was really fun. They’re joyful to add these. People make all sorts of things with the dandelion flowers too from jams, jellies, and all sorts of preserves as well.   [00:51:06] Ashley James: Really?   [00:51:07] Rosalee de la Foret: Yeah.   [00:51:09] Ashley James: That’s awesome. We can eat the flower, the leaves, and the root. What about the stem?   [00:51:14] Rosalee de la Foret: The stem is filled with this milky latex that is especially bitter, so it’s not very fun to eat, but that is a folkloric remedy for warts. You harvest that stem, and if you break off the stem, you’ll see it immediately exude this milky sap. It’s kind of sticky, and you apply that to warts every day. The thing with that is it has to be super consistent. I often recommend internal things as well, but even though we don’t want to eat the stem necessarily, it also offers some medicinal benefits which I just love that with dandelion. It is so incredibly generous. It’s beautiful, it’s joyful, its food, its medicine, its abundant. We could go on and on about dandelion.   [00:52:04] Ashley James: I’m so excited because my son loves eating everything in nature. Now I can tell him he can eat dandelion flowers. Are there any contraindications for eating dandelions at all that we should know about?   [00:52:16] Rosalee de la Foret: No, there’s not. The thing about the flowers is that the petals themselves are kind of sweet to blandish. Actually, a flower head is filled with a whole bunch of those actually—every little petal you see is an individual flower so it’s the flower head. Below it there’s these green parts, the bracts and the sepals, those are kind of bitter. You can eat them, they’re fine, but for a sensitive palate they might find that those green bits are too bitter, so you can separate those if you want. That’s really the only thing. Of course, because so many people do spray, you just want to make sure you’re harvesting from a good area, that’s another thing. One thing is that if you do eat a lot of the leaves and the roots, they are really high in inulin, which can cause some digestive discomfort if somebody eats a whole bunch of them. Also diets that are high in inulin can reduce blood sugar levels and insulin levels. If somebody’s type two diabetic and is needing to strictly monitor that, they would just want to keep that in mind, but of course, I’m in favor of using plant medicine instead of the medications when possible. That could be a way even to bring healthy healing foods into your life and reduce dependence on those things.   [00:53:42] Ashley James: Love it. Very cool. Inulin, I love that it helps with feeding the gut the food it needs to make healthy gut biome, and then it also helps with the blood sugar balance. You talked about how it’s so supportive—the roots—are so supportive to the liver. I used to have liver problems. I had an inflamed liver. My liver was sticking out. You could actually see my liver stick out. It was really bad. I felt a difference when I drank roasted dandelion root tea. I would drink that all the time and I really noticed a difference. I drink there’s some blend with burdock root and dandelion together, but I would actually feel a difference. My liver inflammation would go down drinking it all the time, so there was something to that. I thought that was really interesting. In my local grocery store, it’s a health food store/grocery store, they often sell, this time of year, wild-harvested dandelion leaves in the lettuce section. For people who can’t go out and harvest their own dandelion leaves, they actually sell it. I always think that’s interesting. Another reason not to spray beside the fact that people are giving themselves their dogs and their children cancer by spraying pesticides in their backyard to kill the beautiful dandelions, dandelions are great for supporting the bees. We’re at a very fragile point right now where if we lose our bees, we lose, I believe, a third of our food supply won’t be pollinated. The other third of our food chain is pollinated by bats. By continuing to spray and kill off weeds, we’re harming the pollinators. Thus, we’re going to end our own food supply. That is such a huge problem. By stopping spraying and embracing these beautiful weeds that are then supporting our pollinators, we’re supporting our own health and the ecology of the planet. There are many reasons why we should stop spraying and instead embrace it. These dandelions are beautiful, and if we see them as healing plants instead of as pests—healing for us and also supportive of the bees—then we’ll be changing our mindset for a holistic mindset. You mentioned earlier magic bullet—no one herb is a magic bullet. It’s a really interesting mindset. The mindset that there’s a magic bullet out there for something like just give me the prescription, give me the penicillin, just give me the magic bullet, and let me get back to my life. Let me just chemically alter my world to change my lawn, to change my body, just give me the magic bullet. That mindset was marketed to us for over 100 years. Before penicillin came out, people, when they were sick, would go take a month-long vacation if they could and go to a place of healing where they could rest and recover. They’d spend weeks or months recovering their health and using herbs. Penicillin came along and it was marketed as this magic bullet. Here are drugs. Drugs are the magic bullet. You don’t need to forage in the woods anymore, you don’t need to rest anymore, and you don’t need to take care of your body, do hydrotherapy, and take herbs and all that backwater stuff. Now we’ve got this modern stuff, so here, take this magic bullet. Over 100 years of marketing has led us, several generations, into this thinking that we can just sit back and wait to get sick and can then chemically alter our bodies or our reality with a magic bullet. That’s just not the case. I know our listeners agree with me that there’s no magic bullet, that that is simply a fantasy world that we’ve been marketed to, and that gaining and maintaining true health requires diligence, requires us taking action, and questioning the reality that we were raised in. Questioning this reality like why do you spray your lawn? Because my parents did because my neighbors do, and that’s just what we do. Let’s question that reality. Question the reality of why do you consider these weeds to be pests instead of herbs, right? The change starts with questioning the reality we have and the belief system we’ve been raised in. Instead, looking at the world through a different lens—through your lens, through the lens of how we can use nature around us to heal us. I’m really excited about your book because I think that teaching everyone how to forage healing foods and the craft their own herbal medicine is probably one of the most empowering things we can do right now, but it does start with changing our mindset. If people are still in the mindset of looking for the magic bullet to chemically alter their environment or their body, they’re not going to see the world filled with natural remedies. They’re going to see this world where they have to chemically alter it to their liking. We just have to start to shift our thinking, but I’d love for everyone to embrace weeds as herbs, respect them, try to foster them, and love them instead of spraying them. I’m excited that you brought that up. Tell us about some more really common wild herbs that are available that we may not even realize like dandelions, which are so powerful.   [01:00:13] Rosalee de la Foret: Before I move to the next herb, I loved everything you just said. Actually, I was nodding my head up and down a lot. One of the main themes in the book that was so important to my co-author, Emily and I, is the theme of recognizing interdependence, which is basically what we’re talking about right now. We mean that on so many different levels. A big part of the book is understanding how to forage for plants really ethically and sustainably so we can rely on future harvests and help to make the world around us a better place with more resilient plant populations. But recognizing the interdependence there of not only the pollinators, as you were talking about. Dandelion is a really fun way to observe all the different creatures that rely on the dandelions from the bees like you mentioned to ladybugs crawling around on them. There are also some surprising ones too. In addition to honeybees there’s also native bees, bee flies, and hoverflies. They all love the dandelions. Small birds including goldfinches and sparrows will eat the seeds. Mammals also forage for the dandelions: rabbits, groundhogs, pocket gophers, deer, elk, and even bears are known to eat dandelions. There’s so much going on with this. We are all on this circle together. As you said, we poison the earth around us, not only are there not dandelions to help us, but then there are the poisons that we’re dealing with our children, our animals, and then all of the creatures there. This is a really important message, and it is a mind shift on so many levels. That’s a big part of Wild Remedies too is that it’s not simply about using dandelion roots for your liver, which is powerful and so important, but also recognizing all of this. All of the interdependence and the reciprocity that we can give back to the world around us. That’s an important part of medicine, and a really important part of what we all need to hear right now because that mindset shift is one of the most crucial things in terms of overall healing for ourselves and in the planet as well. It was all beautifully said. Thank you for that. In terms of the other plants, we could talk about the one that comes to mind. First is plantain. Plantain is this weed that’s low growing to the earth, loves to grow on those disturbed soils, and we definitely think of it as a Band-Aid. It takes these downtrodden disturbed soils especially where people love to walk, and it’ll just thrive there. Plantain was actually the very first weed that I learned when I started on this journey. I was in a class, and I was learning about how to make lip balms and healing salves. The teacher started talking about plantain. I had lived in the Dominican Republic where we ate lots of plantains, the banana-like fruit. She started talking about plantain and how abundant it was. I was like wait, what? Plantain grows here? This tropical plant, I just couldn’t believe it. She’s like, yeah. I remember she said, “It’s right out on the driveway. It’s everywhere on the driveway.” I was like, “Really?” And she’s like, “Yeah, let’s go see.” So we went up to the driveway, checked it out, and then I got to know plantain, which is a plantago genus, not the plantain fruit. It’s not related to the banana.   [01:03:58] Ashley James: It’s not related at all? There’s no relation?   [01:04:01] Rosalee de la Foret: No relationship whatsoever.   [01:04:02] Ashley James: Of no relation.   [01:04:03] Rosalee de la Foret: Yeah. A completely different genus, red plantain the banana plantain.   [01:04:09] Ashley James: You were so disappointed.   [01:04:10] Rosalee de la Foret: Yeah. I definitely like okay. That was day one of my herbal learning experience. I started off as a complete newbie and learned about plantain. If people don’t know what I mean when I say plantain, I’m sure you would recognize it if I pointed it out, then you would probably start to see it everywhere.   [01:04:30] Ashley James: Oh yeah, oh yeah. I just searched for it—broadleaf plantain—and I’m like yeah, I pulled a few of those out of my garden for sure. I don’t know if you call Toronto Eastern Canada, I guess you’d consider that Eastern. I’m from the other side of North America, now I’m living just outside of Seattle in the Pacific Northwest. I remember there was a plant that looked just like this. It’s just these broad leaves that are all kind of sprouting out, and then there are these little things that shoot up and they have those seeds on them, right?   [01:05:11] Rosalee de la Foret: Yeah, they have a very prolific seed head. There are several different species and many of them are used interchangeably. The broadleaf is the one you’re looking at. There’s also a narrow-leafed one that’s very common, but they both have these very prominent parallel leaf veins that stick out. That’s an easy way to identify them, but plantain loves to grow where people walk. There are some native species here in North America, but most of what we see are weeds that were brought over from Europe. They quickly earned the name white man’s footstep because they would be found growing in the wagon’s trails as white people headed west. It’s very prolific, and as I said, it’ll grow and it’ll thrive in places that many plants would not. It’s an easy weed to dismiss. It’s common, it’s ubiquitous, but man, this thing is a powerful healer. Plantain is really powerful for acute situations as well as chronic situations. I love that because I just love how versatile it is. For acute situations, it’s very famous for helping with bee stings, or wasp stings, or any kind of insect stings. It can really soothe painful bites or sting, and it can work right away. Basically, what you do is you get a bee sting, wasp sting, whatever the case, and you harvest a leaf. You chew it up, make a mulch poultice out of it, and then place that over the sting. It will take out that sting and the pain immediately, and it will greatly reduce the redness and swelling. It is so amazing. I’ve used it like that many times, but it had been quite a few years since I used it. Just last summer, I got stung by a wasp. Gosh, that’s so painful. It was just one of those like aw. I didn’t realize what was happening, I figured it out and just headed over to the plantain patch, started putting a poultice on, and changed them out every 20 minutes. The pain relief was almost instantaneous and then the redness and swelling were not that bad for a wasp. That one is just a good one that everyone should know. It works great for kids. Not only is it like actually reducing their pain, but the idea of chewing up a leaf and putting it on your body, kids often like that and it distracts them from the situation as well. Once kids know it, man, I’ve been around so many kids that they know. They get stung and they’ll just go for the plantain leaf themselves. Lots of stories of kids even helping out their parents. Oh, you got stung. Let me find you a plantain leaf. Once you know how to recognize it it’s super easy to find. It’s so wonderful for that. Another great attribute it has for acute situations is it’s what we call a vulnerary herb, which is a wound-healing herb. It can promote the knitting of tissues together and the healing of tissues. We can use it on all sorts of things like cuts, scrapes, burns, and blisters. All of those things are great first aid application for that. Again, it can be used as a poultice. It can also be used as a salve, which is where you make a remedy where you infuse oil with plantain leaves, and then once that’s really well infused then you strain off the leaves and add a little beeswax and make a salve with it. It’s one of my most used salves because it’s great for just about anything. It’s a really powerful healer in that regard too, but as I mentioned, it’s also great for chronic conditions. That ability to heal skin and knit tissues back together is also really great for our digestive tract. I’m glad we’ve already talked about no silver bullet miracle cure with herbs because that’s definitely not how I teach about herbs, but they can be a powerful part of an overall healing process. I often recommend plantain for people who have suspicions of having a leaky gut or intestinal permeability. Again, we want to be using the nutrients, we want to be thinking about diet really carefully, but plantain can also be used as a way to help heal the digestive tract all the way through. You can also use it for any kind of inflammatory bowel disease. Basically, any kind of inflamed in tissues, whether that’s on the outside or through our digestive tract. Plantain is really fabulous for that. I like it for that as a tea. You drink a strong tea of the plantain. It’s like bathing all of your tissues in your digestive tract with these healing abilities. You can also use it as a mouth rinse and use it to heal mouth wounds like a canker sore, for example. For acid reflux where tissues are inflamed. Lots of ways to use that internally, but it’s one that I use all the time for that. Another way that I rely on plantain a lot is for coughs. Plantain works really well for a particular kind of cough, and that’s that dry hacking cough that can be really painful and just seem endless. I will often get this kind of cough at the end of a cold or flu. I lay down at night and I’m ready to drift off into sleep and then I’ll just start coughing and I can’t stop. Plantain is perfect for that kind of cough. It just soothes that coughing reflex, helps reduce the inflammation that’s going on there, and just stops that spasmodic coughing.  