Learn True Health with Ashley James

Troy's detox experement results: https://hhresearch.org/current-experiment Learn more about Sunlighten Saunas by listening to this interview with their founder, Connie Zack: https://www.learntruehealth.com/sunlighten-saunas   How To Eliminate Cancer-Causing Chemicals https://www.learntruehealth.com/cancer-causing-chemicals Highlights: Toxicants that bioaccumulate The body is not able to recognize the chemicals in our environment Activated charcoal and detoxification Gene expression Troy Reicherter’s experiments Fasting Re-feeding after the fast   Ever afraid to try fasting? In this episode you will learn about the benefits of fasting in detoxifying the body. Know what toxicants are and the damage they can do internally. Troy Reicherter will also share with us his fasting journey and reintroducing food after a long term fast.   Intro: Hello true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today we have a really interesting guest coming back on the show. In the last two years, he spent over $20,000 in lab tests to determine whether he was detoxing chemicals, like he calls them toxicants; artificial pesticides, you know, chemicals, environmental pollutants, basically, which are very hard to get out of the body – PCBs. These fat soluble toxins that accumulate in the body and that are now known to cause cancer once it reaches a certain threshold in the body. So in the last two years, he has done numerous things and experimented on himself. He’s done supplements, he did 109 sauna sessions, and several long water only fasts. Then he took his blood tests every six months to determine what works, what doesn’t work. And today, he’s here to share his results, his ongoing results, as he’s been on the show before, and he will come back every few years because he’s going to continue doing these experiments, and he has people who want to participate with him. So it’ll just keep growing into case studies. It’s amazing that no one around the world is doing this research. Because if you think about it, research dollars come from wanting to invent a medicine, right? Universities so far has been willing to experiment on how to detoxify the body naturally of these horrible chemicals that get accumulated in our body and cause disease and wreak havoc on our health. And so he’s basically the first person that he knows of, that is doing these types of experiments. So it’s really cool to learn from him today. One thing he mentions, because again, he did 109 sauna sessions, and tested his blood levels to see if it was working among all the other things he was doing. I want to let you know that my favorite sauna, and I’ve been using it with great results for the last year and a half. It has been the Sunlighten Sauna. I absolutely love it, I really noticed the difference.. And if you’ve been a longtime listener, you’ll know my story. I was having this toxic overload happen every time I went to lose weight. So as we you know, we store these toxins, these toxicants in our adipose tissue, and my liver was not able to handle it to manage it. And so anytime I went to lose weight, I would get very sick, my liver would become inflamed, I went and got liver tests and ultrasounds and blood tests and determined that it was a very, very angry liver, and my body would just become so sick that I would be almost bedridden from this toxic overload. So I got a sauna after being recommended by several Naturopaths that the best way to remove toxins from the body is to bypass the liver and the kidneys is through our skin. Our skin can sweat out even these fat soluble toxins. And so I’ve been using the Sunlighten Sauna successfully. I’ve been having amazing results. The first thing I noticed my skin became very soft. Because it has the anti aging properties. The Sunlighten Sauna, which is the three in one sauna has near mid and far infrared and these rays will stimulate collagen production. So it’s great for beautiful skin. But I noticed that I slept better, I had more mental clarity, I had more energy, I was so much more relaxed, and my body started to shed weight without having the toxic overload that I had before. So I’m very excited to tell you that I believe in the Sunlighten Sauna, it’s ultra low EMF, it is non toxic. It’s very easy to assemble. My husband did it single handedly. And so you can get the wooden one or you can get the one that is a solo system, which you’re able to put in your closet when you’re not using it. I recommend that you call Sunlighten and talk to them, see which unit is best for you. And make sure you get the Learn True Health listener discount, you get free shipping, that’s about $500 off because these units are quite heavy. So you get free shipping. And right now they’re giving us an additional… It’s hard to explain but it is very relaxing. It’s it’s a machine that they put in the sauna and it uses light and sound to turn on the healing response in the nervous system. And they’re finding it works really well with people with anxiety, high stress, and even post traumatic stress. So that is something that is wonderful that they’re gifting us as well. So give Sunlighten a call. Mention the Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James for those wonderful discounts. And if you have a Sunlighten Sauna and you’re having great results we want to share with me please feel free to email me ashley@learntruehealth.com, I’d love to hear your experiences. I’ve had dozens of listeners contact me and tell me that they’re having such wonderful results with it. And also because you can even sweat on lower temperatures. It’s great for kids, my back when he was three and now he’s four, he sits with me in the sauna till he’s ready to get out. I don’t keep him in there for a whole half an hour, but he will sweat in the sauna, which is so great to help the children to detox as well. Excellent. Will enjoy today’s show. As I know you will have yourself a fantastic day.     [6:10] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 369. Well, here we are in my backyard garden, sitting here with Troy Reicherter and we’ve had you on the show before you came over to my house for Episode 138. So listeners can go and check that out. And since then many things have happened. And I’m excited to uncover them here today. Welcome back to the show.     [6:45] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. Thanks, Ashley. Thanks for having me. It was two years ago, wonderful to be back.     [6:49] Ashley James: It’s amazing how time flies. It’s pretty crazy. But that was just two years ago. So, what interests me the most when I met you at the Unity Church, you were doing an experiment, you like doing experiments. Do you consider yourself a scientist?     [7:08] Troy Reicherter: Well, I have a master’s degree in traditional Chinese medicine. Technically, that’s a Master of Science degree. But no, I’m not really a career scientist or anything. I’m kind of a citizen scientist, if you want to put it anyway.     [7:23] Ashley James: I like that citizen scientist. So you were experimenting on a few things, you were looking to form enough people to come together in the Seattle area to pray and meditate on peace over the summer, two years ago to see if we could impact the amount of crime or the crime rate in the area. And you’ve also been experimenting for the last few years on fasting, water only fasting and testing your different levels of pollution, chemicals and pesticides that are really hard to get rid off, to see if you could use fasting and a clean diet and some supplements even talk about today to help to eliminate the body of heavy metals and pollution. And so now it’s been two years later, you have some remarkable information to share with us.     [8:20] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. Well, this experiment started back in 2015. When I had read a lot of articles about the things in the body, including heavy metals. I had to pick and choose what I could test for, I would have loved to have tested for heavy metals for flame retardants. But I finally had to narrow it down to two main things. So what I was testing for was pesticides. I think they measured 13 different kinds and then PCBs, of which there are I believe 207 different varieties. So it’s not exactly water only fasting, it’s a modified fasting, and I can describe the things that I did. And I started out just believing that there must be a way because mainstream medical science right now is telling people that there’s no known way, or no safe way to get these chemicals that do bio accumulate out of your blood. Now some chemicals don’t bio accumulate. And so like the phthalates, plastic softeners for example, within a few days they leave your system or the stuff that you get from those plastic water bottles or from receipts, you know.     [9:45] Ashley James: Bisphenol A?     [9:46] Troy Reicherter: Bisphenol A, yes. That leaves your body within a few days, depending on how it’s taken in, maybe a week. So some things do leave the body like arsenic, but then other things do bio accumulate like heavy metals, and DDT, PCBs. So those are the things I’m testing for, and decided to do this fast to see if I could get it out of the body. So that was my whole thesis is that there must be a way to do this. And actually, I am the first person to prove that this can be done. So this is pretty remarkable. Everybody said I was crazy to do it. Everybody said this, how is this going to work? These these things are so lipophilic. And that means that they bind with the fats in your body, and they’re just not going to be released. Because of my experience with fasting that goes back to 1993. I was just very convinced that when you’re fasting, so much of the fat is lost, and it’s throwing toxicants out into the body. And by the way, the word toxin is used by most people to describe these things. But that’s not actually correct. A toxin is actually a toxic substance, that’s made by a living organism. So like a spider’s venom, that’s a toxin. So I’m going to try to use the right word toxicant, which is either either an element like a heavy metal that’s toxic, or else a man made chemical. So these toxicants get thrown out into the blood and I was thinking they must be leaving the body at pretty large rate during a fast. So I was just sure that if we did this and measured, because these tests are very expensive. I’ve spent over $20,000 so far on the eight tests that I’ve done on my blood, and I could use some help pay for the rest. With the donations I have. I’ve set up a website and a nonprofit called Holistic Health Research. But these tests haven’t been done before, and the assumption was fasting wouldn’t work. So that’s what I was trying to prove. So in 2015, I began the whole thing with three-week fast. And you met me in 2017, I guess it was after my second fast. Yeah. So to go back to I guess, to just kind of recap what I knew then, when I saw you last time I had the results of the first four blood tests in. And they’re interesting, but they’re a little bit confusing. I discovered later a little bit misleading. Because what happens is more complicated than I realized. So my initial blood measurements for the PCBs was 71,000 parts per trillion. They give some of these numbers in parts per billion, and I’m adjusting by adding, you know, adding three zeros. So 71,000 parts per trillion, was actually much lower than what most people seem to get. The other results that I’ve seen, for people’s blood is usually much higher than that. There was a test in a family in Oakland back in 2005. And the littlest boy in the family, he had 355,000 parts per trillion, a little girl, I think she was like eight; 207,000 parts per trillion. And then dad had like 200,000 parts per trillion, mom was the lowest she was actually a little lower than me, 67,000 parts per trillion. Can you guess why the mother might have had the lowest rating?     [13:24] Ashley James: I’m gonna guess because she breastfed. And so she gave the toxins to her kids.     [13:28] Troy Reicherter: Exactly. Yeah, that’s the theory anyway. We don’t know what she had before that. But that’s the only known way right now that scientists or doctors will tell you to get rid of these things from your body is to have kids and to breastfeed. Which, of course, is horrible, right? I mean, who would want to do that? You’d rather keep it all yourself, or even intensify your own levels than to give it to your poor child. And what’s doubly worse is the kids are more vulnerable to these chemicals as they’re developing. So it may be that they’re 10 times more vulnerable, we don’t really have a way to gauge that yet, you’d have to do all kinds of experiments. That would be totally unethical. But the funny thing is, we’re doing these experiments on ourselves right now. And there is no known way besides that to get rid of this stuff. So, so these were my beginning levels, which were pretty low compared to other people, 71,000 parts per trillion for the PCBs. And then for DDT, it breaks down into a bunch of smaller groups of chemicals. And the largest group by far is called 44DDE. So it’s basically DDT with a slight change in its molecular structure. And my numbers there were not quite as high, it was 56,000 to start out with. Again, which is about like one quarter, or one fifth of what the average person seems to have. And I can only guess that’s because I’ve tried to eat vegetarian for a long time. Tried to eat organic for a long time. And I’ve done a lot of fasting in the past. So that’s my best guess as to why my numbers are lower than other people’s. Because these these toxicants – they definitely are higher in meat, especially seafood, and dairy products, for sure.     [15:13] Ashley James: Right. And the understanding is that when animals consume, so let’s think of a cow, a lot of people eat beef. We now raise corn to feed the cows. It actually really disagrees with with the cow’s stomach. Some people have even said cows are allergic to corn. And so then they have to be put on a lot of antibiotics because they constantly get infections. So they’re eating all this corn that we’ve raised. This is not organic, just talking about standard, you know, fast food, hamburger kind of meat. We raised this cow on the corn that is latent with pesticides and heavy metals. It’s all concentrated in their fat and their meat – significantly concentrated through a few years of eating pesticide latent corn. And then we slaughter that animal and turn it into a hamburger and you go through the drive-thru. And you’re eating that patty and the fat in that patty is concentrated pesticides. And so no wonder when we eat meat that we’re eating concentrated toxicants. We’re eating concentrated toxicants. We’re eating the flesh of animals, because we’ve been feeding them toxicant latent food for years.     [16:41] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, that’s right. I mean when you when you delve into the subject, you’ll really feel that we should take just a fraction of the money that we spend on the military or sports and do some real research into these things to find out how bad is it? What are the levels and all the foods that we eat and the animals and ourselves? What are the effects of these things on us? What can we do to avoid it? If every time you went to the store, there were numbers of PCBs and heavy metals printed on the food you bought. You think twice before you got that seafood. Because like the one of the articles that inspired me was the 2006 October National Geographic article about the levels of toxicity inside of a Bay Area reporter. And he just went out and had, was it swordfish, I think that he caught off the Golden Gate and his levels of some heavy metals doubled just from one meal. You know, so this is very dangerous stuff. But we don’t think about it. It’s not talked about much.     [17:49] Ashley James: You’re sharing with the numbers with us. I know they’re on your website too. What’s your website again?     [17:55] Troy Reicherter:  Well, there’s my author page is www.troyreicherter.net, and also there’s Holistic Health Research, it’s www.hhresearch.org.     [18:16] Ashley James: I’m going to make sure the links to everything you do are in the show notes of today’s podcast. But before we continue, I want to ask, in the last two years, I know you’re going to share with us your results of lowering these levels. Do you do feel a difference? Do you feel healthier? Can you noticeably say that since lowering your levels of these chemicals that there’s been a shift in your health or your life?     [18:46] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, you notice it most the first couple months after the fast, you just feel like Superman basically. I just turned 51. And I remember last year when I turned 50 and I did that fast. It was grueling. I did a 40-day fast last summer, but I could have gone for another 10 days. And then when it was over and I got back into the routine of eating again, slowly. Like I say, I mean your human growth hormone levels they’re just through the roof. For a man, they may be 22,000% higher than normal. So I really felt like I was 20 years old. Really.     [19:24] Ashley James: You look early 40s. You don’t look like you’re in your 50s. I’m sorry. You said that the human growth hormone in men after doing a fast is how much higher?     [19:36] Troy Reicherter: I’ve read that it can be up to 2000 times higher. For women I think the number was about 1300 percent higher, depends on the person I suppose. But that’s linked directly to testosterone and tissue repair, energy, vitality, all those things that make you youthful and feel good.     [19:58] Ashley James: In Episode 230. Interviewed Dr. Alan Goldhamer. The whole episodes about fasting. But he talks about on on day five of a water only fast, you have a huge spike in human growth hormone. And that is linked to preserving your muscle tissue. Because people are always afraid they’re going waste away, their muscles going to waste away. But the spike in human growth hormone preserves our muscles. So you can do extended fast and not have that loss of muscle mass.     [20:36] Troy Reicherter: Interesting. Yeah, I need to learn more about that as well. And I need to talk to him. So what I discovered, I’ll just quickly tell you what I learned up to the point where I was basically blind for two years where I didn’t have any results coming in because this laboratory that I send my blood samples to, like I say they they do them in large batches and it costs a fortune. So I had to wait a while. I did my first blood drawing in May of 2015, and had those numbers that I just gave you the 56,100 parts per trillion for the DDE and 71,000 for PCBs. Now when I got my results back, first I did two tests. And the second blood drawing was January of 2016. So seven months later, I had only a 12% drop for the DDE and I had actually a little increase in the PCBs. 71,000 is it? I can barely read it there, 900 I believe. By the way, all my results, I use a snipping tool and I took all of them and I put them on my website. So you can see what I see. You don’t have to go through something that I’ve typed up and perhaps you know, made some kind of typographical error on. I mean they are the original results, they send me Excel sheets, then I requested a printed version, and they got kind of irate about it because they don’t usually do that. And then they basically just printed me the same thing that they sent me. So there is no difference. There’s no difference between the report that I got on paper and the report that I got electronically. So what you’re seeing is really all there is. And so I was disappointed way back in 2016, that it hadn’t been a bigger drop. But I’ve learned a lot more in the meantime, which I’ll explain. So all I saw then was it a moderate drop of 12.48% for the for the DDE, an increase.     [22:35] Ashley James: Let me just clarify 12% drop from doing two fasts?     [22:40] Troy Reicherter: This was from just the the 21-day fast.     [22:42] Ashley James: So you do one 21 -day fast and you drop which chemical at 12%?     [22:47] Troy Reicherter: DDE dropped 12% after seven months. These these are blood lipid measurements, by the way. We measure the lipids in the blood, because if you measure the total blood volume, that is very dependent on how much water is in your system, so it throws the whole thing off. So blood lipids are pretty constant. There is a whole other aspect of this, which is the fact that your fatty tissues – we’re not testing. That would require something else, you’d have to do liposuction or something and decide where you’re going to do it, which part of the body. And then you know, it brings up a whole lot of questions as to how that would be accurate. I’d have to check with the company if they could do this. But if you wanted to know a person’s total body toxic load, you’d have to consider the blood lipids as well as adipose tissue. So that’s a really good question as to what’s still in there. However, this was what I did get, I got the 12% drop after seven months and a slight increase in PCBs, because I assumed you know, the fat cells are throwing out their toxicants into the bloodstream, and it was still elevated. Now remember, my experience at that time wasn’t just fasting. I was doing saunas. I did over 100 saunas, I believe 109 saunas, it’s all in my book in great detail. And there’s a case study online. But I was taking supplements, like 30 different supplements, they’re all in my case, study online, Sam E and everything I could think of to try to make more of the enzymes that would get those chemicals out of my body. So I was doing all kinds of stuff. And it’s all documented there. I was meditating on it, I was walking in a circle, because in Chinese medicine, they say that there’s a way to get rid of, expel bad things from your body by doing that I and I recorded all of that stuff. So, that was an unknown how much that did along with fasting itself. I was drinking pretty much pure water during the fast and taking those supplements, along with the vitamin. It’s all documented carefully. So I had hoped way back then that I was going to have this great drop and I’d be done with experiment. And then I suspected, I thought oh, I’ll get, I didn’t know what I get. But I was hoping for this huge drop. And then I could get some funding and do more experiments with simpler model so that we could really prove this intervention had this effect. So I realized I was going to have to go for at least another year. So I did not do a fast in the summer of 2016. I just kind of wanted to see whether or not the level would continue to drop on its own. I was thinking perhaps there would still be a spike in the toxicant levels in the blood. So I did a blood drawing and July 6 of 2016. And I didn’t get the results back till the next year. But that one was almost exactly the same level. So it was 49,100 parts per trillion for the DDE for January. And it was only 48,600 parts per trillion for that same chemical in July of that year of 2016. So almost no change at all. And then for the PCBs, there was a bigger shift. The PCBs had peaked after the fast at 71,900. And then they dropped down to 64,400. So from the baseline measurement, it was a 9.3% drop. But of course I didn’t have those results till the following year. Now in the summer of 2017 right before I met you last time I had done a 30 day fast. So yeah, let me see.So 30 day fast. But I had only had the results from prior to that fast. So in January of 2017, the toxicant levels for the DD dropped a bit. So they had leveled out and then they dropped a bit. But see, I had done one additional intervention. It was the one I wouldn’t tell you about last time because I wanted to see the results first. Do you remember what it was?     [27:21] Ashley James: Are you talking about the supplement?     [27:23] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, it was activated charcoal. So what happened was, I was troubling over my results, because I was disappointed that I didn’t have a greater drop. So in 2016, I went to the University of Washington, and I emailed all the professors of toxicology, and one person got back to me, a dean named Professor Eaton. So he met with me and he was saying, “Well, the reason why fasting doesn’t seem to work for this is because of the enterohepatic pathway.” And I only had basic physiology. So I didn’t really know what that was. So it turns out what’s happening is, inside your body, we talked already about how there’s some chemicals that can be removed from your body naturally. But then there’s others that bioaccumulate. Well, even the ones that bioaccumulate, like PCBs and DDE and PBDEs, all those things, your body is not blind to them. There are enzymes in your body that can detect these things. So what’s happening is, your body has enzymes, cytochrome P450 family, and specifically there’s one called P450 43A. It’s abbreviated to CYP3A4. And this enzyme, you can see if you type that number, and you can see a picture of it on the internet it looks this, it’s just a giant mess of proteins, just a big ball of proteins. It reminds me of the Borg spaceship in Star Trek the Next Generation. And so that thing, it’s the enzyme is like a biological machine, it goes around and it acts on the body, it speeds up or changes cellular processes in the body without being changed itself. And so it can recognize these chemicals that don’t belong. I don’t know how. But it can do that. When it finds one that doesn’t belong, it bonds it to hydrogen. And then it just kind of moves on and finds another one bonds into a hydrogen. So as these hydrogenated molecules are passing through the liver next time, the liver has special cells, they can sense them. And they use that hydrogen as like an anchor point. And they can grab onto it and bond them in with water or whatever is in the bile. So they put them into the bile, and it goes out the bile duct into the duodenum and into the small intestine. So the body has this amazing tool that almost none of us know about or think about to catch these molecules and get rid of them. Problem is, we didn’t evolve with these chemicals present. We evolved millions of years ago in Africa mostly, right? So everything that we encountered back then we had a pretty good way to get rid of, you know, the toxins of animals and plants and whatnot, that weren’t in such great amount that they killed us right away, right? But we’ve never seen these chemicals before. So even though our body can recognize them, in terms of these enzymes, the small intestine has no way of knowing what they are, it doesn’t have any detection system. So once they get into the small intestine, where all your food is passing through. The gates are open, it just comes right back into the body.     [30:37] Ashley James: So to recap what you’ve just said. Because it’s there’s a lot there, I think we really want to make sure that that it’s understood. It’s a lot for me too. So going back to the Borgh shaped enzyme, there’s this enzyme, and where does it come from? How does the body created it? Do you know?     [31:02] Troy Reicherter: Good question. I should look that up again. It may be partly the liver and then other places in the body, other special tissues that make it. But the main thing is that it’s there. It’s like a superhero that’s constantly on the lookout for these bad guys, and it catches them and it throws them out the door. But the problem is the doors a revolving door.     [31:23] Ashley James: Yeah, so I want to talk about that. So our body, like you’re saying, 100 or 200 years ago, we did not have any of these chemicals in our environment. But this is very, very new. Having PCBs, and all these all these things that we’re facing now, I think there’s something like 30,000 new chemicals every year being created and put into our environment, and our body just doesn’t recognize them. But this enzyme, when it senses something that’s not supposed to be there, so a toxin or toxicant, it will attach a hydrogen to it so that the liver can identify – it’s like tagging something and because all the blood is passing through the liver, and the liver goes, “Hey, you over there with that hydrogen, come over here, I gotta put you in the bile. You’re not supposed to be here.” And so it just knows. So it tags to this little really cool Borg like thing in our body is tagging all that stuff that we don’t want in our body with the hydrogen and the liver goes, “Okay, come on over here. We’re putting you in the bile.” And then because bile is meant to help emulsify fat so that we can digest it, but it’s also filled with toxins to get out of our body, including hormones as well. This is one thing for women, is that all the estrogen once the body is done with it, puts it in the bile to be eliminated. And so it breaks it down and puts it into like a form and puts it into the bile. So now it’s getting, like you said, excrete it into the duodenum to the rest of the small intestines and going to go into the big colon. And hopefully we’re going to have a bowel movement. And the problem is that bile is also a very precious substance. So the body will reabsorb as much of it as it can in order to reuse it. And thus, all the toxins that it was eliminating, are going to be reabsorbed because the body cannot tell the difference between the toxicants because we didn’t evolve with them, like you said. And so we need a way to bind in the colon, or in the intestines to bind. And I know, people who eat a very high fiber diet versus no fiber, so the standard American diet are even more toxic, because the fiber helps to bind I’ve heard especially if someone has constipation, that then the toxins will get absorbed quicker and for women will reabsorb the estrogens that have become unhealthy. They’re unhealthy levels of estrogen, that will reabsorb them. So we have to make sure that we’re not reabsorbing these chemicals. So you’ve you’ve started experimenting with activated charcoal in an effort to bind to the toxicants. And you got this idea from this professor.       [34:11] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, he didn’t mention that part of it. But he told me about the enteropathic pathway, which is like the circular thing going from the enzymes to the liver to the small intestine and right back into your blood. So then I immediately thought, “Okay, this seems like the logical weak link in the chain that maybe I can fix.” So I started thinking of what I could do to interrupt the enterohepatic pathway. I’ll call it EPI enterohepatic pathway interrupter. So I did a little research. And there’s a number of things out there, there’s some clays you could take that some people are saying will get rid of toxicants. Well, no one was talking about the enterohepatic pathway, though. It was known for quite some time that taking activated charcoal, which is an interesting product, it can come from different kinds of woods, coconut shells is one way, bamboo, all hardwoods, but it’s made in a very high temperature oven. And sometimes they use high pressure, high temperature steam. And it produces these tiny little granules that have incredible amounts of surface area. And so it’s not absorbing them, it’s ‘adsorbing’,  it’s adsorbing these little chemicals as it passes through. It’s been used in emergency rooms for people who have overdosed on drugs or alcohol, it will get a lot of things right out of your in your alimentary canal quickly. But again, no one that I saw on the internet was using activated charcoal for the purpose I was talking about. It’s kind of fashionable now to bake cakes or pies, or even put activated charcoal into drinks, you know, putting in all these food and drinks with the intent of getting rid of some of the toxicants that are in that food, it may do that too. But I think by far the largest amount you’re going to be finding is what’s coming out in the bile, my own suspicion, but tests will have to be done to really prove this. So after doing research, I started with the activated charcoal in 2016 in August. So from that point on, that was my main other intervention. And I didn’t get my results back from my January 2017 blood drawing. And I got those results back by the time I saw you. So, there was a drop in the DDE, it was about it was a little over 7% from the previous. So if you recall, the DDE had dropped 12% and then it had leveled off for two periods. And then it dropped about 7% down, it’s minus 20.68% from baseline – 44,500 after starting at 56,100. So it looked like a very clear step, as if it had if it had plateaued, leveled out and then dropped again. And for PCBs, it was an added drop, it went from 64,400 parts per trillion down to 59,700 parts per trillion. So it went from 9.3% drop from baseline to a 15.92% drop from baseline. So I couldn’t really tell as much with the PCBs since they had dropped for two periods in a row. But with the DDE, it appeared that it was the added intervention of the activated charcoal that was doing the trick. But there’s more on that later when I get to my next results. So then I was blind as to the results for two years, because I had to wait until I had four batches of my blood collected to send in for testing. So in the meantime, I did a 30-day fast in the summer of 2017, right before I met you. I started about the last week of school I think. I’m a teacher, so I try to time it around my summer break. And then I did a 40-day fast last year. That was really interesting. And you can see the YouTube videos from that. If you go to YouTube, it’s Holistic Health Research YouTube channel. I’ve got videos showing most of the days of the last fast. And right up till day 40 I was out and about doing things, shopping, able to function. And as I said, I really could have gone for another 10 days. I was getting pretty gaunt. It looks a little scary. But I felt like I could keep going. Yeah, you reach a point where you know what you’re doing. And it’s just mind over matter. As long as you’ve got fat to burn, you can keep going. There’s lots of prohibitions about fasting, I should say don’t go off half cocked, you always want to talk to your doctor first, you definitely want to be over 21 before you do any fast, read up on the subject, start small start with a two or three-day fast. I started with a two-day fast you can read about all this in my book. I think my book is a great place to start because I go through all of my experiences, as well as talking about the history of fasting, physiological research into fasting, scientific discoveries about the health benefits of fasting, I have references to all the other books that I’ve ever heard about fasting. So you can read those yourself to all the considerations you have to make before trying to fast, all my own experiences with problems that I had. It’s all in there. And at the moment it’s on Kindle for just $5.     [39:38] Ashley James: It’s nice.     [39:39] Troy Reicherter: Good introductory low price. So what I did for this period, since my thesis then was I was thinking that all those other interventions I’d done – the sauna, the supplements. I had no reason to believe that they worked at all. You know, so I thought I’ll simplify  the experiment from this point on and just restrict it to the fast which I just took some electrolytes and vitamins. I didn’t do all those other supplements to try to increase the enzyme levels, MSM and all those other things that you can take. They’re all listed on my case study, I think I had 30. But I didn’t do that this time around for the 30 and 40-day fast. I tried to keep it very simple, didn’t even do any saunas for a year and a half. And so I did blood drawings in June of 2017, December 2017, June 2018, December 2018, the first Saturday of those months. And I was hoping or I was expecting I guess, my hypothesis was based on all that I knew that I was going to see a big drop after the fast each time and then a smaller drop over the period when I just took the activated charcoal based on what I saw before because there was no big spike after a fast. There was a tiny little spike with the PCBs, if you recall, just like 1.27% the first time after the three week fast. And there was a drop of 12% with the DDE. So I was not expecting any spike after the fast. I thought it’ll be a big drop after the fast, little drop, big drop, little drop. I was hoping that all together it might wind up with a 90% drop.     [41:21] Ashley James: And during the fast you’re consuming the activated charcoal.     [41:25] Troy Reicherter: That’s right. Yeah, during the fast itself, I was taking activated charcoal. Another important point which I mentioned in my book, you have to do colonics if you’re going to do a fast of I would say over a week. I wouldn’t go more than a week without doing colonics and they’re easy. I use a Colima board and just follow the instructions. I would do it every other day. I used to try getting away with every fourth day. If you’re taking activated charcoal, that’s a really bad idea. Because the stuff, it accumulates down there and your large intestine very good at drawing things out. So basically, just imagine trying to pass charcoal briquettes kind of what you’re doing. And so you don’t want to do that, just every other day, I think is a good idea for for that. So yeah, I did. Because I was reasoning that the enzymes would be at an elevated state. When you stop eating and you start fasting, what happens, one of the many things that happens is your body stops producing digestive enzymes. And so all those little proteins that go to make enzymes, they get rearranged into different legos down there, and your body starts pumping out way more of those CYP3A4 to go and search and destroy and tag things for elimination and your liver is working overtime. It’s getting lots of energy to do this, you know, to filter through the blood more and get that stuff out through the bile. So there’s no food at all, your body’s kind of shut down that whole aspect of itself. And it’s just repairing things, all the cells are throwing out the toxicants for removal. So I thought that would be the perfect time – that time and then immediately after the fast. I was almost tempted to take an extra dose of the activated charcoal, but I just kept it the same every day for simplicity’s sake, because someone could always say, “Well, it wasn’t the fast that did it, it was the fact that you took more of the activated charcoal maybe.” So anyway, I didn’t know until this year in April, what effect any of this had. So what’s really funny is everything I expected was backwards. But it was actually better than I expected. So the big shock was the time period in early 2017 between January and June of 2017, I didn’t do any fasting. I took activated charcoal. But you see, I didn’t take that much of it because I was waiting for my results. I sent in the blood sample in January and I didn’t get the results back until March. So I took a break from everything, because I was really sick of taking all the supplements. And I didn’t know if they were working. And I just thought I’ll just wait and see what my results are. So I really didn’t take activated charcoal. I think I only took it March, April and May. So it’s only about three months of it. The exact dates are in the book, and in the case study. But I had no reason to believe there would be any drop at all, or just I thought maybe 3%, maybe 5%? No, it was a huge drop 59.71% drop over baseline. So it went from 44,500 down to 22,600. And so that was for the DDE. And then for the PCB, it’s the same thing, it went from 59,700 parts per trillion down to 30,500 parts per trillion, it was a 15.92% drop from baseline down to a 57.04% drop from baseline. So it was humongous. So the only way I can account for this after thinking about a lot is gene expression. So we know from test on by Valter Longo at USC and elsewhere that the gene expression accounts for almost everything in your body.     [45:24] Ashley James: You’re talking about epigenetics, the ability for genes to turn on and off, right?     [45:28] Troy Reicherter: Well, I don’t know epigenetic, I think that’s a slightly different definition, something beyond genetics. It’s something we don’t understand about genetics, that’s for sure. And as a history teacher, I like the analogy or just a story about how they’ve recently discovered that the base pattern of DNA that makes your hand, or my hand or a dog’s paw, or a fish’s fin is the same. It’s the same base pattern. And what’s really affecting this is the gene expression. There’s big huge parts of the genome that we don’t understand at all. We used to think it was like garbage DNA. Somehow something in there is sending a signal to these patterns to say switch on and off here, switch this on, switch this off. So it’s like, just imagine the same piece of music, winding up being all the music that we hear, but it’s the same on the sheet. And it all depends on how the conductor chooses to play it. That’s almost what’s really happening with our DNA.   [46:25] Ashley James: Right. We have all the same notes. And you could have Mozart or AC DC, and it’s just all the same notes.     [46:31] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, you could say it that way. Or like this, if I have the same recipe, and then just depending on which chef makes it, you know, it turns out to be all the different foods in the world. That’s kind of what’s happening. So we’re just at our infancy and understanding how gene expression works. But gene expression changes when you do most anything like if you stand in your head for a while your gene expression is going to change if you go hiking, get up and higher altitude flying an airplane, your gene expression changes. There were a couple of twins recently, there were one was in space and one was on the earth. And it was in the news that even a year after the one twin came back down, I’m not sure exactly how they can tell. But when they take your DNA out, they can analyze it, they can tell which genes are being expressed differently. And they said he is the same. And yet he’s not the same because it’s identical DNA, and yet it’s being expressed differently. So the only way I can explain that big drop is it’s not the activated charcoal alone doing that. Because I was taking activated charcoal during that time period, not for a very long time only maybe three months, like I said. So for less than the previous period in which there was a smaller drop. So I think what happens is, when you do an extended fast like I did – the 21-day fast or a longer one, you’re making the cell gates open to dump the toxicants into the bloodstream. And they’re not really going back to their default setting of collecting it back for at least two years it looks like, somewhere in that last six months. And I’m not even sure if that was going to be the bottom. I mean, if I hadn’t done anything else, maybe it would have kept on falling. I don’t know. So this is a huge question. And I think I’m the first person to discover this. Because no one else has done these kind of blood tests along with fast, right? So this is amazing to think that the body has this ability to do this. So many questions here about what did the activated charcoal do? What did the saunas do? What did the fasting do? What did these things in conjunction do? Okay, so the next big surprise, almost as big as the first one was the second one, you can see all this on my website, www.troyreicherter.net or www.hhresearch.org, all the graphs are there. So for the December 17 test, this is about six months after I did the 30 day fast.     [48:45] Ashley James: And just to clarify. So the next results that you’re going to give us, what did you do in those six months?     [48:55] Troy Reicherter: Right. So I tried to keep it simple. I tried to eat mostly vegan, although sometimes I fall off the wagon. But definitely vegetarian. And I just did the fast. I didn’t do any saunas. I didn’t do any of those supplements and none of those other fancy interventions that I did the first time, I didn’t meditate on it, I didn’t walk in a circle, and all those all those many, many things that I tried. I did acupressure. You can see all the list of the things that I tried, everything but the kitchen sink approach. I didn’t do that. So it was just the fast and then regular eating without any trouble all the way through.     [49:38] Ashley James: So it was six months?     [49:41] Troy Reicherter: I tried to do it. Yeah, exactly every six months. So it was like the first Saturday of June and December for two years.     [49:47] Ashley James: So for six months, there was no fasting it was just eating as clean as you could and some activated charcoal. But what you’re what you’re looking for is how does the body respond over time even six months after a fast?     [50:00] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. I had started the fast right after the previous blood test. So the previous one was the first Saturday of June. And it was later that month that I did that fast for 30 days. So the fast ended in July sometime. And then I had all those months. So here’s the funny part, based on my first fast back in 2015, I had no reason to believe there was going to be an elevation in the toxicants because I didn’t see it before. Well, this time I did see it. So it jumped up. So it went from 22,600 for the DDE parts per trillion, it jumped up to 34,200 parts per trillion for DDE. And for the PCBs – almost exactly the same thing. It jumped from 30,500 up to 51,900. So now, there was a spike. So the question is, was there a spike because I did a longer fast? Or probably more likely there had been a spike the first time back in 2015. But I didn’t see it because I did all those saunas, all the supplements and who knows what else? So to tease out what exactly is doing what will require a lot more experimentation. I mean, I did, I think it was 109 saunas. So when you think about it at the time, I was wondering, is this doing anything? I was hoping it was, but I think it was now, because I was just taking it for granted all the time. “Oh, there was no spike after the past.” I think there was a huge spike. But I reduced that all the way down through those other methods. And maybe the supplements had, maybe they had a huge effect. I can’t say for sure. But we won’t know unless we keep doing more experiments. It’s going to take a lot of people to experiment, and a lot of different places under a lot of different conditions and reproduce those experience before we really understand what’s doing what. But the way I looked at it was it’s a crash course, I had to figure out how to make those numbers go down as fast as they could and try everything I could. I mean, in this country, there’s over 4000 people every day that are being told they have cancer. And there’s over 500,000 people a year that are dying of cancer. And I can only imagine what it’s like. And if it were me, I would do everything I could, I would try everything I could to get rid of it. Or if I had a reason to believe I was at high risk, I would do everything I could to lower that risk. So I wouldn’t just try one intervention and wait 10 years and see what happened. And we can’t afford to just try one intervention at a time. I mean, sure, if you work in a big university, go ahead and do it that way. But since no one at big universities and institutions was doing this research in the first place, this is why I took it upon myself to do this. And they’re telling us that there’s no way to get these chemicals out of our body. So it is messy, it is complicated. It leaves a lot of questions unanswered. But the big, amazing thing is that I got these numbers to drop massively. And I’ve learned enough now to see that if you did these interventions within the first year and a half to two years, did them all up front, then within two years you’re going to see that adjustment, and then you’ll find out how much you got rid of. And I am doing another experiment right now with a friend. I wish I had 10 friends and I could afford to have 10 blood tests. But a friend of mine, he’s just he’s doing nothing different all year, except he’s taking activated charcoal. So six months out or a year out and God willing, we will do the follow up and see what his numbers look like. So of course, it’s only one person, and what we need our clinical trials to do, you know, for men, for women, for older for younger, all different kinds of people. And then we’ll get some real, real hard data that we can use because different people could react totally differently to these things depending on their their genetic makeup and whatnot in their environment. But I’m trying to find that out as well about the activated charcoal and what effect that has all by itself. But that was my second big shock. First of all, there was this huge drop when I didn’t really do much of anything except the activated charcoal when I wasn’t expecting. So as I said, everything was backwards, I thought there’d be a little drop, there was a huge drop, then I thought, oh, there won’t be a spike, there was a big spike, which leads me to believe there probably had been earlier. But the sauna’s probably were very effective, and maybe the supplements and maybe something else. I mean for all I know, maybe the acupressure acupuncture that I did, might have added another 10% on top of it. All these things need to be researched. So I think that’s the takeaway, I hope I can change culture to get people to start doing these things, and start researching these things and pushing other people to research these things. Because right now all the people with the big funding, they’re just, I don’t know what they’re doing. But they’re doing maybe drug tests, they’re doing anti cancer tests of this type, of that type. But this is your body’s main way to detoxify itself, heal itself and keep you from getting sick. And it’s being almost completely neglected, except for a few people out there that did you hear about every now and then. So okay, not to digress. But as I said everything after that was kind of backwards from what I expected. There was a there was there was a spike after the fast, then then the numbers dropped down to their lowest level but it wasn’t much lower than the June 2017, because it was still on the way back down. And obviously, you’re gonna have to wait a year and a half to two years after your last big fast to see that gene expression come to an end. Or you’re going to get your lowest reading, so it’s kind of frustrating, but you don’t see it right away. And now if we were doing like I said, the test right on the fat tissue itself, you will probably see a bigger drop right now before it readjusts and then you’d know, but that’s a whole nother kettle of fish. I didn’t start with that. I can’t jump into that now, because we don’t have a baseline measurement. I haven’t even talked to the lab to see if that’s possible, but I suppose it probably is. So then the numbers dropped down for the DDE. It spiked in December 2017 at 34,200 then it dropped all the way down to its lowest measurement of 22,000. And then the PCBs dropped down from a spiked high of 51,900 dropped down to 29,200. So this is the lowest measurement right there, was the measurement from one year ago before I started my 40-day fast. So remember I have these numbers in hand.     [56:35] Ashley James: Okay, got it. Let’s back up because I got a little confused there. So I want to make sure the listeners understand. So let’s, let’s tell it like a story. Because they can go look at the numbers, let’s tell it like a story. So the biggest drop that you had was after, I’m looking at the graph here that’s on your website. He’s showing me his laptop. We’re out in the garden sitting under a beautiful 10 by 10 tent that I once used with my husband to sell our handcrafted bat hoses at a farmers market 10 years ago. And it’s since been our our shelter, it’s our outdoor living room. So we’re in the outdoor living room, I buy the garden, and he’s showing me his laptop and I see this graph. And the graph is also on your website, which we’ll have the links to it in the show notes at www.learntruehealth.com. And here we have, I’m seeing the graph and it comes down and then the biggest drop is after – what did you do here to have the biggest drop?     [57:37] Troy Reicherter: Nothing. That was a surprise. I didn’t even take as much activated charcoal as I did the previous time, maybe only three months. And it was when I expected to have the least drop. I had the biggest drop. I think again, it was the gene expression coming to an end. That’s the only explanation I can think prior to this.     [57:52] Ashley James: But all the things you did prior, how many fasts were leading up to this?     [57:58] Troy Reicherter: Well, from beginning in 2015 till prior to the 30-day fast in 2017. I only did the one 21-day fast.     [58:06] Ashley James: So you did a one 21-day fast, a 109 saunas, took supplements, you meditated, locked in a circle, and colonics?     [58:16] Troy Reicherter: It was on the first six-month period.     [58:17] Ashley James: Okay, so you did a ton of stuff. And then you kept taking your blood every six months. So from here when you did all those things, how much time went by to the biggest drop?     [58:29] Troy Reicherter: About two years.     [58:30] Ashley James: Two years. Okay. So two years after the huge amount of detoxing, you spent a whole summer detoxing.     [58:36] Troy Reicherter: Activated charcoal began in August of 2016. And I’ve been doing it pretty much ever since except, as I said, I took a little break in 2017 because I was burned out. And I didn’t know what my test results were. I didn’t know if I was doing anything.     [58:51] Ashley James: You added the activated charcoal and you didn’t do much else and then you saw the sudden drop. But you really believe that that’s from the gene depression?     [59:00] Troy Reicherter:  It could be part of the activated charcoal definitely. But I took more activated charcoal in the previous period where there was a tiny little drop. So there’s something else going on. I think gene expression is…     [59:11] Ashley James: It makes sense. Because like you said, Yeah, you took activated charcoal, and you even stopped all those other things, and you weren’t doing much. And then you got the biggest drop, but you had done a bunch before. Saunas could change our genetic expression, and the fast can change our genetic expression. And so you’re looking at accumulation of all these things could have done it. So you’ve got this big drop and then six months later, it goes up a little bit. I mean, it’s not up like it was at the beginning, but it goes up a little bit. And then it comes back down. What happened here to have it come back down? What did you do in this six-month period?     [59:53] Troy Reicherter: Just the usual. There was no other special intervention. I think after the spike it just naturally starts to come back down.     [1:00:04] Ashley James: Why did it spike?     [1:00:05] Troy Reicherter: Because when you fast again, remember the fat cells are shrinking. And so they’re basically going into emergency starvation mode. So they’re throwing out everything that they don’t absolutely need. Your body is just conserving everything it can keep and it’s throwing away everything I can throw away, gobbling things up, catabolizing things, breaking them down and you know, your body has more enzymes to work on them, but they’re overwhelmed by the amount of toxicants being tossed out by the fat.     [1:00:34] Ashley James: So this spike right here in December 2017 was after a fast?     [1:00:39] Troy Reicherter: Yeah.     [1:00:39] Ashley James: And so you’re saying that it’s actually a good thing that you have a spike there, because your body was in the process of releasing the toxins?     [1:00:47] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. It would be wonderful if we could do this for every one of those chemicals out there. And also if we could do a separate test at each point in time from the fat cells themselves. So because you probably see the opposite. You know, if it goes up here, well, it’s probably because it just got dumped out from somewhere else where it’s mostly stored.     [1:01:07] Ashley James: Yeah. And so now in June of 2018, you have a drop again, what is this? Did you do a fast here?     [1:01:16] Troy Reicherter: The fast? There’s a tab at the top, indicating where the fast were.     [1:01:20] Ashley James: Oh, okay.     [1:01:21] Troy Reicherter: So this is between fasts, it appears that by a year later, that was June 2018, prior to the fast of 2018, it had gone back down slightly below the level from a year before.     [1:01:33] Ashley James: Now what I’m seeing here, I just realized, because you pointed out where the fasts are – I’m seeing that after every fast or at least after these fast, it looks like there’s a little bit of a spike, but it’s always lower. So it’s like constant, like little steps, but it’s constantly getting lower, which is cool.     [1:01:55] Troy Reicherter: That was my last big takeaway. So for the DDE, it went from 22,600 in June of 2017. Then after the after a 30-day fast, it spiked up to 34,200 in December, then it dropped back down all the way down to 22,000 and then after a 40-day fast. So this is a fast of an extra third in length, an extra 10 days, it spiked much less, it only spiked up from 22,000 up to 25,600. So you see, you would expect, if I had lots and lots and lots of fat reserves, or toxic reserves in my fat, like bottomless, you would expect a longer fast to make a higher spike. But the reverse was true, it was a lower spike. So that’s showing that I really am cleaning out the bottom of the barrel. And there’s going to be this huge, huge drop is going to follow almost certainly. I don’t know exactly how long since I did two fast within two years, or within one year, and I did a longer length of fasting. It may be the gene expression will take longer to go back to its default settings. I hope not. Because I’d really like to get the data out there. But I’m continuing to take blood measurements or blood samples, which I will send in when I get enough together for the lab to do it. And so I took blood in June of this year, I’ll take it in December, and then again next summer. I think looking at all these numbers, if a 21 – day fast caused about a 60% drop, then an additional 70 days of fasting, along with another two years of activated charcoal, I think we’re going to see probably greater than a 90% drop for both these chemicals. But we won’t know until we have the numbers. I mean these are not just speculation, these numbers are real from lab – an independent lab. They have no way of knowing what I’m doing. All they do is just do a mass spectrometer test, which is why it costs so much. You know, they’re testing individual molecules as they pass through and weighing them to tell you which one is what size and everything. And they couldn’t care less what I’m up to or what my results are, they’re just giving me the absolute fact on this. So I’m speculating that we’re going to have a greater than 90% drop in the end. It would have been nice if a 21-day fast all by itself had done that. But it obviously didn’t work out that easily. A 21-day fast plus all the other interventions did over two years make a 60% drop, which is pretty astonishing by itself. The two year delay was a big surprise. I in the beginning, was thinking I should try to test as soon after the fast as possible thinking, “Oh, I don’t want to contaminate myself by eating stuff.” I was completely wrong in that. And the activated charcoal has probably changed everything even with no other interventions, seeing a gradual decrease over time, if the theory is correct. Which we’re not sure of now, we can’t really be sure of anything. So like the January 2017 drop from 13.37% from baseline down to 20.68% from baseline, which I assumed had been due activated charcoal. I can’t make that assumption anymore, because it could very well have also been due to the change in gene expression. We don’t know. These things have to be done separately and repeated over and over by different people and then we’ll know more. So I do believe the activated charcoal is working. But I can’t say for sure from the data that I have proven that it is working. We can’t say for sure that my blood lipid levels have dropped a lot as far as my total body toxicity, that would require more testing.   [1:06:05] Ashley James: And you’ve got your friend who’s now just taking activated charcoal. So we’re going to figure out whether just activated charcoal alone is going to help. Now how much is he taking? I talked to poison control a few weeks ago about… and that’s a funny story for another time, but I talked to poison control and they said you’d have to take like a cup of it a day to actually absorb, it’s not like just take two capsules. It’s a significant amount of activated charcoal someone needs to take to absorb toxins. How much do you recommend people take? How did you figure out how much to take?   [1:06:45] Troy Reicherter: Well, first of all, poison control is dealing with someone who’s just massively adjusted something that’s about to kill them, right? So they’re giving them massive amounts to try to save them, that’s an emergency situation. What we’re talking about is over prolonged periods of time taking activated charcoal probably as directed, and trying to interrupt the enterohepatic pathway. So you can read my book about what we know about activated charcoal, you can do your own research, there are some downsides to it, it will interfere with certain drugs like birth control pills, things like that. Maybe headache medicine.     [1:07:23] Ashley James: Because it absorbs those toxins.     [1:07:25] Troy Reicherter: Right. It will absorb the toxicants that you don’t want, but it will also decrease the nutrients in your food, because some of those will get taken out, they won’t make it to your intestine.     [1:07:37] Ashley James: So you take it in between meals?     [1:07:39] Troy Reicherter: Personally I started out taking it kind of staggered throughout the day. And then after that I just simplified it and I take it with meals, or maybe right after a meal. The amounts I was taking in the types is kind of complicated to go into, you can read my book about my experiences. I tried to make my own capsules, I would not recommend doing that. The stuff is more powdery than you can believe. It gets in everything and you’re gonna have a hard time not breathing it in, just buy it already made, it’s way better. So I use different kinds. It’s all in my book. And one of the kinds I was using got discontinued. So I couldn’t take that even if I wanted to. Right now, the kind of that I believe my friend is taking, I think this is what we agreed on, is activated coconut charcoal. They’re 1200 milligrams per capsule. And it says to take two to three hours before a meal. And anyway, so I think he’s taking the recommended dosage. I’m pretty sure I took more than the recommended dosage myself because I was the guinea pig and I wasn’t too worried about it. I just wanted to get those levels down. It’s all in the book how much I took. But definitely there’s every reason to believe that it’s getting things out of your body. The question is, is there any harm in it? There’s some speculation that there may be some acrylamide in it. But from what I can tell the acrylamides are formed from incompletely carbonated substances like burnt toast, you know, meat burned on the grill, but you didn’t burn it completely. So those are cancer causing, very carcinogenic. So I think it’s probably not that way because these are baked at a very, very high temperature. And so I think it’s completely carbonized. That’s the whole point of it. Don’t try to substitute anything else for activated charcoal, it’s got to be real activated charcoal. It’s completely different from the kind of charcoal that we cook with. That’s a whole different.     [1:09:47] Ashley James: Don’t try to make your own activated charcoal with burnt toast.     [1:09:51] Troy Reicherter: Exactly. So I’ve had a few friends who I I asked about if they wanted to be my guinea pig and volunteer to do this. And they said no, not enough is known about activated charcoal. But I suspect that just eating falafel or hamburgers or french fries is probably way more dangerous for you than activated charcoal.     [1:10:09] Ashley James: I think it’s hilarious when people get freaky about supplements like a vitamin C. They just go, “Well, there’s not enough research.” And yet they don’t think twice about taking a pharmaceutical. No, no question about taking pharmaceutical. Just think of all the drugs that have been taken off the market for killing people, were all drugs that were first approved to be on the market and approved to be safe. So we have to like, really remember that. Yes, it is up to us to advocate for our health and to look into the research. Don’t go blindly taking drugs and don’t go blindly taking supplements. Do your Googling and look into it for yourself, you can look at NIH, you can see that there’s so many studies, I’m sure there’s so many studies about activated charcoal. There’s so many studies about many things that we can look into before we jump into it. But to just blindly go, “Well, there’s enough studies about this. So I’m just not going to do it.” But I’m sure that your same friends will go to the drugstore and take an Advil without questioning it.     [1:11:12] Troy Reicherter: Right. Yeah. And like I put in my book, those warnings with the drug commercials that we see on TV, they’re frightening. And yet they just say it as if, “Oh, it’s no problem. Maybe you know, you’ll die you bleed to death. Yeah, you might be suicidal and on and on.” And oh, but talk about fasting and people freak out. They just make it sound as if “Oh, it’s the end of the world you want me to die, I’m going to die.” You could die if you fasted long enough or in the wrong way, you could also die if you just walk across the street without looking, you know.     [1:11:45] Ashley James: Let’s talk a bit about fasting for those who’ve never done it. I’ve only done it for almost three years, like a 2.9-day fast. I haven’t gotten to three yet, and I want to do more. But one of my Naturopaths scared me, she goes, “My boyfriend in college, I had to take him to the hospital after five days because his electrolytes were off and I’d basically pick him up and carry him to the hospital.” So she was so afraid, she tried to talk me out of it or she basically said you need to find a different doctor to monitor you for your fast because I won’t do it. And that kind of put the fear of God into me, and I know fasting is healthy, but it’s also, we got to take precautions. So let’s talk to the people who’ve never done fasting. Give us some advice.     [1:12:35] Troy Reicherter: Well, I can’t give medical advice, per se.     [1:12:37] Ashley James: So maybe based on your experience.     [1:12:40] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. I just want to be careful how I phrase it. So well I I’m a historian and history teacher. And so I have known for a long time about all the fasting that has gone on throughout world history. And in my book there’s one section about a brief history of fasting where I give an overview of this. So I’ve known people have done enormously long fasts, I mean 40 days is like the gold standard. You know, the Pythagoreans used to do it. They say Moses did it. You know, Jesus did it. The Buddha did it. It’s on my website. And so I have always wanted to try a 40-day fast. Fear is a huge, huge part of it and not knowing what’s going to happen and the strangeness of it all. Plus the fact that, well, your body produces a chemical called ghrelin and ghrelin makes you hungry. And we’ve all had the experience of maybe going all day without eating. And at the end of the day, you’re irritable, you’re frustrated, you got a headache, you just feel like you’re going to die. And it’s like give me some food right now before I kill somebody.     [1:13:41] Ashley James: It’s called ‘hangry.’     [1:13:43] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, right. So we’ve all been there. And then people imagine, “Oh, my God, when you fast, it must be like that only worse.” Well, it’s not exactly. It depends on how much you had to eat the day before. There was one time when I I’ve had a huge meal. Probably shouldn’t have. But I had a huge meal before I believe it was the 2015 fast. I didn’t feel anything the whole next day, I wasn’t at least bit hungry. It wasn’t till the second day, that I started to even feel like hey, I’m hungry. But generally speaking, the first day after you don’t eat anything, you don’t feel very good. It’s like the experience we’ve all had of having to help someone move and there was nothing convenient, and you just don’t eat until really late. But it’s that next day after that usually is the worst day. Usually that’s when, I just refer to it as hitting the wall. This last time even though I did a 30-day fast two years ago, last year I did the 40-day fast and I still felt that way. Maybe it’s not going to be as bad as the first time you do it. The first time will be the worst time probably. But I honestly felt like someone had just hit me right in the head with a sledgehammer, just right between the eyes. And I don’t recall if I took anything for it. But I mostly just laid on the couch all day and just moan and groan because I felt horrible. But the day after that, it passes – ghrelin, your body basically says, “All right, you’re obviously not getting any food. So stop making this stuff.” It’s just like, you know, you get a bad injury and after a while it goes numb, because your body’s to stop sending that pain signal. So you stop feeling hungry in the ordinary sense. There’s still a certain sense that, “Hey, I should eat something.” But it’s not that urgent need that you’re used to. And I’m not going to say the rest of the fast is fun or easy. But it’s not nearly what you think it is. You feel euphoric sometimes, you feel light, it has to be built up too though. Like I said, begin with two days, or three days. I mean, if you’re going to go ahead and do two, why not do that extra third day, which feels a lot better than the second day. And that’s the day when your body’s really, I think getting the most work done to repair and rebuild and rejuvenate anyway. But I will just stick with that. What I did in Taiwan, I was reading a lot about fasting and I knew people that required me to fast before I went and did their meditation. So I tried to fast all by myself. And it was like abortive two-day fast and I thought I was going to die. Literally, I thought this is it. My parents are going to read about in the paper, where they’re going to get that call, “Your son died over here in this apartment in Taiwan.” What a bad way to go, right? Just you all alone. Scared to death, your hearts palpitating you’re thinking, you’ve never had that feeling of hitting the wall before and you’ve never gone for more than a day without eating. So fear is making all these hormones come out into your bloodstream and freak you out. But after that, I did another attempt and I made a three day fast. And I just did a whole bunch of three-day fast. I don’t remember how many, five or 10. I mean I did a lot of three-day fast before I dared to go for four and five days. And then you start to have some experience built up. You know what to expect. I think your body learns too. I can’t really explain how, but you feel like your body is just not panicked. Not just your mind, but your body kind of like, “Okay, I see what’s going on here.” And I think there’s a deep learning in the cells that takes place where you don’t feel that bad. You’re okay with it. Plus, you know, also the experience and the sense of not being freaked out. You start to really feel like you can do anything. You’re walking around after 10 days of not eating, 15 days. Last year, when I did my long fast, I went to a Vietnamese temple, I actually put that on my YouTube channel. And afterwards, I was talking to the monks and nuns and the person who had invited me to the temple told an elderly monk passing by that I hadn’t eaten for however many days – it was 27 days, he just laughed and shook his head. He said I don’t believe it. And I said, “Look at how thin I am.” So people even in traditional like that where fasting is a big part of what they do, they still don’t believe it. It’s like you can’t go that long. You can if you have the fat reserves that it takes. And you know, if you’ve checked with your doctor, of course, you’re not pregnant or expecting to be pregnant, you’re not breastfeeding, you’ve checked with all the contraindications that there could possibly be with your with your physician, definitely do that. And then take it slow. As I said, as long as you have fat to burn and you’re a healthy adult, you can keep going lot longer than you’d think. It’s a great feeling. It’s a good feeling to feel like, well, you almost feel like you’re in heaven or something. It’s like, whatever happens in the world around me doesn’t matter. Because I’m okay, I’m up on this other plane floating around doing things just the realm of pure energy. It’s a pretty cool experience, but it is grueling. I’m not saying it’s easy. I mean, 40 days, every day, it was like, “Oh my God, I’m only on day 25. I’m only on day 26.” Time seems to fly ordinarily. Like my summer is flying by this year. I can’t believe we’re almost halfway through the summer. But when you’re fasting, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s like it takes a long, long, long time to get to eating again. And you have to try really hard not to think about eating. It’s not easy. You know getting up, sometimes it’s hard, you have to really just get up slowly so you don’t get lightheaded. You’re not going to get much sleep or at least I don’t, a lot of insomnia, weakness, you have to really plan what you do, you can’t plan to be doing heavy labor, or running a marathon. Walking is pretty strenuous, you can do that. But I wouldn’t ride a bike up a hill at that time. If you can do that, more power to you. But I wouldn’t recommend planning on it. Just doing the fast by itself is grueling enough, it’s hard to take a lot of willpower. But once you’ve done it, I mean, I’ve never run a marathon. And I’ve never given birth, you know, I’ve never done those 24-hour training things they do in the army. I’ve heard people talk about it. I’ve never climbed Mount Everest. And fasting is kind of like that, I think. When you’re done with it, you feel like nothing. If I can do that I can do anything, nothing can faze me. And then of course, you know the great feeling that you get knowing that you’re detoxing. And a lot of health professionals like to say there’s no proof that any detox works, well check my numbers, check my website, because I can prove that it does work. Exactly which components of my plan work to what degree it still remains to be seen. But definitely, it is working. And I think fasting is the main component – supplements along with it, activated charcoal I believe are making a big difference as well. If I was doing this without fasting, I don’t think you’d see these drops at all. I have no reason to believe that. It’s a great feeling. When you’re doing it, there’s there’s moments of feeling great, there’s moments of feeling lousy. And when it’s all done, yeah, you feel much, much, much better in practically every way. And read my book about all the research into fasting. I mean, it’s one of the only ways known to grow new stem cells, to rejuvenate stem cells. Definitely, it’s been found to grow new brain cells in rats. So there’s a dispute now over the growing of brain cells, how much is really happening when you do other things, but I think fasting definitely appears to be doing that as well. HGH levels go up, all kinds of brain chemicals that stimulate your brain increases, it appears to be helping with increasing longevity and a decrease in pathology in every way across the board. Yeah.   [1:21:54] Ashley James: Yeah, Dr. Goldhamer has a fasting clinic and so he studied well over 30,000 people. And he’s been publishing but he doesn’t study what you’re studying, which is to see the decrease of these toxicants. But he’s studying like, whether cancer goes away and heart disease goes away, and diabetes goes away. And he’s published and he talks about this in Episode 230. He published this one woman came in with cancer and 30 days later didn’t have cancer anymore. But they’ve accumulated so much information about the benefits of water only fasting. And he says that on day three, something really amazing happens in the body, and you mentioned this, the body starts digesting its own pathological tissue. So the body starts digesting cancer and cysts, you know, ovarian cysts go away and scar tissue and just the not needed tissue in the body. And even on a cellular level, they’re seeing that the cells kind of clean up. So it’s like a house cleaning for the body. And then on day five is when they see the spiking human growth hormone and they see the spike in stem cells. So even in adults, which, you know after you’re about 24 years old, there’s very little stem cells in your body. But after a five-day fast, the body has a huge spike in stem cells. So by day three it starts cleaning up the junk and then by day five, it starts to regenerate new healthy tissue. I mean, that’s how you’d clean your house, right? First you take out the junk then you sort everything and clean it. So it’s like Marie Kondo for yourselves. We’re just cleaning everything and reorganizing everything and you’re seeing great results. And I love your first big result, which is, you did everything. And now you’re like, “Okay, what worked?” Right? And you published it in your book. Of course, they can go to your website to get the link to buy your book, of course, we’re gonna have the link to it as well, in the show notes. What’s the name of your book?     [1:24:09] Troy Reicherter: Detox Fast.     [1:24:10] Ashley James: Got it. So simple, easy to remember. You had mentioned the family that was back in 2005. Back in 2005, you mentioned a family that took all of their levels of, was it PCB?     [1:24:27] Troy Reicherter: They mentioned the PCB levels and also the PVDE levels, maybe some other things. It was an Oakland Tribune article.     [1:24:34] Ashley James: And I remember seeing that on Facebook. It’s kind of a video that circulated around or a story that circulated around. They didn’t do a fast though they just went organic, right? Do you remember the results from just going organic?     [1:24:49] Troy Reicherter: Well, I think they had been eating organic, basically, you know, shopping at Whole Foods just as a custom. And they didn’t do a before and after, they just did the one measurement just kind of to see. I think the reporter was Douglas Fisher, and they just got some grant money to just see what’s in people’s blood around here in the Bay Area, an average family.     [1:25:11] Ashley James: There’s a different story, I’ll see if I can find it. But there’s a different story of a family. It was like in the Midwest, and they went from eating the standard American diet too and they did a blood test. And then I guess a month later, a few months later, they are just eating organic, they saw a decrease, not levels, like you’re seeing with everything you’re doing. But they saw a decrease. And it’s substantial, I mean, we need to as a baseline, eat organic, it just makes sense that it’s so easy to choose the cheaper option, the conventional grapes versus the organic grapes, because you can’t see the chemicals, the toxicants you can’t see them, but they’re there. So we have to choose organic because if you choose the cheaper food, they call it conventionally grown, which is silly. Conventionally grown should be organic, because that’s what it already always has been. But if we choose the cheaper option, we’re paying in our health, we’re still paying. My husband said yesterday, there’s no free lunch, you can’t get a free lunch in life. You’re just robbing Peter to pay Paul. So we’ve got to choose organic. That’s the number one thing that we need to do every day.     [1:26:21] Troy Reicherter: Try to be vegetarian.     [1:26:22] Ashley James: And try to reduce or eliminate meat as much as possible. Because again, what’s contained in the meat is all the toxins that the animal ate, right? My husband who went vegan just overnight, he was the biggest meat lover to all of a sudden, completely vegan overnight, which surprised me. I came kicking and screaming into eating whole foods plant based, but he but he did it overnight. And he said you know pigs don’t sweat like you know, like a dog pants, right? But we sweat, at least we’re sweating out toxins, but pigs don’t. Pigs – they’ll store toxins much more in their meat. So just considering it for those who eat meat. If you’re going to eat meat, hopefully you can eat less of it or choose more vegetables, choose organic vegetables or choose organic, free range meat. But just know that in the food, there are these chemicals, right? And then how we can get rid of them is by reading your book and experimenting ourselves. Doing small fasts working up to maybe bigger fast, sauna, taking activated charcoal. I really like chlorella. Have you experimented with chlorella?     [1:27:38] Troy Reicherter: It was one of the things I took that first. Yeah, the first year yeah, it would be great if we could do tests on all the different chemicals that are in us because there are so many that we know are there. There were some other results that I got back that were interesting. There were seven pesticides that had blood lipid concentrations high enough that they gave me a before and an after number. And they are a little bit uncertain because they’re in such small amounts. When the lab gives you back the results, they put a little marker J next to it saying that it is basically an amount less than the lowest calibration equivalent. So this is the best they could do though with a mass spectrometer there was six of the seven that were measured all went down.     [1:28:22] Ashley James: And what are these?     [1:28:22] Troy Reicherter: So one was called nonachlor trans. So this was 8,910 parts per trillion in my initial measurement. And then in the June 2018 measurement, it was 4,250 parts per trillion. So that one decreased by 52%.     [1:28:40] Ashley James: What is it?     [1:28:41] Troy Reicherter: Oh, these are pesticides.     [1:28:42] Ashley James: Okay.     [1:28:43] Troy Reicherter: Six of seven different pesticides.I think they tested for 13. Some of them were in such small amounts that they just kind of said can’t even detect it, or don’t even know what to say.     [1:28:52] Ashley James: Is that before? Because you you pretty much always eat organic.     [1:28:58] Troy Reicherter: It’s complicated because when they do these tests, they have to have a – what do they call it? A lab blank. So you have to pay for it too, the same amount is for your blood. Suppose I had two samples there, there’ll be your blood before or your blood after. And then there’s a third thing that they have to test, which is a substance where they put in a known amount, so that they can use that to calibrate the machine, and you have to pay for that the same as for your blood. So that’s part of why the tests are so expensive. And it’s better to do bundles of four instead of bundles of two. You know, then you’re paying for five measurements and four of what you want, instead of paying for three, only to have what you want. So sometimes the lab blank amount determines the detectability amount. So it’s complicated. And these were the ones, going through the numbers that I thought were impressive. There was the nonachlor trans, which went down 52.54%, hexachlorobenzene – you might have heard of, this one started at 7,840 parts per trillion, and then its lowest was June 2018 – 3,250. So that’s a 58.54% decrease. Then there’s chlordane oxy, started at 3,380 parts per trillion and it went down to 1,460 parts per trillion in December of 2018 measurement. That’s a decrease of about 56.8%. The halogen went up a little bit, it started out at 2,920 and it was 3,000 in the end. Maybe because the spike last longer, maybe it has something to do with the way the enzyme receptors act on it. And then HCH beta started at 1,840. It went down to 573, so a 68.85% drop. Chlordane alpha cis started at 1,540 and it dropped down to 833 for a 45% drop. And then mirex started at 1,230 parts per trillion went down to 517 parts per trillion, 57.96% drop. So these are some of those pesticides whose residues are not only on the food, but just scattered throughout the whole world now in the dust and we breathe everything. They don’t break down, they don’t go away.     [1:31:28] Ashley James: So you eat primarily organic, but we’re still exposed to them. You’re saying it’s like through water and air and contamination of soil sometimes. And what about glyphosate? Did you test for that?     [1:31:41] Troy Reicherter: No, unfortunately. I do have quite a bit on that in my book. But glyphosate, it appears that its water soluble. So what everyone is saying, although I’d like to see more proof of this is that it does not bioaccumulate, but that it passes through your body quickly. Recently, there was a study done, you can find online down in Southern California, where they tested people in the 90s. And then again recently, and they were testing the urine. So it had gone up dramatically, dramatically over the last 20 years, because there’s so much more of it in the environment, apparently. But it seems to be that it’s more like the phthalates, it’s the plastic softener is that pass through your body in a short period of time. I did find some evidence online that that might not be entirely true. And glyphosate is just one of the ingredients in roundup, although that’s the main one. So there may be other things going on there, probably it’s a much more complicated story. It’s been implicated in non Hodgkin’s lymphoma, for sure. So it’s probably causing cancer, even though they’re still spraying it everywhere. I would love to see more testing on all kinds of things like that. And then like lawns, whenever you see a beautiful lawn with no weeds in it, almost certainly they’re putting down products that have 24D inside of it, which is one of the main ingredients in Agent Orange, you know, and if I said I’m going to come and spray Agent Orange on your lawn, you’d freak out. But if I say I’m going to use Scott’s organics and such as Scott, such and such product, and I have some of the product names listed in my book, then you’d say, “Oh, yeah, sure everyone’s doing that.” Why not? I want my lawn to look nice. I don’t want to go pull weeds, I’ll just put this down. And then all the things with leaves naturally just die. Well, they’re growing themselves to death because of this chemical, which is no good for people. And it’s been found in streams all over the place. It’s been proven that people who apply it, you know, it gets on the kids, because they play in the grass.     [1:31:55] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. And the pets.     [1:33:45] Troy Reicherter: Pets.     [1:33:45] Ashley James: We have a big spike in cancer for dogs. I think it was like one in two dogs get cancer. I heard some crazy number. But just think about it, your dog basically lives in your house almost all the time and then when it gets out, it’s running through pesticides.     [1:34:01] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, exactly. So there’s so much stuff out there that we don’t think about, it would be great to test for all of it. And I don’t know what levels we would see. I don’t know if anyone knows that. Like, I was testing these because they’re famous. And we know they’re in the body in large amounts. But it could be the 24D is in my blood lipids to a higher degree than then PCBs. I don’t know. It’s all around us. But it’s been noticed in Canada. I think almost 200 municipalities have outlawed it. Whereas here, they’re just spraying it and not thinking anything about it. And those are just a couple of examples.     [1:34:38] Ashley James: Yeah, I had Dr. Stephanie Seneff on my show a few times. She’s a PhD, MIT top research scientist. And her background is not in the body and understanding the body. But she understands how to look at research. She is just like seeing the matrix, right. And she can see all the data and be able to understand it. And so her and a bunch of other researchers have been looking at glyphosate and its correlation with other diseases, Well, it’s interesting, and she talks about this in our interviews that glyphosate binds to heavy metals, and will release the heavy metals. So let’s say mercury or aluminum, right, it’ll bind into aluminum, and then it’ll release the aluminum when there’s a pH change. So let’s say we eat the glyphosate because we’re eating the hamburger, right, and the cow ate glyphosate, because it was on his corn that he was fed. And so now we’re eating concentrated amounts of glyphosate, which is bound to heavy metals. It gets into our digestive tract, and now we’re ready to urinate it out. When blood changes to a different fluid -so cerebral spinal fluid, or when blood changes to urine, it changes pH. So they’re finding that glyphosate releases heavy metals in the brain, and heavy metals in the kidneys. And in Sri Lanka, they banned glyphosate in the rice paddies when enough of the farmers got kidney disease from it. And that’s because there’s accumulation of the heavy metals and the kidneys as the body was trying to expel the glyphosate. So it might be water soluble, but what it’s leaving behind are the heavy metals, it’s depositing them in the kidneys and the brain. So there’s a little tidbit of information about glyphosate and one of the many reasons why we should eat organic and also advocate for our neighbors, and our schools, golf courses near you, but all the properties near you to not use these chemicals.   You know, I wish we could create a movement where weeds are beautiful, you know. I mean, they’re beautiful flowers. They’re nice and yellow. You’re looking across my lawn, you probably see about a million tiny little Buttercup flowers, and you know they’re beautiful. Why can’t we just love weeds and not poison our body by poisoning our planet. You know, if we think about our planet, and our body are one, everything we’re doing to our planet we’re doing to our body. You know it’s amazing that we have the separation of church and state in our head, we have this amazing like idea that we are somehow completely separated from what we’re doing to our environment. It’s just crazy. It’s, we are poisoning ourselves by poisoning our environment. So I love the research you’re doing. I love your passion about it. I love that you are an educator and an explorer, and that you want to help just give this information to as many people as possible. So hopefully we can start to create a movement around it. I urge listeners to donate because you take all those donations, and you pay for these labs yourself on a teacher salary. So there’s a Donate button on your website. Right? Can you talk a bit about that?     [1:38:03] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, yeah, the money would all go, there’s no administrative costs. It’s just kind of a side project, there’s no staff or anything like that. So it’s not like giving to the Red Cross, or you don’t know how much of your money is actually going to get to where you want it to go. It all goes in, that’s all I would pay for is just for more research, you know, I’ve got my blood tests that I want to do. My friend, just one person also doing the activated charcoal only intervention. And I’m interested to do clinical trials with all different aspects of this, and set them up with advice from professors that they could help, make sure that I don’t make any mistakes. And not just for toxicity, but also all aspects of fasting and holistic health, including, I think heart disease is a huge killer. And I would be willing to bet you anything, based on everything that I know that if a person does extended fast, and they do a before and after coronary calcium scan, which is a lot cheaper than these blood tests I’m doing. I think they’re only $200 each. I’d like to get a group of people to volunteer to do some… someone who’s got like a number of 50. Mine was zero, by the way. I was going to do myself, but I was already zero. So I think the fasting has a lot to do with that. And of course eating vegetarian and everything.     [1:39:31] Ashley James: My husband just did one, you know, he’s been vegan for a year and a half. And his was 02. And we’re like, oh, this is great. It’s pretty awesome what you can transform with this natural living, right?     [1:39:47] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. So I would love to do those kinds of experiments and then get in the news more and get more exposure and have more people start to donate. So please, if you’re interested in this kind of thing, don’t just trust that the big institutions are going to do this kind of research, because they don’t seem to be that interested in it. So it a little bit goes a long way. I mean, I was able to come up with two different chemical panels on my blood for eight different points in time for just $20,000. So if people were to give a few hundred thousand dollars, we could do quite a bit more than that.   [1:40:25] Ashley James: Yeah, and start getting volunteers to work with you and do a bigger study.     [1:40:30] Troy Reicherter: Definitely, yeah. Not just one person, because there’s going to be some  kind of a spectrum out there of responses, you’re going to get to any intervention. So, you know, the more times you reproduce the experiment with different people, the better then you can really tell – how men do it, how women, how women react to these interventions, how older or younger people have different body types, and you name it. And then we can start to fine tune it and experiment with other things that may be going on in the body.     [1:40:57] Ashley James: So at the beginning, I asked you how you felt, like what the difference is? You said you felt like a superhero, like Superman after doing these fasts. But how do you feel like today, right now sitting here versus two years ago? You know, what’s your date? I mean, you were already healthy, right? So it’s not like a huge night and day, but you have significantly removed these toxicants from your body in the last two years. Do you notice a difference in the day to day quality of life for you?     [1:41:33] Troy Reicherter    I wish I could say yes, but I don’t know that. It’s that simple. I think what I would say is, I mean, I had been fasting for a long time, and I had been exercising and had been healthy. As you age, you start to notice aches and pains and maybe slowing down of energy. But I think that that’s happening at a much slower rate than it would be happening otherwise. And I think it’s not so much that, it’s just that I’m almost disappointed this summer that I don’t get to fast again.     [1:42:05] Ashley James: You could always just stop eating if you wanted to fast.     [1:42:08] Troy Reicherter: But that would throw off my experiment. Because you see I’m waiting. I’m going to wait a good two years from last year’s fast because I want to see those numbers drop. If I was to do it now, that would interfere with the gene expression and make a new spike. And you’d have to wait for all that to level out. So I can’t really do it.     [1:42:25] Ashley James: You’re making a sacrifice for us.     [1:42:27] Troy Reicherter: Well, not fasting is not exactly a sacrifice. But it’s just that I used to dread it. I mean, when I had to do that 21-day fast, I dreaded it and the 30 day fast. I really dreaded that. But then it got to be last year, and I was almost looking forward to that 40-day fast. And now I kind of feel like, “Hey, where’s my big long month of not eating?” I’m used to this now. And so it’s the first year and you know, for three years that I haven’t done a month or more of not eating. I have some Muslim friends. And when I hang out with them they do their Ramadan and you know I was doing my fast at the same time they were doing some of their Ramadan. And they were like, “So you’re eating at night, right?” I said no. Like, “Are you serious?” So they got quite a bit of respect for that. But of course, I was drinking all day, I’m drinking lots of water. But it’s like that. Even though it’s a it’s an ordeal, they look forward to it for the cleansing that they get from it and the spiritual satisfaction and I kind of miss it. I mean, I don’t know, it’s almost masochistic maybe. But but it’s pleasure and pain. It’s sometimes awful, but sometimes euphoric. And the whole process, you know, it’s just become a part of my life. And I think after this experiment is over, I might do a month a year of just no eating. I don’t know, because it feels so good. It feels so right.     [1:43:56] Ashley James: Yeah.     [1:43:57] Troy Reicherter: It’s not that everything changes for me and I was healthy before. It’s not like everything for me changed from night to day. But it could be that way for someone else who was pre diabetic and has all kinds of other issues going on. Definitely, it could make that kind of change for them. For me, it’s just been more of keeping things better than the average person, I guess. Yeah.     [1:44:23] Ashley James: And you’re preventing cancer, and other diseases from accumulated toxins.     [1:44:29] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, I like to think so. You know, scientists always say how do you know, where’s the evidence? So until we have a lot of people to do these tests, you get a number. Here’s that number 20 years later, but you know, 20 years later, how old will all of us be 20 years older, right? So we can’t always wait for all of that empirical data from all of these peer reviewed clinical trials to come out. Otherwise, it might be 100 years before scientists can agree, “Oh, this is a good thing for you.” In the meantime, we’re long gone, and our grandkids are alive, you know, or our great grandkids. So we have to make decisions based on the best evidence we have available right now. And a lot of times that flies in the face with what mainstream medical reputable people are saying, because they have to be careful of their reputation, and they don’t want to get sued. So they say what everyone else says, what seems to be safe, and they’re going to tell you fasting is dangerous. Don’t do that. How much training do they have in fasting? Zero, right. They’ve never done it. They’ve never seen anyone do it. They’ve never heard about it in med school. Of course, they’re going to say not to do it. But so that’s another caveat to the whole thing is pick a good doctor. I picked a doctor who’s into this kind of stuff. If you pick someone who’s not very open minded to it, you’re going to get told don’t do that. And, well, I’m not going to tell you to fast without talking to a doctor. But it’s up to you to choose a doctor. Just like choosing your own religion and choosing which church to go to, right? Choose a good doctor to go to. Well, I mean, if doctor says not to do it for a good reason, then yeah, if there’s something about your health, that definitely precludes fasting, then don’t do it. But if they’re just against it in general principle, then I’d say maybe you should shop around some more.   [1:46:13] Ashley James: You know, Dr. Alan Goldhamer, the fasting doctor. He has this story he tells about his mom. He got her to eat wholefoods, plant based no salt, sugar or oil years ago, and she tried to convince her friends to do it. And they all said she’s crazy and they kept eating the standard American diet. And now she’s, I think, gosh, she’s in her 90s for sure. And just doesn’t look like it. She looks like she’s in her 70s, she has energy like she’s in her 70s, she’s just running around, and super healthy. And she goes, you know, the worst part about this is, is that I can’t tell them, I told you so because they’re all dead.     [1:46:54] Troy Reicherter: That’s funny. That’s kind of how it is. Yeah, it’s like, if you wait till the end to tell someone that, then they’re not going to be there. So you have to be the one that does the right thing. Even though you get flack for it the whole time, you get told you’re crazy. And that’s another thing about fasting is if you choose to fast in a house where everyone else is dead set against it. And you go through that period of fear where you hit the wall, you’re going to be 10 times more scared. So if you choose to try to do this, after doing the research and checking with your doctor, it’s good to be surrounded by people that are supportive of what you’re doing.     [1:47:31] Ashley James: Yeah. Yeah.     [1:47:31] Troy Reicherter: Otherwise, it’s going to be very negative. Very scary. You’re probably going to get freaked out you’re never gonna try it again.     [1:47:36] Ashley James: Yeah, that’s why I like the True North Medical Center, which is Dr. Goldhamer’s place, because I think staying there’s like the cost of staying at a hotel. I think it’s something like $180 a night and includes all the lab tests, all the doctor’s visits, and they monitor you during your fast and then they help you refeed. That’s another thing before we wrap up the interview, how do you refeed safely?     [1:48:03] Troy Reicherter: Very stupidly, as you’ll see from my book. Yeah, I made some mistakes over the years. And and actually the worst mistake was last year after my 40-day fast. Yeah, it’s easy to sit back and say I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, this is the right way to do it. Even with all my experience, things come up and my son’s birthday comes up and we were taking a trip to Taiwan and so I was I was kind of in a hurry. And so it wasn’t that I ate too much, although I did. What really hurt me was too much salt, you have to be very careful about dry things, anything the least a bit spicy because your stomach lining is very thin. And as I learned to my pain and suffering, and a story about near death experience almost. Well, that wasn’t maybe that bad, but it it’s in my book. I ate, I forget how many days after I’d broken the fast but there was some chips that I bought. And I was stuck in traffic and I was really hungry and I had one and then next thing you know you’ve eaten half the bag. And later that day I had some Mexican food, some some salty foods. Well, when you finish it fast, basically, your body is holding on to any salt that it can. It’s just clinging onto it. And so when you stop eating your body stops producing insulin. But then you start eating again, it over produces because it hasn’t done it in a while. And that makes your body hold on to salt, like you wouldn’t believe. And the salt makes your body retain water. And so my feet started to swell up. And then my leg started to swell up. And if that had gone all the way up to my heart, well, yeah, I would have had to run to the emergency room. And the problem is you don’t notice it until too late. So it’s like hours and hours and hours after you’ve consumed the thing you start notice how it’s funny, my feet are a little bit swollen. And then and I had to get on a plane to go to Taiwan. So which is you know, you’re going to be immobile in a seat where people tend to get edema anyway. So it was a really bad, perfect storm. So be very, very, very careful about all of that. And that would be the gold standard, is to stay at a place like that where someone else will prepare your meals for you. Because I’m telling you, you think you have self control. And I have self control to do a 40-day fast. But it’s when you’re told you can eat but only this much.     [1:50:32] Ashley James: Yeah, the True North Medical Center, I have the printout. And they say like for every seven days you fasted you get one day of juicing. And then after that for every seven days you fasted, it was like one or two days of juicing and then one or two days of just soups. And then you do just raw vegetables. And then so it’s like this gradual process and it’s only certain kinds of vegetables. If you did a 40-days fast, you could spend like the next week, just just gently, slowly refeeding into it and they deliver the food to your room. So that you don’t have to go to  the cafeteria and then get tempted by the food. But that’s really important. The refeeding part is to be gentle and slow and have that level of self-control. And I love that you pointed out about salt. One thing that Dr. Goldhamer says is that you could quit salt after a fast because you have retrained your tongue, basically to taste salt. So now all of a sudden you eat some celery and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, the celery is so salty.” Or you just eat a salad with nothing on it, no dressing and you’re like bursting with flavors, because you’ve retrained your your tongue and your brain to sense the flavors in food that you never sensed before. So after a fast it’s like you get this reset, and all sudden food tastes amazing. You don’t add any seasoning to it. So he encourages people after a fast not have any salt in the house and don’t add salt to your food. Because you’ll be able to taste foods, I mean, no one can hear you’re nodding, but you’re nodding and smiling. Did you notice that after a fast the food tastes so much better?     [1:52:21] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, definitely. Your tongue is much more sensitive. If you just have a piece of bread, you can taste the sugar and the salt in the bread, you don’t have to put anything on it. I wish that I was as scientific as they are about breaking the fast. I I’ve had my own method, which is in the book, which is not advice to others, but just explanation of what I did and why and how it worked out for me and what I think for the future. I usually break it fast with a smoothie but a warm one, never cold. You know, that’s the Chinese medical thing, and then lots of soup, vegetable soup, I’d go very light on the seasonings. And then as far as the length for myself, I think my gut feeling was after this last time that I would basically take the length of time that I fasted in the future, cut it in half and add one day to it. So for a 40-day fast, I would take 21 days to get back to eating a normal meal. And then I divide that up into three parts where, you know, three different stages, stage one, stage two, stage three of equal length. Each one would be about a week long, if I was to do another 40-day fast, that would I think be very safe. And I don’t know if it would be as perfect. I’m sure a century from now, they’ll be so scientific about all of these things. They’ll know exactly what to do. And all kinds of new products will be available, but for myself doing it at home and not having someone else prepare things for me. That’s what I came up with for myself that I think will work well. And as I say, not not perfect by any means. Not something that won’t be changed in the future. But I wrote it down in the book, so I just had such a strong gut feeling that this is the way I will do it in the future. Even though I haven’t done it yet. I thought it would be important to mention to people that that’s what I’m telling myself for now. I should have done.     [1:54:18] Ashley James: Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?     [1:54:23] Troy Reicherter: Well, just to mention, you can read the case study online at www.hhresearch.org. But to really understand what it was all about in terms of the history of fasting, the physiology of fasting, scientific discoveries, about the health benefits of fasting, all the considerations you have to make before fasting, and then all of my experiences from my very first fast 1993 up till now including all the lessons I’ve learned the hard way, all the modifications I made in my fast, and then just what it’s like day to day, because I have a log for each one of the fasts, even going back to the fast in 2007 that I did – what it’s like every day, you know, from beginning to end, how much weight you lose, what you feel like, it’s a lot more than you can put into a simple case study. And then at the end of my book, there’s also a history of toxicity. It’s a brief history, but it’s everything that the average person needs to know. And there’s quite a few practical tips about avoiding toxins and toxicants in your daily life. So I think it’s a good place to start, that was kind of my whole intent is to take a person from zero to 100. In terms of their understanding of this, you know, you may know nothing about chemicals and how big they are, how they interact with your body and other chemicals, where they are. And by the time you’re done with my book, you’ll be at the cutting edge, you’ll be ready to read any other book, and you’ll be able to have a conversation with anybody about pretty much anything on this topic. And you’ll know things that very few people know about fasting.     [1:55:53] Ashley James: That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much for sitting with us here in the garden, in the backyard to discuss fasting. I’m very fascinated with it. And I love that you’re doing these labs to determine how fasting and all the other things you’re doing to detox is helping. And this hypothesis about gene expression is wonderful. So it’s great. And we’re going to continue to follow up with you and hopefully, listeners will donate to help pay for the labs. And if anyone’s super interested in working with you, they can contact you. I’ll have all the information in the show notes of today’s podcast where they can reach out to Troy and then get your book also so for only $5 so that they can be well informed about detoxing toxins and fasting. So wonderful having you here. Thanks for following up with us. I look forward to hearing more interesting information in the future as everything unfolds.     [1:56:57] Troy Reicherter: Oh, thank you so much, Ashley. You know, I did think of one last thing I should have mentioned is that while we’ve seen a 60% drop in the blood toxicant levels for these chemicals that we measured, and we might see a 90% drop later, that doesn’t necessarily equate to the percentage drop you’re going to have in your chances of getting cancer, because it would appear from talking to the professors at UDub, that the way it works with these chemicals is not like other ways like asbestos and other types of things that induce cancer. What seems to be happening is there’s a certain threshold that gets crossed. And if you’re if you’re across that threshold, then there’s a chain reaction starts in the body, which basically creates antigens that make a chain reaction that cause – it’s as if you got stung by a bee and some people just pull up the bee and they’re fine, other people are allergic to it, and then they’ll have an allergic reaction and they’ll be unable to breathe, right? So it’s basically your body’s overreaction to detecting the presence of these chemicals in the first place. So when they cross that threshold, that your body detects them, not the enzymes I’m talking about, but different enzymes, then that causes cancer. So it may be that even a slight decrease. If you cross that threshold and get below it, then it may be that your chances of getting cancer, because of these chemicals has gone from 100% to zero percent, just like that. It’s like a light switch. It’s either off or it’s on. So you get below that level and stay there. And as far as cancer goes, it would appear that you’re not going to get it. So again, this is like the only way right now that is known to do something that that we’ve been told up till now can’t be done to reduce the level of these chemicals that are giving people cancer. So if you are interested in this, and you want to give it a try, or just find out more about how you can reduce the levels of these toxicants in anyone in your family, especially, especially the unborn, the babies that are on the way, you know how you could maybe get rid of some of this if you’re a woman of that age, before you have your own child, that could be all the difference to save them from some kind of problem later on.     [1:59:18] Ashley James: Yeah.     [1:59:18] Troy Reicherter: So that’s the bottom line that I think is so important. So thank you so much for having me. It’s been wonderful.   —   Outro: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people?   You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out The Institute for Integrative Nutrition.   I just spent the last year in their health coaching certification program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition, but from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their lives and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health, I definitely recommend you check them out.   You can Google, Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call or you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in.   Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health Podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible.   I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program and I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are. getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic office, doctors offices.you can work in hospitals, you can work online through Skype and help people around the world. you can become an author. You can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. you can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success and their health goals.   There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach.   So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Mention my name, get the best deal. Give them a call and they;ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you.   Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month. So you’re gonna wanna call them now and check it out.   And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.   —   Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price?   For high quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to www.takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price.   That’s www.takeyoursupplements.com   Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.   Get Connected With Troy Reicherter! Website Facebook Twitter YouTube