It’s also really great for coughing due to particles in the air like dust or wildfire smoke. When the wildfires have been bad and the smoke has been in the air really thick, I often rely on plantain as well as another plant, mullein, to help with that. Just restoring lung health and helping reduce that irritation that’s going on in the lungs. Plantain is one that just grows at our feet and is so easy to dismiss. It’s one of my most used herbs and has so many healing abilities within it.   [01:11:26] Ashley James: Very interesting. It’s one of those weeds I never thought was worth its time being in my garden. Now, boy am I wrong. That’s so cool. That’s so cool. What else? What other wild herbs/weeds? What weeds should we stop thinking of as weeds and start thinking of as herbs?   [01:11:56] Rosalee de la Foret: All of them. Absolutely all of them. Another one that comes to mind is mallow. Mallow is in the malva genus, and it also loves to grow in disturbed soils like all of these do. It can often be the bane of gardeners. Gardeners especially seem to hate this plant and want to pull it up, but it also is wonderful food, wonderful medicine. It is definitely seen as an invasive weed, but historically, it was a highly prized medicinal as well as food. It’s interesting how these things can change, but I’d rarely see a gardener who gives a whoop of gratitude when they see a mallow in their garden. It’s usually the other way around, but I still feel that big surge of gratitude when I see it because it is so generous in its food and medicine. When you make a tea out of mallow, The result is this thick—I hate to use the word slimy because people don’t really think like mmm, slimy I want some of that—but it is like this mucilaginous, slimy, gooey result is this tea. We call that in the herbal world it’s demulcent, but basically, all these mucilaginous properties have come out into the tea. It’s similar to aloe vera—the insides of aloe vera plant, it’s demulcent. Even if you just make up some oatmeal and it becomes kind of like goopy, that’s also demulcent quality. Basically, it’s a thick substance that’s very soothing and very cooling. I mentioned that plantain is great for those dry irritated coughs. I often combine it with mallow and mullein, as I also mentioned, but I often combine it with mallow because it has that additional softening, soothing, cooling, and moistening properties. I love to talk about coughs because I grew up thinking I have a cough, that’s bad, take cough syrup, okay. Basically, the cough syrup is relaxing those muscles and just stopping the cough from happening, but in herbalism, we really want to know what is the type of cough and then how can we help support the body’s healing process.  In this situation, if somebody is coughing because of irritation, because of dryness, but if we just stop the cough, then that means that the dryness is still continuing and that irritation is still continuing. Oftentimes, if there are dryness and irritation, there’s inflammation that’s still continuing. We can use herbs instead of just stopping the coughing reflex. We can use them to support soothing those tissues, relieving the irritation, relieving the dryness, and mallow is just so amazing for this. I use it, as I mentioned, for wildfire smoke in the air. Even just the dryness of summer or the dryness of winter when we have heating going on and drying the air. All of those things can bring dryness to the lungs, and mallow is a great way to just soothe them in a really gentle way. Any of that hot, dry, dusty, or smoky air, mallow is just amazing for that.  Another time we can have that dryness and irritation causing us problems is sore throats like with a cold or a flu symptom or just the dryness again of smoke or dry air. Again, that mallow is soothing, it’s moistening, and it has that thick substance to it and just can be really relieving of all that kind of irritation. Mallow, which is high in polysaccharides and those polysaccharides are known to have immunomodulating activity as well. They can help the body in strengthening the immune system, ward off infection. That’s all wonderful ways to use it. Historically, it was used for wounds and that’s a way we continue to use it today. It was famous historically for wounds. Today, I often use it not only externally but I mentioned plantain actually internally to heal digestive issues and mallow is really great for that as well, and I often combine the two of those. It makes great food if you’re familiar with mallow. If you aren’t and you’re listening to this, just do a browser search for mallow and find it.  Malva neglecta is one of the common ones, but there are species that grow all over. I bet you’ll recognize it because it’s so common. In the late summer, it produces these fruits. I was told to call them cheese wheels because they do look like a cheese wheel, but they’re really cool tasting. They’re really cooling, I should say, and they taste great. There is a crunch to them, and so they’re really fun to add to like salads. This is like a different textural kind of thing, but they are pretty tasty and delicious. I have a recipe in the book for roasted dandelion roots and those mallow cheese wheels. Roasting them with apples and cinnamon. It’s a fun wild food treat. Great food and medicine. Again, that soothing quality of the mallow is just so important. I love how that is as herbal medicine it’s just so practical. It’s like oh, I have heat and dryness. I’m going to take this thing that’s really cooling and soothing, and it works so well as that. Once you get used to using your medicine like that there’s just no going back. You’ll know that you need mallow in your life.   [01:17:29] Ashley James: I love it. I’m excited to learn more. There is a weed in my garden. There’s no chance this thing could be herbally helpful at all because I think the devil himself made this weed, creeping buttercup.   [01:17:46] Rosalee de la Foret: That family, the ranunculus family, they have some great medicinals in there.   [01:17:56] Ashley James: No way.   [01:17:58] Rosalee de la Foret: Within that family, but a lot of the buttercups aren’t known to be used medicinally. When they bloom early in the year that is pretty fun. I don’t know a lot of medicinal uses for that particular plant.   [01:18:15] Ashley James: Okay, so I’m just going to keep pulling it out of my garden.   [01:18:17] Rosalee de la Foret: Especially because I know where you live, it can really want to take over.   [01:18:22] Ashley James: It takes over. I’m constantly fighting it, but it’s worth it to be able to have our own garden filled with beautiful fruits and vegetables. It’s totally worth it. You’re less into gardening and more into wildcrafting. I was going to ask you a gardening question.   [01:18:42] Rosalee de la Foret: Actually, I have quite a big garden. I do.   [01:18:44] Ashley James: You do? Okay. How do you manage slugs? How do you get rid of slugs?   [01:18:48] Rosalee de la Foret: Here, I have the best secret for managing slugs.   [01:18:53] Ashley James: I thought you would.   [01:18:54] Rosalee de la Foret: Move to the other side of the mountains then you don’t get slugs.   [01:18:58] Ashley James: I was wondering if you had slugs in Eastern Washington. That’s so funny. When we first moved here, again, I’m from Toronto. I’m from the province of Ontario in Canada. Like Michigan and like the East Coast, we have really bad insects in the summertime. When we first moved here, there was no screen door on our balcony. I kept saying we need to get a screen if we’re ever going to open this door in the summertime we need to get a screen. My husband who’s from here was like what do you mean we need to get a screen? I’m freaking out thinking we’re going to be eaten alive by mosquitoes and black flies. Come spring and come summer, there were no mosquitoes. Rarely, once in a blue moon, I’ll see a mosquito and there are no black flies here.  