Jacob's site: Shiftsportswellness.com The water filter that I love and believe that EVERYONE should have in their home and office: https://amzn.to/2XWElLe This water filter makes your water taste amazing so you will love drinking your 4 liters each day!   SomaTraining https://www.learntruehealth.com/somatraining   Highlights: What is ELDOA and knowing the basics of it Resolving symptoms using ELDOA How all elements in our body are all inter-connected that one symptom doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the root cause The complexity of the human body and tensegrity Stretches and specific techniques using ELDOA   Improve your mobility and unlock the symptoms that you’re feeling using Kinesiology by Jacob Schoen on today’s podcast. Know about positions to target specific functional units in your body by learning about ELDOA.    [00:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 368. How did you get on the podcast? Did he reached out to you or did you reached out to whom?   [00:19] Jacob Schoen: No. That’s a funny story. I was sitting in the living room and my mom came in and she showed me this post that Ben Greenfield had made on Facebook. She showed me this picture of Ben Greenfield hanging upside down on an inversion table. She had known that I was a fan of Ben’s since I don’t know, probably since I was 17 when I first got into triathlon because he had his book beyond training and he was on triathlon at that time. I watched all his videos online. Anyway, she showed me this picture of him hanging upside down talking about the benefits of traction whether be pulled up float to the head or different types of decompression for the spine or making you feel good just in general or anything like that. This is when I was really, really excited about the Eldoa and I still am but I was just new into it so I was really passionate about it. I decided to message him in Facebook. That’s really what I did. I messaged him and I was like, “Hey Ben, my name’s Jacob Shayne and I have these exercises that I’ve learned. They’re pretty uncommon and you’re a pretty uncommon person. I think you might really dig them. They’re pretty holistic. They’re pretty badass like I think you might really like this things. I’d be totally willing to show them to you if you’re willing to have me teach them to you.” He responded and the next day, I booked my plane ticket to go up to Washington like 2 or 3 weeks later. That’s where he lives in Washington state. I showed up at his house 3 weeks later and taught him exercise for 8 hours for the course of 3 days. Just really got immersed in how he lives up there and what he does, him and his whole family, if he’s listening to this “Man, you’re a beast. Good job for you and your kids and your wife you are an amazing group.” I was to go up there to spend time and just kind of live in the greenfield household and really dedicate myself to training him everyday as intensely and precisely as I could and all the exercises that I’ve learned up to that point just try to give the best impression that I could.   [02:19] Ashley James: That is so awesome and during the time that you were training him over the 3 days, was he recruiting you and that’s how you got in the show? After those 3 days then you sat down and did a podcast interview?   [02:35] Jacob Schoen: Right. The second one. After those 3 days, he was like, “Hey man, I really enjoyed what you did. I think the best way I could give your exposure, the best way we can let people know about this is through the podcast.” He was like, “Let’s set up a time to get on skype and make that happen” that’s exactly what we did. I think maybe 6 weeks later, we are on Skype and we got into it. It’s interesting because there’s just like this person I had seen his books, he’s not famous like Brad Pitt famous but in the world of training and more alternative types of ways of thinking in health sphere he’s kind of the man. To be in his show and to be able to talk to him and really to be able to train him like that was pretty awesome for me. That was a definitely an experience I would never forget anytime soon. It’s still kind of unreal people ask me just like you did, “how did you get up on the show” it’s just like, “Well, I just messaged him.” It’s like a lesson of some way to if you just put yourself out there and say, “Hey, what’s the worst thing that could happen” he says, “No, or the best thing that could happen you know you get on his podcast and a whole bunch of other doors of opportunity open for you. There’s a good lesson to learn from that for sure.   [03:51] Ashley James: That is so cool. We have with us, Jacob Schoen. I was really excited to interview him especially because he was on the Ben Greenfield podcast. Of course, most people know he’s a really cool health podcast. People have told me I’m like the female version of him. I thought that was pretty neat. He was homeschooled. I’m homeschooling. I’m going to homeschool our 4-year-old. In fact, were going to do road schooling. We plan on getting an RV and traveling across Canada and the States and homeschooling there. I’m trying to figure out the logistics of how to keep ding the podcast and while doing road schooling. It’s going to be fun and hey, my idea is I want to travel and go to my guests and even like interview them or video them in person so I’ll have to come down to New Orleans and see you, Jacob.   [04:40] Jacob Schoen: Yes, come down to New Orleans. It’s a good place to be.   [04:43] Ashley James: I’m really excited for you to teach my listeners today some awesome information about how to relieve pain and eliminate pain both the chronic and acute injuries and how to prevent them. You specialize in that. You have a degree in Kinesiology. You’ve got all these amazing training. I’ve heard of it before but I don’t really know a lot about it. I know my listeners will definitely want to know more about what you do. Soma training and all the other things you do. Before we get into your credentials, id love to hear your story. What happened in your life that made you want to dive into Kinesiology and eventually want to help people become better versions of themselves?   [05:34] Jacob Schoen: Yes, sure. I think that starts from day one honestly of my life. Now’s the perfect time to give a big thanks to the main person involved without her, she’s my mom. She’s been my best friend for my whole life and she’s really the person that inspires me to do what I do. Without her, even coming down to just giving me my first client. Without her, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing. So thank you, momma, I love you.   [06:02] Ashley James: I’ve never had guest do a shout out to their mom. I think that’s pretty awesome.   [06:06] Jacob Schoen: You’ve got to give a shout out to mom. She’s so important. I started like any kid. I grew up playing sports. Played any sport you could imagine. Baseball, football, soccer, basketball all those. I just loved being outside, I love playing sports. Also, I am unbelievably competitive. Competitive to the point where not just I would cry if I lost but I would cry for days and think about it. I was super, super competitive and then that brought me into sports into high school where I wasn’t the most naturally gifted athlete but I was really set on trying to work hard to try to find different ways to be better. Whether it was how to make my legs stronger so I could kick the soccer ball harder or jump higher or whether it was how much weight can I do for this to make me swim faster whatever it is. Being really competitive and being really curious and being really interested in trying to learn to find details about things to try to make up for any deficit I might have naturally was really my – on how to learn different things. When I was in high school I had an injury to my knee and later come to find out that injury to my knee actually probably gave me the injury that I have in my hip right now that I was still dealing with to this day. That injury in my hip is what really inspired me to start trying to figure out different ways to get the injury and the pain to go away because it would just bother me all the time. I was really competitive cyclist and triathlete in my late teen, early 20 years and anybody who know athletes who knows sports they know that when they get focused on something they just go for it. Like if you’re a cyclist or  a runner or a  swimmer you could look at the black line all day and just focus on that thing. I was really driven to try figure out what the heck was going on with my freaking hip. I couldn’t figure it out so when I got into college I know that I wanted to deal with something of the physical body. I was interested in performance. I was so interest on how to make the human body bigger, faster, stronger. Just kind of classic like most athletes are. I went into Kinesiology and the from Kinesiology, my senior year of college I got an internship at a holistic training facility in Baton Rouge which is where LSU is. During that semester, I was introduced to all different types of exercise techniques that I’ve never even heard of or thought of. Never even knew existed, because my initial interest was in the sports performance aspect, how to make a muscle bigger, faster, stronger. I’ve never really thought about the body in a holistic type of way. I always just really focus and super-concentrated on a particular level. I’ve never really branched out and try to think about like “what influence does the ankle have on the hip, what influence does the knee have on the shoulder. What influence does all the different parts of the body have on the bigger picture.” Once I got into this internship and started to have my eyes literally not just open but peeled back and just held up into all this new amazing information. I was so inspired to start to learn about this stuff and I was like, “Man, maybe some of the things can help me with the hip problem that I have.” My final couple months there, I got introduced to Eldoa techniques which are a group of exercises designed to create space joints. Whether hip, back, your neck whatever it is. They try to create space to give more room for the nerve so you could rotate and move and really just feel good. These exercises I introduced them and I was like, “Man, not only do they feel really good but they’re also really challenging and there’s academic aspect to learning about them.” I was just hooked from that. As soon as the semester was over and I graduated. I signed up with a couple of guys from the facility to take the first Eldoa one which was in Dallas that next April. Ever since then, I have been on the road to just really learning as much as possible but over time, it’s changed from just learning as much as possible just to be the best practitioner to learning as much as possible because I realized the more things that I learn, the more opportunity that I have for the people that come into my studio for me to help them. If I learn a technique, if I learn something more about the body that opens my eyes a little bit more to a problem that someone else’s is having then that makes me a better practitioner and give me the opportunity to help them. It’s really been all the way back from day one to trying to be good athlete to now, to try to use that same drive to get the people that come into my office out of pain or just to having a more functional life.   [10:58] Ashley James: It’s interesting. If you had never had that hip injury, do you think that you would’ve ended up in the same place?   [11:04] Jacob Schoen: It’s so funny you say that because I’ve been it’s a constant battle in life I think to try to garner perspective and to try to really appreciate the things that are challenging for you and how they put you in the place that you are. For example, like my dad died when I was young, if it wasn’t for him passing when I was young then I probably wouldn’t have that relationship I had with my mom. If I wouldn’t have that relationship with my mom, I wouldn’t have the respect for the work that she does. She’s also a trainer. I probably wouldn’t have been inspired as much by her to do what I do now. Just from that level also like the competitive nature of being a little boy trying to find his way. Everything that comes from that and then – it’s funny because I got the knee injury when I joined the wrestling team in high school. I joined the wrestling team in high school because my friends that were on the wrestling team kept beating me up. I was like, “I can’t keep getting beat up like that. This isn’t that much fun. I want to be able to handle this back.” I did it totally from a place, now I see there’s a place of lack of maturity but in reality, if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have had the knee injury. The knee injury wouldn’t have caused the hip problem, the hip problem set me on the path towards really trying learn about all this stuff. It’s a tough thing to do to have that perspective that the thing that causes you the most pain is probably the best gift but in reality, that’s really what it is. As much as my hip problem annoys me, I have to at the same time be thankful that I have it because without it, for sure I would not have the drive to really try to figure any of this stuff out. I guess I can thank my bum hip for that.   [13:00] Ashley James: You turned your pain into a gift.   [13:04] Jacob Schoen: Yes. Hopefully, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. I guess. [laughter] People who have problem that they’ve been dealing with for a long time, a lot of times there’s a lot of layers of it. It’s complex, not just from the orthopedic level where now my hip problem has caused different things to happen in my lumbar spine and that creates little problems in my neck. I still have the knee problem, yes. All that stuff is connected but everting comes in layers like that. It’s definitely an interesting process for sure both mentally, physically and emotionally too.   [13:46] Ashley James: Now, you’re a Eldoa trainer. Can you explain what does Eldoa mean?   [13:54] Jacob Schoen: Yes, Eldoa. I like try to make it as simple as possible. I don’t if it’s Einstein that said it, “it takes a real master to or anyone can make something simple complex but it takes a real master to make something complex simple” something along those lines. Really, what Eldoa is it’s a group of exercises designed to create space at a joint. If you think about our body in a way that it’s organized, we can get into that a little bit more later too but it’s really organized in what’s called Tensegrity. Tensegrity is like those kids toys you see where there’s a bunch of rubber bands holding a bunch of sticks together. Those sticks are our bones those rubber bands are our connected tissue in our muscles. If you think about your body, if overtime you get dehydrated or too much stress or injury, those rubber bands start to get smaller, smaller and more and more fragile. The goal for the Eldoa is to re-establish the quality of those rubber bands and also to establish again better movement between the sticks it creates space at the joint. On a deeper level, it gets as complex as you want to make it. It means in French, it’s a French acronym. In English, it’s Longitudinal Osteo-articular De-coaptation Stretches. Which is not only a mouthful but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know what you’re talking about.   [15:21] Ashley James: Okay, but I want to hear the French version.   [15:24] Jacob Schoen: Oh the French version? All right, here we go. Gosh, you know I don’t speak French right? [Laughter] it’s like Entirement Longitudinaux Decoaptation Osteo-Articulaire avec something, something.   [15:36] Ashley James: That was awesome.   [15:39] Jacob Schoen: You made me do it and I did it. there you go, I hope you’re happy. Yes, it’s a big, big word that is you really just boil it down, you have two structures, two bones and you want a little more space between them. What that space means is that space means freedom. That freedom gives you an ability to move, it means less stress on the artery and the vein that is associated on that’s space. It means better quality, better hydration, more ability to get nutrition to that area. Just in general, it means a higher quality existence for that particular structure that you’re working on.   [16:17] Ashley James: That’s really interesting because the first thing I think of when giving a joint more space is instability. The more space you give a joint the more and stable it becomes. Can you bust the myth or explain why giving the joint more space using Eldoa would not create and instability in the joint?   [16:36] Jacob Schoen: Yes, absolutely. If you were to for example lay down on someone’s table and they just yank your leg right, let’s say the goal was to create space between your leg bone and your hip bone. So your femur and your ilium, let’s say that was the goal. Let’s say they accomplished that goal where they now have 2cm instead of 1. There is going to be more instability at that joint now, because why? For one because it was done passively. The ligaments that support the joint, the muscle that support the joint, they didn’t learn anything. They didn’t have time to adapt, they didn’t have time to actively take part in it and also the nervous system which is what coordinate your reception and the awareness of your body no longer now has any feedback from that joint that it knows exists. Does that makes sense? When things are done actively, whether it be a kid learning how to write or ride a bicycle or someone learning how to do an exercise to decompress a joint in their back, when it’s done actively, the nervous system takes part, the brain takes part and then locally the muscles and the ligament and all the connected tissue around that joint, they all take part in that process. You become strong in that new place. As opposed as to just being put there by something someone else because you got there yourself. You learn how to be there and the structures that got you there or are there to support you, know what you’re doing. They know what your intent was, their ability to adapt to that new place is so much stronger, does that makes sense?   [18:00] Ashley James: Yes, absolutely. If someone hangs upside down using an inversion table is that considered passive?   [18:18] Jacob Schoen: It is because the active component of that is just gravity. The active component in that is not intrinsic to their connective tissue or to their body. It’s an outside force acting on them and then them allowing that to happen. That is passive, yes, maybe they’re holding on to the pull-up bar. But at a more specific level or a more precise way of looking at it. It is passive. If you do an Eldoa exercise, trust me it is active. I’ve had athletes where for example, I’ve worked with a weight lifter who was, I believe he was 22 at that time. He’s like 160 pounds, he could clean and jerk 375. This kid was an absolute stud weight lifter. I had him do teen on teen Eldoa which is to be fair, one of the more difficult ones. He said, he was more likely to throw in the white flag, it’s a throwing the towel during the Eldoa exercise than he is in even some of his hardest squat workout because what it does is it not only in some way put you in a slide battle against gravity but also in a battle against all the tightness that you have intrinsically in yourself. If you’re really, really tight in your hips, if you’re really, really tight in your shoulders or in your neck and then I tried to coach you into a good position then you had to work against that tightness. The battle against yourself is the hardest battle. It’s super active when you do it but because it’s active your body remembers it. It ingrains it in your nervous system and the result last longer because you had to learn how to do it as opposed to someone just in some way giving you the answer.   [19:59] Ashley James: I’m trying to imagine it. Obviously, with the podcast, we can’t see you doing it. I’m trying to imagine it. Is it like stretching? Is it like doing a squat? I’m trying to imagine going against the tension of the body to open up the joints.   [20:22] Jacob Schoen: I’ll bring it to one of the most introductory postures. It’s really the ones that you learn when you first start doing the Eldoa. It’s the Eldoa for t67. I’ll try to describe it to you in a way hopefully make sense in the context of what we’re talking about but you sit as tall as you can possibly sit. Most people work at a desk nowadays or if you they don’t, they spend a lot of time on their phone or on the computer and they start to develop that rounded posture that everyone’s familiar with the my-head’s-forward-I’m-looking-at-my-cellphone kind of posture. That posture now you have to try to sit tall. Now you can’t sit rounded which is more comfortable for you. You try to sit tall now. Now you’re pushing the crown of your head to the ceiling and you’re pushing your sit bones into the floor. Your initial tuberosities down into the floor. What that is, it’s what called axial extension. Essentially, what you’re doing is you’re taking the resting tension in the spine and increasing it to start establish the deepest level a little bit of tension so you could create some space out of a particular joint. Then with your legs crossed, you start to push your knees down a little bit. The way I think about that is it kind of anchors the lowest level and then you take your hand above you keep them above like you’re praying and you try to touch the ceiling. You don’t just hold your hands at a high point you’re actively constantly trying to touch the ceiling with your head and your hands as you keep your sit bones and your knees pushing down. If you really just take a step back and look at that, is the upper half is doing a tug-of-war to the ceiling, the lower half is doing a tug of war to the floor somewhere in the middle they meet and they meet at T67 and at that joint they create a little battle. They create a little tug of war. The top that’s above wants to go up, the art that’s below wants to go down and so in the middle you create a little bit of space.   [22:12] Ashley James: You said, cross your legs?   [22:16] Jacob Schoen: Yes. You cross your legs. For T67, you cross your legs.   [22:20] Ashley James: Does it matter what legs is crossed? Like leftover right or right over left. Does it matter?   [22:25] Jacob Schoen: No, it doesn’t because you close the kinetic chain at the two initial tuberosities. Whenever you start to cross the legs you don’t have any concern anymore for the balance of the pelvic floor and now you’re really just concerned about the extension above your head. That’s just particular for that posture. For the other ones though you have more concern for the different fascia connection down to the feet to the hips whether depending on which level you’re trying to target.   [22:54] Ashley James: That felt awesome. How long should I hold it for?   [22:57] Jacob Schoen: 60 seconds. Yes, I try to explain it a little bit like it’s a really, really fast jog. It’s not a sprint because you can only sprint for so long. If you’re just, “I’m pushing super hard. I’m holding my breath. I’m trying to make myself as tall as possible.” A lot of people when they first try it they go, “That was tough. Oh man, it’s only been 15 seconds.” The reality is to get the different type of muscle fibers that you are working with to totally relax, to shut off the Sherrington’s reflex. To get the fascia that you’re working with to actually start to respond because of it’s elastic nature. To actually start to respond you need to hold it under tension for a little bit longer. The base-level we say is just 60 seconds. There are adaptations to that depending which Eldoa you’re doing and also the state of the client that you’re working with. If they have a super, super toned nervous system, they’re under a lot of stress, under a lot pain, maybe you changed that a little bit but the base level is that you work for 60 seconds and that also gives you time to start to make modifications too. Let’s say you don’t have super good awareness of your head in space, if you only go up there for 10 seconds well, then you don’t really have time to correct the posture of your head or to really learn that it was in a bad way so you can move it back. That 6o seconds is both physiologically functional but also awareness functional. It lets you try to modify and perfect the exercise while you work at it.   [24:27] Ashley James: I like it. In your pre-interview form, you mentioned that you love to teach people how to have awareness of their body so they when they go to work out they can prevent injuries. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve injured and my husband too, I’m going to throw him under the bus, how many times did both of us have injured ourselves. I remember this one time we went back in the gym. It’s sort of like after we’re taking a hiatus, “Okay, we’re back it’s going to be awesome” the first machine we’re like, “Okay, we’re going to use machines because they’re safe. We’re not going to injure ourselves.” I think we we’re recovering from something. I remember my husband had fractured his ankle. We were working with the trainer and he was like, “Just push harder. It’s fine.” So we were like, “No, we got an x-ray. No, it’s actually fractured. Thanks for telling him to push through it.” When we got back to the gym, the first machine he got on, I guess he overdid it. He re-injured his ankle. I’m like, “How did you injured your ankle on a machine? That’s a stationary object. You’re moving your body in it.” I injured myself so many times at the gym and so the idea of having more awareness and just taking it slow. Making sure our bodies in the right space, in the right alignment. Yes, you’re in the right space. What can you teach us here to help us have better body awareness so we can prevent injuries?   [26:08] Jacob Schoen: Wow, that’s a good question. To be fair, it’s kind of tough to teach someone awareness without being there with them. I’ve worked with enough people now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not the most experienced practitioner. I’m only 26 but I’ve worked with enough people now to really appreciate that fact that not many people have awareness of their body. That’s why a quick sidebar, I think people should absolutely get their children involved in gymnastics or dance to really start to develop that awareness from a young age because gymnasts and dancers even if they’re not the most brutally strong or brutally fast athletes, they have a really good base of understanding their body in space that they can then transfer to any exercise or any sport that they want to. There’s stories of football players that their parents make them take gymnastic and you have these 6’5, 300-pound guys able to do backflips. It’s just unbelievable stuff. That’s a quick sidebar for that. To develop awareness I would say, one you have to have a reference. You have to have something you trust to be for example straight, so you can compare whether or not you’re straight. Your husband or wife to take a photo of you like, you pick a string, an example that people first tell me the how-to assess posture is that they use is that they have a string hanging from the ceiling, then they line it up directly in between the people’s feet and then they take a picture of them and they show them how maybe their nose is not directly in line with the string-like they would think if they were even or the other way you can do it is you can stand next to a wall maybe you have too much curve in your lumbar spine, you don’t know that. Maybe your hips really fall forward put your shoulders and head to the wall you’ll see how much space is between your lower back and the wall maybe you thought its going to be a little bit but it turn out to be a lot. You have that trancendal reference to know because you trust that the wall is built vertical, right? Hopefully at least if your carpenter was good. You have to have to have something that you trust to be your standard so that you can have that thing to compare against, right? From there, you have to start to develop movement practices. You have to start to really try to do movement with an intention. That intention can be anything as simple as when I wake up in the morning, I do a gentle routine where I just start my body a little bit. I roll my feet back and forth, left to right. I roll from front to back. I try to do a little figure 8 with my feet, little figure 8 with my knees. I really try to don’t it just to accomplish it, it try to do it at least when I was first doing it to see how it felt. Is it easier to do it on my right? Is it easier to do it on my left? When I move my pelvis, is it easier to stick my butt out? Or is it easier when to tuck my tail? Do I have a little pain when that happens? If move my spine, if I try to move it left or right can I actually move that? Another thing that your people can do at home which is an interesting thing to try do. I’ll try to explain it. Take your arm out to the side, so that your palm is facing the ground. Alright? You there with me? Okay, perfect. Now turn your hand all the way down so that your palm is facing backward. Okay, do you see that? Now I what I want you to do is keep your palm facing backward but turn your bicep to the ceiling. Were you able to do it?   [29:38] Ashley James: Okay. [laughter]   [29:43] Jacob Schoen: I like the way you’re doing that.   [29:44] Ashley James: My elbows bent a little bit. Was my elbows supposed to be bent a little bit?   [29:48] Jacob Schoen: We’ll start from the beginning again. Take your arm out to the side with your palm facing the floor. Turn your palm towards the back wall. If you look at your elbow now your bicep is facing more towards the floor. Right?   [30:00] Ashley James: My bicep is yes, floor and also kind of in front of me. 45-degree angle. Yes.   [30:12] Jacob Schoen: Exactly, okay. Now what I want you to do is keep your bicep facing that exact same place and turn your hand back flat. Now without moving your hand turn your bicep back to the ceiling.   [30:29] Ashley James: Oh yeah. Okay.   [30:31] Jacob Schoen: Do you see how your elbow and your hand can move separately?   [30:34] Ashley James: Yes.   [30:35] Jacob Schoen: Now what I want you to do the level is to keep your hand flat the whole time and now turn your bicep to the floor. Did you do it?   [30:46] Ashley James: Yes.   [30:49] Jacob Schoen: Okay, perfect. That is your body’s awareness of I know the difference between my hand and my wrist, my elbow, and my shoulder. A lot of people especially if they have an injury they go, okay they can turn it down then can turn it back but then when they try to differentiate the movement at their elbow from the movement at their hand. They can’t do it. It’s not because you and I are from a different planet that we can do it, it’s just because our brain knows how to move our elbow instead of move the whole thing. That is body awareness. There is different practices for that, for everything. It could just be inverting or reverting the ankle. Rolling the knees around, moving the lumbar spine, moving things left to right. A good thing that I’ve tried to teach people when they first come in especially if they have a lot of back pain is what’s called the Good Morning exercise. Essentially, all you do is to sit on your bum, you bend your knees to whatever they’re comfortable most people a little less than 90 degrees or sorry, little more than 90 degrees. Nice and relaxed kind of like a butterfly would be open. All you do is hold on to your knees, you lift yourself up really tall, feel your sit bones on the floor. Feel those hard bones like that would be if you felt those on a hard chair it would be uncomfortable. All you do is to tilt just your pelvis back and then roll your pelvis forward. That just to teach you, “Okay, I know where my pelvis is.” A lot of people when they do that they start to move their pelvis and then their head starts to move forward or their chest moves a lot. I have to educate them that your pelvis is here and not up there. Start to move just the pelvis and then you can increase it so you can say, “Okay, I’m moving my pelvis and more of my lumbar spine. Okay, now I know better where my lumbar spine is in my body.” Then you got from your lumbar spine to the thoracic and then you can go all the way up and down but that’s an education exercise that teaches them how to differentiate different parts of their body. When you’re doing exercise at the gym, really try to pay attention to what you’re doing. Be mindful of what you’re doing and if you’re really interested in learning more body awareness, you go out and you seek out a professional that’s going to be able to teach you whether it be yoga or I prefer, recommend doing the Eldoa because of how precise it is. You really learn a lot about your body and how to manage all the pieces at one time.     [33:05] Ashley James:  I learned about a Z health. Have you heard of that? It was developed by a chiropractor. He explains that when we have injury, the body’s compensating to protect it but when the injury’s healed it’s like we still have the neurological map of holding this pattern. Like that you just said, when someone has had an injury in the past, they might not be able to right away move their arms separate from their wrist and move their shoulder separate for\\rom their elbow then it might just all move in one because if they have elbow injury then their brain is still holding that injury memory. That in Z health he has people do small circular movements with each joint to reset the map. Have you heard of that system? Is this similar to it?   [34:08] Jacob Schoen: I haven’t heard of it. No. To be honest, I’m really a fan of anything that gets people more moving and in the context of moving gets them moving more mindfully. Anything that gets them to get to start to do that where they just pay attention to what it is that they’re doing is something I’m all on board for. I haven’t heard of that specifically.   [34:31] Ashley James: Intuitively, it sounds like you intuitively were doing what he also intuitively figured out. Which is sit there and roll each joint and just pay attention and go, “Wow this is how this joint feels. This is right wrist versus left wrist. Left knee versus right knee and you’re warming them up in the morning, you’re getting the synovial fluid going, but you’re also getting that body awareness and going, “Okay, let’s just come back into the body” which would also be very relaxing. It would turn off the sympathetic nervous system response. It would help the body like you said better circulation. Better circulation happens when we were in that rest and digest state. How many minutes a day would you say do that in the morning?   [35:15] Jacob Schoen: In the morning? Maybe just three. Nice and easy nice and quick. I’ll do that and usually hop in the shower and get my day started. It’s nice because unfortunately, we live in the world were most people are a little sleep deprived so they set up their alarm from the exact last minute that they would absolutely need to wake up to make it to work on time. They don’t really allow themselves that time in the morning for their body to really warm up to the day to day life. I try to give myself that a little bit of time, just allow myself just 3 minutes to move and not only open my eyes and wake up and but also get my body ready to go get the day is something I think really important. It’s also most people’s first instinct when they wake up especially if they’re busy and they have a lot of responsibilities, “Okay, let me check my email. What did I miss? Let me do this” its just nice to take that first couple of minutes to just say, “Hey body, good morning. How are you doing? How my knee? How’s my shoulder? How’s my head?” just kind of take that time for yourself. I admit I’m not always the best with it. There are some morning where I’m like, “Man, I’m just going to the shower I’m tired of doing this.” Most mornings I will try to make that time.   [36:28] Ashley James: You could do it in the shower.   [36:30] Jacob Schoen: I could do it in the shower but I don’t know if that’s slippery soapy environment is my best environment for body awareness. It’s definitely high stakes that’s always kind of fun but I don’t know if it’s the best place to do that. I think this reminds me of why I’m so pumped about – there are certain things that I feel like come to you, just like pop in your brain. You know, I can’t really take responsibility for thinking up. Here is this time when I thought of the tagline for my business or the slogan for my business whatever it is it’s called Move More Aware. I want people to move. I want people to move more. I want people to move more awareness. That awareness can be whether mentally, emotional, how you moving throughout the day, what kind of baggage you bringing with you, what kind of energy are you giving off to the people you’re interacting with. Also physically, how are you moving? It’s not just that you’re moving but what like what’s the quality of your movement? Most people especially in the western culture it’s more about go, go, go. I did 20,000 steps. I burned 6,000 calories at CrossFit class. I’m not trying to talk bad about CrossFit anything. I did 4,000 burpees today. Okay, good but how well did you them? What is that really giving you in the long term? What kind image and what kind of information are you sending to your brain about the quality of your movement and not just the quantity of it.   [38:08] Ashley James: I like that you’re pointing out the quality of the movement is more important than just the quantity of the movement because in the quantity of the movement is where we can injure our self but the quality of the movement is where we can heal our self.   [38:24] Jacob Schoen: Absolutely. That’s where all the power lies. I think it’s general life thing too. It’s really about the quality of your life and not necessarily the quantity. It’s so interesting to me I think a lot of times about people who are doing the longevity stuff. I also wonder say, “Okay good you’re doing all these stuff but what’s the quality of the life you’re living right now? How good is it?” If it’s good, I would like – one of the things I came up with is like, I want to live a little and live a lot. Do you know what I mean? A lot of times when you’re out having a good time and people say, “C’ mon, live a little.” its like, “Okay, I’ll live a little. I’ll do some things but also I want to balance that with living a lot. I want to live long time.” Trying to balance those two things. There needs to be, yes sure there needs to be some quantity on your life. I think it really comes down to most people would probably agree that it’s really about the quality of the relationships that you have, the food that you eat, the movement that you do, the sleep that you get. All of those things are really what create a balanced and beautiful life. It’s really about the quality. I think movement is no different than that. Especially in our culture, it’s about we were pretty short-sided in a lot of ways where we just say, “Okay, I want my muscles to get bigger. I want to be more ripped and lean,” it’s like, “Okay, I understand that. I also want to do that and wanted to do that when I was 16 but at the same time, how well do you move, how much pain do you have? How good is the quality of your movement and where is that going to bring you in 2, 3, 5 years?  If all of those answers are answered and you’re happy with those answers then you can just plug and go along.   [40:11] Ashley James: Right. I love it. looking deeper into what your motivation is for wanting to shape your body in a certain way is important because you point out there are those consequences that come down the road. We want to make sure we’re creating a quality of life and longevity in our life. Also having a great life right now while we’re doing it. It’s both. What is Soma training? That’s another thing that you do. Soma training and Soma therapy.   [40:43] Jacob Schoen:  Yes, sure. Those programs are programs that were developed by Dr. Guy VOYER who is also the gentleman who developed the Eldoa exercises. Everybody has that person, that teacher that they really resonate with and what they find to really provide message that they think is powerful and philosophically they agree with and also academically, you’re otherwise they really find to be true for them, he’s been that teacher for me. I want to thank him for that, thank you Dr. VOYER, you’re amazing. Those two programs are his programs for both trainings so soma training and soma therapy. What those programs are, I’ll talk about the training aspect. What those programs are they really try to teach you how to work with every single part of the body so that no matter who walks into your facility, you can at least in some way help and understand what they have going on because the level of the training you’ve gotten is so in-depth. One of the things that’s interesting about it and i respect so much about it is that it does break the body down into its smallest pieces. When you take a class you’re going to take a class for 3 days just on segmental strengthening of muscles in your legs. There’s a whole bunch of muscles in your legs and people might go “Okay, why do I need to strengthen this specific fiber of this quadricep?” Well, that’s really specific but if you take a bigger step back and you understand the global picture it makes a lot of sense to go after the link in the chain that you know to be the weakest link in the chain. Only with specific tools can I think you really be holistic in the way you approach things. Each ligament of the knee has an exercise for appropriate section. Each segment of the spine has an exercise for the Eldoa. Each muscle has segmental strengthening exercise. Then there is exercises to bring the picture all back together. The Some training what it really does is it divides the body into all of its functional pieces. Teaches you how to work with each individual one and then gives you the context on how to bring it all together in the bigger picture. For me as a trainer, it absolutely changed and really made my practice because I feel confident that anybody who comes into my studio I’ll at least be able to get them on the road towards their goal. Whether it be bigger, faster, stronger, whether it be no pain, longevity or whatever it is. I feel really confident the these exercises, because of their specificity and because of their precision can really move people towards whatever goal it is that they have.   [43:24] Ashley James: That’s soma training?   [43:25] Jacob Schoen:  That’s soma training exactly.   [43:27] Ashley James: It taught you how to work with all body style, body shapes, body challenges and the goals that people have.   [43:38] Jacob Schoen: Yes. It’s an exercise program, exercise curriculum that really teaches you how to respect the individualistic nature of each person. One thing and this is a good time to talk about what people call functional exercise. That’s a really big term that is used super frequently. The thing I would say first off start by saying is that it seems to me that most functional exercise looks the same. It has a similar style look to. Whether it be a certain type of kettlebell thing or certain type of TRX movement or if you’re not familiar with TRX, it’s just that suspension straps but I’m sure you know what those are. It’s just a specific looking type of movement. The one thing I would say about that is that “Okay, what’s functional for me is someone does manual therapy over a table and teach people how to train all day versus functional exercise for someone who’s sitting at a desk versus functional exercise for someone who does hair or is a car mechanic. These totally different functional exercise. The other thing is it’s like, “Okay, what’s your goal. If your goal is to build muscle then yes, a bicep curl is functional exercise for that particular goal.” I think a lot of times in the exercise field, we need to take a step back and we say a lot of people really get dogmatic and say anything that isn’t functional training is bad, or whatever it is. “Okay, functional for you and for me are two different things, otherwise what’s your goal for that?” The Soma training programs that really teaches you how to respect, what is functional in for that person. Also how to apply that to every single person because everybody is totally beautiful and unique and different right? You know, you’re obviously different than I am. Not only different but maybe you have a different way of thinking, a different type of emotional system, a different brain, and a different orthopedic history. The way that I teach you an exercise or how you execute an exercise might be different from how I execute the exercise based off our anatomy based off a whole number of factors and what the program really does is it allows you to take all of those factors into consideration and give the person the best exercise as opposed to just saying, everyone needs to be able to do deadlift or everyone needs to be able to do a kettlebell swing, everyone needs to be able to do whatever because the truth is that, not everybody needs to do the same thing because not everybody is the same.     [46:12] Ashley James: Right. I just imagine the challenges that someone was sitting in the desk all day versus if they’re doing hair or if they’re a machine. Their bodies in a different position all day. It wouldn’t benefit them to just do the same exercise, the same machines at the gym. You are looking to support them and understanding what their body does every day. You can support them in being balanced. That makes sense.   [46:42] Jacob Schoen:  Yes, absolutely. If you have a chiropractor for example. Chiropractor is probably doing manual work and adjusting most of the day. Maybe he’s leaning forward over a top of somebody for 4 hours a day. That a totally different stress in his body than someone who like a hair dresser who’s arms are up by their head all day working on people’s hair or different than somebody who’s a car mechanic who’s laying on his back all day underneath a car. It’s three totally different classes of people just in those examples. To say that their training all needs to look and be the same is super reductionist and the goal is to be précised so you can help the person as quickly as possible and as efficiently as possible. To put everyone in the same box and say everyone needs to do a certain type of training is really narrow. When you have the tools to work with the body then you can apply those tools to anybody. Soma training is just somo which means body, so it’s body training. We know things about the anatomy, we know things about body mechanics we could just apply those if you understand it well to the people would walk into you and say, “Okay, Joe walks in. He has problems with his knee. Should he be doing this or should he strengthen his specific muscle around his knee? How do you strengthen that specific muscle? Well, you do it like this but you have to modify it to the fact that Joe has pain around this point. Everyone’s different. Not everyone is the textbook. If you only have the textbook to work with then you’re going to be really limited as a practitioner to how you can apply that to different people when they come see you.   [48:19] Ashley James: If someone come to you and they have pain and they want to work out. They want to strengthen their body but they have pain so maybe the mechanic or that hairdresser has a frozen shoulder or the person works at the desk all day has carpal tunnel, the chiropractor has lower back pain.   [48:41] Jacob Schoen:  Which is very common by the way, which I get because you’re leaning over people all day you know.   [48:46] Ashley James: Exactly. My chiropractor has pain in his hands from how he adjusts and he’s developed some kind of arthritis. He’s been doing it for over 30 years. He figured out amazing ways at still being a chiropractor and no wearing down his hands. If someone comes to you, they want to work out but they’re really afraid because they have pain and pain has stopped them from working out in the past, do you start by doing Eldoa with them or what do you do first to help get them out of pain so then they can train? Or do you train at the same time? How does that work?   [49:30] Jacob Schoen: It’s really a concurrent process. Most of the time it’s going to happen at the same time. That’s the beautiful thing that I really love about this exercise is that you can get someone who is afraid of exercise or hesitant about exercise because they’ve been hurt in the past. Every time they do something, it hurts more or they just don’t want to be in pain anymore but the beautiful thing about this exercises is that a lot of times you use the exercises to help or start to work on the pain. It’s like a snowball effect, you do more exercise you feel a lilt bit better. You do more exercise you feel better and better before you know it, you’re using the exercise as maintenance thing because you’re no longer in pain and then you can start back on the road of classic fitness training if that’s your goal. Most of the people that I work with, they come and see me because they either had a friend that work with me and they had results or they just tried everything else and they still are not really where they want to be. Most people it is concurrent process of a little bit of manual therapy and then a lot of exercise. I try to do as much exercise as I can in the context of that person because it really gives them the power. If I have someone that comes and sees me and I only see then to do manual therapy then yes, I’m healing them and I believe I’m helping them but it’s, not that its too much power on my hands but it’s not enough power on their hands. I really want to work the peoples that I work with their mentality that start to, here’s a plug, shift. That’s how I came up with the business. I was started talking to myself and I came up with that name. It’s really been great because it’s stuck and is made a lot of sense for me as far as the paradigm goes. Yes, its really start to shift because if they say, “Yes I learned these exercises from Jake. but I’ve been doing them I’m getting result by doing them.” I’ve only seen him once or twice. It’s not that I saw him that got me the result but it’s doing the exercise that got me the result. “Okay I can do this, I can do the change to myself that I want to see.’ To be a part of that s process is the amazing thing for me because you teach people realize they have power. You do it through exercise. Really, my main goal is to start people to exercise by themselves. That’s not an original idea to me, Dr. VOYER one of his best quotes is “You are your own best therapist” whether it that be mental, emotional or a physical thing, it’s really the power is in you. And so yes I have the tools to teach you how to do that but really it’s up to you to get the result for yourself. Most people that are successful with me are the ones who really take the responsibility to do the exercise by themselves. To follow the home program and to execute that by themselves and that how they get the result. Yes, its some manual therapy but I really try to use mostly exercise to get people back moving and start the ball down the road. I had a lady who come and see me she was so afraid to do anything even walk. We were doing some really, really gentle exercise like the good morning thing I was telling you about. She had pain during that. I know that her nervous systems is really guarded. I know mentally, emotionally, physically she’s really protective of what she was doing on. So I was like, “All right before you do any exercise all I want you to do is just go outside and do a nice easy 10-minute walk. Go get some fresh air. Maybe some sunshine,” in New Orleans it’s super hot you have to deal with that but “go outside and get a 10-minute walk” and she was afraid. She as like, “Well, walking hurts my back.” I was like, “Is there anything that doesn’t hurt your back?” she’s like “Well, if I lay down in this specific away.” and I was like, “We have to work together because if you’re going to get where you want to go which picking up your grandkids and going out to dance with your husband. We need to start somewhere.“ I got her to start to do 10 minutes  walks a day she’s like, “It’s a little painful but I do feel better after.” Now she’s walking 30 minutes a day during her exercises and everything is a lot better. It’s just that process. Really getting people to try to take power back into their own hands. Maybe they experience a little pain at the beginning but they feel accomplished after. There’s a whole bunch of factors that go into it to getting someone from a place where they are afraid to do exercise to back to a place where they’re going out and dancing with their husband.   [54:02] Ashley James: What helped her to get out of pain? Was it that not moving was continuing to have the pain or what was it that had her be free of it?   [54:13] Jacob Schoen: To be honest with you, I really don’t think it was anything that I did. I think it’s a little esoteric to say this but I think a lot of people’s pain whether it be at least initially or a lot of times chronic pain, is a mentally emotional adaption from any kind of stress or trauma that they maybe they store in their body. For me, I think hers was a mental-emotional thing mostly. I didn’t say that to her because she came to me for orthopedic reasons. I try to keep it as in that context as I could but I knew that if we got her in some way out of her own way that she would really start to see how powerful she was and how really the pain couldn’t hold her back. If you know what I mean. Getting her to move. Got her to see, “Oh, okay I can do this.” Yes, it’s a little bothersome at first but then she said, “Okay, I can do this. If I can do 10 minutes, maybe I can do 15. If I can do 15 then maybe I can do 20 and you know what, I’m doing 20. I’m feeling better. Okay, all right. I’m doing 20, I’m doing 25, I’ll do 30.” I think in reality she let her guard down a little bit and she started to get out of her own way to heal. A lot of people hold on to these problems that they have and they won’t let them go for any number of reasons. As a trainer, you do have to wear several hats. A lot of people come I and they tell you about their day or they tell you about their problem that they’re having with their kids. I love that because I love working with people. I don’t want to just work with a robot that’s covered with muscle. I want to work with human. A lot of people they have these problems that they don’t really let go. When they come to see me, part of my thing is working with the mental, emotional system. Start to get them out of their own way so that they can progress in the orthopedic system. A lot of times it solves itself over time.   [56:16] Ashley James: I love it. People who are in pain don’t want to be told that it’s all in your head. Because it’s real. The pain is real. There’s proof now that the body the mind can create physical pain that feels real. I believe it was John E. Sarno that wrote the book, Healing Back Pain and he discusses how he could see that when we had mental, emotional issues going on, especially that we were stuffing away and procrastinating to face that the mind would create an ischemia in a muscle would actually tighten the muscle so much that it would cause a tremendous amount of pain because there was lack of blood flow in the are kind of like trigger point. Where the blood flow is cut off in that muscles and just like trigger points would cause radiating pain too so it could mimic pinched nerve. It could mimic a lot of different symptoms. He saw it commonly that it was lower back pain that would be created when someone was having emotional issues that they were facing that the unconscious minds really wants us to resolve things. When we’re in the state of anxiety or panic and we’re faced with choices and they’re really hard so we procrastinate them that the unconscious mind will tense a muscle or tense muscle fibers and create ischemia and create that level of pain that is real. We can move and we can put hot packs on it that’ll give relief temporality but it’ll keep coming back until we look at it and face the emotional stuff. It’s real and physical pain but like you said, she freed herself up and she had to move past that fear of moving and to get that freedom in you helped her face that.   [58:26] Jacob Schoen:  Yes. I try to do my part in helping her see that and I think giving her a little bit of accountability with me as someone who’s going to check in on her and see if she’s walking and see if she’s doing these things was helpful for her but really it was up to her to make the decision to impart trust me and the other part trust herself. The other thing that I find so interesting is that a lot of people like you said they don’t want to be told that their pain it’s all on her head. The problem with that is that just because it’s in your head doesn’t mean it’s not real. If I were to be extraordinary blunt with this lady and see, “Mam, I see that you have back pain but it’s all on your head.” She would’ve been totally turned off and she would’ve been like, “Okay, I’m leaving.” I would’ve understood because it’s pretty insensitive. The reality is that even if I do say it’s all in your head doesn’t make it not real. It just makes it not in the place that you thought it was which is it doesn’t mean its any less valuable or any less tangible or any less real. It just means that its somewhere else. That’s all that really important to take away from that. If you look at the hierarchy of your body, Paul Chek of the C.H.E.K institute did an amazing job with his graphic. He has this totem pole. At the very, very top of the totem pole is the spirit or the mind. The mind if you look all the way down of the totem pole you have the visceral system, have the breathing, you have the nutrition, you have all the stuff down the totem pole but really who’s in charge the big boss is the mind. If you think “Okay, I have back pain.” Yes, sure you have back pain and I agree with that but maybe the back pain is caused by something up higher down the line. It doesn’t have to be another physical thing down the line. It could be an emotional, mental thing down the line that you need to work on to solve the back pain that you’re having. The way I try to work with people is I give them exercises that I think will someway get the water out of the boat and will give them exercises to fix the hole. If you just fix the leak but you don’t take the water out of the boat then you can still have some residual pain. But if you just take the water out of the boat then you’re going to be taking the water out of the boat your whole life. That is a process that you have to work with somebody on is one getting the symptoms that have to go away then two getting the cause of the symptoms in the first place to be resolved. That could be, the human body is complex and the human organism is amazingly complexed. That’s why it’s a beautiful field to be in to work with people because it’s not just plugging numbers and doing spreadsheets. You’re working with dynamic diverse history of a human that walks into your office every day and so you have to treat them with that same respect if you just say, “Yes, back pain I need to go straight to your back and cut off of your disc and do this.” Then yes, you’re going to miss the picture. That makes me think about a gentleman that came and saw me last week, 2 weeks ago. He flew down from Colorado. He sent me all these videos of his neurosurgeon showing that in between L4 and L5 he had narrowing in the space for the spinal cord and how it was exactly 103 ml whereas his other space where 110. It’s like I get it there’s narrowing there but there’s also people that have severe narrowing who don’t have any pain. It’s not necessarily all the time that that ting is causing the pain. It could be multitude of factors that’s causing the pain and the weak link that you have because of your history or because of the structure is what’s pain. Someone who has that same narrowing maybe has no pain and has no pain for the rest of her life because they have better hydration or because they’re not at stressed because they didn’t play the same amount of sports that you did growing up. I really try to treat people as holistically as possible because that’s who’s walking into your office.     [01:02:36] Ashley James: What happened with the gentleman? You practice in New Orleans so people local to you can come visit you. I have a friend that lives in Houston and she said it’s like a 5 ½ hour drive or something like that. You could get people from Texas just driving to see you.   [01:02:53] Jacob Schoen: Yes, come on down Texas.   [01:02:55] Ashley James: Yes. Florida, Louisiana, Georgia. All that whole area could be coming and just drive to you but you had someone fly in from Colorado showing you the neuron surgeon stuff. He had pain for how long?   [01:03:10] Jacob Schoen: He had pain at this point for four months. He is a type a of a person, go-getter of a person that you’re ever going to meet. He’s an absolute stud. I’ll give him that. If I look and move like him when I’m in my early 60’s then I will be doing a good job. With that same context, he had never stretched. He had never taken time to stretch. He was severely dehydrated. You could just feel in his tissue when I had my hands on him. It’s like instead of feeling like soft and hydrated and well-nourished it was dry like leather. Of course, you’re going to have more pre-disposition to tearing certain things, you have less leeway when you have that quality of tissue. Part of the things I just started to get him to drink more water, starting to stretch. If you’re 6 foot tall but your connected system tissue think that you’re 5’8. It’s going to be pretty difficult for you to move well and then something is going to have to pay. So over time, he had just developed this posture. He developed an amount of stress in his body. He developed the quality of tissue that his body finally said “Hey man, we’ve got to do something about this.” Gave him exercises for the posture of his head, gave him exercises for his breathing, gave him exercises to get the water out of the boat in his lumbar spine, gave him exercise for the nerve prolifically. Now he just texted me the other day saying that his pain was an 8 out of 10 and now it’s 4 out of 10. He’s making progress by himself. He came down and we spent a lot of time together, got to know him. It was awesome. It’s awesome for me to work with people like that because whenever they come and see you, they’re really motivated and they really try to work on it and you get to really be in the zone when you work with people like that. I saw him for 3 hours a day for 2 days. Those 3 hours they go by in an absolute flash. Which is awesome because it’s almost like you get transported into another realm and you come back and it “Wow, it’s 5 o’clock already.” When you work with somebody like that it really awesome because you can see a change in their brain when they start to realize, “Oh, these things that I’ve been doing to myself or that I haven’t been paying attention to these might be the things that can help me.” Before this, he was scheduled to have surgery the end of July and as far as I understand he’s no longer going to have that.   [01:05:37] Ashley James: I’m so happy to hear that. I love it when people choose to try alternative methods before just jumping into an elected surgery. One of my mentors, he’s an old school naturopath. He’s yelled at someone who had something removed, some organ removed from their body and then they need help. I think it was thyroid. The doctors removed my thyroid and then they were asking for your help. He’s like “I can’t help you when your thyroids in the garbage. I can’t help you get your thyroid back. It’s been cut out of you.” he was more yelling like sheer frustration because he’s also a pathologist before he became a naturopath and he saw that like you can reverse so many diseases that surgeons just go, “Okay, let’s just cut it out of you, it’s time.”   [01:06:29] Jacob Schoen: Totally. That’s the thing that we have to work against as people who are offering alternative means to these things. It’s because fortunately or unfortunately most people’s disposition is that when they have problem they go to specialist. One of my favorite quotes is that “A specialist knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.” That’s the thing that I really think about. If you go see a neurosurgeon, a neurosurgeon is great at what they do which is neurosurgery. They’re not going to be experts in all these other field that most likely are going to be the cause of your problem. Don’t get me wrong, some people need surgery, that’s a certain thing that you can’t fix with Eldoa. It’s just not going to happen. At the same time, you have to think, what is surgery? You already have a trauma to your body, well guess what, you have to create more trauma to go in there to fix the trauma. Are you doing anything before to repair the tissue for that type of surgery and what’s the quality of the stuff that you’re doing after to make sure that you don’t have another problem because it’s not so uncommon for someone to have a back surgery and then 6 months later be like, “Oh man, that didn’t really work. I need another back surgery” or for someone who have fusion in her neck and be like, “Oh geez, I still have the same neck pain that I had and now I have to go get another fusion to now fix the problem because something was mechanically stuck in my neck and then now everything above and below has to compensate for that. It’s not so uncommon for that. Then as a quick change, the other change is when you go see a specialist, they specialize and they spend a lot of time specializing in that thing but whenever you have your blinders on to focus on one thing, you do miss the things that are around you. A lot of times, for example, people will have problem with their cervical spine, guess what’s right below your cervical spine, your rib cage and your thoracic spine and then your shoulder and then what’s above that is your head. The connections are unbelievable. People who are really interested your pericardium, you have a series and your fibers are pericardium which is the fascia of your heart has connection forward to your sternum below to your diaphragm and above to your cervical spine. If you have bad posture for your neck, guess what, then there’s differentiating tension in the pericardium. Maybe your heart doesn’t work so well as it needs to. Okay, your heart doesn’t work as well as it needs to. Well, now there’s differentiating tension on your sternum, which is where your rib is attached and on your diaphragm. When your diaphragm goes all the way down and attaches to your lumbar spine and into your pelvis. Guess what, there’s no distinction between those connection, if I pull on one end of the chain, the other end of the chain is going to move. Where you have the problem is just dependent on the person.   [01:09:18] Ashley James: Have you helped someone get lower blood pressure, better heart health from using Eldoa and the soma therapy?   [01:09:29] Jacob Schoen:  Yes, absolutely because one, if you start to drink water most people are severely dehydrated. I think that’s what I’m meant to say. First off, you introduce more water so now you have less resistance in the tube and the water flows [Audio Gap 01:09:48-51] blood is viscous so it moves more easily. The other thing is that now you have better water in the tissue so the tissue is more malleable. When the heart has to push, doesn’t have to push against as much peripheral resistance so now the blood pressure can be lower. The other thing is you start to work on the posture. The posture in quotes of the vein and of the circulatory system is off the better alignment. Now it doesn’t have to work as hard to move blood to the periphery so now the blood pressure go slower. The other thing is whenever the posture of the head is in the better way, there’s less tension on the heart, the heart is organized in relation to gravity in a more perfect way. The way that it was intended to be. Whenever you work on all of those factors, the blood pressure a lot of times goes down. The other thing is when you work with these exercises not only do you affect mechanically the bone but on the front of the spine is the sympathetic chain ganglia so the autonomic nervous system sits directly on the spine and it doesn’t just sit there because it’s glued there. It sits there because the fascia holds it there. The fascia integrately holds it to the bone. If you affect the bone, you affect the fascia, you affect the sympathetic nervous system, blood pressure going down baby, everything’s looking good. All of this factors go together to really holistically start to help the person.   [01:11:16] Ashley James: I love that. A few years ago it was 2010 my husband singlehandedly carried all of our furniture into a 26 foot Penske. We moved from Las Vegas to Seattle. We didn’t hired anyone to do it. It was all him. I was busy packing boxes or something, a few days later and he’s a carpenter for 20 years so he’s used to carrying heavy loads. He’s pretty big guy, 6 foot 7.   [01:11:44] Jacob Schoen: That is a pretty big guy.   [01:11:46] Ashley James: Right? We were under a lot of stress. Big move. Lots of new changes and he woke up one morning and his lips were blue and he’s like my heart’s doing something funky. I freaked out what’s going on? It took me a bit that I’m driving him to the hospital. That’s when we found out that he had AFib. Every chamber of his heart was just spasming. That’s why his lips were blue, he’s having problem breathing. They had to reset his heart which was again really scary. The cardiologist said, “This is holiday heart.” Probably because you’re under a lot of stress. We were at that time, we just bought an espresso machine. We thought, we’re living in Seattle, we need to do the coffee thing.   [01:12:37] Jacob Schoen:  Get the coffee culture going. I love it.   [01:12:38] Ashley James: Yes. Exactly. We got the coffee culture going a little bit too much. So he was overdoing it with that espresso and that time we were still drinking alcohol, not that we were alcoholics but we don’t partake in poison anymore. Back then we were not into health as we are definitely now. The cardiologist was just like “between the stress of the move and your new lifestyle and excessive caffeine and alcohol, it’s right around Christmas” so she was like, “this is the most AFib I’ve seen it’s right around Christmas and new year’s. This was just totality normal.” Totally normal okay, great. She’s like, “well, you know, we should do stress test just in case and you’re fine.” It happened again a year later. He as carrying a 6-year-old child on his shoulders who was jumping because she’s excited so she was jumping, as we’re going for a walk. We’re walking with a friend and her daughter and the next day he woke up with AFib again. Not as bad as the first time but it is definitely scary. At this point, we were seeing a naturopath and the naturopath said something really interesting, the naturopath said when there’s compression on the thoracic spine I think it’s T67 but I could be wrong. That there’s a nerve that comes out your be able to correct me one of the nerves that innervates the heart comes from the thoracic spine and so when its’ compressed it can send a full signal to the heart and the heart is completely healthy but the compression on the spine is what’s triggering the AFib. That made sense now that we were thinking to ourselves, “Okay, this is the second time that’s happened” and so the naturopath said I want you to rest. Get an inversion table and do hydrotherapy. Hot cold showers and just rest and see your chiropractor. It went away on its own. It was scary 3 days and his heart was beating irregularly and it just reset and everything was good. We’re like, “Okay, that’s a little scary but now we know. A few years later we’re doing CrossFit and he’s learning how to do deadlifts and the next day not only wakes up but he faints. He wakes up and he faints, he hits the floor and he has AFib. We’re like, “Whoa” That was again that was his first time lifting heavy objects since the last AFib occurrence. He’s only had 3 but 3 acute AFib attacks it makes you a candidate for pacemaker. If we had never worked with a naturopath and we had just seeing a cardiologist he would’ve gone in for a pacemaker which they have to burn the nerves to the heart and then put in a machine –   [01:15:48] Jacob Schoen:  Which is terrifying by the way.   [01:15:49] Ashley James: It’s terrifying , yes. Put in the machine that beats your heart which sends a signal for you instead of your body. Meanwhile, there is nothing wrong with the nerve at his heart. It’s the compression on his spine. We did the exact same thing the third time. We had actually gone to a naturopath and they did an EEG and determined yes, it is AFib. “Okay, great. See your chiropractor. Hang upside down, do hot and cold hydrotherapy and just lay down a lot.” It reset again. Thank goodness. That was the last time because since then, he’s been doing exercises and supplements and seeing the chiropractor on a regular basis all to keep his thoracic spine super healthy and decompressed. Sometimes when he gets a little off or he gets a little tight, he’ll just start to feel it and his heart starts to just do a little bit of a skip and he’s like, “Oh.” I’m like, “You’ve got to get back to the chiropractor. What are you doing? Or do the exercise your chiropractor gave you.” Listen to the whisper. Listen to the symptoms as they’re coming in gently. Don’t ignore them and just push through.   [01:17:02] Jacob Schoen: Exactly. Don’t let the little hearts turn into big hearts later.   [01:17:03] Ashley James: Right. But if we were to see a traditional MD it would’ve gone surgery. They’re amazing doctors. They specialize like you said they’re doing more than 8 years of higher education. They’re so intelligent and they’re passionate about their field and yet they’re not taught that the compression the spine can cause AFib. It just maddens me.   [01:17:31] Jacob Schoen: Yes. There’s only so much time in a day to learn so much stuff. I am definitely not an MD and there’s things about pathophysiology and immunology and things like that that they would absolutely blow me out of the freaking water with. That’s definitely not my area of expertise and if someone has a disease like that I for sure would send them to an MD. When it comes to a lot of other things unfortunately, they’re not really given the tools to be effective with the complexity of the human body that is walking into their office. They have a subset of tools, they have the parameters that they have which is only a certain amount of time with each person because they’re super overloaded with patients. They only have so much time to make a guess and to give a certain type of treatment for that and unfortunately, most of the treatments the we have especially in the western culture is just cut and burn or whatever they do to people’s bodies.   [01:18:36] Ashley James: Cut, burn and poison.   [01:18:37] Jacob Schoen:  Yes. Cut, burn and poison. I’ve had people who come in and it’s funny because they call certain surgeries minimally invasive. If you ever watched video of minimally invasive surgery, I have seen various things in my life that are more invasive than minimally invasive surgeries. They have to go inside of the body especially for the lumbar spine, they have to go inside your body, cutaway bone, slip away disc, burn the disc, sew you back up. I don’t know about you but that’s pretty invasive. All qualification for what it means to actually have remedies for this things are so skewed to this unbelievable procedures. If you want to freak yourself out, go watch a hip replacement surgery. It is absolutely freaking brutal. People say, “You know my hip hurts maybe in a couple of years I have some arthritis and I’ll probably have to get hip replacement” I was like, “Are you kidding me right now? Have you seen a freaking surgery like that? Wouldn’t you just rather do some stretching and exercise?” but unfortunately, this is kind of where I get into my soapbox. Unfortunately, we live in a culture right now where people would much rather give away their responsibility to someone else than have to take the responsibility themselves. They say, “Oh my doctor said this, this, this” it’s just like listen to your body. Give yourself the opportunity to heal yourself. Then if that doesn’t work and you know you’ve tried all the other options then you can get surgery. But for your first instinct to be to get surgery or to get your fourth surgery or whatever it is, it blows my mind but that’s a philosophical thing that is different between where I am now and where I was. I definitely was on the other side of the coin a couple of years ago before I got introduced to these things and where most of the population is because “Oh, you have a problem with your knee? Go see the orthopedic.” What does the orthopedic say, “Oh, we took an MRI. You have a problem with your meniscus. What we can do about that is that we could cut out a piece of meniscus.” It’s like, “Maybe you can do something else?” it’s just crazy what we turn to and what we think is or we think is very valuable therapy but you know. That’s a philosophical thing that is different amongst practitioners. Not good or bad just different.   [01:20:54] Ashley James: Just to add that story, recently I mean, it’s been the last 4 years I thought I had a hernia. I gave birth and so they say it’s common for women after giving birth near belly button I’m like, “Wow. Something is pretty funky feeling in my belly button. I better get this checked out.” I got to the doctor, naturopath of course. He feels around and he goes “You know what that really feels like a hernia. I’m going to suggest that you go get a surgical consult.” I looked at him like dead in the eye. “Surgery is the last option. I will try 100 alternative therapies. I will travel to Tibet and rub I don’t know, Tibetan berries on my tummy before surgery is an option. It’s just my last option.” Luckily, I heard this old school naturopath again mentored me he says, “Anytime that there’s a hernia, go to a Bowen therapist. It’s a Bowen technique. It’ll a massage therapist likely who would administer it.” I found a woman who’s been a massage therapist since the ‘80s and been doing Bowen therapy for 15 years and she’s 45 minutes north of me. I went in and visited her. Very interesting. She spent most of the time doing ranger motion tests to determine where my fascia was. She goes, “First of all, I’m not a doctor. I can’t tell you. I can’t diagnose” like cover her butt. Yes, exactly. There’s a disclaimer but hint and wink-wink, she’s like, “This is not a hernia. This is diastasis recti.” So many people will go in and get a surgery when it’s not needed because the abdomen has separated and she did some very minimal technique. I kind of was like “Are you kidding me?” She just touched me a few times in different places to adjust the fascia and then I started feeling like a new person. It was really cool. She recommended some exercises. I went to see her like 4 times. Again, if I was on the just the MD route even if my naturopath told me I should get a surgical console. If I had just given away my personal power. I would’ve been under the knife the next week and have all of the consequences that come with that versus seeking out other types of therapy. The problem is, people don’t know there’s other therapies. I love that you bringing up that. Now people know that there’s Eldoa which is spelled E-L-D-O-A. There’s this soma training, the soma therapy. You do other stuff too but there’s this techniques that are very effective. Even if they don’t get 100% results, they’re going to get some results. Even if they get no results which is rare I understand. At least they could rule out trying something before they get permanent surgery. Right? I love that it gives people those options. Do you have any stories to share? More stories to share of people who come to you with issues and have had really great success?   [01:24:32] Jacob Schoen: I mean, I just have so many I didn’t even know where to start. I’m just kidding. I just had a gentleman leave a review for me on google because I just trying to get into the – what I’m really bad at, to be honest with you is business, what I’m good at is training and work with people, what I’m bad at is business. I had him leave a review and he had back pain for 15 years and he’s been working with me for 3 years now. He’s’ now a great friend. He hasn’t had any single spell of back pain for over 3 years now. He’s an older gentleman. I’d like to think I helped him changed his life a little bit whether it be just his quality of movement or even just drinking more water, taking more time for himself things like that. It’s funny because when I first got started, to be honest with you, I look back at who I was and the trainer that I was. I have to laugh because you look back at where you were and “Man, I didn’t know a single thing. I didn’t know what I was doing at all.” I know in 10 years from now I’m going to look back at myself now, “Yes, I thought I know so much. I don’t know anything.” I had this lady come see me and she had a lot of people used the terminology but she had thrown out her back. She was all slumped over. Her back was totally wrecked. She couldn’t really do much of anything without feeling a lot of pain. I was a little inexperienced so I tried to get her to do just a little gentle warm-up. Even the warm-up just absolutely lit her on fire. I just laid her down on the floor, had her do some breathing exercises. Taught her Eldoa for L5-S1, which is the pillar of all the Eldoa exercises. Your last lumbar vertebrae, your first sacral vertebrae, it’s really an important area because of how important the pelvis is and the amount of stress that that area takes. I taught her how to do that any gently. She hasn’t had pain since then. She’s text me she like my biggest fan just because she was dancer. She was super active, super healthy lady and now she gets to go back and do all her stuff and she does all her exercises. The amount of people and that I’ve been able to help is pretty awesome to look back on that. In reality, like I said before, it’s really those people helping themselves I gave then the exercise but the people that have the most success with me are the ones that commit themselves to doing the hallmark that I gave them. If you see me for once a week, you see me for an hour or an hour and a half a week and then there’s all hundred something hours left in the week for you to manage what we do and for you to improve on yourself. If you do those exercise if you commit to that, really that’s when you start to get the result because you need consistency to those things. Your body has learned through thousands of bad reps and thousands of days in pain or whatever it is to adapt to a certain posture so to unlearn that takes a little bit of time and that time takes consistency. That consistency takes dedicated effort on your part to do the exercises. I mean, I’m trying to think if there’s really a groundbreaking one that I’m just super stoked on. Honestly, anybody that I’ve helped that had pain I’m pretty pumped to be able to help them out. Let’s see. It was funny because I was working on this lady the other day. I was treating this lady and she had a carpal tunnel in her left hand for 4 years. She was a painter so she really enjoyed painting and she just couldn’t do it as enthusiastically as she wanted because it hurts her hands whenever she would do it. She went to a surgeon the surgeon recommend carpal tunnel surgery. I had worked with her on her neck before of course, –   [01:28:14] Ashley James: With a surgeon that would be like, “I think you should go get a gentle massage.”   [01:28:20] Jacob Schoen: Right. Exactly. She came to me and her hand was almost contracted with Dupuytren’s. Are you familiar with that? Yes, it was almost contracted with Dupuytren’s. She sat them down on the table. I did a bunch of work for the fascia of her hand. I pumped. Pumping is just a terminology thing for getting the joints to move better, more nutrition, all those kind of stuff. Did all that for her shoulder, her elbow then her wrist then work on the fascia of her hand. I moved to the other side because she had small problem with her right hand. She laid her left hand down on the table, I didn’t say anything because I want her to notice but her hand had opened almost completely on the table without her trying to force it because all of the connected tissue of her upper limb had just relaxed. I waited 2 or 3 minutes and she looked over she goes, ”Oh my god, look at my hand.” I was like, “Yup. Check it out, pretty cool.” Just things like that. You have people get on your table. You work on their sacral joint or work on their knee and all of a sudden their back feels better. It’s just like yes, I’d say magic because I’m trying to be funny. The reality is if you respect the connectedness and the holistic nature of the body, you could really achieve some amazing things. Just things like that. Pretty cool.   [01:29:34] Ashley James: What caused her fascia to be tight in the first place do you think?   [01:29:38] Jacob Schoen: For her, I think it was just repetitive nature of holding on to a brush for 5 hours a day for 10-15 years.   [01:29:47] Ashley James: Not taking a break.   [01:29:50] Jacob Schoen: Yes, not taking a break. She was passionate about she loves painting. She loves, loves painting. Just that and then also, I’m pretty sure before she retired, she was not a secretary but she was someone who worked on the computer a lot. Lot of stuff with the hand being in that kind of closed claw position. Kind of gradually chronically shortened everything in that hand when that happens the posture just adapts to it. The posture of the hand affects the wrist. The wrist affects the shoulder, the neck and all that down the line. I think it’s just a chronic thing for her. Some people its hydration, some people it’s stress, some people it’s any number of factors. The superficial fascia of your body covers your whole body except for your face. If I were wearing a bodysuit, just kind of weird to think about. If I was wearing a bodysuit and just scrunched up the fabric by my hand, it would get tighter by my toes, tighten about my knees and my back and my neck, it wouldn’t be as obvious as it is by my hand but for sure it still gets tighter. The body’s connected in that way. For her, I think it was chronic, for other people it can be any number of things. That any number of things is why this job is so cool is because it’s not a cut and paste thing. For anybody that comes in as a new puzzle to try to solve. That always keeps it interesting.     [01:31:20] Ashley James: I love that you keep bringing up that hydration was so important. I was a massage therapist in Canada ages ago and it’s really interesting how tissue does feels different depending on whether someone’s hydrated or chronically dehydrated. Even cellulite and you could correct me if I’m wrong, cellulite is the puckering of the fascia when it’s dehydrated. People always think, “Oh, cellulite is just fat or something” but it’s the fascia adhering because it’s dehydrated and getting all sticky. Is that correct? Is that a good way of explaining it.   [01:32:01] Jacob Schoen:  I believe that. To be perfectly honest, I’m not super sure about cellulite but it makes sense to me because a lot of people – the fat that you have at least above the orthopedic system is located inside of that superficial layer of fascia. If that fascia contracts it makes sense that it’ll create some dimpling effect for the cellulite. Absolutely.   [01:32:21] Ashley James: There’s aesthetic reason why we should hydrate. What do you recommend? Let’s say everyone who is listening is dehydrated on some level. They’re drinking coffee or black tea instead of water. They’re not drinking the 4 gallons of water a day or whatever.   [01:32:41] Jacob Schoen: That’s quite a bit a lot of water. [Laughter]   [01:32:42] Ashley James: I’m from Canada. I keep on forgetting quarts. Quarts, not gallons.   [01:32:46] Jacob Schoen: We use liters.   [01:32:47] Ashley James: You guys use liters. Okay, two liters is a minimum, right?   [01:32:51] Jacob Schoen: Yes, we need to switch to the metric system without a doubt. I hate dealing with ounces and gallons. It doesn’t make any sense. Let’s be honest.   [01:32:59] Ashley James: You drink at least 2 liters of water a day but okay, if everyone is somewhat dehydrated how much water should people drink and how can we help dehydrated tissue to become hydrated again? Are there any exercises or movements that or just moving the body is that going to be adequate enough to rehydrate?   [01:33:21] Jacob Schoen: Yes. That really takes time. The way I think about it is like filling an Olympic size swimming pool. It’s going to take some time. Your body is 70% water certain structures are more or less depending on which one you’re talking about. If you want to think about it, yes, I dumped 4 liters of water into my body today. Okay, that’s good. But how much of that water is needed to work through the kidneys so it can cleanse and detoxify? How much of that water is for biochemical processes and how much of that after is actually going to make its way into my orthopedic system so I can start to rehydrate the structures that we’re talking about. I don’t know what the numbers is. It might be only be a 100ml of that 4L that you drink. If you’re missing 15 kilos of water in your body then it’s going to take a little while for you to get rehydrated. A lot of people say “Oh I need to drink water. Yes, but I’ve been drinking water for last week and I don’t feel any different or I’m just peeing a lot.” I was like, ”Hey, sorry to break it to you but it takes a little while to do that kind of thing” I would say it also depends of what kind of climate you live into. If you live in a super dry climate, it’s different than you live in a humidity, if you live in an altitude that’s different. If you live in New Orleans where I live where it’s just hot as a mother every day, then it’s a little bit different. I like to say that if, I’m going back to ounces look at me talking about how much the metric system is good, I’m going back to ounces. Your bodyweight in ounces of water a day is a good place to start. You also have the thing about the quality of the water. Hopefully, it’s not tap water. I’m crossing my finger for you. It’s not tap water. Nice quality mineral water that has different effect than just distilled reverse osmosis water like with the minerals and things like that. Whether you drink it with food or without food, that’s getting into fine details of it. A lot of people that they think they drink a lot of water and then you really ask them and they go, “Oh, I drink water.” I was like, “How much do you drink?” “Oh, I don’t know couple of glasses. Yes, I drink 4 glasses or 8 ounces a day.” “That’s only 32 ounces mam, you need to drink like a hundred. What are you doing?” People are in some ways surprised that they have these orthopedic issues but that the same time they’re dehydrated. That is the base to base level of nutrition for your body. If you don’t have water you can’t do anything else. Yes, you can’t do anything else. If you want height in the disc for your lumbar spine so that the nerve isn’t so compressed, guess what, the disc is 85% water. You need water in the disc to make a change. You need water in the muscle. You need water in the fascia so that things could actually move. A lot of people – my teacher loves to say this, I think it is such a great idea. There’s the age on your passport then there’s the actual age of your body. We all know somebody who’s in their 80’s but looks vibrant, feels young and moves really well. Then we also know somebody in their 30’s that is like, “Oh my back, every day, oh my knees.” There’s a difference between the age in your passport and the age on your body. Water is the answer. Drink more water. As far as movement that’s going to solicit the water, just moving is good place to start. As far as particular movement, you just move the water around your body. I don’t really have answer for that, unfortunately.   [01:36:45] Ashley James: Just drink and move and your body’s will take care of itself.   [01:36:58] Jacob Schoen:  Think about your body as any other body of water. If you look at a pond that doesn’t have any freshwater moving in and out of it guess what, it get stagnant, it gets stale, it starts to stink, it starts to rot. Guess what? You’re not moving and you’re not getting new water to your body. No wonder that you have this pain or that pain or that ache that just will not go away. You need to manage those things on a more consistent basis for you to really make any change. That takes time too. The gentleman who came saw me from Colorado. He’s been living in Colorado. He’s super active. He’s a super active guy works out on the heat all the time. He’s only been drinking about a liter to a liter and a half of water a day. He’s about 180-170 pounds. That is 50% of what he needs to be drinking and he’s been drinking that for 25 years. There’s no adaptability. There’s no leeway in his tissue because there’s no water in his body.   [01:37:58] Ashley James: I love it and it’s going to take time. Like you said, in 2 weeks working with you, his pain went from 8 out ten to 4 out of ten. I imagine in the coming weeks, he’s going to see even better results but it does take time. He flew down to see you and he flew back and he’s continuing to do the exercises you taught him and getting result. I love it. I love that.   [01:38:23] Jacob Schoen: That’s the hope at least is that it he keeps- unfortunately, it’s easier for us to have a short term memory loss where we go, “Oh, I forgot how much pain I was in. My pain is gone. My body feels good. I don’t have to do my exercise anymore.” Then they try to go right back into the gym, pick up right where they left off deadlifting, how many pounds and they go, “Oh crap, my back hurts again.” it’s like, “Well, sorry brother but you’re not quite back to the place where I need you to be before you can really start loading your body again.”     [01:38:55] Ashley James: Right. I had that happen with my clients where I get them off of the foods that are causing inflammation, get the mono great holistic diet that’s anti-inflammatory and get them on some supplements to aid in rebuilding their body if they have certain nutrient deficiencies. They started feeling amazing and they called me up and they’re like, “Why am I in so much pain?” I’ve had it more than once. It’s so funny. Just one that’s come into mind, this grandma and she’s like, “Why am I in so much pain,” I’m like, “Okay. Well, what’s happening?” she’s doing everything, right? Everything I laid out for her she was getting really great results and all of a sudden she’s just totally flared up and I’m like, “Okay, tell me what you did this week.” “Well, I gardened and then hiked with my grandkids and then I played with them for 4 hours in the yard.” I’m like, “Were you doing any of that before we work together?” like, “No, I was sitting watching wheel of fortune all day because I couldn’t.” so when they start getting really good results take the pain away, all of a sudden they’re living like half their age and they’re go, go, go, and then some pain comes back because they’re pushing their body way beyond what they were used to. We have to always remember that, when the pain is gone we need to ease into it. Like you said, move more aware. Have that awareness and have that patience to baby your body a little bit, as we build up endurance. While we’re creating, we’re building upon a foundation you helped set for them.   [01:40:27] Jacob Schoen:  Totally. You’ve got to take your time unless you’re an elite athlete and there’s a competition you’re getting ready for. Maybe you’re a weekend warrior and there’s really something you want to do. Yes, maybe you can push it a little bit but you have to take that into context that that’s a risk that you’re willing to take. But for most people, take your time, you got nothing to rush here.   [01:40:52] Ashley James: I have a few more questions before we wrap it out because you did say you were going to touch on explaining more about the tensegrity but before we do that we kept talking about water is. We live in a well and the water has been amazing the last few years but something happened also in our well. Water stared tasting funky and were like “Oh my gosh” we started buying bottled water while we waited for the lab results to come back to tell us whether our well water was safe or not. It’s something that I keep forgetting as you should, if you live in a well you should have it tested every year. It’s important you don’t want to die from E-coli. I finally made a purchase of a gravity-fed, this doesn’t require electricity so it’s great for emergencies. A gravity-fed water filtration system that’s really affordable. I’ve been wanting to buy it for about 12 years. I just didn’t have it. I didn’t need to buy it. It also has a way of filtering fluoride for those in the city. We are drinking even more water now because of it even though we’re well water for whatever reason just started it went back to normal. It was like this weird flu I don’t know what happened. Well, water still tastes great and we put this on this water filter that’s on our counter. It’s amazing. It filters out all viruses, it goes all the way down to viruses but like you could basically put sewer water, you could put water from a puddle or a pond, creek and it filters out everything. It doesn’t filter out minerals. It makes the water taste amazing. It’s now my new favorite water filter. I think everyone should own it. I’m going to put a link to it in the show notes.   [01:42:47] Jacob Schoen: What’s it called?   [01:42:49] Ashley James: I forget the size. There’s different sizes, it’s a Berkey.   [01:42:55] Jacob Schoen:  Berkey, yes. I was going to say, Berkey. It’s awesome.   [01:42:57] Ashley James: I did it. I read a bunch of people’s comments about which size to get and I was like, “Oh we should just get the travel size.” I read a bunch of notes you should actually get one size larger than what you think you need because you will want to cook with that water. The whole family wants to drink it but then you’re going to also find that you want to cook with it. Once we start doing that, we realize that we still fill it up everyday. We got the 3rd largest size. I’ll put it in the show notes. This is my absolute new favorite kitchen gadget is the Berkey. Like I said, you can get the filters to filter out the fluoride because a lot of people go, “I don’t like the taste of water.” It’s like you know what, this stuff makes water taste amazing especially if they live in the city, right? Even bottled water. I had a problem with buying bottled water. I’ve had a guest on the show, doctor on the show teaching this. They’re finding now that if you drink bottled water, basically any water from plastic any water that’s been stored in a plastic they’re finding micro-plastic has been leeched into your water. What’s your kidney and liver going to do with microplastic?   [01:44:1] Jacob Schoen: Throw their hands up in the air and complain. I guess   [01:44:19] Ashley James: Right. Exactly. It’s an endocrine distractor, it’s an obesogenic. It’s not healthy in anyway. So many people resort to drinking water from plastic bottles that is why I love the idea of getting the Berkey for everyone because it makes your water taste great. It’ll take out the chlorine and the fluoride and all that stuff from tap water. It makes it taste great so you drink more. It doesn’t require any electricity so if there’s a problem you could still filter water if there’s an emergency.   [01:44:52] Jacob Schoen: I’m actually probably going to buy one for my studio honestly. I definitely should.   [01:44:58] Ashley James: The trick I found is you want to get one that is big enough to feed everyone for the day but only for the day. You want to fill it up at the end of each day maximum at the end of two days but you don’t want to go longer that because if the filter gets dry and air gets in it, it becomes very slow. You want to get one that’s big enough to give enough water so it doesn’t run out during the day but the small enough to still need to put to fill up the top chamber once every one or 2 days. That’s my tip for knowing what size Berkey to get. I highly recommend it. I think everyone should own a Berkey. I’ve seen a lot of people in RV have travel Berkey because they literally go to a pond or a creek and put it in. It’s pretty cool. Yes, okay. That was my plug for – I’ll make sure the link to my favorite size and put the Berkeys in the show notes of the podcast at learntruehealth.com. Of course and the link to Jacob Schoen’s website as well is going to be in the show notes of the podcast which is shiftsportwellness.com. We’re going to talk about how people could work with you but first, tensegrity is that like a mixture of tension and integrity?     [01:46:25] Jacob Schoen: That is exactly what it is. Good for you. That’s awesome. Yes, it was actually originally a term developed for more architectural structures. Buckminster fuller back in like I want to say maybe 1970’s, 1960’s, don’t quote me on that. There’s a lot of big structures across the world that are using tensegrity principles to be built. If you think about a building that is – they’re going to try to build a building I think Dubai or Qatar that’s almost a kilometer high. You can’t build that building by stacking one brick on top of another. It just wouldn’t work. You have to build integrity into the building intrinsically by creating tension across the pieces. You think about the golden gate bridge, you think about I think it’s the Olympics dome in Montreal, there’s another building in France. Classically as you can think about it. It is islands, this is a strict way of saying it. Islands of solid pieces so an island in a sea of tension. What that means is if you look at your orthopedic system, there no place where you should say that “this is supported by that” right? Because it’s not a brick on top of a brick. When I stand up, my head is not attached to a hook in the ceiling or by a rod in my back unless I’ve had surgery. When you look at a skeleton in the classroom, it has to be supported by rod or else it would just fall to the floor. How does it maintain its structure? It maintains its structure by taking this piece and pulling it tight and then attaching it to that piece and then attaching it over there, back and forth back and forth and before you know it, it’s like a spiders web in your whole body that pulls you together and keeps you together but allows you to move and be dynamic at the same time. That tensegrity system is really how we look at the body. If we want to understand how different pathologies or different problems can really be connected because if you look at it from a Newtonian kind of way it’s just this brick is on top of this brick on top of this brick then it wouldn’t make any sense that the brick at the bottom is affecting directly the brick at the very top. If you look at it in the way that this one is connected to that one to that one then it makes a lot of sense how you can have a problem at your ankle which affects your knee which affects your hip which affects your lower back which affects then your neck. All of these pieces together come together to make the tensegrity model. When you have your body it is being held together by the tension and the tension, its base of support or its foundation is this decompressive element, your bones essentially. Through that, you create the beautiful and amazing organisms that you are as a human. Which is how we are able to walk upright and how we are able to do all the things that we can do. If you just took a brunch of bricks held them on a stack and then drop them on the floor they would all fall apart. For me if I stand up and jump when I land, my heart doesn’t hit my pelvis there’s a reason for that. It’s because it supported by all the ligaments that we’ve talked about earlier. There’s a reason why my sacrum doesn’t fall to the ground it’s because it’s supported by the sacral ligaments, the disc in the lumbar spine, all of that stuff and the muscle and all that. Really that goes back to the fascia which is what gives our body the ability to have a tensegrity structure. If you don’t have a tissue that connects all of the pieces, then you don’t have tensegrity structure. You just have brick on top of brick and we know that we don’t have that because a skeleton can’t hang by himself. To respect that we have to use exercise and therapies that respect that organization which is why I think that these programs are so amazing is because they do respect that. Yes, they break it down to pieces but they talk about and teach you how to assess why the ankle might affect a problem with the head or why someone who’s had a concussion needs to have work done on their coccyx. Things like that is just why it’s so freaking cool. To be honest with you. That’s why it’s so complex and so difficult. That’s why a lot of people they can spend their time spinning their wheels, it like “You know, I had a back problem. I went to the surgeon I got my back operated on and I still have back pain.” It’s like, hmm that is interesting maybe it’s because your knee or maybe it’s emotional system or any of the other things. The tensegrity is a biomechanical philosophy but it’s also a global way of thinking because it’s a more complex way of thinking which means that you respect the complexity of a human not just a robot with muscle on them walking into your office.   [01:51:27] Ashley James: Yes. I love it. I’ve got these amazing experience where my chiropractor gives me an exercise for my upper back and my lower back all of a sudden stops hurting. He adjusts my neck and my hip stops hurting or he adjust my assai joint and my thoracic spine stops hurting. I’m like, “What did you do?” It’s cool because like you said, it’s about respecting that integrity of the where the tension needs to be in that balance. I like that your type of training with people, your exercise and also the therapy you do is looking at how you can support that body and having that optimal balance. That makes complete sense.   [01:52:13] Jacob Schoen:  Absolutely. It’s back to the specialization quote. If you only specialize in one thing when someone comes to you for that thing then that’s what you’re going to do. But if you at least have the foresight to say that, “Okay, the thing that they’re coming to me for might not actually be their problem. It might just might be where their symptoms are” then you can really open up the doors for them to actually get the result that they’re looking for which is pain or a better performance or whatever is. Now I’m at the point where I’m just like I’m not even having convinced myself anymore because being classically educated in western culture where most things are reduction is down to this specific thing or the problem is where the symptoms are. I had to work really hard to think in this way and I think in a more complex way and to take myself out of the more linear way of thinking. Now that I’m on the dark side if you will, it’s just so obvious to me. Of course, it’s all connected. Like how simple do you think a human being early is although we can’t be simple sometimes. How complex do you think somethings really be it can be with? It can be tremendously complex. Of course, the muscles of your eyes that help you orient yourself with where you’re looking can affect your lower back. Of course, the concussion that you had when you were 7 because the dura mater envelopes the brain then goes down and attached to the coccyx. Of course that can explain some of the pelvic problems that you’re having but until you take a step back and really see it that way then you don’t really have an opportunity to fully help someone to their potential because you’re limited in the philosophy that you have towards or least you used to approach them.   [01:54:00] Ashley James: Right. There’s a big difference between the hubris and the humility. You have so much humility that you’re willing to say “I don know but I’m not going to impose my belief system in my client. I’m going to be open-minded and be the detective to help find the root cause and help my client come back into balance and be open to learning new things as I go.” Versus other practitioner will have that hubris to believe that they know better. Right? That’s where we really hit a brick wall when it comes to our own healing. When we give up that power especially to practitioners that have that hubris.   [01:54:52] Jacob Schoen: Totally. To be perfectly honest with you, that was not how I started. I’m a person when I was in high school I couldn’t translate Latin to save my life so I would memorize hundreds and hundreds of words of Latin for a particular translation so that when I got the test I could just write from memory. I am a go, go, go type like, “All right. You want to beat me in this contest? Well, good luck.” kind of person. For me to admit that I don’t know something definitely took some time. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s almost freeing to say that I don’t know somethings because then the pressure of having to know isn’t there and also the opportunity to grow from not knowing and having the opportunity to explore and to challenge myself by thinking in different way is now open. It just makes me think of the quote that my teacher always says which is like, “With the body, always possible.” that is just I think so beautiful and powerful. Yes, I’d like to think of ourselves pretty highly. As humans, we kind of dominated the planet and all the stuff that we do to the world but like as an organism, as a creature we are pretty spectacular. The emotional capacity that we have, the physical capacity that we have and all of those to be in the world that we are. We are amazing, amazing creature. I think we have to adopt different kind of thinking to respect that organization. For me as far as an exercise goes that’s what I’m passionate about this makes the most sense.   [01:56:30] Ashley James: I love it you have mentioned that you worked with a woman recently where you did a fundamental exercise to release L5-S1. Is that something you can teach us through the podcast?   [01:56:46] Jacob Schoen: Verbally? No. Before I kind of to but it isn’t something – It’s difficult to do when you’re with someone because of the amount of awareness that it takes. For example, you have to simultaneously coordinate specific movements with your hands, your neck, your eyes, your lower back, your feet, your knees, your hips. I mean your whole body has to be coordinated because what you’re trying to do is I use an analogy like the golf swing. If I want to hit a golf ball at the hole, well then I can’t hit it anywhere else, I have to hit it at the hole. To hit it in the hole, I have to have my hand, my elbows, my shoulder, my hips. Everything needs to be going well. I need to judge the wind all those stuff. All those pieces needed to come together and if they come together, I can hit it the hole. If they don’t come together, maybe I hit it off into the bunker or whatever it is. To be able to actually specifically target L5-S1, the connected tissue around L5-S1 and that joint by itself, it takes a coordinated effort of your whole body. To do that, especially if you are not super aware of your limbs or you’re maybe not the most coordinated person is different to do in person and over audio like this without being visually seeing someone. I’d say impossible.   [01:58:04] Ashley James: Got it. We want to hit it in the hole. That’s why people should come see you. You are willing to talk to people on Skype but you mostly work with people in person and clients have flown to see you. What does it look like to work with you? How people work with you and could people let’s say a listener in Australia work with you through skype?   [01:58:33] Jacob Schoen:  Yes, absolutely. It just depends on what they’re really looking to accomplish. If you have someone who is in Australia for example who wants to learn the basics of Eldoa, wants for someone to introduce it to them to see if they like it to see how they feel I do skype sessions like that all the time. People connect me just because they want to work with me. They like that approach that I have and they want to learn some of the exercises. If you have a really specific thing that you haven’t been able to resolve in months or years or weeks or whatever it is and you have the means to come down and see me, I set up blocks of time for people to come down get the training and work on the exercise and they go home with the full exercise program based on the problems that they have and then how much time they have. You don’t want to give someone an hour of exercise if they say they only have 10 minutes because they’re a busy mom or executive or whatever it is. Then I’ve also had people who had organized little courses where they bring me to their facility for their athletes or for their practitioner and I give them an Eldoa rundown. I teach them some of the basics of the Eldoa. I call it a workshop. I do a workshop for them where the goal is to introduce them to the exercises, to teach them some of the basics that they can start to do for themselves and to start to integrate that in their daily practice or movement practice and things like that. If you’re within driving distance of me come on down and see me. I have my studio here in New Orleans and I take clients everyday except for the weekends. I take off on the weekend for a little me time. Come down and see me and then the process is relatively the same. Have the assessment try to figure out what I see in your body based off your symptoms and all those things to give me as much information I can have about you, your lifestyle, nutrition, stress all that type of stuff. To start to develop a program and a plan of attack if you will, to get you to where you want to be and then either put you back in the car and send you back to where your home and you work on that for a couple of weeks and then you come back depending on your means. Or if you’re an out of town person, maybe we spend instead of just 1 or 2 hours together, we spend 2 or 3 days together. Do a whole bunch of work. Give you a big program like the gentleman who came from Colorado and then you go off. You work on that. You report back to me. You get feedback and then we work from there. It’s really a process for those types of things.   [02:00:58] Ashley James: I love it. And your clinic in New Orleans is called shift sport wellness?   [02:01:04] Jacob Schoen: It was. I did call it shift sport wellness but then I changed to shift training and health because people didn’t know what support and wellness meant so I changed it to training and health which made it hopefully more obvious for people.   [02:01:18] Ashley James: Got it. Okay, awesome. But if they go to shiftsportwellness.comthey can find out more information in your clinic and how they can work with you and how they contact you?   [02:01:31] Jacob Schoen: Yes. I am on there. That’s is going to be the best place. I’m on google. If you search shift training health on google, you’d find me and there should be link to message me on there. Then my email is also on my website. Anything that people want to send me with questions, I try to help with over email as best as I can but the reality is that if I really respect the complexity of the person, if someone tells me that they have back pain for 10 years what can they do. My answer to be honest with you is I don’t know because I don’t know who I’m working with yet. I try to be as helpful as I can but also respect the idea that each person is an individual and I can’t give cookie-cutter answer for people really looking to help themselves.   [02:02:18] Ashley James: I love that. It comes back that you have the humility to respect everyone as an individual. Of course, if someone has back pain for 10 years they should come see you in person so you can do an assessment. Like you said, you do an extensive assessment to figure out if you can see the Kinesiology of the problem. Then, of course, like you said, you asses their nutrition and find out if they’re dehydrated or not and their lifestyle. You can determine what’s going on and you take it from there. I have really enjoyed spending the last 2 hours with you. The time has just flown. It’s easy, so awesome. Is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview? Anything left unsaid or any last words you want to share with our listeners?   [02:03:08] Jacob Schoen: If I hadn’t already said it then I’ll make it explicitly clear. I think when it comes to these types of problems that we’re talking about. I think you really have two options. Those two options are one, you can offload the responsibility and the work and the problem to someone else or you can take the responsibility yourself. Just because you go and see someone doesn’t mean that you’re offloading that responsibility but if you can find a way to use exercise, I mean I see a counselor every week just to because it’s nice to talk to somebody. Like if you can start to work with people that help you help yourself that’s really going to be where the power is. If you continue to do things that in some way start to wheel away at that power that you have. I think in the long term you will find that you won’t be as successful. My really advice to people would be start to bring the power back to yourself and to try to make the change for yourself because in my experience, you can do it.   [02:04:18] Ashley James: That’s awesome. Thank you so much, Jacob Schoen, for coming on the show today. The links to everything that Jacob does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. His website again is shiftsportwellness.com. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show and sharing why we should all learn Eldoa. I think we should all learn it. This is amazing because we want to keep like you said, the integrity and the tension in the right space, in the right alignment as the demands of our body changes throughout our life that we make sure that we are coming back into balance. It just makes sense to work with you. People take their car to the mechanic more than they consider taking their body to the mechanic, right? You’re like the mechanic I want to take my body to. That’s pretty awesome. Jacob, it’s been such a pleasure talking to you today.   [02:05:12] Jacob Schoen:  Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.   [02:05:16] Ashley James: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people? You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health-coaching sort of vacation program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition but from the standpoint on how we can help people to shift their life, to shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can google Institute for Integrated Nutrition or IIN, or give them a call or you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training. So check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name, Ashley James and the Learn True Health podcast because I made a deal with them that they would give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic offices, doctor’s offices, you can work in hospitals. You can work online through Skype and help people around the world. You can become an author. You can go into the school system and help with your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. You can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them and their success and their health goals. There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach. So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. Mention my name. Get the best deal. Give them a call and they’ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month, so you’re going to want to call them now and check it out. If you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.   [02:08:24] Ashley James: Are you looking to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.   Get Connected With Jacob Schoen! Website Facebook Recommended Readings by Jacob Schoen Gray’s Anatomy 1901 by Henry Gray   How To Eat, Move, and Be Healthy by Paul Chek

Listen to my interviews about Sunlighten Saunas and detoxification: https://www.learntruehealth.com/?s=sunlighten   Get Palmer's free Optimal Food Guide to help people dial in the best foods for them; you can download it at PalmerKippola.com/gift   How To Beat AutoImmune https://www.learntruehealth.com/beat-autoimmune Highlights: What is MS and some most common auto-immune diseases One of the key factors that helps to reverse her autoimmune disease was decreasing and managing stress. Reasons why we need to on a daily basis have a routine that decreases our stress levels For autoimmune, removing the gluten is paramount but my lifestyle Find out how FIGHTS can affect your health (Food, Infections, Gut health, Hormone balance, Toxins, and Stress)    Feeling stressed lately? Find out how to build a foundation of health by addressing (FIGHTS) Food, Infections, Gut Health, Hormone Balance, Toxins and Stress in today’s podcast.   [00:00] Ashley James: Hello, True Health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love today’s interview. This woman Palmer Kippola had MS. Multiple sclerosis for 26 years and she figured out how to no longer have MS. Have it completely reverse and heal her MS. In this today’s interview she shares her story. One of the key factors that helped her to reverse her autoimmune disease was decreasing and managing stress. We talked a bit about the physiological reasons why we need to, on a daily basis, have a routine that decreases our stress levels. Decreases the cortisol that puts us in the parasympathetic neuro-system response of rest and digest. It’s very important and we don’t do it enough especially if we have an autoimmune condition. I want to share with you something we really recommend. If you’re a type of person who’s battling a chronic illness and you want to heal, you’re going to love this suggestion. I’ve talked to in the past episodes about how much I loved Sunlighten Saunas I have one myself. It’s really aided me in my healing journey. I know that dozens of listeners have also purchased the sunlight and sauna and shared with me their personal story of how it’s been a great tool for them. This summer, Sunlighten Saunas giving my listeners a free chromotherapy device installed into their sauna and it aids with relaxation. Being in a sauna, number one is very relaxing. It does turn on the healing response, it turns off the stress response in the body. It incredibly healing and it decreases that stress from them. In addition, to just being in a sauna and all the benefits that they provide, this is a low heat sauna, they do have options for high heat but for those who are in chronic stress or having chronic autoimmune condition, you might not be comfortable of going in a sauna because you think it’s just going to be very hot. I start sweating in my sunlighten in about 119 degrees and the air is very comfortable. It’s almost like slightly above room temp. I feel really good. All my muscles totally relaxed and my body is expelling toxins through my sweat. I stay in there about between half and hours and 40 minutes. It’s very relaxing. When you have the chromotherapy in there, it adds both light and sound to decrease the stress. They are able to prove that it sends your bring into these relaxing waves. It takes you down out of that stress response and they’re showing that it is really helpful for those post-traumatic stress and with high chronic anxiety and those in chronic stress states which often people with autoimmune are. I highly recommend checking out sunlighten you can just give them a call. Google Sunlighten Saunas. Give them a call. Tell them I sent you Ashley James from the Learn True Health podcast. You get free shipping and you get this free chromotherapy added to your sauna. That’s worth several hundred dollars there. They do have a type of sauna that is called the solo system and it is portable. You can lay in it. Its ultra-low EMF and nontoxic. When you’re done you wipe it down and you put it in your closet. They do have that option for those who don’t want to have a big wooden sauna in their house or condo which I have and I love it. It only takes up a corner of the bedroom. It’s wonderful. I definitely recommend Sunlighten Sauna. It has been a great tool for me in my healing journey so many listeners have shared with me that they’re having wonderful results with it. As you listen to today’s episode and you start to understand why stress is a very important thing to learn how to manage on a daily basis, know that Sunlighten Sauna has a wonderful solution for you and as a learn true health listener, you definitely have a great discount by going with them. If you’re interested in learning more about sunlight and why I chose their company over dozens of other sauna companies out there, please go to learntruehealth.com and type in sauna or type in sunlighten in the search box, listen to my interviews. I did two interviews on the sunlighten sauna with the founder and one of the employees there who I absolutely adore. Both of them have wonderful stories and explain why sunlighten for me is the better option. I took about 2 years in researching all these different companies and contacting all these diff companies and talking to naturopaths and talking to other doctors until I finally decided that Sunlighten is my Sauna company. I’m really glad I did it. I’ve had only amazing experiences with their saunas and with their company and their customer service. I highly recommend them as a healing tool that help you both detoxify, sweat out those toxins and bring down the stress. Decrease that stress. Also, being in the Sunlighten Sauna help decrease inflammation as well. All wonderful healing tools that we need to help us on our healing journey. My goal for you is if you have autoimmune disease that you learn today how to beat it by listening to today’s interview and following all the wonderful advice that Palmer gives today. Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener of the Learn True Health podcast. Please continue sharing these episodes with all your friends and family so we can help everyone that we love to learn true health. Enjoy today’s interview.   [06:18] Ashley James:  Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 367. Today we are in for a big treat. We have with us, Palmer Kippola who is a functional medicine certified health coach. What has impressed me is much is that she overcame her 26-year battle with multiple sclerosis. She went on to design a formula to help everyone with autoimmune condition to no longer have it. She explains, she teaches us today. She’s going to explain why we can permanently and forever reverse autoimmune disease. If you go to a typical, traditional MD, they’re going to say that you need to be on drugs and manage it. That maybe they’ll even say that your autoimmune disease can go into remission but anytime it could sneak up on you and come back and flare up so they want to get you on drugs for the rest of your life. Not Palmer’s experience. Her experience is that you can epigenetically shift your body so that you can longer express, no longer have autoimmune and you’re 100% forever in remission. I’m so excited for my listeners to learn from you today, Palmer. Welcome to the show.   [07:41] Palmer Kippola: It’s an absolute honor to be with you, Ashley. Thank you so much for having me.   [07:45] Ashley James: Absolutely.  Well, this is going to be really exciting. Right off the bat, I want to say congratulations, your book is number one Amazon bestseller in 8 categories. You launched it a few months ago and it is just selling like hotcakes. Congratulations.   [08:03] Palmer Kippola: Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you.   [08:04] Ashley James: Absolutely. Now, your book is called Beat Autoimmune: The six keys to reverse your condition and reclaim your health and it has a foreword with Mark Hyman. I’ve had him on the show, I absolutely love him. What does it feel to have an Amazon best-selling book?   [08:22] Palmer Kippola: It’s a little surreal. I have to tell you. It just had exceeded my expectation but what it says to me, is that people are seeking real solutions and that is so exciting to me. People actually know it’s possible or believes that it’s possible to completely heal. They are looking for these answers.   [08:44] Ashley James: It’s number 1 in 8 categories including immunology, alternative med, lupus, MS, chronic pain. You cover a lot of really great content in your book and of course, you’re here today to teach us some of that content. Before we get into that though, I really want to hear your story. Can you take us back? What happened in your life that led up to you having MS for 26 years and ultimately discovering how to no longer have an autoimmune condition?   [09:15] Palmer Kippola:  Yes. This a story that starts when I’m 19 years old so I need to take you back just a few years. I was a happy, healthy, well-adjusted 19-year-old young woman. I was home for the summer after my freshman year of college. I’m just working a summer job, doing my thing. One morning I woke you and the soles of my feet were just tingling. That feeling that you get when you’ve sat on a limb for too long and when the blood flows back it’s all tingling. I thought, “You just shake your legs and the blood’s going to flow back. Only this particular morning, the blood didn’t flow back even when I was jumping up and down. I thought, “Get up, this is just going to go away.” Off I go to work but the tingling just crept up my legs like a vine. By the time the tingling reached my knees, I knew something was really wrong. So I called my parents and they called the family doctor who said, “Get her over to the neurologist at UCLA.” I don’t know how we managed it but we got it that the afternoon, by the time we sat in the neurologists’ office, the tingling was all the way up to my tummy. The neurologist had me do this very cursory exam, heel-toe across the room. She tested my reflexes, the knees, touch your fingers to your nose with your eyes closed. I think it was a 5 or 6 minutes visit and she then pronounced, “I am 99% certain that you have MS. Multiple sclerosis. And if I’m right, there’s nothing you can do, except go home and wait it out.” We had never heard of MS. This was before the internet. There was no Dr. Terry Walls. We just left her office with very little information. Very little hope and went home and by the time we got home that evening, the tingling was all the way up into the collarbone. By the time we got into bed, my mom crawled in with me and she was holding me and crying and I was crying because by that time I couldn’t feel her holding me Ashley, my whole entire body had gone completely numb and would stay numb from the neck down for a full 6 weeks.   [11:30] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that must’ve been so scary.   [11:35] Palmer Kippola: It was absolutely terrifying. We just didn’t know what to expect. We couldn’t just go and check out doctor google. Really, I was relegated to the couch for those 6 weeks. We didn’t know how long it’s going to last. I’m just so grateful that I was at home at that time with my parents and they were tremendous supporters. My mom was quick to empathize, hug me and start planning what we could for we don’t know what. My life permitted being in a wheelchair and going to school locally. My dad was also very quick to motivate me and my can-do spirit. He would often say, “Honey, you can beat this thing.” Just I understand him he was a former fighter pilot so he had a very strong can-do spirit and he always fired mine up. I had the empathy, I had the motivation and a lot of time to just contemplate and be on the couch. I will say that during those 6 weeks, I am so grateful that friends came by and they weren’t too scared off by this mysterious disease. One friend came, a family friend who is into things metaphysical, in retrospect I can see that this was a gift, but at that time I was very offended. She asked me “Palmer, why do you think you got the MS?” “What? You think I caused this? What do you mean why do I think I got this?” I was offended. I didn’t have much to do or very far to go. I was like a dog with a bone with that question and I just lay on the couch thinking about this. “Why do I think I got – Did I bring this on?” I will share with you what I came up with this, my intimal hypothesis for why but I need to take you a little bit farther back in time because I had been adopted as a baby I was 3days old, my parents’ very loving parents. My dad who I mentioned who was also a fighter pilot had very strong opinions about things and very definitive views on how things should be. He didn’t liked that my mom was overweight and she really struggled with that. He would yell quite a bit. My earliest memory about age 3 or age 4 is, my dad is yelling at my mom who had shut her bedroom door, she probably crying behind her door. I am standing up to my dad with my little dukes up saying, “You yell at my mom and call her names, I’ll suck your lights out.” Whatever words to that affect. In lying on the couch there at age 19 completely numb, it occurred to me in a flash of insight that the reason for MS was chronic stress. I had become a child warrior. The hyper-vigilant, always scanning the environment for safety or danger and catching knives under the air vigilance, right? That is what occurred to me and I didn’t know anything about the immune system. I had no basis for any kind of knowledge about this but I envisioned my immune system as having become hyper-vigilant too that if there wasn’t a real battle going on, like a virus or some sort of bacterial threat that it could create friendly fire. It would turn against my own body. Much of this still rings true for me today that chronic stress is the root of the MS even though I know there’s a lot more to this story.   [15:25] Ashley James: I love it that you have that as you’re lying on the couch, you have this insight into that how the stress was affecting your immune system and how your immune system was responding. While you’re lying on the couch, did you start to do things to try to calm down or calm down your immune system? What did you do with that information once you had it?   [15:49] Palmer Kippola: Yes. I did. The first thing we did, another family friend brought a book, Norman Cousin’s Anatomy of an Illness and in it, Dr. Cousin’s recounts his own experience healing from some mysterious autoimmune condition with high doses of laughter and vitamin C. I didn’t know anything about nutrition but the laughter made perfect sense so every night my family and I made it our mission to watch funny things on TV. That was definitely a good distraction at the very least it gave me an oasis of calm from the fear. That was one thing and I did start doing visualizations. If you think about Pacman, it was that rudimentary when I was envisioning my immune system like shooting laser beams at these little critters that were in my body that shouldn’t be there. Guided imagery and laughter were two of the first things that I used but it took a couple of years for me to really put this into practice if you will. I am very fortunate that at the end of 6 weeks the numbness were treated enough for me to go back to college. I went back for my sophomore year. I intuited since chronic stress was at the root of the MS then I needed to learn how to relax. That drove me for the next 26 years. That I needed to put relaxation practices in place to calm that hypervigilance. The first thing I started doing is yoga. I noticed that when I did the practice, did the deep breathing and actually did the poses, I noticed a reduction in symptoms. Conversely, when I was really stressed like there were exams at school, conflict at home or later in the workforce, when I might have been overwhelmed with work-related stuff, I noticed flare-ups of the MS. That was really, really easy for me to see the cause and effect of stress equals symptoms, relaxations equals no symptoms. No, not at all but a reduction in symptoms, I should say. The next thing I started doing in the early 90’s is to meditate. I noticed once again if I did it, things would calm down and if I didn’t, I would experience more symptoms. But still the MS still persisted, it didn’t go away just because I started to relax more it was always there to some varying degree.   [18:30] Ashley James: How many flare-ups would you have? Would it be just little symptoms like if you were under stress you’d wake up with tinging numbness or pain? Would you have major flare-ups where you would be in a wheelchair?   [18:45] Palmer Kippola: Fortunately, I’ve never made into to a wheelchair. I don’t know how to say that. I never ended up in a wheelchair, I did have an experience once probably the most dreadful was aside from that 6 weeks of total body numbness was a flare-up of optic neuritis. This is a striking before and after. I was working for AT&T network systems in New Jersey. A stressful marketing job, I went on vacation to a really relaxing Caribbean island fantastic time and I came back, and the moment I set foot in the corporate building under those florescent lights, I was struck blind in one eye and had this searing pain that would last about two weeks. That would take two visits to an emergency room for the pain and them not figuring out what it was and finally a trip down to John Hopkins in Baltimore where there’s an MS specialty to be diagnosed with optic neuritis which is, in fact, a hallmark symptom of MS. For the most part, your question about feeling symptoms, there was tightness like rubber bands around my torso, there was numbness and tingling. There was no rhyme and reason to where the symptom would show up and there was also this general profound fatigue that I felt.   [20:13] Ashley James: The catch22, when you have these symptoms, it causes more stress. It’s just feedback loop because you don’t know if it’s going to get worse, you don’t know when it’s going to get better. You’re feeling it in your body so it’s real. You’re constantly worrying about which is creating more stress, which is creating more symptoms, the symptoms creating more stress and worry which is creating more symptoms and on and on, how do you take a breath and do a break state?   [20:47] Palmer Kippola: That is a great question. It think it’s so important to understand that the stress itself, create such a downward spiral to a vicious cycle of stress and symptom, stress and more stress and insomnia and you can’t sleep and you’re stressed about that. I think inherent in that question too, I think you mentioned taking a deep breath. Anything that you can do to cut that cycle and you’ve practiced, I understand that you do NLP, one thing that I have found super helpful is just to do the deep breathing. Taking maybe a total of 6 rounds of 5 breaths in really slowly deep belly breathing is some way to just get back centered in the body and not to let your mind spiral out of control because there’s no sense creating more stress. There’s what is and then there’s the story that you start telling about what is. Just to stay present with what is and breathe into it and get centered and back in the body. Whatever you can do to center yourself has been in my experience the most helpful.   [21:59] Ashley James: You say that it reminds me of landmark out. Did you do any landmark or did you do that somewhere else?   [21:05] Palmer Kippola: I don’t know if I learned it from landmark but you’ve caught me. Yes, I’ve done landmark through their advanced program. I guess, SELP which was very helpful. I can’t remember what it stands for but maybe you do.   [22:18] Ashley James: Self-Expression and leadership program.   [22:21] Palmer Kippola: There you go.   [22:22] Ashley James: Yes, I did landmark when I was a teenager. Then after my mom died, I ended up taking a lot of their advanced courses and then they hired me and I was on staff in Toronto at the Toronto center. I love Landmark but they got a little miffy when I told them I wanted to study NLP because they just wanted everyone to do Landmark and not look at where landmark got their original stuff from. They copied NLP and so I went basically to the source. Coming back to what you said about story. This is really important. I was just talking a friend of the wall and was very stressed out about something. She was exacerbating her symptoms so much so that she was unable to walk. She was really exacerbating her stress. It’s hard to tell someone, “You’re causing this.” She has health issues but stress exacerbates the health issues and the only time she has flare-ups is when she’s’ stressed. It’s hard to say, “By the way, you have control over this” because people feel like, ”Are you telling me that I’m doing this on myself and it’s all on my head?” it’s not. It’s not saying that at all. It’s very real and that emotional, mental and physical stress both from internal emotional and mental and external stressors, like what we eat and our environment are – if you are in an area where there’s high pollution in the air and you have asthma that’s an external stress on your body but if you are not sleeping at night then you’re worrying a lot. That’s exactly same as breathing in pollution for someone who has asthma. It’s just a different kind of stress but it’s going to do the same thing to the body. It takes the body out of the healing mode and into the fight or flight mode. If we are in fight or flight we’re not healing. Whether we’re healing or we’re fighting to survive in the moment. Like you said, taking those deep breaths is going to give us that break state where we can bring our body back into healing mode and calm it down. When we’re worried about something we’re throwing fuel in the fire and I love that you brought up the idea of the story because that’s exactly what I had to tell my friend which really helped her. She was having symptoms in her body. She has some emotional stressors going on with her life with her family. Her symptoms came up and then she started worrying about the symptoms “Oh my gosh, does this mean I’m going to have to go to the ER? What’s going to happen to me? Am I going to be able to walk? Do I need to go get my walker? I don’t have anyone to take care of me.” So she starts making a story about the feeling. All she had was a sensation in her body but her mind wanted to predict the future so she could be prepared but the mind goes to worst-case scenario, the doomsday. Her mind started thinking about all the worst things that could possibly happen be she’s feeling the sensation in her body. Then that exacerbated her worry and her stress which then created more symptoms and that was the feedback loop. She started feeling more symptom then she started worrying about them thinking, “This means that I’m going to be this, that I’m going to be that. “ I had to say lest focus on what’s so right now because all the this-means that the brain does, all the story that the brain creates is not necessarily true. It’s just trying to predict the future based on the past but were not living our past right now. We need to do a break state. Catch yourself when you’re in story. Story meaning when you’re trying to predict this negative future based on what you’re currently feeling in your body. You felt the searing pain in your head and you couldn’t see at one eye your brain probably went, “Oh my god, I’m going to blind for the rest of my life.” That’s the story that you probably created because I would. I would, possibly in that moment. And then that feeds into creating more and more stress. Like you said, we have to come back to what’s so. What’s so in the moment is I’m having these feelings and that’s it. That’s the only things that so. What can I do right now to help me to trigger the healing mode and to de-escalate the stress mode. I love that you do the deep breathings which immediately helps. Then to manage stress in a daily basis, you’re doing yoga and meditation. Obviously, you’ve discovered more things to help because this was just helping to manage it but it didn’t helped it to completely go away. So after you discovered that the optical nerve,   [27:29] Palmer Kippola: Optic neuritis.   [27:30] Ashley James: Yes, the optic neuritis was a common symptom of MS then what happened?   [27:37] Palmer Kippola: I just kept on this path of stress reduction because I thought that that was going to be my path to freedom. In fact, it was big part of it but in addition to that, I did a bunch of other experiments over the 26 years. I intuited that food had to do something with the MS. I didn’t know what and at that time there was very little information available and I came across the swank diet book that purported that a low-fat vegetarian diet was in fact the best for MS. That was the next experiment I did. For me, it didn’t work. I didn’t notice a reduction in symptoms and in fact, when I added more healthy whole grains into my diet I noticed that I started having more tummy trouble and no reduction in MS symptoms. Every time I ate, I would notice some gurgling not like IBS symptoms that were debilitating but this kind of gurgling sensation that you can just feel something going on that doesn’t feel great but I thought it was normal. I thought everybody felt this way after eating. I didn’t think anything of it. I just kept eating the whole grains at every meal. I grew up eating great big bowls of cereal, I had my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on whole wheat bread, and for dinner there’s was either pasta or sometimes pizza or beer. Every time I ate, I felt that grumbling. That was my first experience with food and I must say that all different types of vegetarian is for me, didn’t seem to make anything better. In fact, I discovered that I had more tummy issues as a result of adding more grains to my diet.   [29:33] Ashley James: Right. Not many people get that there’s a connection between gut health and other systems of the body. Did you feel that disrupting your gut health with grains played a role in affecting your inflammation, affecting the MS, the autoimmune, did you take that correlation?   [29:58] Palmer Kippola: I didn’t make any correlation whatsoever. Again, I thought this was normal and it just seemed like a failed experiment to me at that time. It wasn’t until 2010 when I actually discovered my lynchpin trigger which I will talk more about. I just wanted to add one more failed experiment to this equation before telling you what my eureka experiment was. The third experiment I tried was medication, which for me was not beneficial. I, in fact, developed more people know of them as side effect, they’re not very side effects they’re very direct effects that medication causes but I think the drug companies want us to believe that these are just little tiny side effects. I actually developed heart attack symptoms about 15 minutes after injecting myself one night with this medication purported to help the MS. That was a terrifying experience. They just assured me that this was a normal known side effect of the mediation. I developed a wound that wouldn’t heal for 6 months. I developed lipoatrophy, which is a disappearance of fat where you inject yourself in all the fatty places, they don’t talk about a that. If the medication worked, you overlooked those. It’s a question of balance. Is it doing more good than harm? For me, it ended up more harm than good. I was already managing well with the stress reduction. I was modeling along with the diets trying to figure it out on my own again, not having the internet, it wasn’t until 2010 that I decided to finally I need to go see a nutritionist. I found a functional medicine nutritionist who lived pretty close to me. She ran a bunch of tests and it turned out that I have non-celiac gluten sensitivity. In other words, I didn’t have celiac disease but I was very sensitive to gluten. One of the proteins in grains notably wheat. This functional medicine nutritionist educated me on what gluten is doing to my body. How that was what was causing this gut symptoms. Remember I shared that I was eating gluten at every meal for as long as I could chew food. I had no idea what was doing to my body. She educated me on how it was inflaming the lining my gut creating leaky gut and she led to through gut healing protocol that included a 30-day elimination diet so that’s what I did in October of 2010. I remember the date because this was really notable for me. Within a week of removing gluten, I stopped having tummy trouble after eating. Within one month of removing the gluten, I stopped having any and all symptoms ever again. Like end of story. I really quick to footnote Ashley that your experience might be different. Everybody has a different reaction. I’m not suggesting that reversing MS is as simple as removing gluten and you’re done because our root causes are different and we’ll go into the FIGHTS categories that I’ve came up with to look at all the things that need to be looked at. Gluten happens to be the number one biggest baddy when it comes to food and autoimmune conditions. I just wanted to get that said and I would also like to add that I was so excited about this fact that by January of 2011, I thought I’ve got to go tell my neurologist because over 26 years I’ve seen 6 neurologists, this 26-year period where I’ve lived in different places, 6 neurologists who all had done MRIs and office visits and everything who have said, yes this is MS. This one that I was seeing in Palo Alto, I told him this is what I did. I removed the gluten and I don’t have MS anymore. I can’t feel it. Prior to that, I felt like I was plugged into an electric socket 24/7. I could feel this humming in the background all the time. I knew it was always there. When I went into his office really excited he gave me one of this pat me in the head condescending remarks and said, “Palmer, gluten sensitivity is a fad, your MS must’ve been benign after all.” There’s no acknowledgment of anything that was done. Fast forward now to last year when I went back to the same neurologist. To close the story, 8 years later, I thought it would be a good time to go back and get a follow-up MRI with him just to check-in. He wondered what I was doing back and I said, “I was actually really curious what his thinking was on MS and autoimmune conditions and the first thing he said to me was, “Palmer, we now know that gluten sensitivity is real. I bet more than a third of my MS patients are sensitive to gluten.” There was a recognition and acknowledgment that about 10 years later, he had come to another understanding maybe he had read the science for himself. He had me do the follow-up MRI and I came by sat side by side with him and we looked to the results the before and after. He showed me that pattern of MS and how there was a dozen finger pattern that was very much consistent with MS patients lesions in their brain look like and how my brain showed that the lesions had disappeared or were fading. He just looked at me and said, “This could’ve been a better story.” Ashley, I tried to partner with him saying, “You know, I’m a functional certified health coach.” and he said, “I can’t give you my patient list but maybe I can send people to you. I said, “Wouldn’t it be great just to have 2 or 3 clients that we work on together like a one plus one equals three kind of thing?” I pursued that a couple of times and I never heard back from him again.   [36:34] Ashley James: That is so frustrating. Why are they so threatened with getting people off of medication and a hundred percent healed especially when it comes to partnering with holistic health practitioners. Why? Why can’t they drop the ego? Also the ego, this just drives me crazy. MDs and this is part of their training, I know as individuals, I know there’s probably MDs listening right now because they write to me. I’m not bashing individual MDs, I’m saying that their training, it’s like when you get a soldier to go into the military, they put them through hell week or whatever, or hell month whatever their training is in order to mold them, in order to shape them, if you look at how they develop the training their MDs, it is to mold them into a certain kind of thinking. They do 24-hour shifts, this kind of things where it really does shift how you act and how you think. Their entire education, they spent eight or 9 years being molded to believe that they have been taught everything. That new information is really hard to come by because they’ve been taught everything. Their immediate reaction when they hear something like, “Oh, I cut out food and my diagnosis is going away or has gone away” is to scoff at it. It’s to put it down without looking for information to prove or disapprove. They just tell the patient that’s incorrect. That’s their ego. That’s their huberous. Instead as a scientist, they would say, “Interesting hypothesis. I do not know.” Most MDs can’t say “I do not know. Let’s go look into this together. I’m going to put my bias. My personal human ego and bias aside and lets go look into this together and see if there’s other studies, see if there’s validity to your claims.“ No. Most MD’s do not do that. If you find a doctor that says, “I don’t know the answer but let’s find them together” that is a potential keeper. It just frustrates me. Especially, women, I have heard story upon story of women who have not been listened to by their doctor. It’s like they’re brushed off “That’s just hysteria. That’s just your hormones. That’s normal. Whatever your symptoms are that’s just normal,” and they’re not listened to. There’s so many cases of people coming to their doctor and they feel like something’s wrong. It turns out, years later, they develop cancer and it’s like they knew something was wrong but because the doctor just writes it off and sends them home. They’re basing things on their ego and not as a scientist. Let’s see if we can prove or disapprove this hypothesis. It’s frustrating to me because people go to their doctor because we put them on a pedestal and we expect answers and then if they don’t know the answer that’s treating to their ego so then they just makeup one instead of actually looking into the science. That puts the patient down and disempowers them. We want to empower people to advocate for themselves and thank god, there’s the internet so we can – and thank god there’s podcast like this and interviews like this so we can go and empower ourselves and seek information. We have to remember when we bring this information to our doctor, they’re not putting their ego aside. We have to get whatever they say if they’re not willing to go and look into the research then don’t give up, go to the next doctor and the next doctor and find one that’ll partner with you. Be okay with you advocating for yourself. I love seeing naturopaths. Many naturopaths I’ve seen are excited when I bring research from the internet saying, “What about his, what about that? can we look at this can we look at that and they’re excited to not know all the answers and to learn with me because they’re better at reading the science than I am. So if I can bring them something to look at and to research and look at all the studies then great, they’re going to do that for me I’m just going to point them in the direction that I want them to go to help me because I’m advocating for myself getting my doctor to look into what I want. I love that you noticed and you listened to your body those 26 years and you kept experimenting. Obviously, you never gave up because that’s your quality of life. You advocated for yourself. Just because your doctor said, “This is who we eat. This isn’t real.” you did not go, “Oh, I’ll just go start eating cheerios again because my doctor says that this is who we eat.” You know, you still listen to yourself. People I know who their doctors have talked them out of a healthier lifestyle because the doctor just didn’t believe in it. That is so sad that sometimes people put the opinions that their doctors give them as higher than their own ability to listen to their body.   [42:26] Palmer Kippola: So beautifully said, Ashley. I want to thank you for saying all that. I am with you. This is not us coming down on doctors but it feels like when there’s not a curiosity that’s demonstrated even in the face of evidence that’s everywhere and will get into this now with epigenetics and now there’s actually an autoimmune equation, we have the knowledge but not being curious, it’s a little bit baffling but it really speaks to the need that we all have to become the CEOs or the captain of our own ships, speak of our own health. We really must do that and I know that that’s daunting because that seems that the doctors supposed to be the one who educates who know all of this. Sadly, my understanding is that in medical practice often follows about 17 years behind science and that’s just because the medical schools can’t keep up with what’s coming. The textbooks are out of date, they are really, really busy people and of course, insurances involved, that further limits what they can actually talk with patients about and get paid for. The bottom line is we need this root-cause revolution. We have the information today to show us that it’s not just about putting this autoimmune conditions into remission and I love how you said we’d be getting like its lurking there in the background waiting to pounce forward. It’s not that way with cancer either. We’ve read Kelly Turner’s radical remission for the stories of people who’ve overcome cancer. There are things that people put into practice that actually matter greatly in terms of changing your health outcomes. I just wanted to say thank you for really advocating on behalf of each of us becoming the CEO of our own health and well-being. Feeling the confidence to step up and say, “You know that just doesn’t seem right to me” because food apathy said food is medicine 25 hundred years ago and we know this to be true just because the doctor didn’t have nutrition training doesn’t mean that it’s not true. Anyway, I do want to say that western medicine is fantastic for acute illnesses. For broken bones, for surgeries and these acute conditions but this gray area mysterious diseases that don’t have a clear beginning and end are really not – that’s not the purview of medical doctors, they didn’t get trained in this stuff. So many systems are interconnected. For the most part, doctors get trained in their xylode approach. Works like I said for those acute illnesses and that’s when you want to see a doctor if I want a heart attack I want to got to the hospital but if I have MS, maybe not the best place. They don’t have the right toolkit.   [45:47] Ashley James: They’re not looking to heal the root cause. They’re looking to manage symptoms, they’re really good at managing symptoms. It’s up to us to heal the root cause because it keeps coming back to, it’s our lifestyle that is the cause of this. Lifestyle being the nutrition, the food we eat and don’t eat the amount of stress we have, how we move our body, all of that. Our environment, all of that triggers the genes to express in a certain way. Let’s jump back to your story so we can discover what you did then. After you leave your doctor 8-10 years ago, you left your doctor’s office and you knew that cutting out grains, was it all grains or just gluten grains?   [46:43] Palmer Kippola: Well, I eventually cut all grains. I started just with gluten but I found that for me I have naturally high blood sugar. For me to manage the blood sugar, just not having grains at all or starchy carbs was a better way to go. I’ll just say for autoimmune, removing the gluten is paramount but my lifestyle, it’s better for me to avoid all grains.   [47:11] Ashley James: Got it. After you left the doctor’s office and he have purported going gluten-free, you knew in your gut you’re on to something, then what? Where’d you go from there?   [47:24] Palmer Kippola: I just have this cognitive dissonance. The feeling that you have when you know something in your bones and yet I have been old for 26 years by this 6 neurologists there’s nothing I could do. It just didn’t compute. Right? How in the world was it possible that a woman like me, I was in sales and marketing for high tech companies, I was not in the health industry, but I decided I needed to learn for myself. What had actually happened. I dove into the research, you probably know PubMed. It is probably the largest database of biomedical research, I think owned by the NIH it’s just endless. I started doing research upon research and looking for studies on the cause of autoimmune conditions and I found just an incredible amount of evidence that talked about things like low vitamin D is associated with autoimmune conditions. Low DHEA which is another hormone associated with autoimmune, high mercury associated with all – I’m thinking oh my goodness, there are so many things that we can control. These environmental factors seem to be associated with developing autoimmune conditions, it wasn’t just MS. I thought MS was going to be some different animal or some different beast but it turns out that any of the 150 or more autoimmune conditions all have similar root causes. I just started putting the puzzle pieces together. I started writing down these categories and it turned out it spelled the word. Fights. Which stands for Food, Infections, Gut health, Hormone balance, Toxins, and Stress. I just was super excited that now, we had information that wanted to share with the world. I knew that people needed to know about this. It wasn’t okay with me that a doctor didn’t know more about this and I felt like, I really wanted to help people so I finally decided that I needed to share this with the world in a form of a book and not just keep this for myself because honestly, I felt like it should have been front-page news and it wasn’t.   [49:47] Ashley James: Each time you came across a study like the high mercury, did you look into what you can do to detox mercury as you go through each one, “Oh vitamin D. I should get my vitamin D checked, oh vitamin C.” each time you came across one did you address it in your health?   [50:07] Palmer Kippola: Yes. Well, first thing I did is I wrote it down and I had what I called my root cause reversal checklist. I just wrote everything down. I saw that poor sleep, for example, only getting 6 hours a night was enough to turn on inflammatory genes and getting restored of sleep, on the other hand, turned on the nourishing genes and dim down those inflammatory ones. I learned that dairy can be very inflammatory for people with autoimmune conditions. So I did. It was self-experimentation first but writing them all down on this sheet of paper so that I could see the full array of different root causes and there were many of them which I ended up putting in categories so, yes.   [50:53] Ashley James: I am fascinated. 6 hours or less of sleep epigenetically turns on the expression of inflammatory genes?   [51:02] Palmer Kippola: Yes.   [51:05] Ashley James: Think about all the people. Does that include disrupted sleep?   [51:09] Palmer Kippola: The study says even a few hours of lost sleep can lead to turning on inflammatory genes   [51:15] Ashley James: That’s huge   [51:16] Palmer Kippola: Yes, it is huge. I’d like to if this is an okay place to talk about it, introduce the topic of the toxin bucket. I know you’ve talked with your audience about this before but I think this is really an appropriate place to include it because we each carry inside us this metaphor of a toxin bucket into which all of these lifestyle factors go. Those things that I was researching the mercury, “I had a mouthful of mercury fillings, I had an addiction to sugar growing up. I not only had my cheerios, I put tablespoon upon tablespoon of sugar and added my non-fat milk to it. So I ladling in dairy, I’ve got the gluten, I’ve got the chronic stress from childhood, I’ve got a mouthful of mercury filings.” All of those things, individually your body deals with. We have a certain amount of resilience as a child or teenager as an example. Theoretically, our bucket can hold a certain amount of toxins and the bottom of the bucket should have holes metaphorically where those toxins get excreted. Through our skin, our colon, through our kidneys, etc. we want to make sure that the detox organs are functioning perfectly. Things are flowing but it turns out, that in my case, I was adding more things to my toxin bucket than I was excreting. It just gets to the point where once things starts spilling over, the whole system just goes tilt. This is when the leaky gut develops, this is when we start to experience symptoms because leaky gut is the gateway to autoimmune conditions. I finally figured out in doing all these research that all of those elements that I was studying, the poor sleep, minimal exercise or minimal movement, eating a sad diet, even infections like Candida and chronic Lyme disease, all of those elements are adding to the toxin bucket and it’s our job if we want to stay healthy or get well. To examine those things that we’re putting into the bucket or might be to our knowledge and to do something about it. We can start by emptying the toxin bucket and I think that’s a lifetime’s work because we want to practice daily detoxification and not just do a few quick cleanses a few times a year. That was what I decided. I had my toxin bucket head overflowed and that is how the MS developed and so to heal from the MS and any other autoimmune condition, we need to examine what our own buckets are filled with and see if we can remove those element so that we can get back to balance.   [54:12] Ashley James: To go to your acronym, food, infections, gut health. What were the other?   [54:21] Palmer Kippola: Hormone balance, toxins, and stress. Those were the big categories.   [54:27] Ashley James: Yes, it makes a lot of sense. You started discovering as you went through your research that certain nutrient deficiencies were associated with autoimmune and then toxins, the toxic overload like mercury was associated with autoimmune. Where do infections come into play?   [54:49] Palmer Kippola: Infections are a very insidious contributor to autoimmune conditions. They are there often lurking in the background. Like Epstein-Barr for example is a herpes virus. It may be you had childhood mono and it’s not until you’re hit with a major stressor maybe later in life. Maybe a loved one dies or maybe you lose a job or something happens that knocks you off balance. That hidden or latent infection gets reactivated and that can become a major contributor. It’s usually some combination of factors and with infections, it’s both a cause and hitchhiker I’ll call it because sometimes it’s the chronic Lyme disease that is the root cause of an autoimmune condition or Epstein-Barr. Sometimes when your immune system has taken a hit and it’s dealing with an autoimmune condition, your defenses are down and it’s more likely that people with autoimmune conditions will pick up an infection because people with autoimmune conditions typically are hypometabolic meaning their metabolism are low and slow. There’s usually low thyroid involved and when we’re at a hypometabolic state, we are our environment our milieu is more attracted to infections, that’s another conundrum with infections and autoimmune conditions. They seem to go hand in hand.   [56:31] Ashley James: I’m thinking, Lyme disease often has co-infections and the people I’ve interviewed on the show about Lyme all say, these experts help people reverse Lyme disease, they themselves have had them and helped people reverse it and they say that it’s the environment of the body that became optimal because like an entire family could be exposed to ticks that have Lyme but only one person in the family develops chronic Lyme disease and everyone else just gets over it. It’s not like a hundred percent of the time people develop Lyme. It’s at the environment of the body was perfect meaning their toxin bucket was full and their immune system was somehow compromised and the body became this perfect host for the chronic Lyme disease and all this co-infections. So all the experts on the show keep saying, it’s the environment of the body that invites these infections to live in us. When I say infections, it can be parasites, it can be bacteria or viruses. All of them. Right?   [57:47] Palmer Kippola: Right. Absolutely.   [57:48] Ashley James: You’re looking to help the body become an environment that’s inhospitable to these infections.   [57:59] Palmer Kippola: Well said. Absolutely. It’s all about the terrain. What I have found is that we actually need a two-prong strategy to address these infections. It’s not just about kill, kill, kill. The Lyme co-infections as an example, it’s not just a killing strategy. Like with chemotherapy for example, if you have cancer and you get chemo, it might kill the cancer cells but if you don’t do anything to address the root cause of why you got cancer in the first place, the cancer often returns with a vengeance. It’s a similar kind of story here. The two-prong strategy that I talk about is first, we’ve got to unburden our immune systems. When you’re dealing with any kind of autoimmune condition, MS is not a brain problem. Hashimoto’s, thyroid is not a thyroid disease. Rheumatoid arthritis is not a problem with your joints. It actually may manifest that way but these are all immune system problems. When you help unburden your immune system, you’re actually helping resolve the autoimmune condition and you’re doing the best you can do and help clear infections. We want to remove all sources of inflammation. That would include those inflammatory foods that we talked about, the gluten the dairy the sugar and for some people they have challenges with things like eggs, soy, corn, some with nuts and so forth. You need to discover for you what your sources of inflammatory foods are because that’s the best place to start when we remove the sources of inflammation when it comes to infections. They love sugar. Infections like candida as an example thrive on sugars so when you take away their preferred fuel, their sugar you’re creating an environment that’s inhospitable to those infections. That’s why that’s a very, very good way to start it’s addressing the sources of inflammation that you’re putting into your system and then the second piece which is very much synergistic with the first is to raise your metabolism and the way we can do this is to help ourselves. I have found three things that work really well, one is to go low carb because carbohydrates convert to sugar in our body, high glycemic ones. We want to do what we can to minimize the high glycemic foods, and starches and processed foods and I also find that intermittent fasting is an excellent strategy to remove those sources of even digesting is metabolically really high energy for the body. When we can give ourselves a break or digestion a break, we can actually focus our energies on healing as an example. Finally, cold showers. At least the last 30 seconds or a minute of a shower can be another great way to raise your metabolism. These are all strategies to help you become an inhospitable place for infections.   [01:01:24] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. I love this approach because you’re looking at correcting the train of the body and looking at it from all the different angles. How long have you been teaching the FIGHTS method to help people no longer have autoimmune condition?   [01:01:44] Palmer: Kippola I have been coaching people for the last couple of years. I got my certification to be functional medicine certified health coach. It’s interesting Ashley because the first book that I set out to write was a book of healing stories. I wanted to not just share my own story of healing from MS, I wanted to make it an exponential good news story to share other people’s stories and I have an agent and she tried to shop that around, it’s disappointing to me that I learned that, and the quotes where “healing stories don’t sell.” I couldn’t believe it. I know. I find healing stories very powerful and I share it on my website. But in fact, the publishers weren’t interested in that, instead of having 12 doctor’s perspectives on healing, they wanted my perspective. That’s when I thought I actually need to package this up in a way that is digestible, pun intended so that people can really get their arms around what they need do to. That’s when I really started coming out with more information on FIGHTS as a protocol and not just throwing things against the wall to see what would stick. I actually now have a framework for healing.   [01:03:09] Ashley James: So you have been working for the last few years and getting results, can you share what kind of results? Can you share some of those stories of success?   [01:03:19] Palmer Kippola: Absolutely. Here’s an example, one of my clients is a – she’s probably 50 years old now. She has a couple of kids. She’s a single mom. She works and have had IBS symptoms so bad that she couldn’t leave the house. She used to be an athlete. She used to run and participate in races. When she developed these IBS symptoms, she was terrified as you can imagine to leave the house to go for a run and not knowing whether there’s going to be toilet. She also had a long commute to work and that made it nearly debilitating for her. She also had celiac disease and she had Hashimoto’s, thyroiditis. I have given a talk at the end of 2016 for an organization called Silicon Valley health institute. SVHI. They recorded a 30-minute video of me sharing my MS healing journey and what I’ve learned to help others. This woman saw my video and she was across the country so it was great that we have the internet now to share this healing stories. She reached out and she became a client. At that time, she was also losing her hair and had real hormonal imbalance and dysfunction with very, very heavy menstrual cycles. That was what we started with. We talked about my methodology and she was just eager and ready to do what she could to change her lifestyle. We came to find that she was eating a lot of these foods that were actually interfering with her immune system including gluten, corn, tomatoes, dairy, all of which she was reacting to but that she craved. As difficult as it is to consider doing an elimination diet and giving up your favorite foods, I told her that “Look, it’s only 30 days. For me, it’s the most empowering experiment that I ever did. We’ll go through this together.” Sure enough, she did. She removed all of those foods including eggs and coffee and so forth. At the end of the 30 days, she felt fantastic. Then she tried to add some of those foods back in, she just found immediately that when she added back in the tomatoes, she loved her chips and salsa, that is just an absolute inflammation bomb, she had a very bad outcome with that but this was so empowering for her to actually see that what she was eating almost on a daily basis was causing so many of these problems. Over time, we’re able to balance her hormones, get her blood sugar balanced. Get her feeling great. She dropped, I’m going to say nearly 25 pounds of inflammatory water weight and weight that she wanted to lose, by the end of working with her after a couple of months, she was feeling good enough to start doing 5ks again. I forgot to mention one of her symptoms at the outset was she was falling asleep at work. This is not a good situation. You don’t want to be I don’t know if it’s official narcolepsy or I’m not even sure. I know narcolepsy is an autoimmune condition but her fatigue was so great that she was falling asleep. After this her energy returned, her hair stopped falling out. She was able to get back to more regular cycles and honestly Ashley, it was astounding that it was mostly removing the bad things that were harming her and just adding a few supplements like getting her vitamin D levels up, getting her magnesium balance and up. Avoiding those favorite foods and she was really, really amazed with how she felt.   [01:07:36] Ashley James: No longer has IBS?   [01:07:38] Palmer Kippola: No longer has IBS. Doesn’t associate herself with having Hashimoto’s or celiac. She’s really clear on what she can eat or not. She’s just decided some of these foods are going to stay out. She knows if she chooses, which is empowering because now we have choices, right? Now we know cause and effect and we know if we want to add something back in and she knows what will happen if she does and that’s that.   [01:08:05] Ashley James: Just to clarify, she was diagnosed with IBS, hashimoto’s and colitis?   [01:08:12] Palmer Kippola: Celiac.   [01:08:13] Ashley James: Celiac, okay. Got it. That is so cool. I love it. How long from start to finish did it take for her?   [01:08:23] Palmer Kippola: I want to say two months of being diligent with her diet and working with me and adding back in the nutrients to really deal with some of the deficiencies like vitamin D and magnesium and vitamin B12. She was able to get back to life and in fact, she’s running 5kms now with her daughter. It’s super empowering. What happens is it is not just about her, this is the ripple effect of healing when somebody is able to overcome these health challenges they become a role model for their family and friends. So it becomes a ripple effect in the family and then in the community and you can just see the ripples in the pond going out. That’s super exciting.   [01:09:15] Ashley James: Super exciting. I love it. You mentioned magnesium. I want to let you know that I’ve been on my health journey healing, I had multiple problems, you listen to this show so you know but for listeners who’ve never heard. I had many health problems. I was very very sick. I had spent the last 10 years finding my own health solutions and something I really believe in, supplements. Magnesium is the most important mineral. Everyone thinks calcium is but magnesium actually is more important. They’re all important but magnesium, the body needs it so much and it’s so hard to get enough magnesium especially if someone has a gut issue. If you’ve been eating gluten grains and it has caused inflammation in your gut it’s very hard for your gut to absorb enough of the minerals, right? We have this catch 22 where our gut can’t absorb enough and then there’s not enough minerals in our soil anymore because of the farming practices of over a hundred years especially the pesticides that have been used in the soil. Even if we buy organic it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that we’re getting enough minerals. So we have to take supplements. Magnesium’s very hard to take orally either as a liquid or as a capsule and get to full self-saturation because if we do take a lot of it orally, magnesium just causes the smooth muscles, the bowel to go “wee” and then we’re running to the toilet which is the nicest way I could possibly say it causes diarrhea. Great for people with chronic constipation but if you have chronic constipation you need to look to that too. In my discovery of figuring out how to get full self-saturation because I have lots of magnesium supplements that I’ve enjoyed them all but again, couldn’t get the full self-saturation. There’s a 50-dollar blood test you can get when you go to walkinlab.com called magnesium RBC. It’s between 40 and 60 dollars because they always have it on sale. In the United States, you buy that test online and then you go to, they’ll tell you where your nearest lab is. They’ll draw your blood and they’ll send you the results. You don’t even have to see a doctor to check your magnesium levels. It wasn’t until through a friend of mine I discovered this magnesium soak that within one month of doing it every day gets – 76% of people reach full self-saturation. We absorb about 20g of magnesium every soak. I know. It blew me away. I did it and I’ve had a miner’s push before which is where they the naturopath will inject you with magnesium straight into your vein. You feel really drunk and kind of happy for a few minutes because it’s very relaxing. I felt that same feeling after my first soak. I went, “Oh my gosh, this is real” we can’t absorb magnesium readily from Epsom salt. It’s just not the right molecular size to absorb into the skin. This woman who I’ve had her on my show. She was like 70 something pounds in a wheelchair with 30 seizures a day and magnesium was one of the biggest things that helped her to recover her health. She ended up getting the magnesium from the Zechstein Sea and then shipping it here and then selling it in jugs. You basically soak a quarter of a cup in a basin of water, you put your feet in it and you soak for an hour and you absorb about 20g every time. Like I said, 76% of people get to full self-saturation within one month of doing it. It’s been really cool because you mentioned magnesium while you know and everyone else listening that they can use that. If you’re having problems absorbing through your gut then absorb through your skin and we can bypass that. It’s so cool, right? The website is, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com I know it’s a really long website to type in, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and then the coupon code she gave all the listeners which gives them 10% off is LTH as in learn true health. If you want Palmer, I can connect you guys. You guys can chat because I think that you would love to, as I know all holistic health practitioner would love to connect directly with her, chat and learn more about her magnesium and her healing story. You mentioned that and I thought, “Oh, I’ve got to tell you.” My intuition said that you would really like to know more about that. Since that, it’s one of the clogs. Right? It’s so great that you cut out the grains and had such an amazing response. You were, however, for 26 years doing healthy things. It wasn’t like you walked out of a McDonald’s and with a coffee in one hand and having cigarette in the other. It’s not like you had this really unhealthy lifestyle and you just cut out grains and all of a sudden you didn’t have MS. You spent 26 years building a foundation of decreasing stress and eating healthy and looking for answers and that was the last, for you, that was the last hole in the bucket that made it just exponentially healed. Makes your body exponentially healed. For others it might be correcting sleep, dealing with infections, healing the gut, it might be hormone imbalance, toxins stress or it may be all of them. That’s why I like that you’re addressing all of them because you’re building a foundation of health by addressing all the FIGHTS together. I wanted to make sure that we touched on the fact that food being the F in FIGHTS that you have a free gift for the listeners because everyone goes, “Well, what should I eat?” I know that there are some people out there who no longer have MS because they’re vegan. It’s not necessarily that eating low carb high fat would work for everyone because for some people it’s like just eating a ton of vegetables and cutting out the meat was what their genes needed we don’t know. Doing the elimination diet and figuring out for themselves what they should eat for their better health is key. You’ve come up with a free gift that teaches people what they should eat by listening to their body. We’re going to have the link to that in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com the link is Palmerkippola.com/gift. We’ll make sure the link is there in the show notes because I just want to make sure that listeners who are at this point going, “Well, what should I eat?” Great, go get the free gift and it’s a guide to teach you how to listen to your body so that you can dial in what is best for you. Like I said, I know people who are vegan who reversed their MS and you sounds like you do a bit more like of a Paleo diet. Is that correct?   [01:16:57] Palmer Kippola: That’s right. I don’t purport to know what diet is best for everybody that’s why this optimal food guide would be – I think of really good resource for people to find out what’s best for them. In my case, I’ve sort of landed on what I’ll call a paleo template diet where I eliminate grains, dairy and sugar and the meats that I do eat or the fish that I do eat or the poultry that I do eat is either going to be 100% grass-fed that means grass-fed and grass-finished. The chicken and turkey are happy free-range and important note about this, we’re not just what we eat. We’re whatever we eat ate. Super important to pay attention to what do those cows eat? When we digest and ingest that food, that profile of the meat of a cow that’s been fed corn, which by the way cows are allergic to corn, you really want to make sure that you’re ingesting something at is biologically a match for you. If you are going to eat meat do opt for 100% grass-fed. I have heard it think it was Dr. Pozorno say that meat is one of the most important foods, Dr. Lee Cowden said this because meats can concentrate pesticides and herbicides three times more and maybe even greater than that than any other source. If you’re eating vegetables that are conventionally grown yes, you’ll get the pesticide and herbicide. Meat becomes more important to find the wild, the free-range, the healthy pastured version of what you eat. We do try to find poultry from farmer’s markets where the chickens are eating bugs and grubs. Organic chicken just means that those chickens are eating organic corns and organic soy. If you have a problem with grains or soy, you might still have issue and not know what the problem is. Until you’ve removed the chicken. That was very surprising to me. I just want to mention that to listeners that you have to really put your detective hat on. Just be really curious about that’s going.   [01:19:24] Ashley James: That’s very interesting. My son was colic and we figured out that there was a handful of food like broccoli, onion, garlic. I’m dairy-free anyway. I’m allergic to dairy. My husband’s allergic so we just assumed our son was and sure enough, he definitely was when we tried formula. When I was breastfeeding, he would have horrible reactions to the foods that I ate. It’s just like what the chicken eats, if you’re allergic to what the chicken eats, don’t eat the chicken. I had to cut out the foods. I wasn’t allergic to those foods but my baby was allergic to those foods. I had to cut out those foods when I was breastfeeding because it was giving him really horrible pain and gas. I just makes sense that we need to be diligent. Be a food detective. I like how Dr. Mark Hyman talks about, “If you’re going to eat meat, make it be a condiment.” It okay if that’s 12$ a pound, you’re not eating a pound of it. You’re making it a condiment. We don’t need the giant steak, we don’t need the meat to be the centerpiece of the meal. It’s more of a condiment for the nutrient.” I myself don’t eat meat right now. My husband went vegan a year and a half ago. I’m experimenting myself. I went from pescatarian to vegan. I’m just experimenting. I’m going to see. I’m getting my bloodwork this week from my naturopath. We’ll see how it’s going for me. It’s about experimenting and be willing to try different things see how it feels and if you have cravings. I love that you brought up it, someone allergic, your client is allergic to these foods but craving them. Craving sometimes can mean that we are nutrient deficient and the body is seeing those nutrients but it can also mean that it has that dopamine addiction to it as well. Those hyper-palatable foods of salt, sugar, and oil are a bit addictive. The brain lights up just like cocaine and heroine that we need to recognize that the body’s become addicted to these hyper-palatable foods. Do those deep breaths. Those moments of food addiction where my body is going towards the cravings and it’s like, “Wait a second, is that what my body really needs? Does my brain really want dopamine?” and I have to do those deep breaths. I like that you help your client address that the cravings especially when you’re doing food eliminations those craving come back with a vengeance. We have to catch ourselves and realize that, “Yes, my body might be nutrient deficient that why it has craving but it also might be dopamine deficient so let’s go watch some YouTube videos that make us laugh and get dopamine somewhere else.”   [01:22:21] Palmer Kippola: That’s is great. I can add to that just a moment. You mentioned addiction and craving the opposite of that is aversion. Things that we don’t like and don’t want. I have found that people sometimes who have an aversion to meat, they don’t care for the taste it just turns them off or sometimes deficient in zinc. That is something just to pay attention to, you can do a zinc challenge and taste it. Just do a little bit of zinc after eating so you don’t get nauseous. That’s sometimes clears up that aversion to meat so just wanted to add that.   [01:22:59] Ashley James: That’s fascinating and zinc is so important for our immune health. Very cool. Awesome. All right so we talked about the food and we talked about infections. Let’s talk a bit about gut health. How do you help people restore their gut health? Do you recommend they eat a bunch of fermented foods and avoid grains? Or is it more about listening to the body and seeing what helping, what not helping?   [01:23:26] Palmer Kippola: Yes, such a good question. I just want to step back a tiny bit because the gut is so central in the development and healing of autoimmune conditions that we can’t talk about autoimmune healing without talking about the gut. It turns out that in the early 2000s, Alessio Fasano and his team at Harvard found the final element in the autoimmune equation that is the leaky gut or scientifically known as intestinal hyperpermeability. When we’re eating these sad foods or taking medications in some cases or even having stress, those factors can all cause our guts to become leaky. That had been proven to bet the pathway or gateway to developing autoimmune conditions. The exciting part about having an autoimmune equation is we can flip it to heal it. Meaning, if we remove the things that are causing the inflammation and the leakiness and we heal and seal the lining of our gut, we can as Dr. Fisano says, arrest and reverse the autoimmune condition. This is no longer conjecture and myth or wishful thinking that we can reverse these conditions. We now understand that there is science behind this leaky gut. That scientist for year purports that this is not being real. Well, it is very real and we know many things that lead to it. We also know what we can do to restore it. When it comes to repairing our gut the first and foremost we musts top putting things in that are harmful. Those would be the inflammatory elements that we’ve talked bout. There might be suspect foods that are toxic to some and are helpful to other. I have one problem with eggs or nuts as an example but for somebody else, their kryptonite might be eggs. That elimination diet can help you define and refine your foods at least for maybe 6 months those are what you’ll enjoy, you need to get rid of some for short term while you’re healing your gut because if you continue to eat things that are causing your gut to be permeable, so if I wanted to bring the MS back, I might start eating gluten again, sit down to sandwiches, pasta and so forth. We now know that there are many medications that create permeable intestines. There are actually Ashley, I think there is a study that says that there are 90 medications are known to induce Lupus by creating a permeable gut. It’s really known information. This is not hidden information, this is out there. So whatever you can do to minimize unnecessary medications, to eliminate those sad foods and get rid of toxins in your environment. I only recently understood that stress creates a leaky gut like getting ready to do public speaking, for example, creates intestinal permeability. Some things are not all stress is bad and some of it is growth-oriented but we are stuck in that always-on, stress response, that is when our gut stay open and permeable. The first step in any kind of gut healing program is to make sure that we’re minimizing the things that are causing harm.   [01:27:04] Ashley James: Right, yes. Just like inflammation is a good thing when it’s acute but not when its chronic and always turned on. I know that Advil or Ensets I’ve been told increase gut permeability and also harm the liver but they do increase gut permeability causing leaky gut. I had a neighbor once, this is just a few years ago, 21-year-old woman who is going through chemo not for cancer. The doctor decided to give her chemo for lupus. That just blew me away because I even knew back then that cutting out gluten and cleaning up diet played such a huge role in autoimmune. I’ve been gluten-free for 8 years with my husband and just to see that she was suffering so horribly going through chemo for what – just that MD could’ve looked into the research and seen what you saw but instead he chose to give her chemo. Chemo’s the one medication that doctors actually get kickback from something like 2500 dollars every dose. They get a kickback. It infuriates me this young woman’s potentially her entire youth has been destroyed because she’s suffering greatly from chemo which was obviously not helping the lupus. We have to be diligent. We have to advocate for ourselves. You always have to get 2nd or 3rd opinion, don’t put the doctor to the pedestal. Obviously, always seek a doctor of I never recommend someone especially if you have symptoms that you avoid medical attention. It’s just get more opinions and do your own research and be willing to keep seeking answers especially when it comes to a surgery or treatment like we should really, really make sure that it is the best option for us. Food, infection, gut health, hormone balance. Now, you are a functional medicine practitioner, health coach that you can get people to do blood tests. Tell us did you do labs and blood tests? How does that work? How do you help people to balance their hormones?   [01:29:47] Palmer Kippola: I partner with functional medicine practitioners that’s how I can get the lab work done. One reason why hormones is last in the book in terms of a core chapter, the book is not in the same order that FIGHTS is spelled. We start with food then we go to gut health which we’ve just talked about but hormones is last strategically because often times when you deal with the other root causes, your hormones can fall back into balance. That really is the goal to do whatever we can from a lifestyle perspective first. Some of the biggest hormone imbalances that we see with autoimmune conditions are high insulin, high cortisol. Insulin again that’s going to be when you’re eating high carbohydrate foods. We also see the diabetes increase through the environmental toxins. There are the two things you can control and if you remove the toxins from your environment, you go lower carb, you can lower the insulin potentially. High cortisol being one if you address stress we can bring cortisol into a balance. Low thyroid is very common. It is probably one of the most common hormonal imbalances we see and that is something that can also get regulated when we do everything else for ourselves including removing the sugar and addressing stress. High estrogen, estrogen dominance. This is something that’s both common in both in men and women.  It doesn’t just mean that your estrogen is high. It’s relative to progesterone. Progesterone is the calming hormone. We want those hormones to be in balance. The two other final imbalances we often see are low vitamin D and low DHEA. In the book, because hormones is such a complicated category each chapter is a little book onto itself. I give people tips and strategies for how to address things naturally. If you need additional help, how to find a practitioner who deals in bio-identical hormones which are not the hormone replacement therapy, which are the synthetic hormones but rather, if you’re going into the route of hormone therapy, you want to make sure that they’re bio-identical in nature. From my experience, I dealt with all six of those hormonal imbalances. So I offer a story from my own perspective on how high levels of sugar and high levels of stress created a hormonal mess for me for many, many years.   [01:32:39] Ashley James: How much did your hormones come back into a balance by just shifting food and gut health?   [01:32:40] Palmer Kippola: I wish I could tell you like a wimble that wobbles but it doesn’t fall down when you take your hands off. It just goes right back to balance. That wasn’t the case for me. Part of my personal story is that my hormones were so imbalanced when I was 15 years old. I had excruciating cramps and actually had to miss school on occasion because they were so bad. I had a gynecologist who put me on a birth control pill very, very, early and told me to stay on the pill until I decided to have children. This is the same gynecologist who ran my blood test for a while. Why would I doubt her? She’s the expert, right? For years and years, I just did what she told me to do and she ran my blood tests and told me that my total cholesterol of 104 was excellent. This is opening a can of worms.   [01:33:44] Ashley James: For those who don’t know, that’s way to low. For those that don’t know. There’s healthy cholesterol and we need it, we want it to be high. The body needs a certain amount. The cholesterol is so important that the liver makes it. How cholesterol medication works, it bruises the liver to the point where the liver ceases to function correctly and liver can’t make cholesterol. What drives me crazy is that doctors will put people on cholesterol medication but don’t tell them to stop, like stop eating fried food, stop eating the fats that are damaged. They have oxidative damage on them which increases unhealthy cholesterol. They’ll give you a medication that damages your liver so your liver stops producing good cholesterol and then they won’t tell you to stop eating bad cholesterol. It just drives me up the wall. There’s a balance. We need to have healthy fats. It’s so important that the liver makes it. The myelin sheath on your nerves are made from fat and MS is when the myelin sheath is destroyed and then the nerves are inflamed. Hello, of course. You are set up for having MS if you didn’t have enough healthy fats from the body. They are the raw building blocks for the body to produce myelin sheet.   [01:35:04] Palmer Kippola: That’s right. That’s beautifully said. I’ll throw in a little factoid here that just completely floored me. The countries with the lowest cholesterol, in other words like my gynecologist that 104 was excellent, die the fastest. Highest all-cause mortality and the countries with highest cholesterol lives the longest. That’s research that is available for anybody that wants to find that. Cholesterol it turns out is essential for our health and it’s the foundational building blocks of our hormones, our cell membrane, and our brain health. Our brain is 60% fat. We need healthy cholesterol. It’s all about the balance of different types of cholesterol that is, what I’ll say about this is I was a hormonal mess that I didn’t just regulate back to balance by getting everything else in line and I opted for bio-identical hormones and now my hormone are finally in balance. You know I never felt better. It can be done and if I was suffering in all six of those hormonal imbalances. I’m doing great now than I know that you can heal.   [01:36:18] Ashley James: Beautiful. I definitely want my listeners who have autoimmune to get your book, make sure the links to your book is on the show notes of today’s podcast of learntruehealth.com. Tell us a bit about who should read your book, is it only people with autoimmune or is it people that want to just generally be healthy? Tell us a bit about your book and who it serves.   [01:36:44] Palmer Kippola: I wrote the book with the intention to – it’s the book that I would’ve wanted at 19 when I didn’t know what to do to my younger self. I wanted a step by step but for anyone, the first audience would be people who are suffering, who are actively seeking healing and don’t really know what to do next. That would include people that are finding it difficult to afford a natural medicine or naturopathic practitioner. I really urge people if you can to work with somebody because they will help you shortcut your time to healing. It was so worthy investment in yourself if you can do that. My book is actually quite popular now with integrative and functional medicine ad naturopathic physicians who also wanted to help their clients so they’re actually buying it for their offices which I was thrilled to see that happening. That would be the first level, is people who are actively seeking to heal. I have clients who I’ve worked with who are seeking to prevent an autoimmune condition because it runs in their family, everybody has a thyroid problem. Their father had MS and they don’t want to go down path. They just want to know what they can do to prevent something. If you put those two categories together that’s basically everybody because I don’t know what the actual stats are Ashley, maybe you know better than I do. At least one in five people is dealing with an autoimmune condition that may be diagnosed. Many, many more people had mysterious symptoms from joint pain and brain fog to profound fatigue to insomnia to infertility to numbness and tingling and migraines and all of those mysterious symptoms are messages from your body that something is out of balance. Anybody that’s dealing with mysterious symptoms, who has an official diagnosis or want to prevent one, this is who is book is for.   [01:38:51] Ashley James: I love it. So many people have mystery symptoms and they’re seeking information that’s why they’re listening today. I hope they get your book and they apply all the lessons to helping them figure out the foods that are most important for them and reducing the inflammation and the infections, helping their gut health, reducing toxins and stress, of course balancing their hormones. That’ll help a hundred percent of the population everyone could benefit especially those who are beating autoimmune. It has been such a pleasure having you on the show today. I wonder, do you have any stories of success or have you heard from people who have also reversed their MS using your protocol?   [01:39:37] Palmer Kippola: Absolutely, yes. In fact, most of the people who follow me who are MS warriors themselves who are actively seeking to heal from or have beat MS. I will end with this story one of my favorites is a client who was diagnosed with MS actually the information the letter came to her in the mail from Kaiser Permanente saying the results of her MRI are in and it seemed that they were consistent with MS. She experienced the loss of vision in one eye, numbness on one side of her body, almost stroke-like symptoms and she was in her mid-30s, had two young kids and a husband, waking up one morning unable to function and to see properly. Just was absolutely terrified. When to the neurologist and got her results as I’ve said by mail. Somebody who knows us both connected us and I was able to talk with her before her second appointment because the neurologist was insisting that she go on injectable medication immediately and he wanted to do a spinal tap which I’ve never have done but I can’t imagine was pleasant. I got in the phone with her and was able to transmit the certainty that I have based on all my research, my personal experience working with other clients that if she was willing to work with me, give it a couple of months, try the elimination diet, work with me about reducing her stress, would she be willing to let the neurologist know, “Look, I know where you are and I will schedule my follow up appointment with you after I’ve tried these lifestyle interventions. If they don’t work, I know where you are.” and she said yes, she was willing to wait. So I worked with her, coached her for probably 6 weeks or so where we talk every week. We still talk maybe not as often maybe once every 6 weeks. She found out what her trigger food were, removed them and her big issues he felt were chronic stress also growing up in childhood. She had a really difficult situation both parents either had alcoholism or drug addiction and were not able to care of her so she grew up with her grandmother. She has a lot of stress that was manifesting with her current life with her kids. A lot of it she felt was driven by her past. Once she was able to feel better after removing those foods, after about 6 weeks she stopped having any and all MS symptom. Nothing was noticeable anymore after she removed the foods and healed her gut. Then she was able to have the energy to deal with those profound stressors from childhood and she started a forgiveness practice. She started doing gratitude journaling every night. Now her family, her kids no longer ask her for sweet things. She has actually become a role model for health and other people look up to her for information. This is another one of those ripple effect stories. Her husband revered symptoms of type II diabetes. Her children are off sugar. She is an icon for healing with food. That’s not an isolated incident this is most people when you take the bad stuff out, it’s been one of the most profound surprises that I’ve experienced. It can be way more simple than you know if you’re just willing to put your detective hat on. Give it a try, get some testing done. Yes, there might be an infection to clear up. Yes, there might be mercury poisoning that you need to deal with but the end result is this freedom and it’s just been a super good news story.   [01:43:49] Ashley James: I love it. Thank you so much, Palmer for coming in the show today and sharing this awesome information. It definitely fill people with hope to know that yes, they can completely reverse their autoimmune condition. They can improve their health. For those who have mystery symptoms, following the keys in your book will help them restore their body. I think everyone’s going to get some great information for your book. I highly recommend people buy it and try it out for themselves. If they have any questions, they can go to your website, Palmerkippola.com. Especially go to palmerkippola.com/gift and get the free guide. Is there anything left unsaid? Is there anything that you would like to share to wrap up today’s interview?   [01:44:39] Palmer Kippola: I would like to invite people to get still within yourself and allow your own intuition to come forth and to maybe ask yourself the question that that family friend asked me many, many years ago, “Why do think you got this blank?” Whatever it is. If you’re dealing with something that you got a diagnosis or if you’ve got mysterious symptoms. Why do you think that is? Allow time for the answer to bubble up. Really acknowledge that because chances are pretty good, you already know what’s out of balance in your life. Maybe it’s you really wanted to do something different in your life and you didn’t take that path or maybe you’re in a situation where you’re not happy at work or your relationship is not working. I believe that these autoimmune conditions are really an invitation to us to wake up to who we truly are. We may not see the gift at the moment when we’re going through the middle of these awful symptoms but I just want to invite people to dig deeper and really know that you can get to the root of what’s going on.     [01:46:02] Ashley James: Beautiful. Excellent. Thank you so much Palmer Kippola for coming on the show today. It’s been a pleasure to have you share this information that I know will help to transform people’s lives. I feel honored that you are here to share this information and I am so thrilled for the potential of how many people you’ve just helped. So thank you so much.   [01:46:28] Palmer Kippola: Thank you, Ashley. It’s been an honor and a delight.   [01:46:31] Ashley James: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people? You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health-coaching sort of vacation program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition but from the standpoint on how we can help people to shift their life, to shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can google Institute for Integrated Nutrition or IIN, or give them a call or you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training. So check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name, Ashley James and the Learn True Health podcast because I made a deal with them that they would give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic offices, doctor’s offices, you can work in hospitals. You can work online through Skype and help people around the world. You can become an author. You can go into the school system and help with your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. You can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them and their success and their health goals. There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach. So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. Mention my name. Get the best deal. Give them a call and they’ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month, so you’re going to want to call them now and check it out. If you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.   [01:49:39] Ashley James: Are you looking to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.   Get Connected With Palmer Kippola! Website Facebook Facebook Group – Transcend Autoimmune Instagram YouTube Book By Palmer Kipppola Beat AutoImmune Recommended Reading by Palmer Kippola The Last Best Cure by Donna Jackson Nakazawa       Adventures by A Himitsu https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgFwu-j5-xNJml2FtTrrB3A Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported— CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Music released by Argofox https://youtu.be/8BXNwnxaVQE Music provided by Audio Library https://youtu.be/MkNeIUgNPQ8

https://www.learntruehealth.com/grounding   Grounding And Earthing https://www.learntruehealth.com/grounding-and-earthing Highlights: What is grounding / earthing? Grounding and inflammation. You are creating free radical damage when you’re ungrounded. The human body is electrical in nature. How to prevent electromagnetic interference in the body.   Have you experienced feeling fatigued even if you just woke up? In this episode we will talk about the connection of our bodies to the earth and the amazing benefits of grounding / earthing. Clint Ober will share his products that help the body to stay grounded and reduce the risks of immune related conditions.   Intro: Hello true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast today, I think will be the most important and interesting interview you have ever heard. This information to me is absolutely crucial essential for everyone to know. So I’m very, very excited that you’re here to listen to today’s interview, Clint Ober is doing a giveaway. We talk about it near the end of the episode, but I want to make sure you know about it. Since sometimes people take a few days to listen to a whole interview, especially when it’s as long as this one. So you want to join the Facebook group Learn True Health, just search Learn True Health in Facebook or you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/group, and it’ll take you to the Facebook group. We’re doing a giveaway and Clint Ober is going to be giving away several of his products for free as a big giveaway. It’s so exciting. He’s giving away so much – their grounding mats. And the one that I’m using right now, my feet are on right now are pretty much either at cost or they’re putting all the money back into helping people. So he’s mission driven. He’s heart driven, I really really enjoyed interviewing him. I also watched his documentary which something we talked about, we talked about a lot in the interview, and they’ve given me permission to play the documentary for you right now. It can’t be a public documentary, because it is being played at film festivals around the world. And it just won a bunch of awards in Hollywood at a film festival. So in order to be in compliance with the film festivals, it has to be password protected. Well, they gave me the link and the password. And I’m going to be sharing that in the Facebook group as well. You’re going to want to watch this documentary, it is fascinating. We sat down and we were glued to it. In fact, I’ve been wanting to go back and watch it again. That’s how interesting it is. Now as you listen to today’s show, if you decide that you want to try one of his grounding mats, I absolutely recommend you do it has made a big difference. I’ve tried other stuff from other companies, but he has so much science behind it. I really love it. So you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/grounding. That’s www.learntruehealth.com/grounding. And there you can find the mats. One thing is if you want to try it and have your whole family try it then there’s a little kit that you can get –  the patch kit. And later on in the interview, I asked him to explain each product and the reason why he created these products was out of a need because he wanted to do studies. So he’s done 26 peer reviewed studies. And he had to create a product in order to do this grounding. When I first got into this, I really thought that it sounded like a lot of woo woo, it sounded really hippy dippy, like, you know, “Oh, what are we going to go dance barefoot in the grass?” And that little skeptical part of me was like, “Are you kidding me, there can’t be any science to this. This just sounds like a bunch of placebo.” Well, the documentary goes through the science and explains how the immune system works and how these electrons that are built up in our body because we are not grounded anymore. With the shoes we wear, the carpets we walk on. Throughout the day, we are not grounded. And so we’re collecting electrons that you can actually hook yourself up to a meter. And you can prove that we’re being like little batteries. There’s this positive charge that’s occurring. And through the process of earthing which is connecting directly to the ground or grounding, which is using a device in your home. Sometimes it’s easier to do grounding, especially if it’s like February in Montana, and a lot of people want to go walk in the grass right now it’s summertime. So we all want to go out and walk in the grass barefoot, but there are parts of the country that we don’t want to do that in because of heavy spraying of pesticides. So in that case, the devices are amazing for helping you. I love that it calms me, it makes me happier. And our son who’s using it on his bed is sleeping in now. We’ve done really well with sleep between the magnesium and changing our mattresses, and all the little health habits that we do. But since we added the grounding mat, he is sleeping in more. So I thought that was really neat. And I also noticed that we’re getting even deeper sleep, I didn’t think that was even possible. And that’s because when you do grounding or earthing, it significantly lowers inflammation in the body. And he talks about that both in the movie, in the documentary that you’re gonna have access to by going to the Facebook group, and also in this interview that you’re about to enjoy. So I’m so thrilled that you’re here to learn from this information from Clint Ober. He is quite a character quite fascinating and such a wonderful soul. It was a true blessing to interview him today. And I know you’ll really enjoy what he has to share. I just want to make sure you know, to join the Facebook group and participate in the giveaway because you could win one of the awesome mats and I’d love for you to do that. I’d love for you to win it. That’d be great. He’s giving me I think like five of them. And also definitely come to the Facebook group so you can have access to the documentary and watch it. It is amazing. And if you have any questions, please come to the Facebook group, Learn True Health in Facebook and ask them. Our community is super supportive. So many people not just me, I’ll definitely be there to answer your questions. But the whole community comes together to help each other. So it’s a really wonderful place to be. Wonderful. Well enjoy today’s interview. Welcome to the Learn true health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 366.     6:10 Ashley James: I am so excited for today’s guests. Out of all the interviews I’ve done and it’s been over 365 interviews. I feel like this one today is going to be the most important interview that you listen to. We have with us Clint Ober. I’ve watched the documentary with him recently the Earthing Movie. And it has completely blown my mind. I feel like you know that little nuclear explosion that went off in my head. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is the most important thing my listeners need to know.” Clint, I’m honored to have you here on the show today.     6:51 Clint Ober: Well, Ashley, I’m honored to be able to visit with you and present what I know about earthing and what we’ve learned over the last 20 years and hopefully help some people.     7:03 Ashley James: Absolutely. Now I first heard about this, I want to say about maybe a year and a half ago, I was interviewing I believe was a naturopath. I’ve heard about a dozen naturopath and holistic experts on my show, telling me that grounding or earthing is vital  – is absolutely essential to someone’s healing and it kept coming up. But the first time I heard it, I was asking one of my guests to share some homework for the listeners, what would be one thing they could do to really change their life, like what one thing that 100% of the population can do to change your life. And she said, the first thing I do with my clients is I get them a grounding mat on their bed. Absolutely essential that every one of her patients have one. And I thought, wow, if she says that it’s that important, then I need to look into this a little bit. And so I told my husband and he got really curious. And that’s he actually found you through searching through YouTube videos. And he came to me he goes, “You have to have this guy, Clint on your show. He’s amazing. This stuff is amazing.” And yeah, and so we started to do things like walk barefoot outside, when we could and hug, I was hugging trees. You know, just to feel –  do I feel different? Do I notice a difference when the electrons are leaving my body? And then my husband got into trying to build our own mats because he saw some videos online. And I don’t recommend making your own mats, it was kind of messy and, and it just didn’t work out very well. But your mats are amazing. In fact, I have my feet on the grounding mat right now for the office. And when I have my feet on it, I actually don’t want to leave the office, I start feeling so good. Have you heard that before, people say they don’t want to get off the mat?     9:03 Clint Ober: Yes. You don’t want to get out of bed.     9:06 Ashley James: Right. Well, what’s really interesting is that we put the grounding mat that we bought one from you and put it on our bed. And and we noticed a difference, we’re like. “I wonder if our son knows the difference?” He’s four and so we didn’t tell him but we put him on one. And he started sleeping in. And that’s like a miracle for us because he’s been our alarm clock for the last four years. And he was sleeping in, we’d wake up and he’s still sleeping. And that would never ever happen in the past. And it’s the only change we made – was putting them on the grounding mat. I thought that was really interesting.     9:46 Clint Ober: It is. Absolutely love it.     9:49 Ashley James: Yeah, so I want to get into your story. I know definitely we picked some people’s interest. What is this? What is this grounding or earthing? It sounds so woo, whoo. You know, “Oh, go hug a tree, go walk barefoot in the grass.” Well, when we started telling my mother in law about this, she thought it was fascinating because her nanny growing up was her grandmother from Germany. And every morning she would go out as the sun rose, and they would walk barefoot in the grass, in Pasadena, California. Every morning her whole childhood, her grandmother made her do that. And and so when we started talking to her about earthing or grounding, she said, “That’s what I did my whole childhood, my grandmother made us do it.” And I thought that was really interesting that we, as humans knew to do it. And we’ve lost that way in the last few generations. So I want to get into your story. And then we’re going to dive into the science of why earthing or grounding can remove inflammation, pain, depression, it has even helped women lose weight, and balance the systems of the body. It’s it’s very fascinating. But first, let’s get into your story, Clint, what happened in your life that led you to discover earthing or grounding?     11:18 Clint Ober: Well, I never really know where to start. But probably the best place is to – I spent 30 years in the communications industry, primarily cable television, broadcast television, satellite distribution and things like that. And in that industry, we have to ground everything to the earth, in order to maintain electrical stability throughout the system to prevent noise, electrical glitches. It’s like if you see a TV set that has lines in it then flicks and you know any kind of electromagnetic interference. So we have to ground the system to maintain it at earth potential. So that eliminates all the static charges. And if there’s any atmospheric electrical events, a lot of times people think of lightning, but there’s lots of other rises and ground potential and all of that thing. So But anyhow, the main thing is, everything had to be grounded to the earth in order for safety and for electrical stability. And I learned that when I was quite young, prior to that, I grew up in Montana. And we were barefoot all the time, most of it. And a lot of my friends were Native American. And so we were a very earthy group of people. I mean, we were more nature oriented, it’s like, in nature, everything is connected. It’s it’s all systemic, and we’re a part of it, and so on. After I had a health event, before I had a root canal, as a result, an abscess in my liver, and I had to go in for surgery, and they had to remove a lot of my liver. And at the time, they didn’t know how much they could remove and habit grow back. And I was young enough to get a new liver at that time, I was like 49. I’m 75 now. The problem was, I didn’t have time, because of the condition I was in. And so I did recover from that. It was kind of, I think, a little bit of that was touched on in the movie. After I went through that traumatic experience. I woke up one morning, and I looked out doors and the world was just very different to me, I couldn’t go back to work yet. But anyhow, I looked out the window and everything was vibrant, it was electrical, it was like there was energy, the pine needles, the sky, everything was vibrant. For some reason, I looked around the room that I was in, my bedroom. And I was looking at all of the art that I had there, plus I had lots of other things. And I just had this epiphany that, you know, I almost died and I spent my whole life just acquiring all these assets and almost died. And so my kids would get part of it, most of it would be auctioned off or thrown away. And I realized that, you know, my life, that I didn’t really own these things. They owned my soul because I owned them. So I had to take care of them. I had to provide, and the environment, the home, all that stuff. And and in the end, I almost died and so what’s the point in all of this? So anyhow, as I came through that I, I just had this feeling came over me that I didn’t own any of this stuff. So I gave everything I had away except for what I could put in a couple of suitcases and an RV. And I didn’t go back to work and the company that I owned, I turned it over to my employees and let them have it. And it was a fairly large company. But I didn’t want to make my life about working anymore. The main thing that went through my mind was, I knew that I almost died, because I went through all the processes. And when I recovered, I was different. I knew that this time, if I’m going to die again, I want to be able to be happy. I want to be able to look back on my life, not for anybody else, or for any rewards or anything but just look back on life and say, I was worth being here. I was a contributor, I did something good. And so I disengaged from everything in my life. And I spent about four years driving around the United States in an RV spending most of the time with my kids, grandkids and in national parks. And I spent a lot of time alone. So I ended up down in Key Largo, Florida. One night I felt like was nature talking to me, I was looking over the bay. And here’s some manatees hosing them down a bit and playing them for fun. But anyhow, I was standing there and watching the sunset over the bay, over the gulf, I just had this feeling that I had to go do something. So I went into the RV and I wrote on a piece of paper, become an opposite charge. And I didn’t have any idea what that meant. An opposite charged me would be no gotten. Stir up the troops charge everybody up, get them excited, get them moving. And then the second thing I wrote down is status quo was the enemy. And again, I didn’t really understand that other than, you know, change. So I didn’t think too much about that. And I just kind of put that away. I just had this feeling and I had to get back West. So I unplugged, loaded everything up, stop to see a couple of my daughters on the way and I ended up back in California. And I started driving around, I was looking for a place that I could just settle. And I didn’t feel comfortable. So I went to Tucson, that wasn’t right. So that night I was driving in the afternoon, I was driving up to Flagstaff because that’s more like Motanna where I come from. And on the way I stopped in Sedona, Arizona, and I pulled into an RV park late at night, couldn’t see what was going on. Just pulled into a space and park. Woke up in the morning and I looked outdoors and I said, “Well, I’m not leaving here.” This is like living in a national park. And because of all the beauty and the energy and the feeling and it just felt good. So I spent about two years there. And in that process I started doing, when I was a young kid, I did a lot of stage lighting and things like that, for fun. So I started doing some lighting and for all the galleries in Sedona and Scottsdale. I would just go in and help them light up their shows. And in many cases you would have to redo their circuits or move the lighting around. So that kept me busy. But one day I was working on my computer and it kept crashing. This is back in 98, 97. And I knew that it was from static electricity. So I went in fix the outlet. So it was grounded. Then I put a piece of conductive tape across my desk and connected it to the ground. And so whenever I would touch the computer, I would touch that first. So I wouldn’t have a static charge on my computer. After I resolved that I was just finishing up a job, and so I went out doors, and I sat down on a bench and an RV full of tourists pulled up. I was at an art gallery area where I was fixing some stuff. And I just sat there and I looked at them and they were getting off the bus. Everybody was wearing these white tennis shoes, athletic shoes. I don’t know whether they’re Nike or Reebok or whatever. I think they were Nike. But anyhow, I just intuitively asked the question. I wonder if humans no longer being naturally grounded, it could be affecting us. I mean, affecting how we feel our affecting us. I didn’t know. So that night I went home and I got a meter and I grounded it to the earth. I walk indoors and put a patch on, just started going around the house and I noticed all of the elevated EMF charges on my body, and then I started to measure the static electricity, which is more DC and the huge static electricity that builds up and that every time you take a step, you’re creating a static, if you’re wearing shoes, rubber soled shoes, and you’re walking on a carpet or a vinyl or some kind of flooring. Then every time you pick up your feet, there’s contact separate. I mean there’s separation of electrons, so you’re creating charge on the body. If you do a lot of it, then you’ll get the little shock when you go touch a doorknob, but forever in a home you are you have static electricity build upon your body. And in many cases, you have high levels of these electric charges, electric field charges on the body. That night, I said, “Okay, it’s getting late, I needed to go to bed.” So I laid some metal duct tape that I bought earlier in the day. And I laid it across my bed, connected an alligator clip to it through a round wire out the window, connected into a ground rod through a second wire out the window and connected the electric meter to a little separate ground rod. And then I measured them together and I knew that the tape was grounded because the meters went to near zero. So then I laid down. I measured the body voltage and all that stuff on my body. And then I laid down on the tape. And as long as I laid flat on it, and I saw the body voltage dropped to zero. But the most important thing that happened that night was that I laid down on the bed normally for me to go to sleep, I had to take Advil, because I had a lot of pain I was a cowboy, I’m a skier, I played tennis, I’ve done everything and back at that time I was in my early 50s. I’m pretty tough shape. But I had to go to sleep, I had a lot of pains and a lot of issues, so I take Advil to go to sleep. That night, I was laying on the tape, I had the voltage meter lying on my stomach and I was measuring the voltages. I just kind of laid it on my chest. And the next thing I knew it was morning, and the voltmeter was laying down beside me. And I stayed flat all night long. I was excellently grounded for the first time in my life. And I woke up and I said, “Wow, there’s something to this, I need to learn more about this.” So I started to look around a little bit on the internet, which is really difficult back in 98 to 99, there just wasn’t a lot of data. So I went down to the university in Arizona and I went to their medical libraries looking for anything I could find on grounding. The only literature on grounding had to do with, if you know if you’re going to perform surgery, and then the patients need to be grounded. And in many cases, the surgeons have to be grounded in order to prevent static sparks. Because if they cut the skin and there’s a static spark, it can trigger a heart event. So that made some sense. But anyhow, I couldn’t find anything about grounding for help – Grounding for to reduce static electricity, to protect chips, to protect computers, to protect software, to protect against gasoline events, fireworks, all of those things. Grounding is a huge industry. It’s a multi billion dollar industry in the commercial area and it’s 100 years old. I mean, ever since dynamite and gasoline, people have to wear grounded shoes. They have to be grounded and everything has to be protected from that sparks. And then I went back to Sedona and I started grounding a few of my friends, a couple buddies that I hung out with a little bit. One of them had severe arthritis in his hand, and I didn’t think anything about it. But I told him, “You gotta let me do this. And you got to experience and make sure I’m not crazy.” So I went to their homes, and I grounded them like they I grounded myself. And both of them said they had real results. First of all, it was a joke, it couldn’t possibly be whatever. But the third day, the fellow who had arthritis, he says, “Do you think this could have any effect on arthritis?” I said, “I wouldn’t have a clue.” And he said, “Well, my arthritis is coming down.” And so that piqued my interest. So I kept playing with it and playing with it. And then I recognize that, yes, this affects me, it affects my friends. So there’s something here, but there’s no information on it. And it wasn’t till after we wrote the book, all of these people from around the world – from Germany and all of the Native American populations throughout North and South America. And all of these I mean, grounding, or barefoot was a known thing. But the science behind it did not exist. So the thing that happened, I want to make sure I’m on track here. But the thing that happened, as time went on, I came out to California and I went to UCLA. And I asked them and they said, you know, they pretty much told me that you know you’re you’re crazy. So anyhow, I took that, and I went and found me some researchers that were in the meeting there, and they helped me do a study. And then we saw that, yes, there’s some dramatic effects going on here. Anecdotally, we could see it, then there needed to be some quantifiable studies, then we did the cortisol study and all the others ones. And I can kind of come back to that. But the real event that happened was in the late 50s, they invented plastics. And then by 1960, we had the plastic materials that we could create carpets with, we could create soles of shoes with. And so the whole world, this was a real benefit. Because now the poorest people around everybody, no matter who you are, you could afford shoes now. Because the leather soled shoes that we had before. Before 1960, this is an important thing. Before 1960, 90% of all visitors to a practitioner were for infectious disease, acute injury and childbirth, 10% for stress and whatever, today over 90% of all visits to a practitioner for a stress related health disorder. Meaning, it’s about something’s affecting the immune system sufficient that you can maintain health. And now we know that that’s inflammation. Before 1960 when I was a kid, we had leather shoes that we had to wear to school, or go to church, and for weddings, or real special events. Other than that we were barefoot. And if we were going to church on Sunday, and it was raining, we carried our shoes in our hands, walk barefoot and when we got in the church would put the shoes on, we couldn’t walk in the water or the rain with leather soled shoes, because that would ruin them. And they were expensive back then. That’s the world I come from, now it may be different in the bigger cities and other populations of the world and in Europe. But everything was leather sold, which is a semiconductor. So even wearing a leather soled shoe, you’re somewhat grounded. But when we invented the plastic soled shoe, then that’s like putting a jacket around an electrical wire – it insulates. It insulates us from the earth. Now, that takes us to what is ground? Ground is the earth itself has an electrical surface charge, you can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it, but you can feel it. On the average, the earth, it will vary between midnight and 12 noon, at 12 noon, the electrical potential of the Earth is higher because the sun’s hitting the earth directly. And it excites electrons on the surface. At night, everything calms down. It’s quieter. But it has a 24 circadian profile that absent flows and so on. But you know, when human beings stand barefoot on the earth, the earth has a negative surface charge. And the word negative – a lot of people would know this word because in a battery, it has a negative side, it has a positive side. On a little battery one hand is positive, the other hand is negative. How batteries work is you store electrons on one side. And then if you connect to wire to the other side, than the electrons will travel from the negative side to the positive side. That’s how batteries work, but the earth is a huge battery being charged by the sun. But it’s has a negative surface charge of about 20 to 50 millivolts on the average. So there’s a lot of free electrons stored on the surface of the earth that can move and reduce charge. Now go back to the cable industry, TV industry for a minute. The reason we connected everything to the earth, was so that a conductive cables, and everything electrical could be held at earth potential – meaning as soon as we connect them to the earth, the cable system, then it goes negative 20 to 50 millivolts, the surface wires. So if there’s any charge or static, they’re automatically absorbed by electrons coming from the earth, up on the wire and neutralizing charge.   28:54 Ashley James: So when the cable wires which we’ve seen they’re up by the telephone wires, in these poles, are they collecting a charge because they’re having the sun beat down on them, because they’re in the positively charged environment of above ground? Like what’s charging them?     29:20 Clint Ober: It’s mostly wind.     29:22 Ashley James: Oh, interesting. So the wind is carrying the positive charge?     29:26 Clint Ober: It’s the friction of the wind hitting the cable, and then you have the atmospheric charges. If a cloud passes over, then it’s going to have a pull on the electrons on the earth and kind of well up. Temperature, wind, dust, all of the pollution, all of these things, but it really comes back to wind. Wind is the primary thing because the wind is constantly blowing and there’s a lot of friction being created between the wind. And the air and the atmosphere is positively charged.     30:14  Ashley James: So the reason why I asked that question is to compare our bodies to those cables. If those cables, which are just standing like they’re staying in one spot, can collect a positive charge, then what happens to us we’re moving around, we’re out in the wind, we’re at our desks in front of electronics, and we’re not grounded, we’re insulated. Our entire life has become insulated, as you pointed out starting in the 50s. Because we are wearing our Nike rubber soled shoes or whatever, a Reebok rubber soled shoes, and all of our shoes now have that rubber. And we barely ever touched the ground with our bare feet or our bare hands, very few people do. In fact, I had a guest say, “You know, if it wasn’t for the fact that we had to wash our hands with the faucet, we would probably all die because we accidentally ground ourselves at least once a day by touching the faucet.”     31:13  Clint Ober: Yes. And that’s very true. For instance, most of the diagnosed autoimmune disorders, which we know are related to this are female. Men have a lesser amount, but men live in different environments. They golf, they work on cars, they are outdoors, they do the lawn, they do various things, they accidentally, incidentally get grounded.     31:41 Ashley James: Oh, I see.     31:42 Clint Ober: Women get up in the morning, they’re on a carpet, go take a shower, they do get a little ground there in many cases, then they put on, a lot of times you have clothes that has poly in it and put on shoes, then you walk on carpet or indoor insulated type of flooring. And then in many cases, they’re handling vacuums, and hair dryers and all of these things. And then when they go to work, they get in, they walk to the car in insulated shoes, drive the car to work, get out of the car, go sit in an office that they are totally ungrounded in static or whatever, sitting in front of computers over the electric fields in the static electricity, and their bodies are just totally electrified.     32:30 Ashley James: You mentioned DC charge, that static electricity builds up inside us, all the electrons have built up inside us. These free electrons, which are free radicals, it’s causing free radical damage, right? That they’re built up inside us, like a DC battery, on the Earthing Movie, it was mentioned that someone could have up to 20 volts stored inside them because they don’t ground.     