I thought this is crazy because my entire existence I thought the planet was covered. I thought the whole northern hemisphere was covered in mosquitoes every year. I didn’t realize there was a region of the world where mosquitoes did not take over. Then out came the banana slugs and it was a particularly bad year and these things are like a foot long just sliding across the backyard. You could see them, they’re huge, huge slugs, and they were everywhere. I couldn’t walk barefoot because I’d step on one.   [01:20:20] Rosalee de la Foret: I was just going to say, they make you think twice about being barefoot.   [01:20:22] Ashley James: Worst sensation. I feel so guilty when I kill something, and I’m like oh my gosh, you’re walking through your backyard and it’s like stepping on a water balloon that’s slimy. You just feel so bad. Slugs are everywhere. I’m combating slugs. I think I’m going to spread diatomaceous earth. You live in eastern Washington so you don’t have a slug problem. That’s quite hilarious. It’s so funny. It’s so funny. That’s hilarious. I’ve got mushrooms growing in my garden, which means it’s healthy soil, good mycelial network in the soil, so that’s good. I don’t know anything about mushrooms though in terms of how to harvest them or which ones are safe so I don’t ever venture that way. But I did have a run-in with an herb that popped up in my garden. This is two years ago so I’m forgetting the name of it but it looked like this herb that I know is safe. I ate a bite of it and I’m like oh, it tastes just like licorice. I thought this is so cool, it’s growing in the back. It’s a wild herb. It’s just so neat. Then my hands started to shake. I’m like uh oh. I looked it up and I actually took a picture of it, sent it to my local gardening group, and they said oh that’s—and again, I’m forgetting the name of it but they’re like that’s a poisonous weed that will kill you. I thought oh my gosh. I called poison control. I didn’t die, obviously, I’m still here. It really snapped me back to the reality that we can’t just go around eating.  There’s a man in 2012 that died in Washington State from eating this weed, so we can’t just go around picking anything and eating it. We have to know. We have to just verify and know, but that snapped me back to reality like herbs can be, depending on which herb, it can be as dangerous as taking the wrong medicine, as taking the wrong drug. We just really want to make sure that we’re doing the right thing and identifying. That’s something you teach in your book, right? To identify the good ones and the bad ones, the poisonous ones and the not poisonous.   [01:22:44] Rosalee de la Foret: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought that up. That’s definitely step one is always be 100% sure of the plant you’re harvesting. In the book, we have beautiful botanical illustrations—watercolor illustrations—that we had done specifically for the book for each plant, but also in the beginning chapters, we talked a lot about plant ID and understanding botanical terms. We like to make it really fun for folks and so it starts with looking at botanical parts at your grocery store. You notice the plants in the produce section and learning to recognize plants is really just learning to see patterns. At first it can seem intimidating, but our minds are really great at recognizing patterns. Once you understand different leaf patterns they’ll just jump out at the landscape at you. The other thing is that I have always been taught this and I always continue to teach it. The most important plants to identify growing near you are the hazardous ones. That’s where you start when you learn how to do plant ID is you learn about potentially toxic plants. You learn them really well, and you learn how to ID them really well. It’s not like there are hundreds of them but there are some ones that are very, very important to know. Where I live, all around my house, I have death camas, which is aptly named. It’s one of the most poisonous plants in North America and can definitely cause instant, or I shouldn’t say instant, but very painful death.   [01:24:13] Ashley James: Wait, what’s it called again? I got to search this up. What’s it called?   [01:24:16] Rosalee de la Foret: Death camas.   [01:24:18] Ashley James: Death? The word death is in it?   [01:24:19] Rosalee de la Foret: Yeah, it’s very aptly named.   [01:24:21] Ashley James: Oh, look. I type in death and camas pops up.   [01:24:23] Rosalee de la Foret: There you go. It’s a very common plant. It grows here in eastern Washington. It grows all over though. Not as common where you live, but it’s not related to camas, but camas is a very important edible food here in Washington State. Before they flower they can look pretty similar so it’s a really important one to know. There’s all the poison hemlock, water hemlock. I wonder if that might have been what—   [01:24:47] Ashley James: That was poison hemlock. That was it.   [01:24:50] Rosalee de la Foret: Yeah, that one is very, very important to know to not eat. That plant family, the umbelliferae family, is a really good plant family to know to be able to differentiate them because there are some important medicinal and edibles like the carrots are in that same family, parsley is in that same family. You want to be able to recognize those. We have a whole section in the book where just getting to know your local potentially toxic plants. The thing is once you know those, it’s not like it makes every other plant safe, but there is an empowering sense to be like I know the potential hazards in my area. If you headed off into the woods you would want to know are there rattlesnakes there, should I prepare for ticks, or is this a flash flood area? Just all of those times when you would want to know what are the potential hazards around me? That’s one of the things you want to know. Again, for me, a really empowering thing to be able to look around the plants that grow around me, to be able to identify them, to know which ones are food and medicine, which ones are beautiful, which ones are potentially toxic, all of those things are so important. Another one that makes me think of is foxglove. Foxglove is a really powerful medicine that most people don’t use it as medicine as much anymore because it is very difficult to administer and can easily cause death. The heart drug, digitalis, is actually based on constituents found within foxglove. It’s a beautiful plant, grows prolifically where you are. It’s so much fun to enjoy it. We don’t really use it as medicine anymore, but when it’s young, it can look like mullein, which is a very safe medicinal plant. It can look like comfrey. But once you know the plant it’s not hard to tell them apart. It’s just in the beginning plants can look very similar before you really suss out their differences. You really want to know what you’re harvesting. Dandelion doesn’t have poisonous look-alikes, but it can have plants that really look like it. Once you know the secrets of dandelion, you’ll be able to tell two dandelions apart from other ones as well. Definitely very, very important. Extensively, in our book, we went through helping people to identify plants correctly. There are also great ways to learn plants local to you. Native Plant Societies in North America, Canada, and the United States. There are Native Plant Societies where you can meet up with other people who are plant geeks. You can find herbalists, other people doing plant walks, and interpretive centers. There are local field guides. There are lots of ways to learn plants. Obviously, I’m biased, but I find the whole process of getting to know plants just to be joyful—incredibly joyful to be out there listening to the birds, feeling the sun on your face, and getting to know all the creatures that go around you, but also incredibly power empowering. Again, when I go on