33:03 Clint Ober: Voltage is a measurement between two points, the electrical potential between two points. Like the Earth would be zero and your electric lights would be 120 volts. So what they’re talking about in many cases, let me explain something first. The body when it’s grounded to the earth, it’s identical to a cable, or a TV tower or your refrigerator or your computer, if it hasn’t grounded. For instance, your refrigerator is grounded, the metal housing on the refrigerator is grounded. So it’s identical to earth potential, I mean, it has the same amount of electrons per square inch, as the earth itself does. And the reason that you ground that to earth so if there’s no electrical event, you know, broken wire or anything ever happens, that refrigerator is grounded, so the human being will not get shot. So the electrons from the earth, switch up the wire and the breaker gets blown. That’s the safety side of it. But what happens to a body, how does a body get voltage? If a human being is standing in their living room or laying on their bed, and they are grounded, then their body is an antenna for electric fields, and electric fields radiate from all electrical devices. These are lamps, some computers, if they’re not grounded computers, TV sets. But electrical wires – anytime you see a lamp or an electrical wire anywhere, it is radiating an electric field. The only way you can remove an electric field or prevent an electric field is to unplug the lamp. But if you are in the proximity, or close to it, the closer you are to the electrical cord, then that electric field is being radiated from that wire. It creates a charge on your body. And you can take an AC voltmeter, you can connect it to the earth on one side. And then you can put an electrode patch or anything on the body with the other side of the voltage meter and it will measure the AC charge that is on your body. And you can walk close to a lamp, it will increase. You can walk further away, it will decrease. You can stand barefoot on the grass or on a grounded device, and it will go to zero because the pad is at earth potential. When your body stands on the earth or the mat, then the electrons from the earth come up the wire, the negative free electrons on the earth, they come up the wire, they bring pad to earth potential, then anything that touches that pad, if it’s a human body then the human body is going to equalize with the earth. You will maintain the same negative charge as the earth. And what that means is there’s an abundance of free electrons on the body that are able to move and reduce charge. Does that make sense?     36:24 Ashley James: Uh-huh.     36:29 Clint Ober: Okay, so over a period of 60 years, we started wearing rubber soled shoes. And there’s an exponential curve that is still climbing. It was about 2010, 2011 when we had about 90% of the shoes sold in America were plastic soles. Back in 1960 10% were plastic soled shoes. So we’ve had this complete reversal of leather soled shoes versus synthetic soled shoes. But if you look in the book, The Earthing book, there are charts that show the growth of,for instance, rubber soled shoes over a 58 year period. And here’s the growth of autism, lupus, MS, diabetes, and so on, and so on, and so on. So, now in the early days, when we started investigating all of this, we did not understand what the mechanism was. How could grounding the body reduce pain? That’s the only thing we knew at that time. And this was back in, I think in 2001. I was at a conference in California, trying to talk to people that might know something. And we ran across Dr. Stephen Sinatra who was a cardiologist and I started talking to him. Because cardiologists deal with electrical, they know the body’s electrical first chemical second. But no one else did at that time. And more importantly, Stephen said, “Clint, if you are affecting people’s pain, then you need to be looking at inflammation. Because pain is a byproduct of inflammation.” You have to have inflammation first before you can have pain. So that’s, I went home scratching my head, because inflammation to me was, I was playing tennis, and I slipped and twisted my ankle, and it was who would swell up, it got red and heat. So that was inflammation. That was what I knew. But along the way, we began to learn. And we kept doing studies, and we began to learn that when we ground the body, it would reduce the pain. And then we went on and did some tests on hormones, especially cortisol. We wanted to know if it calms the body when you ground. So we needed to understand that. So we did a study on cortisol, we would measure cortisol every four hours for 24 hours, and ground them for a few weeks, and then do it again. And it’s just dramatic – the change, the shift, because before their circadian cortisol profiles were all over the place. And then after grounding for a few weeks, they all synchronized. And these people lived in different parts of southern California. So we knew it was connected to earth rhythms and so on. So we learned about cortisol, and I’d like to come back to that later. Then I started investigating inflammation and then I learned one day that neutrophils, macrophages and many of these white blood cells, what they do is – how the immune system functions, is if you have a damaged cell, or pathogen in your body, then it sends over one of these white blood cells, which have many different many purposes, but they encapsulate the damaged cell or the pathogen, and they release reactive oxygen species. As soon as I saw the word reactive, then I knew that this is an electrical process.     40:46 Ashley James: That’s so fascinating.     40:50 Clint Ober: So it was an accident.     40:51 Ashley James: So just to illustrate for the listeners, a white blood cell, it needs to attack a pathogen, or maybe the white blood cells need to digest a, like a cancer cell or a cell that’s damaged. And it comes along the white blood cell encapsulates the cell, and then it releases reactive protein, which what it’s actually doing is releasing free radicals, it’s releasing lose electrons, that magnetically tear apart that cell, so then the white blood cell can continue to digest it, is that correct?     41:28 Clint Ober: Right. That’s how the immune system destroys pathogens, and damaged cells – by stealing electrons from their structure and killing them.     41:36 Ashley James: Uhm-hmm. And if we have too much of that, so the inflammation comes in, when we have too much of that going on and we have too much of a buildup of these electrons in our body because we don’t ground, then they start to attack. The electrons start to attack the healthy tissue creating more inflammation.     41:55 Clint Ober: Yup. What we have to do is go backwards now. In 1960, before then we were all semi grounded, or we spent a lot of time grounded. People who didn’t spend any time – you know, there’s a few of those. But these autoimmune diseases, inflammation related health disorders started to climb in around 1960, late 50s, and the 60s. So when the body is grounded, it has ground, earth potential – ground potential. What it has is a reservoir of free electrons, the body is negatively charged. So those free electrons are not just on the surface of body, they’re in the body, they’re everywhere. They don’t have free range. I mean the body gates – everything in and out and all that kind of stuff. But basically, when we did our grounding studies, it was like 2008 or 2010 when I met with Stephen Sinatra back in Essex, Connecticut, and there were about a dozen doctors got together. And we’re all trying to figure this out. So what we did is they drew blood from everybody and looked at the blood under a microscope, then grounded everybody for 30 to 40 minutes and looked at their blood again. And what we saw was a complete separation, automatic, perfect profile of the blood after they were grounded. But before there was real low formation, like static electricity, and peanuts, you know, the blood was all stuck together. When it’s stuck together like that, can’t get in and out of the capillary, so soon as you ground and the blood can get in and out of the capillaries, then everybody’s face started to pink up and so on. As soon as you ground the body, then the red blood cells, we found out through further experiment, that the negative surface charge on red blood cells increases by a factor of almost three. So now the red blood cells being more negative, they can’t stick together, and they repel each other. That’s how nature maintains normal blood viscosity, the thickness of blood. But more importantly, is as the blood circulates throughout the body, and the negative surface – so if you have negative increase negative surface charge on red blood cells, you have increased negative surface charge on every cell in the body. So now when the white blood cells come over and release reactive oxygen, and destroy a cell, if there’s any remaining radicals – free radicals, then the blood can give up an electron here, there or adjacent cells, there’s plenty of ground free electrons on the cells in that area that can absorb and reduce and prevent, the blood can give up an electron to a free radical which prevents damaging the blood or damaging the cell. So by grounding the body, in the past, the immune system was dependent on us maintaining a negative charge. A quick side note is if you look at the animals who live in the wild, the elk, deer, coyotes, all the animals that live out there, cancer doesn’t exist out there. They don’t have plaque on their arteries, they don’t have plaque on their teeth, they don’t need to go to the emergency room, when they get hurt, they can just go find a piece of ground bury themselves in they heal up. But the animals who live indoors with their owners, they all manifest autoimmune diseases, just like their owners. And they have a death rate of approximately 50% from cancer – indoor, domesticated animals. Now a lot of people could say, well, it’s the food, it’s this, it’s that and so on. But the simple corollary is, the animals in the wild are naturally grounded 24/7. They can’t have inflammation in their bodies.     46:14 Ashley James: And what fascinated me was  the understanding of how the immune system works, like you said, how the white blood cells work to attack and digest pathogens or damaged cells. To destroy them, they use the free radical charge.     46:15 Clint Ober: Yes.     46:16: Ashley James: And if we have too much of a buildup of that charge, then it attacks the healthy cells, and then we get inflammation because now the body is having to clean up the damage from these free radicals running through our body. And my listeners have heard about free radicals. We talked about how when you consume rancid oil or if you eat anything that’s fried food, it’s proven. I had Dr. Joel Fuhrman on my show, and his latest book, which is called Fast Food Genocide, he talks about the studies where they proven that if you consume fried food on a regular basis, like once a week is a regular basis, that you have cut 10 years or more off your life. So that’s free radical damage from eating fried, like fries once a week. Let’s say you go out and have some fish and chips once a week, meant you’re now going to die in your 60s instead of in your 70s or 80s from that one choice. That’s how bad free radical damage is from fried foods. And we think about free radicals as in, we can get them from our food and we need to consume antioxidants, which is all the fruits and vegetables to neutralize those free radicals. But no one thinks that we need to ground ourselves to release the free radicals because the free radicals are just these lose electrons, right?     48:07 Clint Ober: Let me try to straighten this out a little bit. If the body is grounded, then it is negatively charged, and you can’t have inflammation in the body when it is grounded. Pathogens I mean, free radicals, every time you take a breath, you’re breathing in all kinds of particulates. And they create problems in the lungs and the immune system has to clean all that up. If you have asthma, you know it for sure. But even when you’re healthy, when you’re breathing bad air, you’re breathing in radicals. And so the water – it’s definitely food and all these issues that are going on in our environment. But what grounding is all about, is when you ground to the earth and your body is negatively charged, then our working hypothesis is and that’s what we’ve kind of proved, is if you get grounded and stay grounded 24 hours a day, and you saw the movie. And you saw a lady with MS. I told her, “I can help you. But you got to do this, you got to ground 24 hours a day and stay grounded until you get well.” And you saw her story I believe so. Anyhow, if you get grounded and stay grounded 24/7 here’s what happens to the immune system. If you’re ungrounded the immune system, you have the build up of these radicals, whatever source they’re coming from; food, all of it, and from metabolism, just the body itself creates a lot of radicals. So when you’re grounded, the immune system provides free electrons everywhere in your body all over the place. Okay, radicals that are produced, or reduced – radicals from a white blood cell, it produces reactive oxygen in order to reduce and tear apart that pathogen. Where inflammation comes from primarily, is if there’s any remaining radicals, they don’t build up. They will only last for 10, 20 nanoseconds, at the very most. They’re going to reach and grab and steal an electron from something in the vicinity. And the only real thing in the vicinity is another cell, another normal cell in the body. So they reach over and attach to and grab an electron from a healthy cell and damage it. And so that neutralizes those radicals. But in the meantime, now we’ve damaged another cell. So metaphorically, a message goes out to the immune system, “Hey, something has got me. It’s still here.” And so it sends another neutrophils and neutrophils, if that cell can’t be repaired, depending on the damage, then it destroys that cell. So then if there’s any reactive oxygen left from it 10, 20 nanoseconds later, it’s going to steal it from another cell. And so that’s like burning along. That’s oxidation. So the immune system is oxidizing healthy tissue. You’re not storing free radicals, what you’re doing is you’re building up free radical damage. So now the immune system rather than do what it would normally do, like take care of the pathogens from breathing, or water or, or food or some of these other things, and you can overwhelm the immune system with any of them. But let’s just say in a normal situation. So now the immune system can’t fight things that it would normally do during the day, it has to go and spend all this energy and resources, trying to manage the free radical damage and to stop the burn. But it’s creating more burn as it’s trying to fix it. And so it’s stressing the immune system sufficient that the body can’t maintain health.     52:32 Ashley James: And then doctors say under a microscope, “Why is it the immune system is attacking supposedly healthy tissue? This must be an autoimmune disease.” When pathologist look, pathologists are like, “Well, there was nothing wrong with the thyroid, why is the body constantly attacking the thyroid?” for example. And what you’re saying is that it is this chain reaction that we we’re not grounded. It’s a chain reaction, that’s happening at the size of an electron, the size of an oxygen molecule. And so of course, a pathologist with a regular microscope can’t see that that supposedly healthy tissue was damaged. Because of the immune system could not do what it’s supposed to do, because they’re that we’re not grounded. So we need to ground ourselves constantly as much as possible need to. It’s not just go out once a day and walk barefoot for five minutes, it’s all day long. We need to ground ourselves so that we are at earth’s potential which is releasing all that positive charge so the white blood cells can do their job, because otherwise the white blood cells end up damaging the body in the process of trying to do their jobs.     53:57 Clint Ober: Yes, collateral damage.     54:00 Ashley James: So autoimmune disease is collateral damage of not grounding ourselves throughout the day?     54:06 Clint Ober: All autoimmune diseases are related to a dysfunction immune system because the immune system is oxidizing healthy tissue.     54:13 Ashley James: Have you seen people cure their own autoimmune disease by grounding themselves throughout the day?     54:20 Clint Ober: Thousands.     54:22 Ashley James: This is why I said at the beginning that this interview is going to be the most important interview that everyone’s listened to. I’ve done so many interviews and such great information, but my goal has been to help people get to the root cause.     54:39 Clint Ober: Right.     54:40 Ashley James: And this is the root cause.     54:41 Clint Ober: It’s ground meaning it’s its base, it’s at the very foundation of health. You have to have this throughout all the time. The human body was grounded like the animals are in the wild now. And autoimmune disease was not the problem, infectious disease, acute injury, childbirth, war and famine and so on. But environmental inflammation related health disorders, autoimmune diseases are 100% I believe, related to loss of ground. The body has lost its electrical ground, it lost its ability to neutralize positive charges. In this case, reactive oxygen species. Now you can drink a glass of water, it’s going to help and if it’s more negatively charged is going to help. But you can’t drink water all day long. Every day all day long. There’s not enough free electrons and a glass of water. Blueberries, certain types of berries are much more beneficial than others, but you would have to have a blueberry drip.     55:54 Ashley James: My husband would agree with you. He eats two pounds of blueberries a day. It’s his favorite food.     56:00 Clint Ober: Exactly. It’s really, really simple and that’s what’s complicated about this, because the body is electrical first – everything in the body functions electrically, then chemically. You have to take an electron from here to there in order to create energy, life. That’s how we know when a person is dead, because they have no more electrical potential. I mean they’ve lost their electrical capacity. So how do I Where do I go from here?     56:40 Ashley James: Well you just bring up a really good point. If we go to a cardiologist they’re going to read the electrical, they hook us up to the EKG or these other machines that will read the electrical signals from our body, we have to remember that every part of our nervous system has electrical potential, has an electrical charge that in between each synaptic gap in the nervous system. We keep thinking we’re a bunch of chemicals but beneath that, it’s actually electrical information that is happening in the body as well. We’re bio electrical beings. And when I think about it, think about a machine where the electronics are not grounded like a computer that it’s getting static, your TV gets staticky, it crashes, the hard drive burns out, it doesn’t work correctly. And that’s just a machine, which is an electrical being. It’s a machine that’s not grounded, it can’t function. And now we look at us, a significantly more complex being because we’re bio electrical beings and when we’re not grounded, the circuitry is blowing out.     58:00 Clint Ober: Right. But you also have to recognize that every cell in the body functions electrically. You have an electrical surface charge on the cell and an internal electrical circuit charge, and how it takes information or nutrients in and takes other things out is through repolarization. So anytime there’s a difference of a few bolts on a on a cell, then they’ll depolarized, repolarize – so everything is electrical first. The body is the most electrical thing in the environment. There’s nothing on earth that’s more electrical than a human body.     58:41 Ashley James: I want to talk about some of the studies that you have participated in, because where we left off on your journey was that you had gone to universities and they kind of threw you out, laughed you out at the university. And since then you have conducted 24 peer reviewed studies that are monumental. In the earthing movie they talked about one study where they hooked preemie babies up to basically becoming grounded. They grounded these preemie babies in the NICU in their little oxygen tents. And and they had outstanding results. Can you share the results from that study?     59:24 Clint Ober: Yeah. Basically, babies in these ICU units – they’re ungrounded and their little bodies and nervous systems are all electrically charged. And there’s a lot of EMF around, but there’s a lot of static electricity because they’re in plastic things, and there’s people coming in touching them. So anyhow, I think there were 24 preemies and these were babies that were prematurely born by some number. These studies are all available on www.earthinginstitute.net for detail. But just to give you a general concept, what they did is they put a simple electrode patch on the babies, and grounded them to the earth via the electrical ground, and the babies, they’re totally stressed. Their heart rate variability is really significantly challenged. And you know, they’re they’re just in this wired state, and it causes all of the cholics and a lot of the problems that these babies experience. So what they did, when they grounded them, then they measured everything, of course. And what they found was that there was a, you know, like a 60 70% increase in normalization of vagal tone. And vagal tone is the calmness of your balance of the parasympathetic versus sympathetic normalizing and normalizing heart rate variability, then the babies would calm down, circulation would normalize, and all of these things. and it was universal across the board. And so that was the first study. And that was done, I think, at the Hershey Children’s Clinic in Hershey, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania. So that was a really, really good study, because here we find that grounding normalizes and vagal tone. What that means is, you have a parasympathetic nervous system, you have a sympathetic. The sympathetic nervous system responds to anything in the environment – noise, wind, cold, somebody breaks something, just whatever, or stress, you know, whatever is going on. So the sympathetic is on one side of the body pushing, and it’s like a fight or flight mechanism. If you see there’s a bear in the woods, so cortisol spikes. In the beginning, that’s not a problem. But as time goes, on the parasympathetic, it’s releasing hormones to modulate the response of the sympathetic so that you will stand still for a split second to determine if you really need to run or if you’re really need to fight, and that calms down the response. But eventually, if you live in a chronically elevated sympathetic state, that means you got noise, everything chaos going around you in your life all the time, then what happens is, the parasympathetic has limited resources. So it’s going to run out of hormones, and whatever, and then all of a sudden, the sympathetic will start over driving. And that’s when you get this, what’s going on with these babies, I mean, this challenge, I mean their bodies are just screaming. And it’s the same with adults, I mean, people who are wired, and take a look at our kids, especially in classrooms, they’re wired, they’re just jumping in their skin. So by normalizing vagal tone, what you’re doing is, to me, you’re giving the body itself a reference. It’s connected to the earth, it’s got a reference. So the inflammation that is created by the sympathetic over responding, the negative surface charge of the earth, the negative electrons come into the body, then they’re reducing the positive charges in the body, and that calms down the system, and then the parasympathetic can recover or begin to recover. And for people who have chronic fatigue, adrenal burnout, all of these issues, this is what it’s about. So here we have a, you know, a class A study showing that just simple grounding puts out the fire of inflammation, calms the nervous system, and stabilizes the heart rate variability. That’s powerful. And now we just have to convince people that babies and adults and children are all the same. Their nervous systems are all the same. So if a child in school gets up in the morning, puts his tennis shoes on, and then he spends his whole day insulated from the earth, that’s why we have a lot of this high anxiety, and irritability and chaos.     1:04:53 Ashley James: I’m just seeing it with our four year old son. We don’t feed him sugar, we don’t overstimulate him with TV or anything like that. And yet, and he hasn’t had any trauma in his childhood. He’s just average healthy, happy, but he, he hasn’t been grounded a lot, you know, we always put his shoes on, and maybe once in a while he’ll play barefoot. In fact, when we’re outside, he usually throws his shoes off. It’s just his instinct to do so, which is great. He knows he knows to ground himself. But just putting him on the grounding mat to sleep on, and it couldn’t have been placebo. He didn’t know he was on it. He was asleep by the time we put him on it. And he started to sleep in, you know, two hours more than he normally does. So we get him to bed by seven, he usually wakes up at 6:30 or seven, and he’s been sleeping until nine. So his nervous system just went, ah (sigh), and relaxed, because he was grounded from using your grounding that while he was sleeping.     1:06:08 Clint Ober: Right. That’s that’s what it’s all about. These kids need lots of sleep.     1:06:12 Ashley James: Yeah, they do. They do. Absolutely. So tell us about those people that you said that were in different parts of California that all had cortisol issues, that were all under stress. And that you said within a matter of weeks that they begin to connect to the earth’s rhythm.     1:06:32 Clint Ober: Yes, what we found and again, it was really interesting. No, this isn’t brand new, people in the communications industry knew this. Back in the early days of before telephone when we had Western Union, those kind of ground wires. So they had to know different times of the day, they could only send messages because the sun affected the signals. If there was no sun, then you’re not going to get a telegraph message, and so on. And so on, we knew that the electrical potential of the earth, from the communication industry plays a big role in everything, traveling on the surface of the earth. So what we did is we took a handful of people, I think there were eight or nine people in the study. This was done by an anesthesiologist, and what we did is he measured their cortisol every four hours, for 24 hours; 8pm, midnight, 4am 8am, noon, and 4pm. Now in the book, these charts exist there, and they’re also on the institute under the cortisol study. But anyhow, if you look at it, the first chart looks like spaghetti. I kind of knew these people not personally, but by age, the younger people were high stress and they had elevated cortisol. And the older ladies had low cortisol exhausted adrenals. But to look at them as a group, they did have a peak coming in around 4am and peaking at 8am, and then dropped off. But as soon as we grounded them, they all synchronized and they’re all identical on a tight little band, and they all kind of went to normal. And when I say normal, what that means is at 4am, first of all, if you’re not sleeping at night, if you’re there’s only one reason I believe that people can’t sleep, they have elevated cortisol. Because cortisol is a fight or flight hormone it’s not, it’s not going to let you sleep, because you’re worried about a child, bill, work problem I whatever life issue that’s causing you stress, and causing you to think about or worry, or whatever. And that’s causing the body to secrete cortisol. And it’s really hard for the body to go to sleep as long as the cortisol is elevated. Sleep is autonomic, but you cannot sleep if there’s a bear in the woods. So anyhow, what we saw first of all, was the cortisol normalized between 8am and 4am, where before it was kind of spaghetti. And then at 4am, we saw the cortisol rise from, I can’t use the word milligrams here. But anyhow, to give you an example. They, they rose from let’s just five milligrams, all the way up to 50 milligrams, or about 40 milligrams at 8am. So you have this at 4am, then the body starts producing lots of cortisol. And that cortisol is to create the energy that you’re going to need to get out of bed. A lot of people will have heart attacks, because of low cortisol in the morning, morning heart attacks. So anyhow, the main thing that we saw was one, the cortisol circadian profiles, the daily profiles synchronized amongst this group of primarily women. But more importantly, in the original study, three of them, they were outliers, and we couldn’t figure out why because their cortisol would peak, I mean start climbing at one in the morning, and so they couldn’t sleep. What we found was these were stewardesses. These were three stewardesses that were based in New York, but they spent half their time in San Diego. So they were on the nonstop flight San Diego. But the majority of their time they lived in New York. So when they come to San Diego, and their circadian cortisol rhythms are off three hours. So that’s what you call jet lag. So what we learned is one, jet lag is real. But more importantly, what we learned was if you go stand on the earth for 15 minutes, after you fly from East Coast to West Coast, or vice versa, you stand on the earth for 15 minutes, it resets, or your ground – it resets your circadian cortisol rhythms.     1:12:00 Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that is so amazing. When I was 16, I flew with my parents from Toronto to Honolulu, Hawaii. And the first thing I did, you can imagine that was a long day of flying, but it was like the middle of the night for me. And the first thing I did at the airport was kick off my shoes and stand in the grass. I just had to, it was like a calling. And I didn’t have any jet lag that entire trip.     1:12:28 Clint Ober: Your body knows what to do you listen. We’d get out of our own way.     1:12:33 Ashley James: Yes. That is so cool. Well, my husband, when he first got into this, he had built our own mat and it was a really big pain in the butt. And so I can I can tell people that yeah, you could go out and buy all the materials and try to make your own but I don’t recommend it. It was a big pain in the butt and the thing fell apart. And it was kind of expensive for how not professional it was, but that your mats, I am in love with. They’re very low profile, you don’t even notice like you’re sleeping on them right now, my feet are on the one in the office one. But when we’re lying on the one on our mattress, it’s not bulky. I I really feel it, it’s just, you know, people might say it’s a placebo, but there is a difference. So my husband, the plug is on his side. And because it’s plugged into the ground, and you have a device that comes with the kit that you test the electrical outlet to make sure that it’s safe. And that it’s it is in fact a safe ground. I want to talk about that next. But I can tell when it’s not plugged in and when it is plugged in. So he’ll do like it’s just been a little bit of an experiment, but he had it plugged in. And then he had it unplugged. And then he had it plugged in again, over the course of a few days. And I noticed a difference. So I didn’t know when he had it plugged in and when he didn’t, but I could lie on the bed and I could feel whether or not we the grounding mat was plugged into the ground or not. I do have some questions about this. So we did try, put a wire out the window into the ground. And not everyone can do that, because a lot of people live in condos. And you know, that’s kind of a pain in the butt, because you have to figure out how to get around your screen on your window. I like your system much better. It’s cleaner, it’s low profile, you just plug it right into the ground. I appreciate that. But I do have a question about electromagnetic fields. So if an outlet is there beside your bed, isn’t giving off an electromagnetic field. And when you’re plugging into the ground, would that also bring the electromagnetic field of the outlet onto the grounding mat?     1:15:12 Clint Ober: Well, the EMF industry, that’s their big story from an electrical point of view. And the reason we ground everything in the communications industry, and ground all of our equipment and put up shielding to prevent all this stuff. But basically what happens is, when you are grounded to the earth, the earth is infinitely large, bodies infinitely small, relatively speaking. But when you’re at earth potential, you have the resources of the entire earth to hold your body at earth potential. If you are grounded, then you are antenna for electric field charges.     1:16:02 Ashley: Because the atmosphere is positively charged?     1:16:06 Clint Ober: No. We’re talking about electric field, static electricity is different. When you’re grounded, it dissipates static electricity. I mean, that’s the industry. I mean, that’s a huge industry. Now electric fields, EMFs. You have an electric field and a magnetic field, magnetic fields you or nobody else can do anything about whatsoever. Because they go through bricks, they go through everything, you can’t shield them, you can with new metal, but nobody could afford it. So magnetic fields are not the problem, we have done enough work that we know that the active agent with EMFs is electric, the electric field. And the electric field is kind of like the bear on the wood. I mean, the bear is radiating an electric field. You have an electric field, the bear has been electric field. This is a fact. And when you sense his field, then it’s going to fire your sympathetic nervous system and your cortisol is going to spike. And you’re going to run or you’re going to fight. So here’s my take on all of it, I have a huge background in all of this. And it’s really hard to teach everybody electromagnetism or the basics of electromagnetism. But the reason everything is grounded is to prevent electromagnetic interference. That’s the real term here. So what we’re trying to do is prevent electromagnetic interference in the body. And how does an electric field create interference in the body? First of all, you have to know where they come from. Everybody is worried about what they can see, they can see a lamp, they can see an electrical outlet, they can see a cord. But what they can’t see is when your house was built, before the wallboard went up, all of the studs and everything were put in place, then an electrician came in with a drill. And he drilled all the holes going across the timbers at waist high to an electrician. If he’s short, it’s a little lower if he is tall, they’re a little higher. And then he ran all the wires through those holes up and down to the outlets to the switches to the ceiling, whatever, and around the whole house. So then, if you see a house before they put the wall board up, you’ll know and recognize that it’s a cage wire. There’s electrical wires running everywhere. But that isn’t so much the problem, it is a problem. But that isn’t so much of the problem. The problem is, now they put the wallboard up, and the carpets down, and they bring in the mattress and the box spring. And they bring in the nightstands and the lamps and whatever else. So you would think that the lamps probably is the biggest problem. But in fact – I hate to tell people these things, because if I don’t like to tell people something they can’t do anything about. And that’s what the state of California Health Sciences told me, they said do not go out and bother these people and tell them that they have a problem unless you got a solution. And the solution has to be no cost or low cost. And that’s another little story here for me to tell. That’s why these products are low cost and, and why I preach barefoot, it’s no cost. But anyhow, I’ll go ahead and I brought it up, so I have to finish it. But anyhow, so you put your mattress up against the wall, then you put your pillow up at the end of your mattress, then you go to bed and and everything’s beautiful and whatever. But there you are more affected by the electric fields radiating from the romacks in the wiring, at the head of your bed, because your head is within six inches of those electric fields. So the body at that point is an antenna. A lot of people say, “Oh, well, all you gotta do is ground the springs of the mattress.” Or, “You ground this, you do that.” That’s crazy, the body is an electrical, it’s every bit as much of an antenna as the springs in your mattress, or the lamp in the corner, or anything else. So the only thing you can do is turn off the electrical in your bedroom at night. There’s no other option. And I hate to tell people that because it’s expensive, most people can afford it most people can comply with things like that. So the only other option you have is to ground yourself and get rid of the antenna effect. Now, here’s how electric fields affect people, they do not cause cancer, they do not do all of these things that a lot of these fear people are always talking about. What they do is the hair on your skin, on your arm in your head. It’s really an electrical antenna. It can sense. It’s like a bear in the woods. In the old days when there wasn’t all this noise in our environment. If you were out in the woods, you could feel a bear, you couldn’t see him, you couldn’t smell and you couldn’t hear him. But you could feel him, you knew he was there. And so what you did is you look for safety or your cortisol came up and you are prepared to run or fight. Now then as soon as the problem went away, cortisol went back down, life was back to normal, everything was happy and good and you’re grounded. So any inflammation that was created from that charge of cortisol is automatically dissipated, get the immune system in ground. So now today, we have the mailbox is a bear in the woods, the phone’s a bear in the woods, a swimming child is a bear in the woods, the boss is a bear in the woods, the traffic is a bear in the woods. So our sympathetic nervous system, which is sensing all of these environmental things. And now we have this electric field that’s radiating from these electrical appliances and devices and so on. And the hair on your arm can sense that. And it’s holding your body in a chronically elevated sympathetic state, as is everything else in life. Wind can do the same thing, chronic noise, there’s many things that can do the same thing. So if you’re sleeping ungrounded and your body is an antenna, or you are in an environment where you’re exposed to a lot of electric fields, and you are wearing rubber soled shoes, then when you’re in a chronically elevated state, what you’re doing is your body’s pumping cortisol, your sympathetic or your parasympathetic which is operating on hormones, it becomes exhausted. So it can no longer function and maintain that normal state. So anxiety, irritability, and depression, come next, then comes diabetes and lupus, MS, et cetera cancer, heart disease, et cetera. Because our bodies are taxed, but electric fields themselves are not the problem.     1:24:06 Ashley James: It’s not being grounded, that’s the problem.     1:24:08 Clint Ober: It’s not being grounded, because the human body throughout most of time, most of existence on this planet was grounded. The immune system had that resource to function and be the mop to clean up the excess free radicals or to prevent free radical damage to healthy cells. So that’s my take on it. Now a lot of people say, Well, I gotta fix my electric fields. Well, I mean, that’s maybe four or five or six on the list. It’s probably your food, it’s your toxic work environment, it’s your toxic relationship, it’s all these other things – not enough time sitting in the park, not enough time walking, not enough time waking up and becoming a little more conscious about our environment and nature and who we are, and how we relate to it, and that we’re a part of it. And we have separated ourselves from it. But anyhow, one thing that’s beautiful about it, is you put it back and you ground it and put it back in nature and you see some nice healthy food, do a little exercise, the body returns to normal, take the stress off the immune system, stop inflammation, take the stress off the immune system. The body only knows to do one thing – return to normal. And you have to remember, health is the body’s most natural state.   If anybody’s got anybody’s got a health problem, then they’re doing something or they’re in an environment that their immune system is challenged and it can’t maintain health. And it manifests differently. You know, it’s like the fellows at  Rutger and those folks at Boston Massachusetts, when they came out with that article in 2004, cover of Time Magazine, and it showed the body on fire and it said inflammation. And what they’re really saying is you don’t have cancer, you don’t have lupus, you don’t have ALS, you don’t have any of these diseases, what you have is chronic low grade inflammation. And as time goes on, the body becomes compromised. And then the body’s going to try to save itself. But in the process, it has to give up something. Maybe I’m going a little bit too far here. But anyhow, disease manifests differently in different people based on their genetics, and based on their environment. And that means what you’re breathing, eating and, and doing and hearing and whatever. But if you if your immune system is functioning perfectly like it in nature, like in the wild animals, then you couldn’t have lupus, MS, you couldn’t have these things. It’s not possible.     1:27:04 Ashley James: I had a listener recently and shared that she went out to do some grounding. I think she lives near LA or in California. And she was really upset to have been poisoned basically by whatever they sprayed. Because I think she’s at either a condo or an apartment complex. And so she doesn’t have control over the grounds. But they sprayed some kind of chemical maybe to kill the insects. And she was walking barefoot and end up getting this big rash. And she was really upset because she thought that  her body’s absorbed some toxin. And I was just last night chatting with a chiropractic friend of mine, a chiropractic doctor in Las Vegas. And I used to live in Las Vegas and many houses or condos, those grounds are sprayed with all kinds of chemicals. And so I was telling her, “Go do some grounding.” And she goes, “I don’t know, where could I go, every park is sprayed.” Some people, like I can go in my backyard, I live in Washington State and I can go, there’s lots of places I feel comfortable and safe going because I know there’s no pesticides, but there are so many places, especially in the cities where we just don’t know what’s on that grass. And so we’re not really sure that it is safe. Or in the winter time when there’s snow, I’m also from Canada, originally, and so there’s like six months of the year where we would not go barefoot outside. So I really like the low cost solution you created, which is the grounding mats for when we’re at our desks, for when we’re sleeping, that allows us to ground you eight hours a night at our on our bed and all throughout the day at our desks. And then if we can go outside in nature, which is obviously preferable if we can access a healthy patch of grass or ground that we know has not been sprayed, then that’s good as well. But it’s not something that we do once a week for five minutes and think that that’s enough. Like I’m really getting that it’s something we need to ground ourselves as much as possible. Dr. Joseph Mercola was on that documentary saying that 95% of the time he is grounded. And that just blew my mind that we really need to make an effort to ground ourselves all the time.     1:29:35 Clint Ober: Well, that’s the issue. And I have to tell you a real short story here. When we were doing our research studies, I had to make ground planes, meaning pads and whatever to either put people on so we could measure them, things they could sleep on, and or electrode patches and things that we could use to do our measurements. And many of our subjects, they all begged and pleaded to keep the little devices that we had created. And then all of a sudden there is this, “Can I get one from my uncle?” “Can I get one for whatever people who had problems?” In the early days of all of this, I never had any intention whatsoever of going out and creating products. I had to have products in order to do the studies, or not products, but devices. And we manufactured those and we know begged and borrowed and figured out some things and how to do all of this. And so anyhow, but this business grew up, it was an accidental business. And as an absurd business, you have to try to reconnect because I mean, 60 years ago, we couldn’t get off the earth. And today, we can’t get back to the earth. Except for having a wire, or something of that nature. So and then this one, I remember the, like I said earlier about California Health Services and National Institute of Health Sciences, they all say the same thing. “Don’t go out there and scare the people and don’t go out and create trauma unless you have a solution that you can offer them.” And that’s where I started, I said I will not talk to anybody, I will not do anything unless you go outdoors and go barefoot for a half hour or an hour and just experience this. And then if it helps you, if it has benefit for you, then do it another half hour and then do it more time and do it every day. And then if it’s really important to you, then there are these devices that are beginning to surface and that we’ve been able to pull together that now work and now have some long life and longevity to them. Going outdoors, first of all, anybody who could go, if you can go to the beach, if you can go and find a sandbox or build your own sandbox or do whatever, to spend some time grounded to the earth, it’s just really, it’s it’s bigger than just reducing inflammation, it’s the connection. When you are connected to the earth, when you are in contact with electrical contact with the earth, then you’re connected to every living thing that’s in contact on the earth, throughout the entire planet. You are electrically connected, because electrical operates speed of light. So it’s important, when possible to find your place in nature, if you can find that. But on the other hand, if you’re going to be exposed to all of this craziness in our living environments, whether it’s static electricity, or whatever, then you need something, some mechanism to ground yourself in the home. So what we tried to do, and which we sold probably a million products that we never advertised, this was all word of mouth, and it went around the world. And now we’re trying to figure it out, because there’s so many people trying to get into the business and all this nonsense out there. But it does have to be safe. And that’s number one in anything electrical and it has to be safe. So all of the products that we put out there are involved with, they have a built-in electrical resistance. So they are not a purely conductive, they’re called a deceptive or a soft ground. That means electrons can move back and forth, slowly enough that there’s no possibility of an electrical shock or a spark, or anything of that nature, anything uncomfortable. So that’s number one. And then number two, it has to be functional, you have to be able to put it on the bed. And it has to be something that people can tolerate. And it has to have a life expectancy. For years we had the cotton sheets, they put silver yarns in them. In many cases, especially men, because they perspire and there’s a lot of sulfur in their perspiration. It’ll oxidize a silver in just a few days. Or women could sleep on them for months or years. And so we had to fix that problem. And that’s why we ended up with the black carbon mats, because carbon is safe, clean, it will last, literally it could last forever, somebody would take care of it. So now what we have is a no cost, low cost, and that’s what I deliver. It’s free, it’s free. Doing it yourself is okay if you’re if you have an electrical background and know something about electrical. But do not just run out and start grounding wires and tying wires around people’s toes. You have to have you have to be conscious of safety.     1:34:55 Ashley James: Absolutely. So this little white box with these three lights, red and two yellows, and it has a little instructions like what the lights mean. You plug that into your outlet and it tells you whether your outlet is a clean, healthy ground or whether it’s undergrounded or whether it’s a dangerous outlet. So tell us a bit about that. Because that’s something that other people who try to copy what you’ve done, you’re the founder, you’re the original. You’re the first. Right?     1:35:34 Clint Ober: Right. 20 years ago, for biological grounding. Yes.     1:35:40 Ashley James: Absolutely, biological grounding. I remember making computers with my husband and we knew to attach ourselves to something grounded while we were working with the electronics and my husband has been building computers since 94. And I feel very blessed to have his skills, the computer I’m currently using he built for me a few years ago and it’s still holding up. So in terms of people who make electronics, they know to ground themselves or like you said doctors and patients in the OR have to ground themselves. But those are for different reasons. The reason we’re talking about is so that we can release those electrons and beat become grounded, like we’re meant to, we’re returning to what we were less than 100 years ago. It’s just hard to wrap my brain around it, less than 100 years ago. We were grounded almost all of the time. For the most part, right? Almost all of us were grounded all the time, and just to see the rise and all these chronic diseases take place at the same time as us becoming less and less grounded. It’s just no wonder between becoming ungrounded, and stressors, like you said have now multiplied, and the chemical stressors, and environmental stressors, and the stress of poor food and lack of exercise and bills and all that. So the stressors have increased. And then the biggest stress of all, which is the stress of being ungrounded. Coupled with all that, no wonder we’re seeing these diseases come out of nowhere that we didn’t have 100 years ago. So that’s fascinating.   So you have this little device that when people buy your grounding mats, this little device, they plug into the wall first to test it. Can you talk a bit about that?     1:37:40 Clint Ober: Yes, I will. I want to follow up on one thing you were discussing. A good way to think about grounding is amino therapy. Ground therapy is your grounding the immune system, restoring the immune system function, bu it’s restoring the immune system. That’s what it’s all about. But anyhow, enough of that. The electrical outlet tester, that is a universal device for outlets, like used in America and Canada and various other countries. So you plug it in, and what it’s doing is it’s testing the heart and the neutral and the functionality of the ground. So if everything is proper and working properly, then you only get to the two little yellow lights come on, saying it’s there’s a ground, there’s a working ground. So then you can plug in your device, put that away and put it in a drawer. And the only time you ever use that again is if you move on, you need to check your outlets and make sure they’re grounded. So then you plug in your device, and it’s connected to the ground, it’s not connected to the electrical system, it’s connected to the ground which ends up going to ground rod in the earth. So it’s like the water coming out of the pipe coming into the house. This is electrons coming up the wire into the house. And then whatever you connect to it, it will hold that device, if it’s conductive and at earth potential. So it’s like going out in the backyard and taking a few square feet of earth and bringing it in the house.     1:39:24 Ashley James: Uh huh. Yeah, absolutely. I feel a difference. Like I said, My feet are on it right now and I don’t want to get off of it. I noticed a decrease in stress, I just feel more relaxed, and calm and happy, happier. You know, and I know that you had people saying that even their depression was going away which makes sense. I mean, if you take the stressor out, then the body’s like you said, the most natural state for the body is health and the body’s constantly trying to get back to homeostasis, concentrating back to health. And if we remove that stressor, then we’re going to notice that shift. So, that’s really exciting. I know you’ve got several different products, you’ve got the one for the bed, you’ve got the grounding mat that I’m using my feet on for when you’re at a computer, what other products do you have?     1:40:21 Clint Ober: What we have, first of all on that meter, if you see the red light comes on, that means that you either don’t have a ground or is not wired properly, you need to call an electrician. Or you may not have a ground, if your home was built before, you know 1960 or so in that timeframe, most homes weren’t grounded, they did not have an electrical ground in their electrical system. And a lot of times with all the Do It Yourself remodeling, they go to Home Depot or whatever and buy new outlets, and they have the ground port, but there is no ground wire in the wall. So it’s not connected to anything. So when you stick the electric tester in there, then it’ll show that there’s no ground. So then you have to either get a ground rod like we were talking about, then throw it out the window or whatever, put it in the earth where there’s grass, or flowers or something. Or just have them come and install, figure out how to run an electrical ground for you. The products – we’ve experimented with a lot of things, but what we’ve ended up with, one of them is called a patch kit. It’s the ground therapy patch kit. The reason I came up with it is it has a couple of wires in it. And it has 90 electrode patches in it. It has a book videos and everything and a nice little kind of like a first aid kit. And the reason for that product is so that most people can’t get their mind around grounding until they experience it. So with the patches, they can buy the patches, if they have, they can put it on the bottom of their feet, they can put it on the palm of their hand. And if they have inflammation in their body, put it wherever, you need to actually put it over an area of inflammation. But anyhow, so people can experience grounding, like you’ve experienced your bed. So a lot of people don’t want to do anything until they experience every piece. It’s really absurd and unbelievable that this is true. In many cases, they cannot go outdoors because there is no place for them to go that’s convenient. A lot of like you say in apartments and condos and city areas, everything is sprayed, you know bug killer fertilizers, pets, the whole thing, it’s just not going to happen. So what we did is we came up with this kit so that everybody could have something available that you can go experience yourself, or go patch grandma, see if it helps her, patch mom, patch anybody and everybody, you know. Because here’s what we’ve learned over the years, the average person who buys a product and grounding products in between 35 and 55. Yes, and it’s 99% female, men all go out and tinker which is fine. So anyhow, she buys a product. And the first thing she does, she uses it for two or three days telling, “Oh my goodness, this works.” She calls her mom, her sister or her girlfriend, or her child who needs it worse than she does and gives what she bought to them. Then she buys another one for herself. And then she gives that one to somebody else that needs it worse than she does, but she needs it worse than anybody. But she wants to. She’s a caregiver. And she’s not happy unless she is helping somebody heal with their health or something. It’s just middle aged woman. And it’s just in her blood. So now she’s found that resource that is relatively inexpensive, that she can share and many times she will go put it on the bed for them because they won’t do it themselves. The doctor doesn’t tell him that I’m going to do it. The patch product is kind of a product that you can use for acute injury, acute issues, after surgery, all kinds of things. But it’s really designed to let people experience grounding, so they can learn about it and find out if it’s a value to them. And then we have the movie and the resources, books and all that kind of stuff we put in with it so they can do whichever. So then as soon as we figured out in the early days what people need the most, what can we do to help people the most and that was ground the bed, because put it on the bed one time, plug in and forget about it. Every night to come home go to bed and get up, there’s no compliance and they’re going to get great benefit. And there are various sizes of that. Number three product was a mat that’s 14 inches wide and 40 inches long. You can put it on the floor, put your feet on it. When you’re at the computer you can put it on your desk, put your keyboard and mouse on it. You can’t have carpal tunnel if you have that mat under your keyboard and mouse because the palm of your hand will touch the mat. A lot of people buy it because it’s a little less expensive, but we call it the poor man’s bed because if you can’t afford it, what’s the least expensive thing you can do to sleep grounded because that’s when most of the healing occurs in the body. And so it’s the most important time to be grounded. So we focused on that. The little mat, it can be used in a chair, it can be used, on the floor, it’s called the universal – it can be used for anything. And again it has to work and it has to be functional and all of that, so it took us years to get the right product, get their carbon, the right everything to make this work. And so it’s not toxic. Then the fourth family of products is what we call it throw. One day we were playing around, people want a grounded mattresses. It didn’t make sense at the time because of the silver going bad, but they had made up a yard of material 36 inches wide and 72 or whatever inches long. And so I was standing there and it was cold so I just wrapped it around myself and my shoulders that day. And somebody said that would make a good throw. So we ended up making that product by accident. And it’s a conductive wrap like a throw on a couch. The new ones are like 45 inches by 72 inches. And so you can lay on the couch and put it on top of you or even put it on the bottom and lay on it. And people in recliner chairs, a lot of people use it as a cover. It’s just a comfort thing. It’s a very popular thing in the winter, especially up in the Canadian and most areas. So that’s the only real products that we have. We do have grounded meditation chairs that are coming online, we have grounded recliner chairs, where the entire chair has grounded carbon leatherette material on it. These are zero gravity recliners, and we have in the works other things that will come online as time goes on. It takes six months to a year to bring anything new online. So what we’re trying to do is put the most effective, least affordable, most affordable, most effective product we can out there, and that’s what these products are. I don’t know how we can educate people too far on them, but basically the sleep mats, take your sheet off, put them on top of the mattress, plug them in, and then you put your sheet back over the top of it and just lay down  and go to sleep.     1:48:48 Ashley James: If you had a mattress protector, they’re usually some kind of plastic. Is it okay to put the grounding mat underneath it or that then defeats the purpose?     1:48:58 Clint Ober: That defeats the purpose.     1:49:01 Ashley James:  Got it.     1:49:02 Clint Ober: We do have one coming up maybe four or five months that won’t have the whole [inaudible 1:49:07] So it can serve as a mattress protector and a waterproof mattress protector.     1:49:14 Ashley James: Ah, there you go. Excellent. Well, we figured we probably should not put it underneath the mattress protector. Now most sheets, though, are not synthetic. So most sheets, does the material the sheets matter? Do you need to make sure their cotton or bamboo or there’s something that’s not synthetic?     1:49:45 Clint Ober: Well, the only thing that’s not synthetic would be a fiber, like cotton, or hemp or something of that nature. Anything like bamboo, I don’t think that’s a fiber. That’s a polymer. So that’s a synthetic. But that family, anything that’s a polymer base. You would be better off with cotton, normal thin cotton. But if you use anything, when you lay on it, you’re going to perspire. And as you perspire, it hydrates the sheet. It’s like when you drive a car and you reach back and touch your back of your shirt in a few minutes, you’ll feel the moisture. So when you lay on a mat, the perspiration is creating a moisture. It’s hydrating, your pajamas and your sheet and you will eventually be grounded. I mean within a few seconds.     1:50:41 Ashley James: Got it. It’ll conduct because of the moisture. Right?     1:50:46 Clint Ober: Yes. People whose health is very compromised – that means you have lupus, MS, or something more compromising. They will sleep directly on it, on the black mat. And the reason they do that is because it works. But once they recover from the situation they’re in and their life and everything stabilizes, then they can go back to sleeping on the sheets. We don’t tell them to do this. This is what they do.     1:51:23 Ashley James: I love when people’s intuition kicks in.     1:51:27 Clint Ober: Yeah. What I do tell a lot of people to do, is if you have a chronically inflamed knee, or elbow or joint or you have chronic inflammation, something debilitating that’s interfering with your sleep – to put a patch on the bottom of the foot, and sleep and put a sock, you need to make the wire and everything stay on, but sleep grounded, I mean put a patch. Because it will put the fire out and then the body can heal. And what we’re trying to do is support the immune system, reduce the inflammation so the immune system can clean up the damage, rebuild the knee or the ankle or whatever is going on.     1:52:14 Ashley James: So just to recap, you’ve discovered that the cortisol returns to healthy levels, when we ground on a regular basis, cortisol – so stress hormones are returning to a regular basis. The body is coming out of the stress response, the autonomic nervous system is balancing. So if we’re not in fight or flight, the sympathetic nervous system response then we switch over into the parasympathetic rest and digest response. So it’s helping the body come back to rest and digest. When we ground, it helps the immune system function properly so the immune system can clean up the unhealthy cells and not accidentally harm the healthy cells in the process. I believe in the movie, The Earthing Movie, they said it was around two hours of grounding or earthing, that the blood becomes viscous and healthfully thinned, meaning it wasn’t all stuck together, that they could see that the blood was acting like really healthy, viscous, thinned blood – not clotted together, and it could then better transfer oxygen to all the cells and pull the toxins away better. They also talked about that the buildup of electrons affects the mitochondria, which is the powerhouse of the body in producing ATP. We didn’t touch on that, can we just touch on that for a second?     1:53:48 Clint Ober: It’s really simple, you need an abundance of electrons to create ATP.     1:53:56 Ashley James: So in order to create cellular energy, we need to have that balance though.     1:54:03 Clint Ober: I don’t remember exactly how all of this works. But anyhow, when you digest food, basically you have molecules, and these molecules are somewhat balanced, let’s say, like sugar. So when they go into the ion channels, then what happens is how the body creates energy is it separates electrons and protons, and they’re electrofiles, so they are forever wanting to get back together. Boom. These all feeds into the ATP. I wish Dr. Sinatra or a couple of these others were able to explain the details of it. But yeah, your ATP increases significantly when you are grounded. And that’s what gives you more energy, you get up in the morning. When you get out of bed in the morning, you’re ready to get up, rather than dragging yourself out of bed.     1:55:05 Ashley James: I love it, I love it. So it helps people have more energy, have less stress, balance their stress hormones, put them back into the healing mode, balances the immune system, the immune system is now acting healthfully. Gosh, so many of my listeners have autoimmune conditions, I am almost in tears, thinking about how much this can help and how much this will help all the people who are listening, I’m really, really excited. Clint, it has been so amazing having you on the show today. I’m going to record a little blurb at the beginning, so everyone knows this. But for those who want to try the patches, or the bed pad or the pad that I’m using right now, which is the pad that you can put your feet on or put your wrists on, they can go to www.learntruehealth.com/grounding. That’s www.learntruehealth.com/grounding. And that takes them to your site with all of the different options that you’ve discussed. Of course, and the free one is go put your foot your feet on the ground, take your shoes and socks off. But not everyone can. So if you can’t, then get the grounding mat or get the little patches and just experience it for yourself and do it as much as possible. And do it 95% of time like Dr. Joseph Mermcola and see the difference?     1:56:29 Clint Ober: Yes. It’s really important. I can tell you I started out in my early studies and research working with ladies who had MS and lupus. And what I saw was the dramatic impact the grounding had on them is what gets me up every morning. It’s the first thing I’m thinking about when I go to sleep at night, whether it’s 10 o’clock or midnight or whatever. The last thing I’m thinking about is what can I do to get this done so they can get to the people, so that people can take charge of their lives and restore their health.     1:57:03 Ashley James: You are going to be revered. You know, it’s only a matter of time. Because of the way this information travels. Like you said, you sold so many of these mats without ever advertising it because it was word of mouth. I’ve already told dozens of my friends since using your mats and since watching the Earthing Movie. I can’t stop telling people about it. So I know my listeners who are very active and love helping their friends and family to gain their health back. It’s going to be like a ripple effect, right? Turn that ripple into a tidal wave and help as many people as possible. Now we do have a lot of international listeners. What about those in the to 220 volts? So it’s a different looking outlet? D How would they go about using your products?     1:57:58 Clint Ober: It’s identical. They have adapters.     1:58:01 Ashley James: Ok, so the adapter will work?   1:58:03 Clint Ober: Yeah, they have adapters for each of those countries. And they can get outlet checkers in any hardware store. And generally their systems depends on the country, India is terrible, but other countries are great. But yes, all of those can be accommodated. One way or another. But we do have like the UK, Australia, China, various adapters that are universal throughout the world.     1:58:40 Ashley James: When you say India’s terrible, do you mean that they often don’t have a ground?     1:58:44 Clint Ober: Yes. They have too much electrical. And I mean, it’s electrical exploded over there, many years ago, but they didn’t have the resources to come back and fix it up. So if you go to India and look up, you’re going to see a maze of wires overhead. So in India, we do have a lot of grounding in India, but they have to use ground rods, or they have to live in one of the newer, something built after 1980.     1:59:20 Ashley James: God, but they could figure out how to ground their house? It just may take working with an electrician or getting creative. And we know they are incredibly intelligent and creative and resourceful people and they will figure it out.     1:59:30 Clint Ober: There’s a whole new industry waiting out there for people to come and fix these homes, these older homes and make them, so people can ground. And especially young people or older people who don’t have time, people just don’t have the knowledge, they need to have a ground. I remember in the old days, we started installing cable TV. While it was an industry, it took 40 years and took an army of people to get a cable installation into every home and build the programming and build everything that went with it and so on to make it work. And then came the computer industry, we had to redo it and do it better. And all of these things. So it’s the same thing. The telephone industry had to go drill holes, cable industry had to go drill holes. This is another industry, 40% of the homes in the world don’t get ground.     2:00:29 Ashley James: Yeah, I can definitely see a need for that for sure. When you were in Florida, looking at the mentees, and just on your journey of enjoying life after you had that sort of near death experience. And you received those two messages be an officer in charge and status quos, the enemy. I will point, did the light bulb go off when you knew what that meant?     2:00:58 Clint Ober: I didn’t know what that meant until many years later, and when we started to write the book and about 2010. Then I realized that becoming an opposite charge was becoming negatively charged rather than positively charged. And the whole world had the problem, that we were all ungrounded and we needed to fix that. And status quo is very simple. People don’t change, people don’t want change, people will fight change. And so I think I got the message loud and clear. But there’s a bigger, more powerful driving force behind this than me. And so I just keep working away and this is an opportunity for the world, I mean everything gets out of balance, our medical institutions are out of balance. We’re treating symptoms rather than preventing problems. And that’s what this is more about is prevention. But it’s also, I don’t like to necessarily use the word spiritual. But nature is spiritual. I mean, we are a part of it, we’re connected to it. And when you connect with nature, it affects your psyche. It affects your heart and it affects who you are. You’re a nicer person, when you’re grounded. You’re more conscious of other people and you know, you aren’t some money or you aren’t materially oriented. You there’s a natural beauty and there’s a natural elegance and a natural scheme to nature of which we are partners. Just you can’t put it in words.     2:02:37  Ashley James: Absolutely. You know I think I am a bit nicer now that I’ve grounded. I started thinking about some grumpy people in my life, I need to go get them on a grounding mat.     2:02:50 Clint Ober: Well it gets rid of the stress. And the most important thing is getting our kids grounded teaching them grounding. And slowly getting into the schools because it’s gotta stop, We can’t electrify our kids. I mean, all of our kids are sick today, or their health is compromised. I’ll say it that way. They don’t have perfectly natural health.     2:03:14 Ashley James: And I love that in the movie, The Earthing Movie that they covered a classroom, a special ed classroom that had grounding mats. And they noticed that even children who were autistic nonverbal wouldn’t sit still for more than two or three minutes, that would sit still for seven minutes if they were on a grounding mat. And that they could get kids to focus that their constant fidgeting and twitching and looking out the window and fidgeting with things that it all went away. And it makes sense because when they covered those who have MS. In the movie, they said that their restlessness went away, the crawling of their skin that feeling like their legs were restless, and their skin was crawling. And that just wired feeling went away.     2:04:01 Clint Ober: Yup.     2:04:02 Ashley James: And it makes so much sense.     2:04:03 Clint Ober: You know, autism is an inflammation related health disorder. It starts out as an inflammation related health disorder. And you gotta put the fire out. I put the fire out these kids calm down. And if they’re damaged, not too much damage is done, they can slowly recover. We’ve seen it too many times. The immune system is a self healing mechanism. It only knows the one thing, try to restore if its got the resources and remove the stress.     2:04:34 Ashley James: That’s wonderful. So this movie, you’ve done two movies, and this latest one is now being shown at different festivals. What are your thoughts on that? Is it kind of like surreal to sit back and go, “I’m in a movie that is being shown at these big film festivals.” Isn’t that awesome?     2:04:56 Clint Ober: Yeah, it’s weird.   2:04:58 Ashley James: You’re like a movie star.     2:05:00 Clint Ober: No. What’s interesting is we were at a film festival in Hollywood. Two weeks ago, I think. And we won the Audience Choice Award for Best Documentary in Hollywood. So that’s a huge thing. And what it meant to me was this can get to the world now.     2:05:28 Ashley James: Yeah. That’s awesome. So cool. So what’s going to happen with the Earthling Movie? Is it is it going around the world to all the different festivals? Will it ever end up like on Netflix or something? What are your plans with it?     2:05:39 Clint Ober: My plans are, Netflix and all those people who manage films, they’ve all come to us. And we have said that what we would like to do is, first of all, finish up the festival just so we get the media and we get the feedback from the consumers. And then we would like to make it free to the world through whatever mechanisms we possibly can to facilitate educating as many people as possible. It’s not about money, we haven’t made any money, we sold a million plus we have not made any money yet. It all goes back in. And this is really a mission. It’s more of a movement. And it’s bigger than me, much, much bigger than me. And I’m 75 now, and some youngsters are going to have to come along here and you know, help out. I mean, we are working with people in China, Malaysia, India, Europe. Everybody’s starting to wake up more so there than here. It’s easier for them to tune into nature, I think, than American for some reason.     2:06:59 Ashley James: Yeah. You have you have a gauntlet to go down, that’s for sure. Like you said, once people experience it, they’re forever change, they can’t go back,     2:07:13 Clint Ober: Yes, they can’t go back. And then they have to share it. So what we are trying to do is provide them tools that help share it. You’re eventually going to have grounded flooring, grounded beds, grounded everything. Because if ground is what maintains the immune system in its natural state, then we have to incorporate grounding into our living environments. Now that’s going to create an army of what they call it value added. So when they make sure is they’ll value add grounding to it, they’ll value add grounding to the carpets, to do the flooring, to whatever. So it’ll create a new industry, like TV, or telephone, or radio or TV or sewer, or railroads or anything else. It’s a new industry, we have to go back and fix, find balance and fix what we did over the last 60 years. Plastics are good, plastics are good. And they can be used, we just need to make them so that they have ground material in them. So that when you use them, you’re still grounded.     2:08:23 Ashley James: Last night, as we walked to bed, I said to my husband, I wonder if we could ground the floor. If there’s a material we could use, I’ve seen these corks, you know, but like a natural material, if there’s a way to ground it. And his response was that sounds like it would be too expensive. And he started thinking about all the problems. My husband was a carpenter. So he starts thinking about right now, how that could be possible. And my vision was to see every floor grounded and just and then we need to teach people to walk barefoot in their homes and leave their shoes at the door. And that was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s that’s the solution. You ground everything in the house.” And now that’s what you’re saying is that this is you have that same vision that everything in the house needs to be grounded.     2:09:12 Clint Ober: Over the next 40 years it’s a new industry that will employ a lot of people. And you know, it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s like the medical industry didn’t happen overnight, the way it is. It took 60 years to get there, it’s going to take 60 years for the transition to occur. But there will be grounded flooring, it’s like a lot of the plastic based flooring materials that they have. They put a layer of conductive film on that. And so it wouldn’t even be noticeable. You put in saltillo tile or use water based cedars on concrete, you know, concrete floors and polish them and make them pretty. There’s lots of things that will surface.     2:09:58 Ashley James: Very cool. It has been such a pleasure having you on the show, Clint. Is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview anything left unsaid, you want to make sure that you share with our listeners?     2:10:12 Clint Ober: Well, I could probably talk for hours.     2:10:15 Ashley James: I’d love that. I love learning from you.     2:10:18 Clint Ober: Yeah. The main thing is, if you have pain in your body, if you have anxiety, irritability, depression, chronic fatigue, if you have an autoimmune disease, you must pay attention to this and at least go outdoors, take your shoes off and spend enough time out there that you can know if this will serve you. And then if you can’t do that, then you must go to ground therapy and at least investigate what they have. And find something that you can afford. And try it if they don’t, I’m sure they’ll give you your money back. But we know that doesn’t happen. Because once they get grounded, then then they they have to keep using it there. The big issue then is how do I get grandma? How do I get I’ll get my sister how to get my girlfriend grounded? That’s more of the issue. But again, this isn’t about pushing product to make a profit. For me, it’s about educating people. But these tools like ground therapy, they’re important tools. And we did try to follow the advice of the NIH and California Health Services to provide low cost methods to solve the problem.     2:11:42 Ashley James: Awesome. Well, listeners can go to www.learntruehealth.com/grounding to check out those packages. And I was informed by your excellent staff that several are being given away to the listeners. So we’re going to have a giveaway and I’m going to make sure that I make a blurb and put it at the beginning of this interview. But that there’s going to be a giveaway in our Facebook group Learn True Health Facebook group. And so the listeners who aren’t there yet can go to Facebook and search Learn True Health and join the group. Or they can go to www.learntruehealth.com/group and that redirects them to the group. And from there, we’re going to have a giveaway for listeners to be able to win some of your awesome grounding mats and materials. My listeners love to share their experiences with trying new things. And so they’re going to get vocal and share how it made a difference in their lives. And then we can all have this discussion in the Facebook group about how we’re feeling and how this is changing our life. How earthing and grounding is having a positive impact on our lives. So thank you so much Clint, for everything that you do. I am such a fan of yours. And I am a cheerleader for the work that you’re doing. You’re welcome back on the show anytime you need a platform, you want to have a platform to share new information. And I’d love to interview anyone, any of those doctors that you see fit. I’ll definitely have them on the show because I know that there’s so many doctors that are seeing a difference in the lives of their patients, and that they’re totally on board with your mission to help the world get grounded again.     2:13:21 Clint Ober: We’ll have a few of those. So I’ll point them in your direction for sure.   2:13:27 Ashley James: That sounds great. Thank you so much, Clint. It’s been such a pleasure having you here today.   2:13:29 Clint Ober: Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity.   —   Outro: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? 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You can Google, Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call or you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health Podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program and I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are. getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic office, doctors offices.you can work in hospitals, you can work online through Skype and help people around the world. you can become an author. 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For high quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to www.takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s www.takeyoursupplements.com Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program. Get Connected With Clint Ober! Earthing  The Earthing Institute Grounded Beauty Ground Therapy Earthing Movie Facebook – Clint Ober Book by Clint Ober Earthing Recommended Readings by Clint Ober Return To Nature by Adolf Just The Plant Paradox by Steven Gundry

Health Coach Success Summit: https://www.learntruehealth.com/success More info about becoming certified in Functional Diagnostic Nutrition: https://www.learntruehealth.com/fdn and (use coupon code LTH for the listener discount!) Free Gift - 21 Day Program to figure out why you feel fat, sick, or tired all the time and to learn how to fix it in 21 days or less! URL is- wholistichealthboss.com/truehealth Music: FreeBackgroundMusic Kynemon - Happy https://youtu.be/nSDovG5vQQA Track Info: Title: Spite by ZAYFALL Genre and Mood: Dance & Electronic · Inspirational Free Download: http://bit.ly/2Jd4qCW   What is The Root Cause Of My Disease? https://www.learntruehealth.com/what-is-the-root-cause-of-my-disease Highlights: The body expresses itself if it’s out of balance. Symptoms mean there’s something dysfunctional inside the body. Looking at the body’s whole picture to remove the root cause of physiological symptoms. Health issues does not happen overnight. Parasites and yeast overgrowth, how it affects the body. How the moon phases affect the body internally. Environment is 80% of the disease process. Autoimmune disease and gluten connection. The importance of quality sleep. Stress and its relationship to disease. Things you can do to de-stress.   Intro: Hello true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health Podcast. I have a little announcement for everyone who is a health coach, an aspiring health coach or who works in the healthcare industry. In my interview today, I interviewed a health coach that specializes in functional diagnostic nutrition. She took a course with FDN to learn how to read labs and how to choose which labs should be run specifically around understanding the metabolic process. My guest describes it as metabolic chaos and being able to dive in and assess and figure out the right tests and the right labs to run so that they can understand the root cause. The example she brings up is that many people with Hashimoto’s thyroid actually the root cause is in their gut health and liver health. That is the first thing that set off this chain of events that trigger the Hashimoto’s. As long as they still have that liver and gut dysfunction they’ll never be able to fully heal their Hashimoto’s and so, many people are going around chasing symptoms. Even naturally chasing symptoms, because they haven’t been able  to get to the root cause. That’s exactly what Functional Diagnostic Nutrition provides. So if you’re a holistic health expert or health coach and you’d love to learn how to read labs and how everything interrelates, if you’d love to learn how to provide that for your clients that kind of skill set that would take you to the next level, then definitely go to www.learntruehealth.com/fdn as in functional diagnostic nutrition and get more information from that website. You can click through and they’ll give you all kinds of information and I know by using that link and the coupon code LTH, they’re giving $750 off this week. Normally, if you use that code, they have told me that they’ll give my listeners $500 off but this week only it’s $750 off. This course is online and at your own pace which I really enjoy. I’m gonna be enrolling and taking this course because I’m very interested especially after this interview. I’m very interested in learning about how to order these labs and how to interpret these labs and not only do they teach you how to interpret them, they also teach you what to do once you have the information. In fact, coach Jen even told me that some people take this course simply for their own knowledge which I can see myself doing. Learning how to apply these for my health, my family’s health, but also helping all my clients as a health coach. So go to www.learntruehealth.com/fdn to learn about how you can learn about functional medicine and become a functional diagnostic nutrition certified that adds to your ability to be an excellent health coach. Speaking of being an excellent health coach, there is a free summit for health coaches that is coming up in 14 days. I want you to enroll so you get your spot reserved, it is called The Ultimate Health Coaching Success Summit. They interviewed 36 speakers that are experts in health coaching and marketing and they teach you how to grow your thriving health coaching business and the things that you can do to make sure you empower your clients and grow your business. If you are a health coach or if you’re interested in becoming a health coach, you definitely want to attend this free summit. They also give you the opportunity to buy it and own all of the interviews as well but if you sign up, you can watch it for free. Go to www.learntruehealth.com/success to sign up for the Ultimate Health Coaching Success Summit that’s coming up in 14 days. If you do decide to purchase it, you get to watch it right now. That’s something really cool, you could sign up but if you can’t wait and you want to start watching it now and watch at your own pace then you can decide to purchase the Summit. So www.learntruehealth.com/success gets you access to the summit and www.learntruehealth.com/fdn gives you access to more information about the Functional Diagnostic Nutrition course. Excellent, well thank you so much for being a listener and if you’re in the states, Happy 4th of July. This is a time where we definitely celebrate with our loved ones and I hope that you are having a wonderful week celebrating with those that you love most. Enjoy today’s interview.     0:05:08.1 Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 365. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us a Functional Diagnostic and Transformational Coach, I love that title it’s quite a mouthful. Welcome to the show Jenn Malecha it is such an honor to have you here today.     0:05:35.9 Jenn Malecha: Thank you for having me, I’m excited to be here to provide some information and insights for your listeners.     0:05:43.1 Ashley James: Absolutely, we were just chatting before we hit record and you were telling me how you were just listening to one of my more recent episodes about mold and how mold has really played a role in your health journey and that you and your family have experienced mold several times and also, you now can help your clients as well with mold. It’s one of those major things that we don’t realize, it is a major contributing factor to triggering disease and autoimmune conditions and kind of maybe being that straw that broke the camel’s back for a lot of people. It’s fun that we’re gonna dive into your story because I think you have a really interesting story that we can all learn from. Then you’re gonna teach us some great things about helping us heal when we have been faced with stress, maybe not the best diet that we didn’t realize was the best diet for us, or hormones were unbalanced, maybe we have autoimmune condition. How do we just finally take control again and get conscious and figure out what are those necessary steps in getting us back to health and I know that you are here to share some great tips for us today. I’d love to start by hearing your story.     0:07:00.4 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, I would love to share it too because all of us I think have a health story in some way and obstacles and challenges that we’ve faced and ultimately, our health is what supports us really living our best life. When you think about anything that you do in this lifetime whether it’s your career, family, or if you love to travel like I do, if you don’t have your ideal health and weight then you’re not really getting to, you know, optimize those experiences or get the most out of them in a lot of ways. That was kind of a beginning part of my health journey. I had always been kind of an active kid growing up and I would say I’m fairly healthy in comparison to most. My parents had a garden and we would get about making sure that we had balanced meals for dinner and that we ate our dinner before we had desserts and things like that and so, I actually went to college to pursue an education in Fitness Nutrition and Health and soaked all of that knowledge up and in my early twenties when I was in college is probably when I first started having some health occurrences and I began to come into light and this was very much pre-mold. So I’m definitely gonna talk about the mold’s piece but the molds piece in my journey is the second obstacle that I have faced. I think just explaining to the audience a little bit about the journey prior to that is gonna help bring light to the mold situation a bit too. When I was in my early twenties I, all of a sudden just started to develop seasonal allergies that were worsening year over year over year and these were the things I never had as a kid to the point where I was having recurring ear infections and the seasonal allergies were so debilitating that they would take me down for days or sometimes weeks at a time. I remember one of the last ear infections that I had I was really laid up on the couch for multiple days just struggling for it to finally go away. At that time I was questioning, why was this happening to me because I never had allergies. I was somebody who really prided myself on always being healthy and not ever getting sick. Along with that, I also started to experience what some people might call Chronic Fatigue where I was a personal trainer at the time so I graduated college with my degree in Personal Training where I was kind of figuring out the future of my career path and I just remember going to Starbucks in the afternoon and getting a double Americano and still struggling to keep my eyes open and to stay awake as I was training my afternoon and my evening class and that’s just not normal. I was tired all of the time. I would go home and literally sit on the couch for 5 minutes and fall asleep instantly. I was having different joint aches and pains that were recurring and I thought that just because I was a runner, that those might be normal but then it became kind of debilitating too. Finally, at the age of 26, I was diagnosed with skin cancer which is kind of like light bulb (aha!) moment for me because when I really started to ponder why I was diagnosed with skin cancer, the pieces of the puzzle just really didn’t fit together. First of all, it was extremely scary to be diagnosed with skin cancer, I think out of all the diagnoses one can receive, anything related to cancer is one of the scariest ones to have because you just don’t know am I going to survive this? Is it treatable? Is it gonna come back? There’s so many questions when it comes to cancer and when I was looking at my specific case, you know, the dermatologist and the doctors start asking you if there’s any family history of cancer and all the questions that looking for clues about why you would be diagnosed with cancer. In my family there was no family history of any cancer related to skin cancer specifically. There was other cancer that ran in my family but nothing related to skin cancer. I was not your, you know, what we will qualify like a chronic tanner, somebody who’s out baking themselves on the beach all the time or using the tanning salon on a recurrent basis. I was, you know, the healthiest people that I knew, I was like “healthiest people” because that version of healthy is not the version of healthy that I practice today and I’ll explain that a little bit, also, but at the time I was eating lean proteins like boneless skinless chicken breast and having a vegetable with every meal and eating yogurt and berries as a snack and exercising regularly, like that’s most people’s definition of healthy right? It wasn’t until I got into the work that I’m doing now as a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner that I really started to be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together to figure out why I had been diagnosed with skin cancer or how that manifested in my body. When I enrolled in that training program The Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, one of the things that they have us do is run some lab tests like its a requirement, you have to run a couple of lab tests on yourself as part of the training and one of the lab tests that I ran was about Health 101, it’s a metabolic profile that looks at urinary bio acids which is basically getting you some insights as to how the liver is functioning, like is it sluggish or congested? If it’s not moving bio acids through, that can be an indication that there’s toxic build up. It’s probably happening in the body, it’s just not detoxing as well as it could be. My urinary bio acids where high, my liver was clogged, and then it also looks at lipid peroxide which is a measurement of oxidative stress, and oxidative stress gives you some insights as to how the body is aging, like is the aging really fast which can be some indication for cellular damage or DNA damage its going on and my oxidative stress was also very high. Also measured something called urinary indican which takes a look at how you’re digesting protein and can give you insights about malabsorption, bacterial overgrowth such as H pylori or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, and my indican was off as well. After running a simple test, I found that I did have H pylori overgrowth happening in my gut which attributed to some of the migraine headaches that I was having and the recurring back pain I think its vertebrae T7 its where its associated with. I also ran a Salivary Adrenal Hormone Panel and I had a level of adrenal dysfunction that was going on. Essentially on the inside I was a metabolic disaster even though on the outside I was doing all of these allegedly healthy things, right? Especially when I saw that my liver was clogged and the oxidative stress markers where high, I was like, “Oh, this is exactly what’s cultivating this environment for cancer to basically grow in my body”. I immediately implemented a plan that changed my lifestyle like my diet, my rest, the exercise doing more stress reduction type of stuff, eliminating toxins out of my environment, taking supplements to support my body in ways that it needs to be supported and I’m happy to say that the skin cancer never returned and here I am this year 10 years skin cancer free as a result of making some of those lifestyle changes which is huge.     0:14:41.6 Ashley James: That is definitely huge, now did you just have it surgically removed or how did you proceed with your oncologist to eliminate the skin cancer and monitor it?     0:14:52.2 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, so, they went in to the sites. I had a couple of different sites, like the one on my leg and a couple on my back, they cut out a certain diameter around the skin cancer to make sure they get all of the cells and then they stitch it up so I’ve got some beautiful scars on my leg and my back and they monitor that over time. I had to go for skin check-ups every couple of months to make sure that there weren’t any new spots that are coming back. Thankfully, the biopsies on the places that they have kind of cut out came back and none of them were related. So that indicated that the skin cancer itself wasn’t actually spreading it’s just that I had multiple different spots that were happening. So I still go back every year for a skin cancer check just because I am always gonna be a high risk person from having it previously and I’ve never had anything new pop up since those first instances.     0:15:46.3 Ashley James: Can you share what kind of cancer it was?     0:15:48.5 Jenn Malecha: Oh, you’re gonna make me think about this. I wanna say that it’s been so long, I don’t really keep track anymore because it’s something that I just don’t think about aside from it being a fact a huge part of my story. I believe it was basal cell melanoma but I have to go back and check my records I don’t actually know that off the top of my head.   0:16:07.2 Ashley James: Right, you don’t sit around going “I had basal cell melanoma type 2.5 and whatever”. They come up with all these numbers. You figured out that the environment of your body expressed itself with skin cancer because the environment of the body was at a point where it couldn’t handle its oxidative load and so it expressed itself not only with cancer but like you said, you had fatigue, you’re getting chronic infections, and allergies. So all these symptoms, your body is expressing itself saying “I’m out of balance, something is incorrect, something is not optimal” and then you started to dive into those tests. If all of us were to go get those tests would we all find that we are out of balance in some way or have you actually seen people who get these tests and they’re all within normal ranges? I mean, is it pretty common to be out of normal ranges when we get these metabolic tests?     0:17:13.7 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say that most of the time I see that people are out of range but that’s because people are coming to me with some type of health complaint that they want to resolve. They already have some insights that their body is signalling to them that something’s not right, they don’t feel right on their own skin, they don’t feel at home in their body, they’ve been diagnosed with something and so the majority of the testing that I see is gonna indicate some things out of balance. If we were running testing on people who said that they felt great on a normal basis, we probably wouldn’t see much and sometimes the reason for that is because everybody has their own threshold of vitality in a sense. It can be an example of how we can correlate this or an example of this is if somebody can get stung by a bee and it’s the end of the world, that’s excruciating pain for them versus another person getting stung by a bee and they don’t feel it at all. So their pain threshold is different, or like women who give birth and some of them are able to give birth naturally and they are like, “Oh, it’s like an easy experience” versus other women who are like, “Give me the epidural as soon as possible” because they can’t handle the pain. Everybody has this bio individuality where our threshold, our adaptability is different. There are some people out there where they can recover or adapt from environmental factors and chronic stresses maybe better than some other people and what’s also interesting that I’ll add about your question here too is that, any time that we’re doing a test it’s only a snapshot in time and the body’s metabolic state is constantly changing like you’re thyroid hormone can be different every single minute of the day. When I work with clients and we do testing and do the training that I’ve received, one of the things that we really emphasize is that we don’t treat the test results, we treat the person and that’s because I definitely have had test results come back what I would say clean, like there’s not really anything on them but the person feels terrible and so I’m not going to dismiss the way that the person is feeling just because the test result comes back saying there’s nothing to be found here like it could have just been that snapshot in time when we caught it at a good moment and there was nothing to show but if we would have tested it five minutes later it could look totally different. The reverse of that is that I definitely have had people that I worked with and say, “I feel really good”, and their test results shows some dysfunction but if they’re telling me that they feel good, there’s no point in chasing the test result and having them go through all the stuff if they feel good because again maybe we just caught it in a bad moment on the test results.     0:19:59.9 Ashley James: Absolutely, I was just at my naturopath yesterday and the nurse, the second I walked in takes my pressure and it is amazing. Throughout the day, my blood pressure is absolutely amazing. I just know myself, the second I walk into the naturopath where I had our 4 year old son and he was extra hyper yesterday for some reason so he was just bouncing off the walls and I have my husband with me and he was just a little bit cranky that our son was just bouncing off the walls and so we’re all in one room together with the nurse who’s taking my blood pressure the second I walked in. I’m like, “My blood pressure’s going to be high” like I just know that and it was like 148/97. I was just, “Wait a second, take it again give me a few minutes” because I have a really good blood pressure so the nurse was like, “Ok, I’ll get the doctor to take it”, I’m like, “Good”. She used one of those machines and I was like, “What are you doing? Get your sphygmomanometer and take it yourself, don’t put this machine on me” and sure enough after I had my appointment with my naturopath and then I’m like, “Oh, by the way can you take my blood pressure?”. She was like, “Sure”, whips it out I was 117/78 or something like that, I’m like, “See, my blood pressure is always good, you just gotta give me a minute, let me sit down and recover from the chaos” but that’s just it is, we would take a snapshot of one time we take blood pressure, one time we take a lab, it can be different from 5 minutes from now. Like you said, we don’t want to treat the lab results as though it’s like the 0:21:51.3?? but we need to see the person as a whole. So, you’re looking at how the liver is functioning, understanding that it can go up this lab result isn’t what it is all the time but it can go up and down, thyroid does go up and down, cortisol does go up and down. I’m sure there are some tests that you do like 24 hour urine collection where it’s like an average of 24 hours or taking samples of saliva throughout the day for the whole day cortisol snapshot, gives you a better understanding of what’s going on but you’re really looking at the symptoms. Can you maybe dive in to a bit about listening to the body, listening to the symptoms and how it paints a picture for you so when someone comes to you and gives you a set of symptoms, you go “Aha! It might be this, or it might be that”, can you talk a bit about those kind of symptoms that you commonly see and what they mean.     0:22:48.6 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, so let’s just first define the fact that symptoms are the last thing to show up in a dysfunctional state. When we’re experiencing symptoms, there’s already been some type of dysfunction that’s been going on underneath the hood of your car and your body basically for a period of time and we kind of touch on this earlier when were talking about my skin cancer story is that my body had been giving me signs, the allergies, the fatigue that I was experiencing, the stuff like not being able to manage my weight very well even though I was doing all the right things. These were all symptoms that something was happening and the skin cancer was like my body raising a huge red flag going, “Hey! Like you need to pay attention to the situation that’s happening here because this is not good, you know?” I do remember finding that first, it was like a mole on my leg and really feeling like intuitively it was a foreign thing on my body. I have moles on my body and freckles and things like that and this one I was like, “This feels like it’s not supposed to be here”, it’s like an alien whose landed on my leg and I needed to go get this thing checked out and I think that so often, most of us are ignoring some of the signs because we consider them normal just because they’re common. Symptoms can be very common but that doesn’t mean they’re normal. We need to start looking at like one of the symptoms that we’re experiencing and what does our body trying to tell us as a result of that. There’s a lot of symptoms that we will ignore that we just don’t even know that are symptoms for example like one of the questions that I ask clients on my intake forms is, are you sensitive to bright lights, and most people would not even think about it as a symptom because it’s so normal just to put on sunglasses immediately as you walk out your front door right? We look at symptoms, the tricky thing about symptoms is that they are cross-related to multiple different systems of the body so we can take something like fatigue for example. Fatigue could be related to adrenal dysfunction, it could be related to poor blood sugar regulation, it could be because you’re getting inadequate sleep at night time, it could be because your T3 hormone is low, it could be because you’re liver’s not functioning very well, maybe you’re nutrient deficient because you’re gut is dysfunctional, and so the reality is when it comes to symptoms, we may never know what the root cause is but we can always have a positive effect on it and when one system of the body goes down, all the other systems of the body are going to be soon to follow essentially. Going back to your question Ashley, you asked me, basically, how do you look at a cluster of symptoms to determine what somebody might have, well, my job is not to diagnose people with their condition, my job is to look for healing opportunities in the body because regardless of whatever the condition is, if we go back to the general principles of health and we coach up function or improve function in the body no matter what their symptoms or conditions are, they’re going to start to resolve themselves you know. I find in my own personal journey and with a lot of the clients that I worked with, a diagnosis isn’t really helpful in a lot of cases like I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s as a result of the mold that we eventually found in our home in a later point in time in my story and having that diagnosis didn’t necessarily changed the course for me on what I was going to do to get my body back, like it still involved modifying my diet, my rest, my exercise, stress reaction, some strategic supplements that were supporting my thyroid and some other functions that were going on like it helped. It’s like it helps with 20% but the other 80% is really just dialing in on those general principles of health that we kind of all know to be true but I don’t think that most of us are really paying attention to or prioritizing sometimes in ways that we need to really feel our best.     0:27:06.2 Ashley James: So you have a set of rules for helping people to dial in optimal health, you know, the foundations, the building of the strong foundation of health regardless of what their diagnosis or symptoms are, they follow this set of rules. I’m pretty sure I could guess some of them like to drink enough healthy water everyday, move your body in a way that brings you joy, and get enough of those wonderful nutrients from fruits and vegetables everyday. There are certain things everyone knows to do, whether they’re doing them or not is another thing but that they really do make a difference. I definitely want to dive in to what you teach to build the foundations of health but first, I would like to go back. Are there symptoms that you could tell us that when someone presents with this symptom, this is the test I look for, this is how I help them, do you have sort of a list of symptoms that when someone experiences, it puts a light bulb in your head to go “Ok, we should look over here”.     0:28:15.8 Jenn Malecha: Actually, I don’t because that would be chasing the symptoms versus really understanding what the healing opportunities are within all systems of the body. When a client comes to me, no matter what the condition is or the issues they’re having whether it’s fatigue, or known autoimmune condition my goal in order to truly understand what is going on with the person on a physiological and a functional level, I love to run a group of lab tests to look at the hormones, immune, digestion, detoxification, energy, and nervous system. Let’s get the big picture of what’s going on here because, no matter what is the condition or the symptom that they’re having, again, going back to the concept that every single system in the body is interconnected, that’s a network of systems. If one system is going down, they may be presenting symptoms in one area but that area could be completely disconnected or really far away from whatever the root cause is and a really great example of this is Dr. Tom O’Bryan is somebody that I follow and one of my mentors, and in his book, the Autoimmune Fix, he’s talking about a 4 year old child that had a recurring growth on their eye and they couldn’t figure out what was going on with this. They finally cut gluten out of this child’s diet and the growth never came back and then they tested him to be celiac so that can just be an example of how like the root cause can be removed from where the symptom is actually showing up like you would suspect the recurring growth a tumor in your eye is related to celiac disease. How is the eye related to the gut you know, it’s what a lot of people would be considering. Thyroid is another really great example of this too, if you have poor thyroid function or a sluggish thyroid, well we have to ask a question of why is that happening in the first place? If you go through the physiological process of thyroid where you have your TSH that is released from the pituitary gland to stimulate the thyroid to produce T4 and T4 has to be converted into T3 and then the majority of that conversion happens in the liver and then the intestinal tract, if you have low T3 we need to be looking at what’s going on in the liver and the intestinal tract also like, why are you not converting T4 to T3 properly or is it you’re actually not making enough T4 from the thyroid and if that’s the case then ask him the question again why is that happening, like, are you not getting the right amount of nutrients or support, is the HPA access not working well? So you can start to see how in order to really understand the whole picture we want to look at all these different systems of the body at the same time to see how they’re all interconnected and where the multiple dysfunctions might be lying and that is where you understand how you really get to heal the body. We can correct cortisol dysfunction if we can boost liver function, if we can get the gut running better and cleaner, then the thyroid issue is going to resolve itself. We don’t want to just go after thyroid, is that making sense?     0:31:40.3 Ashley James: Absolutely! If I have a friend with Hashimoto’s and her nature path finally after years discovered that she had small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and now she’s being treated for that and what you’re saying is that what’s going on in your gut absolutely affects your thyroid and your other hormones.     0:31:59.9 Jenn Malecha: Exactly, and that’s why I have so many people that come to me and say, “I have been working and taking thyroid medication or done some things to support my thyroid but I’m still not feeling better”, it’s because they’re kind of missing some of these other pieces of the puzzle and so I never really chase the symptoms. I’m like, let’s actually look at the whole picture and see what’s going on and where are those areas of opportunity where we can boost function in the overall body which is going to have that same domino effect to help bring the other systems of the body back up and running again.     0:32:30.4 Ashley James: Cool. I want to reword my question because what you were explaining is actually what I want, I want more of that. So, when someone comes to you and they have been experiencing the symptoms for a while and they have a diagnosis like, autoimmune or hashimoto’s or autoimmune of the thyroid or some kind of autoimmune condition or some kind of maybe their hormones are out of balance in some way, regardless of whether they have a diagnosis or not but they come to you and they say, “This is what’s going on with me or this is what my doctor told me I have.” and obviously they’re suffering. Can you give us some examples of ok so someone comes to you with this diagnosis or these set of symptoms and you go, “Aha! We need to look over here.” and it’s just like thinking, “What do you mean the gut has to do with skin health” or “What do you mean the gut has to do with or the liver and the gut has to do with thyroid”, can you just explain a bit about why looking at the body holistically is so important when people come with each of these different conditions and where you want to look to see what’s going on like these different conditions that you end up looking at the health of the liver, or health of the kidneys, or health of the gut in order to help them to resolve something that doesn’t seem like it’s related to the gut, or the liver, and the kidneys.     0:33:55.6 Jenn Malecha: Yeah. First, I’ll say to that is that whatever you’re currently experiencing right now in terms of the health issue did not happen overnight and that is the first thing that I explain to people. We get in a consultation, that’s basically where we start is I just set the preface of the conversation with whatever you’re experiencing currently right now did not happen overnight. It’s an accumulation of things that have happened over a period of your lifetime that have probably just worn down your body and started to degrade some of these systems, like dysfunction started to set in and then we have symptoms that arise ultimately. And so, I will have people go through their health history, I have them go all the way to the point of birth Ashley because, if somebody was a C-section baby or they were not breast fed for example, those could actually be factors that are affecting their current health for them right now in their 30s, 40s, 50s, or however old they are because right from the beginning of their entrance into this lifetime, they were not exposed to the right types of bacteria to help build a healthy microbiome and a healthy immune system and so we usually find clues right there and then throughout their childhood, they’re often becomes more inclusive, like recurring illness, or infections thats happened, or things and then all of a sudden their menstrual cycles were off from the beginning and they have forgotten that all of these things that happened over their timeline or they just haven’t really paid attention to them realizing that they were contributing factors to what’s going on with them today. So, that’s part of my answer to your question because looking at the whole person means looking at that whole life experience to understand what are all the different types of stress that they have encountered in their lifetime and I ask people to redefine what the word stress means to them because we often think that stress is just the mental emotional stress that we encounter when we get in a disagreement with a loved one, or when we have an angry boss, or we get stuck in traffic or something but, stress is anything that places a burden on your body that results in inflammation and leads to dysfunction. It could be to foods that you’re eating that aren’t right for you, poor quality food that your getting, over or under exercising, toxins in your environment, and other types of triggers. Someone comes to me with let’s say they do have a diagnosis of Hashimoto’s. My goal is to understand how they got to that point in the first place because I want to get us some insights on how do we go about reversing it. Again, going through that clear health history from the point of their birth all the way leading up to where they currently are, being able to pick out clues of things like, maybe they had hormone imbalances that set in in adolescence when they started their menstrual cycle and they have indicators for what would be like estrogen dominance which can lead to triggering Hashimoto’s and thyroid imbalances or if they’ve been drinking and bathing in toxic water, the chemicals and water that can bind the thyroid hormone and start to create dysfunction that’s happening in the body and that would also give me some insights that their liver has been overloaded based on their environmental exposures. Talking about their digestion, what do their bowel movements look like, do they have bloating or gas, are they responding to food; could give us insights about what’s going on with gut health. And how do they sleep? You know, there are some key clues that you can get around sleep like if somebody is wired and tired at night time and has trouble falling asleep that usually highly correlates with having a parasite bacteria or yeast overgrowth that’s going on in the gut, if there’s somebody who wakes up recurrently in the middle of the night, usually that window of like maybe 1  to 3 AM that’s an indication of their blood sugar dropping so you have poor blood sugar regulation which probably means that they’re not eating the right diet, like macronutrient breakdown for them to regulate blood sugar or that they have some cortisol dysfunction that set in that’s dysregulating blood sugar as well, or they’re insulin resistive and kind of like putting all the clues of the puzzle together and whatever all the clues of the puzzle are, they always kind of relate back to these foundational tests that I run with every single person to start. Again, so we can look at the hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification, energy, and nervous system all in one swoop and see this big picture of like let’s look through all the systems and then based on that information, I will put together a protocol for them that includes strategic recommendations for diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, supplementation, and toxin removal, and there’s a reasonable expectation that within 90 days, they should see some really significant improvements in their health. If they’re not seeing the improvements that I would expect them to see or making progress in a way that I would expect them to, that’s where we go back to the drawing board. Let’s dive a little bit deeper, you’re doing all of the right things, you should be seeing x, y, and z results but you’re not getting that, so now let’s consider something like mold in your home or an underlying autoimmune condition that we don’t know that you have or lines or something else that might be deeper that didn’t necessarily show up on one of those foundational lab tests. Regardless of some of those deeper issues that are happening, you still need those foundational lab tests to be supporting those systems of the body because let’s say it is molds, toxicity for example, you still have to support the hormones, liver function, the digestive system, energy, nervous system, immune system in order to be able to recover from mold exposure, right?     0:39:55.1 Ashley James: I love it. I love that you are looking at the body as a whole and that you have these insights. I know about waking up in the middle of the night was blood sugar but, being jittery tired but wired, I did not know the connection to parasites. I’ve had a few really cool interviews about parasites and it always blows my mind how common parasites are. No one wants to talk about it, by the way. My mom, when I was about 11, or 12, it was late 80s early 90s. My mom brought home a book called, ‘Guess What Came to Dinner?’ and I still remember it, my mom put us on a parasite protocol because we got some parasite testing and we had picked up one parasite from Mexico and 2 parasites from owning pets, a cat and dog parasite. Who knows how long we’d had them for. I think it was like one dog parasite one cat parasite. I had a dog when I was like an infant, so the whole family basically had these parasites. I remember doing the whole parasite cleanse. I was just a kid and I was so into it, I thought it was like, “Are you kidding me? We all have worms inside us?”. I grew up, my mom was really into health stuff and doesn’t every family do parasite cleanses and drink fresh smoothies and juices and protein shakes and doesn’t everyone do supplements. I grew up and that was my environment and so I just thought this was totally normal and now coming into the real world going, “This is so not normal!” like, parents don’t talk about parasites with their kids and go on parasite cleanses. Of course, for the majority of people this is news to them, thinking that we need to deworm ourselves. One of my previous guests Dr. Jade Davidson explains and he has a whole protocol of getting rid of parasites, especially for people with lyme disease and his protocol works really well with people with lyme and he says that, back a 100 years ago our great grandparents knew to deworm, that every year we would give these herbs and clays and all that stuff to all of our farm animals and we do it to ourselves too, that it was just a known thing. Since modern medicine has come in, in the last 3 generations we’ve really given up our health and health education over to the pharmaceutical companies and the doctors and the hospitals and we have stopped practicing these daily health habits. It’s been lost, you know? We all moved away from the farm to the city, and with a matter of generations we forgot about midwifery and we forgot about how to take care of ourselves using nature. Now we’re coming back, now we’re turning around going, “Wait a second”. So listening to the body, what other symptoms do you look for to confirm for you that someone might have parasites or yeast overgrowth or candida, what other common symptoms happen?     0:43:28.3 Jenn Malecha: Yes, another thing that’s interesting is that they can correlate with the moon cycles. So, we’re in a new moon right now, today’s the first day of a new moon and so usually the symptoms you’re having would be lower in a new moon stage versus during as we get closer to the full moon if you’re having digestive issues or skin issues or anxiety or sleep issues, you would see those symptoms start to worsen as you get closer to a full moon because the full moon, creates its gravitational pull on the earth and we know this from tide cycles of the ocean during a full moon, the tide tends to be higher, the tide will shift on the earth and that same gravitational pull kind of happens in our body and creates this awakening response in the kidneys, and within parasites and bacteria and yeast. That would be something to look for as I start tracking and seeing if your symptoms are worsening as you get closer to the full moon and as you start to see some relief as the full moon starts to go away we get into a new moon phase. There’s also, skin issues can be a result of parasites and bacteria and yeast overgrowth or they can be connected because whenever you’re experiencing skin issues like rashes or acne like anything that’s coming out of your skin is like an indication that your body is trying to detox, and parasites and bacteria and yeast overgrowth create their own byproduct or waste product internally and they can create a really toxic environment for us. Definitely, variations within your bowel movements, if you vary from being more constipated to having diarrhea, if there’s a potent smell that comes along with that, sometimes you can actually see what we call biofilm in the toilet, it seems like there’s a filmy substance that’s in the toilet because parasites and bacteria and yeast, they produce biofilm, it’s like a protective layer that they produce so they don’t get eliminated. Another thing is teeth grinding, a lot of people don’t know that teeth grinding and tinnitus actually can be indications of parasitic or yeast or bacteria overgrowth as well. These are really common things I see a lot that can be linked to those kind critters that are going on in our gut.     0:45:55.3 Ashley James: Now, one thing is becoming more and more popular is autoimmune disease and one argument is, “Well, we’re better at diagnosing.” People have always had autoimmune disease, we’re just now good at diagnosing it so that’s one argument. Kind of like, autism are those in the spectrum it was like 1 in 10,000 children back when we were kids and now it’s like between 1 in 40 and 1 in 60 depending on boys or girls and so some people say, “Well, we’re just better at diagnosing and better at seeing it.”, is one argument right? We can’t really disprove that but we can definitely gather some evidence to prove or disprove it but ultimately, we know it’s a hypothesis. The other hypothesis is that in the last 30 years, many changes have happened in our environment and even in our food chain that have lead to people developing autoimmune, so autoimmune is primarily a man-caused illness that if we were all living peacefully in the jungle eating fresh fruits and vegetables and we had no chemicals, we didn’t have any pollution, that no one would have autoimmune condition or that it would be incredibly rare. So, this one idea that in the last 30 years it has exacerbated greatly because we are exposed to so many toxins and the body just can’t handle it right? It’s showing up as the weak point in that person’s genetics. What is your is your belief in huge increase that we’re seeing in autoimmune? What do you think contributes to triggering it in people?   0:47:46.7 Jenn Malecha:  I wanna think that the environment is 80% of any disease where currently known, autommunity, cardiovascular disease, like whatever is going on, environmental plays a bigger role that I think most people are willing to or want to even acknowledge. And we know this because there are still places around the world we call them blue zones where the diseases are virtually non-existence and people were living well into their nineties and their hundreds disease-free and a colleague of mine Jason Proll just did a whole documentary about this called the Human Longevity project and they went out and they researched and met with these people that lived in this blue zone to figure out what are the things they are doing like what makes it different for them and environment is the biggest part and you know just how they live their lives and the fact that they do live in these areas is where toxins and modern society is barely present in their environment, I think that’s a huge factor. When we look at something like autoimmune conditions, there are rules that says that 3 things have to be in place, this one that you have to have a genetic predisposition to it but, we are not a result of our genes. Our environment is what turns our genes on or off essentially. So, you have to have this genetic predisposition to it. Second is that you have to have basically a degree of leaky gut going on. And leaky gut really means that you have a dysfunctional intestinal tract where toxins are crossing the gut barrier getting into the bloodstream that aren’t supposed to which then is triggering the inflammation in the body and the immune system and autoimmunity really shows itself when the immune system has become so overwhelmed with so much inflammation that it no longer is able to differentiate who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and it starts attacking healthy tissue as well. The third piece of autoimmunity then are these triggers for inflammation and there are some specific triggers that then can be related to certain autoimmune condition. With Hashimoto’s for example, we’ve found that epstein barr or also known as mono like UBV is a trigger for Hashimoto’s as well as certain parasites and bacteria like H pylori bacteria, blastocystis hominis as a parasite, those have been strongly correlated with Hashimoto’s cases. On the stool sample tests that I run with all my clients, there’s actually a section for autoimmune trigger types of bacteria and parasites, we got other things like klebsiella for example, which is a common one that we can find amongst a lot of people. Gluten is a trigger for some autoimmune conditions obviously celiac but also crosses over to Hashimoto’s as well and then there are certain toxins in our environment. If we look at this factor of like what you are saying, I love that you’re bringing these 2 hypothesis to light because, yes, we are better at diagnosing I have been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s and when I was looking at family history, both of my grandmothers were being treated for thyroid disorder but they hadn’t necessarily been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. Now, knowing that I’ve been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, they’re long passed but I could probably make a really good assumption saying they probably had Hashimoto’s too just probably didn’t know how to diagnose it then. There’s studies and surveys that have been done with the traditional medical world with doctors coming out of school to ask them, how comfortable do they feel with diagnosing autoimmune conditions, and the reality is it that they don’t really feel comfortable about it and so do you think it’s been underdiagnosed for a long period of time but that means that we actually could have higher populations of people in the previous generations that had autoimmune conditions and we would have to ask why would they have these autoimmune conditions and then we’ll start to look at environment again. So, they kind of really interplay with each other, I think, and the environment is a huge factor and that’s what we have to be more conscious of because I know it for myself, reversing my Hashimoto’s, the way that I was able to do that was by changing my environment and changing my lifestyle. Just because you’ve been diagnosed with something doesn’t mean that your doomed to live that way or have that forever. I will always have to be aware of this risk factor that I have but I don’t have to live a life suffering with Hashimoto’s because we do have that ability to change our environment and our lifestyle and reverse the effects of it essentially.     0:52:40.1 Ashley James: I’m glad you brought that up because some people especially some doctors will tell their patients that you have an autoimmune condition, you’re going to have it for the rest of your life. If I had stuck with MDs they would have kept me on metformin and kept me in diabetes. Luckily, especially if any MDs is listening to the show which are about 20% of my listeners are holistic health professionals, so I have had MDs write me and say, “Hey, I’m not one of the bad guys”, I’m not trying to bash them but it’s just if we take all of them, there’s a majority that will give their patient metformin or give their patient insulin if it’s called for and tell them ok, “Follow the American Diabetes Association diet” and we’re going to manage your diabetes. I’m talking about type 2 obviously type 1 is a totally different concept but type 2 being that the body can still produce its own insulin and the blood sugar is out of control it’s not in healthy ranges and the body is able to produce insulin, so type 2 diabetes. So going to see “traditional pharmaceutical allopathic based medicine”, you go to see that MD, they put you on drugs to “manage” as in we’re not curing you, we’re not going to reverse it, you will always have diabetes, we’re just going to try to manage it. So a lot of people that have an autoimmune condition get the same treatment, get the same spiel that we’re going to put you on these drugs, we’ll test you every few years but there’s no talk of let’s reverse it, let’s cure it, let’s no longer have it, no you have it and you will always have it. Maybe you’re body will spontaneously go into remission but you will always have it. That’s one philosophy right, and then we’ll have to pull ourselves out of that box, pull ourselves out of that man-made philosophy, man-made confinement, and pull ourselves out to this new way of thinking where the body has the miraculous ability to heal itself if we give it what it needs and if we stop giving it what it doesn’t need.     0:55:05.3 Jenn Malecha: Exactly.   0:55:07.4 Ashley James: And that diagnosis is man-made. It’s a set of symptoms and the body can correct itself. So, we are not so broken that we’ll always be broken. That’s what the pharmaceutical companies want us to believe but the body has a miraculous ability to heal itself. Let’s not own the diagnosis as though it’s a death sentence or a life sentence or how we are defined or confined, instead, we come out of it. Just take yourself out and go, “Ok, my body has a set of symptoms, something’s going on let’s heal the body and it’s reversible”, now if I went and decided to eat junk food everyday, if I went and eat a standard american diet I could recreate diabetes in my body, that’s just how my genetics expressed when I fill it full of junk right? And so, I know that about myself and someone like you, you could recreate autoimmune condition or the skin condition, you could recreate that, you could give your body a set of circumstances, like McDonald’s and Starbucks everyday and figure out how to recreate that disease. It’s kind of empowering, once we realize that the choices we’ve been making 50 times a day, everything we put in our mouths and how we choose to manage our stress, or not manage our stress, and whether we’re moving our body in the way that it brings us joy or not, but every single choice that we’re making everyday has built up and led us to the disease state we’re in and that we can shift that, like you said 80% is the environment we can shift it and help the body gain health. Coming all the way back to birth, can you elaborate why even knowing you’re a C-section or whether you’ve been birth vaginally and whether you were breastfed or not, why that can play a factor in someone’s health now 30 or 50 years later?   0:57:11.7 Jenn Malecha: So when we are a natural birth we go through the vaginal canal and at that point, you are exposed to all of the bacteria within the vaginal canal and that bacteria is what helps to stimulate your own micro biome growth and helps to stimulate the strength of your immune system. So, if you’re a C-section baby or if you have C-section children, you’re missing out on this once in a lifetime opportunity. We’re not going back up and down on that vaginal canal ever in our lifetime right? There is a practice out there, obviously C-section has to happen sometimes because of medical concerns or if the mom or the baby’s life is at risk and things like that, and there are some doctors out there who are practitioners of something that you should request if you ever get yourself in a position of having a C-section baby is that they can still sweep the vaginal canal and smear? some of that bacteria over the baby’s face and the mouth and eyes so they get some of that exposure and that can be very helpful. When it comes to breastfeeding, there’s colostrum. The mother produces colostrum, there’s also bacteria that’s coming from the mother’s body that’s again helping to boost the immune system and helping to build the microbiome and so, if we don’t get exposed to that from a young age then we’re basically missing some of the building blocks that are really critical to the future of our health. And aside from that, when breastfeeding doesn’t take place then what are we supplementing with? We’re supplementing with formula which tends to be really high in sugar and that is then disrupting or causing inflammation within the intestinal tract and also tends to be milk-based. So milk that’s produced by cows or somewhere else and that is not our natural form of food for humans. It’s not exactly replicable, formulas not a great replacement necessarily but it’s the only thing that we really know about or know what to do if right now, right? There are places out there where women donate their breast milk, and you can go get that. You know I’ve had friends of my own, I don’t have any children but I’ve had friends of my own where they were in a situation where they weren’t able to breastfeed. It just wasn’t working, you know, for various reasons and they were a little bit reluctant to go utilise some of these places where you can purchase breast milk because it is a hit to your ego and your pride a little bit, I understand that. I hope for some of the listeners out there that are listening to this, know that if you’re the one who set your child up for the best success with their health, that should be something that you might want to consider as a replacement instead of going straight to formula. We can get down the rabbit hole of the push on formula in the food industry, but ultimately we need to be like you said, every choice that you make or every action you take is an opportunity to make a choice for your health or your child’s health if you’re raising a child, every time you sit down to eat, you would have a choice to make. You can eat something that either support your body and builds it up or breaks it down. When we go out to exercise, or when we look at our sleep, or the other choices that we’re making in life, every single action is an opportunity to make a choice on how you’re going to support your body, to either build up health or break it down essentially.     1:00:48.0 Ashley James: Yes, absolutely. Our son, when he was born just over 4 years ago I could not produce enough breast milk and I did everything, I drank the teas, and the tinctures, the cookies, and all those little things that the midwives and doulas and my naturopath all recommended and I did everything I could and I still wasn’t producing enough. The first rule is baby gets fed and that’s when I was introduced to Human Milk for Human Babies which is a project where women, wherever you are look for Human Milk for Human Babies’ Facebook group in your area and if you have milk to donate go to Human Milk for Human Babies and find the local Facebook group and so there’s women who are donating. So I connected with women who say I eat organic, I’m not on any medications, I eat organic, I do not drink alcohol, I don’t drink coffee, my baby is this old, and I have this many ounces to donate. We went around for the first 6 months of our son’s life and supplemented the majority of his milk. I’d give as much as I could and then we drove around and we would drive sometimes an hour away, even this one woman who was a client of one of our naturopaths who had flown to the east coast and she has a huge surplus, she shipped it frozen, she shipped it overnight to us. Now that was like a month’s supply, like a huge cooler, a month’s supply of breast milk. It can be done, it absolutely can be done and it was a great adventure and actually made some friends that are still friends to this day. It can be a great support network to connect into and if I do have another child and I have a surplus, I would be so excited to donate it but it’s very interesting that we can see the correlation between whether someone was breastfed, whether they were birth vaginally and their health to this day, and so we know that if someone wasn’t, that we need to do extra support for the microbiome of their gut and that does play a role in their health. The last 2 weeks I love doing experiments on myself. I’m always shifting my diet. I’m always playing around with what does my body needs? I figured that you would just be playing with your diet and I think the listener would benefit from this kind of mentality where it’s like be fluid and be willing to experiment, be willing to do these little elimination diets with yourself. You know what, I’m going to do an experiment for the next 2 weeks, I’m not going to have any dairy, or I’m not going to have any grains just to experience what does your body feel like away from those foods. And so, I decided to cut out, I’ve been gluten-free for 8 years so I don’t eat barley wheat oats but I decided to go flour free and I’ve been sugar free for the most part but you know like occasionally would have something with some kind of natural sweetener but I decided to go 100% sugar free, I’m already dairy free, and flour free, and focus my foods on whole food plant-based. So it’s like a very anti-inflammatory diet. I wake up with so much more energy now and I don’t feel like I cut out that much, I just decided my plate is full of vegetables and whole grains, so like either brown rice or sweet potato and just tons of vegetables and some legumes and that’s it, that’s like my breakfast, lunch, dinner for the last 2 weeks and I’m really impressed by how good I feel. So there’s been a few times where I was out or I was at a friends house and I could have eaten sort of off my plan that I’ve created for myself and I sat there and I thought, “You know, I could have that.” like whatever the food was, that was delicious. I could have that gluten-free vegan cupcake at the birthday party last weekend, but I didn’t because I thought, you know what, I feel so good right now and I just know that I won’t feel as good after I eat that very pro-inflammatory food. And so we have to ask ourselves, do I want the 5 minutes of joy that eating this McDonalds, I always use McDonalds as an example but, I’m going to get a letter from them one day, and just whatever that food is you know that is pro-inflammatory to you, is 5 minutes of joy really worth a 3 days of inflammation and maybe just feeling off and feeling kind of sluggish, is it really worth it? And ultimately, it wasn’t for me. I am just feeling even better and even better everyday noticing that the inflammation that was caused by flour products and those grains that its dropping of my body and I’m feeling better and better. It’s a cool little mind trick. Once we’re eating really clean it’s like, it’s not worth it to go back and eat the foods that are harming us because 5 minutes of pleasure and that 5 minutes of dopamine spike is not really worth 3 days of pain.   1:06:21.9 Jenn Malecha: Right, right. Yeah, I love this concept. I mean, this is something that I talk with my clients all the time about is play this game with yourself, create presents by every time you’re faced with food choices, like ask yourself is it worth it, because most people are just moving through life on autopilot, we were talking a little bit earlier about, have you ever had that experience of driving home from work and all of a sudden you are in your driveway and you don’t really remember how you got there because you are on autopilot. It’s like a routine of what you do every single day and most times that’s how we’re moving through life as well, we’re not paying attention to how this food or how does this experience or how does this action really make me feel, and then questioning like is this worth it and I know that was a shift to that I made in the beginning also, when I started to move towards a gluten, dairy, sugar, soy free type of lifestyle which is starting to make that connection that when I eat this I feel this way, and is that how I want to be feeling. After I’ve been gluten-free for some time we went to Thailand in 2017 and we’re in Chiang Mai and I remember there was a local dish there sounded so amazing and I decided to try it knowing that it had gluten in it, I shared it with my friends and I didn’t feel great afterwards. I had brain fog, my stomach was a little bit upset, and my joints were a little tender and so I remember just consciously going through this process of is this the way that I want to experience the rest of my trip, because this is like day 2 when we arrived there. I want to have energy, I want to remember and be clear minded, like all the beautiful sights that are to be seen here, I flew 36 hours from California to Thailand, I don’t want to mess this up you know. And I think that that’s just how we want to start living our life more on a day to day basis is really just creating that presence and recognizing like tuning in to our body and seeing how it responds to the things that we’re doing. And also this point that you brought up too, is that things can shift. One of the reasons that I kind of play around with my diet from time to time is because our body is always shifting. When I was in the midst of healing Hashimoto’s I had tried to start and get into a little bit of intermittent fasting and more of a Keto style diet and I instantly realized that my body was not responding well to that and I healed the Hashimoto’s and now I primarily eat more of like a keto style diet and it totally works for me because I’ve resolved the underlying hormone imbalances that were going on or another great example of that is eating seasonally, you know, you’re in southern california in the US, you know it’s summertime and so the hotter weather like I’m finding my body craving blueberries or we walked by a peach tree the other day and I was like salivating looking at these peaches. And I was like, you know what, this is my body, we’re meant to eat seasonally, we’re not meant to be forced into this structured diet 100% of the time, I don’t believe that. If we look at our ancestors and even indiginous tribes that are around our modern day society now, they eat seasonally based upon what is available. They have great food orientation in their diet and that’s something that we should be considering too as well and you might find that some foods are problematic for you right now, you cut it out for a little bit and then you may be able to reintroduce them and have no problem with them you know. And it’s all about the overall load on your body and sometimes we just need to stop adding fuel to the inflammatory fire and allow our body to heal and then we’re able to tolerate things much better afterwards.     1:10:21.5 Ashley James: I’d love to dive in to what you teach your clients. Overall, what’s the foundations of health that no matter what condition they have really benefits, so benefits a 100% of the population to make sure that their doing.   1:10:40.1 Jenn Malecha: So the first thing is figuring out what foods your body needs to eat to function at its potential and I’m not biased towards any type of diet. I really believe that you are unique and therefore your diet should be too. There is a difference between eating healthy and eating right for your body. Eating right for your body will incorporate healthy foods but not every healthy food is right for your body. You just gave a great example of yourself, that you’re gluten free and all these things but maybe like, even the gluten free flours were “healthy”, they were not doing you a good service at this point in time in your life. A banana, banana will obviously be considered as a healthy food but if you have blood sugar regulation issues or insulin resistant going on, that’s not a healthy food for you right now. And so, and what they try to walk people through in exploratory process like we use food sensitivity testing, looking at their digestive system, as well as metabolic typing to kind of find those pieces of the puzzle to figure out what kind of foods are right for your body then they go through this journaling experience to really dial that and see how their body is reacting to certain foods so that they create a connection with their body, an intuitive connection so that, they will know how this knowledge moving forward about what foods are right for their body and that’s something like you’ll always have, that’s priceless. And then, really that might have huge emphasis is on sleep, because I say all the time like your diet and exercise efforts are worth nothing if you aren’t sleeping well and aside from sleeping well, good quality sleep during the right periods of time of the day. I’m sure you’ve talked about circadian rhythms and cortisol rhythms here on your show before and our body has this natural rhythm to it that is in alignment with the sun and the moon cycles. And so, there are certain times, really critical times that we should be sleeping and generally speaking, that’s from about 10PM to at least 2AM and then in extended 8 hours would be 10PM to 6AM or so. Once the sun sets and temperature decreases and light decreases, our bodies are already starting to shift into this creative like we’re supposed to preparing for sleep and based on this time clock that we’re on certain critical functions are supposed to just happen in certain times. A couple of hours after the sun sets your body will start releasing human growth hormone and the liver’s supposed to its big huge detoxification process around like, 2AM in the middle of the night. If you’re not sleeping during those times those functions will not be happening or they won’t be happening to the extent that they should be and your missing out on these natural healing opportunities that happen all the time and no matter how much you sleep in the next day, your body will never make up for those lost times. So that’s why a lot of people can like, they go to bed at midnight or 1 and yes, they sleep until 8 or 9 or 10 o’clock the next day but they still feel groggy, it’s because they missed out on that critical sleep time from 10 to 2 and they missed out on those critical functions that their body is supposed to be doing at that time of night. A really good visual for this is people can Google the Chinese medicine like body clock or time clock, and in Chinese medicine, they have it all mapped out. There are certain hours at certain times a day, like your body is supposed to be doing these things. So if you’re not sleeping during those hours, you’re missing out on those incredibly important functions.     1:14:30.6 Ashley James: And how important is timing around eating because if someone’s still digesting their food at 2 in the morning because they have a late night snack, or they ate right before bed, how much does that disrupt the big liver healing that happens at 2 in the morning?     1:14:48.4 Jenn Malecha: It can be different for every person. Especially if somebody’s got some more severe blood sugar imbalances that are going on, some of those people actually really benefit from eating a high protein or fat containing snack right before bed within a 30 minute window before bed because it helps to balance their blood sugar in the middle of the night versus other people won’t do as well with that. So I think that’s just on an individual basis to really figure those things out and what might work for you to resolve that issue like when I have somebody eats a high fat or a high protein snack before bed to balance their blood sugar in the middle of the night. Once we get it balanced, they eventually don’t need that anymore and usually that comes from resolving what their eating throughout the rest of the day. Making sure they have balanced meals throughout the rest of the day but I do believe that and I found this to be successful in most people, we do need to give our bodies a break from digesting which is kind of where the whole philosophy around intermittent fasting comes into play or like just having an eating window of like 11AM to maybe 7PM so that you can give your body a break. There’s a lot of healing benefit that occurs like cell autophagy and things that can happen when we’re not digesting all of the time. That’s for some of the lab testing that really helps like I can see on a DUTCH test if their cortisol or other things are super dysfunctional then fasting isn’t right for somebody in order to balance things out at this point in time once we get them in a better place and they can implement some intermittent fasting or specific eating windows that are right for them.   1:16:33.8 Ashley James: Absolutely, that’s where the individuality comes into play. If someone doesn’t have a blood sugar imbalance and they might benefit from intermittent fasting or experimenting, I love experimenting, it’s like “try it.” I turned to my husband a few weeks ago and I said, “Let’s try finishing dinner by 6PM and then just seeing how long we last until we break the fast. It might be 2PM the next day, who knows? Let’s just see how we feel.” and I noticed that for me, I have way more energy in the morning when I make sure that the last food that gets put in my mouth is at 6PM and that’s just maybe drinking some water, some herbal tea, obviously caffeine free, you know herbal tea in the evening and then, going to sleep at a reasonable hour between 9 and 10. The next morning I have way more energy and I feel so much better than if I had eaten at 8PM because sometimes, you know, I just get into the routine of feeding our kid and then doing the bedtime routine with him, getting him to sleep and then I get to cook dinner for myself. Just that little change of eating with my son versus eat after he’s gone to bed has hugely given me way more energy, I mean, the more energy that I could ever get from 4 espresso shots. I’m just so impressed by how much energy that one tweak. So, be willing to tweak and try things but try it long enough, try it for enough days to go, “Yeah, this really does make a difference”, and then also the next experiment which I’m working on is what’s optimal for my body right now to break the fast, is it first thing in the morning, is it later in the afternoon, because it’s really different for everyone. Because sometimes for some people, if we wait too long and we break the fast at 2PM then, they end up being so hungry by 7 or 8 PM and they don’t have the willpower to say, “Ok, I’m sticking to this.”, and so then they end up pushing their feeding window to be too late and they go to bed with a full stomach. So, we have to play around with it. I love the idea of let’s experiment on ourselves and track our progress and see how we feel.     1:19:01.6 Jenn Malecha: I was going to add to that too. Recognizing we have different energy needs on different days. If you have a 12-hour work day, you know, that may not be an ideal day to go on an extended fast. Being a little bit flexible, I think also in recognizing what are the demands being placed on your body and making sure that you’re supporting whatever those demands are at the same time.   1:19:23.6 Ashley James: Stress is something that you’ve talked about that I think especially as women, I mean, I’m a woman so I don’t know what it’s like to be in a man’s body. Based on the observations of my husband I am sure that men also equally do not deal with stress. But, I could speak as a woman, I know that we culturally do not deal with stress that we really would rather put ourselves through the ringer, put ourselves last, drag ourselves through the mud. I had a client once, I gave her the best diet plan based on her needs and the supplements and the lifestyle changes and we worked on everything and she seems to be getting some results but she hit a wall, and I kept coming back to her stress and she said, “I don’t feel stressed”, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, thank you for saying that. Stress is not an emotion that you feel.”, when you actually feel stress as an emotion, you are at your breaking point. When it’s an actual sensation that you’re feeling like feeling your blood pressure, in your neck, in your head, you are way at the breaking point. So you don’t feel stressed, you’re just doing things that cause stress on the body by not managing it. She had a mother who was sick, she had a young child at home, and she was a very busy manager. So she has constant demands on her at work, with her mother who was ill, and her young child and there was not one break. I gave her all these things that she could do throughout the day to manage her stress that because it didn’t seem important. It wasn’t like, and I get it because it doesn’t seem not important, like why is laughing and hugging and social time and relaxing, that stuff doesn’t seem important, what seems important is working at your job 12 hours a day and then taking care of your kids and then taking care of husband and then just putting ourselves last. But all of that, the lifestyle of not managing stress exacerbates disease and causes the body not be able to heal. Could you talk a bit about your observation with stress and its relationship to disease?     1:21:43.7 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, I talked about in the beginning too just the concept of let’s redefine stress. Stress is anything that places a burden on the body that results in inflammation and dysfunction. We’re talking here about mental emotional stress, but there is also a ton of other things that can stress the body for example, travelling across different time zones if you’re a traveller. That places a stress on the body and disrupts your natural circadian rhythm that we’re talking about earlier or toxins in your environment or mold like we’re talking about earlier, those all place a stress like a burden on the body that then results in inflammation and that dysfunction. The mental emotional side of stress is so fascinating because I love this example of the woman that you were just speaking of is I find this too with clients. The mindset that we’ve developed in our modern day society and I remember watching the presidential elections that we had here in the US, when was it 2016 with Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump running against each other and then there was a point where Hilary Clinton got really sick and she just kept and she just kept plowing through and what am I thinking in my mind is, “This is just a terrible example for women.”, a powerful woman I think would take a sit back and say I need to take a break and recuperate and take care of myself because what good are we with a person if she would have had won the presidency like what good are we with somebody who’s going to be chronically ill because they’re not really willing to prioritize themselves and take a break from the amount of stress that they’re experiencing. I often have clients because I tend to work with really Type A personalities who have climb their corporate career ladders from a young age and they sacrifice their health as a result of doing so, like they have this defense mechanism built in on those, I would call it as like, they just put their head down and keep plowing through and they never really stop to acknowledge how stress is affecting their body and then they come to us with all of these health issues and again like you said, are doing all the diet things, all the other things but the health issues aren’t fully resolving themselves and finding if we can correlate, let’s start journaling this and writing this down and we can notice, “oh you had a super long day at work” and then we’re working on a huge project and all of a sudden you’re exploited with some symptoms or you’re travelling and then you’re exploited with some symptoms and we can start to connect connect the dots. And it’s not even lack of wanting, it’s kind of like an ingrained ignorance because they just don’t know any better because of the mindset that we’ve developed in our society to even be able to acknowledge the fact that what they’re doing in their lives is contributing to their health like the fact that they’re not acknowledging stress or that again, going back to this concept of just because it’s common doesn’t mean that it’s a normal scenario. I’ve had conversations with clients before where they’re doing all the things like we need to start looking at the fact that like you know, it’s your job, have you considered getting a new job because it’s what’s killing you and that’s where I infuse them of that transformational work and the coaching that I do with clients because it’s not uncommon for a lot of my clients to either end up changing career paths or moving out of their city or their homes because we start to recognize that those are some of the biggest burdens of stress that is depleting their body and making them feel unwell.     1:25:34.9 Ashley James: Can you elaborate on certain conditions that you’ve seen that stress has caused or exacerbated.     1:25:42.2 Jenn Malecha: I keep going back to Hashimoto’s because it’s so close to home but that is certainly one of them. When we look at the energetic aspects of autoimmunity, it manifests a lot of times and correlates with feeling attacked our personal lives in some kind of way. Especially for women and we see that women are like, I can’t remember exactly what the statistics are but, so much more likely to develop an autoimmune condition over men and to be diagnosed with the thyroid imbalance as well. A lot of these comes from like, if we look at the energetic aspects like the thyroid is related to our throat chakra, and the throat chakra is all about communication, like the communication center so when we’re not standing up for ourselves and setting boundaries and speaking our truth and owning our self- worth, we are stopping all of this energy and creating a road block. It can then manifest itself into a disease state essentially or we’re kind of evolving out of this time like a more masculine air into a more feminine presence now, spiritually speaking in the world and so many women have tried to keep up in a man’s world where they don’t call out sick, they don’t stay at home with their kids to take care of them, they shove their emotions to the side, I mean I remember working in the corporate world and having one of my regional bosses came in and he said, “You’re too emotional for a manager”, talk about like you know stunting my health progression right there or like giving me a nice good kick in the gut or should I say my thyroid and just making me feel really bad about being emotional as a woman and I think now in the world that I work in now like my attunement with my emotions is part of what helps me create success and also is what helps me be such a good advocate and intuitive leader for some of the people that I work with. So in any point in time whenever you’re not fully expressing yourself, you’re creating a blockage of energy that’s happening in the body and so when we’re shoving emotions to the side, not acknowledging stress, it’s gonna fester and it’s gonna manifest itself in some kind of health condition for sure.     1:28:14.2 Ashley James: It’s so individual, it’s so specific to each person’s circumstances, can you give some generic – for everyone kind of advice on how to figure out what is causing stress for them and what kind of steps they can take to de-stress?     1:28:37.9 Jenn Malecha: Yeah. I mean there’s a couple of scientific tools that you could use to evaluate. Like heart rate is one of them, when we are stressed out, our body releases cortisol which acts almost like an adrenaline rush and so your heart rate variability is one way to be able to measure stress or just your heart rate in general. You gave a great example earlier talking about your blood pressure also, right, so what you were having a psychological response like a stress of your kid running around, and your husband being there and all these things happening and you knew when you bought into that quiet room with that naturopath that if she took your blood pressure again it would look better so the physiological responses – anxiety, I think would be another one as well to look at like that’s something that lets you know – communication of stress and just feeling wound up when were round around the axle or when we are shooting all over ourselves, I should have done this, I should have done that or I should be doing this, you know we’re being self critical that can be another indication of just being really stressed out or trying to control a situation and that oversensitive control is stressful in itself. The list can go on, there is an emotional aspect that even so people recognizing they are stressed out and then they tend to eat as a result of that, often we have clients kind of assess that when they see that they feel they need a snack or that they’re hungry all the time. We are working on improving their diet, and they’re doing a lot of the right things but they still have a sense of being hungry all the time or they need a snack then I asked them to stop and shift “I want you to stop in the moment when you feel that way, check in with yourself and ask yourself, what is really going on” and check in and see if there is an urge of boredom or reaction to stress in some kind of way or scarcity or a fear, what is the emotion that is coming up and then implement an activity that shift whatever that is that’s happening. So we will define some things that they can do, like go outside or do some deep breathing techniques or something like that. Those usually resolve the problem once they shift that mindset and get out of that stressed state. In terms of things that you can do, deep breathing hands-down is the single most effective and easiest thing that anybody can do to take themselves out of a stressed state into a rest or digest and healing state. So one of the things that I want to drop for your people here Ashley is like, your body can only heal in a relaxed state. If you think about how many times a day you are actually in a relaxed state, it’s very infrequent. When we adopt the deep rhythmic breathing patterns of a relaxed person, it automatically flips the switch in our brain, it takes us out of sympathetic fight or flight mode and puts us into parasympathetic mode. I’ll usually have people do a deep breathing technique or inhale for 5 seconds then hold it for 5 seconds and then exhale for 7 and they just do that 5 to 10 times. It doesn’t require learning how to meditate or any devices or other tools, it’s something that’s accessible to you all of the time. I have clients do this right before they sit down to eat so they can get in the parasympathetic mode because you can actually only really digest your food when we’re in parasympathetic mode so that’s called the rest and digest state basically versus the fight or flight state. I’ve had clients use this breathing technique when they’re feeling anxious about getting onto a plane, when they’re in a meeting and they feel themselves getting worked up, nobody can tell that you’re sitting there doing deep breathing you can be sitting in a room with 20 people on the spotlight, in a board meeting and be doing deep breathing and nobody knows the difference. Otherwise, there’s some really great tools out there people want somewhere like biofeedback stuff, something like Heartmath is a great tool you can use, one of my clients was just telling me she’s been using something called A Muse that helps you with your meditation state and it can identify when you get your brain starts to wander so it kind of pulls you back in. Meditation is another way that we get into that relaxed state as well. So there’s a ton of tools out there, different fitbits and Apple iWatches, all of these technology tools that we have are starting to incorporate more of these stuff in there as well like a mindfulness tool that helps you just take a moment to breathe and relax and calm down a little bit.   1:33:47.9 Ashley James: Got it, I like the free one, just breathe. Taking that time to do that slow deep breathing is great. Thank you so much, there’s so many nuggets of gold in what you’ve shared today. What kind of homework would you like to give our listeners? What kind of changes would you like to help them make in their life? Can you give them an assignment so they can go and do it and make some really positive changes.     1:33:47.9 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, well, since we’re talking about deep breathing and I just said it, I think that the deep breathing before you eat is huge because you could be eating the healthiest food in the world but if you’re not digesting it very well, you’re not getting much out of it you know and often times in our fast paced life, we’re constantly eating on-the-go or eating with distraction and so simple doing this 5 5 7 breath like I said 5 to 10 times before every meal you’ll probably notice some shifts and the amount of energy that you get out of your food, your ability to digest your food a little bit better and also just feeling satiated and full for longer are usually some of the really few things that people get from that. The other thing we talked about that was so important today was sleep, so for everybody out there, like we said the critical sleep time is be asleep by 10PM or as close to it as possible, most nights out of the week and most nights would probably be like 5 nights out of a week if you could do it every night of the week, awesome but you know I’m a realist there’s going to be Friday night dinners to go to or parties or whatever so there might be those times when you’re up a little bit later but on the majority of your time, get to bed at a reasonable hour and your body will 100% thank you for it, definitely. I think these will be the 2 biggest things that I recommend as homework for people and if I was to add a 3rd it would really be to just be more present every single time you sit down to eat and checking in with yourself like we were talking about earlier, and remember every time you sit down to eat, you have a choice. You can eat something that builds you up or breaks you down and just being present in that moment and making a conscious decision about how it is you want to feel after that meal, or for the rest of the day, or into tomorrow and when we connect with those choices, it makes it so much easier just to naturally choose foods that are right for us versus the ones that aren’t as beneficial for us.     1:36:38.6 Ashley James: And you said sit down to eat, that’s actually part of the homework.     1:36:43.8 Jenn Malecha: That’s part of the homework.     1:36:47.0 Ashley James: I know women who will stand to eat by the kitchen sink, shovel the food in their mouth in between doing the laundry and getting the kids to bed or whatever or drive and eat. It is sit down and take that 5, 10, 15 minutes to eat slowly and to be conscious of that everything we put in our body is feeding our body. You know it’s funny to me that someone will take a prescription medication, the size of a pea, let’s say they take 1 pill a day to manage their blood pressure or manage their blood sugar or manage their thyroid but it is a pill the size of one pea that they take everyday and that tiny little pill the size of a pea has a huge impact on the body. I’m not saying in negative, I’m just saying it has an impact. It can shift your blood pressure, or it can shift your blood sugar, or it can shift your hormones, so this tiny little thing that you put in your mouth once a day or maybe twice a day really impacts your body and we know that. Like if someone takes an Advil for pain, like they know they take this tiny little thing and it has a huge impact on their body, it’s going to shift how they feel and yet we’ve disconnected that everything else we put in our food has an impact on how we feel, there’s a disconnect. So like people are eating the standard American diet right and not getting that huge plate of food can, way bigger than any of those pills they take, has even more impact on the body than that 1 little pill does. Everything that we put in our mouth throughout the day is like a medication. If we think about that, is it a medication that, it has side effects right, so fried foods for example has absolutely studies of proof and will take 10 years off of our life. If we eat fried food everyday, it will take 10 years off your life and cause heart disease and increase the chances of cancer. It’s been proven and studied enough that these foods that are readily available to us have side effects. If we would look at everything that we put in our mouth, like either this is a healing food, or this is a harmful food just like medications. We’re really careful about the medications we choose to be on or not choose to be on based on their effects or side effects. If we take that approach with our food, that everything we put into our mouth is healing or harmful. And another thing that I’ve had a struggle with, I’ve been doing a lot of emotional healing for years around food and that food is something for pleasure like ice cream or chocolate bars or whatever and it’s like catching myself going, “Wait a second, am I missing so much joy in my life that I need to get a dopamine high from the food?”, and I really have to catch myself and go, “Okay, when I wanted that twinky or when I want that ice cream”, even a celebratory ice cream with my kid, it’s like ok and even if it’s vegan and all that stuff. It’s still looking to food for dopamine, I’m putting it in my mouth and it’s what are the effects over the next few days on my health versus how can I increase joy and dopamine and excitement and love, how can I increase that amount of happiness in my life and not have it come from foods. We do live in the real world, we do go to birthday parties there’s always birthday cake, I get that. That’s one thing that people can choose to participate in or not participate but, I did find myself everyday seeking food for pleasure and everyday opening that fridge going, “What am I gonna eat, what am I gonna make for dinner?”, based on wanting more pleasure, and I had to catch myself going, “Ok, I am making food choices that are motivated by this lack of happiness in my life.” and I’m trying to fulfill happiness from food and that ultimately is destroying my health. And you know what? Healthy food, like my salads taste absolutely amazing. I’m sure I’m getting dopamine from my salads now. I can make them taste really good but I know I’m also getting a little bit of a high knowing that everything I’m feeding my body is moving me towards better health. And so for me there is that emotional component, that psychological component, that mindset that comes into play when choosing food and you’ve outlined some really great fun steps that sitting down, being conscious, taking those deep breaths, and you’re asking yourself, “Is this food that is healing for my body or maybe I’m missing something else in life and try to compensate?”. I love your advice around that. I know that you have a free gift for our listeners, I definitely want to make sure. The link to everything that Jenn does is going to be shown on today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Your free gift is a 21-day program, I’d love for you to just explain a bit about what it is and the link to it is www.wholistichealthboss.com/truehealth. So what is this wonderful 21-day free program that you’re giving us?     1:42:15.8 Jenn Malecha: So the 21-day free program actually goes through in more detail a lot of the stuff that we talked about today and it’s kind of getting to the roots of why you might be feeling fat, sick, or tired all the time, essentially, and uncovering some of those hidden healing opportunities. Week 1 is actually all about exploring what food is right for your body so they can function at potential, I actually take you through some of the journaling aspects that I mentioned earlier today to really narrow in on how is your body responding to certain foods and then based upon that feedback, you can then go and make adjustments to really figure out the perfect meals for you and the foods that work with your body best. And then week 2 we move in to talking more in-depth about sleep, giving you some more tools to improve the quality of your sleep, shifting your sleep cycles so that you’re just ultimately getting more restful sleep, in general which will support all of the metabolic processes that your body goes through. And then week 3 is where you get to explore some parasites, bacteria, yeast overgrowth opportunities that might be happening so going through some self screenings where you can check and do some home test to pre-screen yourself to see if these are potential issues for you, and then I’m definitely available to answer your questions for you as you go through that process and I love to hear the feedback that people have from it too on what their finding and exploring. And obviously, I’m open to helping people in more depth if they need some more guidance beyond that but, those are probably the 3 big key areas that I focus on with people and when we make those shifts on those areas they’ll start feeling better instantly in just a matter of couple of days or a couple of weeks. There’s just overall improvement in their health and it’s bringing awareness to some things that maybe they didn’t know previously so they can support themselves better moving forward.     1:44:18.6 Ashley James: Awesome, thank you so much for that free gift. The website again is www.wholistichealthboss.com/truehealth and I know that my listeners will love gaining more insight from you. It’s been so great having you on the show today. Is there anything you’d like to say that was left unsaid or anything you like to say to wrap up today’s interview?     1:44:38.5 Jenn Malecha: You know I just want to empower people and leave them with that, I always like to say that I think that you’re kind of in this line of work too, Ashley, we’re in the business of making the impossible possible. We’re here to help people that feel stuck and aren’t getting answers or solutions, so no matter what you’re situation is, just know that there’s probably a solution out there for you and it’s just a matter of finding the right person to work with and sometimes you just have to keep digging and really, the possibilities are endless. I also love to tell people, you only know what you know until you know something different. And I know that even when I’ve done lab testing on myself, like I’m in a really good place right now but every time I get lab test back sometimes, I’m like, “Oh, like I can improve in that area”, like I just got my cortisol and dopamine values back and they’re sitting a little bit low and I was like, “I consider myself a pretty energetic and happy person but what is there like a possibility for like, I can feel even better than this,” you know. So, the possibilities are really endless, and I think that just coming from a place of empowerment, like we’re talking about earlier today that you’re not doomed to the results of a diagnosis or a situation that you’re in, there’s likely a solution that’s out there for you, and to just keep searching and having hope you know.   1:46:07.7 Ashley James: Wonderful, absolutely, yes. There is hope, the body has the miraculous ability to heal itself. We got to give it what it needs, stop putting in what it doesn’t need and that there is absolutely hope. I have even seen a woman who is in wheelchair from MS, was told that she’d never walk again and a month later was walking and pain-free because she shifted her nutrition, her diet, and her lifestyle. Just cause the doctor said you’re going to have something for the rest of your life doesn’t necessarily mean, even if you do, you could optimize, we could always optimize our health and well-being. But it does take time and it takes effort and it takes being a detective and that’s what I love doing what you do. I love what you do because you’re that detective that helps people to go deep and find the root cause and support the body holistically. So wonderful, excellent, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing, and of course giving us your free 21-day program as well. It’s been such a pleasure to dive in to this topic with you today.     1:47:15.1 Jenn Malecha: Yeah, thanks for having me and it’s been wonderful to chat with you.     Outro:   Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people? You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out The Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health coaching certification program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition, but from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their lives and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health, I definitely recommend you check them out. You can Google, Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call or you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health Podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program and I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need ore health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are. getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic office, doctors offices.you can work in hospitals, you can work online through Skype and help people around the world. you can become an author. You can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. you can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success and their health goals. There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach. So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Mention my name, get the best deal. Give them a call and they;ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month. So you’re gonna wanna call them now and check it out. And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.   Get Connected With Jenn Malecha! Website Facebook Instagram Free Gift – 21 Day Program to figure out why you feel fat, sick or tired all the time and to learn how to fix it in 21 days or less! Recommended Readings by Jenn  Malecha Beyond The Pill by Dr. Jolene Brighten The Thyroid Connection and Autoimmune Solution by Dr. Amy Myers The Wahl’s Protocol by Dr. Terry Wahls The Autoimmune Fix by Dr. Tom O’Bryan Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms and Why Isn’t My Brain Working by Dr. Datis Kharraian  

https://www.greenhomesolutions.com For questions reach out to David Bloom via email: davidb@greenhomesolutions.com For the Free Jar of Magnesium Muscle Cream use coupon code LTH, Add the Magnesium Jug to your cart, and the free muscle cream will be added automatically as well as the 10% discount. https://livingthegoodlifenaturally.com/product/magnesium-jug To join IIN and enroll in their Health Coach Training Program, 25% off with zero down, call (844) 315-8547 (U.S.) or +1 (212) 730-5433 (International). In support of the show please join Ashley's fun kid's book party! https://kidsbook.party   How To Prevent And Treat Mold Naturally https://www.learntruehealth.com/how-to-prevent-and-treat-mold-naturally Highlights VOCs and particulates are the most common household air pollutants Dangers of burning candles Best air filter combination Molds accumulating indoor Indoor moisture problem can be serious Radon – a harmful, naturally occurring gas Environmental mold Prevent mld growth inside the home The importance of proper ventilation House treatment after a flood   Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 364. We have a very interesting guest for today’s show, David Bloom. I’m so excited to finally have you on the show. I’ve been a really big fan of Green Home Solutions which has created a revolutionary technique for removing mold that is both non-toxic and permanent. It’s something that no other company has. I have personally experienced the benefits of what you’ve created. I had black mold in our bathroom and it was making sick. I didn’t even know it was making me sick. It basically shot my immune system and I was catching everything, and then I finally used your services and it removed the mold, and I stopped catching the germs. I thought this is amazing. I spent probably a year just catching every single cold and flu and just feeling like my immune system had hit rock bottom and it was because of the mold in our house that I was being exposed to everytime I went to our bathroom which is right off our bedroom. So I was basically breathing in these mold spores all the time. Other companies will use harsh chemicals. They won’t actually get rid of 100% of the mold, and I’m really looking forward to you teaching us today more about how to create indoor air quality; what to look for and the science behind this technology that you’ve developed. So welcome to the show.   0:01:56.0 David Bloom: Thank you very much for having me, Ashley. It’s a privilege to be with you. You’ve done some great work. I’ve listened to several of your podcasts. Just to give you an idea of how this all got started. About late 90’s to early 2000, I had just completed finishing my basement turning it into a living space. We had had a sewage backup or a blockage and the plumber came out with the septic system. He was running a snake from the tank back towards the house to clear the blockage. What I forgot was above the ceiling in that newly finished basement space was a standpipe for water [inaudible 0:02:36.1]. So everytime the plumber is pushing the snake there is ethylic coming over that pipe into the basement which had just been completed into a living space. So I started to freak out and called my local DP and they said get rid of everything, get somebody in there. Called environmental protection with the same issue. But I remember meeting a gentleman at the Atlanta airport who had created a particular product that was rather unique. Back at that time, I live in Connecticut northeast, and most homes or a lot of the homes up here are heated using heating oil. And the oil tanks had historically always been buried in the ground. They found that around that time that most of these tanks started leaking. And if you had a tank in the ground you couldn’t sell your house. You would have to remove it first, and if you removed it and they found any evidence of leakage that was considered hazardous waste – that had to be hold away. So he had come up with a combination of microbes that would be injected into the ground prior to the tanks being dug up a few days ahead of time. And these microbes would actually digest the oil in the ground and then when you dig the tank up there’s no hazardous waste left. It was brilliant. So I got his card and I said, “Stephen, will this stuff work with what I’m doing?” He said, “I have no idea, but why don’t you try it.” So we did. We dried the space out ourselves, we used his product as a spray, we used it on the carpet, we used it as a wipe down. We used it for everything. Now, it wasn’t a big mess. It came in a quarter, maybe a 6 by 6 area, but it was a carpeted space. They told us we’d have to get rid of all that and everything. Bottomline was we spent a couple of days playing around with the stuff. I had somebody come in and test my house and there was no evidence of mold and there was no evidence of bacteria. That actually stayed that way. The only thing we got rid of – there was a wood bookcase that had a particleboard core. So that swelled up a little bit. I got rid of that. Everything else stayed there until about two years ago when we finally re-did the space. I test my house regularly, usually about every six months. Never have had an issue. So, Steve and I got together and we formed the company and we started looking at other alternatives. So we worked on this particular product for mold remediation specifically because at that time they’re a good industry to get into and we expanded it off of that with other cleaning products. We have odor neutralization technologies we developed, we do biogas desulfurization for anaerobic digesters which is to clean the gas up so it can be burned in a generator from plants or using a fuel cell. So what happened was I went back to school at roughly 50 years old for microbiology because I had to know what I was talking about and everything took off from there. I come from a family of scientists. I actually took a wrong turn when I went to college and thought that law looked pretty good. My uncle is a very well-known research chemist in the Boston area. I used to work for him during the summer. As a matter of fact, I had a better chemistry set in my house when I was a teenager than my highschool had. It just thrilled me to death to get back and become a scientist. My daughter is finishing up her PhD in neuroscience. I mean we’re a science type of family. We love what we do because we’re helping people. We’re not breaking things down. We’re just helping people get healthy the best way we can. It took us a couple of years to get the formula perfected and it needed to get through an EPA registration which is not an easy process. You have to prove your efficacy, you have to prove the safety. it really comes down to having a registered product means that the EPA has looked at our data which is generated from third-party laboratories and it matched what we say it does. So, it does what we say it does. It’s the safest we say it is. That’s a big deal. In the mold remediation industry there’s a lot of cowboys out there. We call them “spray and pray.” They go in to somebody’s house with God knows what? I mean they’re gonna tell you, “Oh it’s all natural. It’s safe. Everything’s fine.” But if it’s not EPA registered, there’s no way of verifying that and you just really don’t know what you’re getting. Unfortunately it’s giving the industry a pretty bad rep. With Green Home, I got involved with them 2015. They have an exclusive – mostly the products that I make now. We have a couple of things we do for the industry but most of the products we make. I had been responsible for training their remediators. They all have to get accredited by the American Council for Accredited Certification whose own programs are created by the council of engineering and scientific specialty branch which is the only one like it. There’s a lot of people that have [inaudible 0:08:03.0] after their name in the mold industry, but usually it’s a paid up plaque. You pay them a fee, you answer some questions and you get a certification. ACAC does not offer any kind of training. All they do is they do proctored exams. So it’s really a great way to do it and it puts us ahead of a lot of the other people that are out there and much more reputable. We’re actually getting into a lot more things than just mold. In fact, I’m not sure if you’re aware, but the two most common indoor pollutants are VOCs and particulates. People don’t realize it. There is an article recently in one of the journals where they analyze the air in a home after they had cooked the roast in their oven. It was a gas oven, I think that would probably make a little bit of a difference. The air quality was equal to New Delhi India which is about the 6th most polluted air in the world – off from that roast.   0:09:05.9 Ashley James: Yeah. I believe that. I had a doctor on who wrote the book Dirty Genes and his whole thing is teaching people how to help their body through epigenetics. Because when we’re exposed to different chemicals, it can actually trigger genes to turn on and off – basically genes to be suppressed or expressed themselves. And when we are cooking with gas, when we’re breathing and we don’t have the hood on to suck all the byproduct or the waste of burning gas away from us, it can change our genetics. Because there are chemicals like formaldehyde in the gas that comes to our stove and so people often will turn the oven on and not think to turn the hood on and their whole house is being filled with formaldehyde.   0:10:01.5 David Bloom: Yes. The electric stove still have the issue from the particulates from the cooking process itself, but obviously not from the gas. And while we’re talking about gas, one of the other major pollutants are the pilot lights that are in gas fireplaces. A lot of people still have pilot lights instead of electronic ignition. Those are very inefficient – they way they burn. They let something that’s not used very often. When it’s on it gets complete combustion. You don’t get the same particulate matter, but when it’s not operating and just the pilot light is on – then you’re putting particulates in. And along those same things, the next one that everybody should be avoiding is burning candles. Candles are atrocious for putting particulates into the air, especially paraffin candles. Soy-based candles are better, and if you had to burn a candle and you could keep your wick short under about half an inch – that’s even better. We did a test where we hooked up a sort of like a radon fan in a filtration system. We burn a single candle for 20 minutes, the filter was as black as black could be from that one candle. Nobody realizes it and then you go into somebody’s home and they can’t understand why they don’t feel well and they got 25 candles burning everywhere – not a good idea.   0:11:28.4 Ashley James: Wow. We have one air filter that we keep running in our bedroom. I turn it on a few hours before we go into the bedroom to sleep. I turn it on high and when I walk in there, it is like I’m walking into a fresh forest. The air smells amazing. Not that our house smells bad, but it’s just there’s something totally different about the quality of the air. It smells clean and fresh and it feels different when I walk into our bedroom after having turn the air filter on high and we have it running all night long with us. I just notice a difference. I thought that was really interesting that the rest of our house is so different from this one room that has an air filter in it.   0:12:18.6 David Bloom: I’m guessing you have charcoal filter in that filter also. Activated charcoal is unbelievably good at absorbing some VOCs and gasses. So typically the best combination that I would ever recommend is a HEPA filter with an activated charcoal pre-filter and that will take care of a lot of the pollutants that we would normally see. A HEPA filter is down to .3 microns so you’re getting most anything that could get down deeper, you’re not getting really tiny stuff, but you’re getting a good portion of it.   0:12:51.3 Ashley James: Is Green Home Solutions planning on designing and providing air filters that are effective?   0:13:03.4 David Bloom: Actually we’re in the middle of looking at that now. There’s a lot of them out in the market. There’s a big discrepancy between what the lab results on a lot of these filters are versus what you actually get in real life. In fact, Wire Cutter which is a division of the New York Times published an article just recently where they did real life experiences with a bunch of different air filters and made some strong recommendations. There’s some really good ones. So we’re not necessarily to re-invent, we’re looking to see if we can find the one that does what we want. If we had to, we will. But I think we’re gonna find a manufactured product that we can recommend based on the design and how it works.   0:13:43.8 Ashley James: Very cool.   0:13:46.1 David Bloom: But I would recommend that article for your listeners.   0:13:48.5 Ashley James: Great. I will make sure that we link it. Is there a particular brand that you have in your home right now that you like?   0:13:56.4 David Bloom: No. [Laughter]   0:13:59.1 Ashley James: The jury is still out?   0:14:01.0 David Bloom: I actually have a commercial unit that I was still learning remediation business for a number of years before I decided I didn’t wanna do the work anymore and just make the stuff that other people use and train people how to do it. So I’ve got air scrubbers that will move anywhere between 500 and 2000 cubic feet of air per minute.   0:14:19.7 Ashley James: I bet your house smells amazing.   0:14:22.0 David Bloom: Well, we’ve got dogs and cats. So, got to take that into consideration. But I’ll run those periodically for a couple of hours especially if we’re not home during the day, I’ll let it run. I have activated carbon pre-filters on those also. So that’s what I do use. Getting back to the VOCs, what a lot of people don’t realize, I mean formaldehyde is bigger. Formaldehyde can come from building materials, particle boards, new carpet smells – typically formaldehyde. But most of the VOCs that we find when we test homes are actually from personal care and cleaning products. So the typical house if you open a cabinet under the sink is just a zestful of VOC producing chemicals and people don’t realize that that could be affecting your health in the home. Personal care products – I had a client that I was visiting and she was undergoing chemotherapy. She thought she had mold in the house and it tested negative for that. So we looked for bacteria, we didn’t find anything. So we did the VOC test and there was some sort of a funny smell and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it when I was in there. So when the test results came back, she had two major sources – one was under her sink and the other was she had a perfume that she would put on when people are coming over. It was a very light scent, it had a perfumey type of smell but I didn’t really detect it on her, but that was putting a tremendous amount of VOCs into the air. And so here she is sitting getting chemotherapy but she is making herself ill. So once we got her to change, things got better of course. The other thing that people don’t realize is when they store – if you have an attached garage and you store chemicals, pesticides, gasoline. All of those things can generate gasses that then can get sucked in to the house. Most homes are under a slight negative pressure. Ideally we’d have them under positive pressure, but most are under negative pressure and that comes back to what’s called the [inaudible 0:16:42.0]. Assuming you’re in the basement or crawlspace, air will flow from that cooler space below all the way up through the attic. One of the things just on a side note is if I walked into somebody’s attic and I see that they’ve got mold there, the first thing I would look for is a wet base in their crawl space because that’s typically where it comes from. Second would be lack of ventilation.   0:17:07.0 Ashley James: So an attic can have mold because there’s like a leak in some other part of the house but that the moisture is travelling upwards into the attic.   0:17:17.0 David Bloom: That’s correct. So if moisture generates below is always gonna go up and you reach middle pressure, somewhere towards the top of the house and then you get a little bit of negative pressure in the attic. So it is all going in that one flow. It’s a very common known issue. Nowadays they typically try to air seal attics from the rest of the house so that you don’t get anything going up and then if you can condition your house to take care of that moisture, you’re fine. But here in New England we typically all have basements here, but if you don’t have a dehumidifier in your basement, you’re gonna have a mold issue. Because in the summer time it gets very hot and humid and you get a tremendous amount of moisture because that cooler space down below, you get hot air infiltrating into the house reaches that cools space and you get moisture. Ventilated crawl spaces are a big issue. Same thing, you have hot humid air coming in, it gets the cooler surface of the dirt or the floor in the crawl space and it condenses and you end up with a moisture problem. In fact some people would fans in there because they think if they move more air through their crawl space it makes sense, but the reality is you’re really just bringing in more moisture and allowing it to condense. So I’d like to say, seal the crawl spaces.   0:18:45.1 Ashley James: Oh okay. I was gonna say what the solution? So the solution is to seal them.   0:18:48.1 David Bloom: Yeah. That’s the best thing you can do. Seal it. If you don’t have combustion appliances in the crawl space then we would actually recommend sealing the entire thing. You should probably put a dehumidifier in there, but you’d seal between the crawl space and the living space and obviously you’re gonna seal between the outside and the crawl space itself in the ground. If you do have combustion appliances, you have to be careful because those typically require either a draft for the gas to get up the chimney plus the air for combustion. So there you have to have some alternative ways to doing it. Modern day furnaces, condensing furnaces, gas units have their own air supply. For other types of units – oil; here they do something where they bring in we call a fan in a can, but it’s a little fan that turns on when your furnace turns on. So it has enough air for combustion. But sealing them up is one of the best things they could do. It improves the whole indoor air quality of the house.   0:19:50.4 Ashley James: So Green Home Solutions franchises. So you teach, you’re one of the main educators at Green Home Solutions and you teach these franchisees how to do these things and I know they go through extensive education with you. Do you teach them how to detect these kinds of problems? Sort of beyond mold, but looking at what should be – like where the VOCs and particulates are coming from, what should be sealed off, is this something that if one of our listeners called Green Home Solutions and have one of their local people come out to their house they could inspect this and see if they could find these problems?   0:20:35.4 David Bloom: Yes. We spend several days just teaching building sciences. So we teach them about proper construction techniques to manage moisture so that when they go to look at a property and if it doesn’t look like they way it’s supposed to look, you know you’ve got a potential issue there. As far as testing for these, we’re just really getting into it. I’ve been doing it for a while. I’ve got several franchisees that are preferably qualified and we’re slowly getting everybody. So originally we go in and test for mold. If that came back negative, then we’re sort of out of luck because we’re not helping anybody. We just tell them they don’t have mold issue, they have some other issue. And actually mold is really isn’t the problem. Mold is a symptom of a problem. Moisture is the issue. So mold is just a symptom of a moisture problem. That’s why we spend so much time at the building sciences is because they have to be able to identify where the source of moisture is coming from. And we do that, we use thermal imaging, moisture meters, we have[ inaudible  0:21:40.9] so they can look inside walls. We have a number of tools available to help us do these inspections, but there’s really no substitute for your eyes and your nose actually – of just looking around. We can test for molds, we’ll test for bacteria, we can test for VOCs, formaldehyde – we test for separately because it doesn’t always show up on a standard VOC test. If there were spray foam insulation, we’ll do a different type of aldehyde test. Spray foam – if it isn’t put in perfectly, it can off-gas and the half-life is like 50 years. It never goes away.   0:22:16.7 Ashley James: Oh my gosh. I know so many people who thought they were really smart to use spray foam for insulation. They do it themselves.   0:22:24.3 David Bloom: I used to recommend it. I don’t any longer. Although in some situations it’s okay, and if they’re doing it themselves and they’re using a single-part system, that’s okay too. But when it’s done professionally, there’s two separate components to it that get mixed together, and if everything is not perfect it doesn’t cure properly and then it has the potential to off-gas for an extended period of time. But in some areas you have to do it, we talked to some people up in Boston that had bought a new condo and they’re renovating it and they only had about nine inches of sealing space, but Boston requires an R60 I think it was for insulation in the roof. The only way you can get that level is with spray foam. So if it’s done properly – somebody described it to me as this, somebody smarter than I. He said it’s like playing Russian Roulette with a revolver that’s got 50 chambers. 49 out of 50 times it’s gonna be fine, but when it’s not, it’s catastrophic. I did several spray foam insulation remediation projects or managed them a few years back and I couldn’t do it anymore.It was just awful. The first one, we literally cut the roof off the people’s house. Cut it off where the rafters meet the ceiling bush. Take it with a crane, we built them a new roof. Second one I did, they tore the house down because there’s no way to fix it. If it’s a mild issue, you can bring in more fresh air. I did one where we put in something that brought in an extra 7,000 cubic feet of fresh air, conditioned it and it kept the house in a positive pressure so it held the gas in the wall. That’s why positive pressure is always good. When you end up at negative pressure you can suck pollutants in places you didn’t even know you had.   0:24:23.3 Ashley James: I need to unpack that. My mind is about to explode. So many people have homes that have this spray foam. Maybe they moved in to a house and someone else had done the spray foam and they’re sitting here going, “Oh my gosh I have spray foam in my attic. I have no idea whether my house is positive or negative.” Or whether the draft is coming down from the attic and I don’t know whether it’s off-gassing. Can we talk a bit about what are the symptoms, what’s the harm in having the spray foam off-gas for 50 years to our whole family in our house?   0:24:58.7 David Bloom: If it’s off-gassing, that’s a big if. Like I said 49 out of 50 times it’s probably just fine. If it’s off-gassing, there’s usually a little bit of an odor that you detect, but not everybody is sensitive to it. That first house I mentioned where we took the roof off, the two other people that live there had no symptoms at all and one of them is actually one of their children couldn’t stay there. He just would get headaches, migraines, he’d feel awful and as soon as he left the house he felt better. So obviously there’s some sort of a correlation there. Now, if somebody wanted to check and see if it’s cured properly, you could actually cut a little sample out. Put it in a mason jar and set it out in the sun for a little bit, then open it up and take up and take a big whiff. If it has sort of a sweet fishy smell, that would be an aldehyde – one of the gasses that’s pretty common that’s not right. Formaldehyde is an aldehyde. There are other aldehydes – glutaraldehyde, formaldehyde, but they’re aldehydes. Often you have acetic acid which is like a vinegary kind of smell. This is not a scientific test by any way, but it is simple that somebody could do. To do it properly you would have to have sorbent tubes in a pump it runs for about 24 hours and that then gets analyzed specifically for gasses that could be present in spray foam. There’s not a lot of places that do that. In fact, I’m only aware of one laboratory that does that kind of analysis specifically for spray foam. There’s a lot of really good labs that can test for various VOCs, but they have a very nice panel of all the potential gasses that could come out of spray foam insulation.   0:26:59.9 Ashley James: We didn’t define VOCs. So for those who don’t know what VOCs are, can you just define it and explain why they’re harmful?   0:27:10.4 David Bloom: VOCs are Volatile Organic Compounds. They’re essentially gasses that are given off by various organics through their life cycle so to speak. Now, a lot of them will off-gas fairly quickly and dissipate quite quick. We had new carpet put in as I mentioned when I redid my basement living space not long ago and that stunk. It was awful and I have a way of getting rid of it, but I wanted to see how long it would take to actually dissipate on its own using. We weren’t using the space, so I figured it would fine. And it took almost four weeks before it completely off-gassed. So it’s just such an off-gassing from a chemical compound. It usually gets more intense when it’s heated. So that actually is one of the methods of trying to get rid of VOCs in the house. You could turn your heat up as high as it’ll go. Let it run that way for eight or nine hours and then ventilate the heck out of it. So the idea is to get as much of that gas you can into the air and then get it out of the house.   0:28:21.8 Ashley James: And don’t stay in the house while it’s happening. [Laughter]   0:28:26.0 David Bloom: No, because you’re gonna put more of it into the air. The other thing that people forget about is just open your windows. I mean this is gonna sound silly but I tell people this all the time. Dilution can be the solution for pollution. Just diluting that air, so the concentration now is lower makes a big difference. And as houses get build tighter and tighter and tighter for energy efficiency, if there’s not enough fresh air make-up, you’re carbon dioxide levels go way up because as humans are exhaling a lot of carbon dioxide. The moisture levels go up because we as humans have a lot of moisture and it’s got nowhere to go which is also why we see more instances of mold growth nowadays than we did in the older homes.   0:29:16.9 Ashley James: Right.   0:29:18.3 David Bloom: My first house I bought was built in 1865 I think. It leaked like a sieve but I never had a mold issue because it could breathe. It had the ability to dry if it got wet. It could dry to the exterior. It could dry to the interior. Now, when we build these things so tight, there’s no ability for them to breath. So there are units that are either energy recovery ventilators or heat recovery ventilators – ERVs or HRVs. Those are pretty standard issue today in modern homes. What they do is they take and equal amount of outdoor air and exit an equal amount of indoor air. So you always have some fresh air coming in. The problem I see is they don’t seem to be enough in a lot of cases. The house is really tight but just not enough of it, and it needs to be increases. There are ways to doing that, but as I mentioned open your windows and take a deep breath. Now, granted you’re exposed to a lot more mold outside than you are inside normally, but getting that air diluted especially for any of these other things we’re talking about particular to VOCs – let’s dilute it and make it not such a big deal. Getting back to the things that we test for, we can also test for settled allergen. We’ll take a dust sample and have it analyzed for pet dander, dog and cat dander, dust mite matter, rodent excrement – there’s a lot of things they can look for and they can actually look for actual particles too. I had an instance where an old woman wasn’t feeling well in her home and she said that she’s had an abnormal amount of dust lately. We had the dust analyzed and it was silica. So I took a drive around, in about a mile away from her home, there was a place that they were demolishing a building and they were generating a lot of silica dust and that was carrying into her home and that’s what was causing the issue. So it really becomes sort of an investigation. It’s a lot of fun actually. The other thing too is radon – is the second leading cause of lung cancer after cigarettes in this country. People would test for radon when they buy their home and never think of it again. it really should be tested every three or four years. It’s a simple test, non-invasive. And your water should be tested on a regular basis, especially if you’re on a well system.   0:31:59.3 Ashley James: Oh absolutely. I want to talk about the radon for second. What in the home could generate radon?   0:32:05.9 David Bloom: Radon is a naturally occurring gas from the ground. It comes from rocks similar to uranium actually. It’s naturally occurring. It’s much stronger in certain parts of the country. The northeast has pretty high radon because we have a lot of rock and that tends to be where it is coming from.   0:32:29.0 Ashley James: Because of the bedrock, the Precambrian Shield, I think it’s what’s called.   0:32:34.1 David Bloom: Yeah. Other parts of the country, it’s not nearly as big of a deal, but certain parts on the East Coast is pretty good. Getting down south, we don’t see it as much because the sand is more sandier and it’s not anywhere near as much rock. But the EPA has a map on their website that shows where the highest instances of radon are. I would certainly recommend to your listeners that they take a look at that and if they’re in one of the red areas, get it checked if you hadn’t done it in a couple of years. It’s odorless, colorless gas. you’ll never know if you have it.   0:33:09.5 Ashley James: But it can cause lung cancer.   0:33:12.4 David Bloom: It can cause lung cancer.   0:33:13.4 Ashley James: Very interesting. Yeah because we’re always thinking that these things in our home might be from like you said, carpet or a mattress off-gassing, or mold – but we don’t think that something totally natural coming from the ground would be harmful. So remember to test radon. It can shift, so when you first buy your home radon might not be present, but five years in the future it could start happening. Like shifts in the earth and then it just starts off-gassing?   0:33:48.3 David Bloom: A construction project can do it. Our well water has always been perfect. I was in a fairly rural area. They were building a new house maybe a quarter mile from me on my street and all of a sudden I started getting iron in my water and it came from the construction that they were doing and when they had a blast because again, we have so much bedrock – they had a blast to actually get their well dug drilled, it disturbed the aquifer and all of a sudden it started with a relatively high iron content. We had to put a fairly sophisticated filter system to take care of that.   0:34:36.2 Ashley James: I just had the exact same thing happened. We’re on a well and we’ve been living here for five years, the water has been perfect. We were joking about bottling it in glass bottles and selling it to Europe or something. I mean it’s just like the best water. We have friends come from all around to bottle out water and take it home with them and all of a sudden our water become murky, it taste like heavy metal, it taste very metallic and it had an odor to it. Out of nowhere, just one day it’s fine next day it’s not and we got a water filter, but we’re waiting back from the lab right now. They said it will take like 10 days because they’re testing all these things. It feels like it’s taking a million years to get these results back because I wanna know with our water. Is it even safe to bathe in it. We were like bathing in a friend’s house. But yeah, that made me realize that I hadn’t actually had our well water tested since our son was born because we had it tested to see if the nitrates were high – that’s one thing because we had to substitute with some formula and I didn’t wanna make the formula with water that’s high in nitrates because it can cause blue baby syndrome. For adults too, it makes our red blood cell not be able to carry oxygen, and so people can feel really lethargic and sort of just down if their drinking well water that’s high in nitrates, and most filters cannot filter out nitrates. I discovered this, that most filters in the market – you have to get a specific filter that filters nitrates. So really being careful if we have a well and making sure that we test our water every year is really important. Time just flew by and I’m like, “Oh my gosh. What are we doing to drink this water that we don’t test every year.” So yeah, being really careful testing for radon every few years. if you have a well, most people don’t, but if you do – get that water tested. You mentioned that one of the things that your franchisees do with Green home solutions is test the home for bacteria. Why test the home for bacteria? Is bacteria growing inside the home?   0:37:08.7 David Bloom: bacteria is growing everywhere. There’s a book by a guy named Rob Dunn called “Never Home Alone” and it’s about the microbial bio [inaudible 0:37:17.2] all the time. It’s creepy, but it exists. We need them. Most of the bacteria is healthy and it’s fine, but we just don’t need bacteria. So when I was back there before I got involved with Green Home, we found a number of instances where we would test for mold and it would come back negative. So we would test for airborne bacteria levels and if those were elevated, we would take care of it in the same way because the product works equally as well in bacteria as it does in mold. Bacteria is actually much easier to get rid off. Bacteria just have a single cell wall whereas mold spores can have two or three membranes you have to get through before you can get to the nucleus, and I’ll get into that in a minute. So airborne bacteria levels which a lot people take slobs on the surface. It’s [inaudible 0:38:08.3] bacteria when it should in most cases. But elevated airborne bacteria levels sometimes could be an issue. It’s not as common, we don’t do airborne bacteria very often but it is a test that’s available. Now, for surface – one of the things we do we’re using something that’s out of the food service industry which is called and ATP test. This is used to determine cleanliness. ATP is a particular enzyme that is present in all organic matter, and this is an instant test. We do it with a meter and a slob. I can take samples in numerous locations around the house ad if the levels are elevated, I don’t necessarily know that it’s bacteria, but it does indicate a general level of uncleanliness I guess, which could easily be bacteria. It could be peanut butter for all I know, but there’s something. So it’s just an overall level of cleanliness, but if you have a clean home you typically don’t have much of these other issues with bacteria that you don’t want in particular.   0:39:23.4 Ashley James: So when you met Steve at the Atlanta airport, I think that’s such divine intervention to have the two of you meet with your love of science and that problem that you had in your home. Did you look back at your life and see how, it’s sort of like all the stars were aligned. You had to have that bad thing happened to you in your home in order to be intrigued. So when you met Steve you had this problem to solve and then that led you to want to solve this problem for other people.   0:39:54.6 David Bloom: Yes. That was life-changing for me. I switched careers. I was a small business owner for a number of years. I completely switched careers in the middle of my life and I just fell in love with the fact that I was able to help people. I like the fact that Green Home being a relatively new company, a lot of people that I work with are half my age which is terrific. I love it. And I love sort of getting the next generation involved in the same kind of work. I’ve never been happier. I can’t imagine why I would ever want to retire. I love what I’m doing.   0:40:41.8 Ashley James: Yes. That’s exactly it. You know you’re doing what you should do when you don’t wanna retire. Like when I interviewed Dr. Esselstyn, he’s in his 80s. I think he’s 87, and he still is an active cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic and he still takes phone calls. If you call him up, he’ll answer the phone. He talks to people all day long for free. He’s amazing. but he’s the kind of person that he’s gonna be like 110 years old and he’s still gonna be a cardiologist helping people. So, when you find your life’s calling, you find your purpose in life, you do it for free – you know when you absolutely love what you do, especially when it comes to helping people. David, I know you’re passionate about what you do, but you’re also really helping people. You’re helping the business owners, those who choose to be a franchisee of Green Home Solutions – you’re helping them to help other people and then ultimately you’re helping all these homeowners through what you’re doing as the Chief Science Officer at Green Home Solutions. When you met Steve and he talked about this enzyme that he created to breakdown the oil, how did you figure out that it could also be effective at basically destroying and demolishing mold? Can you take us back to that moment, that conversation you were first having with Steve, was it a light bulb moment? How did you come to that conclusion?   0:42:19.2 David Bloom: It’s actually by chance because I’d met him and learned a little bit about what he was doing with the oil stuff. So I had enzymes in my brain to start with, and when you look at what enzymes do, enzymes can either break things apart or they can build things up. We have about 3,000 different kind of enzymes in our bodies. We would not be alive without them, because what they do is the speed up the reactions that are required to keep us alive, and the reactions wouldn’t occur fast enough without them. They are in our RNA and DNA and various enzymes in there. They’re in almost everything. So when he was talking about using the enzymes to essentially digest the oil molecules I said, “Why couldn’t we do this…” And then of course when I tried it, we had no idea whether it would do anything or not. It did actually worked pretty good. Not as good as what we have now, but it did work pretty good. The concept of breaking something down by using itself so to speak, so the enzymes that are present in our mold product are actually from molds. They are harvested from other molds. So molds have a very very strong protective mechanism and they have these things we call acceptors that open and close. They are like channels that allow material to get in. That’s how they get their food, energy, and moisture. When they come in contact with something that’s foreign, they typically sort of like close up and don’t allow anything to enter. When we attack the mold spore with our product, it’s like a homecoming and they welcome it with open arms. So it actually gets in and destroy the mold spores from the inside out.   0:44:10.8 Ashley James: That’s so cool.   0:44:12.9 David Bloom: And then the enzymes themselves are specific types to breakdown various parts of the mold spores. So there would be one type that would go after the membranes, one type that goes after the fatty lipid layer between the membranes. The nucleus is typically a protein, so we use a protease which breaks the bond. Proteins are just strings of amino acids held together by a peptide bond. By breaking the protease, it breaks that bond and actually digest it. So all that’s left is amino acids, and typically when most people have a reaction to molds, your typical reaction – I’m not talking about people that have very serious diseases, but just your typical sort of sinus type reactions. That’s a reaction to the proteins. So by breaking down the protein’s amino acids – there’s no protein, there’s no allergy. So mold is essentially a histamine, that’s why if you get a cold or a stuffy head, you’re gonna take an antihistamine to try to get rid of that. So molds has the same symptoms as histamine, that’s the trigger. So by breaking down the components so that you don’t have an allergen left makes all the difference in the world.   0:45:23.6 Ashley James: Does inhaling mold or mold spores increase histamine in the body?   0:45:30.5 David Bloom: I don’t know, to be honest. I’m not a medical professional. That would be a question sure I could find out. It’s just nobody asked me that question before. [Laughter]   0:45:45.3 Ashley James: If in itself is a histamine, is it as we’re inhaling it, is it the same as our own histamines? I know our bodies react to it. It is like breathing in pollen and their histamine levels go up. Or someone eating a food they’re allergic to and their histamine levels go up or even under stress our histamine levels go up.   0:46:08.2 David Bloom: I would assume it’s the same kind of trigger.   0:46:10.7 Ashley James: This is so fascinating. One thing that was explained to me – I had a health coach on the show and she’s the one that introduced me to you guys, and it was life changing for her to have find your company. She bought a home with her family in California and for six months she could not live in their new home. She had to live at a tent in the backyard because she was sick everytime she went into their new home, because it had mold. And they finally found your company and so they went in and they sprayed everything. And she said it was like a miracle, she was able to live in their home after that. She’s had a lot of her clients use the Green Home Solutions services very successfully. When I interviewed her she told me about it, because at the time I was telling her about my immune system was shot and I didn’t know why because I eat super healthy, I have a really healthy lifestyle, like what’s going on. And something that you wrote to me that basically health requires three things; it requires that we take into account – lifestyle, genetics, and our environment. She pointed out that my environment probably had mold in it and told me about you guys. How she explained how it works – she basically said a lot of companies will say they’re mold remediators and they go ahead and just use something like bleach which just kills the molds but does not get rid of the mold spores. So even though it’s “dead” is actually now more toxic because now it releases these mold spores and it can still harm your body. Is that an accurate description? Like if I went to Home Depot and bought some kind of natural mold remediator or bleach which is so common. I’ve heard landlords use bleach all the time. The different between those chemicals and the enzymes that you use, can you explain the difference?   0:48:22.5 David Bloom: Sure. It’s actually pretty simple. Most of those products – a lot of them are oxidizers, and oxidizers can work a couple of different ways. An oxidizer can literally shake a molecule to break it apart and then essentially the guts leak out, it’s dead, but you still have the residual. Others are DNA disruptors – they actually don’t kill the spore, they just make it so it can’t reproduce. So you still have the spore left, it’s still intact and could still trigger an allergic reaction which is the most common response. Bleach is a really good example of this. If you have mold on a wall in our home, the roots of the molds are into the paper. What you see on the surface is topical. So bleach let’s say it reacts with that mold. It’s what we call a stoichiometric reaction, it’s a one on one reaction and all the energy in that chemical is consumed instantly. It’s used up instantly. So even if it kills the mold on the surface, the byproduct of that reaction is water, and water is now gonna feed the roots that are still in the wall. So that’s why, often when people use bleach – it looks like they got rid of it for a short period of time, but it comes back because they actually fed the roots. Enzymes on the other hand are catalyst. So a catalyst enables a reaction to occur but it’s not consumed in the reaction, so it will continue working as long as there’s something for it to work on. The best analogy I can give you is men’s facial hair. If I were to shave, that’s sort of like using a bleach. if I would have laser hair removal, that’s using our product.   0:50:10.0 Ashley James: Because you’re getting the root.   0:50:13.9 David Bloom:  We’re getting the root. That’s what makes the difference.   0:50:15.0 Ashley James: It’s so fascinating.   0:50:17.1 David Bloom: It’s not an exact salience, but there is some evidence that molds, when it’s killed or reactions occur – some molds can give off toxins, they’re known as mycotoxins which can be harmful. The problem is that not all molds produce mycotoxins and even the ones that do, don’t do it all the time and there’s no real easy way to measure for them. A lot of people will test for mycotoxins in their urine, but I would challenge that everyone of us has evidence of mycotoxins in our urine because it’s on our foods. If you are to open your refrigerator door and close it because you had somebody take an air sample for mold, you would dramatically skew those results even though you have no visible mold in your refrigerator. Trust me, there’s mold on your food. So that’s where it comes from. So, it makes it a little bit difficult. Going back to your air filtration – activated carbon is pretty good at working with mycotoxins. So that’s why I talk about activated carbon a lot. You can even buy these bags now that you just sit out and they absorb some odors and things like that. That kind of stuff could be helpful for someone. The other thing that we found when we started working with doctors, and that’s where that whole three-part thing was. It was to try to convince a doctor that, “Look, if you’re looking at genetics lifestyle and environment, if we can take your environment on the picture, even if it’s not the problem, at least we eliminated one leg. Now, it makes it easier for you to do your diagnosis.” Several of the doctors we worked with did discover a correlation between a treatment for lyme disease and moldy homes. So what they’re trying to use the normal treatments they would do for lyme weren’t working on a number of their patients. When we got them to look at the environment then we cleaned up the environment, all of a sudden they started responding to their treatment.   0:52:37.7 Ashley James: Yes. So What kind of things were common? Did you find that everyone that had lyme also had mold in their home? Or was there some kind of commonality?   0:52:47.6 David Bloom: The commonality for us was the particular practice that started us on this path because they had a lot of lyme patients, and they were trying to figure out what could it be, why are these people not reacting. The commonality was the fact that had mold in their homes.   0:53:03.4 Ashley James: Ok. That’s what I meant. So, you had all these lyme patients given to you by this practice and you went into their homes and all of them had mold in their homes?   0:53:11.7 David Bloom: All the ones that weren’t reacting to the treatment. Yes.   0:53:16.3 Ashley James: That’s what I meant.   0:53:17.9 David Bloom: Yeah.   0:53:18.5 Ashley James: So all the lyme patients who weren’t reacting to the treatment, all of them had mold in their homes.   0:53:23.5 David Bloom: That’s correct.   0:53:24.2 Ashley James: And when the mold was removed all of them started responding to the treatment?   0:53:29.7 David Bloom: I can’t say that every single one is good because I didn’t know.   0:53:36.1 Ashley James: You didn’t stick around to follow up with the doctor.   0:53:38.6 David Bloom: Yeah. I didn’t stick around to follow up long enough, but this particular practice in Virginia have us referred to patients. And that has actually spread, so we’ve made some really strong inroads. And that what’s made us get into all those additional testing things because we’re gonna look at the environment home, we decided that mold is one piece of the puzzle, but look at all of these other potentials. The downside is lab fees can add up quickly. So when we go in to look at a home, we wanna know what we’re looking for. I don’t wanna just go in and test. I want to get a hypothesis and device a testing strategy that will either prove or disprove that hypothesis. So often, we’ll do a couple of basic test first to rule out the most obvious and then. it gets a little bit more detailed if that’s not the answer. And I have to admit, there are some times when we’ve been stumped. I have one of Green Home franchisees not far from me has a particular client that we just can’t figure it out. I’ve done a fair amount of testing and all kinds of different things. His doctors don’t have any clue. Occasionally there is some syndrome and for the life of me I can’t remember where your brain gets wired a little bit differently. It’s not a hypochondriac because the symptoms are real, but they’re caused by the brain not necessarily by an external force. There is an actual name for it. I just can’t recall what it was. There’s other people out there that do mold remediation in a number of different ways. The old way was just what we call “Bash and Trash.” You go in, you just physically remove everything. Now, we do follow IICRC S520 standards – that’s the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration certification. They came up with a guideline on basic standards. So they have five specific principles that we follow as part of what we do. So to say that we don’t remove building materials would be a missed number, we do. We just try to preserve as much as possible because of our method. We’re typically able to preserve more which makes it a more economical project instead of just going in and just ripping everything out and putting it all back together. So there’s a lot of that going on there. We had a client that I got a wonderful letter from just recently where she was in the Atlanta area and they found mold in her home and her doctor told her she had to leave the house and get rid of all her possessions and she did. She moved into an apartment. She had Green Home test the apartment, it had mold. So then, they said, “Well, we gotta get out of here.” So they looked at four or five different other places and they all had mold. It’s in the south, it’s humid, it’s hot, there’s mold. So, when I talked to her I said, “Look, why don’t you let us see if we can get you back into your home. There’s a number of things that we can do and if it doesn’t work, don’t pay.”   0:57:11.7 Ashley James: That’s nice.   0:57:11.9 David Bloom: Let’s give it a shot. So we did. We went it. We treated it for mold. We have a device that uses a very low level of hydrogen peroxide but yet gets a 99.999% kill. Which is a lot of reduction on bacteria. And we did that in a couple of areas that were problematic just sort of her insurance and I believe you are aware that we also have this probiotic treatment. We put that back in there. They moved back into the house and she said it was like the place is brand new. So the letter I got said that I saved her marriage, I saved her life, I saved her kids happiness, I saved their dog. It’s just crazy but we got her back into her own house because all the properties are gonna have an issue, let’s just fix the one we’ve got. But I fear that happening time and time again. I was meeting with a doctor in Peabody Massachusetts who had a client that had just built a $5 million dream home on a lake and the same thing, whoever her prior doctor was told her, “You’re house is killing you. You gotta leave.” She got out of the house, went somewhere else and she didn’t get any better. So it wasn’t necessarily the home and that’s what we try to avoid. There is a lot of testing that’s being done now called ERMI – Environmental Relative Moldiness Index. ERMI was developed in early 2000 to be used as a research tool to see if there was any correlation between water-damaged properties in the Detroit area and childhood asthma. So they came up with. It’s actually PCR testing which is measuring DNA. So it had a very specific design. We took a 6 by 3 area in the main living room and we vacuum that with a special attachment for exactly five minutes. We repeated the same thing in the main bedroom. And then it gets analyzed for mold DNA and what they did is they had a list of 36 molds; 26 that were potential water damage indicators and 10 that were typical environmental molds. They subtract the environmental molds from the water damage molds and it come up with a score. What the score shows is sort of a history of that building, that’s why they did it on carpeting. Carpet is designed to hide dirt. So it traps stuff deep down, and that’s how they look clean. So it’s getting that stuff, but you don’t know if it’s something, and as I mentioned mold is a symptom, moisture is the issue. We don’t know if there was a moisture problem in that property 25 years ago or yesterday. So what happens is nowadays there’s a lot of people recommending that particular type of testing and it does serve its purpose. Don’t get me wrong, not that I don’t like it. But they’re making decisions on whether they should remediate or not based on it and they’re not following the test, but most of these are getting advise and take a swiffer cloth and just go pick up some settled dust that are on there. But that’s not how the test was designed, it was never meant to be done that way. So they’re not sampling properly and then they come back with a high score and they’ll spend thousands and thousands of dollars chasing something that doesn’t exist because there is no moisture issue – it’s really at that point housekeeping. Getting rid of all that dust.   1:00:40.9 Ashley James: So just to elaborate on what you said earlier on, mold is a problem. Mold is dangerous for our health, we should not live in a home with mold. But it’s not the root cause, and you don’t chase symptoms. So if you go to an MD with a headache they might chase symptoms and prescribe something instead of asking deeper questions. Where you go to a naturopath, they’re gonna go, “Ok. What’s going on? Let’s find out what the root cause is because a headache is a symptom.” So you’re saying mold in a house is a symptom of a problem. Moisture and looking at whether you need to make the house pressurized, whether you need to ventilate properly, or whether you need to seal off certain areas, but when you solve the root cause and of course take care of the mold. You solve the root cause, the mold doesn’t come back.   1:01:35.0 David Bloom: Correct.   