a walk, I know all the plants that grow around me. I do know what I could eat right now, today. I could go out and make a meal from the plants that go around me. Not only a meal but those joyful remedies as well. The dandelion jelly, wild rose petal honey, or stinging nettle soup as you mentioned, which is one of my favorite wild food dishes as well. There’s so much joy out there and that’s what keeps bringing me back is that joy. We’ve been talking about how herbs are not a magic bullet for anything. It’s very popular within natural health as we have all these things that we should be doing. We should sleep well, we should exercise, and we should eat well. Obviously, I agree with all of that. Those are the foundations of our health, but if we leave joy out of that, it becomes a list of to-dos, and a list of should. It becomes less and less fun. For me, being with the wild plants and using Wild Remedies is incredibly joyful and it’s not a should, it’s an I get to. I get to go out into the forest today and spend time there to feel calm, feel more relaxed, enjoy all there is to offer, to harvest some nettles, to fill my basket, and appreciate all of the beauty and wonder out there. I get to bring them back to my kitchen. I get to make a nourishing meal. I get to enjoy this nourishing meal that is so tasty and delicious. That becomes the foundation of health. From that spring so many. From the nutrients of the nettle I have more energy that allows me to have more movement in my life. That increased movement allows me to rest more peacefully at night and get a better night’s sleep. As we talked about all of the other side effects of having more energy, to more luxurious hair, to better skin. We didn’t even talk about skin with nettle, but that’s another important gift of nettle is how it can help bring vibrant skin to the surface. All of these things build upon each other in beautiful ways, and again, I love that it is inspired by joy and beauty and less about shoulds or to-do lists.   [01:30:11] Ashley James: Very cool. Yeah, we can have so much fun with this. Make a game out of it. Especially if you have children, or if you have a husband or a partner, we can go make a game out of it and do some kind of wild foraging game like who can identify the most medicinal herbs or something like that, so we can make it fun. I’d like you to think about the last 24 hours, how many herbs have you used in your personal life in the last 24 hours?   [01:30:51] Rosalee de la Foret: Wow. That would be a lot especially with spring here. I’m constantly grazing outdoors. I already mentioned that last night I made socca bread and I put wild violets on it, dandelion flowers and leaves, and some other things from my garden like chives and pansies. I served that with a dandelion pesto, so I put that on top of it after it was eaten. As a drink, I had violet syrup that I just made. The violet is another plant we can go on and on about but the violets are just so amazing right now. They have this really incredible scent and flavor to them, so I made a syrup out of those. I made it by making a strong tea and adding a bit of honey to that just as a little preservative and then I use it up pretty quickly because I use little honey so it doesn’t have a long shelf life. But then I added that to sparkling water—a tablespoon of that to sparkling water. Last night, having that meal, I was pretty thrilled with myself actually because it was so beautiful and such a priceless thing. You can’t really buy violet syrup of that quality anyway. It’s all of my own making. I went out to the meadow, I harvested the violets, and I made the tea. The tea from purple violets is just so incredible. It’s a beautiful purple intense color. I had all those experiences and was able to enjoy that. Another plant that I have been enjoying a lot lately is hawthorn. Hawthorn is a plant that I regularly use and often widely recommend as well. It’s an amazing cardiovascular tonic, and there are so many benefits to hawthorn especially in regards to heart health. You don’t have to have heart disease to enjoy or benefit from hawthorn. I think of it as the kind people will say eat your carrots to have healthy eyes. It’s just something you do. I think of hawthorn as like heart disease is very prevalent, might as well enjoy hawthorn regularly. Hawthorn is really high in oxidants and flavonoids, modulates inflammation, which is often the underlying cause of what’s going on with heart disease. So many studies out there showing vast benefits of hawthorn both for prevention as well as for people who have moderate to severe symptoms of heart disease. The berries are just delicious, and so they’re really fun to add to your life. I love to make a vinegar extract from the hawthorn berries. In the fall, I harvest lots of the berries, fill them in a jar—fill up a jar with them—and then I fill that with vinegar. I often just use apple cider vinegar. Cover that with a lid that doesn’t have metal on it, and let that sit for a while. Sometimes I’ll add honey to that. A straight-up vinegar I’ll use as a base for salad dressing. Every time I’m eating a salad I’m getting the hawthorn in there. Then when I add honey to it, that makes what we call an oxymel, and that is a really delicious way. Again, I’ll add it to sparkling water and it’s this tangy, sweet, and sour drink. It’s this beautiful red color so it’s gorgeous. It’s really fun to make. It’s like a wild food mock soda, I guess. That’s another wonderful way. I’ve had lots of hawthorn in the past 24 hours as well. I’m about to go harvest the stinging nettle as I mentioned. I had a tea this morning that had oat straw, nettles, hawthorn, lemon balm, and lemon verbena in it. That’s what’s coming to mind right now in terms of wild foods. I‘m a big fan of herbs and spices and cooking. My husband made this breakfast today with lots of vegetables. He uses an amazing amount of spices there. This is a running joke. I asked him like, “This tastes so good, what spices did you put in here?” He says, “All of them.”   [01:35:30] Ashley James: Yes, I love it. I love it. You mentioned lip balm, salves, what other ways are herbs seeping into your life that are unexpected? Like for skincare, hair care that kind of thing.   [01:35:50] Rosalee de la Foret: I definitely love the lip balms and salves. I love infused oils actually. One of my favorite infused oils for this time of year is to infuse violet flowers and dandelion flowers into an oil. Both of those gently move lymph and just support lymphatic function. It’s a beautiful oil to make. You can add a little bit of essential oil to it once it’s done. That makes a great oil for all over the body but especially in places that are rich in lymphatic tissue, so it’s a wonderful breast massage oil just to keep breast tissues happy and healthy, axilla or armpit areas as well. That’s a lovely way. I make all sorts of infused oils throughout the year, I’m kind of famous for them especially amongst my friends who have already started making requests for the year.   [01:36:42] Ashley James: I love that you said that. I’m kind of famous. I’m kind of a big deal. I’m kind of famous with these oils. I’m like yeah, you are.   [01:36:50] Rosalee de la Foret: I’ve given away so many herbal medicines, and after a while, I began to realize that’s what my friends really wanted were these infused oils. Infused oils, which then can be made into facial creams, which I also get a lot of requests for. I infuse wild roses into oil, that makes a beautiful one. I grow holy basil in my garden, which is an amazing herb. That one I just started making infused oils with that recently, and I’ve already had many requests for it again this year, so lots of infused oils. There are so many applications for infused oils in terms of moisturizing your skin, obviously, but also, you can use it for pain relief. I do arnica infused oil, cottonwood bud infused oil, which is oh my gosh, that smells so good. Cottonwood bud oil is great for pain relief but also doubles as a perfume because it has such this heady lovely scent. I use herbs for shampoo. I like to infuse nutrient-rich herbs into tea, and then mix that with castile soap—makes a really great shampoo. That’s kind of an unexpected way. It can also be a body wash as well. Let’s see, what else? I love to do baths with plants. One of my favorite baths is to make a really strong chamomile tea, and by that I mean two cups of the flowers infused into a quart and a half of hot water for 20 minutes. You make this really strong tea, it’s super bright yellow. You strain off the chamomile flower so you’re just left with the tea, and you add that to bathwater. So profoundly relaxing especially if my shoulders get tense or just my whole body is tense. Obviously, the hot water is relaxing, just relaxing in the bathtub is relaxing, and then the addition of this really strong chamomile tea is also really lovely.   [01:39:00] Ashley James: There’s this Korean spa in Seattle I love going to, and it’s only for women. They call it The Naked Spa.   [01:39:11] Rosalee de la Foret: I’ve been to The Naked Spa.   [01:39:12] Ashley James: Okay, okay. You know what I’m talking about. You know I’m talking about. Oh man, I love it. Before you get into the hot tubs, you can pour this tea on you, and it’s so wonderful, so relaxing. It’s antimicrobial. I forget what herb that is.   [01:39:32] Rosalee de la Foret: They use mugwort in that.   [01:39:33] Ashley James: Mugwort, that’s right. So you can use mugwort as an antimicrobial to wash away fungus, virus, and all that stuff. In the light of COVID-19, have you changed any of your home remedies, or have you added anything in the last few months for your family?   [01:39:52] Rosalee de la Foret: Yeah, definitely. I feel like I haven’t been doing new things, but it’s been an inspiration, we could call it, to really double down on the things that we normally do. One thing, Ashley, is the hawthorn. As I mentioned, when something that’s coming out in the news a lot right now is that people with hypertension and heart disease are having more serious complications with COVID-19. They’re also seeing these issues with blood clotting coming out. I feel like things are changing so often so I don’t know. By the time this airs, there might be even more news or different news about it, but that’s what’s going on right now is there are lots of things about the blood clotting and involvement with cardiovascular disease. I don’t have those things but it made me think I might as well just enjoy hawthorn even more, and I’m in no way trying to insinuate that hawthorn is going to save anybody from COVID-19—the severity of the symptoms. However, what COVID-19 is showing us is that the healthier we are the better chance we have at either having asymptomatic, being asymptomatic, or having reduced symptoms. It’s a reminder to me how important hawthorn as well as all the lifestyle choices that go along with healthy cardiovascular function can be, but hawthorn is definitely showing up a lot in our lives right now because I think might as well support the heart as best as we can. Something I often feel, but again, especially inspired right now. Hawthorn being really important. We’ve been using a lot of teas that are wonderful for modulating immune system care. What I mean by modulate is there’s definitely herbs that we know that boost the immune system. You take it and then suddenly you have increased NK killer cell activity or increased macrophage activity. We know that we can boost the immune system in that way, but herbs are pretty amazing and that we’ve seen time and time again through studies because obviously, this is not something we can inherently know, but that herbs have a balancing effect. They act differently in somebody depending on what’s going on. When we talk about seasonal allergies, which can be an intense immune response, we can take these immunomodulating herbs. Boosting the immune system further, they actually modulate the response and help calm this excitability that we’re seeing. Anyway, these herbs are wonderfully modulating for the immune system and can help just support the immune system. Many of these herbs are tonic in that we take them for a long period of time. It’s not something like you take it and then suddenly you can leap buildings in a single bound or anything, but it’s something that you take daily over a long period of time to see the benefits. A big one for me is an astragalus. It’s a root that comes originally from China, but Western herbalists have adopted it widely because there’s really nothing else like it. It is nourishing, it’s sweet in flavor, it can be added to so many different things, and it’s just a wonderful way to support your immune system day in and day out. We’ve been using lots of astragalus in decoctions, which is simmering the root. With that, I often combine it with codonopsis. Both of these are really wonderful herbs for the lungs. They support and strengthen lung function, which seems to be also an important thing to be doing right now. Those three are at my big list. Sometimes, I taper off my vitamin D supplementation at this stage, but I haven’t spent that much time in the sun this spring and so I’ve kept up with vitamin D, which also seems to be very important. All those things that I already have naturally dialed in because it’s not my first day. I’ve had a serious chronic disease, and I’ve taken care of myself ever since. I think these things—we mention them, they’re so profoundly important to the best of our ability, to get that restful sleep, to get movement in our lives every day, and eat those nutrient-dense foods. As I’ve mentioned before—joy, I think that is such an important part of it too. I know that can be a hard thing right. So many of us are going through varying levels of sadness. Some of us are safe sheltering at home. Some of us are essential workers on the front line. There are so many things going on right now that the world’s topsy-turvy and it can be easy to be falling into anxiety and fear, which is only natural. But the more we can counteract that purposefully with joy the better. In whatever way we do that is a good thing. I love The Office, the TV show, so I’ve been watching an episode or two of that a day because it makes me laugh and it just takes my mind off things. Laughing is so important right now. In addition to my walks, that’s part of my daily therapy is to laugh in whatever way. Even the passing of the seasons, that is such a powerful thing for me too. It makes us see how precious life is to see the wildflowers come and go so quickly. We can’t hear the wildflowers are blooming, and they will soon be gone, and so it’s that reminder to be present and appreciating things day in and day out and just the joy that surrounds us when we really get to do that.  It takes away the monotony for me. I think of before when I lived in cities, actually Seattle, it was so easy to ignore the seasons with indoor air climate control and being able to get whatever vegetables I wanted whenever at the large grocery stores. It’s easy to just lose sense—it rains nine months out of the year. It can be monotonous in some ways, but when we tap into the seasons, there’s so much richness there. Seeing what birds are coming and going, being in tune with the seasons, recognizing those differences, how slight, seeing the plants come and go—it’s all a beautiful thing.   [01:46:21] Ashley James: I love it. I’ve had several expert guests on this show about how to get rid of parasites. It’s really interesting that we, in our modern age, believe that we’re infallible to parasites because we’re humans, not animals. We live in houses, not in woods, and so of course, we don’t have parasites. Meanwhile, one in three people has a parasitic infection and don’t know it. One of the experts I interviewed, Dr. Jay Davidson, said that our ancestors, even just our grandparents our great-grandparents look 100 years ago, we would regularly deworm ourselves every year with the same herbs that we would give our cattle. Farmers would take the right doses but take the similar deworming herbs that they would give the animals because they knew we needed to cleanse our body. That was something that we did through trial and error for thousands of years is take herbs and take certain foods that help to remove the parasites from our body. What wild herbs do you take to prevent parasitic infection?   [01:47:42] Rosalee de la Foret: I can’t say that I really take herbs with that intention, but those bitter herbs that I mentioned before or just bitter in that sense is widely used for getting rid of any unwanted creatures growing down there in our bowels. That bitter flavor is something that, I mentioned, when we have a little bit of bitter, it can be enlivening and bring a spark. When you get intensely bitter things, it’s just as bad to us as it is to parasites or whatever. That is the idea, by having these bitter foods, it’s basically sending out a signal like this is not a good place to call home. You want to leave now. Those plants are widely used for that. We call them vermifuge herbs or vermicidal herbs, but it’s rare that we use herbs necessarily to kill. If they kill parasites, then it’s going to be very difficult for our own bodies to handle it, so it can be on that toxic scale. But we can use them to basically show them the door like all right, you don’t want to be here anymore. Those bitter herbs are really important for that. One of the most famous for this is gentian root. That’s one that doesn’t grow here. I really love to use the herbs that grow around me, but I did fall in love with gentian root. It comes from the Alps in France where my husband’s from, and I love to visit it there. It has been a bit over-harvested, so now I only get cultivated sources of it. You could call it a disastrously bitter herb. It’s not pleasant in any way, shape, or form. In terms of its bitter flavor at the very intense, but widely effective. You could take it in a capsule as a way to avoid taking that super bitter flavor.  One thing I like to do is make my own herbal, I call herbal pastille after the French word, which is basically like an herbal pill. You basically take powdered herbs and mix them into a little ball and then add just a bit of honey to hold it together. Those bitter digestive pills you know can be used for digestion, but again, those bitter flavors are not loved by parasites. So gentian often makes up a big part of that.   [01:50:18] Ashley James: Very interesting. One of the herbs that is relatively safe for us, but not safe for parasites, is mimosa pudica seed, and that’s from ayurvedic medicine. I was surprised to see a mimosa pudica tree growing out past Monroe, Washington. I think it was in Sultan, big beautiful tree. I thought it would only grow in India. Maybe there are different variations of it, but that’s one of the things that Dr. Jay Davidson talks about. As you said, certain ones are really harsh and can be harsh on our bodies as well as harsh on the parasites. We want to do everything we can right now to bolster our immune system and support the terrain of our body so we can have the best outcomes possible when we come in contact with any kind of virus or any kind of pathogen. You had mentioned violets a few times. Before we wrap up today’s interview, can you tell us about the medicinal properties of violets? Is this just the wild violet flower that you’ve been making these delicious teas out of?   [01:51:37] Rosalee de la Foret: Yeah. The violets I’ve been using are at a friend’s house. The story goes that she got a clump of violets from her friend 20 years ago and planted them in her garden. Now, she has like millions of violets. I mean it just covers the whole sidewalk there where she lives. It was several years ago that she just happened to mention. She has mentioned it offhandedly to me like I got all these violets. They just are invasive and they spread everywhere I was like what? Wait. Tell me more. Now, I go every spring and I get to harvest so many of them. Violets are beautiful plant medicine. You can use the leaves and flowers. The roots can be slightly amidic or make you want to throw up, so those have been used therapeutically in the past, but we don’t use them so much today. Mainly the leaves and the flowers. We talked about similarly how plantain and mallow especially have that soothing demulcent quality. That is also true of violets. When there are dryness and irritation, violets are really wonderful for that, so kind of the same thing. It’s kind of funny we talked about all these herbs that do that because there’s not a lot of soothing cooling herbs out there, we just happened to talk about them today. Violets are really great for that, great for the dry coughs. I mentioned that they do support lymphatic health. I think of our lymphatic system as this big waterway that’s running throughout our body. Just as rivers and streams can run smoothly or they become stagnant or swollen, same with lymphatic vessels. Violet helps keep things moving cleanly, clearly. Wild violets love to grow near running water. They will grow on string banks. I like how that it reminds me of how they can be used to keep our internal waterways running really well. Violets are used to break down hardened cysts especially chronic ones. I mentioned it can be used as a breast massage oil. It’s used for fibrocystic breasts. It’s all of those. Anytime there are hot conditions, especially hot dry situations like maybe a rash, it’s really great for moistening that, soothing that as well. Violet is lovely for the nervous system, it’s very calming.  Anytime there’s stress and panic, violets can be used to soothe and calm things. In Iran, they love violet medicine, and they use violets in really interesting ways that we don’t necessarily do in Western herbalism, but I just know from researching it. Now, I’m excited to try it out. There, they use violet for promoting sleep, for example. They use it specifically for people with insomnia, so that’s another way to use that. Part of the reason that violets can bring joy and help us be more calm is the medicine we make from violets is so profoundly beautiful. I mentioned, you harvest these especially the purple ones. You can use pretty much all violets in the same way, but the viola odorata, which has a beautiful scent to it. There are a couple other purple flowers that have the scent as well, but not all of them do. But if you can find the purple flowers that have the scent, it’s such a unique violet scent and you really cannot find that anywhere else except from the fresh flowers. That’s very hard to capture that for the long term. Anyway, you make a tea from that. The violet flowers are also used for litmus tests because they’re very sensitive to the pH of the water. When I make violet tea, it actually turns blue. It turns this deep dark sapphire blue. Then if I add just a little bit of lemon juice to it, I’m talking a couple of drops or so, then it turns into this brilliant purple like amethyst little purple or definitely gem-colored. That’s really fun to make medicine with that. I make mocktails with that. I made the syrup, he just made ice cream with it with coconut milk. It’s like a coconut milk ice cream with violet syrup. It’s beautiful. It turned out a pale color when you’re diluting it with all that coconut milk, but it was just really beautiful. The syrup, as I mentioned, you can drizzle that on whatever you want. I like to add just a little bit to water and drink it in that way. It’s beautiful but it’s also wonderful medicine as I mentioned, it’s great for moving the lymph and addressing stagnant lymph as well as for dry coughs too. Then the leaves are great food and medicine as well. Both flowers and the leaves make a wonderful tea, but you can take those young leaves and add them to your salads. They’re delicious. A bland taste and have a ton of flavor to them, but a great addition to salads as well.   [01:56:57] Ashley James: Very cool. So unlike drugs where most drugs people take because they’re already sick and then they get on a drug, some herbs you can take preventively like you can take as a supplement to feed the body more nourishment to support the body in being healthy. You can figure out how to get these wild herbs into your life every day to increase your vitamins and minerals and fight all the phytonutrients, anti-cancer, antioxidants. Then there are certain herbs that you can take when you have an acute situation. In fact, many drugs, pharmaceutical prescription drugs, are actually based on herbs. They figured out—I mean the most common one everyone knows about is aspirin. Aspirin is a pill, you can buy it in a store. You go to the pharmacy, you buy some aspirin, but aspirin is actually from willow bark. What’s really interesting is that if you take too much aspirin you can go blind, you can go deaf. I actually had a friend who had aspirin. He had a really bad toothache, and it was like a Friday night. It was so painful that he just started taking aspirin like crazy. By Sunday he was blind and deaf, and he was freaking out, obviously. He gave himself aspirin poisoning because he thought to himself aspirin is healthy because it’s natural, and therefore, I can just keep taking it like candy to get rid of this pain. He soon discovered you can’t. You can probably kill yourself if you take too much aspirin. What’s interesting is if someone were to take the willow bark and make a tea out of it or something and try to get the same medicinal properties, if you take too much of it, there are other compounds that would cause you to start throwing up, that would cause your body to reject. When we isolate something out of nature—nature has these fail-safes in place. So if you take too much of some herbs, not all, your body will reject it or your body will throw up and try to get rid of it because it’s too much like willow bark. But if we isolate it and make into a drug, then it actually becomes something that could kill us if we take too much of it. It’s interesting to see that in nature, there’s more of a balance. We want to make sure we know how much to take and how much not to take, and know what we should take what we shouldn’t take. Just like drugs, you want to have the same level of respect with herbs. But herbs have a lot more safety than many drugs do. I think it’s very interesting this whole world to dive into and to learn from. I know that my listeners will absolutely love learning from your latest book Wild Remedies: How to Forage Healing Foods and Craft Your Own Herbal Medicine. Now you’re giving away a copy of your book to the listeners. They can go to the Learn True Health Facebook group, and you’re going to be giving away a copy of your book, which is really exciting. Thank you so much for offering to give one of our listeners your book. I know that all of our listeners should go out and grab your book because now, the state parks in certain states are reopening. We’re going to have access again to nature, for those who didn’t. This will be such a fun thing to do for the whole family to go out and wild forage and discover this whole pharmacy in our backyard. It’s so beautiful what we can do. Again, with caution, with safety, and with education we can step forward in a very respectful manner into nature and find our remedies. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview, Rosalee?   [02:01:01] Rosalee de la Foret: I keep thinking about joy today. It is a powerful thing in these times to choose joy with all the uncertainty going around. I would like to leave by encouraging people to get outside and just to observe and experience what’s out there and be open to finding joy and happiness in the simplest of things. Watching a butterfly flutter away, listening to a songbird, feeling the sun the wind on our bodies. If you can get outside even for a little bit, lay on the lawn or anywhere and lay down and just feel the joy of being outside, the fresh air that’s there. I think that is some of the best medicine that we can find right now. The further we want to sink down into that—identifying plants, getting to know them, using them as our food and medicine—the deeper and more profound that joy becomes. It begins with that first step of just getting outside. That’s the step I’d encourage everyone to take.   [02:02:09] Ashley James: Beautiful. All the links to everything that Rosalee does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Rosalee de la Foret’s website is herbswithrosalee.com. You are welcome back on the show anytime. I know you have even more to teach us. We had this whole section planned out on people, plants, and energetics that I thought that was really fascinating. You teach people how they can understand their symptoms and their energy to pick out the right plants for them. I’d love to have you back on at some point to dive into that. I think the listeners would really enjoy that.   [02:02:52] Rosalee de la Foret: Yeah, that’d be fun. I’d really enjoy that as well. I really like this format that you have of allowing so much time to really sink into these conversations. I’ve been enjoying it while listening to your podcast and then to being a guest, it’s nice to be able to really talk about these things in depth.   [02:03:10] Ashley James: Yes, let’s go deep. It’s so funny when I first launched this show I got a negative review. They’re like this is too long. I’m like then don’t listen.   [02:03:19] Rosalee de la Foret: Yeah, it’s not for them.   [02:03:20] Ashley James: Then go listen to something shorter. This is not for people who want short podcasts. I want to go deep, I want to get lots of information, and I want to really get value. I’ve had listeners say sometimes it takes them a week to finish an episode but they’re so happy because they’ll always play it when they’re in the car. I had so many listeners say that an episode that really intrigues them they’ll listen two or three times and take notes. That’s when I knew I needed to transcribe the episodes, so we got a transcriptionist. We transcribe them so listeners don’t have to—I mean, you can take notes if you want to—but they can go to the learntruehealth.com website and they can read through the transcription to find, and we try to make them as accurate as possible. There’s always goof-ups in transcribing, which are comical, but they can go through and see things so they can reference what you said as well. It’s really exciting that my listeners love the deep long conversations where we get to go into all this wonderful information and learn so much. It’s like taking a college course from you. We just dived in and learned so much from you today, and I can’t wait to learn more from you. I can’t wait to get your book Wild Remedies. I know my listeners would love to get your book as well. Of course, having you back on the show. I can’t wait to dive into understanding more about how to identify what plants we should use for ourselves. That’s going to be a lot of fun. So yeah, please come back on the show.   [02:04:50] Rosalee de la Foret: Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Thanks, Ashley.   [02:04:51] Ashley James: If you enjoyed today’s episode and if the Learn True Health podcast makes a difference in your life, please consider joining my membership. For less than $10 a month you can support me to continue doing this podcast, and you can also support your health because I’ve made a membership site where I teach you amazing delicious healing recipes including a recipe I talked about today, the stinging nettle soup, which is so delicious. It’s the most delicious nettle soup I’ve ever had. That recipe, among many other delicious healing recipes, is in the Learn True Health Home Kitchen membership. So you’d benefit this podcast to continue to do the work that I do, and you benefit yourself and your family by joining the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen and give it a try. For under $10, you’d be getting access to all these great videos that I keep making for you every week with these amazingly delicious healing recipes. I keep saying the word delicious, but they are, they really are delicious and they’re healing foods. So it’s like this win-win situation. Help yourself, also help the podcast. I’d love to see you there. I’d love to support you in your health and healing success, and I can’t wait to see you there. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen and check it out. Thank you so much for being a listener of the Learn True Health podcast. I so appreciate you, and I hope you have an excellent rest of your day.     Get Connected with Rosalee dela Foret! Website – Herbs with Rosalee Facebook – Herbs With Rosalee Instagram – Rosalee dela Foret Twitter – Rosalee Foret   Books by Rosalee dela Foret Wild Remedies Alchemy of Herbs