1:01:37.3 Ashley James: So if other companies test incorrectly, they could be testing for a mold problem that no longer exist and then paying thousands of dollars to treat something that’s not there.   1:01:50.3 David Bloom: Correct.   1:01:51.7 Ashley James: Got it.   1:01:51.8 David Bloom: So the Inspector General of EPA came out with a position statement a couple of years ago and said exactly that, that this was designed solely as a research tool. It was never intended to be used to determine whether a property needed remediation nor should it be used to determine if remediation was done properly. One of the more interesting things thought, if you look at the numbers – so if I had an individual that was mold sensitive, I would think the overall mold exposure is gonna be very important. We wanna limit that as much as we can. Let’s say you had a very small amount of the water damage indicator molds, but you had a ton of environmental molds, you’re overall exposure would be quite high, but your ERMI score is gonna be very low and vice versa if it’s true. So if you really cleaned the place well so that there’s absolute, almost none of the environmental molds but there’s a couple of fragments of the other ones, you can have high ERMI score because there’s nothing to subtract from it. So, when we see people using ERMI to confirm remediation, typically they’ve got to wait 30 to 45 days to let that house settle down and equalize and then ERMI is where it comes down. But instead they’ll spend, again they sometimes get into that trap of spending thousands and thousands of dollars. It kills me when I see that happen. One of more interesting things thought, if you look at the numbers – so if I had an individual that was mold sensitive, I would think the overall mold exposure is gonna be very important. We wanna limit that as much as we can. Let’s say you had a very small amount of the water damage indicator molds, but you had a ton of environmental molds, you’re overall exposure would be quite high, but your ERMI score is gonna be very low and vice versa if it’s true. So if you really cleaned the place well so that there’s absolute, almost none of the environmental molds but there’s a couple of fragments of the other ones, you can have high ERMI score because there’s nothing to subtract from it. So, when we see people using ERMI to confirm remediation, typically they’ve got to wait 30 to 45 days to let that house settle down and equalize and then ERMI is where it comes down. But instead they’ll spend, again they sometimes get into that trap of spending thousands and thousands of dollars. It kills me when I see that happen.   1:03:25.5 Ashley James: Thank you for warning us about that. I know that Green Home Solutions is in a lot of places, but it’s not everywhere. So if someone’s in an area where Green Home Solutions just isn’t there and they have to use a different company, it’s really good to know to make sure you don’t use the company that uses the ERMI score to test your mold.   1:03:46.8 David Bloom: Again, don’t get me wrong. ERMI does have a place and it could be a very useful tool especially if you’re looking for historical idea of what’s going on in the property. It just shouldn’t be the only thing used to determine if you need remediation. You could get a false positive. Fortunately a lot of the medical community has gotten involved. I mean the idea of having a standardized test is brilliant because the other types of testing for mold, either air sampling or surface sampling – it’s not an exact science. Typically we look to compare suspect areas to non-suspect areas. So if you tell me that you feel okay in the bedroom but you don’t feel good in the living room, I’m gonna sample both and see what the difference is. If it’s not that situation, typically we look and see what the outdoors is, because once you open your windows or your door, you’re gonna start to equalize whatever you have outside. We’re never gonna make the house completely mold-free. What we’re looking for is just to make sure that there’s nothing actively growing in the home.   1:04:49.1 Ashley James: I was about to ask, you mentioned environmental molds versus the sort of the black mold growing in my bathroom. So. environmental molds, maybe someone walks into the house after going for a walk and they don’t take their shoes off and they’re tracking something to the house or our groceries come into the house or a dog walks into the house and the dog tracks in something. So environmental molds are just things that would come from outside from nature?   1:05:19.9 David Bloom: Yes. If you’re sensitive to molds, any kind of mold could bother you potentially, but these are molds that we would commonly see in our everyday life and you don’t even have to bring it in with you, just open the door and you feel that little breeze? Yup, that’s all coming inside. So we can’t escape it, but we try to keep the house as clean as it can and make sure that it’s not actively growing.   1:05:51.4 Ashley James: So environmental mold comes from the outside, it’s not growing, it’s not taking hold of the wood or the drywall and like replicating itself.   1:06:05.0 David Bloom: Well, it could if you had a food source which is complex polysaccharides  – is what they love which is like paper cellulose and a moisture source. So yeah, it could grow. Often you’ll see windows that get condensation, you will see a little bit of black mold all the way around them? That’s actually cladosporium – is the king of leaves and grass. It’s a very common outdoor mold and it’s probably the most common mold there is. That you can just wipe off. It’s coming because your windows have condensation on. You see in southern areas particularly because a lot of times they have metal window frames, you have hot humid weather outdoors so they keep the inside really cold, and that temperature difference will cause condensation. Just like if you take a bottle of water outside in the summer and it starts to sweat, that’s the same reaction. And then you’re getting your typical environmental mold growing on it. A lot of molds are black by the way. When people talk about the black mold, they’re usually talking about a species of stachybotrys chartarum which happens to be a particularly nasty mold to a lot of people. Which brings me to another thing, I just want to mention why mold testing can be valuable. If I got called into a home and there’s some mold growing because the washing machine hose broke two weeks ago. And I look at that with blinders on and got rid of it. I may be doing that client a disservice. If we take samples for examples, and I see that there’s chaetomium  or stachybotrys – those are what we call tertiary molds. So you have three classes of molds essentially; primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary molds will show first after a water event and sometimes it’s fast as 24 to 48 hours. Penicillium is a good example of a primary mold. Secondary molds typically take three or four weeks of that moisture exposure before they grow. And then your tertiary molds can take months. So if I’d look at this damage that occurred two weeks ago but I picked up stachybotrys or I find some stachybotrys, I know that something else is going in that property, it’s been going on for a long time. And I would be doing them a disservice if we don’t try to track down what that long term even was. Often, it’s just chronic high humidity. That’s a big cause of a lot of issues. People just don’t seen to dehumidify. And again, in the southern half, often the air conditioning system weren’t sized properly, so they’ll cool a place down before it gets the chance to fry itself out and that’s the recipe for mold growth. So there’s a lot of things that can contribute to that, but chronic humidity is a big one which is why you see mold in the bathroom. Again, one of the things that’s out of sequence, but we were talking about mold in an attic. In this area, I’m not sure if it’s the same all over the country, a lot of people have pull-down stairways to get up into their attic, and they’re typically located in the hallway, and that hallway is typically pretty close to a bathroom. So, if somebody get out of the shower and let’s assume you have an exhaust fan, not everybody’s fat. Assuming there’s an exhaust fan in the bathroom, they shut it off and leave the door open as soon as they leave. All that moisture is gonna get sucked right up through where that stairway is because they’re not sealed. It’s on top of the attic side that keeps a tight air seal, but sometimes they’re called blankets. There’s a number of different ways of doing that, but the normal thing for a shower is when you take a shower, the door should be closed, the fan should be on, the fan should stay on for about 10 minutes with the door closed after you vacate it. That’s what it takes to get rid of that moisture, but when you open it and release it, now you’re dumping moisture into the house.   1:10:14.1 Ashley James: And it’ll go where the air in the house is pushing. Like you said, into the crawl space, up in the attic, down in the crawl space. It’s gonna push somewhere in that airway.   1:10:28.3 David Bloom: It’s typically gonna go up.   1:10:30.4 Ashley James: It’s gonna go up and push. The hot air rises, cold air falls and so the moisture is gonna go with the hot air up into the attic and create the mold and we’re not looking. So we don’t really know. We’re just experiencing the spores which can really harm our immune system, seriously.   1:10:56.1 David Bloom: One of the other things that is typically is often we’ll see bathroom vents vented into the attic space itself which should always go up to the roof. Or we see multiple vents connected to each other and then they go up. So what happens is when one vent is running and the other isn’t, you’re actually pulling air from one bathroom to the other bathroom as opposed to get rid of it.   1:11:20.8 Ashley James: I interviewed a woman in the last few months who’s a health coach who is in Florida and had to have their home mold remediated and it was a major deal. Apparently it’s only in the bathroom, so they have to seal off the whole house and they said, “Okay. We’ll work on it in the bathroom, but it’s totally sealed off while we’re spraying. You guys just hang out in the living room.” So she’s in her living room with her young kids and it definitely affected her health living in a home with mold, and as she’s sitting there and they’re doing all this work on the bathroom she’s starts smelling the chemicals. So she’s like, “What’s going on?” And she comes in and said, “Hey. I thought you guys sealed this off? Is it okay for us inhaling this? And we’re now inhaling the mold because they are doing construction to remove it.” It turns out how the house was built – the venting for the bathroom went into the living room. It’s the most ridiculous thing. So now they’re sitting there and the first company she hired was just a complete joke – ended up causing them to be exposed to more mold and the chemicals which were not safe. So they breathe them in and they started to feel sick. So they ended up having to get another company to come in and they had to do construction and make proper venting for the bathroom and it was just this whole ordeal, but the first company was so irresponsible with their health. It’s just amazing that a house would be built in Florida where the bathroom would vent into the living room – it’s just beyond me. Just like we have to advocate for our own health, we really need to advocate for ourselves and look into how our home is built whether we’re renting or we own it. We need to know, what’s the ventilation system like, have we had our ducts cleaned properly, do we have mold, let’s test for radon, let’s look at the insulation – make sure it cured properly, let’s test the VOCs and make sure we’re not being exposed to particulates and off-gassing that’s harming us. We need to take our home environment into our own hands. I love that you’ve mentioned that when a family cooks a turkey in the oven, that the pollution inside the home is like being in New Delhi, like breathing in the air of New Delhi. And we are sitting here thinking that, “I live in such a wonderful neighborhood where the air quality is so clean.” Or like, “Here I am living in Washington state where it rains so often and that we always feel like the air is really clean here.” But not inside the house, because these newer homes are designed to be energy efficient, so the more energy efficient the home is, the more it becomes like a balloon where the air is trapped inside and it traps all of these VOCs, particulates, mold. It traps everything inside and so our home air can become toxic over time. I had a woman on the show who said she had this machine, it’s like a little box, and she leaves it in a home for 24 hours. I’m sure you probably heard of them, and then it captures all the VOCs and then she tests it. And she said that she could tell you what brand of cleaners you have in your home. There’s this one Mr. Clean Wipes – because of the specific carcinogenic chemicals that she would see on this list that was captured from the air quality in the home, because she said everything under your sink off-gasses including all your cosmetics. And we think that we’re safe because they’re in a metal container, if it’s a spray – like Lysol or something. “Well, it’s in a metal container. What do you mean?” Or if it’s in a plastic container, we’re safe it’s in a plastic container. But all these things off-gas even through their containers and pollute over time the air we breathe. So we have to look at every single thing and create a home environment that supports our immune system, our overall health. Just like you said with the lyme patients, they were responding to the treatments after the mold was remediated. They weren’t responding to their treatments because they all had mold. I mean, that is right there a big wake up call for people who are listening to the show going, “I’ve tried everything. I don’t know why I’m still sick.” Just like me with catching every cold when I know I eat really healthy. It was because my home environment was destroying my immune system.   1:16:22.2 David Bloom: I’ll tell you an amazing story. I got called into a job where somebody went in and did some mold testing and it came back negative. They guy didn’t believe him. So I went down to take a look at the property. The house was pretty clean. It did have a little bit of an odor to it. The wife has been horribly sick. She swore that they had tons of mold. I went down to the basement and there’s a 6 by 3 shelving rack and it is 5 or 6 shelves. Everyone of the shelves was stocked with Lysol floral scent something. And I said, “What is all these for?” He said, “My wife sprays it everyday, everywhere because she thinks she’s got mold.” But what she was doing was contaminating the environment because there’s a lot of chemicals in propellants – number one, depending on what they’re using. it could be bad for you. Who knows what other additives are there. I mean the active ingredients they have to list, but you don’t know what else is in there. She was using so much of it, that’s what was making her sick, and after she stopped using it, within a week or two she felt fine.   1:17:29.4 Ashley James: Oh my gosh. She thought she had a mold problem and she was causing her health problems with the Lysol.   1:17:38.1 David Bloom: Yup. Too much of a good thing just doesn’t work.   1:17:42.4 Ashley James: We need to be really careful with those chemical cleaners and also really careful with those things that “Kills 99.99% of germs.” It’s like we do actually need, like you said there are beneficial bacteria in our environment and we don’t want to live in a sterile environment. We need to have the good bacteria, the good microbiome. I know everyone in the last 18 years has been talking about the microbiome of the gut. You know, “Eat yogurt because it’s good for your gut.” Or. “Eat fermented food because it’s good for your gut.” And now in the last few years, everyone’s raving about that there’s a microbiome on our skin and on every surface of our body and in so many more areas of our body than we knew and it’s beneficial bacteria. And so, we’re home which I find fascinating also has beneficial bacteria.   Tell us a bit about this device that you guys created to spray, to spread beneficial beneficial bacteria into the home. Why did you guys create it and what are the positive results of it?   1:18:48.1 David Bloom: Actually we can’t take credit for creating it. Environmental probiotics have been around for a while. There is several companies in Europe that have been on to this technology for quite some time. The device is designed to spray every 30 minutes for 20 seconds. Essentially it’s fermented bacillus and what that does is it’s very unfriendly to the bacteria we don’t want and much more friendly to the bacteria that you do want. So the way that it works essentially is, a lot of bacteria is transferred on skin cells. We all shed thousands and thousands of skin cells everyday. If you ever used a facial scrub, part of that uses a keratinase which is a particular enzyme that’s formed when bacillus is fermented. And keratinase is present in our nails, our skin, animal clubs, horns, and things like that. But the keratinase sort of softens up that piece so that it’s not conducive for bad bacteria to attach to, and it’s also slightly acidic which makes it much more unfriendly to bad bacteria while encouraging the growth of good bacteria. So it’s sort of like probiotic and people take probiotics as a supplement. If you’re taking antibiotics, they typically tell you to take a probiotic so that you can keep that balance going as the antibiotics are not selective of what they’re getting rid of. So the idea is just a sort of filling the environment with bacteria that’s not harmful. Bacillus is the same bacteria that if you are a kid playing in the dirt, that’s what you would get that on you, which is one of the other interesting things I have too. If little kids nowadays will spend more time outside and eat a little dirt once in a while, they’d be a lot healthier as when they’re grow up. But they’re just not exposed to it, well certainly like I was or people my generation anyway, and so this is a sort of supplementing that. So it’s not an air purifier – it doesn’t filter anything out. The idea is just to get a healthier biome. Results on that have been pretty good. I have one on my bedroom. I don’t really notice much of a difference, but I also have a 70 pound dog that sleeps between my wife. Wonderful birth control by the way. [Laughter] And we don’t seem to have had any issues. So I’m guessing it’s helping, but a lot of the people that we put it in especially the ones that have had serious mold swear by. The pricing on the units has come down, it’s not as expensive than it used to be. But it’s an interesting concept. Because it doesn’t get rid of any particulates, it’s not a replacement for a good air filter.   1:22:02.6 Ashley James: Yeah, it’s just designed to support the microbiome of the home and discourage bad bacteria, encourage good bacteria. Can you share any of the anecdotal testimonials from using that?   1:22:19.7 David Bloom: Yeah. But one thing I did fail to mention, the one thing that it does do and this is pure review literature on this. There are two particular enzymes on dust mite matter that are very strong allergen triggers. And the bacillus neutralizes those two enzymes. So dust mite matter is a huge allergen trigger. It’s a little bit different bow because mattresses aren’t quite made the same. But years ago, your mattress could gain half of its weight again after 10 years and that was all because of bugs so to speak, from dust mites. So that’s a very very strong environmental trigger and it does definitely negates that along with helping crowd out that bacteria and provide a healthier biome. We had one woman here in Connecticut. She had very severe mold illnesses. We went through the whole situation and we treated her house, we put in the better air units and she was feeling pretty good. Then she would leave and go visit, I don’t know if it was her son or daughter, and say that she just didn’t feel well. So the second time she took the machine with her – it’s only the size of a half loaf of bread. She took the machine with her and she was fine. So is it in her head or did it really make that much of a difference? I can’t answer that, but it seems to work very well for her. The people who have them like them because they have to replace the cartridge every three months. So we certainly would know if they stopped replacing cartridges. They love them. There are some units actually go into an HVAC system and treat the whole house as opposed to the unit but they’re considerably more expensive.   1:24:14.7 Ashley James: My son is allergic to dust mites and it causes him to have asthma. And we again, eat super clean. he doesn’t eat processed foods, no sugar. Like we eat so clean so when he was getting asthma, I’m like what’s going on? He doesn’t have nutrient deficiencies, he eats super healthy, he gets outside, you know everything. His health is perfect and then all of a sudden he was just getting this asthma. And we finally did all these allergy tests and we figured out he was allergic or sensitive to about five different foods that would increase his histamine, but that dust mites was through the roof. Like he was really really allergic to dust mites. So of course, we’re vacuuming like crazy and we have the special dust mite covers on the mattresses and we’re washing all everything really often. I even saw this really cool study where they’re able to kill most of the dust mites, it was something like 96.7% something like that with washing and soaking linens, blankets, and pillows with eucalyptus oil. And we’re just going like gang-busters, washing everything with eucalyptus oil like crazy. And so he doesn’t have his asthma right now, but if he goes to a friend’s house and he plays in their playroom on the floor for half an hour, he comes home and has an asthma attack. So we really noticed that when he is at other people’s homes and they might not vacuum as diligently as we do, he’ll have asthma attacks from being around dust mites for even half an hour. So we’re looking for anything we can do to mitigate dust mights. And what you’re saying is that this device that you have that releases the bacteria healthy microbiome into the bedroom, that it somehow neutralizes dust mites?   1:26:26.4 David Bloom: It neutralizes the two allergenic triggers that dust mites have. The reaction that you have to dust mites is as an allergen and that allergen is caused by I think  it’s an F1 or F2 enzyme – it totally neutralizes that so that you shouldn’t have that allergen. You could also use that in a spray, a personal spray and spray some of it on his clothes before he goes to play somewhere and see if it makes a difference for him.  I don’t know if it would or not honestly, but it might.   1:27:02.1 Ashley James: Or bring the small box, because you said it is very reasonable, I could travel with it to a friend’s home and plug it in their playroom. Does it act that fast or does it take time?   1:27:17.3 David Bloom: No. It takes a little bit of time to build up. When we install these, typically what we’ll do is we’ll actually spray just like we would for mold. We’ll spray all the surfaces with sort of a boost to give it a head start and then it starts working from day one, but otherwise, it can take a week or two before it builds up enough where you would notice a difference.   1:27:40.4 Ashley James: Interesting. And what about the enzyme that Steve brought to you that breaks down mold, and of course he was using it to break down the oil in the soil. Do these enzymes also destroy dust mites or kill them? Do you have any experience with that?   1:28:06.5 David Bloom: No. Again, we’d have to be very careful because when you start to make claims, your product has to be registered for that purpose. So these enzymes are different than the ones that are digesting oil. The concept is the same, but the enzymes are much different. But even if it did, I couldn’t say it does because the registration is not one of the intended uses when we registered the product. So we’ve never actually done that same rigorous amount of testing on bugs as we did with bacteria and molds. We did come up with something for bed bugs that we developed, would have been what’s called the 25 B Exempt Pesticide. 25 Bs were very limited and what you could use for the ingredients is very select list. But if you stay within that list, it doesn’t require a federal registration. Although it typically does in the States, because that’s what we are trying to do – to get something really really safe that would help bed bugs. it worked terrific, but the problem is it didn’t have any walk-over kill. So in other words, if I sprayed at bed bugs, it would kill them. If I sprayed a surface and a bed bug walked over it, the kill rates are very low. So we just couldn’t decide and just forget it about it at that time because it was too difficult.   1:29:36.3 Ashley James: Got it.   1:29:36.7 David Bloom: But that’s the difference. I mean most soaps will work. Because if you spray something in a soap, you’re gonna suffocate it essentially. Or in cases like with ants for example, the way that ant’s circulatory system works – there’s no actual vein system, but it sort of breaks the bond and literally their guts leak out. But a soap could do that because it’s a surfactant. It’s more slippery than water and so by decreasing the surface tension, it can kill bugs. So that’s why people use it on plants for small bugs all the time and they’re pretty harmless.   1:30:18.6 Ashley James: Right. And that’s a natural way to go about it.   1:30:25.1 David Bloom: So that won’t work with dust mites, it would have to be a direct contact. That’s the difference.   1:30:34.2 Ashley James: I just love it. Now what about cat or dog urine. The smell – I’ve heard of people using sprays that have enzymes that break it down. Does Green Home Solutions have a solution that helps to breakdown the smell of cat urine?   1:30:54.6 David Bloom: Yes. Cat urine and tobacco are the two worst odors to try to get rid off. Green Homes’ order technique and it incorporates a product that I made, that is an actual  odor neutralizer. So most of the things you have, air fresheners and things like that mess with the receptors in your nose. So it’s not that the odor necessarily went away, it’s just you can’t smell it anymore. Either that or it substitutes a different fragrance for the fragrance that exited. A lot of times the use of molecule called cyclodextrin which is sort of like a seashell shape and it typically have a lot of solvents in the product and you gotta break it up into small pieces and it gets trapped in that molecule and that molecule would be coated with a masking odor. So again, the odor is still there, you just can’t tell because it’s being masked and it tricks your nose. Neutralization, we actually change the physical characteristics of the odor molecule so it no longer has an odor. Most [inaudible 1:31:58.9] have a charge to it and the product has the opposite charge, it becomes neutral. Once it’s neutral it has no odor. So it works really well. Dog urine is not a problem, dogs are fine. Cat urine though. Cat urine is made up of several different things. Initially when the urine is fresh it’s a bacterial odor. So at that point, anything that’s antibacterial would actually get rid of the odor because you’d kill the bacteria, you’ll get rid of the odor, but it has to be relatively fresh. But when you come into a home that had cats for a long time and it’s old, eventually the urine will form uric acid crystals and uric acid crystals are not water soluble. It takes about 15,000 grams of water to breakdown one gram of uric acid. So that’s where the enzymes come in, but when you do add that water, it actually releases more of the odor. So everytime you try to clean up with something that’s water-based it seems like it’s getting stronger. So enzymes will breakdown that particular odor. But you gotta be able to get to the source and that sometimes is tough because it soaks into things quite deeply. So we have a procedure that takes a number of steps. It’s a little bit time consuming but it’s been proven to work. We do use a little bit of hydrogen peroxide and depending on the situation, I mean if there’s a carpet, the carpet is gonna have to go. Unless you want to keep cleaning the same spot over and over again which would be somewhat labor intensive and too expensive. It really has to go. Because then you can get to see if it got into the sub floor and a lot of times on a real estate job that we do a lot of work with realtors from the house they’re changing hands and the owner will say, “Well my cat only messes this one room.” And then you’ll pull out a black light and you see this orange and greenish blotches everywhere – that’s where all the cat pee is. And if they’re male cats, they spray – you’re talking about going up about two feet on the drywall. Source revealing is the best think you can do. We can neutralize it once we get the source of it. If it’s on concrete in a basement for example, often we can get rid of it but then we have to seal it. Because you’re not gonna necessarily get down far enough into that concrete. Concretes are very porous to be able to pull everything out, but there is a process for it. Tobacco, it’s the same thing. If you are in a room and somebody smoked in the room, we could spray that room to go away instantly. But if somebody has been smoking for 20 years, there is what we call third hand smoke which is everything that builds up on the walls  There are 4,000 different chemical compounds in tobacco smoke. The problem with neutralization technology is the chemistry is different depending on what you’re trying to neutralize. So we came up with a formula that works on most everything. There’s no way I’m gonna cover 4,000 different chemicals, but if the smoke is new, it’s fine. There is a study in [inaudible 1:35:14.0]? they had people smoke in a room for four hours. They measured the gas level. They went back and 10 hours later and measured the gas, then they went back 10 hours after that which is 24 hours later and measured the gas levels. The gas levels were high at the 24 hour period. So that was because everything that got onto the walls was giving back. So in a tobacco remediation, those walls, ceilings, floors, all have to be physically cleaned first. You got to get rid of that source. Again, if I just sprayed it I would neutralize what’s on the surface but eventually whatever is buried in the paper is gonna emanate back up. So you’ve got to clean that all off first and then you treat it and it will work fine. We’ve been very successful. But it’s not as simple as we’d like. But it’s really only those two odors that cause that issue.   1:36:04.2 Ashley James: It’s amazing to think about like if someone buys a home from a smoker, they’re being exposed to 4,000 chemicals that’s off-gassing out of the walls.   1:36:14.4 David Bloom: Yes. They may not all be there but they are going to be exposed to a significant amount.  I’ve gone into homes were the person moved out and the walls were yellow and when all the pictures are gone, you could see that the walls are really white and the difference is dramatic. I mean it looks like there’s a ghost in there because that’s how heavy it got built up.   1:36:41.1 Ashley James: Amazing. I like talking about these different things your company does. I mean obviously removing cat urine is not gonna be sort of life changing to someone who has health issues. But it is the reality of being a homeowner and also being a pet owner and your company can save people a lot of headaches.   1:37:02.4 David Bloom: Yeah.   1:37:03.8 Ashley James: And save money – I like that your company tries to do it the smartest way instead of like, “Ok we have to tear out everything.” You’re gonna do it the smartest way and try to save the homeowner money.   1:37:19.8 David Bloom: 90% of the work that we on those two in particular – cat urine and tobacco, are done because of a real estate transaction. Somebody wants to sell their house, they have an open house, people walk in the door, turn around and walk out if the house smells like smoke – that kind of thing. Most of the time the people that have the cats don’t necessarily realize that there’s an odor and maybe there is. I mean I’ve got cats, I don’t think my house smells. Typically if you’re trying to sell your house, you’re looking to buy a house that has that type of an issue, that’s when we can really make a difference.   1:37:59.7 Ashley James: So a lot of real estate agents use your services?   1:38:04.4 David Bloom: Correct. For a number of reasons, number one – we’re pretty quick. We’re really good at what we do. But because we can preserve most of the building materials or certainly more than conventional remediation, the turnaround is much quicker. So often we can be done in a house in a day, but it really depends on the extent of it. In the northeast, I’d say a good 75% of their real estate work is just attics because they all have problems. The probably 15% is basements and 10% is somewhere else in the house. Our whole goal is to help them preserve their deal, not waste a sale. And they are excellent referral source of course.   1:38:53.3 Ashley James: Speaking of preserving, I know that your company also works with a lot of victims of floods. We’ve had some really crazy floods the last two years. I’m just remembering hurricane Harvey, I had friends in it and their house was so damaged. And so I’m just thinking about the floods we’ve had and are currently having now in the  United States, tell me about how Green Home Solutions helps people who have just had a flood to basically preserve their home.   1:39:36.1 David Bloom: Floods are different and the reason they’re different is the water – when you get rising water like that, you don’t know where it came from, you don’t know what it traveled through. So it’s considered category 3 water. Anytime you have category 3 water, anything that touches has to be physically removed, unless it can be cleaned. So drywall has to go. Normally we can clean drywall and preserve it, but in case of a flood you can’t. Because you can’t be 100% sure that there’s not something in the middle of that drywall that could kill you and you just can’t take that risk. So any kind of rising water, flood waters, sideways rain is considered category 3 water – so if you get a tornado type of thing or you get the wind whipping the rain around sideways, again, you don’t know what that water could have gone through before it reached you. Normally, our work is done with either category 1 or 2 which is category 1 is potable water and category 2 is, I wanna say gray water, but it’s water that isn’t perfect, you wouldn’t wanna drink it, but if you did, you’re not gonna die. Category 3, you could die. So that has to be treated considerably different. Not all of our franchisees do water dry outs. A number of them do, especially the ones on the West Coast and we do have a group in Houston that got started in Harvey. They preserve as much as they can, but you’re gonna lose a lot because you just can’t. It’s not worth the risk in those kind of situations.   1:41:19.2 Ashley James: And so, can you walk us through. Let’s say someone has just gone through a flood, can you walk us through, like what are the steps that Green Home Solution takes to ensure that, that home is gonna be safe to live in.   1:41:34.0 David Bloom: First thing you’re gonna do is you’re gonna get rid of the water – that’s gonna get pumped out. You’re gonna dry everything as fast as you can, because you can dry it quick enough using commercial dehumidifiers, a lot of air movers – you can at least limit any kind of mold growth. And then often if there’s a lot of debris left behind, you have muddy things – there’s a piece of equipment that’s almost like a carpet steam cleaner that it’s made to clean this type of work – to clean all those surfaces off and getting down to where there’s no contaminated materials. Normally you’re gonna have to test it, make sure there’s no bacteria, make sure there’s no mold growth.   1:42:21.8 Ashley James: Is that where you use the ATP device?   1:42:25.5 David Bloom: No. It would that as a screen, but if it came back positive, you would definitely check and make sure it’s bacteria. You’d wanna know what was going on in there. Like I said, not a lot of our franchisees get involved in the heavy flood stuff. There are some decent water restoration companies. It takes a lot of equipment. The capital investment to be in that end of the business is substantial and you also have to be on-call 24 hours a day. Not everybody who gets involved in the business wants to be a 24 hour a day business, they like their 9 to 5.   1:43:14.3 Ashley James: Sure. That makes sense.   1:43:17.4 David Bloom: So we don’t do a lot of that, except most of the guys in California and the ones in Texas do water restoration.   1:43:25.3 Ashley James: Got it. So let’s say someone has done the water restoration side, could they have Green Home Solutions come in and just test to make sure that there’s no mold?   1:43:41.4 David Bloom: Yeah. We actually work with some of the water restoration companies where they’ll go in. They’ll do the demo, whatever needs to be taken out. They’ll get the place dry and we go in and we’ll typically treat it even if it’s just preventative to make sure that there’s not gonna be any bacterial growth or mold growth, but it’s after it’s been dried out. So we let them do the heavy lifting and then we go in and take care of the house like we normally do.   1:44:08.8 Ashley James: So the enzymes that you have that you use to kill mold, it can also be used preventively?   1:44:15.9 David Bloom: Yeah. It can. It’s sort of an insurance policy. So it’s really prophylactic to try and prevent growth by making sure there’s nothing there that can grow. So if the house sits for a couple of days or something and it’s humid, we’re hoping to run and prevent that growth from occurring. Ideally we would do it again when all the walls that are up in the house is in back condition. We do a lot of work with Habitat for Humanity, we’re one of their major sponsors. And in their situation, a lot of times they build a home, it doesn’t get occupied for maybe three or four weeks and it sits there and they have the potential for mold growth. So for them, we go in and test. If it’s not obvious, we can’t say anything, then we’ll test. We’re gonna clean the house, if they feel comfortable turning a house over to their [inaudible 1:45:14.8] So it would be something similar to that.   1:45:20.3 Ashley James: Ok. I was curious whether the enzymes that you spray to kill the mold, if you spray an area, let’s say a bathroom, it doesn’t have mold but you sprayed it. Do the enzymes stick around and then if mold were to enter the area kill it later on? Like does it have a half-life or shelf life that it kills what enters the area for a certain period of time?   1:45:51.3 David Bloom: You know I get asked that question quite often and to be honest, I don’t know. Because we’ve never been able to get a scenario where we could actually test that. That being said, if you go and treat an area, obviously it’s gonna kill anything that’s there, so you’re not gonna have any mold. And if you did that in some sort of a reoccuring timeframe, then you’re never gonna allow it to grow. By the time you can see it, you’ve got a lot of it. So when you have a square inch of moldy wall board for example, that could be anywhere between 10,000 and a million spores. So you can’t see it until it’s already got its little fragments that are gonna start to grow into things. So spraying periodically would be helpful to keep it away. Now, can I tell you how long in between? No, I really don’t know. We got a school that we did in West Virginia that was sitting in a flood plain. So they would get water under the building quite frequently and there is a lot of mold growth under the building. We treated the school, we actually broke through the foundation to treat in there one time. And then the idea was that we would come back, they would have the school tested every three months, I think it was. And we had figured that we’d probably have to come back about every six months and re-treat it. They ended up closing the school. I mean they kept it for that school year and then close it. So we actually never did go back, but it did keep it away for nine months or so.   1:47:38.1 Ashley James: And I like that your whole philosophy as a company is to get to the root anyway. Your philosophy isn’t let’s just spray all the time and keep coming back and spraying, let’s try to prevent it. In the school’s case, you couldn’t prevent the recurrence of flooding.   1:47:57.0 David Bloom: Correct.   1:47:58.4 Ashley James: But in most residential areas, your company looks for the root cause and make sure – whether it’s putting a dehumidifier in and making sure the bathroom is ventilating correctly or the other steps you take. You’re making sure that the home doesn’t have sort of that perfect environment to create mold and then you spray to kill it. But you’re not necessarily spraying – coming back and spraying preventively because there would be no need if you got rid of the moisture problem.   1:48:27.2 David Bloom: Right. If we can get the homeowner to address the moisture issue or at least we’ll do it. Somebody’s got to address it. If we can do that and we get rid of the mold that they have now, they should never need us again. Because without the moisture, you shouldn’t have a mold issue. Now, at some places there are areas that you can’t just avoid it, but there’s a lot of things that can be done. When I look at a property, when I approach a client’s property, I’ll look at the outside of the building first and I’m saying, “Ok. If I’m a raindrop, where am I going?” Are there gutters that are gonna take the water away from the foundation? Or is it dumping it straight down along the foundation? Is the grading such so that water is gonna drain towards the house or drain away from the house? Because when you think about it, it’s really pretty simple. There’s only four places that water can from from. It’s either gonna come down from the top, it’s gonna come up from the bottom, it’s gonna be a pipe leak or some sort of a leak, or it’s gonna be high humidity. So when you break into those simple things and look at what you’re dealing with, it’s not that complicated. Sometimes you have buildings that have a convolution of factors. One in particular was in the clubhouse for an over 55 housing community and the exercise room – the pictures in the room started falling off the walls because they’re are so wet. This was in Maryland, and what happened here was a whole bunch of different things. So for example Maryland for some reason, they love their mulch and they mount everything up really high. In fact a couple of trees were dying because they were drowning, they were just holding so much moisture. So because they love their mulch, they had splash blocks which is a gutter comes down, goes into a splash bx and lead their water away from the building – turned around backwards because they didn’t want it to wash the mulch away. So the water is just going back towards the building. They had sprinkler heads that had a 360 degrees spray pattern, six inches away from the building which had a brick facade and brick is very porous. The rest of the building was vinyl sided and there was no vapor barrier. In Maryland that’s not uncommon because half the year the vapor barrier would be in the wrong side anyway, pretty much even heating included. But the inside of that exercise room which was kept cold had vinyl wallpaper which is a vapor barrier. So now, vapor pressure is driving moisture in the humid summers into that room, and it’s going from hot to cold, and it hits that cold paper, condenses in the vinyl wallpaper but it can’t get out because it can’t get through the vinyl. Vinyls are impervious, so it just collected in the wall. And it was all of those things together that caused that problem we had. That’s why you can’t just look at the obvious and a good visual inspection is the best thing you could do. Your eyes and your nose are far better than any testing. Testing can confirm, but your eyes and your nose are really what you need. That’s why we have to train our people so well.   1:51:54.7 Ashley James: And I love that because these tests were really expensive and if someone just comes in and doesn’t take the time to look at the outside of the house. What happens if they came in the winter, they may not think to think about the sprinkler system in the summer for example, or if they came during the dry season they might not be thinking about the gutters of the house. In Canada we call them eavestrough, but here in the States you call them gutters. But basically to see the water coming off of the roof and where does it go and what’s the gradient of the landscape. There’s this one corner of our house where it kind of floods outside and we have a pump underneath the house pumping water out, but that failed one year. It didn’t get in our house but it was underneath our house – there was water. And just to think about, like wow. That could be mold under our house you know, coming up like you said. In our bedroom, in our walk-in closet we have a trap door with stairs going down into the crawl space underneath which is is just dirt and that was flooded a few years ago until the pump was replaced. I haven’t even been down there, but it’s not a vapor barrier, so mold could be down there coming up potentially. So having the visual, looking around and see where is it coming from, what’s going on in this home inside and outside before you even spend thousands of dollars testing, because then now, like you said, you know what to test. Your company really helps people save a lot of money. Whereas another company might wanna come in and just start testing mully nelly and wracking up that bill.   1:53:43.5 David Bloom: Well basic mold testing is not that expensive, depending on how many samples you have to take. It could be $300 to $400 maybe.   1:53:56.8 Ashley James: Ok. That’s reasonable.   1:53:58.2 David Bloom: It’s when you start going into all those other types of tests. The VOC testing is a little bit pricey. The lab fees on that are pricey because you’re using a $3,000 piece of equipment. But yeah, testing for the sake of testing makes no sense. I mean you really need to get an idea what’s going on. So if they go up in an attic, they know how to check and make sure there’s enough ventilation. It’s very simple for limited use, they’d make sure that they have ventilation. And again in the Northeast you get a lot of ice in the winter. If your ventilation is improper, you don’t have enough insulation in your attic and that could be like a waterfall coming into the house. It’s a very ugly situation, but they’re not uncommon. So it’s those kind of things we look for and you know we certainly don’t want to scare anybody. We try to put everybody at ease like, “You know, it’s not as bad as you think and we’ll take care of it. Don’t worry about it.”   1:54:59.0 Ashley James: We need to advocate. We need to look into these things to make sure that our home  environment is as important as our diet and exercise and reducing stress like that is really important. There’s this hot yoga studio that went out of business or moved or something out of this building in Woodinville which I live close to and we watched them moved into the building, start their business and a few years later they moved out and for weeks there was construction. So we went by just out of curiosity and I looked inside and I couldn’t believe that the construction workers all had masks on and they were removing the drywall and they were removing the insulation. They had to gut the entire building that the hot yoga studio had been renting. They had to gut it and as I looked in the entire building was black, I mean black mold. And the light bulb went off my head, I’m like, “Oh my gosh. How many people do hot yoga and not realize that it is behind the walls, it’s all black mold.” They’re breathing in and they’re going into a sanctuary where they think they’re getting healthier or like you said into a gym – someone thinks they’re getting healthier in this room for an hour a day and they’re actually being exposed to toxins that are making their health worse.   1:56:25.5 David Bloom: There’s that. I mean how many times you would drive by a site where they’re building a house and the lumber sits outside for a couple of weeks in the rain?   1:56:32.5 Ashley James: Yeah. In the rain.   1:56:35.9 David Bloom: That’s not uncommon. Lumber yards typically, a lot of their lumbers are stored outdoors anyway, they’re covered but it’s outdoors. When we first started making our product, we did some testing to determine long term efficacy. We bought sheetrock and plywood off the shelf at Home Depot and some of the samples we inoculated with molds and then treat it. Some of them inoculated and didn’t treat and then we had our controls which we didn’t do anything to. The control pieces which were just the way it came from the store under the same humid conditions that we created for this test actually grew more mold than the stuff we put mold on.   1:57:17.7 Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   1:57:19.9 David Bloom: Because it came that way, and you’ve got to be aware of this kind of stuff But I’ll tell you one thing though. The most satisfying thing that we can do from Green Homes perspective, and this is part of our culture – is go into a property, do an investigation and tell them they don’t need us. It is the best feeling in the world to do that and it’s worth so much in goodwill. The industry itself doesn’t have a good reputation, we really pride ourselves on that and if you don’t need us, we’re gonna tell you, you don’t need us. Nobody in this company needs money bad enough that they would do work that wasn’t necessary.   1:57:59.4 Ashley James: And then they’ve earned the trust of that customer, that customer’s gonna refer to them or maybe use them in the future. It’s so good to do a relationship with a company that we can trust. That’s why I love you guys and I want my listeners to know about your services because I want my listeners to live in healthy homes and have a healthy air quality and to know the things that you’ve shared today. You’ve given us a lot of really great tips that we can all apply today – to our living space, including something as simple as have a dehumidifier, turn the fan on in the bathroom and leave it on, make sure that it vents out correctly outside of the home. You know these kind of things that we can test for. It’s been wonderful having you on the show and having you share all these great information. Before we wrap up, there’s one last thing that I wanted to ask. Would you like to explain a bit about a bit about Green Home Solutions franchise. Maybe there’s someone listening how has been looking for another career or wants to help people in some way and wants to stop being an employee and own their own business. Can you tell us a bit about the business side of it?   1:59:17.9 David Bloom: The business is actually pretty simple. It’s really about establishing relationships. Most of our work comes from referrals. Initially when a new franchisee gets started, we typically have them visit with their local real estate agents, go to some of their real estate sales meetings, make a presentation in front of them, start joining some networking groups, and just make sure that people know that you’re there. We cannot create a demand for our service. It’s sort of like, I’m liking it to a Funeral Director.   1:59:56.6 Ashley James: [Laughter] You’re good at murdering people?   1:59:59.7 David Bloom: [Laughter] No. But you wanna make sure that everybody knows what you do because when they time comes you want them to come to you. So it’s really a lot of just building relationships. I don’t know all that much on the franchise side, I mean I know the franchisees individually because I work with them everyday and train them. I don’t know as much about that side of the business as I do with the science and the actual work that we do. But we’ve had people from all walks of life. We’ve had numerous people that change careers. I had one recently, I think it’s a couple of years I guess. He was a highschool music teacher and he just saw that were numbered because the school budgets are getting lower and lower and they’re cutting out some of the arts and music programs, and he has a very successful franchise. Well it takes a little while to get going, but it doesn’t require a big capital investment, obviously there is some franchise fees and there’s equipment that you need to buy. But if somebody likes to work, it’s not easy work. I mean that much I have to say, there’s some hard labor involved especially if you’re working in attics and basements. But the thing that I can emphasize enough it’s in incredibly satisfying because when you do this work for somebody, I mean they wholeheartedly thank you and you’ve got a friend for life.   2:01:27.0 Ashley James: I bet. You had mentioned that making connections with never can groups and real estate agents and I would say you should add to the list since you know all the franchisees, that they should really connect with health coaches, naturopathic physicians, chiropractors, like all kinds of healthcare professionals in the holistic field that are aware that mold is a big problem and that’s exactly how I found out about you guys. So I love it.   2:01:55.1 David Bloom: Actually that is one of our focuses now. We’ve been gearing more towards it. I do speak to doctors groups periodically because if I can get them to listen and I’ll make sense to them, they at least would give us a shot and all we got to take is one patient that’s feeling better and it works out terrific and they’re great people to work with. Some of the people that they have – patients are a little bit more needy, we had them take their time, but it’s a wonderful feeling when you see somebody who was absolutely miserable and all of a sudden feeling better.   2:02:30.6 Ashley James: I bet it is. David, it’s been so lovely having you on the show. Is there anything you’d like to share or say to wrap up today’s interview. Was there any story left unsaid or any of your bullet points that really wanted to cover?   2:02:43.8 David Bloom: Well I think we’ve covered probably more than expected.   2:02:47.5 Ashley James: I know. Right at the beginning before we hit record you’re like, “I don’t know what we’re gonna talk about.”  And I was like, “You just leave it to me.” [Laughter]   2:02:55.8 David Bloom: I do wanna thank you for providing the platform and from what you’re doing for the same type of people that we are helping, which is absolutely tremendous. I was unaware of who you were until I believe it was after you’re meeting with Jeff and started looking into it and I’m just astounded at some of the guests you’ve had. I mean it’s a treasure trove of good information for a healthy lifestyle.   2:03:24.0 Ashley James Thank you so much. This is just like you are doing what you do that you’ll never wanna retire because you love what you do. I love what I do and I love learning from these guests like yourself and also helping all my listeners and my listeners love sharing these episodes with their friends and family. So we can spread this information and help as many people as possible to learn how to develop true health. It’s where the name came from, Learn True Health. So we’re all in this together. We’re all becoming healthier and healthier together. David, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. You are welcome back anytime you wanna come and teach more. I love that you’re constantly striving – you’re a scientist and you’re curious and you want to help people, so you’re in a really good space where you can take that science and apply it to real life situations. And if you guys come up with anything new that’s groundbreaking that’s really helping people, I’d love for you to come back and share it with us.   2:04:20.6 David Bloom: Thank you very much and again, if your listeners have questions that are appropriate for what we discussed today, I’d be happy for you to share my contact information with them.   2:04:32.9 Ashley James: Great. I will make sure I put it in the show notes to today’s podcast at www.learntruehealth.com so that people can reach David Bloom and also they can go to www.greenhomesolutions.com to check out more about the services and see if there’s a local franchisee in their area that they could get in contact with, but I’ll make sure that your email address is in the show notes as well.   2:04:55.2 David Bloom: Thank you very much, Ashley.   2:04:56.4 Ashley James: Thank you. — Outro: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people? You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out The Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health coaching certification program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition, but from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their lives and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health, I definitely recommend you check them out. You can Google, Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call or you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health Podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program and I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are. getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic office, doctors offices.you can work in hospitals, you can work online through Skype and help people around the world. you can become an author. You can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. you can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success and their health goals. There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach. So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Mention my name, get the best deal.  Give them a call and they;ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month. So you’re gonna wanna call them and check it out. And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people. — Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to www.takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s www.takeyoursupplements.com Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program Get Connected with David Bloom! Green Homes Solution Facebook YouTube Recommended Links Learn True Health Episode 306 – Molds

Get Dr. Z's free videos and his book: https://learntruehealth.com/oilsdiet For the Free Jar of Magnesium Muscle Cream use coupon code LTH, Add the Magnesium Jug to your cart, and the free muscle cream will be added automatically as well as the 10% discount. https://livingthegoodlifenaturally.com/product/magnesium-jug To join IIN and enroll in their Health Coach Training Program, 25% off with zero down, call (844) 315-8547 (U.S.) or +1 (212) 730-5433 (International). Join Ashley's fun book party! https://kidsbook.party   The Essential Oils Diet https://www.learntruehealth.com/essential-oils-diet   Highlights: Most diseases are preventable with weight loss. Inflammation – How your diet and lifestyle affect your brain and body. Essential oils are not enough. Bioactive compounds. How dangerous the ketogenic diet is. Inhaling, ingesting, or topically – How should I use essential oils? Does essential oil cause toxicity? Some essential oil recipes. Dr. Eric Zielinski’s top three essential oils   Hello, true health seeker! Welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health Podcast. I’ve got an awesome interview for you today. But first, before we jump into it, I’m really excited to share three pieces of news with you. Awesome information, so just listen to the next few minutes and I will jump into the interview. The first piece of news is my favorite magnesium soak, if you’ve listened to the show for a while, you’ve heard me talk about it. You probably heard Kristen Bowen, the founder of Living the Good Life Naturally. The website is www.livingthegoodlifenaturally.comand the coupon code is LTH. She’s hosting this week a special just for Learn True Health listeners. I pulled the listeners in the Facebook group. So if you’re not in the Facebook group, come join us. Go to Facebook and search Learn True Health or you can go www.learntruehealth.com/group and it will redirect you to the group. But I pulled the listeners and asked them because Kristen gave me a choice. She said, “Listen, I’d love to throw on a summer sale for the Learn True Health listeners.” And she offered us either a free jar of the magnesium muscle cream or a free jar of acerola cherry powder. Now, acerola cherry powder, I love it. It is a vitamin C powder, but it’s whole food plant-basedvitamin C powder. So it actually has all the other cofactors. It tastes really good. Listeners have been noticing that their skin gets healthier, that they’re faster from cuts, that their bleeding gums go away. You know, if you brush your teeth and you have a bit of bleeding gums, that’s a vitamin C deficiency. And so, lots of listeners have said they really enjoy it. Some people find that it helps them with their parasite protocols to rid their body of parasites, they add it to their parasite protocol and they find that it kicks it up and really helps. So I pulled the listeners, and you guys decided that you wanted a free jar of the muscle cream. People were raving about it in the Facebook group. They said it really helped to lessen the tension in muscles. They’d rub it on sore, tight muscles and they noticed that the muscle relaxed because it delivered that magnesium straight to the localized area. So, that’s really cool. So, when you order a jug of the magnesium soak from www.livingthegoodlifenaturally.com, it is gonna automatically add a free jar and then they’re gonna give you free shipping for the jar as well. All you have to do is buy the jug, you’re still gonna receive 10% off as part of the Learn True Health code. So, just go to www.livingthegoodlifenaturally.com, click on their magnesium section and grab that jug of magnesium soak, they’ll add the magnesium muscle cream for free, and that magnesium soak is amazing. I’ve shared about it before on the show and I’ve shared about it several times in the Facebook group. We actually have a post with over 200 different comments of people sharing their experience about this magnesium soak. It has been life-changing for our family, our young son was always fighting sleep until we started adding it to his bath and now, he is calmer and wants to go to sleep at night. So, we also have noticed that we felt better rested at night, we slept deeper, and it also felt like my muscle tension went away because I’m holding a lot of stress in my shoulders and my back. So, the magnesium soak is amazing and then the magnesium muscle cream is awesome for those local areas and that’s gonna come for free, and that’s this week only. If you have any friends who you know are magnesium deficient, and there’s over 200 symptoms of magnesium deficiency. But the common ones are pain, stiffness, sore muscles, sleep problems, twitching or spasms or cramps, restless legs is a really big one – that people notice they get a lot of relief from doing the magnesium soak. The instructions come with the jug when you buy it. It explains exactly how to soak in it to maximize your results and of course, you can go to www.learntruehealth.com and in the search box, search “magnesium” and listen to my episodes with Kristen, she shares her story. She actually was 70 pounds. I think she was 78 or 79 pounds in a wheelchair and having 30 seizures a day. That’s how sick she was and the magnesium soak is the key thing. She was doing a lot of stuff to get her health back, but that was they key thing that helped her to recover from her seizures and get herself back online. And so that’s why she made it a business. She started out as a customer and then she ended up creating the business to make sure that she could deliver not only to herself and her family, but to everyone that she came in contact with. The highest quality, purest form of concentrated magnesium with all the co-factors in it. So our skin, our body actually absorbs it readily and you can prove it with blood test. So she talks all about that in our interview, so definitely go back and check that out. So, www.livingthegoodlifenaturally.com coupon code LTH. Grab your free jar of the magnesium muscle cream when you buy a jug of the magnesium soak this week only. So, that’s news number 1. News number 2 is the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and I’ve saved the best for last by the way so, keep listening. The IIN is hosting a fantastic sale. So if you’ve been thinking about becoming a health coach like me and you’d love to take their online training, it’s designed for busy people, specifically Joshua Rosenthal designed the course for busy stay at home moms or busy career moms basically the busiest people on the world. So, anyone can take it and men also take it as well, not to exclude anyone. But if you’re busy in life, yes you can take this program. It’s designed for you to be able to do it, you know, you can do it in 20-minute increments, you can do it a little every day and a lot of it is audios and videos. Not a ton of reading because it’s easier to consume that content and people learn better through listening and through watching. There is reading that you can do, but my learning style is listening. I read very little and I listen to everything and that really helped me. So, some people learn better through reading and they provide everything written as well. So, they hit all of the learning style. So, if you’re concerned like you want to become a health coach, but you’re concern that you won’t learn as well as others because maybe you learn better at watching and engaging, they actually have us engage, watch, listen, read. You can learn in these different ways. So, they make sure they hit all the learning styles. I love their program, it was life-changing for me to go through it. Now, they have their program and a year long program, they also offer a condensed 6-month program for people who want to be full-time students. This week only for the Learn True Health listeners, they’re offering 25% off their payment plan and completely zero down. Meaning, you can call them, you sign up and for 30 days you are not paying them, and if you don’t like it, then just call them up and say, “Hey you know, it wasn’t for me.” And there’s no risk to you, so you could join IIN right now and start taking their training, and that is so cool. So, there’s no risk. You can jump right in. It’s really exciting news actually. And the first 35 people that join and take advantage of this sale right now, they’re going to gift you it’s worth almost $1,000. They’re gonna gift you one of their advanced courses. The advance course which I really want to take this course. It teaches you how to become a successful author and create and publish your own dream book. So, this is wonderful news. You can go ahead and Google “IIN” to get their phone number. Give them a call, tell them that Ashley James James from the Learn True Health podcast sent you so that you will get this special. I definitely recommend them. I’m a big fan of IIN. And hey, if you do join please reach out to me. You can email me, support@learntruehealth.com or you can find me on Facebook in the Learn True Health Facebook group and please reach out to me. I love mentoring my fellow health coaches, and if you do join and you want help with promoting your business or growing your business, becoming a successful health coach and helping other people, I would love to help you. So, I’m here as a resource for you. Take advantage of IIN sale right now. All right. Now, we’re almost done. News piece number 3 and you’re gonna jump right in to the interview. Thank you for hanging on. I know this is a long promotional spiel. I get it. I’m really excited to share all these info I didn’t want you to miss out on these sales. So here’s the thing, this doesn’t have to do with health, but it does have to do with helping to support the Learn True Health podcast. So my husband and I have this wonderful 4-year old son, and if you don’t know my story, I was infertile since I was 19 years old. I was told I would never have kids and I used natural medicine to conceive naturally and to have a healthy boy. And now he’s 4 years old and he’s wonderful and it’s all from natural medicine. We would’ve never had him had we not found natural medicine. So that’s one of the reasons why I do this podcast because it gave us our son. We’ve been helping him learn how to read and in doing so, I discovered a company that I am in love with. It is called Usborne Books & More and they hire child education and development specialist and these wonderful people work alongside designers and illustrators to create these beautiful books that engage children and make them want to learn. In fact my son, and we do very little screen time. We offered him the choice of playing with his Usborne Books & More stuff or watching some TV and he chose to play with his activity book. And I was like, “Yes! This is so awesome.” It has increased his confidence in reading. I love it. I’m really in love with this stuff. They have over 2,000 different kinds of books to choose from. It’s so not what a library has and we’ve been going to the library since he could sit on our laps as we read him night time stories. So, it’s completely different stuff. So if you have any kids in your life at all, they develop special books for infants, toddlers, school aged children, teenagers, they even have some really fun stuff for adults as well like adult coloring books. It’s all based on making reading fun and engaging and making learning fun. So, if you have kids or grandkids or nieces or nephews, I’d love for you to join my Facebook party. We’re hosting it next Sunday evening and it starts next Sunday evening, so you just join it and then you watch it at your convenience. I’m gonna post some videos and I’m going to go live in that Facebook group and share my favorite Usborne Books & More books and answer any questions you have. Most of these books by the way are under $9.00, they’re really well-priced. But anything you do purchase, the proceeds will go to support the Learn True Health podcast. It’s going to help pay for the transcriptions, help pay for our hosting, help pay for my assistant that helps me stay on top of everything and get these great guests. So, if you love the show and you have children in your life and you want to support them and increase their love of learning and love of reading, how you do this is you go to their website www.kidsbook.party. There’s two buttons there, it’s super easy. Either click on the Join the Party button or you click on the Shop Now button. If you have questions, please reach out to me. I’d love to help you. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sticking around and hearing all the specials. I hope you take advantage of them. I hope you join my Usborne Books & More Facebook party. Even if you just come to support me in my little launch that I’m doing on Sunday, I’d love to see you there. And if you have anything at all that you guys need, please reach out to me, come join the Facebook group and ask questions. It’s such an active wonderful community that loves to help each other and I’d love to see you there. Enjoy today’s interview.   Intro: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James James. This is episode 363.   0:13:40.7 Ashley James: I am so excited to have back on the show with us, Dr. Eric Zielinski who is the leading expert in essential oils. He was originally back on our show in episode 302 and now, he’s come back to teach us about his new book “The Essential Oils Diet.” I know you talked a little bit about it in our first interview and it was so intriguing because there’s so much controversy around ingesting oils and a lot of concern that some essential oil companies are not of good quality and some essential oils would be contraindicated to ingest. And so, because you are a doctor and you really know your stuff, you’ve been able to create the Essential Oils Diet book helping people to understand how they can incorporate these healing extracts, these healing essences of plants to help our body. Not only to detox, lose weight, to have more energy, to help the body come back into balance. I’m very excited to learn more about the essential oils diet today. Welcome to the show.   0:14:57.1 Dr. Eric Zielinski: Well, thank you for having me back. I’ll take that as a sign that I didn’t bummed the first interview, I didn’t scare you or your listeners away and your awesome blog followers. I love you. I really do, Ash. I really appreciate all that you do and your awesome questions and your show. I’m really excited about sharing this for a number of reasons because we’ve gotten a lot of slack for this, by the way. And when you start talking about essential oils, for sure you’re putting yourself out on the chopping block and then when you start going against conventional recommendations – yes you can consume them, but the right way. You really get out there, so we’ve been flogged 40 lashes minus one a couple of times already online and so I’d love to kind of set the record straight and help people.   0:15:41.0 Ashley James: Absolutely. I’m definitely excited to dive in to all that. My personal story of essential oils that I’ve shared on the show before is when I was a teenager. I was about 15 and I was really sick. I stayed home from my summer job at an all natural spa that happen to also sell essential oils and the owner who was an aesthetician and really, really into essential oils. She gave my mom a bottle of lavender and peppermint and sent her home to take care of me. I must have picked up some stomach flu basically. I had a fever, I was throwing up, I felt so nauseous and so sick and I’m lying there in bed just feeling miserable and my mom comes in and she was told to take the lavender and make it with some carrier oil. The only thing we had in the house was olive oil, so she put a couple of drops of lavender and some olive oil and she was told to rub it on my chest and my tummy and she was told to take one drop of peppermint oil put it in some hot water and let me sip it, and I did that. I sipped the peppermint and she put the lavender oil on my chest and tummy and the moment I started I started sipping that peppermint, I was also told to inhale the peppermint as I sip it. But the moment I sipped it, the nausea went away, I lay back down, I fell asleep – I slept for a really long time and when I woke up, my fever broke in and I was no longer sick. That was my introduction to the power or essential oils. And so, I was just a raving fan and I consumed all the books and all the information I could. I just loved it. Because of how much I loved essential oils, I became the number one salesperson at the spa because every person that walked through the door I wanted to tell them about how great essential oils were. So they are, they’re wonderful, but we have to learn how to use them correctly. And so, of course you’ve created all these resources online and now on your books to help people to do just that. And what I really like about your approach is that you don’t align yourself with any one company because you want to just teach people how to use them and how to find the right company for them or the right brand for them. I guess people might say if you have aligned yourself with a brand, then maybe they would say you’re bias in some ways. So, you’re just here to educate us which is wonderful I’d like to know what inspired you to write The Essential Oils Diet?   0:18:26.3 Dr. Eric Zielinski: You know Ashley James, my first book published last year, “The Healing Power of Essential Oils” it was an instant best-seller. It actually flew up the shelves in a way that no one really was expecting because no one was working on essential oil books at the scale that this was published by a major publisher. My publisher is Penguin Random House, and you haven’t seen a major publisher pick up a book on aromatherapy in quite a while like this. Since then, it’s become an international best-seller in seven different languages in multiple continents and countries. And so what happened was, my publisher being in the business of selling books came up to me and like, “Hey, what’s the next book?” And I’m like, “Well, they want a second.” And you know, my wife called some Irish twins, like here I am we just kind of delivered birth to this baby which takes a lot of time and effort and now you wanted me to get pregnant again? Like, hold on. But anyway, I did what most do. I dealt with pregnant amnesia and I’m like, okay let’s do it again. And so, I did some soul searching. I did some data research and I contacted our community. We have a pretty thriving group on Facebook, you know, just ways that we reach out to the followers that we have online and I started asking, “What do you all need?” You already know how to use essential oils. What is it that you want help with? In my though was the main diseases in the world – cancer, autoimmunity, diabetes. So I just started surveying people and asking people and ultimately, yes people did have those issues, but that happened was a light bulb went up in my mind. When I started connecting the dots I realized, you know what a commonality is between all of these diseases? It’s weight gain, obesity. Having that inflammatory response, never having a chance to soothe in someone’s body because of what they’re doing to their lifestyle, because of the foods of that they’re eating, the products that they’re putting on their skin. And so, my thought was this, the biggest bank for someone’s buck is to lose weight. If there’s one thing everyone on the planet can do, if someone is trying to prevent disease and treat disease, you can’t do that if you’re overweight. And the thing is that obesity, not just obesity but even just being 10 pounds overweight is so fundamental to every fundamental to every aspect of your health. It’s like you really can’t truly fight cancer if your body’s metabolism is burdened with excess fat. You can’t really prevent autoimmune conditions or anything. And then of course you think about diabetes and pre-diabetes, and musculoskeletal issues – everything keep going back to weight. And then obviously the statistics show were getting fatter as a group all around the world. And then kids – this what really got me. Kids, never before has a life expectancy been predicted to be less than their parents and primarily it’s because of obesity. At the end of the day if we were to pinpoint one factor that is attributed to all chronic disease right now that is 100% preventable, and that’s something I really stress that it’s preventable, regardless of hormonal imbalance, regardless of thyroid conditions, and we talked about that in the book and that’s become a scapegoat – regardless ofmetabolism, it’s weight loss. And that’s something that we actively have an ability to control.   0:22:04.6 Ashley James: And some people may not feel or look like they’re overweight, but we’ve heard of people who are skinny but have fat on the inside and skinny on the outside. So, when they do scans of their body, I mean they might be a size 10 or size 8 and they think, “I’m good. I don’t have fat to lose.” And I’m not saying that people who are skinny should become anorexic or unhealthy, but there’s something where this fat can accumulate in the organs and around the organs, and that fat is actually more dangerous than the fat on their thighs, for example.   0:22:49.0 Dr. Eric Zielinski: You know, the underlying discussion you’re talking about highlights the notion of fatty liver. I was just featured on a documentary regarding that. That is non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, it’s affecting upwards up to 25% of all Americans. That’s 100 million Americans are being affected by fatty liver and non-alcoholic because we know that alcoholism has a direct impact on the liver and develops fatty liver which is almost insurmountable among the symptoms. And a lot of people, we could blame candida, stress – like what are these symptoms coming from? And it’s hard, it’s really hard to determine, like, why do you feel the way you do? Where the brain fog come from? Why the sluggish libido out of nowhere? Why can’t you sleep anymore? The indigestion and the anger, the anxiety – all these things that just seem to happen and then you go online, this gets really confusing, by the way. You go online, you type up like, “Why am I feeling this way?” And you start researching and now, people are becoming hypochondriacs, self-diagnosing themselves with everything. Now everyone has leaky gut, everyone has candida overgrowth, everyone has this, everyone has that, and so people are freaked out. Rightfully so, because you’re sick and you don’t know why. And so, your can’t help you because your doctor hasn’t been trained in advanced diagnostic procedures to really figure out what’s wrong with you. And a lot of folks are suffering from fatty liver, and they don’t even realize it because of lack of exercise, their diet, and just because their body cannot process this amount of fat that they’re consuming. So, there are some valid concerns with that in relation to the other organ issues that people are dealing with. I’m really glad you mentioned that because people aren’t talking enough about fatty liver and the testing of fatty liver isn’t too difficult. A good diagnostician and a functional medicine doctor will know what to do. But here’s the problem, it’s not on most medical doctors radars. They’re not like thinking, “Oh, you have all these symptoms, maybe it’s fatty liver.” They’re not thinking that, what they think is, “Oh, you’re depressed. Okay, here’s an antidepressant.” “Oh, you’re dealing with nausea, well here’s something to help with your stomach.” “Oh, you can’t sleep, here’s Ambien.” And that’s the problem, is when we’re treating symptoms and we’re not looking at why? You shouldn’t be feeling this way. You’re 45, 50, or 60 years old – you really shouldn’t be going through this and it might be fatty liver.   0:25:41.1 Ashley James: I just interviewed a guy on nootropics. These herbs and supplements that all help the brain to have less inflammation, to work better, to have a balanced serotonin and GABA and dopamine and all those good chemicals. And we talked about inflammation, and it’s amazing just inflammation alone can cause so many issues, and then again we’re left treating symptoms and we think that we’re treating the root cause, but the root cause is inflammation and what’s causing the inflammation? We have to back up, so brain fog is one of the symptoms of inflammation or even being tired, or stiff joints, or even just being cranky, or just feeling off and not being to point your finger on it, but just feeling off. That kind of inflammation can affect the dopamine or serotonin and you just end up feeling a little off and you can’t figure out why or you can feel a lot off and be really cranky and the root cause is coming back to seeing that it’s the systemic inflammation. And what’s causing inflammation and we got to go deeper, and it’s that stress, lifestyle, the foods were eating, the foods we’re not eating. But we have to stop it, we have to have that break state where we can help the body to stop the inflammation. Even taking NSAIDS like Advil for headache, I thought this was really interesting that we think it’s an anti-inflammatory as a drug, but it inhibits our own natural body’s mechanism to fight inflammation. So, by taking it we maybe have a temporary artificial decrease in inflammation from the NSAID, but then we end up having this much more inflammation after it wears off because now our body’s ability to handle inflammation has been dampened.   0:27:53.3 Dr. Eric Zielinski: Writing this book, we’re talking about a diet book. Okay, how many more diet books can we have? We’re talking about essential oils, like what does that mean? Can you love an essential oil? The name of the book and all of these things, I was trying to wrap it all together in a package that would really educate and empower people. Inflammation was a big part of my first book and it kind of blend into the next book and led into a deeper discussion of what really is inflammation and what is the proper way of viewing inflammation? I think it’s important for us to realize that inflammation isn’t bad. Inflammation is a God given response to our body to heal. So, if you cut yourself in the kitchen, if you’re like me in the kitchen and I have a tendency to be quick in the kitchen, and I need to get slower, I need to use my cutting board. I’m the guy with a mango on my hand with my knife cutting it. [Laughter] So what happens when you cut your finger? You cut your finger and you stop, whatever, you hurt yourself. The body’s natural healing mechanism starts. First of all, pain, and that’s a good thing. Pain is actually a good sign, because if you don’t hurt yourself, you’re not gonna realize there’s damage, you could end up hurting and re-injuring that same part of your body which can cause permanent damage. So pain is a good thing, and then blood rushes into that area and it starts getting hot. What are the cardinal signs of inflammation? Pain, blood rushing, heat, swelling, loss of function. These are not bad things, but this is again the body’s response to heal. The problem is we are not designed and we shouldn’t be in a constant state of inflammation and that’s it. Again, if you cut your finger over and over and over again, thank God for bandaids, but if you’re gonna cut yourself in the same spot, non-stop, that’s gonna cause significant problems. And you think, “Yeah, okay. Dr. Eric Zielinski that’s stupid simple. Are you saving that?” Of course I’m not gonna cut myself on the same area or my finger all day long every day. That’s exactly what we’re doing to our bodies, by this low dose – this low-grade inflammatory response from the products that we put on our skin to the air that we’re breathing, the water that we’re drinking, the food that we’re eating, the thoughts that we have. You know, stress isn’t bad. Even stress is a good thing, but we’re not supposed to be. chronically stressed. Exercising and tearing your muscles and “stressing” your muscles, but you can’t live at the gym. You got to take a break, a day or two off between you go back. And so, when you think of it in these terms, the light bulb went up in my mind. “What then is causing this low-grade inflammatory response that I can’t directly feel that is happening at the cellular level?” A lot of people are just into that, I actually can feel more inflamed now than I used to. You could test it, you can look at your C-reactive protein levels. You could see your inflammatory levels, it could be tested and the local lab down the street. The stuff is kind of cheap, $50 to $60. You’ll see, your eyes get a little puffy, I mean you kind of get puffy, like there’s puffiness. So you’ll wonder why can’t you fit in your pants? Well, that’s maybe inflammation. You’ll see your brain can’t function as well. You’ll be on the edge. Like for me, inflammation manifest through anxiety, a little bit of stress – my body is not able to completely deal with what I’m going through at that time, even if it’s just a little something simple happens at work and it sets me off. That’s a sign of inflammation. That’s a sign that my body is not being able to respond properly to an insult, and that’s it. And guess, why is this even important? Because when something happens, like you’re exposed to a virus and you’re exposed to bacteria or you’re exposed to something else, let’s say cancer starts to slowly develop – your body’s metabolism cannot properly keep you healthy because it’s barely keeping you alive, and that’s why metabolism is not a scapegoat for weight gain and research has shown this. And even in the Mayo Clinic and UK’s National Services, they’ve gone to record that says, “Hey, a small metabolism is not and has not been linked to weight gain. In fact, overweight people have a faster metabolism because their metabolism is on overdrive just to keep them alive because they’re so overweight.” So, when you have this low dose inflammatory response happening throughout the day all day long, no wonder you’re dealing with so many different symptoms because your body is just barely in survival mode.   0:32:55.2 Ashley James: Fascinating. I have heard that for longevity you actually want a slower metabolism because we only have so many cells. The theory is we only have so many cell replicas that the body’s gonna make and so once we ran out, we ran out. And that was the idea that this part of the DNA that gets shorter and shorter showing that  they can see someone age over time. So, you really don’t want your cells to be damaged enough to turnover and create new cells quickly and it gets damaged again and it has to turnover quickly. We want to have a slower metabolism and that we want the whole body to just be healthy and not have damage at the cellular level and none of the inflammation, unless we need it to repair and be able to survive on less calories that are more nutrient dense. The blue zones, older people that when they live in those areas and they eat the way people eat to live to be 100. They’re actually eating less than 1400 calories a day, but it’s more nutrient dense food and their metabolisms are slower and they definitely don’t have inflammation. So that’s really interesting. This idea that we shouldn’t blame our thyroid or metabolism and then use that as a scapegoat to not take action. But that the symptoms that we might be experiencing could definitely be caused by inflammation. This is such a huge topic. How do we incorporate essential oils into our diet to decrease inflammation?   0:34:46.4 Dr. Eric Zielinski: Before we even touch on essential oils, it’s the lifestyle and it’s something that we try people with. You could use essential oils all day long, but if you are on this fast food lifestyle and if you’re eating a diet depleted of nutrition, it’s like one step forward three steps back. And that’s what we get and I’ve got to say, I’ve been at the largest essential oil company conventions and I’ve signed books at retailers and things and I’ve been very much shocked. It’s not a judgement call, please don’t be emailing me hate mail. I was shocked to see so many over weight people at these conventions, clinically obese, morbidly obese, and this is supposed to be a health conference of health advocates and people that want to sell essential oils to teach you how to be healthy. And so, you compare that to these other conferences I’ve been to that are “health conferences” and everyone kind of looks relatively healthy. But I have never seen such a disparity in health before going to an essential oil conference, because a lot of people, all they do is just essential oils. They eat the same junk, they are not exercising, and they use essential oils to help them get through, and that is a concern that I have in the aromatherapy industry. Because I’m not hearing enough from an aromatherapist and essential oil distributors really talking about wholeness and holistic care. Because the body cannot even respond to the essential oil if it’s in such a toxic state and if its metabolism is compromised by what we’re doing. So, that what’s in the book. We cover this concept of bioactivity and why and how to consume food that are rich in bioactive compounds. When you look at bioactivity, these are the plan-based chemicals that are non-nutritive. You don’t need these to live. You need fats, carbs, calories, and proteins, vitamins and minerals to live or you’re gonna die due to deficiency. But researchers have shown that a diet replete in bioactive components will lead to suboptimal health, so you’ll never really be healthy and this is my biggest issue with the fad diets out there; low carb, high fat diets. It’s completely focused on quantity not quality of food at the core. What are the list of bioactive compounds? Fiber. It is key. Eating a good amount of fiber can actually replace your probiotic supplement because fiber is prebiotics. They feed the probiotics. A lot of people are literally wasting money, and research has shown that consuming probiotic supplements actually cause drugs like immunotherapy to be less effective. I mean, throw it out there, a lot of people are on drugs and we’re trying to teach integrative healthcare. So, fiber is key to have good bowel function. Antioxidants. Those aren’t nutrition like polyphenols. Over 8,000 different plant-based chemicals known as polyphenols that are rich in antioxidants. What about carotenoids, the pigments that you get in your oranges and your g rapefruits, and your peppers. The reds, oranges, yellows – these are foods that are good, healthy, immune-boosting components and essential oils. See, that’s what really all pulled it together because essential oils are bioactive compounds. They’re non-nutrition, non-nutritive substances in plants that give you robust health. So, the whole purpose of the book is too get people back to quality not quantity. If you really wanna boost your health profile, consider using essential oils in your food in addition to the topical remedies that we have to soothe inflammation and balance blood sugar. I mean flat out, this will blow people’s minds like using essential oils can actually help you burn fat. Research have shown inhaling grapefruit and inhaling lime will stimulate lipolysis, proven and we’ve seen it. It’s not gonna help you 50 lose 50 pounds in a week, but for a lot of people they’re out of crocks, a lot of people have plateaued, a lot people are just hitting a wall. Especially for those dieters out there who have gone through the different plans and they’re back to where they’re at, that yo yo effect. Maybe essential oils might be that thing to help you over that hump to get you that next level. And that’s what really we’re trying to help people. To put things into perspective when it comes to just the whole essential oil discussion.   0:39:30.3 Ashley James: Yeah, the idea that there’s a thousand different nutrients in broccoli, those nutrients that help our body fight cancer, detox, create healthy cells. We can’t get that eating the standard American diet and we definitely can’t get it in a pill and I am a believer in supplements. Supplements changed my life because I did have a nutrient deficiency. They really changed my life and I have their place but you cannot ought supplement a bad diet and you can’t ought exercise a bad diet.   0:40:06.9 Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yes.   0:40:10.6 Ashley James: Diet is first and we need to look at that and I love that you’re pointing out stop counting calories and start counting nutrients, because the most nutrient dense foods are actually low in calories.   0:40:24.4 Dr. Eric Zielinski: That’s why nutrition labels are useless because they’re not telling you how many antioxidants are on the food. Beside fiber, that is probably the most valuable thing on the nutrition label next to the ingredients. You don’t know. Just because it has “Vitamin C” doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just one component, just one little aspect of immune boosting quality in food, but it really doesn’t matter. I would even say it doesn’t even matter – the caloric intake. Because here’s the problem with looking at calories, there is no way to determine your caloric need on a daily basis. To say you need to be within this range is ludacris because it all depends on the exact moment and what your body needs and that depends on your activity level, how much you slept, how much stress you’re dealing with, that depends on whether you’re fighting some kind of illness or virus, or you’re sick, or you’re on drugs like narcotics, drinking alcohol, smoking, are you on pharmaceuticals? To determine someone’s caloric need on a daily basis is impossible, and so that’s where you mentioned the blue zones, in Okinawa they have a proverb that says, “Hey, stop eating when you’re 70 – 80% full.” And we talk about that in the book, we actually cover the blue zones a lot, because you don’t know, they’re not counting calories. They have no idea, they don’t even know the concept of what a calorie is. They’re just eating, and they’re eating good nutritious food that’s available in the land and most of it by the way is plant-based, and that’s interesting when you really think about it. What are they doing? They’re not gorging, and just like a dog – you give the dog food in a bowl that’s a certain size, the dog will eat until the bowl is gone. That’s kind of how dogs are really wired. Humans are wired the same way. Like the clean plate club is pretty much the most dangerous things in the planet, but that’s learned. You don’t see that as a baby. Like my kids, “I’m done.” You could put cake, you could put straight up sugar on their plate and my kids are like, “I’m done.” Like my baby, my 2, 3 year old – I see this in my kid, but it’s later, “I’m gonna be a part of the clean plate club.” And that’s something like a learned behavior, we got to unlearn that and get back like, “Okay, I’m happy. My tummy is good.” That’s another thing, how do you know when you’re tummy is good when you’re overweight? Your leptin and ghrelin, the hormones that tell you when you’re full are out of balance, and that’s a concern with over weight obese people – is they’re leptin resistant. They don’t feel full. So they’re having three, four plates of food at the buffet and they’re like, “I want more. I need more.” And next thing you know they’re gorging, they’re loosening up their buttons on their belts and all the things on their pants just fit another plate in. That’s real and I know what that’s like because I experienced that in my own right. I never became obese, but I gained weight at one point and I had to enlarge all my pants and I call them fat pants. I have my fat pants story, I actually talked about that on my podcast a few couple of months ago. I remember what that was like and never feeling truly satisfied with my food, regardless of what I ate. That’s a dangerous place to be, but you have to train yourself and we cover that. Little strategies. These are little strategies. How do you know when you’re full? Well, you’ll start to feel your tummy slowly distended and remember it takes 15, 20 minutes or so for your body to even react and respond to the food that you’re eating now. So, the stomach has to distend a little bit, give it some time, eat slower. When your food doesn’t taste as good, typically speaking the last bite of cake isn’t as good as the first bite of cake, think about that. Like, “Okay, I’m done.” And also you start to feel a little sluggish, you shouldn’t be tired after eating a meal. That’s a big sign that you overate, a big sign because your body is just like, “Okay, I’m overloaded. Stop. I gotta manage this stuff.” And now metabolism just gets compromised and over burden.   0:44:48.0 Ashley James: You mentioned that the last bite not tasting as good as the first. I would say that if we are noticing that, we’re actually following the dopamine high that were caught in the pleasure trap of wanting those highly palatable foods with salt, sugar, and oil that stimulate those brain chemicals. The same brain chemicals are stimulated if one were to do street drugs like cocaine, that there are those parts of the brain that go, “Woah, this is amazing. I have to have more.” And that happens when we go to Dairy Queen and have that piece of cake and have some kind of fatty food. I’ve done the ketogenic diet a few times in my past. I’ve done pretty much every diet. I’ve experimented. I love learning and experiencing things first hand, but man I have learned so much and the ketogenic diet is incredibly dangerous. In fact it harmed my husband’s kidneys, it damaged my liver. It took as a year of eating plant based to recover and we had to do blood work and everything, but it took us a year to recover from the damage it did. And yet when were doing the ketogenic diet, I want to say the more like Atkin’s way. Either people think the ketogenic diet is a bunch of ghee or butter or cheese on top of a steak, and there’s virtually no vegetables, all these thousands of phytonutrients and antioxidants and all the fiber – they don’t eat that. They just go for the steak and the butter, the fat, and the coffee, and whatever. So many people are going down that rabbit hole because they’re hearing that the ketogenic diet is really good for weight loss. Yeah, you could lose 10 or 20 pounds on any diet because it’s mixing it up, but what the damage you’re doing, it’s gonna last years and I’d found that the hard way. I’ve interviewed some people that talked about this idea of doing a plant based ketogenic diet.   0:47:13.0 Dr. Eric Zielinski: That’s a lot of avocados.   0:47:14.2 Ashley James: Yeah.   0:47:14.8 Dr. Eric Zielinski: What are you gonna eat? I mean, you got a food selection of 20 foods.   0:47:20.6 Ashley James: Right. And so there’s this idea of that. There’s a hundred dietsout there and people are chasing what’s the best diet for weight loss. We need to go deeper. We need to look at what’s the most healing diet. Skip this idea of diet – what’s the most healing lifestyle that’s gonna make me live to 120 and optimize my brain health, my liver health – just optimize everything. And in doing so, my body’s gonna correct itself and it’s gonna lose the weight it doesn’t need and it’s gonna be healthy and have balanced hormones. We want to stop thinking about “What’s some kind of fad I’m gonna do for three months to lose some weight.” And start thinking about “What can I do for the rest of my life.” So, your book isn’t like, “20 days to a flat belly” or something, your book is how do we get to a point where we’re supporting the body in optimal health.   0:48:24.1 Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah. It has to be a lifestyle. Well a couple of things I want to unpack there because you just shared something so valuable and my heart goes out to all the people out there that are following a health celebrity or a health influencer and they are really pushing the ketogenic diet right now. It is a pied piper type of experience, where you have a couple well-known famous leaders in the health space and a lot of folks are following them. It’s just like whatever, and that’s the problem with blogging, that’s a problem with podcasts. A lot of this is none of this is regulated. Most people aren’t really qualified. And I say that very humbly, but it’s hard to say most bloggers and Pinterest pinners and Facebook celebrities, these people aren’t qualified. They don’t really understand even physiology. They haven’t been taught toxicology, and they don’t know nutrition. And when a leader says, “Hey, this is it.” Everyone’s like, “Okay, that’s great. Dr. So and so says that.” Or, “Mommy blogger says this.” And the ketogenic diet is one of the most pervasive dangerous lies out in the market today. We need to unpack that for a second because it is “the diet,” just like Atkin’s was “the diet.” And it’s something to think about that this diet was formulated to help epileptic children stop seizing in 1920’s. Think of that, why would you as a normal, let’s say you’re overweight but you’re still relatively healthy, like neurologically healthy – why would a relatively healthy person goes on a diet that’s designed to stop seizures? Just let that sink in like, “Oh yeah, this kind of seem odd.” Number two. Why are we trying to adapt the lifestyle that has not been proven long term? This is a really important point. You mentioned the blue zones, that’s thousands of years of research there. I mean really, even before research was known as research, people have lived this way. We see, we looked at this group of people around the world, we see their ancestors and their great ancestors, their traditions, and now science is finally catching up to the reality of a lifestyle that’s very much life-giving. There are zero longitudinal studies evaluating what the ketogenic diet does for a normal, healthy adult. We have longitudinal studies on what the ketogenic diet does for children that are epileptic. We’re finding that these kids that are now adults and been on keto, they’re dealing with heart disease, stroke, fatty liver issues, and disease. But we don’t know what the ketogenic diet looks like for people losing weight as a lifestyle. Zero studies we could see after 12 months, so yeah, you’re right, we could argue ketogenic is great to reset some things if you want. Like shock the body, flood the body with “healthy fats,” minimize sugar so maybe you’ll lose some quick pounds. Essentially it’s a starvation diet. It’s a carbohydrate starvation diet which gives you immediate, quick whens, but what does that do to the body long term. And we don’t know, that’s a big fat question mark, kind of like 5G – like Luxemburg, the country just banned 5G and they said publicly, we’re not gonna let our people be science experiments. “You’re in America? If you want to screw around with your people, do it, but we’re not letting 5G in our country.” That’s what the ketogenic diet is, it’s just like 5G. We have no idea what’s gonna happen to people on keto, and that’s a concern, and then just the quality food that you’re eating. And so, we have a big concern in our household, in our circle with meat. And just the sheer volume of toxins that are in most meat products and it’s getting really really hard to find good clean meat, even “grass-fed organic meat.” It has no guarantee that the meat is good and healthy and pure, and then how it’s process – and then milk and dairy, it gets scary. And again, we’re not vegan, but we are probably 95% plant based and every once in a while, personally I’ll crave a little red meat. I like icelandic grass-fed lamb, like that’s my little thing, and on Thanksgiving we have a turkey. We don’t eat meat much at all and we found that we feel a lot better. So, anyway I know a lot of people swear about the ketogenic diet like, “It saved my life.. You know I don’t want to take that away from you all, but all I’m trying to say is you need to come up with a better system if you want to live for something for the rest of your life. But like you, I can’t tell you how many people have come up to us and said the ketogenic diet almost killed me, because we just shouldn’t be consuming that sheer amount of fat. Because again, we need to focus on quality not quantity, and to say that you need to restrict your diet to any percentage of anything doesn’t make sense. So, that’s why our diet book or plan, like it tells you, “Hey, it’s okay to eat apples. You’re not gonna die.” I mean you’re not gonna hurt yourself eating fruit again. We are preaching food freedom and that’s where life opens up. Now don’t fall into the trap of all things in moderation. Like man, as a recovering drug addict, as an alcoholic; I can’t go back to a little bit of cocaine, I can’t go back to black out bender, I can’t go back to a little bit of smoking cigarettes. All things in moderation is a life from the pit of hell. It’s a license to do things that will hurt you. Let me just give you one word to help that. All good things in moderation – that’s the key. A little bit of honey, the bible says. And it’s good, but too much we’ll get sick and vomit. Like that’s in the book of Proverbs, right? Ancient Jewish wisdom for thousands of years, look at ancient text and they recognize moderation of good things. You don’t have a little bit of adultery, little bit theft, little bit of killing. Think of it in terms like that because we know, you know, I know – and we know we preach to the choir for the brave soul who has listened this long. It was never heard of you or me like, bust your heart, but we know what sugar does to the body. It’s more addictive than cocaine. It’s by far the number 1 link to disease because it triggers inflammation which we’ve already talked about. It’s the cause of most diseases right now that we deal with. So, you can’t have a little bit of sugar, process white sugar is poison. So, how do you live without sugar? We teach you. How do you live without your microwave? We’ll teach you. How do you incorporate essential oils into your life to make life more enjoyable? We’ll teach you. And hopefully before we get off we can give them maybe some practical tips because I love giving recipes and little hacks along the way. All that from the keto diet, you know. And so, thank you for mentioning that.   0:55:45.0 Ashley James: Absolutely. I remember a Naturopath that I was seeing was getting every single person in her clinic that got in and she said we’re seeing amazing results, in one month people’s inflammation is down, like she’s looking at blood work. I am convinced now the reason why people have these good results, if they do keto for short term – one to three months maximum, the have some really good results. And I’m convinced it’s because they had to cut out crappy food. It has nothing to do with eating 70, 90% fat. It’s in order to eat that much fat, it crowded out, it pushed churros off their plate, it pushed Oreos off their plate, it pushed pizza off their plate. Whatever foods that were filled with sugar had to go, and so of course inflammation came down because they stopped eating processed sugar, you don’t need to be in ketosis or be on the ketogenic diet or put butter on your steak in order to gain the benefits of not eating sugar. So, looking at how can we gain the benefits that people are claiming they have from the ketogenic diet, well, also eating in a way that’s sustainable and that is looking at filling your plate with fruits and vegetables as much as possible and even some starchy root vegetables – have a sweet potato everyday or a baked potato, that kind of thing, and you don’t need to slather anything in oil or butter. In fact people find that when they whole food fat, so no oil, but instead eat what the oil came from – so eat an olive, or avocado, or sprinkle some flax meal, or chia seeds, or have some hemp hearts – whole plant fats, but avoid anything that’s been processed. So looking at eating foods that have been very minimally if not, zero processed, and that way your body recognizes what it is, it’s able to get the nutrients out of it and you’ll feel better. I was a type 2 diabetic and so I was very afraid of eating fruit, I was very afraid of eating root vegetables. I thought potatoes were the worst thing you could eat, so I’ve spent years being afraid of carbohydrates, and years being afraid of even vegetables. And I kept constantly went back to this sort of Atkins or keto way of eating because I had a fear of carbohydrates. Then when I went whole foods plant based and removing oil for example, there’s this philosophy that the amount of fat the people are now consuming is actually gumming up the works and making us insulin resistant, and I thought this is so stupid. This just sounds like the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard because here I am coming from a lifetime of if I eat an apple, my blood sugar goes to the roof, so why would I trust that eating a bunch of fruit and vegetables would be good for me? And I’ve been told my whole life that all these fats are really good, right? So, that just seems totally opposite, but I tried it because again, I’m willing to experiment and try anything. I remember taking my blood sugar and I just started crying. I couldn’t believe that I had stopped all the oil and all the processed fats, and all the meat, and I was eating just vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, beans, legumes, and that’s it. That’s all I was eating and fill my plate up as much as I want until I feed good, three times a day. And my blood sugar, I remember an hour or an hour and a half after eating was 89 – I’d never seen that number before and I felt amazing. I felt on top of the world. I had so much energy. It was really the first time in my life that I noticed no inflammation. Like I just woke up clear headed, jumped on the bed. There were no barriers to entry, there were no symptoms, and that’s what it really sold me. And I know it seems like we should know all this, but you mean eating unadulterated foods from the earth and just filling my plate with that, that would be the healthiest way to eat, and just listening to my intuition and doing that. But I did have to battle the cravings and the triggers, seeing and smelling all the wonderful processed foods out there, we need to battle those little addictions as they come up and this idea of falling off the bandwagon. So, let’s say we do fall off and eat a burger or whatever right? And this idea of, “Oh, well I guess I’ll get on the diet again next week and I’ll just eat this bad way for the next few days.” Right? That’s our justification. It’s kind of like having one flat tire and getting over the car and shooting the other three tires. So we need to catch ourselves. I needed to keep catching myself if I ever “fell off the bandwagon” to go, “You know what? My next choice is gonna be a good one.” Not, “My next choice next week.” Or, “I’ve fallen off. So I can keep eating this way.” Because we are led by our dopamine. we are led by the desire to have those hyper-palatable foods. But my understanding is that essential oils can really help us curb those cravings and maybe have that break state to just stop our brain from telling us that it really really wants that whatever its craving, and instead allows to have a bit of a break state. What kind of essential oils can we use, either by smelling it, or applying it topically, or by ingesting it that will help us to stay on track and stop those cravings, or at least allow us to calm down so that we can make better choices.   1:02:24.2 Dr. Eric Zielinski: That is key, because if our cravings are going to drive us to do something unhealthy, then we want to satisfy them. So one thing, using essential oils like cinnamon bark, black pepper, and peppermint can actually help. There’s research to suggest why. Like black pepper, it’s actually been shown to help reverse the addiction cascade in people that are quitting smoking, so the withdrawal. I get it, I tried to quit smoking multiple times falling flat on my face. And so, that drive, that addiction like I need that hit, I need that high – black pepper can soothe and ease and lessen those withdrawal symptoms. Addiction is addiction and that’s something that you learn. Just like basics are basics. So whether it’s addiction to sex or drugs or food or sugar or alcohol – it’s the same cascade that happens in the brain. So, black pepper can help with that. Cinnamon bark is fantastic for balancing blood sugar and that is probably the number 1 cause that is most easily remedied through exercise and diet is rampant blood sugar. We’re just overdosing on sugar. Like you mentioned before, you just stop eating sugar A.K.A. the ketogenic diet, you’re just gonna lose weight. We find that typically 15 to 20 pounds are really easy to lose in the first month just by cutting out sugar alone. And so, when are diets are filled with sugar and processed forms of sugar like, processed wheat flour and things that are metabolized like sugar – essentially has caused insulin receptors not respond well to the insulin that’s out in the bloodstream and basically, the body doesn’t know what to do. So you’re consuming sugar all day long and the body’s like, “Ok. Obviously you’re a diabetic.” But most people don’t get that using certain things can help insulin sensitivity – can reverse the problem, and that’s what cinnamon bark does. So cinnamon bark can actually help your body not only produce more insulin but help your insulin receptors and increase sensitivity. So, that can help with the sugar cravings, because if insulin can do its job, you’re not gonna crave sugar anymore, because your body doesn’t crave it anymore, because your body got it. Peppermint is one that is very good for satiety and natural energy booster. It helps you feel full and it’s also good for athletic performance, which kind of all place into each other. You really want to incorporate this lifestyle of activity, a lifestyle of healthy behaviors, and that’s why when it comes to cravings too, we want to make people feel better. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been a comfort eater in the past and I know what it’s like being down in the dumps and battling with clinical depression and I find that food because food gives you that immediate predictable high, especially if it’s sugar. Like, boom I get a little sugar high. If you’re not depressed, if you’re happy, the bible talks about joy is medicine – happy heart does better than medicine. It’s something to be said like diffusing and using topically citrus essential oils which are proven antidepressants. Proven to help with anxiety and panic attacks – that could help you too. It’s a roundabout way, you don’t think about it but you feel better. You’re not gonna be tempted to eat that second pint of Ben & Jerry’s and maybe even that first pint. And what we wanna do is help people feel better about themselves and there is an aspect where we talk a lot about in the book is emotional detoxification, like falling in love with yourself again, doing what you know is right. And essential oils if used well and properly can help you get in that meditative state, can again help naturally produced serotonin and dopamine, can help deal with some of the issues of life in a way that maybe, you can’t do it alone.   1:06:13.8 Ashley James: Are there essential oils that help the liver. I know that when it comes to weight loss the liver has to metabolize that fat.   1:06:30.5 Dr. Eric Zielinski: Not directly. So, we don’t have any research to suggest that essential oils can help liver function, but we do know that abuse of essential oils can actually cause liver and kidney toxicity, because they still are chemicals. That’s something to realize. As natural as they are, you’re not gonna walk into a lavender field and see a pool of lavender, these flowers and blossoms need to be distilled and takes about roughly 30 to 35 pounds of lavender flowers to get one itty bitty bottle of lavender. So for sure, don’t take 15 drops in your mouth and call it a day. That’s the danger of a lot of misguided folks in using essential oils – it’s to overdo it. Like a little goes a long way. When it comes to liver function going back to fatty liver, using the essential oils we’ve already talked about and especially the citrus oils – we’ll go back to lime and grapefruit helping the body produce what’s known as lipolysis, the burning down of fat – triggers fat burning and fat breakdown. That will actually help aiding the body in losing weight. So again, it’s a roundabout way, but if you wanna support your liver function, you just got to lose weight. I mean you really need to lose weight to support your liver function, but do it gradually. And you know what’s something too, it’s as important, I just want to add and I don’t want to name a magazine but the tabloids, and you all know what it is. The ones at the counter right when you’re about to check out the grocery store, you see that woman 60 pounds – that’s dangerous. I’ve known a man, he went to the hospital, he almost had his gallbladder removed because he was fasting doing a flush and he was essentially starving himself and he lost 50 pounds in 3, 4 weeks and he put such a strain on his gallbladder that he almost had it get removed. He almost blocked his ducts – gallstones. To the point where it was a bad deal, his body couldn’t process the amount of fat. it couldn’t metabolize the amount of fat that was being processed through his system. You want slow, gradual, consistent, sustainable weight loss, and you know 15, 20 pounds is really sustainable for almost anyone – they could lose that. You can get up a little bit, but I get concerned. I don’t want people lose 40 pounds in a month, that’s way too much too quick. You want to get that over the course of months and that’s why our program, we have the 60-day challenge we call it. The first 30 days is really designed to help reset metabolism, balance hormones and also reset and retrain your taste buds. So, now  when you consume food you’re not like loading up with sugar, you know you’re not putting sugar on your Cheerios or some people not putting Cheerios on your sugar. You’re not like just automatically reaching for the salt shaker at dinner before tasting food. You’re gonna taste it first then. So, it takes time. It takes about a month and women know this, obviously you’re on a monthly cycle. Men too, we’re on a monthly cycle. Our skin regenerates itself every month, our hormones balance, so give us month just to kind of reset things. Then another month to kind of really establish lifestyle behaviors because research has shown it takes up to 66 days on average, this is so interesting – 66 days on average to develop a habit. Now, that takes into account everyone like me, I can develop a habit in two hours, I’m really extreme. My wife probably takes two, three years to develop a habit because she’s not the extremist as I am. But on average, so do you want to change your life forever to establish habits where you’re not tempted versus no? I’ve not had a McDonalds burger in 16 years, I haven’t had a Coke in 16 years, I haven’t had a cigarette in 16 years. It’s been 16 years since my “health transformation.” I have options for everything that I want. So, if I want a pumpkin pie, we know how to do it the right way, if I want a soda, I make my own with a little bit of essential oils and stevia or I like Virgil’s which is sweetened from stevia and that’s our quick one that you can get at the store. I love their root beer by the way. We have solutions to the things, and so you come up with these systems that guarantee your success and that’s something that all of you can do. If you’re listening and if you’re on the ketogenic diet, because we’re picking on keto today. If you’re willing to starve yourself of carbohydrates and go through that extreme planning and expense and all those things to just load up on fats and stay away from all those carbs, that’s a lot of effort. Just give me part of that effort, just a portion of that to start thinking about a more holistic kind of approach. An approach that satisfies your palate, an approach that gives your body time to adapt and to respond and to truly heal, and that really is the one thing I love about what you do. It’s all about healing from the inside out; emotional, spiritual, mental, and of course physical.   1:11:41.4 Ashley James: Yes. Absolutely. We have to look at every aspect of our life and lifestyle in order to heal because something like emotional stress can cause physical inflammation at the cellular level. Speaking of inflammation, what do you teach in your book for decreasing  inflammation?   1:12:03.3: Dr. Eric Zielinski: There’s a lot of essential oils that can help soothe inflammation. We have a couple recipes that you can in the book, and I ‘ll share a couple with you. For one, if you want to ingest essential oils, that’s very safe. Make sure that the oils are 100% pure. Not adulterated, no fillers, no additives. You got to do a little research, make sure the company is transparent with their sourcing, transparent with their – I call it the blood panel, the GC-MS; Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry – basically it just tells you what’s in the oil and it should have “executive. summary,” like you get from a blood panel like, “Hey, your numbers are within normal limits or they’re without. So you want to look at the report, you really do. You wanna do a little bit of research especially if you’re gonna use essential oils to treat a disease like most people do right now using oils. So if you’re gonna ingest them, they have to be pure. A good recipe that we found that really helps people is getting a size 00 which typically most people can swallow that, a 00 vegan gel cap. You can get gel caps on Amazon really cheap, and you get one drop of copaiba, one drop of orange, and one drop of peppermint. It could be a sweet, bitter orange, wild orange, I don’t care orange in a nutshell is very similar depending on the species. So you can just get orange oil, one drop copaiba, one drop peppermint. You put them in the capsule and you fill the capsule up with a good vegetable oil like coconut oil, or grapeseed oil, or olive oil type of thing, not Canola. And you take that as a pill, you could take that up to twice a day and then just kind of monitor your results for about two weeks. And that’s what we do, take it twice daily for two weeks and see how you respond. And you might find that certain symptoms just kind of go away, like bloating and we’ve already mentioned a bunch of them; nausea, bloating, libido, energy, and brain fog. There are other techniques while  you’re doing that, you can apply a roll-on. Same oils, or if you want to use different ones, we have found that ginger, lemon, spearmint, peppermint comes up a lot because it’s traditional soothing oil – anti inflammatory. But a roll-on recipe you could use, get a 10ml glass roller bottle, 4 drops of ginger, 2 drops of lemon, 2 drops of peppermint, and 2 drops of spearmint. And you could try different ones out and that’s one thing we try and incorporate and educate people, “Hey, if you don’t have spearmint just use a couple extra drops of peppermint.” It’s not gonna make too much of a difference. We’re just trying to get people a variety especially those people who have a robust medicine cabinet. A nice inhaler or diffuser recipe is equal mixtures of clove, eucalyptus, and orange. Eucalyptus is rich in a chemical known as 1,8-cineole which is exceptionally anti inflammatory. And so, that is something you want to incorporate. It can be eucalyptus radiata or eucalyptus globulus. I personally have no preference, they both have a similar effect on inflammation. So again, whatever your favorite company uses or sells, you’re good to go. Same thing with clove oil. Typically there aren’t many different varieties of clove oil, it’s just clove oil. But clove oil is extremely rich in antioxidants and can soothe inflammation, there’s so many more. Once you kind of get into the world of essential oils, you find that all of them have this somewhat minor to significant inflammatory response to it and that’s why you apply them topically, inhale them, and if you really want an impact you ingest them.   1:15:52.7 Ashley James: Could you do damage to the liver just by inhaling too much essential oils or by applying too many topically or is it only when you ingest them?   1:16:03.4 Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah, typically ingestion. You have to apply an extreme amount on your skin because the skin even though we all hear that the skin is the proverbial sponge, the largest organ on your body – the researches suggest that only 50 to 60% that are applied on the skin penetrate the bloodstream. So, the skin does have a direct barrier fact, there’s only so much that will get into the bloodstream. So, skin is very safe. And inhalation, I have not seen any research that really substantiates that inhaling essential oils can cause any organ toxicity. Of course overdosing is one thing, like a nebulizer is a potentially dangerous apparatus. I’ve got myself near fainting; vertigo – dizzy with using a nebulizer incorrectly, a nebulizer that is straight essential oil, not mixed or not part of a water diffuser. So, when you have this ultrasonic water diffuser that most people think of as diffusers, there’s a vibrating disc at the bottom of a water tank that vibrates at such a high speed. It breaks up the water compounds and the essential compounds and then emit steam, so there’s no heating, it’s just super high vibration that breaks things up and emits mist. There is a similar apparatus out there called the nebulizer, but there’s no water. So, you’re putting 40, 50 drops of essential oil, pure true oil, and then there’s a vibrating mechanism in there that emits pure essential oil that is super concentrated – you do not want to use that for more than 10 to 15 minutes at a time and of course in a well ventilated room. So, if someone is being on whys and if they’re just using oils in a way where they can cause an overdose response, yes that’s possible, but that’s rare, but the caution is there though. Because you know, that’s what you’re taught, you’re not gonna follow instructions, you’re not gonna know what to do. That’s why a lot of these companies sell a nebulizer straight all diffuser that has automatic shut off at 5, 10 minutes. But most people like me just put it back on because we like the smell, well no – what are you doing to your body? [Laughter] There’s a reason it shuts off automatically 5 or 10 minutes. So please, please, you waste so much on oils when you’re using a nebulizer if you’re not doing it for true disease management. Like if you want to stop a panic attack, nebulizer is the way to go, but most people should not be messing with that. 99% of us should be using these water diffusers because they’re the safest sustainable way. And we also got to think about a lot of waste, you could easily go through a bottle of oil in a week and that’s 35 pounds of lavender gone. It’s a lot of lavender. That’s as much as my wife and I can grow in a year. Like we just consumed that in a week because we misuse the oil. So I want that put that healthy caution to everyone because I want kids and my grandkids to be able to use essential oils and we just don’t wanna consumerize them to death.   1:19:16.7 Ashley James: Are there essential oils that should not ingested? Like I’ve always heard don’t ingest tea tree oil. Are there ones that absolutely you should not swallow?   1:19:28.3 Dr. Eric Zielinski: Ultimately it’s dosing. It’s not an easy answer because wintergreen is one that all aromatherapists recommend. Wintergreen can cause toxicity if ingested but what do you think flavors your root beer? I mean that’s the concern that I have with throwing the baby out of the bath water – it’s dosing. And so, if you’re using a culinary dose, if you want to make homemade root beer and you have a batch of a gallon and you put a drop of wintergreen – and again, what do you think flavors your Coca Cola, your food products? And so, by enlarge, if you’re using essential oils for culinary purposes and if you’re following the recipe like in my book – go add it. But if you’re using oils for medicinal purposes, you need to take a little more consideration because there are known drug interactions. And again wintergreen, yeah I’m not gonna ingest in a medicinal dose. So, that’s the confusion. There are contraindications for a medicinal dose versus a culinary dose, like huge, because we’re talking parts per billion. Like one drop in a gallon, that’s parts per billion, because there’s how many billions of drops are in a gallon? So, that’s something to think about. So yeah, there are lists; tea tree – personally I’ve ingested tea tree in a capsule or some way that’s safe. Oregano, tea tree, cloves oils that could be caustic, but none are “toxic” in the sense that a drop of oil and the capsule and the capsule is gonna cause any sort of damage. There’s no research, trust me, at all to prove that or to suggest that. But in my aromatherapy text and I’m looking at the guidelines and our “work manual” type of text, there are max oil dosages for all oils and there are really few like bitter almond. Who’s gonna buy that, wormwood, rue? Who has rue? And so, there are certain oils that are definitely contraindicated to consume, but no one’s buying them. The oils that you’re getting, your lemons, your lavenders, your eucalyptuses and stuff, people consume them on a regular basis all the time. But we want to put a healthy caution out there. So this is where I get a little criticism from the aromatherapy community because I try to get people licensed in a sense, empowerment to do this, but we always have to have that caution.   1:21:54.6 Ashley James: Right, absolutely. Do we have to do the capsule or could we just put it in a glass of water or stick it on our tongue? Why the capsule just the taste or is there is a medicinal reason?   1:22:08.5 Dr. Eric Zielinski: Really to protect the mucous membranes in your throat and in your esophagus. They’re super concentrated. I mean they’re very much concentrated to the point where they’re caustic, they could burn. And I would argue and research has suggested that diluting actually helps the body absorb better, for one. That’s why you just don’t wanna apply undiluted oils on your skin, it’s hard for the body completely metabolize and absorb that because again, they’re just pure chemicals. That’s what essential oils are. They’re pure plant based chemicals. So when you dilute them with a carrier oil, it actually helps the body absorb and metabolize them better. So that’s one thing, but also protection. I mean nothing will burn your mouth like from a drop of oregano, and water doesn’t dilute them – water and oil don’t mix. So, you could put a drop of oil on your water and mix it up, but the oil suspends on top. You either need to get an emulsifier or something or if you really wanna drink them like me, I love my matcha green tea in the morning – that’s my thing that help me quit the coffee habit, it gives me a nice little energy boost and I love the benefits I get from them. I’ll put a drop of cinnamon bark and a drop of peppermint in that, but because I have a fatty oil or a fatty substance like coconut milk in it, it helps dilute that. So, always ingest essential oils with some sort of fatty carrier and/or the safest way, if you’re doing it for medicinal purposes is through a capsule. You could also just put a teaspoon of olive oil or coconut oil in a bowl and mix it with a drop of oil and eat it like that, but you know there is that taste aspect to it, but that’s much more safe. It’s infinitely more safe if you’d just put a drop. Sublingual use, I don’t know. That’s a tough one. I see more harm than good. There’s no research to suggest that sublingual – putting a drop under your tongue is gonna help your body assimilating and absorbing it any better than using  a gel capsule or another way.   1:24:17.2 Ashley James: Essential oils are antimicrobials. So, what about the good bacteria in the gut, do they harm the good bacteria while killing the bad?   1:24:28.4 Dr. Eric Zielinski: That’s a fantastic question, because we’ve seen through the studies that essential oils have what’s known as cell selectivity. Because again they’re from nature, they’re of the earth, and I don’t want to use the word innate because they’re not alive, they’re not intelligent. But there is this somewhat innate intelligence we seen in these inanimate objects that they know how to interact with the body. The body knows how to interact with that. I mean we’re all of the earth if you look at it, and so whether it’s cancer, whether it’s healthy cells, cancer cells, good bacteria, bad bacteria – you see that essential oils actually target pathogens and they leave the healthy alone. So, there’s no research at all to suggest that oregano oil will the probiotics or the good bacteria in your gut, but we do know that it will definitely kill the back bacteria. Same thing with our skin and that’s the key about why using essential oils topically is infinitely more better than like, hand sanitizer or antibacterial products. It’s because it allows and fosters good healthy bacterial growth versus just annihilating everything. So, they’re not like antibiotics because antibiotics are very much, I don’t know what to say, I hate to use the use the word intelligent, but they’re so synthetic that the body can’t react to it. It’s like this nuclear bomb approach, but that’s the wonderful thing about nature, that’s the wonderful thing about God’s design. It blows my mind, I can’t explain it more than just what I just did. But again, the technical term in the research is cell selectivity. So, that’s pretty cool, especially when you’re trying to cure cancer cells and you see that certain essential oil chemicals can do that, but they’re not killing the healthy cells. I was like, “Wow. Interesting.”   1:26:07.4 Ashley James: What about those who know that they have candida or they know they have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, yeast problems, that kind of thing. What kind of essential oils should they ingest to help the body to fight those infections?   1:26:33.8 Dr. Eric Zielinski: Well, if that’s your issue, get my first book “The Healing Power of Essential Oils” because I have a whole chapter on candida. The issue with candida primarily is diet related to a large extent. And so, if you tightened up your diet and then if you’re really focusing on good, balanced, healthy carbs, not being afraid of sugar, but if you’re someone who has candida you really should not be consuming honey, maple syrup, even the natural sugars; agave or the coconut sugar – you really wanna limit that stuff. But using essential oils like lavender, caraway, clove is exceptionally potent against candida. I have candida roll-ons and capsules. I wrote the recipes in my first book, that stuff is there. You’ll find that one issue about candida that really blew my mind when I was writing my first book, was the use of antibiotics and how that has been linked to candida overgrowth. Because especially women that have UTIs which is somewhat common in women – you get a UTI, you get on an antibiotic and that ultimately produces candida vaginal infection. And then you get an antifungal which then leads into a UTI and then it leads into resistance, It’s like this vicious cycle where women often times from UTI, vaginal infection, to candida overgrowth. To stop the onslaught first is to try to find the solution to stop overdosing and taking antibiotics as much as possible and that in it of itself can help regulate and bring healing. One thing about essential oils is we have no research to suggest that the thyme, oregano, and the clove that are extremely antifungal that fungi would become resistant to them. And that’s an issue with candida, it is antifungal resistant fungus. That’s scary because we’re creating superbugs, bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics, fungus that are resistant to these solutions. Again, essential oils can really help a lot. We have like gentele tampon, tea tree tampon. That’s the other thing. Tea tree is another good one that’s a traditional one. But you know, when you think of candida, we oftentimes think of vaginal infection which is a known issue, but men deal with them too and we are finding that people that are doing systemic candida overgrowth, it’s definitely approachable and you could beat this thing.   1:29:16.9 Ashley James: And so, you’re saying get the first book because you talked about fight it. Do you talk about oils to ingest in your first book for candida?   1:29:29.8 Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah.   1:29:32.0 Ashley James: We’ll make sure the link to your first book is also in the show notes as well. What about parasites? You know, getting on the idea of using essential oils which are herbs, they’re just concentrated extracts from plants. So this is botanical medicine. Are there essential oils we can consume to help kill parasites?   1:29:55.9 Dr. Z Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah. You know, the thing about parasites is there’s not much research and we see the herb, actually we see a lot of wormwood which we don’t wanna be using wormwood essential oil internally. That is a known toxic oil, it’s just too concentrated versus the herbal or the dried form. Clove is one that comes up a lot, but other than that, I haven’t looked too deep into it because what I see essentially, I don’t know, I see a lot of the supplement solutions out there are very much whole form base and people aren’t messing with essential oils at that level. And we have some anecdotal evidence out there which might be good, but the only thing I could really come up with is clove. That is like the consistent one overall. But yeah, there’s nothing and that’s a shame because I’m sure there are solutions out there, it’s just we don’t have the research and  that’s where the funding is desperately needed and the Natural Health Community start funding this stuff, but our pockets are quite shallow compared to big pharma so, we’re getting by.   1:31:08.7 Ashley James: So I’ve got a little quiz for you. Say, I’m gonna take you and fly you to some island where there’s no stores and you are gonna help that population there and you can only bring three oils, and these people are suffering from the common, everyday illnesses that we’re suffering from. Apparently they’re eating McDonalds, but there’s no shop, you can’t buy any more oils. You could only bring three. What three oils do you bring to help this people?   1:31:46.2 Dr. Eric Zielinski: You know, I’ll choose three out of the four that I focus on the book. I’ll choose lime, cinnamon bark, and peppermint and between those three, whether we’re fighting a pathogen, boosting mood, whether we’re trying to lose weight, it balance blood sugar – you could do a lot of things with those and they mix well together surprisingly enough. And so, lime which is one of my favorites – very tasty. By the way, if you’ve never had guacamole without a drop of lime and a drop of cilantro, you haven’t lived. It’s yum and so we try to enjoy that as well. Cinnamon bark and peppermint for sure.   1:32:23.3 Ashley James: I love it. Tell us a bit about cooking with essential oils versus putting them in a capsule and consuming them. They’re obviously being more diluted, because if you’re putting one drop of lime, one drop of cilantro, and whole bowl of guacamole and then sharing it with other people, so you’re not consuming an entire drop like you would if you used the capsule. But you’re still getting some medicinal benefits and then the idea also, the question is – because you’re mixing it with food, do essential oils interact with foods to create a synergistic effect. So, is there a benefit to cooking with them?   1:33:10.0 Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah. You know, you get that minor culinary dose and that’s something that we’re trying to incorporate with people is you don’t have to take a garlic supplement to get the benefits of garlic, just add a clove of garlic to your food and have a nice medicinal dose, like constant dose throughout your day with your different food items. And so, that’s something that we’re really trying to encourage people to do. There are virtually no contraindications when you’re doing that, especially because the therapeutic effect is minor. So that is the key though, it’s minor negligible therapeutic effect. Again, we’re not like balancing blood sugar by putting a drop of cinnamon in huge pumpkin pie. So you put things in a perspective like that. So, it’s very safe, it’s a great way for people to ease in and feel comfortable with ingesting oils, but also it enhances the flavor. It really makes food just taste better in a lot of different ways. So, that is the main difference. Follow the recipes in the book when it comes to the capsules, like there are 2, 3, 4, sometimes 5, 6 drops at the most – drops in a capsule. Like that’s getting up to max oral dose limits. So, you want to be careful if you’re doing that; you are under the guidance of a healthcare professional if you’re on drugs because there known drug interactions, and that’s something they have to consider. But going back to the culinary use, unless they are on a heart disease medication and they’ve been told by their doctor not to eat grapefruit, most people don’t have nutritional contraindications for their pharmaceuticals. And so, that’s another way that we can get people to use essential oils. I really like the culinary low dose aspect of using essential oils. It’s the same thing that you get when you’re diffusing. Diffusing essential oils and inhaling those microparticles in the air isn’t  gonna instantly shift your whole physiology. It’s very minor, very subtle, but that’s good though for people. You don’t want those dramatic changes like taking an NSAID and your body’s physiology changes within minutes and it’s like, “Woah. What did I do?” We’re trying to make things more gradual and this is sustainable long term health and healing. This isn’t like “Hey. I wanna get fixed.”   1:35:29.2 Ashley James: Right.   1:35:31.0 Dr. Eric Zielinski: Because a concept that we gotta remember you all, especially for people that are overweight, is it took you awhile to get into this mess, I’ll testify. When I gained my 10, 15 pounds when I got into my “fat pants” it didn’t happen overnight. It was months up to a year worth of neglecting my body, not exercising, eating foods I shouldn’t be, and chronically stressed – it just didn’t happen. You can’t gain 10 pounds in a day or two or a week or sometimes a month – it takes time. And so, it will take time to reverse and sometimes it might take longer to reverse depending on how long you’ve been in that state. It took you five months to get into the mess, you’ve been in this mess for 10 years, you know, you gotta give yourself a year. But, you got to think about that – a year, for the rest of your life especially for people that really need to lose some serious weight. They want to get off their drugs. They want to really get control of their life again, that’s when things change.   1:36:31.8 Ashley James: I love it. There’s definitely a link between inflammation and allergies and the histamine response. And you’ve already talked about how to help the body to lower inflammation, but is there anything specifically about helping people cope with allergies or lower histamine that you can provide.   1:36:52.6 Dr. Eric Zielinski: No. That is one thing that when it comes to histamine, I have not focused a lot on the histamine triggers when it comes to food. Allergies, there’s a lot you could do with essential oils as a whole. Lemon, lavender, and peppermint is the typical allergy blend. Very detoxifying, helps open up the airways, very cleansing and soothing, calming – that’s what the lavender does. So we’ve recommended that to thousands of people and you can ingest that in a gel capsule, you can topically apply that over your chest and the back of your neck, you can inhale that through your diffuser. But lemon, lavender, peppermint – really good for allergies and seasonal allergies especially. But one thing about allergies though I want to caution you all is, allergies sort of become normal. Allergies are not normal. This is really important – you should not have seasonal allergies for more than two years at the most. If your body’s working, your immune system has an adaptive response. Unless something dramatically changes, like you completely changed the landscaping of your home and you have completely different flowers and plants and shrubs, or something and now you have different pollen to adapt to, your body should be adapting to its environment relatively quickly. And so, for people that deal with chronic, year after year seasonal allergies – that is a huge trigger and that’s a red flag. I would say that is an early stage autoimmune condition because your body is just in such override. You’re immune system is so much on edge that it cannot even handle the slightest of toxin. It’s basically saying you’re immune system isn’t properly adapting to its environment. It’s not functioning properly. I’ll testify. I’ve been there. Mold toxicity is the number one cause of seasonal allergies. And when I was dealing with mold toxicity – black mold in my home, I never suffered through seasonal allergies like that in my life; but now that we have a home that’s pure, clean – we just went through the allergy season. Yeah a little bit or runny nose and sneezing because there’s like a ton of pollen in here, well yeah. About the same thing with sneezing there’s a dog nearby with a lot of dander, that’s normal. But these people suffering through days and weeks, that’s not good. So, I want to put that out there – it’s a sign, it’s a chronic inflammatory that is a pre-autoimmune condition that can be solved.   1:39:22.3 Ashley James: Exactly. Absolutely. I’ve had clients who when we’ve cleaned up their diet and they were on years and years of Claritin or something like that. But cleaning up the diet, getting rid of gluten for a lot of people getting rid of grains, or the gluten grains – helping heal the gut that they no longer have those allergies or seasonal allergies. And it is the subtle symptoms of the body. If we have chronic symptoms that we need to run to over the counter meds for, we need to stop and take a deep dive out and look at what’s going on because if we treat symptoms, even with natural stuff – if you’re just treating symptoms all the time, then there’s damage being done deeper. So we have to get to the root and we’ve got to clean up the diet, we wanna use essential oils to support us, we wanna use supplements to support us, we have to have a diet that’s healing and then create a lifestyle that is healing. And so, we’re gonna do it one step at a time, right? We’re just gonna take one step at a time and if we get overwhelmed, we’re gonna get inhale some lavender and lime and peppermint and we’re just gonna take one baby step at a time, but we’re gonna get there.. It was 10,11 years ago that I was really really sick. Coming up 11 years ago when my husband and I decided to eat organic and then shop  [inaudible 1:40:53.9] store and then one thing led to another. One baby step after another. So, it does take time, but you can do things like cut out the sugar and do 30 days with no processed sugar and just see what happens and then use essential oils to help you overcome those sugar cravings and help you stay focused and help you love yourself and increase the love in your body and for your body while you’re going through that change and then try another challenge and try going dairy-free for a month or trying going meat-free for a month, then try adding two cups of vegetables at each meal. And these are fun challenges and then you get to see after 30 days, do i feel better, the same, or worse? You’ll know what’s going on. Give it a good amount of time to see how you feel and then one step at a time you’re gonna get there. Dr. Z you have a whole bunch of resources for us and we’ve made an easy link for everyone, it’s: www.learntruehealth.com/oilsdiet Listeners can go to www.learntruehealth.com/oilsdiet And you’ve provided us with a whole bunch of really cool trainings. Can you let us know what that is?   1:42:16.2 Dr. Eric Zielinski: You mentioned the word challenge a lot. One thing that we offer is we call our 60-day challenge, It’s free group coaching program that walks you through those 60, you can just us two months – even though the research suggest it takes 66 days to develop a habit. We’ll walk you through our initial 30-day we call a little fast track and we’ll walk you through the next 30 days which will hopefully set you up forever. We have nearly 2,000 people on this group right now and it’s open enrollment. So whether you’re listening early, whenever this is gonna air in 2019 or 2020 and beyond, this group is gonna be available. We have mentors and people that have gone through the program. So that’s what I want to encourage you all, you’re not gonna do this alone and that’s the number one thing. Again, the recipes are good, essential oils are fun, people love feeling better, but it’s the camaraderie. One lady just really touched my heart. This is on the Facebook group. One person just wrote, “You know, I’ve never had a lot of friends in my life and this group, if I didn’t get anything else from just meeting and being able to chat with and talk to some people and have “online friends” that’s been worth this more than anything.” That’s someone of an extreme case, but you know, maybe you do have a lot of friends and family that love you, but maybe they don’t live the way you wanna live, and maybe they couldn’t truly support your lifestyle, maybe it’s hard for you to go out at the church, socials, or family functions because of all the tempting things and bad stuff that people are eating and doing. Imagine being a part of a group of people that will help you just share how they’re over coming and posting recipes like, “Hey. I just made this.” Or “I just did this with my family.” That’s important and that’s why we changed the name of our website to Natural Living Family because it’s kinda been what we’ve done and we’ve been blessed to start and develop a natural living family. So, that is of itself invaluable. And then mama Z, my wife has created hours of videos on how to perform, literally do, demonstrate all of the exercises because we have an exercise program too, a home exercise program, regardless of your athletic level or your fitness level, or you weight – she’ll help you do it. And so she walk you through our fun little shopping tour, we’ll go to a natural health food store and we spent about and hour and a half with our natural living family answering questions and walk through every isle and then mama Z walks you through how to make some of our favorite recipes from the book. So, you get all that stuff plus ebooks. It’s a really really cool package because you can get the book on Amazon for $17 then what? And we don’t want this to be just another book that you get on the shelf and just ends up collecting dust on our bookshelf. That would be a travesty to me. We have seen of course the 45 pounds and 45 inches loss story, that’s like normal if you need to lose that weight. But we’ve also seen people gained weight that need to gain weight and people get off medications. That one lady, she lost a little bit of weight, but the most important thing for her was to get off of her anxiety medications. Wow, like really? And other people getting off their thyroid medications, so many fun stories. If you’re willing to do the soul searching and if you’re willing to put in the effort, and a lot of the time is spent on your needs, a lot of the time is spent meditating, alone – really reflecting on you and who you are. You know, if you wanna fall in love with yourself again, if you wanna enjoy your life again and if you wanna be a light to the world, that’s our invitation. You’re the person that we want in our world because we could help you with that. If you just want a quick fix, you just want to lose 20, 30 pounds in a week, that can’t help you because that’s not safe. That’s not healthy and we wanna get you out of that mentality because we don’t do cheat days, it doesn’t even exist. And we’re gonna walk you through how to completely eradicate temptation, so you’re never tempted again. That will blow our mind.   1:46:40.2 Ashley James: I love it. So they go to www.learntruehealth.com/oilsdiet and when they get to join the group, they have access to videos as well. Can you tell us a bit about the videos that they have access to in addition to the group which is the biggest thing of course.   1:46:59.9 Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah. My wife Sabrina makes six of her favorite recipes. Everything from a treat to our lemon buns, tea bread, crockpot lasagna for people that are at that stage of the diet program to simulate other kinds of tasties. But you know the key is just to show you how to do the exercises that we talk about. Because a lot of people go how do I really do this? So, it’s a full exercise demo class and also that shopping tour I mentioned where my wife and I are with a group of 10, 15 local natural living family members at a local health food store and we just took over the store, and we just talk, they ask questions and we answer them, we went through every isle and just kinda help them navigate what to look for and what not to look for, and not lose your wallet over being a healthy eater because being healthy does not have to be more expensive and we explain how.   1:47:56.2 Ashley James: I love it. That’s awesome. There’s so many wonderful things that your are providing and I’ve really enjoyed all the training that you provide. Our first interview episode 302 you gave some great info and I love the recipe that you gave in that episode for making your own hand sanitizer. That really stuck with me. Listeners you got to go back and also check out episode 302 after this to hear Dr. Z’s great tips and we dive more into what are essential oils and how to use them. So we talked more about that in 302. I love this idea of really incorporating them throughout the diet. Making sure the diet is rich in those nutrients. Is there anything left unsaid, is there anything that we haven’t covered that you really wanted to make sure we covered today?   1:48:50.5 Dr. Eric Zielinski: You know, just this concept that diets not work, but transformation does. A diet by definition is a collection of foods that you eat. I mean my diet is different than your diet which different than your son’s or daughter’s and my son’s and daughter’s diet. So diets are relative. And so, the essential oils diet is really a transformation program to help you look and transform from the inside out. From personal experience and from actually helping thousands of people, we’ve been very blessed to say that helping thousands of people go through their metamorphosis, it’s like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. Just be patient with yourself and fall in love with yourself and know that you’re worth it. Don’t look back, don’t beat yourself up. Look over and think what do I need to do? What can I do? And like you mentioned, Ashley, focus on the low hanging foot and baby steps and build off of that and never forget those things to be grateful for because those are the things that are really gonna help you when things get tough, and things will get tough. Life happens. But you know, we have what it takes to overcome that. And so, that’s my encouragement and my challenge to everybody is to do your best and never look back and realize that you can enjoy a truly healthy abundant life.   1:50:19.1 Ashley James: Wonderful. Beautiful. Beautifully said. Thank you so much, Dr. Z for coming today and sharing. This time has just flown by and I am really looking forward to cooking with some essential oils. You’ve given me some great ideas and I can’t wait to dive in to your book and go further into these recipes integrating essential oils even more into my life. It’s been such a pleasure having you here and I can’t wait to have you back on the show. So, thank you.   1:50:47.0 Dr. Eric Zielinski: Well, thank you for having me and bless everyone listening. Talk soon. — Outro: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people? You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out The Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health coaching certification program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition, but from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their lives and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health, I definitely recommend you check them out. You can Google, Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call or you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health Podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program and I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are. getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic office, doctors offices.you can work in hospitals, you can work online through Skype and help people around the world. you can become an author. You can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. you can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success and their health goals. There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach. So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Mention my name, get the best deal.  Give them a call and they;ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month. So you’re gonna wanna call them and check it out. And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people. — Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to www.takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s www.takeyoursupplements.com Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.   Get Connected With Dr. Eric Zielinski! Official Website Facebook – DrEricZ Facebook – The Essential Oils Revolution YouTube Pinterest Instagram Twitter 10-Part Video Masterclass Books by Dr. Eric Zielinski The Essential Oils Diet Healing Power Essentials Book Using God’s Medicine For The Abundant Life Heal Your Gut With Essential Oils

https://nootropicsexpert.com - A free copy of David Tomen's book "Secrets of the Optimized Brain" by entering your email address and subscribe to the weekly Nootropics Expert newsletter. https://www.youtube.com/c/nootropicsexpert   Nootropics  https://www.learntruehealth.com/nootropics   Highlights: David Tomen on discovering Nootropics and becoming a Nootropics expert. Nootropics and smart drugs. What are those? What is the difference between smart drugs and Nootropics? The importance of knowing which supplements to pick. A walkthrough in taking Nootropics and their different effects. Choosing a high-quality supplement. Things to look for to spot a high-quality supplement. Foods that can promote brain health.   Intro:   Eyeing to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to www.takeyoursupplements.com, and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s www.takeyoursupplements.com Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.   —   Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James.   This is Episode 362.   0:00:51.5 Ashley James: I’m very excited to have on the show today a Nootropics expert. His website is www.nootropicsexpert.com. His name is David Tomen. David, we’re finally getting you on the show.   0:01:06.6 David Tomen: Finally, hi Ashley.   0:01:08.0 Ashley James: Hi. It’s been quite a ride. David and I have been going back and forth and every time, either he was in a car accident, and then I had some crazy flu, and then something else happened. I don’t know. So we finally have you on the show. I think the universe is conspiring and now is the right time. So I’ve been fascinated and intrigued for months to finally get to talk you about what Nootropics are. We’re definitely getting into that. My very limited understanding is from hearing about certain herbs that will be really good for the brain, or I hear in Silicon Valley how they’ll microdose LSD or mushrooms to try to get the cutting edge on their brain firing and their intelligence and their creativity. So there’s this big weird world out there of neuroscience when it comes to supplements that support the brain. I really enjoyed going to your website, which we’re going to make sure all the links to everything David Tomen does is in the show notes of today’s podcast at www.learntruehealth.com. And your website list about 90 different neuro tropics and how they work, but we’re going to get into the most interesting ones. Before we do and I definitely want to dive into your story. Can you define what Nootropics are? Can you give us an understanding about what they are and then I’d love to go into your story and learn why you became an expert in them.   0:02:56.1 David Tomen: Generally, like the 30,000 Nootropics are a class of substances that improve brain function. That’s the big picture of it, but the term nootropic is relatively new. There’s a Romanian psychologist and chemist named Dr. Cornelio Gurghiu. He synthesized Piracetam back in 1963, and he coined the term nootropic in 1972 after he invented this new class of substances. And the word nootropic is derived from the Greek “nous” for the mind and “tropein” to bend, so to bend the mind. And then Dr. Ghurghiu went on to define what he thought a true nootropic is, and this is what he said, “A nootropic enhances memory and the ability to learn. It assists brain function under disruptive conditions such as the lack of oxygen, and after convulsive shock, it protects the brain from  chemical and physical toxins like anticholinergic drugs and barbiturates, it increases natural cognitive processes, and it must be non-toxic to humans or stimulate or depress the brain.” That’s officially what a nootropic is. Now since then, every person has been calling everything that affects the brain one way or another nootropic. And we make a very strong distinction between Nootropics and smart drugs. To my mind, Nootropics are natural substances, sometimes synthetic but mostly synthetic made from a natural substance. It does not include things like Adderall or Ritalin or Modafinil or microdosing LSD. Those aren’t considered Nootropics in my opinion, but you’ll see headlines every week of somebody referring to something like Ritalin is a nootropic, and it’s not. I consider it a smart drug. A nootropic that you do not need a prescription from your doctor to buy. You can get it at Whole Foods at the vitamin shop or your local vitamin store, but you don’t need a prescription.   0:05:28.6 Ashley James: I really like that the distinction is that it actually protects the brain.   0:05:35.3 David Tomen: Yes.   0:05:36.6 Ashley James: And it doesn’t stimulate, so we’re not talking about caffeine. It doesn’t stimulate or depress the brain. So it’s not affecting the serotonin or dopamine. It’s not causing that kind of shift in the chemistry of the brain. It protects the brain, it doesn’t stimulate or depress, and it helps with memory and learning even in adverse conditions.   0:06:06.1 David Tomen: Well, a lot of these substances though do directly affect things like serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine and epinephrine, and they help lower things like cortisol and stuff. Because some of these things are actually the precursor to dopamine or the precursor to serotonin or the precursor to melatonin, so I would classify those as Nootropics, so some of them naturally are natural stimulants to the brain. So we take a little bit of license on what Dr. Ghurgiu’s original. He was referring specifically to the Racetams that he was inventing. And so we have taken a little bit of license since then. In a general sense, some of these things do stimulate the brain to a certain degree, or they depress the brain to a certain degree. When you look at the neurochemistry of how something like gabba works. Gabba is an inhibitor, right? So theoretically, it kind of like depresses the brain but it doesn’t depress the brain like an SSRI would or something like that. Does that make sense?   0:07:22.8 Ashley James: So we want the brain to be in balance.   0:07:25.8 David Tomen: That brain has to be in balance, yes.   0:07:28.3 Ashley James: So you’re saying that Nootropics are more like adaptogenic and that they’re not going to over stimulate or under stimulate, but they’re going to help because they’re precursors to these neurochemicals. Are they going to help the brain to be more in balance? Is that correct?   0:07:44.9 David Tomen: That’s correct to a certain degree. Anyone of these substances you can use too much of it or for somebody that shouldn’t be using a particular substance. It could do something bad to their brain. So you’ve gotta use intelligence and wisdom when it comes to using some of these things, or you could really, really mess yourself up. But the bottom line is that the fully optimized brain, the brain that’s firing on all cylinders has got to be in balance.   0:08:12.6 Ashley James: I like that you brought up this warning. Since we can go to Whole Foods or The Vitamin Shop or wherever to buy these substances, people could be misusing them currently.   0:08:24.7 David Tomen: Yes, and that’s the reason why. I think I reviewed 90 individual substances so far somewhere around that, maybe a little bit more, and I’ve include dosage recommendations which are based on clinical studies and user experience. And often the dosages are different than what’s on the bottle from the manufacturer. It also includes side effects, and I tell people what types to buy too because there are oftentimes different forms like when it comes to extracts and stuff. There’s a specific warning, for example, something like St. John’s Wort, do not use St. John’s Wort if you’re on any kind of an antidepressant or anti-anxiety medication or you will cause serotonin syndrome that could very likely kill you.   0:09:18.7 Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   0:09:21.7 David Tomen: So yeah.   0:09:23.1 Ashley James: Do you ever contact these manufacturers and let them know about the clinical studies that you’ve found?   0:09:29.9 David Tomen: They know it. The bigger manufacturers, the legitimate ones – the ones that have been around for a long time that really know what they’re doing have got the science to back up their products, and oftentimes they’ll publish it. A lot of the stuff that I’ve been doing is cutting edge research though because I just dug in a lot deeper than even the manufacturers have done. But you’ll oftentimes see warnings on the labels of certain supplements that you pick up. Talk to your doctor before you use this or if you are on any medication, do not use this before you talk to your doctor.   0:10:12.0 Ashley James: But they weren’t really putting it on the doctor to know everything.   0:10:16.4 David Tomen: That’s a problem because most doctors don’t know anything about this stuff.   0:10:21.7 Ashley James: Right. I want to talk to you about this all day. So let’s get into your story. What happened in your life, David Tomen, that made you want to get interested and then eventually become an expert in Nootropics?   0:10:34.8 David Tomen: Like everybody else, I just never ever thought about my brain up until about 12 or 13 years ago and I’ve lived an interesting life. I lived all over the world, I’ve helped run companies, but I always had a problem with focus. Every time I had a management review of whatever country I happened to be living in and what company happened to help to run, I was fantastic as an Executive, as a Manager, I was great with people, but you got to learn how to focus. And so I bought the books, and I thought it was a moral feeling that I couldn’t focus. And then 13 years ago, I met this beautiful girl in North Miami Beach, and we ended up getting married. Within a year of us being together, she noticed what was going on and she suggested that I see a psychiatrist that she really respected up in Palm Beach. So I went in to see this guy, and he sat me down, and within 10 minutes he says, “You’re adult ADD and PTSD.” The PTSD part took me 10 years to figure out where that came from but the adult ADD, he put on Ritalin. As soon as I started taking Ritalin, it was like somebody turned the lights onto my brain.   0:12:03.9 Ashley James: Wow.   0:12:04.9 David Tomen: It was like a miracle, and I went, “Oh wow.” But within a couple of years, I started growing a tolerance to Ritalin, and it wasn’t working as well, and I’m going, “No, this ain’t happening. This was working too well.” So I started researching to find out how it worked and I found out that it was a dopamine reuptake inhibitor which means that it blocks the dopamine transporters in your brain so that theoretically it provides more dopamine in your brain which in the truly clinically ADD or ADHD brain, it helps your brain work better, and you can focus better. So I figured, “Ok, I’m lacking dopamine.” So I’ve discovered L-tyrosine. L-tyrosine is a precursor to dopamine, and I started taking that along with acetyl L-carnitine, L-carnitine which helps in the synthesis of acetylcholine. Acetylcholine is necessary for brain cell signaling, and all of a sudden, I wasn’t tolerant to Ritalin anymore. It started working again, and it was working fine. So every day I would take my Ritalin, and I would take L-Tyrosine and acetyl L-carnitine, and it kept on working. Then about 6 years ago or so I got really, really, really sick. My wife took me to the ER. She thought I was having a heart attack, and it turns out my heart was fine, but I was for some reasons severely hypothyroid all of a sudden. And you’ve seen the symptoms of hypothyroidism. It’s 2 columns of symptoms on a page. I had about three-quarters of those symptoms, and one of them was severe brain fog and memory loss.   0:14:04.2 Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   0:14:05.6 David Tomen: Ashley, I mean complete memory loss. I lost my memory. It was so bad that I ended up seeing 2 different neurologists and they tested me for Alzheimer’s, and it turns out, it wasn’t Alzheimer’s, it wasn’t dementia. They couldn’t tell, they couldn’t figure out what was wrong. And it was because I was hypothyroid and my thyroid had stopped working and thyroid hormones which I understand now but at that time they couldn’t help, and I was desperate. I mean, my marriage was falling apart; we were broke because my business was failing. My life which was completely upside down. And I figured if I’m going to survive this, I got to figure something out. One thing I did remember was my experience with Nootropics and Ritalin and AD. So I just started experimenting with different things, and it took me about 2 and a half years to 3 years, and I finally got my brain working again and that it’s working better than it ever has in my adult life. I was desperate. I had to start experimenting with a bunch of different things until I finally found a protocol that worked for me that healed my brain and I got things running again the way they were supposed to be.    0:15:31.9 Ashley James: Did you heal your thyroid? What happened there?   0:15:35.4 David Tomen: Well, I healed my thyroid. You know what, the funny thing about the thyroid is that every endocrinologist look at TSH and started me on Synthroid which is synthetic T4 and it wasn’t working for me. So again, I started doing some research, and I discovered natural desiccated thyroid. My brother’s a doctor up north, and I had him send me some because I couldn’t find anybody around here to prescribe it for me and I started taking it and all of a sudden I started feeling better. And I finally found a naturopath here in North Miami Beach that would prescribe natural desiccated thyroid for me which is what I’ve been using since. And so, I got the thyroid hormones back to the levels within the range of where they’re supposed to be, and I took the right supplements to finally heal my brain. So it was working again. After I started feeling better, I decided to shift my marketing focus so that I was just working on one thing, and I started copywriting, and I started writing for natural health companies. There was a guy in England, and he had a nootropic stack that he wanted me to write some advertorials for him. And when I was researching, I wrote 5 advertorials for him and his company which he thought he loved; he thought they were great. But what I discovered when I was researching for writing that sales copy was that the information for Nootropics was scattered all over the place. There was no one central place that I can go to for information; there were no books on it. The last book that was published on this subject was 1992, and so I thought, “Hah! The world needs an authority for Nootropics.” It needs one place for somebody that’s got any kind of a problem with their brain to be able to, and that was the birth of Nootropics Expert.   0:17:52.3 Ashley James: [Laughter] Awesome. Hearing your story, right when you first told me about being rushed to the hospital, I thought, oh no, all the herbs he was taking caused his hypothyroidism.   0:18:09.0 David Tomen: The only thing I was taking at that time was L-tyrosine and acetyl L-carnitine.   0:18:14.0 Ashley James: Right. I just pulled up my phone then the next thing I thought was, what about Ritalin? And it says that one of the side effects of long-term use of Ritalin can be hypothyroidism. Have you considered that maybe that’s what caused your hypothyroidism to become so severe?   0:18:32.7 David Tomen: No. I didn’t because I did an extensive amount of research on methylphenidate which is the chemical term for Ritalin and they’ve been using it since the 1950s, and I looked at tons of clinical studies, and of all the drugs used to treat ADD and ADHD, it’s the safest one out there. You know it’s neither here nor there. Even if it did cause hypothyroidism, that never occurred to me because it wasn’t significant enough to come up in my research.   0:19:10.8 Ashley James: Right.   0:19:11.2 David Tomen: But it doesn’t matter because I discovered that the only way that my brain can work is with some that kind of help.   0:19:18.9 Ashley James: Oh, absolutely. Right.   0:19:22.0 David Tomen: And it needs that kind of help. It’s my job to be able to support it so that it doesn’t get into any other kind of trouble.   0:19:30.3 Ashley James: Right. No, I’m not questioning your past decisions. My belief is if we can find something natural and that looks even better than drugs, then awesome. But if we come up against something, you know drugs are a tool in our tool belt.   0:19:46.5 David Tomen: Yeah.   0:19:47.8 Ashley James: But there are tools because they’re synthetic, there’s a tool that can have a set of side effects.   0:19:54.5 David Tomen: Absolutely.   0:19:55.0 Ashley James: And so we need to just be really responsible and do our research. Dr. Klinghardt who I interviewed, he’s been an MD for 40 years and really interesting guy. I interviewed him, and he became a surgeon and an MD, he received his training in a part of Germany where all doctors also become homeopaths and acupuncturists at the same time as becoming surgeons. So very different kind of training that we get here and his philosophy has been his whole career that he wants to find an herb or a supplement or some kind of a natural remedy that is even better than a drug and he looks to that but if he can’t then he goes to the drug. So, I’m not questioning that you ever took Ritalin, it’s just more of the – I get curious, and when this body has a symptom, I want to know what happened? So that you can prevent it, right? It’s part of helping your body so I think it’s actually a little comforting to know that the Ritalin might have been the cause of your hypothyroid and that your body left to its own devices without the Ritalin wouldn’t have gone there or wouldn’t have created the hypothyroidism. So I mean just looking at that, but it’s wonderful that the Ritalin helped you find Nootropics so that you could support your brain. And what it actually really was missing along which was dopamine, right? We don’t have a Ritalin deficiency, but it was the gateway that allowed you to discover Nootropics.   0:21:35.4 David Tomen: That’s absolutely true.   0:21:36.5 Ashley James: So we can be grateful for them. But those who have taken ADD medication and have really enjoyed the benefits of it, cannot know that there is a natural way and it’s to help the body have enough dopamine and which is what you were saying. So you just dived into Nootropics, and you became the Nootropics expert. Now, tell me about this thing about drawing a clock. What’s up with that?   0:22:10.6 David Tomen: There’s a couple of different tests they use early on to evaluate to find out if you’ve got Alzheimers or dementia. And one of them is drawing a clock, and then I’m going to give you a time, and I want you to put the time on it, and somebody who has got Alzheimer’s or even early onset Alzheimers has got trouble drawing a clock. They can’t draw the clock properly and can’t put the time in the proper place, but I drew a perfect clock. And then there’s another test that they do; I forgot what the name of the test is called. I think it’s on the website. But they ask you a series of questions, and you have to be able to remember. They test your memory basically, and I came up with top scores on that too. So they knew that it wasn’t Alzheimer’s or dementia.   0:23:14.2 Ashley James: Got it.   0:23:16.7 David Tomen: But it was scary. [Laughter]   0:23:17.9 Ashley James: When you had those symptoms, that was what everyone thought it was going. But because it came so suddenly, dementia doesn’t hit so suddenly. Isn’t it more gradual?   0:23:29.6 David Tomen: Right.   0:23:29.8 Ashley James: Right.   0:23:31.7 David Tomen: I was desperate. I mean, what are you going to do? [Laughter] Your life is completely [inaudible 0:23:38.2] and you’re so, so sick that you can’t make any money to support your family. I mean, you’re desperate. You run to anybody you think of that can help you, and it turns out that nobody could help me. I had to help myself.   0:23:52.8 Ashley James: How did you discover that it was hypothyroidism? Like was it you or did they do tests?   0:23:58.3 David Tomen: In the hospital, they ran a full thyroid lab.   0:24:05.0 Ashley James: And did they go, “Oh, this is what’s causing your memory loss.” Right away or did they just say, “Oh and you have hypothyroidism” then you discovered that hypothyroidism was causing your memory loss?   0:24:19.6 David Tomen: I was the one to discover that.   0:24:22.7 Ashley James: This is what we have to advocate for ourselves, you know? We really need to. Amazing. So what happened then? So there you are, you’re doing copywriting for this man in the UK, and you are really excited about Nootropics, what happened then?   0:24:40.1 David Tomen: I just decided to put up a website and started writing about the stuff that I was learning so that everybody else can learn what I was learning along with me. And I started Nootropics Expert – I don’t know, it was about 3 years ago now. Maybe a little over 3 years ago, 2016 I think the dates on some of the stuff. I didn’t realize that it was that long when I looked and I just started writing and I kept on writing for these companies and doing sales copy for them. I kept on writing this, and one thing just led to another, and I’ve got a YouTube channel now with over 30,000 subscribers and a big email list. I’ve get tens and tens and tens of thousands of people all over the world coming to Nootropics Experts for help.   0:25:32.0 Ashley James: That’s very cool. What do you offer, like you sell them? How do you make money with Nootropics Expert?   0:25:42.8 David Tomen: Good question. I’m an affiliate for some companies. For the guy that I was originally working for, I’m an affiliate for 2 of his lines of supplements, and then I’m an affiliate for other companies for stuff that he doesn’t carry like CBD oil and a couple of other things. I can’t remember right off the top of my head. So I have links on the website, and I get a commission when people buy through the website. I do coaching now, people that can’t figure this stuff out on their own or people that can figure out on their own but they just want help tweaking whatever they’re doing. I offer personal consulting for half an hour or an hour via Skype or phone, depending on where they are in the world. And I have a book, “Head First” that’s been selling really well. I mentioned earlier that the last book on the subject was published in 1992, and it’s called “Smart Drugs II.” That was the last book that was published on Nootropics.   0:26:57.8 Ashley James: Wow.   0:26:58.1 David Tomen: Yeah. So I wrote a book, and it’s almost 600 pages, and I’ve got doctors and naturopaths and nurses and holistic practitioners and all kinds of people including just the [inaudible 0:27:16.8] on the street buying Head First and using it as a guide to help fix whatever their problem is.   0:27:25.4 Ashley James: Now, you had mentioned that your marriage was really upside down during that time when you had dementia and the thyroid.   0:27:32.1 David Tomen: Yeah.   0:27:34.0 Ashley James: Hos is it now? I’m left hanging. How are you guys now?   0:27:39.0 David Tomen: It’s better now. We’re more in love today than we were the day we got married.   0:27:45.8 Ashley James: Did you sneak some kind of Nootropics in her orange juice every morning? [Laughter]   0:27:50.3 David Tomen: No. She’s allergic to this stuff.   0:27:53.3 Ashley James: Oh, that’s funny.   0:27:54.9 David Tomen: I give her a choline supplement and she just goes crazy. So nope. [Laughter]   0:28:02.2 Ashley James: That’s interesting. I have actually had allergic reactions to some adaptogenic herbs. They make my heart race. We have to try it with caution. They can be absolutely amazing. They can be wonderful and life-changing, and we can sometimes have allergic reactions to them, so it’s good to test them a little bit at a time. Maybe you could walk us through some precautions and teach us some of the more common ones and how to take them and what to look for, the ones that people might be accidentally taking because they bought it from Whole Foods, that kind of thing.   0:28:42.6 David Tomen: I get this question often like, what do I do? How do I use Nootropics? And my first question is, what do you wanna fix? Like what’s your problem? Because you’ve got so many options available to you, but unless you can tell me exactly what you’re trying to fix, I can’t really help you. So for example, if you have got a problem with learning and memory, you want to take a look at like Aniracetam and Bacopa Monnieri and CDP choline and L-theanine and DHA. On the other hand if you have a problem with anxiety and depression, you can use some of those same things for anxiety and depression, but you also probably wanna look at things like lithium orotate and sibutramine and Rhodiola Rosea, or if you got a problem with energy and motivation, you wanna look at things like acetyl L-carnitine and alpha lipoic acid and CoQ10 and PQQ. So it depends on what you’re trying to fix. That’s the starting point. Another thing that I find out from people is like if you’re dealing with depression, are you on medication? If you are on medication, what are you using, and is it working for you? And if the answer is I’m on SSRI, then we find out exactly what’s the mechanism of action of that SSRI, how exactly does it work in your brain and let’s find a natural substance that does exactly the same thing on your brain. So that people can start lessening their dependence on that prescription drug. The same thing with ADHD and ADD, you don’t have to use stimulants. A lot of people can get away with not using them. I came up with an ADHD protocol, and I actually tested it for a year on myself, not using Ritalin, just using the stack I put together, and it worked. Under normal circumstances, I could’ve just used the things that I’ve got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 things in my stack. I used those for a year, and I was fine, but I found that my workload and at my age, I just found that I couldn’t handle my everyday workload without the help of the stimulants, so I started using Ritalin again, but I still use the stack. I know that there are tens of thousands of people managing their ADHD and ADD just with this protocol I put together.   0:31:36.9 Ashley James: Love it, very cool. I recently saw an article  that said that if someone has been on an antidepressant, that their brain chemistry will never be the same again and that they’ll need to be on it for the rest of their life because it forever alters their brain chemistry. has that happened in your experience or if someone has been on an antidepressant in their past, is there a way through Nootropics to support the brain and having healthy levels of serotonin and dopamine and all those chemicals?   0:32:12.0 David Tomen: Well the thing about antidepressants is most of the time it’s difficult to stop them because these things, a lot of antidepressant drugs and anti-anxiety drugs are more addictive than heroin and cocaine and oxycodone. I mean they’re that addictive, and it’s extremely, extremely difficult to wean yourself off of them, and I’m not an expert on that. One person that is is Dr. Kelly Brogan who helps people wean off of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs and give them the natural route, but it is a rough, rough road. But there are certain Nootropics that you can use to support some antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, and they help them work better, but they’re very few, and far between because of the time they will cause more problems than they will help. If somebody has got depression for example and their doctor wants to put them on an antidepressant of some kind, but they’re reluctant to do that, and they come to me and say, “I’m dealing with depression, please help me.” We have to start digging in to what’s causing the depression in the first place because what the big pharmaceutical companies tell you is not a lack of serotonin in your brain, it could be a problem with dopamine, it could be a problem with neurogenesis, it could be a problem with stress, it could be a problem with inflammation. For example, the primary neurotransmitters play a role in depression, get this, acetylcholine, dopamine, glutamate, gabba, norepinephrine, and serotonin – where do you start?   0:34:18.4 Ashley James: Right.   0:34:19.3 David Tomen: Right? And so if a person hasn’t got a clue, if they’ve never used any prescription medication before, so they haven’t got anything to kind of like look at saying, “Yeah this kind of worked.” If they’re starting from scratch, I have them go through this list one at a time and try different nootropic supplements until they find something that works. And this can be a long process, but it’s worth it because you’ll finally get or leave. For example, acetylcholine, the precursors to acetylcholine are alpha GPC or CDP choline, so you can try something like CDP choline or acetylcholine for a little while and see if that helps. If that doesn’t help, then let’s move on dopamine. So you try something else – tyrosine, or N-acetyl L-tyrosine and try that for a few days and see if that helps. Well if that didn’t work, then let’s move onto gabba and let’s try supplementing with GABA for a few days and see if that helps. Sooner or later you’re gonna get  through this list. If nothing helps in supporting these neurotransmitters, then we know that it’s not a neurotransmitter problem. Then it could be an inflammation problem, so then we start looking at different things that take care of the inflammation. Things like turmeric or curcumin and there are a few other ones that help tame inflammation – pine bark extract or an antioxidant. So, these are the kinds of approaches that we take. It depends on our starting point and what our knowledge level is and what we know about our own body. And one of the reasons why I’ve consulting business too because you can get stressed out just trying to figure this thing out.   0:36:16.7 Ashley James: Yeah, right. What about this idea like a person has enough GABA but there’s something going on with their receptors. How do we resensitize the receptors to uptake the GABA or the serotonin or dopamine?   0:36:34.5 David Tomen: There are some Nootropics that help repair receptors and help in neurogenesis, aniracetam for example, which is one or the racetams that I use every day and it’s one of my favorites. It helps heal dopamine 2 and dopamine 3 receptors. Pine bark extract helps heal receptors, and it helps with neurogenesis, and it helps with cerebral blood flow. So those are just 2 examples. If somebody is looking for this kind of information, they just go to Nootropics Expert and type into the search bar “synapses” and see what turns up or “receptors” and see what turns up.   0:37:23.1 Ashley James: You mentioned blood flow, and that’s really interesting because they’re finding that dementia is basically caused by the vascular flow being cut off and they’re saying that there’s plaque, but a lot of doctors in the holistic space are saying that it’s basically dysregulated blood sugar over many years. Not enough to be diabetes, but you know the state of American diet is way high in sugar and when we can consume, let’s say we go and have ice cream with our family, we have way more blood sugar than our body knows what to do with and if someone regardless whether they’re diabetic or not diabetic, they have higher blood sugar that’s not healthy and this causes systemic inflammation to the whole circulatory system including the brain and we do that enough and the brain ends up being like Swiss cheese in these brain scans where they’re seeing areas of the brain that have such disruption from the vascular flow being harmed from our diet that eventually the brain becomes like Swiss cheese. And so they’re saying that dementia is like a form of diabetes. And you’re saying that you have Nootropics or these supplements that support the brain that increases vascular flow and the health of our vascular system, the circulatory system to the brain – not that we should take that and go eat ice cream, we have to make sure our diet is healthy for our brain as well. But tell me a bit about these supplements that support the vasculature in the brain.   0:39:11.2 David Tomen: Ok. Let’s just talk about the aging brain in general, and we’ll touch on each of these. We’re talking about prolongs with free radicals in the oxidative stress, and you’re talking about synapses that you already mentioned, and then Alzheimer’s and dementia, and vascular dementia and cerebral circulation and neurotransmitter decline. I actually wrote a post on this that takes a deep dive into how each of these works in the aging brain. What I mean by the aging brain is anybody after 20 has got an aging brain because there are certain neurotransmitters that begin to decline after the age of 20. So everybody can use this help. For example, free radicals in brain aging, free radicals are when your brain is firing, and it’s doing these tens of thousands of times. You got 10,000 oxidative interactions between DNA and free radicals in each one of your brain cells that occur every day and every minute of every day. But if you have an unhealthy diet particularly, these free radicals can get out of hand, and it causes oxidative stress, and your body tries to cope with it because it’s got a built-in anti-oxidant system. So you’ve got things like vitamin C and vitamin E and CoQ10 already naturally in your body, but it hasn’t got enough to be able to cope with the workload. So we can use things like alpha lipoic acid which is a naturally occurring fatty acid that is both fat and water soluble, and it has a unique ability to neutralize free radicals in all cellular environments, and it helps boost the synthesis of acetylcholine, and it increases glucose uptake in brain cells. It also helps regenerate other depleted antioxidants like vitamin C, E, and glutathione and it recycles CoQ10 that’s already in your body, and it gets rid of heavy metals. So you can start supplementing with alpha lipoic acid, CoQ10 is a natural antioxidant that’s synthesized in every single cell on your body and your brain, and it helps adenosine triphosphate which is the fuel that the mitochondria use in your brain cells. So we just supplement with extra CoQ10 to help support what’s already gone in our mitochondria. Creatine. People in athletic circles use creatine to help them, but it’s an essential amino acid that’s synthesized in your liver that your body uses to recharge adenosine triphosphate to fuel mitochondria. So we can add creatine to our diet. Creatine that we’re not already getting from food that boosts cellular metabolism and helps protect neurons from damage caused by toxins. And I can go on about just free radicals. And then we get into synapses like we talked about earlier. Ashwagandha is an old ayurvedic remedy that recent researches found regenerates axons and dendrites and it helps reconstruct synapses. Artichoke extract is a natural PDE4 inhibitor which supports the cAMP, which is a secondary messenger, and it stimulates the production of CREB. The CREB is cAMP’s response element-binding protein. It’s a protein needed for new neuron synthesis in synapse growth, and it increases long term potentiation which is needed for encoding long term memories. Berberine is an amazing supplement. It enhances synaptic plasticity, it reduces the aggregation of amyloid B protein that leads to Alzheimer’s, and it helps reduce the protein Tau, which is associated with Alzheimer’s, and it works as in antioxidant. And I use it because my naturopath says I’m insulin resistant. It works as well as metformin, but it doesn’t have the side effects. So I use berberine. So that’s synapses. For cerebral circulation, if you wanna get more blood flow moving in your brain. I find the 2 most effective supplements are one, pine bark extract – it’s used primarily on nootropic circles to increase cerebral blood flow, but we’ve also found that it’s a very, very potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory. And the other one that I love is vinpocetine, which is a semi-synthetic derivative of the Lesser Periwinkle plant, and I use that every day.   0:45:00.1 Ashley James: Can you say it again?   0:45:04.3 David Tomen: Vinpocetine.   0:45:04.8 Ashely James: And it’s a semi-synthetic, can you explain what that means?   0:45:09.0 David Tomen: It’s derived from the Lesser Periwinkle plant in the lab. It’s an alkaloid that’s derived from the Lesser Periwinkle plant. It’s used as a prescription drug in a lot of countries, but here you can still get it as a supplement, and I use it just increase blood flow. It’s amazing.   0:45:34.0 Ashley James: In the countries that it is a drug, what is it prescribed for?   0:45:38.3 David Tomen: Blood flow. It’s prescribed for things like Alzheimer’s.   0:45:43.0 Ashley James: Interesting.   0:45:44.4 David Tomen: And stroke patients.   0:45:49.6 Ashley James: Really cool. So you must have a protocol for those who are recovering from stroke?   0:46:01.5 David Tomen: Kind of like what we just talked about because a stroke wreaks havoc on your brain and one of the problems with stroke is that your antioxidant system cannot keep up with the oxidative damage that’s been going on. So some of the stuff that we just talked about and a dozen other supplements that I’ve got in the same list. Somebody that’s dealing with stroke, I had encouraged them to put together at least half a dozen of these and start taking them right away. I also have written about PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and TBI (traumatic brain injury). Treating TBI is like treating stroke because TBI causes the same kind of problems in the brain, and you’re dealing with axon injury, and you’re dealing with problems of the cerebral circulation, glutamate overload, and you’re dealing with glucose and mitochondria getting out of whack and you’re dealing with an NMDA receptors that are not working properly. Then I’ve got a list of about 12 supplements for dealing with concussion or TBI. And I actually wrote this particular post after one of the hurricanes because a lot of people that survive a hurricane or any kind of a natural disaster like that are dealing with PTSD and they don’t even realize it or TBI when they get knocked in the head by something.   0:48:06.9 Ashley James: Absolutely and concussions are so common, and there’s no treatment for them. They just say stay awake and go home and rest. Rest but don’t fall asleep and that’s it.   0:48:18.1 David Tomen: That’s just not true. You can do real things to help your brain, but there are no prescription drugs that I know of that can help heal your brain, but you can use things like creatine and DHA which is an omega 3 and green tea and N-acetyl L-cysteine, or NAC, resveratrol, turmeric, the B vitamins. All of these things can help you recover from that kind of brain injury.   0:48:51.3 Ashley James: What about helping the body heal like a motor neuron lesion or a spinal cord injury? I have a friend in the hospital right now who had an operation from stenosis and now they’re paralyzed, and the doctor believes that they will regain. It will probably take 4 years, but they’ll regain the ability to walk again. How can we support the nervous system in healing from that kind of trauma?   0:49:20.3 David Tomen: Some of the things that I just talked about for concussion and TBI, but I would also use lion’s mane mushroom. Lion’s mane mushroom is an amazing supplement if you’ve ever seen a picture of it, it looks like a lion’s mane. It’s the strangest looking mushroom. But the lion’s mane helps better than anything in neurogenesis, and there was one study done, and I think this study was done in Malaysia where they used lab rats, and they were mean to these rats. They crushed their gluteal nerves so they couldn’t walk which kind of breaks my heart but then the next thing that happened was they gave them lion’s mane laced water to drink. Within 2 weeks, their gluteal nerves have healed, and the rats were walking again.   0:50:19.5 Ashley James: Did they have a group of rats they did not give the lion’s mane too?   0:50:25.5 David Tomen: Yup.   0:50:26.4 Ashley James: Were they able to walk again?   0:50:28.7 David Tomen: No, they weren’t. They are permanently crippled.   0:50:31.9 Ashley James: Amazing. I mean sad for the rats, I don’t like hearing that kind of experiment to any animal but also very amazing that lion’s manes can help people that well.   0:50:44.9 David Tomen: It’s incredible.   0:50:47.3 Ashley James: How much would one need to take? What are the doses of these kinds of things?   0:50:51.1 David Tomen: A lion’s mane is anywhere from 400mg to up to some people take 1200mg a day. Something like that is perfectly safe to take in really, really big doses. You don’t have to worry about overdosing on it. Some of these things, they won’t hurt you other than give you like an upset stomach, if you take too much of it or take too much of it at once. Oftentimes when you’re taking bigger doses of some of these things, it’s better to split your dose into 2 or 3 doses per day. So you take 1 in the morning, 1 at noon, 1 in the afternoon. But yeah lion’s mane, absolutely.   0:51:34.1 Ashley James: Very interesting. I have a friend who was on the street at some point and was addicted to meth, and she has since recovered, but she says that it’s as if there’s no happiness in her life. That’s just in her brain, right? And the only way to get back to normal, or to get back to just like how you and I would feel on an average day – that level of happiness would take meth. Not even to get her to feel high or overly happy, but just to feel normal.   0:52:17.5 David Tomen: I understand. You’re dealing with a TBI, you really are. Now I am no doctor, I don’t even play one on TV, but it’s common sense to me that the same things that work for somebody with a concussion or TBI, somebody in that kind of a situation, I would encourage them to use the same types of supplements, but the thing is there’s no one pill solution. There just isn’t. We’ve been conditioned to think that there’s a one pill solution, but there’s not. It’s gonna take at least a half a dozen supplements and taking it for a long time until you start feeling some relief. Because the brain, how long it’d take to damage the brain – you know it took you years. So, fortunately, it doesn’t take years to help the brain recover. You can do it in a few months, but you’ve got to be diligent and stick to it and religiously take this stuff every single day until you start feeling some relief.   0:53:26.5 Ashley James: What about addiction? What about like someone who is addicted – alcohol, or maybe even food addiction, or porn addiction. Is there a protocol that helps people to balance their brains, so they don’t have the compulsion or that addiction?    0:53:42.8 David Tomen: You know there’s not really a protocol, and I haven’t looked into in that deeply but there are a couple of supplements that I had reviewed that I remember seeing either anecdotal evidence or clinical studies showing that people were not as prone to addiction when they were using it, and I cannot remember off the top of my head what they were. You know what Ashley, I just don’t remember what they are but I know that they exist. It’s not a miracle cure by any stretch, and it’s not gonna make you stop drinking by taking it, but it reduces the tendency to want to do that. I think that possibly Mucuna Pruriens L-dopa may be one of them.   0:54:49.0 Ashley James: And someone could book a consultation with you, and you can go dive into the research?   0:54:55.1 David Tomen: That’s exactly what I do.   0:54:57.9 Ashley James: Right. What about 5 HTP, is that a nootropic?   0:55:04.2 David Tomen: I can say that it’s a nootropic, but you got to be super careful with it.   0:55:07.8 Ashley James: Why is that?   0:55:08.7 David Tomen: Because people take too high overdosing themselves from their trouble. You got to understand the serotonin pathway. It goes L-tryptophan to 5 HTP to serotonin to melatonin. So somebody is depressed, and they feel like they need to boost serotonin, the first thing they do is they grab 5 HTP and 500mg of HTP, and they overdose which is an overdose, and they feel like crap the next day, and they don’t know what went wrong. It’s a lot safer to do something like L-tryptophan and take 500mg or 750mg before you go to sleep and you’ll feel better the next day. 5 HTP you dose like 25mg at a time, but you can’t find a 25mg of 5 HTP supplement. The lowest dose I’ve been able to find is 100mg.   0:56:14.4 Ashley James: Right. Yeah.   0:56:16.4 David Tomen: So what I do is because I use so much to boost dopamine, I have to keep serotonin in balance. I use L-tryptophan before I go to sleep, but during the day I also use 5 HTP, but I get a 100mg lozenge, and I use a pill splitter, and I cut it in quarters. And when I feel like my serotonin is a little bit out of whack compared to dopamine, I just put 25mg under my tongue   0:56:50.0 Ashley James: How does one know?   0:56:52.2 David Tomen: You just feel it   0:56:53.5 Ashley James: How do you feel? Like for someone who has never distinguished what serotonin versus dopamine feels, what are the symptoms of too much serotonin versus too little?   0:57:06.5 David Tomen: I can tell you more with too much dopamine than serotonin. Too much dopamine – because dopamine turns into norepinephrine and turns to epinephrine which is you fight or flight hormone, you get really irritable and sharp with people and antsy, your dopamine system is out of whack. Too much serotonin is you just feel like you’re sick. But it’s unlike sick that I can describe because it’s unlike anything else I’ve ever felt, it just feels really weird. I can’t even describe the feeling, Ashley. I just know that feeling. [Laughter]   0:57:57.2 Ashley James: So how do you bring dopamine down then, if you have too much of it?   0:58:03.9 David Tomen: Boost serotonin. Dopamine and serotonin play off of each other.   0:58:09.9 Ashley James: Got it.   0:58:10.6 David Tomen: They have to be in balance. If dopamine is too high, you suppress serotonin or serotonin is too high. You depress dopamine.   0:58:18.0 Ashley James: So if you’re antsy, irritable, and kind of short-tempered with people then take some l-tryptophan at night and see if that does the job. Taking at night, that does that then help boost serotonin all day long the next day?   0:58:33.5 David Tomen: It does, and it helps you sleep because it eventually turns into melatonin.   0:58:38.4  Ashley James: And is that a supplement that someone can take over the counter?   0:58:41.8 David Tomen: Yes.   0:58:43.2 Ashley James: It’s still available?   0:58:45.5 David Tomen: The L-tryptophan is readily available.   0:58:48.1 Ashley James: Okay, great. I don’t know. I heard something about it being taken off the counter.   0:58:54.1 David Tomen: I heard that too, and I have no idea where people got that information from.   0:59:00.1 Ashley James: But it’s a naturally occurring amino acid in Turkey.   0:59:03.8 David Tomen: Yeah. I know, I looked into this one time when somebody else mentioned that. There was a problem with one particular manufacturer of L-tryptophan.   0:59:15.0 Ashley James: Oh, right.   0:59:17.5 David: They were putting out an adulterated supplement or something. I don’t remember exactly what the story was, but it was a bad batch, and it made headlines, and it was taken off the market, and everybody said L-tryptophan has been taken off the market. That’s not true. It was taken off the market from this one particular manufacturer because they had a bad batch that went out.   0:59:42.0 Ashley James: Ok.   0:59:43.1 David Tomen: And that happened years ago.   0:59:44.6 Ashley James: Yeah a long time ago.   0:59:46.1 David Tomen: And people are still talking about it. It’s amazing.   0:59:48.4 Ashley James: Right. Let’s bust that myth. It’s available. We can get it. You don’t need to get to Turkey to get your L-tryptophan. [Laughter]   0:59:55.6 David Tomen: The last one I got was from Amazon.   0:59:59.3 Ashley James: Interesting. I mean really buy or beware in the supplement space. I know that you are an affiliate of some brands that you like. Do you have any advice for watching out, like what kind of companies shouldn’t one buy from?   1:00:19.0 David Tomen: That’s a really good question. I wrote a post called “7 Tips for Choosing the Highest Quality of Nootropics Supplements,” and I went through how I think about this. The first thing to look for is brand names. And by brand names I don’t mean like Walgreens or CVS or GNC or Target, that’s not what I mean by brand names. By brand names, I mean like Gaia Herbs, Doctor’s Best, Nature’s Way, Irwin Naturals – those kinds of brand names. That’s the first thing that I look at. The next thing I look at is if they’ve got any kind of quality assurance, and the way to find out about this is to go to their website. The first thing you can  find out is if it makes sense. If it’s natural, is it USDA organic, right? Has it got the seal on it? The other thing to look for is the certificate of analysis, and some of these manufacturers will actually put a certificate of analysis for each batch that they put on their website.   1:01:44.7 Ashley James: Nice.   1:01:46.4 David Tomen: So you can use the batch code on the supplement and go to their website and download the certificate of analysis. The certificate of analysis tells you exactly what a third party testing lab found in that capsule or tablet, including how much of the supplement that the manufacturer claimed was there. Is it really in there and is there anything else in there? Are there heavy metals in there? Is there something that’s should not be in there completely? A couple of years ago the New York Attorney General sent letters to places like Target and Walgreens and GNC and some other big retailers that had private label supplements on the shelf that they had tested the supplements for things like ginkgo biloba and Rhodiola and found there was nothing in the capsule but wheatgrass. Right? So that’s why I say, do not buy a private label from any of these retailers, unless they can prove what’s in their capsule or tablet.   1:03:01.3 Ashley James: Right.   1:03:01.7 David Tomen: The other thing to look for is the US Pharmacopeia. If it’s USP verified, that can be good and bad. That can be good because somebody went into that facility and tested their products and verified that what’s in the capsule or tablet is really in there and they have the USP stamp of approval on it. Where this does not help is when it comes to things like vitamins and minerals because you don’t really want a USP Pharmacopoeia stamp of approval on vitamins and minerals because the minerals are ground up rock and something that your body can’t use. NSF International is an independent non-profit organization that provides certification for dietary supplements. You can look for their seal. Lab Door is an international and independent company who buys products off of retail shelves and online, and then they test them for active ingredients and potential contaminants and publish it on their website. Consumer Lab has got a similar kind of deal. It’s an independent subscription-based service that tests dietary supplements to see what’s in the capsule or tablet. But  a word of caution about Consumer Lab, because the company doesn’t disclose the brand names of supplements that fail their testing.   1:04:45.7 Ashley James: Ew.   1:04:46.7 David Tomen: If the manufacturer has paid them their $4,000 yearly fee.   1:04:52.6 Ashley James: Ew. So basically what they publish is safe, but they don’t publish anything that it might not be safe?   1:05:03.8 David Tomen: Right, yeah. I don’t completely trust Consumer Lab.   1:05:11.0 Ashley James: Well, if you can pay them off to have them not be a whistleblower then, yeah.   1:05:17.9 David Tomen: The other thing to look for is therapeutic dosages. The thing is that there is no therapeutic dosage. So if somebody says in their advertising or on the label that this has got a therapeutic dosage in it, for individual dietary supplements, there is no established therapeutic dosage. There is the dosage that we found through clinical studies and actual user experience to find out what works.   1:05:47.2 Ashley James: Right.   1:05:49.4 David Tomen: So it’s [inaudible 1:05:49.2] It is not true. The other thing to look for and this is extremely important, are the other ingredients. If you take a look at the back of a supplement bottle on the bottom of the list of ingredients, there is a thing called “other ingredients.” And under other ingredients are things to help increase shelf life, to bind tablets together, to improve consistency, to improve moisture resistance, to help stabilize ingredients, to add bulk like to fill a capsule, and to add color and flavor – all the stuff that you don’t really need. Right? Some of this stuff could be really bad for you. Cellulose is a binding or a thickening agent that you’ll see on a lot of supplements. It’s cellulose. It doesn’t do anything. It’s not good for you. It’s not bad for you. It just shouldn’t be in there. Magnesium stearate or vegetable stearate or stearic acid is a flow agent or a lubricant that speeds up their manufacturing process. So it stops the ingredients from sticking to the mechanical equipment, and it’s also added to tablets to make it easier to swallow. The problem with magnesium stearate is it suppresses your natural killer T-cells.   1:07:20.7 Ashley James: Oh no.   1:07:24.3 David Tomen: And you can see magnesium stearate in a lot of supplements, even big brand names that you would otherwise trust. Titanium dioxide is a pigment used to provide color. The problem with titanium dioxide is that it leads to mitochondrial dysfunction. It damages astrocyte cells, which leaves them unable to absorb glutamate and it induces potent oxidative stress and mitochondrial damage in luteal cells. Silica is an anti-clumping agent that stops ingredients to mechanical equipment that you see in a lot of supplements. Probably the safest one that you’ll see there is rice flour. It’s used as a filler. I look for supplements that have as few as or no extra ingredients. The companies that I mentioned that I’m an affiliate for on Nootropics Expert – Performance Lab and Mind Lab Pro, there is zero other ingredients in their products.   1:08:31.8 Ashley James: Very cool.   1:08:33.3 David Tomen: Zero. Nothing. Zip. The other thing that you want to look for is bio availability, which is really important when it comes to things like turmeric because turmeric is really poorly absorbed. So you want to find a turmeric supplement that the manufacturer has – you’ll see patented turmeric or curcumin ingredients that manufacturers have found some way to make them more bioavailable. One way to make turmeric more bioavailable is to take with Bioperine or piperine. Clinical studies show that it increases absorption by 2,000%.   1:09:17.1 Ashley James: Wow.   1:09:18.8 David Tomen: Another example is L-tyrosine, which is the amino acid that is directly involved in the synthesis of dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. The problem is that it’s not very bioavailable and it’s not officially absorbed when it’s taken as a nootropic supplement for some people. So to boost the bioavailability of L-tyrosine, they add an acetyl group to it, so it’s called N-acetyl L-tyrosine or NALT. And that seems to boost availability. I find that my body can use either one or the other, but some people can only use L-tyrosine. Some people can only use NALT. You want to make sure they’re in the right form and that when they’re stacked with other ingredients that they’re working synergistically together and not working against each other. And that is a completely other subject, that’s for a whole other podcast because there’s too much to talk about there. But you’ve got have the right ingredients put together and the right dosages for the thing to work. And the last thing is extracts versus the whole herb. Sometimes an extract will work better than a whole herb. Lion’s mane mushroom, for example, some people will argue that the whole fruit works better than an extract, but there are other products were the extract, like an extract of turmeric or curcumin for example that works better for some things. So, just be aware of that. One particular supplement could be more effective if it’s in an extract and another supplement could be more effective if you’re using the whole herb. So, that’s it. I got a little checklist and I kind of like do this automatically while I’m looking. Brand name; quality which includes country of origin and certificate of analysis or certified organic; certification which includes certificate of analysis, bioavailability, other ingredients, and extracts. I go through that in my head before I choose something.   1:11:58.0 Ashley James: Very good. I like that it was thorough. I really like that.   1:12:05.4 David Tomen: Because there’s so much garbage out there.   1:12:07.9 Ashley James: Oh yeah, totally. I had a guy on the show all about mushrooms, and he has been in the mushroom industry for over 30 years. He was a farmer of mushrooms and then got into medicinal mushrooms, and now he has a company that grows them organically in China, and he talked about how most mushrooms, and he talked about the difference between myceliated mushroom and the actual whole mushroom. Micilianated means that the farmer here, let’s say in the U.S., you get this lion’s mane supplement and you’re all excited because it says, “grown organically in the U.S.” And you think, “Excellent, what’s grown in the U.S. must be better than what’s grown in China.” And you take it, and nothing happens because it’s myceliated which means that took a bunch of rice and then they put lion’s mane to grow in it as like a mushroom and the lion’s mane made little sort of mushroom roots, the mycelia. And then they took the entire batch including all mostly rice and grounded up and popped it into a capsule, and then they say, “You know there’s some rice in there for whatever filler.” I don’t even know if they have to declare that the rice is there because it’s part of the farming practice, but that it’s 90% rice and only 10% lion’s mane and you take 2 a day thinking you’re getting 2 full capsules of lion’s mane when you’re not. And he has little experiment; he said go get some iodine which you can get at a drugstore and take it 2 capsules of your mushroom supplement and dump it into a little glass of water and mix it up and then put a few drops of iodine. If it turns black, then it is myceliated. It’s 90% rice or some kind of cornstarch or something – you know if it’s not rice, then it’s corn. But they grow it in basically a grain, and so your mushroom supplement is not pure if the water turns black because iodine reacts to the starch.   1:14:20.9 David Tomen: What color does it turn up, if it’s real mushroom?   1:14:25.4 Ashley James: I think it doesn’t react. It’s just iodine color.   1:14:32.6 David Tomen: What a great idea.   1:14:33.6 Ashley James: Because iodine turns black when exposed to starch. I mean you could take cornstarch and put iodine in it, it’s gonna turn into a really dark color. It’s gonna change color.   1:14:42.5 David Tomen: They used to call it black porridge in Russia. The iodine in potato starch, anyway that’s a whole other story. There’s a supplement company that I just started working with that came over from Kazakhstan that based all of their research off of this guy in Russia who ended up in the goo log and saved the entire goo log from dying of dysentery with black porridge, and it was iodine and potato starch.   1:15:14.2 Ashley James: Very interesting. Yeah, it turned black exactly. So that what happens. You can use iodine to basically test the purity of your mushroom supplement. But just to complement your elaborate checklist of what to go through when looking for quality, it’s not necessarily where a supplement is created. I guess I just had a bit of ignorance around that. I thought if it’s from the U.S. or if it’s from Canada, then it must be the best or much better than if it’s from Asia – it’s just not true. That yes, Asia can have contaminated water, contaminated air just like we can, but that this one man that I had on the show, he said that his mushroom farms are in this part of China that’s on the mountains where the cleaner air and the mountain water and he has all of his stuff tested in China, and then he comes back and has it tested again for heavy metals and all that kind of stuff. We want to go through your checklist to make sure that the lab tests are available or the company is willing to share it  and that it’s off that batch, not just from any batch and that they’re comfortable with things being certified organic and having third-party lab tests to prove that they’re safe. And so, we just want to be diligent when going through these supplements. I really like your tip on taking 750mg of L-tryptophan at night. if someone feels that their serotonin might be low, my naturopath put me on serotonin because I eat a really clean diet and I was noticing that – and what I mean by really clean is no processed sugar, no junk food, plant-based, and I was having these cravings at night and I was feeling sort of a little bit down. I would not say depressed by any means, but just a little bit low, and she thought this might be serotonin. I also told her that I take melatonin at night to fall asleep. So she gave me 100mg of 5 HTP to take in the morning, and I started digging into all the studies and I saw that there were studies were they did 500mg in short term, 2 and 4 week increments and the people that they did it are people who were obese and had cravings and that those people after taking 500mg a day of 5 HTP would naturally just didn’t want to consume as much carbohydrates and so they lost weight.   1:18:17.9 David Tomen: Interesting.   1:18:18.8 Ashley James: Yeah. I thought that was interesting. So I decided to do a plain experiment on myself, and I doubled the those that my naturopath gave me. I did 100 in the morning and 100 at night, and I promptly began to feel horrible and had to run to the bathroom. It actually gave 3 days of diarrhea, that’s the only change I did. And so, of course, I love experimenting on myself. So I did this experiment a few times just to prove that yes, increasing it was not great, but I also noticed that I felt kind of airy like in a really happy way. I mean I don’t drink, but it was almost like my brain just felt a little fuzzy, but in a spacey – I just want to space out and watch cartoons kind of way. So it was definitely doing something, altering my chemistry but in going too far in one direction, I’d say. Actually what’s really interesting I think is that for the first few days of taking 5 HTP, I noticed a huge increase in cravings and I thought, what is going on? [Laughter] I since stopped taking it, but I did take it for a few months, and I feel as though my body then just adapted to it, and I started to feel normal again. And now that I’m off it, I don’t really feel any different. I do have a listener who told me that she found herself one morning inconsolably crying in her kitchen, I think she said. And she couldn’t figure out why she was so depressed until she realized she had ran out of 5 HTP 3 or 4 days prior. So she got back on it and promptly began to feel like her wonderful self again. And so she says anytime she runs out of it she just feels horrible, and when she gets on it, she feels amazing. So for some people, these Nootropics are quite life changing.   1:20:20.5 David Tomen: For a lot of people they’re really life-changing, but every single body is unique and different. And how you react is oftentimes completely different to how I’m gonna react to something.   1:20:37.0 Ashley James: Right.   1:20:38.6 David Tomen: You mentioned too about food and your diet. One of the things that I did when I got really sick about 6 years ago, hypothyroid and stuff, I really cleaned up my diet. But one of the things that I discovered since is that you can clean up your diet so that you’ve got the cleanest diet on earth and you’re eating the best food that man produces on earth, and you’re still lacking in certain vitamins and minerals. You just are, because our food supply cannot provide the nutrients that our body and brain needs to function properly anymore.   1:21:19.9 Ashley James: Yeah, it’s amazing.   1:21:23.6 David Tomen: There was a randomized placebo-controlled trial at North 1:21:28.0?? University with 215 health men aged 30 to 55. These guys were given a multivitamin or a placebo for 33 days. These guys were tested at the beginning of the study and then again at the end of the study for mood, stress, memory, and general health. After 33 days of using a daily multivitamin, the researchers reported a significant improvement in general mental health, reduced stress, increased vigor, and overall improvement in mood. And the men who used multivitamins during the trial also showed improved memory and reduced mental fatigue. The placebo group experienced no significant changes.   1:22:11.7 Ashley James: Amazing.   1:22:13.2 David Tomen: Now, why is this? It’s a problem with our food supply. A lot of the reasons why we’re sick with one thing or another is because we’re not getting the nutrients that we need. There was a study in 2004 on fruits and vegetables, and they found that everything from protein, iron, vitamin C significantly declined since 1950 and they looked at the data for 13 nutrients across 43 vegetable crops. And research of fruits and vegetables show that minerals, vitamins, and protein content has dropped significantly over the last 15 to 70 years. But the problem is not just big agra, right? And problem with the depleting soil, there’s also a problem with our air. There’s a guy named Irakli Loladze who’s a mathematician by training, and he studied nutrient and vitamin levels in plants for 15 years. And Loladze found that the earth’s atmosphere had 200 parts per million of carbon dioxide before the industrial revolution and last year they’re playing across over 400 parts per million for carbon dioxide. Now, that might seem like a good thing because plants thrive on carbon dioxide. Higher  carbon dioxide levels aid in photosynthesis which means that increased plant growth and more food, but the problem is that this increase in rapid growth also leads to plants that are creating more carbohydrates like glucose instead of other nutrients that our bodies and brains need like protein, iron, and zinc.   1:23:58.6 Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   1:24:01.5 David Tomen: Yeah, it’s just the air. And so everybody that I talked to, I say, “Are you using a multivitamin?” Because you have to, it is the simplest, simplest thing that you can do for your health. But the problem also is choosing the wrong multivitamin, because you can go to the drugstore or into your supermarket and you can see Centrum and One a Day, and you look at the label, and you have no idea what you’re looking at. What you’re looking at is you’re looking at vitamin B1 that exist in food in the form of thiamine pyrophosphate, the vitamin B1 in that Centrum multivitamin is thiamine mononitrate which is a coal tar derivative.   1:24:55.9 Ashley James: A coal tar  derivative.   1:24:59.5 David Tomen: Yeah.   1:25:00.2 Ashley James: You’ve got to be kidding me.   1:25:01.6 David Tomen: No. you can go through the whole list of vitamins, and then you go through the list of minerals. And the minerals are basically and literally ground up rock.   1:25:14.7 Ashley James: Well iron, is it like iron oxide or something which is basically rust?   1:25:19.4 David Tomen: No.   1:25:21.0 Ashley James: It’s not bioavailable.   1:25:23.1 David Tomen: Iron is very bioavailable if it comes from a plant.   1:25:26.6 Ashley James: Right.   1:25:28.9 David Tomen: So what you want to do is you want to find a whole food or a raw food multivitamin that has been grown from something like yeast. They grow it from other things like brewer’s yeast that has the same cofactors. It’s exactly the same thing that you get from food. But you gotta be careful because when you’re looking at these labels, if it says, “No USP nutrients” or “100% food” or “No synthetic nutrients,” you know that it’s artificial.   1:26:07.1 Ashley James: Why?   1:26:11.2 David Tomen: 100% food-based vitamins are grown in yeast culture. So you’ll something that has 16 natural capsules, and it says, “Yeast free” that’s a big dangerous signal right there. Because if it says yeast free on the label, you know that it’s synthetic. A really good multivitamin, if you open it up and it smells like yeast – like what you find in the kitchen, it’s good. So Performance Lab, the company that I am an affiliate for came up with a multivitamin that’s got just nutrients, just the vitamins and minerals and nothing else. There’s no other added ingredients or anything, and everything is grown from yeast, and it’s the first time that I’ve actually taken a multivitamin that I actually felt the difference.   1:27:06.6 Ashley James: Very cool.   1:27:09.6 David Tomen: I felt better using this thing. I wrote an article about this, and I’ve got pictures of the labels in this post, about what you typically find on these multivitamins and it’s just scary. It’s scary, and when you see headlines like “Experts say that taking multivitamins a waste of time because all you’re doing is you’re peeing the stuff out.” Well yeah, it’s true you’re peeing it out because it’s inorganic and your body isn’t using it.   1:27:53.3 Ashley James: But also in order for you to even to get to your kidneys, you absorbed it and went into your bloodstream and bathe every cell in your body.   1:28:04.7 David Tomen: Yeah. You did some kind of damage. [Laughter]   1:28:08.9 Ashley James: So are you saying that niacin or the B vitamins that are grown in yeast don’t change the color or urine at all?   1:28:20.1 David Tomen: Yeah, they will.   1:28:21.4 Ashley James: They do change the color of urine?   1:28:24.8 David Tomen: Sure, they can.   1:28:25.6 Ashley James: Right. But when someone starts peeing more fluorescent yellow and then someone says, “Well, you’re just peeing out your vitamins.” So let’s assume that what they took was a healthy multivitamin that was plant-derived, their body absorbed it into their bloodstream and bathe every cell in their body, their cells were able to utilize it and because they’re water soluble the kidneys immediately start to remove any excess but at least it got to every cell in the body and usually what happens between 2 and 4 weeks of taking a really good quality of multivitamin that the color of their urine will go back to normal, also presuming that they’re drinking enough water. The body then becomes better at utilizing all the nutrients that it’s being  given. You brought up Centrum. People don’t even absorb it. There’s a man I met who owns a company in Florida, a porta potty business and there’s a catch that catches things and then when they go to clean them, it catches like it’s associated through a stone in there. The catch would catch these hard objects, so when they’re cleaning them, they can tell you which Centrum the person took because it still says Centrum Silver on it after it’s been sitting in a porta potty.   1:30:01.7 David Tomen: That’s amazing.   1:30:04.1 Ashley James: And gone through someone’s digestive tract. We don’t even digest or absorb these over the counter.   1:30:12.4 David Tomen: And people don’t know.   1:30:13.4 Ashley James: Right.   1:30:15.3 David Tomen: They don’t know that when they take a multivitamin, it should make them feel better. [Laughter] It really should. They should actually feel the difference.   1:30:25.3 Ashley James: Right. Yeah.   1:30:27.1 David Tomen: I do, and I eat well too.   1:30:31.6 Ashley James: Right. And I wanted to ask you what your thoughts were on a healthy diet for the brain. Are there foods that are known to support brain health? Or just a general diet overall, what foods are best for brain health?   1:30:46.9 David Tomen: The nutrients that you get from fruits and vegetables and healthy fats. Healthy fats are really important because you gotta think that your brain is  60% fat, right? Most of that fat in your brain is DHA. So eating good grass-fed meats, for example, or wild seafood like wild salmon – is the best brain health and for overall health, but you still need a multivitamin on top of that.   1:31:32.6 Ashley James: You know I was really sick about 8 years ago. I had type 2 diabetes, chronic fatigue, and chronic infections. I was told I’d never have kids since I was 19 seeing an endocrinologist. They told me I’d never have kids and I had polycystic ovarian syndrome and infertility. My husband turned on some random podcast interview. This was 9 years ago with a naturopath who was talking about just like what you’re talking about how as a society we are completely deficient, especially in 60 minerals. But we’re completely deficient because we can. no longer get all the nutrients, all the 16 vitamins, the 12 amino acids, the 2 fatty acids, the 60 minerals – we can’t them in the quantities we need anymore for multiple reasons like you’ve mentioned – the higher levels of carbon dioxide. If that’s higher, then the plant is just gonna grab it more which is we want plants to do that to filter the air, but it’s gonna end up creating more sugar, more carbohydrates, and less of everything else in each plant. So even if we’re just eating a vegan diet, we’re still not getting what we got 100 years ago. But the farming practices in the last 150 years, the farmers have not re-mineralized their soil, they only put an NPK back in, and if you go to an organic farm, they put compost in, but we’re not re-mineralizing soil. And so if spinach isn’t grown in iron-rich soil, it’s not going to be a good source of spinach. I love it when people say, “I eat 3 Brazil nuts a day for my selenium.” And my question to them is how do you know they were grown in selenium-rich soil because plants do not make minerals. And so this naturopath was going on about this, and by the end of the interview I called him up because I was so intrigued. My husband actually urged me, too; please call this guy. We were suffering. We got to do something about this. I switched my diet around; within days, I started to feel better. I could not believe. Actually, within 24 hours, my constant hunger went away because I had these horrible blood sugar swings. Within 5 days, my energy came back, it’s like I got my brain back, and within 3 months, I was no longer diabetic. My chronic adrenal fatigue subsided. it took us just a few years, but we conceived naturally without doing anything else other than cleaning our diet and taking supplements.   1:34:25.6 David Tomen: Isn’t it amazing?   1:34:26.1 Ashley James: Yeah and we have a healthy, wonderful 4-year-old boy and none of these would have been possible had it not been for hearing a naturopath. See, the things you’re saying today which is we need these nutrients. Now, maybe someone’s motivation is they want Nootropics because they need to be sharper at work or they’re sick of being tired and unmotivated or depressed or whatever’s going on or they want to prevent dementia because it’s in their family history. So these are all great motivations to explore Nootropics and what I’m hearing you say is that you can’t just take a Nootropic and go to McDonalds and not take a multivitamin. We need to do everything. We need to have a healthy lifestyle. And in the Nootropics with our healthy lifestyle is going to support us overall.   1:35:22.9 David Tomen: Another example is L-tyrosine will not turn into dopamine without the B vitamins. It just won’t.   1:35:38.2 Ashley James: Right. So it’s cofactors. The body needs everything so we gotta do it. You mentioned some foods that are really good. What foods are really bad for brain health?   1:35:50.7 David Tomen: Processed food because the junk in processed food and the way it’s processed just causes so much inflammation that things are breaking down in your brain and in your body.   1:36:02.9 Ashley James: Right. There’s one naturopath that says that oil in a bottle, any kind of oil – cooking oil, don’t do it. It damages the circulatory system. He says don’t eat nitrates or nitrites which are in a lot of deli meats. Now you can get at Applegate organic, no nitrates or nitrites. This naturopath was a pathologist before he became a naturopath, so he had an intimate understanding of how this stuff works. Nitrates and nitrites will cross the blood-brain barrier and damage it and get clogged there, and they also will clog the kidneys and further exacerbate kidney damage. He takes people who are on dialysis and gets them off of these processed food and off of deli meats and of course get some multivitamin and minerals, but their kidney function improved greatly and even to the point of getting off of dialysis, but that they can seriously damage their kidneys by eating bacon for example, or deli meats with nitrates and nitrites. I thought that was fascinating. Then he also talked about foods that are burnt and fried cause [inaudible 1:37:23.0] which again cause oxidative damage to the circulation, the circulatory system of the brain. So inflammation in the brain like you talked about. Yeah, pretty much if we avoid processed foods or avoiding all the foods that he warns people against. If we lived a lifestyle to make our brain healthy, then everything else seems to fall in place, doesn’t it?   1:37:53.6 David Tomen: That’s the reason why I called my book “Head First,” because if you take care of your head first, then other things seem to fall into place.   1:38:03.6 Ashley James: I love it. Do you have any stories of success after publish your book and people reading it and applying everything you teach to their life, do you have any stories success or memorable that you’d like to share?   1:38:18.1 David Tomen: Nothing that I really can share because if somebody can take a look at the comments section on Nootropics Expert and look at the testimonials, and if somebody published their name, then I generally don’t talk about stuff like that because you’re talking about stuff that I treat as confidential. I know that sounds like I’m skirting around it, but that’s just kind of like the way I look at this. This is other people’s business if they want to tell their story. They do tell their stories in the comments section because I see over and over again, “Thank you, David, so much for providing this information. You changed my life.” But there’s nothing that I would want to broadcast in a podcast necessarily.   1:39:14.3 Ashley James: Ok. Awesome. This has been really informative, and I definitely want to have you on the show to dive deeper because there’s so much more that we can explore.   1:39:30.1 David Tomen: We can dive into depression, anxiety, ADHD, anti-aging, TBI, PTSD.   1:39:44.0 Ashley James: I’ll leave it up to the listeners. So after I post this episode, I’ll ask our Facebook group. Those who are listening can go to www.learntruehalth.com/Group or search Learn True Health on Facebook and join the group and comment. I’ll make a post that’s an announcement and comment on it what you would like David to elaborate on or explore, what additional questions you have for him and we’ll make sure we cover those in our next interview with him. Well, thank you so much, David for coming on the show. Is there anything left unsaid? Is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview   1:40:19.3 David Tomen: If you have an issue with your brain, please go to www.nootropicsexpert.com And to get you started, there’s a free book that you can download called “Secrets of the Optimized Brain.” It’s about 75 pages and all it is, is page after page of nootropic supplements, it gives you a brief explanation of that, and how much to take. Then there’s my book “Head First” which is nearly 600 pages, and that’s like a manual on your brain. The first chapter is kind of like my story. The second chapter is how your brain works, which kind of like supports everything that I talk about and then the bulk of the book is individual supplements that I reviewed – what they are, where they come from, why we use them, how much to take effect, and the types to buy. And then the last 2 chapters are suggested stacks, best Nootropics for ADHD, depression, anxiety, learning, and memory that kind of thing. So you can get that at Nootropics Expert. I’ve also got close to a hundred videos now on the YouTube channel that’s turned out to be very, very popular. So please visit me on YouTube and just please visit Nootropics Expert, I’d love to help you out if I can.   1:41:44.3 Ashley James: Absolutely. I’m curious. So far it sounds like everything’s for adults, do you have any information for children or teenagers, is the dosing different or have you looked into sort of the pediatric application?   1:41:58.6 David Tomen: I’m starting to take a deep dive into the pediatric thing for a client in India, but there are some things that I just warn people don’t use if you’re a teenager or younger than 21 and other things, just be careful of the dosage. But I’m doing a deep-dive now into pediatric, and I should have more in the next month or two.   1:42:25.9 Ashley James: Very cool. Excellent. Thank you so much, David Tomen. It’s been wonderful having you on the show. Can’t wait to have you back.   1:42:31.7 David Tomen: Absolutely, my pleasure. Ashley, thank you for having me.   —   Outro: Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people? You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out The Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health coaching certification program, and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition, but from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their lives and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health, I definitely recommend you check them out. You can Google, Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call or you can go to www.learntruehealth.com/coach, and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health Podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program, and I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are. getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic office, doctors offices.you can work in hospitals. You can work online through Skype and help people around the world. you can become an author. You can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. you can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success and their health goals. There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach. So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Mention my name, get the best deal.  Give them a call, and they’ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month. So you’re gonna wanna call them and check it out. And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding, and you get to help so many people. — Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to www.takeyoursupplements.com, and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price. That’s www.takeyoursupplements.com   Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.   Get Connected With David Tomen!  Website YouTube   Book by David Tomen Secrets Of The Optimized Brain (E-book) Head First – The Complete Guide to Healing and Optimizing Your Brain with Nootropic Supplements  (Ebook)

www.DrRachnaPatel.com Visit learntruehealth.com/eva and use coupon code LTH for 20% off Eva CBD Whole Hemp Plant Supplements! Listen to my interview with a founder of Eva CBD and how they formulated their potent whole plant supplements: https://www.learntruehealth.com/phytocannabinoid Jay Hartenbach, a founder of Medterra CBD, is giving Learn True Health listeners 15% off on his CBD products, so be sure to type in the discount code LTH at checkout. http://www.medterracbd.com You can listen to my interview with Jay about the hemp farming and supplement industry here: https://www.learntruehealth.com/cbd   Song: Del - Tropical Love (Vlog No Copyright Music) Music provided by Vlog No Copyright Music. Video Link: https://youtu.be/k-4zY7Ri2Po   Medical Cannabis https://www.learntruehealth.com/medical-cannabis Have you ever had pains you can’t describe where and what to do? So painful it’s already giving you anxieties or worse, sleepless nights? It pays to take care of our body so opting for going for all natural remedies would be a good investment in the long run. Check out today’s podcast to learn more about going “Au Naturale” when dealing with pain issues in your body.   [00:00] Ashley James: Hello, true health seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True health podcast. We have a wonderful interview for you today with Doctor Rachna Patel, who’s a medical doctor that specializes in helping patients around the world to transition into using either medical cannabis or using CBD products in order to help them, sometimes even get off of pain medications but a lot of people that come to see her have complicated issues like parents who have children with autism who’s also experiencing anxiety. They found that CBD has been very effective at helping these children lower their anxiety. Those who have complicated chronic pain issues like fibromyalgia and they’re finding that even on multiple opioid medications that they’re having a very difficult time managing their pain. They come to Doctor Patel and they have found great success in using her expertise. Now, I thought it was pretty easy. Just if you have pain just start using CBD or if you have pain just start using medical cannabis, no big deal. You know dear, what I’ve found really interesting is that there’s a bit more finesse to it that if you really want to use hemp and cannabis products as in a medical herb. That you want to know somethings first. You know how to ingest it? How to get it in your system? You want to know the measurement of how much you are ingesting. We also want to know the contraindications and the side effects of if you have taken too much. It’s not dangerous but you should know the side effects. Who wants to experience side effects anyway? From natural or man-made drugs. We want to make sure that we are taking something safely and effectively. We can easily overdo some CBD products. Now there is also a concern about quality in the supplement industry. Since a lot of CBD products are expensive, we really want to make sure that our money’s going towards products that are good quality and provide us exactly what we are looking for and the dose we’re looking for. I had a really interesting thing happen a few days before the interview, which I found to be just perfect timing. How the universe lines up to help us. One Sunday I was roughhousing with our son. We are playing together, building forts, laughing and tickling. I injured my back. I don’t remember quite what happened but I injured my back. I don’t remember it quite what happened but I injured my back and Monday morning I went to the chiropractor and he said, “Yes, you did quite a doozy.” I had basically torqued and twisted my pelvis. He said it’s going to take a few days to recover. I was very sore. Instead of reaching for the Advil or for something stronger, I went for the supplement that’s been sitting on my shelf from EVA CBD. I interviewed the founder of EVA CBD. It’s a whole hemp plant supplement company. I interviewed Nicole back in episode 337. She has a wonderful story including curing her dog’s cancer using a whole hemp juice. That was very interesting. She also cured her – I believed she had a form of IBS and it was very painful for her and she was able to reverse her inflammatory bowel issues using medical cannabis. What I love about her story is that they really apply their lessons personally to their own health. Then they look to create a supplement to help others. She had sent me a bottle of her supplement called – I have it right here called, the EVA Better Relief. I hadn’t been in pain when I interviewed her and so I kept it thinking “Well, I’m glad I have it. Hopefully, I don’t ever need it but if I’m in pain, I’ll use it.” I came home from the chiropractor in tremendous amount of pain. Almost unable to walk, kind of a nine out 10. I took two, I drank some water, and of course, this is hemp so it doesn’t make you high or anything. It took about 20 minutes for it to kick in and I noticed that it really bought down the pain. I was able to relax. I had some pain cream I tried using but it really didn’t feel like it was doing the job because this is a pretty deep joint pain that I was experiencing. About 20 minutes after I took the EVA product, the whole hemp plant supplement for pain, it kicked in. It started to go down. I was able to rest. My back started to relax a bit and the pain went all the way down to zero. I noticed that if I get up and walk around a lot, it would get agitated but it wouldn’t get sharp. It was really dulled. It felt almost that I’ve taken some Advil. It was that effective for me so I took it twice a day every day. I still have back injury. It’s still healing but today’s better than the day before. It’s been five days and every day I’ve taken the EVA batter relief. Each time, I go from a lot of pain to very little pain to almost no pain and then I have to rest then I could come all the way down. That for me sells it because I think I would have had taken a lot of Advil to have gotten that results. I don’t want to take Advil. The end sets are dangerous for our liver. They actually inhibit the body’s ability to further decrease inflammation. Having said that, I know a lot of listeners have told me they love the EVA CBD products. I wanted to let you know that you could definitely go to the show notes of this episode because I’m going to link my other interviews about CBD which I think really compliment this interview. If you’re interested in trying the EVA products, they have one for brain health, they have one for nerve health, they have one for emotions and mood, they have one like I said, for pain. They have about six different kinds. They mix herbs along with the whole hemp plant supplement. You can get 20% off when you go to learntruehealth.com/EVA and then you put on the coupon code LTH. Thank you so much for being a listener. For sharing these episodes with those who love especially if that someone’s in pain. I can tell you, they’ll be very happy to learn about this supplement. I have never used a supplement for pain that worked this well, so I’m really happy about that. The other CBD interview that I did that I think is really interesting to listen to in addition to listening to today’s episode is my interview with the founder of Medterra CBD, Jay Hartenbach. He actually also gives us a discount. He has a totally different product. Doctor Patel actually sells a CBD product and she talks about it in this interview that you’re about to listen to. Each of these are different. Doctor Patel has one that’s a whole plant CBD tincture. Then the EVA CBD is actually the entire hemp plant but in powder form so its’ less adultered. It’s a bit different. I think you’re going to get different experiences from each one. Then Jay Hartenbach’s supplement which is Medterra CBD, they guarantee that there’s no THCs. They have a process and he explains it. I think it’s fascinating to listen to this one, which is episode 300. Of course, I’m going to have the link to this episode as well on the show notes on today’s podcast. What I think is very interesting is that’s he talks about the farming industry for hemp and the different qualities of plant and how they manufacture it to make sure that it is clean. Because as Doctor Patel talks about it in today’s interview, buyer beware there are some CBD oils out there that are filled with molds, fungus, pesticides and heavy metals. Some of them contain very low amounts of CBDs, so you’re just basically taking a poison instead of a medicine. Jay talks about that in our interview episode 300. For his discount, you can go to MedterraCBD.com, use coupon code LTH and he gives 15% off. Excellent. Well, enjoy today’s interview, I know you will. Please share it with those of your friends who are in pain, have anxiety, have problems sleeping. All these conditions benefit from medical hemp and medical cannabis. Excellent. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day and enjoy today’s episode.   [09:31] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast! I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 361. We are back on the show with Doctor Rachna Patel. Who we had all the way back on episode 49. It’s been a long time. I can’t believe it. now, we’re in the 360’s and going strong. Welcome back to the show.  [10:02] Rachna Patel: Thank you. Thank you for having me.   [10:05] Ashley James: Absolutely. You just shared with me that when you came in at episode 49, it was your first podcast interview.   [10:13] Rachna Patel: Very first and I was really, really nervous.   [10:16] Ashley James:  Well, you did not come across as nervous. I thought you came across as memorable because it was a really interesting interview about how you help your patients as a medical doctor, helping them to relieve anxiety and post-traumatic stress, pain, chronic pain using properly administer medical marijuana. Now, you are here today to talk about CBD, which is much more widely accepted than medical marijuana considering people don’t get high from it. Yet people are seeing great results with pain management and anxiety and sleep. I myself right now, currently on a CBD from a whole plant, a whole hemp plant medicine because I hurt my back on Sunday roughhousing with our four-year-old. I went to the chiropractor and he said, “Yes. You are really messed up.” My pelvis was torqued. I just did a number on myself. Now, I’m just recovering but I’ve been in pain. I am really surprised at how this has been more effective than if I took an over-the-counter medication. I don’t feel dopey and I know I’m not hurting my liver. I’m really relieved. I’m glad I had some in stock because I’m not normally in pain and the fact that I went to it first instead of Advil. I’ve had some really great results managing my pain while my back gets better. I’m really a big believer in hemp, using hemp as medicine. The extract CBD as medicine. I’m really excited to learn more from you today. Since you’ve been on the show on episode 49. A lot has happened in your career as a doctor and a healer. Tell us about what’s happened since and why you’re so passionate about CBD.   [12:12] Rachna Patel: When we last spoke, I was still in my Brock and Morten practice in California. Since then, I had transitioned to an online practice because I was getting phone call upon phone call from people all over the world who were basically like, “Teach me how to use this.” Mainly CBD oral because that’s what most people have access to. I transitioned to online practice. I’ve written a book in that time as well. The following on my YouTube channel has exploded. Tons that has happened.   [12:56] Ashley James: Awesome. Very cool. Now, you can work from wherever you want. You were just mentioning to me that some of your recruiting crew was in New Jersey. I don’t even know, where are you right now?   [13:08] Rachna Patel: I’m actually in Austin, Texas right now.   [13:10] Ashley James: Awesome. Very cool. You get to travel and help people all around the world. Tell us a bit about that. About helping people online around the world versus one on one in person in your clinic. What’s the difference that you’ve found?   [13:27] Rachna Patel:  I’m still doing consults online. There’s still one on one consults. The only difference is that rather than just working with people locally in the San Francisco Bay area, I’m now working with people from England and South Africa, in Indonesia and Canada. All over the world. What’s interesting about that is that I have to customize and tailor the treatment options based on what’s available in those particular countries, right? In a way, it’s a challenge but in a way, it’s also learning experience. You have to figure out how to be very – just basically think on your feet and figure out, “Okay, well, this is not available to them” so, “This is something that could work instead”. Yes, that’s what the experience has essentially been like.   [14:30] Ashley James: Awesome. Very cool. Can you share without obviously saying anyone’s name, can you share some stories of success in the last year working online with people around the world?   [14:40] Rachna Patel: Yes. I have helped a lot of parents of children with Autism. A lot of times these children, they tend to struggle with anxiety. A lot of that anxiety is triggered when there is a change in routine. Any sort of change in routine triggers this anxiety. In the worst case of scenarios, it can be aggressive behavior. It can manifest as aggressive behavior. Oftentimes even physical. With the help of CBD, these patients have, we’ve been able to manage the anxiety that these children experience and therefore just to crawl up of that anxiety that manifests. Working with that, working with severe pain as well. A lot of back pain. A lot of these things like anxiety, chronic pain, insomnia. They’re common to people all over the world, right? Because the human body’s a human body and the human experience is the human experience. There’s a lot of commonalities there that this one medication can benefit.   [16:01] Ashley James: Now, what point did you start to really use CBDs? When we spoke, I felt like you weren’t talking about CBDs as much as you’re talking about medical cannabis, medical marijuana. Using the difference strains to get different results. Then how to use it was really important like not just sitting there and smoking it was actually harmful but there’s ways to use it that’s less harmful and actually can be a benefit. That was more of what you’re talking about. Now you’re talking about CBDs. What happened in your journey that made you want to use CBD more?   [16:43] Rachna Patel: The thing is that, actually I was always talking about CBD. When I would talk to patients even in the context of marijuana, in terms of what combination of cannabinoids. You know what combinations of CBD and THC they should be using. I was still talking about amounts of CBD and amounts of THC. Then you have Farmville 2014 come along which made CBD even more accessible. CBD derived from hemp even more accessible. Overall, if I had to breakdown the benefits of CBD and THC in terms of percentages, I would say that about 80% of conditions benefited from high amounts of CBD. Whether that high amount of CBD comes from marijuana or if it comes from hemp. Then about 20% of medical conditions benefited from high amounts of THC. Of course, there are conditions in between that do need both CBD and THC to effectively treat the conditions. It’s something that I’ve always been talking about. Like I said, in the context of marijuana but with the regulations changing and CBD becoming more accessible, it was basically more that I just started to focus more on CBD. People still come to me with conditions where CBD doesn’t benefit their conditions. So I outright tell them that, “Hey, you know you’re better off using a marijuana based product because you are getting that high amounts of THC and CBD.” That’s really the context in which I speak. Even in the book that I’ve written. Which conditions could benefit from high amounts of CBD, which conditions for high amounts of THC and which conditions benefit from both CBD and THC.   [18:39] Ashley James: Very cool. Can you illustrate those points to us now? I’m pretty sure most listeners will have an understanding that like CBD doesn’t make you high. Medical marijuana when it’s activated, like the THCs activated it’s heated up, it goes from THCA to just THC. That’s’ what makes people experience the high. For people who don’t want to experience the high and just want the medicinal herb then that’s the CBD. Can you go into more details and explain what CBDs really good for? Versus medical marijuana?   [19:21] Rachna Patel: Yes, sure. I just want to touch very briefly on the concept of the high. Mainly, there’s two things that cause it, right? One is that the THC is of a significant potency in the product itself and two, is that you’re consuming a certain dose in order for it to actually get you high. You’re consuming excess amounts. If you don’t consume excess amounts of the THC then you’re not going to get a high of it. If the CBD is a lot higher than the THC, then you’re not going to get a high off of it. In terms of conditions that are benefited by high amounts of CBD, these are the most common conditions that I’ve encountered in my clinical practice. They include things like migraines and headaches, muscle pain. Also we’re talking about things like spasms, spasticity. Then there’s nerve pain. For instance, back pain caused by sciatica, neuropathy that’s caused by diabetes or chemotherapy. Even trigeminal neuralgia. Then we have anxiety. The umbrella of anxiety covers all sorts of different conditions. We’re talking about obsessive-compulsive disorder, PTSG, ADD, ADHD, panic disorder and also mild to moderate insomnia. Now, conditions that need in addition to the CBDs, some amount of THC include nausea and vomiting, lack of appetite, autoimmune conditions, right? These include conditions like psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, lupus. Severe nerve pain, this is pain that’s caused by conditions such as shingles, spinal stenosis and then finally, severe insomnia as well. This is specifically where the person cannot sleep unless they actually take some sort of heavy-duty medication or a high dose of medication as well. That I would say, in a nutshell covers the conditions that are benefited by high amounts of CBD and then conditions in which you do need some amount of THC as well.   [21:45] Ashley James:  Thank you for that explanation. Now we’ve got some great questions in the Facebook group. I want to make sure we get to all of them. Yesterday, I posted in the Facebook group asking if anyone had any questions for you. All listeners who aren’t in the Facebook group, please come join us. It’s a great community. Just search Learn True Health in Facebook. I know you’ve got the list of questions pulled up. Do you want to run through them?   [22:09] Rachna Patel: Yes, sure. Let’s see. First question comes in from Jenna and Jenna is asking what form of CBD is best for anxiety and depression. I’m thinking of trying the pill form. Would this be effective? What dosage? Okay, there’s a couple different things I want to touch on here. First of all, let’s look at anxiety and depression separately. Anxiety like I mentioned, is one of the conditions that benefits from high amounts of CBD. Depression on the other hand benefits from THC. That is because of the chemical pathways that these chemicals impact. CBD tends to have an impact on Serotonin which is what impacts anxiety. Oftentimes, what’s prescribed for anxiety are what are called SSRI. Selected serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Basically, these medications up the levels of serotonin in your body. That’s what’s helping the anxieties, it’s high amounts of CBD. However, depression is typically helped by high amounts of THC because tends to impact Dopamine, right? And dopamine is one of those feel-good chemicals. The important thing to know here is that, that impact of THC on depression is very transient, lasts for couple of hours or so and then it dissipates. Overall, I would say when it comes to anxiety, CBD is a lot more effective than pharmaceutical medications. What I found with depression clinically is that, the pharmaceutical medications tend to have a better longer lasting effect than the THC. Now you’re talking about form, okay? There are a lot of different forms in which you can consume CBD. There are edibles, there are tinctures, which are drops that you put under the tongue. You can also inhale it as well. A lot of this comes down to in terms of what’s the best method to use comes down to your medical history. Let me give you an example. I’ve had patients who’ve had gastric surgeries. For instance, gastric bypass surgery. In their case, they’re not able to absorb edibles as well. They’re not absorbing the CBD as well. It sort of just passes right through them. In their case, what works better, what’s more effective is inhalation or using drops with the tongue. That’s what I’m going to tell you about that. Now when it comes to dosage, what I’ve find is it’s a very individual process. Just to give you an example, this is an example having to do with insomnia but can also apply to anxiety as well. I have two patients, they both struggled with insomnia. They were otherwise healthy. No other medical diagnosis that they had. They were of similar body size and body shape. They had similar BMIs. Both patients tried the exact same CBD product. One patient ended up needing just 2.5mg of CBD to sleep better whereas the other patient needed 15mg of CBD to sleep better. I’ve seen this be the case with anxiety as well. Now there’s a couple different components that come to play when it comes to using the right amount of CBD. First and foremost, you want to take the strength of the CBD product into account. What I’m going to tell right now is, on the market, in an ounce whether it’s an edible or tincture, you’re going to find anywhere from about 250mg of CBD up to a thousand milligrams of CBD. That’s highly variable in terms of strength. Then the next job then is to figure out dosing. Then also taking the right frequency of CBD as well. You don’t want to overdo it because you can develop a tolerance to it. Again, let me walk you into an example. I’ve had patients with severe back pain and nothing’s really worked for them. They finally turn to CBD ad it does actually work for them and they get overzealous. They overdo it. [Laughter] Then two to three weeks later, I’ll get a phone call saying, “Hey Doc, this worked great and now it’s not working anymore.” That’s because you can develop a tolerance to it. Basically, you know you develop a tolerance when you’re, number one, you’re having to take higher and higher doses to get the same effect and then you reach a plateau where no matter how much you take, it’s having no effect on you. Those are some general basic guidelines that I would give you in terms of answering this particular question. Should I just roll through the next couple of questions?   [27:09] Ashley James: Actually, I’d like to stop in between I’ve got some questions. CBD, is that fat-soluble? Do we need a gallbladder to properly digest it to the point where we can absorb the CBD?   [27:27] Rachna Patel: No, not necessarily. Enzymes that the gallbladder release are not necessarily needed to digest CBD but here’s what I’m going to tell you. The CBD does get stored in the fat cells in the body. What I want you think of it as is as Vitamin D. Some people can be deficient in vitamin D, you know, when you test your blood levels. Some people can be normal. Basically, the people who tend to hold on to fat better have basically an advantage because they’re holding on to more of the CBD. Therefore, often times they need to take lower doses and need to take a rest frequently. Whereas the people to tend to metabolize their fat quicker may need to take higher doses and take it more frequently as well. Does that how to answer your questions?   [28:29] Ashley James: Yes. You mentioned that those with gastric bypass for example, just they have less intestines so there’s less of a chance of them to actually digest and absorb the nutrition fully. As a result, those who’ve had gastric bypass can develop deficiencies like B12 is very common. They need to be on supplements. What you’re saying is, they shouldn’t take an edible, either CBD edible or medical marijuana edible simply because they won’t digest it enough to absorb the medicine but you are saying that those with digestive issues like let’s say Crohn’s or IBS, or any kind of absorption issues. Someone knows that they have gotten an inflammation and dysbiosis and they’ve got issues with absorption. That edibles out but that tincture out of the tongue is still okay and we can absorb it fully even with a compromised digestive system.   [29:28] Rachna Patel: Yes, because it’s a different route. Rather than being absorb through the gastrointestinal tract the tincture gets absorb through – if you’ve ever taken a look under your tongue, you’ll see all of these blue lines, those are all blood vessels, that’s where the cannabinoids are being absorbed. It’s through those blood vessels. Inhalation is being absorbed through your lungs. In both situations you’re bypassing the gastrointestinal tract and it’s still getting into your bloodstream. Here’s what I would tell you. To touch on Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, which are inflammatory gut conditions. I haven’t found absorption of edibles to be as much of an issue as for someone who has for instance, gastric bypass surgery or even ostomy. The people with the inflammatory bowel diseases still tend to absorb edibles fairly well.   [30:32] Ashley James: Okay. Very cool. You mentioned being dosed by weed. Someone is a 100 pounds versus 300 pounds, would they increase their dose of CBD to get the full effect?   [30:47] Rachna Patel: It’s actually not by weight because it actually has to do with the turnover of your fat cells. You know how some people can be fat on the inside, thin on the outside and vice versa. Fat on the outside and thin on the inside. So-   [31:10] Ashley James: Meaning the fat surrounding the organs?   [31:11] Rachna Patel:  Right. Basically overall, the turnover rate of your fat cells. That can vary from person to person. How much a person weighs doesn’t necessarily contribute to that turnover. I’ve had small people need small doses and large people need large doses and vice versa. Large people need smaller doses and smaller people need larger doses. It ultimately comes down to metabolism in general. It comes down to metabolism of fats and then finally, it comes down also to what sort of machinery you have in your liver to break down chemicals because these chemical are broken down in the liver. Several different factors that come into effect there. Direct correlations make it easy, right? For X do Y and for Y do Z but I haven’t found that to be the case with CBD. It’s very individual in terms of what dose someone ends up needing.   [38:29] Ashley James: Got it. What happens when you overdose? I mean, we can keep talking about dose. What if we take too much? What happens when we take too much CBD?   [32:40] Rachna Patel:  Couple different settings. One is the most common side effect is you’ll start to auto reject or fatigued. It’s almost like a hangover feeling. You know, when you’re dragging. Next most common side effect is you can get diarrhea. Third most common side effect and this is more or even long term, you can get changes in your weight and appetite but that is typically I could say, rare.   [33:08] Ashley James: The appetite increases or decreases, weight increase or decrease, or is it both?   [33:13] Rachna Patel:  Typically, there’s a decrease in the appetite and the weight.   [33:20] Ashley James: Okay. So overdosing is not harmful but there are known side effects that are manageable.   [33:29] Rachna Patel: Yes, exactly.   [33:31] Ashley James: Got it. If you’re trying to figure out your dose and also you feel lethargic then you just took too much and then the next day take less.   [33:39] Rachna Patel: Yes. As a general guideline. Yes, correct.   [33:41] Ashley James: Yes. What do you recommend for people starting? What’s a starting level for a dose? Just to see is it different for pain versus anxiety? Or just, you tell everyone to start with half a drop or full and then go up from there?   [33:57] Rachna Patel: Everybody does start at the same dose. I’ve had a wide variety of ranges in which I’ve had patients start and a lot of it depends on their history. How they’ve reacted to medications, how they’ve reacted to what other medications they’re on also matters. What their medical history is. The starting dose varies from person to person and the increment in which they increase the CBD also varies from person to person. A lot of it also depends on the severity of their condition as well. How severe for instance, their pain level is or how severe their anxiety is. Those are all very different factors that I’m basing starting dose and incremental doses off of.   [34:49] Ashley James: Got it. Are there any interactions or contraindications like you mentioned interactions with drugs? Are there any known interactions with drugs? Or there any contraindications that would say that we shouldn’t do CBD?   [35:04] Rachna Patel: Yes. In terms of drug interactions, there have been two drugs that have been studied in conjunction with CBD. One is called the ASM which is the Anti-seizure medication typically used in children. What they found was that, when Clobazam was administered with CBD, the levels of Clobazam stayed elevated far longer. The danger in that is that, you can build up a toxic level of the prescription medication. In this particular case, the study the level of doses of the Clobazam had to be reduced. That was actually a good thing because the patients we experiencing pure side effects of the prescription medication. That’s one. Second thing is when they were studying Epidiolex. Epidiolex is basically a prescription version of the CBD. It was approved sometime about in the summer of 2018. When they were starting this medication which is essentially CBD, again, they were studying it in a some set of types of epilepsy in children particularly. A lot of this children were on Valproic acid otherwise known as Valproate which is also an anti-seizure medication. What they found was that when patients take Valproate with CBD, their liver enzyme levels tended to go up. It cause a mild liver injury. Typically, they did a couple different things. They either eliminated or reduced the CBD or they eliminated or reduced the Valproic acids and then the liver enzymes went back to normal. That’s what’s known, right? But in the study what they said was that, we would extend our conclusions to any medication that causes what’s known as Hapado cellular injury. Basically, any prescription medication that tends to cause liver damage or elevate liver enzymes. When these medications are used in combination with CBD there has to be a lot of monitoring that has to be done. A lot of precautions that have to be taken. That’s pretty much what I would tell you. Now on my YouTube channel, I do have a video specifically on CBD and drug interaction where I list medications that a person should use with caution in conjunction with CBD.   [37:42] Ashley James:  I was at the grocery store a month ago and talking to the lady that was checking out my groceries about melatonin. My melatonin over the counter, it’s safe. They have melatonin gummies for children and for adults. To me it’s a safe, obviously, use everything responsibly but it’s a safe alternative to prescription medications for sleep. She started saying, “You know, I should really look into melatonin because,” and then she lists one of the most common drugs for sleep, Lunesta or something like that. You know the side effects, pretty crazy. She said that she’s on a few medications to help her, calm her down anxiety and go to sleep at night. So the checker was – here she is complaining about the side effects of the medications she’s on. Then there’s a natural remedy like CBD. There’s a natural remedy that helps people to sleep, Melatonin. She wouldn’t try it because she’s worried that the melatonin would interact with her medications. I was like, “This is the weirdest thinking.” I’m coming from the point of, “I don’t want the side effects of the medications.” Right? She’s thinking, “I don’t want the side effects of a natural substance to interfere with my medications”. She didn’t want to be on those medications. If she could work with her doctor and try CBD and Melatonin and like magnesium soak bath every night. She could try these things which when she described her situation, she just went straight for the drugs. I know over 70% of adults in the United States were on at least one prescription medication. It’s the norm. Her experience is the norm and my experience of not wanting to be on many medications and looking for alternatives is not the norm. We‘re all swimming upstream. We’re going go against the green here and I know my listeners are as well. Looking to do everything we can to be as natural and healthy as possible. There are going to be times when someone wants to use medications and use natural medication together in harmony. So I’m glad that you cover where CBD might entrap with the medication and how we can go about adjusting those things. In terms of contraindications, is CBD safe for everyone? Or are there times when it’s not?   [40:21] Rachna Patel: Yes. I would say it’s definitely contraindicated in women who are pregnant and breastfeeding. The reason I say this, it is a conservative recommendation. Reason being, when cannabinoids in general, CBD and THC have been studied in the context of marijuana. What’s been found is that they can lead to low birth weight and they can also lead to pre-term labor and delivery as well. I don’t know if I would feel comfortable as the doctor taking that risk on a person who is pregnant and breastfeeding. It’s important to know that when you are breastfeeding, these cannabinoids do get passed through that breastmilk.   [41:09] Ashley James: Are those studies only for medical marijuana? Or they’re also for CBD? Exclusively?   [41:18] Rachna Patel:  They’re on medical marijuana. They’re not on CBD. It could be marijuana and likely these women are obtaining marijuana off the streets, it could’ve been marijuana that is high in THC or it could’ve also be marijuana that is high in CBD. That distinction has not been made. Whether it was the THC, CBD or even something else, we don’t know. It’s just at this point in general category of cannabinoids is what I would tell you.   [41:50] Ashley James: Right. There’s so many other factors to that. I mean, just to play the devil’s advocate, we don’t know what kind of the group of women that they chose to study whether they were – what was their socio-economic position and if that played a role. If they were all unable to eat three meals a day or do they have the means to. Were they studying people who are in shelters or homeless or were they studying people like at what age. I can understand low birth weight if you’re just stoned all the time and don’t want to eat or if you’re stoned all the time on the streets and don’t have access to food, is much different, right? What would it be like if it was women in their 20’s who had a house and a job and they chose to use medical marijuana while pregnant. Would it be the same? Are those other factors taken into consideration?   [42:51] Rachna Patel: Yes. I could tell you even one factor the use of other drugs was not taken into consideration. Then the other thing is that, one of the other scenarios could’ve been that a lot of women get what’s called hyperemesis gravidarum. You get a lot of nausea and vomiting especially in the first trimester of pregnancy. Oftentimes can be difficult to control with prescription medications so out of desperation these women could’ve been turning to marijuana off the streets. I highly don’t recommend that but that could’ve been another scenario that played out as well. We don’t know, right? CBD hasn’t been as well studied. I would tell you overall as THC. It’s now being more and more studied. You have to realize up until just recently, because marijuana’s only been very recently accepted. CBD has only be very recently been accepted. These substances, these chemicals we studied as drugs of abuse. You’re looking at it a certain perspective. That has shifted now, we’re now looking at the medical value of it. Things are studied differently as I would tell you.   [44:18] Ashley James: Right. They wouldn’t turn around and the positive benefits of heroin use during pregnancy. That’s how they saw it. They wouldn’t turn around start telling like the benefits. In that study, they would’ve been like, the women who used medical marijuana or street marijuana while pregnant saw a reduction in their nausea and were in less on or something. They wouldn’t talk about that. They’re addressing those issues, low birth weight and early labor. Interesting. We’re just pioneers right now. In a few years, we’ll definitely see more studies come out. Outlining whether or not CBD is safe for the baby during pregnancy or breastfeeding. I imagine what’s interesting is the endocannabinoid system, our body makes and uses these chemicals. Anyway, can we talk about that before our next question? What is CBD attaching to in our nervous system and why does it complement our body so much?   [45:25] Rachna Patel: Yes. Sure. Basically, you have receptors. You can think of receptors as locks. Now think of these round circular cell. It has itsy bitsy locks on it and those locks only accepts certain types of keys. Now, within endocannabinoid locks, you have CBD one. You have even more specific type of locks, you have CBD 1, you have CBD 2. Then a group of other receptors, which haven’t been clearly defined as a part of the endocannabinoid system but you have CB1 and CB2. CB1 and CB2 are not just actually located at the bottom of the nervous system, they’re located throughout the body. Even including on your immune cells. These locks reacts to certain types of keys and our bodies make these certain types of keys and they’re known as endocannabinoids. If you break that worked down, there’s two parts to it. Endo and cannabinoids. Endo means within and cannabinoids are these specific types of chemical that interact with the cannabinoid reactors. The two most common endocannabinoids are anandamide and 2-AG. Very similar in structure to the endocannabinoids are the phytocannabinoids. If we break that word down we have phyto and we have cannabinoids. Phyto means plant, cannabinoids again, these are chemicals that interact with the cannabinoid receptors. The phytocannabinoids include chemicals like CBD and THC. They also interact with these locks because their structure is very similar to the endocannabinoids that we naturally make. Finally, they are what are known as synthetic cannabinoids. Synthetic basically means fake. These are chemicals that appear like cannabinoids but are made in a lab. We have all these different types of cannabinoids that interact with the body and when that key enters that lock, it triggers a series of chemical reactions. Going back to the serotonin impacting anxiety and the dopamine impacting depression, that’s what going on. It’s impacting all these other chemical levels in our body. Then having an impact like relieving anxiety. Putting you in a little bit of a good mood. Helping to relieve your pain. That’s what’s pretty much what’s going on. The system was very fairly recently discovered. We’re talking about basically the 60’s is when these whole system was discovered. We don’t know as much about it as other systems in the body. For instance, the opioid system. We know quite a bit about that but we don’t know as much about the endocannabinoid system but what we do know is that it’s significant. It’s a significant system in the body otherwise it would not be having these clinical results that I’ve been seeing in patients.   [48:53] Ashley James: Very cool. Yes, I found it fascinating learning about the endocannabinoid system. We have one guest that talked about how when people are deficient in their fatty acids. The omega 3, 6 and 9, if they’re deficient in them. That the body also becomes deficient in the cannabinoids that it makes. He sees that when people use CBD oil who are deficient their EFAs, they see a really positive result. It’s like giving someone a fish oil and you can also get them from algae. Doesn’t have to be from fish but in EFA, essential fatty acid supplement because the body can become deficient in CBD. It’s thought of more like a nutrient. Like you said, vitamin D or vitamin C. It’s a nutrient the body can become deficient in and I had a friend tell me recently, it’s either a guest or a friend, talk about how we used it, how cannabis in our diet. Hemp hundred years ago or 200 years ago, even 300 years ago was grown here, we use it. We put it to our food. We fed it to our animals so that even the milk from the cows would contain some of these cannabinoids. They would eat it, they give it to the chickens, they’ll be in the eggs. We’d have it in our food because you can use hemp, there’s all kinds of ways to eat it. Also, we would then make ropes, clothing, linen out of it and the sails from ropes from ships. The fact that we sort of have it more from our diet back then than we do now. I thought that was really interesting. Have you heard about that? Or seeing that we are more deficient in CBD now as a society than we were in the past?   [51:03] Rachna Patel: No. The fact that it was in the food supply is actually new to me. That’s something I’d have to look into but in terms of deficiency, I would say the most objective measure of that is to measure the cannabinoid levels. Just to see whether or not we’re deficient. Also, what we don’t have right now is what’s normal for an individual. How much cannabinoid should a person have? I wouldn’t use the word deficient because I feel like then people would start using the cannabinoids as a vitamin on a regular basis. As I’ve mentioned before, taking too much of it and taking it too often does lead to tolerance. Taking too much of it can lead to side effects as well. I wouldn’t say deficient but we need more information like I said, in terms of the baseline of what’s normal and also, measuring these amounts in people.   [52:05] Ashley James: As I’m sitting, realizing I don’t have any back pain at all from taking – I took the Eva product which I’ve had her on the show and it was a whole plant, hemp plant. There’s CBD in there but it’s a whole plant. Basically, I took two capsules and I’m sitting here not in pain anymore. I woke up, walked around, I woke up with no pain and as when I start standing and I’m moving around, I’ve got to bed around 6 or 7 and at ten in pain was just pretty bad for me and I took two. Now, I’m just sitting here and all the pain has subsided. It’s amazing. I would’ve been on Advil all day long and maybe even a muscle relaxant if I wasn’t into holistic health. I didn’t know that there were these options. If I only knew what the pharmacy had. I wouldn’t be taking this natural route. It really does work to relieve pain. I know we have a question in the group about using it topically. How effective is that to use like hemp oil or CBD oil on a joint? Let’s say the wrist or hand that a person has an injury or has arthritis?   [53:29] Rachna Patel:  Yes. So we do have receptors for cannabinoids in our skin. In terms of types of conditions that I’ve seen topicals benefit, they include skin conditions. Any sort of inflammatory skin conditions like psoriasis for instance, eczema, it’s effective for. I’ve also seen it be effective for very localized muscle pain. If you have spasm, it’s effective for that. What I have not seen it be as effective for is joint pain. With joint pain specifically, what I find is most effective is both CBD and THC because there’s a large inflammatory component there. What’s going on with inflammation? Remember the autoimmune conditions that I’ve talked about there’s a large inflammatory component there as well. You have CBD and THC, they both have anti-inflammatory properties when you combine them together there’s an even greater anti-inflammatory effect because you have these phenomena known as the entourage effect or synergistic effect would’ve otherwise known as what’s going on. One chemical is enhancing the effect the other chemical, there’s even more anti-inflammatory effect. I would say if there’s mild joint pain then yes, the CBD alone can be effective but if it gets into the realm of being moderate or severe then you do need some amount of THC in the form of a topical to effectively treat joint pain such as arthritis.   [55:00] Ashley James: Very cool. It’s okay to mix and match like someone uses a topical and takes the tincture and or uses the vapor and uses the tincture uses the vapor and uses the topical or is it okay to mix and match or should they just stick with one?   [55:16] Rachna Patel: It’s okay to mix the topical with other delivery methods but other internal delivery methods but I would not mix and match multiple internal delivery methods because there’s a cumulative effect. These chemicals are getting stored in the fat cells in your body, right? So you can overdo it if you use too many of the internal methods at once but combining a topical with an internal method should be fine.   [55:45] Ashley James: When you count, let’s say someone goes, “Okay, I’m doing 100mg a day”. I don’t even know, is that how you measure it? By milligrams?   [55:54] Rachna Patel:  Typically yes.   [55:55] Ashley James:  Yes. Okay. That’s what I thought. 100mg per day is my dose. I’m going to do 50mg of topical or 50 of oral? Is that how it works? Or do you only count the oral and then topical is just bonus?   [56:10] Rachna Patel: I just count the internal and then the external is just bonus. The thing with the external, the topical is that it’s very local absorption. You’re not absorbing enough of it into your bloodstream. What goes into the bloodstream can pretty much be considered negligible. Unless, you like big CBD oil, [inaudible] [laughter] you put on some music, some candles and you pour a lot of CBD in your bathtub then you know you can get quite a lot of stomach absorption.   [56:55] Ashley James: I think I’m going to come out with that line of CBD bath bombs, to bathe in CBD. [Laughter] That’ll be pretty cool. Awesome. All right, next question.   [56:57] Rachna Patel: Why do some people use high quality CBD oil and feel no difference at all? Okay. It could be that the CBD oil has no CBD in it. The fact of the matter is that it’s an unregulated industry. So pretty much anything goes. Really, the most important thing that you can do as a consumer is look at the laboratory test results before you purchase a product. You go look at the laboratory tests result for the particular batch, the batch from which the product was made because every batch has different amount of CBD and THC. With the amount of the CBD on a laboratory test result, you want to look at the total amount of CBD and with the amount of THC, you want to ensure that it’s less than .20% which is the legal requirement. That’s what I’m going to tell you based on that. Honestly, I don’t rely on any of the marking, on any of the labelling. If I have to judge a product, the first thing that I ask for are the laboratory test results. The fact that for that particular batch one of the things I’m looking at is the total amount of CBD and the amount of THC. Let’s see here. This next question is actually a really good question. “My husband is a DOT driver. He would like to try for anxiety but is concerned it would show up in a drug test on the same spectrum THC/marijuana does? Is this true? Does having higher grades of CBD matter with this? Thank you.” Here’s how I want you to think of it. The difference between hemp and marijuana comes down to the amount of THC. By law, hemp has less than .3% THC. Marijuana has more than .3% THC. They both have THC. There a greater likelihood of the THC being detected with the marijuana product but there’s less of a likelihood but there’s still likelihood of the THC being detected with a hemp product. One of things I want to touch on here are ice split CBD oils. The general perception is that, they just take out the CBD from the hemp plant and they do but this is done using a series of chemical process. The types of chemical that they’re using are pentane, hexane. One of the drawback of these is that you don’t know how much of these potentially toxic chemicals get left behind. No one’s testing for them and you certainly don’t want toxic levels of pentane or hexane on your body. At the very least, it can cause a lot of inflammation. That’s one of the drawback of the ice split CBD oils. It’s usually ice split CBD oils that have typically little to no THC in them. It can even more significantly reduce the likelihood of the THC showing up. However, that’s not to say that there have been products on the market that have been marketed as ice split CBD oils which are otherwise known as pure CBD oils but when lo and behold when people get drug tested there has been THC that’s shown up. Again, what I would recommend is go based on laboratory test results. If you’re going to purchase an ice spilt CBD oil, what you need to specifically look for are amounts of residual solvents and you want to make sure that they’re non-toxic. That the solvents that were used to extract just the CBD have been cleaned out of that final product.   [01:01:04] Ashley James:  Got it. That makes a lot of sense. You don’t want those solvents and chemicals in your tincture that’s for sure. I know that you sell a CBD. How do you ensure that it is clean? Is your CBD that you sell going to show up in a drug test?   [01:01:29] Rachna Patel: Yes. I drive my farmer crazy. It’s what I do. Basically the way it works is that, I don’t bottle up a product until I approve of the laboratory test results. There’s a couple different things that I check for. Number one are the amounts of CBD and THC. Now that particular product that I’ve created, it has less than .3% THC. It’s what’s known as the full spectrum CBD oil, which basically means you’re getting the full spectrum of cannabinoids that are in the plant. It’s not just the CBD. Yes, the THC can be detected with a line of product that I’m selling. In addition to testing from the amount of CBD and the amount of THC, I’m also testing for pesticide levels. Two pesticides in particular that you absolutely want to make sure your CBD oil has been tested for is bifenazate and myclobutanil. These are the most commonly used pesticides on hemp plants. Again, it’s an unregulated industry so there’s no control over what can and cannot be used in terms of pesticide in hemp plants. The other thing is, I also test for fungus and bacteria this is because this is especially important in people with compromised immune system. This can include anybody who’s undergoing chemotherapy for cancer for instance. Anybody who’s HIV-AIDS, anybody who’s had an organ transplant but also for people who have auto-immune conditions and are on drugs that suppress the immune system. Basically, a hemp is a plant. It’s just like romaine lettuce. It can have e-coli, it can have salmonella. It can even have a fungus known as Aspergillus. The people who are most vulnerable to these bugs are the people who has compromised immune system. That’s another thing I make sure of. The other thing is heavy metals. This is important because the hemp plant and even the marijuana plant, they’re known as bio-accumulators. They just soak up heavy metals in their environment. Those heavy metals can seep into your CBD oils. They have toxic levels of lead for instance found in CBD oils. Now, before heavy metals in particular that you want to make sure your CBD oil has been tested for include arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury. Then finally the other thing is which I touched on before are residual solvents. There’s unsafe solvents which I touched on and they fall under the category of hydrocarbons. We’re talking about things like pentane, hexane, butane, propane and if some of these chemicals sounds familiar it’s because they’re used for everyday things. Like propane for instance, is used to fire up your barbeque grill. Butane is what’s in lighter fluid. Any of these chemicals are used, like I said they’re more commonly used in ice split CBD oils, we want to make sure there’s none toxic levels left behind. They’ve been cleaned out. Now the safer solvents on the market that are being used more and more, carbon dioxide, CO2, the gas that we breathe in and out everyday. Also, alcohol. Those are the safer solvents that are used to make CBD oils. Those five things at a minimum, when I was creating my line of CBD oils I was asking farmers all sorts of questions like what sort of growing you are using. Where are hemp plants being grown? For me, I wanted to ensure that they’re grown in the United States specifically in Colorado because that’s the one state where there’s some control in terms of regulation on the production and cultivation of hemp. There’s a variety of different factors but these five that I walked you through you especially want to make sure with any brand of CBD that you’re buying.   [01:05:49] Ashley James:  I’ve heard maybe you can clarify that, I know with medical marijuana there’s indica and sativa. They’re these different sort of strains of it, that are instead of thinking of it as one plant, we think of it like mushrooms where there’s shitake mushrooms and reishi mushrooms. Many different kinds of mushrooms and each can have a different medicinal quality to it. Same with the cannabis and the hemp plant that they have sort of different strains that provide different benefits. Is that true with hemp as it is with cannabis? Is there like a sativa or indica of hemp to get different kinds of THC? Or sorry, different kinds of CBD?   [01:06:40] Rachna Patel: Yes, here’s what I would tell you. I don’t actually go by the names of different strains, indica or sativa, I don’t care about all that. As a doctor, what I care about is objective data. All I care about are the amounts of THC and CBD. When you’re looking at marijuana products, what you want to look at is the amount of CBD relative to THC or the amount of THC relative to CBD. Plain and simple. When it comes to hemp-based products, you’re looking at the total amount of CBD. Number one, you’re making sure that the amount of THC is less than that .3%. Then you’re going to look at the amount of CBD and look at what the total strength is in that one ounce. Remember, you want to compare equivalent amounts. An ounce to an ounce. Not an ounce to 2 ounces for instance. I’ve mentioned this before but I want to emphasize it again, typically what you’re going to find in the market is anywhere from 250mg of CBD to a 100mg of CBD in a one ounce bottle. When it comes at hemp-based products you’re looking at strengths. More is not always better. Like I mentioned before, optimal is what you’re aiming for. The strength that’s right for you. Just to give you an example that relatable, lets’ take ibuprofen. Ibuprofen is used for headaches oftentimes. You have the person where they come in 200mg tablets, you have the person where 200mg does the job of reliving their headache but then you will have other patients that’ll need hundreds of milligrams that comes in the form of prescription strength to help relieve their headache. The person where 200mg does it of ibuprofen, you’re not going to have to take hundreds of milligrams to help relieve your pain. Same thing with CBD, for one person the 250mg strength does the job. You don’t need to go all the way to the other end of the thousand milligrams to relieve whatever symptom you’re experiencing. Does that help in terms of – so it’s not strains but it’s strength of CBD that you’re looking at.   [01:08:59] Ashley James: Don’t be worried about the strain of the plant, we‘re just looking at the amount of CBD. Your CBD oil is whole plant. Meaning it’s whole plant extract so there’s actually more than just CBD in there? There’s terpenes. I don’t even know these words but do you ever look into sort of the medicinal benefits of the other compounds that come from the hemp plant?   [01:19:026] Rachna Patel: Here’s the interesting thing with terpenes. Terpenes were highly in volatile compounds, that why whenever you’re near a lemon grove, what you’re smelling is lemony floating around in the air. When you’re near pine trees, you’re smelling the piney that’s floating around in the air. They’re highly volatile compounds and when CBD oils are made the heat process is high enough where these chemical evaporate. Oftentimes really what’s going on with the manufacturing process is that these terpenes are added back in after the CBD oil was made. Finally, laboratory testing goes through several phases. One, you test the plant. Second, you test the extract. Third, you test the final CBD oil. Let me simplify this for you. General perception is that it’s just the CBD extracted in the oil like the kitchen grade oil, the coconut oil or the olive oil. That’s not the case, what’s going on is that the CBD is extracted in the solvent. One of the solvents that I’ve mentioned, CO2, ethanol are one of the hydrocarbons and then once it’s extracted in that then it’s being mixed up in the oil. The plant is tested because if the plant is not good like if it’s infested with fungus, e-coli, salmonella then you can’t use it. Then the extract is tested because you want to know, make sure that in the heating process you’re getting the right amounts of CBD and THC. Finally, once it’s dissolved in the oil, you’re testing it again for amounts of CBD and amounts of THC as well. Once the CBD oil is made, put into that oil then typically the terpenes are added back in. You can buy terpenes online in powder form and it’s mixed back in. That’s what’s typically what happens. It’s interesting because there’s research done on this too where they just took a little bud of marijuana because marijuana has terpenes as well. They put it in boiling water. They test it for terpenes before they boil it and then after they boil it most of the terpenes disappear after putting it in boiling water. Like I said, they’re highly volatile compounds and they just very easily, any amount of heat that touches them they’re sort of are in the air.   [01:12:12] Ashley James: What are their medicinal benefits?   [01:12:013] Rachna Patel: The main medicinal benefits as far as I know come for the cannabinoids themselves because that’s what’s interacting with the cannabinoids system. The terpenes could be interacting with other systems in the body but the two combined I haven’t found much in a way of research so it’s difficult for me to say.   [01:12:37] Ashley James: You know what I found really interesting about CBD is that if someone smoke too much pot and they’re too high that they can use CBD to bring them down really quick because the CBD floods the receptors and blocks the THC receptors. If someone did too much pot like maybe medical marijuana patient for the first time and they’re going through chemotherapy  or they’re in a lot of pain and they’re looking to relieve themselves and they’re okay with getting high because whenever they’re at home. Then they feel too high maybe they get paranoid or scared if they take some CBD then all of a sudden will bring them back to reality much faster. We don’t have that with alcohol. The old saying is drink some coffee but now you’re just drunk and awake. It doesn’t actually speed up your liver and metabolize the alcohol much faster. When you drink, you’re just going to be drunk for the next four hours. If you’re high, you can just be high for the next four hours but with CBD it can actually can bring people down faster. I thought that was really interesting. I did not know that when I was younger and might have benefit from that information. [Laughter]   [01:13:53] Rachna Patel: Yes, all the college students, some high school students. Yes, probably. [Crosstalk]   [01:13:57] Ashley James: I don’t know if it’s anecdotal but I heard that EMTs will have CBD in their kit to help patients who are – the people they’re helping that might have eaten too many pot brownies then called 911. Have you heard of that? That EMTs would travel in their ambulance with CBD oil?   [01:14:23] Rachna Patel:  I have not actually heard of that. Do you know which country this is in? [Crosstalk]   [01:14:26] Ashley James: It was anecdotal. I don’t know If it’s true or not. It’ll really be interesting to find out but I heard that because CBD is so effective at bringing people down that EMTs have been using it. I don’t know if it’s true or not but it’s interesting to consider that it has that effect. Now, you said that during the testing that three times you test. You’re testing at the farm basically you take the plant itself and have it tested. You’re testing for mold, the CBD level of the plant and pesticides, is that correct?   [01:15:03] Rachna Patel: Yes. You’re testing for the bugs, the pesticides and also you’re testing for the amount of CBD and THC. Actually, at that point the amount of CBD and THC does not really matter. Not the CBD but the THC. You want to make sure it’s less than a certain amount. During the extraction process based on the heeding, you can actually use a heeding process to change the amounts of the CBD and the THC.   [01:15:37] Ashley James: Okay, so that’s not as important. The first time you test, it’s more about whether this plant is even worth taking it to the factory to make it into a tincture, to make it into medicine. You want to make sure there’s no mold, you want to make sure there’s no pesticides or that they’re below the limit that you’re looking for. Then after you had it made in the lab is when you test it again for the CBD levels and the THC levels and then you said there’s a third time you test it, can you clarify that?   [01:16:12] Rachna Patel: Yes. Just to go through the whole process, you’re testing the plant mainly for things like pesticides, fungus and bacteria and heavy metals. Then you’re going to extract mainly for the amounts of CBD and THC. Lastly, you’re going to test the final product for amounts of CBD and THC and then also like residual solvents, heavy metals, pesticides and then you don’t really have to do fungus and bacteria at that point. Those are the main things that you’re testing for at the third stage of it. Now, this is how I do it. Ideally, how it should be done but is this how everyone does it? No, because again, there’s no regulations in the industry. I just tend to be very, very tight and use the knowledge that I have very strictly but yes, this is how I’ve worked with my farmer and done it.   [01:17:11] Ashley James: Very cool. A question just came in from Jodi. They say, “I’ve been seeing citrus forms of CBD with zero THC. How well do these work? If you have zero THC in your body, how well is it going to react with your system? Or what would you do when you’re body builds up a tolerance?” There’s some few questions in there. One is, what are citrus forms of CBD?   [01:17:41] Rachna Patel: I don’t know actually. I was going to ask you the same question.   [01:17:44] Ashley James: Maybe it’s the edibles or maybe it’s like citrus flavored tincture. Okay, they say it has zero THC, which means the manufacturer had to have used all those solvents to remove it. How well do this work? In your experience, how well do the ones that have solvents that have removed THC compared to the whole plant CBD?   [01:18:12] Rachna Patel: It’s going to depend on the symptoms that you’re experiencing, right? If it’s a condition that really doesn’t necessitate any amount of THC and really is benefited by high amounts of CBD then it’s going to benefit you but if there something where you do need some amount of THC, then it’s not going to benefit you. It really depends on the combination of symptoms that you have. As in the example of joint pain that I’ve gave you, if you have mild joint pain for arthritis then yes, it could help but anything more than that marches severe then in all likelihood it’s probably not going to help. What would do when your body builds up a tolerance? You scale back, that’s pretty much the simple solution to it   [01:19:01] Ashley James: Got it. Very cool. Yes, a friend once told me that he found – he was doing medical marijuana and he found that when he added CBD that he needed to do less medical marijuana to get the same results. He found it actually made his body seem more efficient with it. Have you heard of that?   [01:19:22] Rachna Patel:  Yes. If you think about if that’s a product that has high amounts of THC, it still does have some amount of CBD and if your body is benefiting for the CBD you’re going to have to use more of it to accumulate more of the CBD. The smaller amount of CBD you’re going to have to take more of in order to accumulate some of that but then if you’re adding the CBD, then you’re not going to have to take much of the high THC low CBD product. Does this make any sense? Hopefully, I don’t confuse you.   [01:19:59] Ashley James: I think so.   [01:20:00] Rachna Patel:  Let’s put numbers to it. You’re using a marijuana product that has 10mg of THC and only 2mg of CBD. Say, your body really needs 10mg of CBD for it to be effective. You’re going to have to take a lot of that to accumulate 10mg but if you add in a CBD product that has 8mg of CBD in it and then you add it with the 2mg that’s already there, you’re obviously not going to need a much as the other product.   [01:20:35] Ashley James: Yes. That makes sense because what the body actually was really benefitting from as what you’re saying is, when people use medical marijuana what they’re really benefiting from is the CBD in the medical marijuana plant.   [01:20:50] Rachna Patel:  Right, for certain conditions. If that’s what you’re body really needs, it’s going to keep on asking for more until it gets enough but if you give it the high CBD product that has the right amount then it’s not going to ask for more. It’s going to do the job.   [01:21:07] Ashley James: I know someone. Actually, I think I know of a few people because I heard this more than once but I know of someone. I’ve watched them do it, they use CBD, pure CBD to quit using marijuana. That they have been using it recreationally and they found that they use it for four years non-stop every day and every time they want to stop, they didn’t want to stop. They felt as if there was an addiction there. I know it doesn’t have the same, it’s all addictive like cigarettes or heroine I get it but for people who are doing it every day, they’re seeing some relief in their own life especially if they have anxiety and when they go to stop, they feel compelled to keep doing it. I’ve talked to people who feel like medical marijuana has that addictive nature for some people just like chocolate bonbons would. It can be helpful but it also some people can find that they don’t want to quit. I know someone, watched them do it where they used the CBD extract and it helped them to want to quit. They used it and obviously had to do the work so they need to face life, face life sober. But that’s when they used the CBD that it brought on all the same positive benefits like the lower anxiety, the better sleep, all that. They found it much easier to not feel like they wanted pot anymore so it gave them a relief from the craving. Have you ever heard people using CBD to help quit using marijuana as a recreational drug?   [01:22:58] Rachna Patel: Yes. I want to put it into context here. Sounds like the person you’re talking about over did marijuana use.   [01:23:10] Ashley James: Right, yes.   [01:23:11] Rachna Patel: Quite a bit. Just like any other drug if you abuse it, yes, there’s potential for addiction. That’s important to know. Chemically speaking, CBD is what’s known as an inhibitor of THC. The CB1 receptor that I was talking about, CBD attaches to it, it changes the shape of the place where THC attaches so the body no longer gets any sort of effect from the THC anymore. That is potentially something that could be going on in terms of reducing the effect of the THC and therefore the need for it as well.   [01:24:00] Ashley James: Very interesting. Okay. Anything else that you want to make sure that we cover?   [01:24:06] Rachna Patel: No, we covered quite a bit. I would say that for those who want more information, I am constantly answering questions on my YouTube channel. Actually, starting next week what I’m going to do is I going to try to go live everyday on the various different platforms and just answer questions for people because people want answers. They can post their questions on YouTube, on any of my social media platforms, on Facebook. I’ll select them because I do get a lot of questions so I’ll select them and try to answer them. There’s more information on my book as well. Some of the things that I mentioned, I go into it in a lot more depth in the book and that’s available on Amazon. It’s titled “The CBD oil solution” and then subtitle is, “Treat chronic pain, insomnia and more without the high.”   [01:25:06] Ashley James: Got it. I’m going to make sure that the links to everything that you do is in the show notes of today’s podcast to learntruehealth.com. I am currently on your website and looking at your hemp oil and the CBD oil solution book, we’ll make sure the link to that is also in the show notes. People can join your email list and immediately give some great information. Then of course follow you on Facebook. You and I have been, I’ve been following you on Facebook since episode 49 when you’re first on the show and I see you posting all the time and on Instagram I see you posting all the time pictures of lectures that you’re giving and slides and all kinds of interesting stories as you navigate this world educating people on the benefits of CBD. It’s been a lot of fun actually following you and seeing how you progress and how you’ve been really shining a light on this great information because if we can use CBD instead of or use it to reduce pain medication. Right now, in opioid epidemic that we’re in, if we can use anything natural just to help people either prevent ever needing to get opioids or help them to get off of it or help them to reduce it. All of that is a benefit. Just like my experience. Sitting here, I am so grateful I’m not in pain right now. Sitting here, like I said I injured my back. I’m just thinking about I would’ve absolutely taken over the counter drugs or prescription drug had that been offered to me if I didn’t know of the benefits of using hemp for pain reduction. It works which is great.   [01:27:05] Rachna Patel: I would say that if we’re going to talk about the opioid epidemic in the context of the solution when I think CBD oil is that –   [01:27:17] Ashley James: Absolutely. Well, you’ve been helping people both in a clinical setting one on one as with doctor-patient experience. Consulting people around the world so you’ve had that experience of working with people, helping them to use CBD and use medical marijuana to get off of drugs, the help of prescription medications to lower prescription medications. Also, with their medications. You’ve actually seen hundreds of people be successful using these methods. Do you have any success stories that you would like to share specifically that comes to mind in terms of using CBD and getting off of pain medication or reducing pain medication?   [01:28:03] Rachna Patel: So many, thousands of stories but specifically what comes to mind are my patients with fibromyalgia because that’s a condition that tends to be very resistant to conventional medications. These patients, the medications are just piled up on top of them to that point where they taking like essentially a cocktail of prescription meds. A lot of times they’ll go back to their doctors and complain that, “This isn’t working” or “That isn’t working”. These patients they’re dismissed that they’re told that it’s all in your head. The pain that you’re experiencing is in your head. When these patients have come to me, I put them on a regimen of CBD and or THC. They’re in tears. They’re saying “You know doctor Patel, nobody’s believed me. For the longest time I’ve been trying drug upon drug upon drug and now I’m at a point where I can manage my pain with just the form of cannabis that I’m using”. I think that’s tremendous. Both on the patients end and on my end to be able to witness that. To be actually be able to solve someone’s problem from my end but for the patient to experience that sort of relief because they’re prisoners of their medications. Medications that aren’t working for them and now they’re using these medication on an as-needed basis to help manage their pain. It’s a lot of freedom that comes with it.   [01:29:46] Ashley James: Absolutely. I’m so excited to hear that. That’s phenomenal. Well, I’ll continue to look forward to learning more from you, following you on Facebook, watching your live Facebook and Instagram videos, seeing all the questions come out of the woodwork and seeing what happen in this industry over the next few years. Like I said, we’re pioneers. It’s all just starting. It’s all just starting out since it’s legal now and we can see the studies start to come in and the result starts to come in terms of all the benefits that CBD can provide us. It’s very exciting. Now I do have a question, would like to participate, I can edit this out if not but would you like to participate in providing something like a drawing for the Facebook group?   [01:30:44] Rachna Patel: Yes. We could do a free drawing for a book. What I can do is I could put up a post. Do you have a group? I think you have the group, don’t you? Facebook group?   [01:30:53] Ashley James: Yes. Learn True Health Facebook group.   [01:30:56] Rachna Patel: Yes. I think I’m actually a part of it. What I can do is out a post, I’ll share a post through my page and that can just be shared. It’s worked for me before but basically whoever shares it, likes it, tags other people will end up running a book.   [01:31:17] Ashley James: Awesome. That’ll be great. Normally, I do the post in the Facebook group but you can do the post. It’s totally fine. So listeners just jump in to the Facebook group after listening to this. Go to Learn True Health in Facebook, find the group or you can go to learntruehealth.com/group that’ll redirect you to the group. Look for Doctor Patel’s post and we’ll have it up for about a week after we publish this episode and comment in order to enter to win her book, to win it for free.   [01:31:51] Rachna Patel: Okay. Awesome.   [01:31:52] Ashley James: All right. Fantastic. It’s been wonderful having you back on the show. Is there anything that you would like to say to wrap up today’s interview or anything left unsaid?   [01:32:03] Rachna Patel: No. I would just tell your listeners just to tune in on my YouTube channel and I’ll continue to answer more questions on there.   [01:32:10] Ashley James: All right. Fantastic. Well, it’s been great having you back on the show.   [01:32:14] Rachna Patel: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.   Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition and how we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people? You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. I just spent the last year in their health-coaching sort of vacation program and it really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over a hundred dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition but from the standpoint on how we can help people to shift their life, to shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can google Institute for Integrated Nutrition or IIN, or give them a call or you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training. So check it out and see if it’s something that you’d be interested in. Be sure to mention my name, Ashley James and the Learn True Health podcast because I made a deal with them that they would give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program. I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, health coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic offices, doctor’s offices, you can work in hospitals. You can work online through Skype and help people around the world. You can become an author. You can go into the school system and help with your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. You can go into senior centers and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them and their success and their health goals. There’s so many different available options for you when you become a certified health coach. So check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. Mention my name. Get the best deal. Give them a call and they’ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes are starting at the end of the month, so you’re going to want to call them now and check it out. If you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people.   Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high-quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are highest quality and the best price. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.   Get Connected With Dr. Rachna Patel! Website Facebook Book By Dr. Rachna Patel The CBD Oil Solution

https://www.skinterrupt.com http://www.healthyskinshow.com   Ways To Make Healthy Skin https://www.learntruehealth.com/ways-to-make-healthy-skin Discover how Jennifer Fugo, a Clinical Nutritionist embarked her journey on finding out the various root causes of different skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis. Be inspired as she narrates how she overcame her painful experience of having skin condition called Dyshidrotic eczema. Moreover, know whether topical treatment really work as well as the do’s and don’ts of treating skin conditions.    Are you looking to optimize your health? Are you looking to get the best supplements at the lowest price? For high quality supplements and to talk to someone about what supplements are best for you, go to takeyoursupplements.com and one of our fantastic true health coaches will help you pick out the right supplements for you that are the highest quality and the best price– that’s takeyoursupplements.com Be sure to ask about free shipping and our awesome referral program.   [00:43:00] Ashley James:  Welcome to the Learn true health podcast. I’m your host Ashley James. This is Episode 360. We’re in for such a treat today. We have back on the show with us Jennifer Fugo, she was with us on Episode 198. That’s a lot of episodes between when we last had you on, we talked about your gluten free school which is now transitioning to have your gluten free school be underneath your umbrella of Jenniferfugo.com but that’s not what we’re here to talk about today but listeners can definitely go back to Episode 198 and listen to your story and great advice around going gluten free. Today’s episode is all about skin health. I hear almost weekly from my listeners about rashes, skin irritation and hives– histamine issue. The list goes on and on. Some people have skin issues that they have been diagnosed like eczema or psoriasis and others just have these rashes pop up and they’re itchy and or scaly skin and or acne. All these skin issues on the outside, wearing our illness on the outside, we become so self-conscious because everyone can see what’s going on. We really want to get to the root of it. You’re here today to share with us how we can interrupt those old patterns and create wonderful skin health. Jennifer’s podcast is called the Healthy Skin Show and her website is skinterrupt.com— combinations of the words skin and interrupt which is really cool. Jennifer, welcome back to the show.   [02:38:00] Jennifer Fugo: Thank you so much for having me, Ashley. I have to tell you, this is one of the podcasts that I feel deeply honored to be back because you are an amazing person and you’ve led the charge in helping so many people change their lives. You just got such a great audience as well. It’s just a deep honor to be here for the second time. Thank you for having me back.   [03:01:00] Ashley James: Well, thank you. I’m really excited for you to help all of our listeners who have skin issues to resolve them today. For those who didn’t get to hear you in Episode 198, can you take us back? Share a bit about your story and what led you to want to work with people in order to correct their health and heal their skin.   [03:25:00] Jennifer Fugo: Yes. What was interesting when we talked in the previous episode it was mostly about the Gut issues that I had struggled with. If we fast forward a bunch, I went to Grad School to become a Clinical Nutritionist because while I had loved working with people from the food perspective I really wanted to dive deeper into underlying reasons that were driving Autoimmune Disease and inflammatory conditions. I love biochemistry. I learned that I love it however, in the process of going to Grad School and being under an enormous amount of stress. I started to develop these– I don’t know how to describe them other than it would look like these little crystals, like little balls underneath my skin on my fingers. I was like, “What is that?” It looked almost like a white head but it wasn’t. I couldn’t figure out what it was, I couldn’t get them. I didn’t feel anything just under my skin and I never noticed them before. As the summer kind of went into full force, the area became increasingly red and itchy then eventually, those little pustules burst. I thought, “Did I get poison ivy?” I’m like, trying to figure out what it is. I’ve never had that in my life. I went to my dad who’s a doctor and he’s like, “Oh, it’s some sort of dermatitis.” I was like, “Dermatitis? What is that?” It turns out that I did not have some random dermatitis. I had developed a condition called Dyshidrotic eczema, it’s a type of eczema but it affects the hands and the feet. Fortunately, it only affected my hands which has this good positive benefits because I didn’t have a problem walking but in the same respect affecting the palms of your hands can have a major detriment upon your life. That summer I watched as what became these little rashes turn into massive patches of red skin that cover the palms of my hands up to the sides and the webbing of my fingers down the tops of the fingers and even started to destroy the nails themselves. You might say like, “That stinks. Your hands are itchy.” Let me just tell you that if you’ve never had eczema on your hands, I’m not saying that it’s any better or worse than anybody else’s different types of eczema, they have but it’s a real challenge to open doorknobs. I couldn’t exercise anymore. I had a really hard time holding anything. I had to wear these blue gloves that I bought at a Home Depot because I couldn’t touch anything. I couldn’t wash my hands anymore because water burns so badly. I couldn’t wash my hair or take a shower. It really impacts your life a lot. If you have rashes elsewhere, you can cover them up a lot of times with clothing but when it’s the palms of your hands and it’s the middle of summer it’s very difficult to avoid when you meet a new person to not shake their hand. When people see that your hands look all red, rashy, and oozy, you have some sort of infection, they don’t want to touch your hands to shake it. I was in so much physical discomfort and also this horrible sense of being dirty or disgusting. Almost like you’re a leper in modern day and there was no way for me to hide it. You walk around with baby blue gloves on, everybody can see that and like “Why are you wearing those?” I went to a dermatologist. They basically said steroid creams and Vaseline to keep the moisture. I’m like “Vaseline, like how impractical and I wouldn’t want to put a petroleum-based derivative on my skin that’s all open and whatnot.” As the winter came around, those red burning, oozing, itchy rashes turned into incredibly fragile dry skin. Remember, it’s all on my hands, every time I would bend my fingers, it would break. I ended up with what felt like 1000 paper cuts all over my hand. I’ve tried all sorts of stabs. I used to wear gloves to bed to try and keep the moisture in these fabric gloves. I was just desperate for relief and it would come and go. Finally, I just had enough. I was a nutritionist at this point and I felt ashamed, to be honest with you. I thought that I’m supposed to be this pinnacle of health and here I am having this really serious condition. People don’t even want to touch me; they don’t want to shake my hand. How can I go give a talk with blue gloves on? I had to stop taking cooking classes and whatnot. My husband, I have to credit him with being the inspiration for writing my attitude and showing me that this could be an opportunity for me to look at myself as a client and say, “What would you do to help yourself if you walked into your office?” That was what set me down the path of thinking, maybe there is something else that I can do while Google hadn’t turned up very much that was helpful. Maybe I need to think about this from a different perspective and that’s really where my journey began. I can tell you that I have been completely 100% in remission for at least the last year and a half. No more flares. I’ve been really appreciative of all the connections that I’ve made and I’m very passionate now about sharing everything that I learned with people who are stuck in this boat of suffering from skin rashes.   [09:34:00] Ashley James: When we were talking before we hit record, you said that since we last spoke, you are going in a new direction that is so authentic to who you are. Now having heard this side of your story, I can really hear the authenticity in your voice that this is your calling although the gluten-free school was definitely mission-driven. You were definitely out to help people to heal at the root level their skin is your calling. I can definitely hear that passion in your voice and it’s very exciting because I’ve known many people with skin issues that were suffering like you were for years and all they were given from medical doctors was steroids. I knew one woman who was in her early 20s. She had been on the steroids since she was six years old. It was $700 a month. If she wasn’t on it, she couldn’t leave the house. She was in agony. Her entire body from head to toe was covered in eczema so bad that her whole body would burn. One year someone stole her purse and she didn’t have an extra $700 to buy the cream and so she suffered for a whole month until she could get the money together to buy an extra tube.  I had said to her, “Have you ever read the side effects?” She came back almost crying because it said do not take for more than two weeks. She was about 21 at the time and she’d been on it since she was six. This meets the number one side effect and concern– the reason why they say discontinue after two weeks is that it causes cancer.   [11:30:00] Jennifer Fugo: The other piece too is one side effect– it’s a major problem known by different names. It’s called Red Burning Skin Syndrome. It’s also called Topical Steroid Addiction or Topical Steroid Withdrawal. When you are constantly on topical steroids your skin essentially develops an addiction to the steroid cream because the steroids are a pot of water that’s boiling over except you put a lid on it and the steroid cream is the lid. You’re keeping the inflammation that’s bubbling up under the surface but there’s still something going on. You take that steroid cream away and all of a sudden the symptom goes completely haywire. For example, you have eczema on the front of your thighs, you’ve been using a steroid cream for a really long time but you decide, “I’m going to go cold turkey. I’m just going to get rid of it, not going to use it anymore.” What can happen if you develop this condition? Now, the steroid creams are gone, the rash will get worse. Not only will it get worse but it will spread and alert many cases where it spreads to your entire body. It creates such a level of pain and suffering that is horrific for many people. It’s flaky skin, red, itchy stinging rashes that are all over. Not just in the original place where the eczema or the rash was. You can end up with swelling, fatigue, infections, increased skin sensitivity and this can take up to a year to go away. There is a real concern that there is a lack of coaching amongst dermatologists and primary care doctors who are just saying “Oh, we’ll use a steroid cream.” Additionally, the other issue is that while you are putting this on the skin, it can thin the skin as well. It’s another long term problem. You can end up with discoloration and scarring but it also can affect your adrenal because you’re putting a steroid cream on your skin that is absorbed into the body. There is really fascinating yet sad research demonstrating that the start long term steroid cream use does impact adrenal gland function. It’s even worse in children and babies because they’re so small and so young. I’m not saying anyone listening to this should stop using their steroid creams or throw them away. I think there’s a way to use them responsibly while you’re trying to do other things. I certainly did use it on my journey which I’m happy to talk about to how I made my shift. I wanted just caution anyone listening “Oh, my gosh. It’s like poison. I have to throw it away.” Don’t do that.   [14:44:00] Ashley James: Right. Neither one of us is a doctor. We cannot prescribe drugs. We cannot tell people to get off of a prescription. You definitely want to work with your dermatologist when tight trading off of medication or off of a skin cream that is medicated. I like your idea of why don’t we come in and work on the root cause. Nitrify the body, correct the diet and lifestyle, figure out what happened that created this illness in the first place. Heal the body that way and get the body so strong that we can come off of the steroid cream, slowly while we’re bolstering the body and then we can have a smoother transition. Is that what you did? Did you have a smooth transition?   [15:34:00] Jennifer Fugo: No.    [15:39:00] Ashley James: Did you just throw your cream and go cold turkey?    [15:42:00] Jennifer Fugo: No. I was having trouble sleeping through the night. I would wake up sometimes and had discovered that I was scratching my hands in the middle of the night and then rip gashes in my skin. Discuss it with your doctor but the goal is to use the steroid cream as little as possible and as least frequent as possible. There are different theories like you’re on for so long and then you go off of it and you sort of alternate back and forth. I would just try to use it as sparingly as possible. In actuality, it’s interesting because there’s a lot of root causes. Right now I’m up to 16. There’s overlap amongst a few of them. It was 15, I recently added 16th, which is actually drug reactions. A lot of people don’t realize that there are very common medications that can trigger your skin rashes and even things like psoriasis. There are actual medications with psoriasis that can trigger problems. It’s important to understand that it’s not just a skin problem. I think that’s an important place to preface this conversation. I like to think of the body like ancient technology. The way it tells us things, communicates and sends us messages is sort of like through smoke signals. I wish it was computer technology but it’s not.  We would be like, “Oh, yes.  My vitamin A is low.” We would just know that right off the bat but we don’t instead, we have to get all of these random symptoms. The other piece to this is that the skin as far as priorities of Oregon systems are concerned is the lowest on the totem pole. You could walk around with gashes and wounds due to rashes that will not heal but if God forbid something happens to your heart or your brain or your lungs, you will die because those organs are more important. You can’t survive if your thyroid function is non-existent or if you don’t have any function in your mitochondria. That underscores the importance of saying, “What type of skin rash condition I have? What if the symptoms themselves are actually symptoms of something else going on deeper in the body?”   Take a look and say, “What can we ask our team from within and outside to help us put the pieces together?” There are a lot of root causes. Typically, in my experience, people have a combination of about three to five which is why, unfortunately what may work for one person, may not work for another person. Do you want me to just share quickly what my list is?   [19:05:00] Ashley James: Yeah. I’ve got a pen and paper here. I’ve already written down number one which is drug reactions and waiting to write down the next 15.   [19:14:00] Jennifer Fugo: All right. We’ve got number two which is Mitochondrial Dysfunction — poor energy generation at the cellular level and we’re not efficiently producing ATP. We’ve got Hormone imbalances, Unmanaged stress, Heavy metals, Environmental toxins –that could even include like paint fumes, raid on, off gassing, new carpeting or paints—   [19:45:00] Ashley James: Mattresses, Memory Foam, off gases.  I think there are eight carcinogens in memory foam.   [19:50:00] Jennifer Fugo: Exactly. Your jeans certainly play a role in some of this and we can talk more about that if you’d like. Diet and Food reactions are a piece of it but they are not as big of a piece as a lot of people think. Microbiome Dysbiosis is another one however when I say this, I want to clarify that this includes not just the gut microbiome but also the microbiome that lives on the skin and they are different, however, they communicate with one another.   [20:23:00] Ashley James: Can I just rub yogurt on my face? Would that help the microbiome on the skin?   [20:32:00] Jennifer Fugo: For some people, they might find that works. I know that people who don’t really have horrible skin conditions and maybe they’ve just got some dry skin may find that helpful. For a lot of people that do have skin rash conditions, there’s usually a lot more involved than just a yogurt mask. I wish it was that easy but not always. Environmental allergies are another piece to that– like pollen, dogs, cats, horses, cockroaches. There are also a lot of chemicals in our environment that I personally never even knew about until I started really digging into this. These are formaldehyde– all sorts of things that are coding. Very common substances or items that we use in our daily life that you wouldn’t think had any chemical sprayed on them and they do. You can even have an allergy to your shoes. Some people who have rashes, severe cracking and pain with their feet can have Shoe Allergy. There are definite environmental allergies that have to be identified and looked at.  Nutritional deficiencies certainly play a role in skin rash conditions. Autoimmunity and Autoinflammation, I consider those to be sort of in the same bucket. Gut Dysfunction and Liver Detox Challenges. We’ve also got trauma. Maybe your father died at a very young age and obviously, as a child that was traumatic for you. Maybe you were in a bad marriage or you went through a period of time where you lost your home or one of the crashes and whatnot. It could be anything from a really big trauma to little tiny trauma. I’ve even had some people discuss sexual assault in the past and whatnot. And then last but not least, thyroid dysfunction.   [22: 42:00] Ashley James: I think I wrote down 17. We’ve got the Environmental Allergens and the Environmental Toxins which were different. I wrote down 17. You got 17 root causes now.   [23:06:00] Jennifer Fugo: Maybe I do.   [23: 11:00] Ashley James: It totally makes sense. A few of them relate to histamine. When you say Diet reactions and Environmental Allergens both would trigger histamine. Is histamine the root cause? Is histamine what’s causing the skin issue?   [23:36:00] Jennifer Fugo: What’s interesting is that not everybody has an issue with histamine. When it comes to eczema, some people can have more histamine present. They have chronic urticaria or hives that can also certainly be a concern. There’s too much histamine in their system or they’re consuming foods– lots of fermented foods are not always good for people with chronic skin issues. One of the first questions I asked someone on the phone is “Oh, well, I have ecz.” I go, “Okay, can you please tell me the symptoms of your experience of that particular skin condition?” They sometimes pause and they’re like “Why? That’s what I have.” I’m like, “I understand but your symptoms are going to be different than someone else’s. You can’t assume that because you have eczema or you have psoriasis. It’s the same exact problem that’s triggered this issue.” I have had clients who some have histamine issues and I’m part of their eczema issue. I have other clients with eczema who have no issues with histamine at all.   [24: 48:00] Ashley James: Very cool. So, histamine isn’t at the root cause but it can be sort of the trigger.   [24:56:00] Jennifer Fugo: Exactly.   [24: 59:00] Ashley James: How do you feel about going through each one and unpacking them?   [25:03:00] Jennifer Fugo: I don’t know if we have time for all of that. We can certainly talk about a few of them. The one that we started with number one, the drug reactions piece was the most shocking to me because a lot of people assume that over the counter drugs are safe. Again, this conversation is not meant to at all demonize medication because my dad’s a doctor and a surgeon and frankly, I don’t necessarily think with skin issues, we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, “Oh, we don’t need any of the medications that are available.” I don’t actually think that’s entirely true. I think there are a time and a place and whatever you choose to do you should jump in with your eyes wide open. The biggest piece people are promised is “Oh, if you take this pill or you get the shots, you’re going to be better.” I literally had a conversation with a woman this morning that has horrible full-body eczema. She has been on Dupixent which is one of the biologic drugs that is supposed to be the spike Godsend to completely cure your eczema so you no longer have it and you walk around eczema free. She said it makes her living experience more tolerable however, she still has incredible itching; her face looks like it’s constantly burnt. The Dupixent has not fully addressed her issue and she’s like, “I can’t live like this. I need to find out what is driving the inflammation underneath the whole thing!” With psoriasis, there were some really surprising drugs and I only found this out because a woman who tuned in to my Eczema and Psoriasis Awareness Week last year had rung me and said, “Did you know that a blood pressure medication could actually cause your psoriasis.” I was like, “Excuse me.”  It turns out that these very common medications are called Beta-blockers as well as Ace inhibitors. Those are two classes and there are also Angiotensin Receptor Blockers. All three of those have the potential to trigger or worsen psoriasis for people. Other ones that you might also be surprised about are like Lithium. If you’ve been taking Lithium to help with your mood, you can have skin-related side effects. We see that for about up to 45% of people who take them and who take those supplements. Anti-infection medications– one very common is Plaquenil. There are people who take that that can cause flares on about 31% of people who have psoriasis. Plaquenil is considered an Immunosuppressant drug. The other class of medications which maybe you’ve talked about on your show is the Fluoroquinolones which are a class of antibiotics that actually in at least in the United States has a warning placed on it by the FDA because of so many problems with it. The most popular drugs that people probably know is Cipro. Aside from the fact that there are potential issues with how it can damage mitochondrial function, this is one of those drug classes that can actually cause problems for people with psoriasis and other skin issues. Tetracycline, interferon, and TNF or tumor necrosis factor alpha-inhibitors medication can do this. A lot of these are biologic medications which shockingly are medications that are prescribed to people with psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis like Remicade and Humira. I’m not trying to scare people. The point is to say, “Hey, I really actually should read what the side effects could be.” While the 2% doesn’t seem like a lot, what happens if you are the 2%? I’ve talked about with the Gut stuff and said drugs– non-steroidal anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen but that can also trigger or worsen psoriasis as well. There’s a lot of gut involvement with enzymes that can increase gut permeability, as well as the risk of Gut bleeding throughout either the stomach or the GI system. It’s important, as far as drugs are concerned, to just take a look at all the medications that you’re on and double-check that they aren’t maybe the reason for why this happened. Think back to the time around when the rashes started in. Did you start medication? You know, it’s important to think about these types of things. The most common piece to a lot of this that I see is typically Gut Dysfunction. When I say dysfunction, I actually include Gut infections or Dysbiosis and the NutritionalDeficiencies piece– those two are huge problems.   [30: 08:00] Ashley James: Let’s get into those then. I do have a question about drugs. Have you seen that some people have their skin problem because it was triggered by a drug that they were on? Let’s say a course of antibiotics like the tetracycline. Or they were on a blood pressure medication and now they’re no longer taking it, the drugs are no longer in their system but the skin issues still there? Is the drug what triggered it and turned it on? They have four or five other things all contributing to their inflammation now, those other issues are continuing it. Do you see the drugs kind of like start the fire? Or do you find that when drugs are the reason why that they have a skin problem, that when they switch their medication or get off of a drug that the skin issue goes away?   [31:04:00] Jennifer Fugo: That’s really complicated because if you took one of these antibiotics, it’s like dropping a bomb in your gut. At that point, whether you stay on that antibiotic or not, you’ve now dramatically impacted the makeup of your microbiome. You allow for opportunistic bugs to go crazy; yeast and fungal organisms. If you inhale, swallow or eat contaminated foods that get through your stomach, you can end up with infections. That’s a tricky question. I don’t know that I actually have the answer to that. A lot of people have these things in their past. That’s a bigger problem from what I see on my end. Gut is one piece to this however, new research is telling us that there are very distinct communication conduit, so to speak between the microbiome in the gut and the microbiome that is on the skin. To be clear in case anybody’s thinking, “Oh, well, the bugs must be the same.” They’re not. There are similar classes of bacteria or phyla of bacteria but they’re not the same exact types because the bacteria on the skin eat lipids, it’s called a Lipid dome. Whereas the bugs that live in the digestive system really prefer to eat fiber.  We know about FodMap foods and fermented foods. Researchers showing us that when you have a healthy microbiome and you’re eating plenty of fermented fibers, they will produce their waste products called Short Chain Fatty Acids. Those Short Chain Fatty Acids are really important for the acidification of the gut microbiome because you actually want a more acidic colon. You don’t want an alkaline colon but you don’t want it to be too acidic. The body regions, as far as pH is concerned need to be within very specific ranges in order to maintain a certain level of health. Part of the reasons why it’s too crowd out is there are bugs that shouldn’t be there. What research is telling us now about Short Chain Fatty Acids is that they actually communicate – that is the communication device of how the bugs in your gut are then establishing a healthy microbiome balance on the skin and butyrate which is one of the three. There are actually three short chain fatty acids but butyrate is one of the most important ones. When we have enough butyrate that can really help rebalance the microbiome of the skin — it’s not to say it’s going to fix all of your problems but you have to ask yourself, “Why don’t I have enough butyrate? Why don’t I have enough acetate or propionate? Why don’t I have enough of these?” It’s like an onion, you’re peeling back the layers. Do I have an infection? Do I have Gut Dysbiosis? What’s going on in the Gut? Am I not eating enough fiber? You have to really take a look at what’s under the hood so to speak. What is going on in the gut can show up on the skin. I’m currently working with a boy whose 13 years old and unfortunately when we did stool test on him he came back having the most Gut infections I have ever had a client have. It was no wonder that nothing they did topically would work because it was so many problems underneath the surface and as a result the gut is no longer in a state where it wants to invite in nutrients because it’s leaky. You don’t have to have gut symptoms to have Gut infections or dysbiosis. I have clients who have really messed up skin and they swear to me up and down, “I poop like a champ, poop 123 times a day. I’m really good. No problems, there are no gas, no bloating, no nothing.” They’re still tests come back with dysbiosis, too much yeast or infections. It just so happens that it manifest on the skin in that particular case. Don’t write off a Gut issue just because you don’t have any gas or bloating or you poop normal. It’s really important to look at the puzzle without judgment and take a look from the very basic things. I’m sure you know too, you do that with your clients. It’s always like, what’s going on with digestive function? Are we eating good quality food? Are we bringing in enough nutrients? That’s a big piece to this puzzle.   [36: 30:00] Ashley James: You mentioned a stool test, do you look at parasites? In some way, we could consider yeast, Candida as a parasite. Parasites don’t have to all be worms. It could be worms and flukes. Looking at parasites, is that something you’d add to your list as potentially causes for skin problems?   [36:57:00] Jennifer Fugo: Yes, absolutely. You’re looking at anything that shouldn’t or either shouldn’t be in the gut or isn’t too high of a proportion. Everybody under the sun has Candida in their gut. You should actually have it. It’s actually a normal commensal organism. You just shouldn’t have it in excessive amounts. We’re looking for fungal organisms and all different types. It doesn’t necessarily have to be Candida Albicans, Giardia– anything that really shouldn’t be there. There are certainly ways if we suspect for example that somebody who’s traveled extensively overseas. I have one client that did many tours over in Africa while he was working for a nonprofit. He’s living in the villages and eating their food and I was like, “You got to get checked for worms. You have to.” You have worms and parasites because you have a level of potential exposure that most people don’t have. A dermatologist can’t figure out what’s going on. It’s also Gut function making sure that you have enough stomach acid, that you’ve got enough digestive enzymes being produced by your pancreas and have enough bile. If you don’t have your gallbladder anymore, you’re not able to absorb fats. Nutritional deficiencies are a big piece to this if you don’t have enough vitamin A and vitamin D, which are both fat soluble or if your gut is just super leaky you have a higher incidence of fats being lost out of the stool. If the gut is super leaky and unhappy, you can end up with Keratosis Pilari. That’s a very common sign of vitamin A deficiency where you get those little like chicken skin bumps on the back of the arms and whatnot. Vitamin D is also very important for the skin as well. The Gut is a big first piece to consider.   [39: 04:00] Ashley James: I love that you pointed that out. I was getting on the Examination Table when I was pregnant, my naturopath held my arm to help me—a giant pregnant lady trying to get on the examination table and her hand touched my elbow and she went, “Oh, you’re vitamin D deficient. We need to increase your vitamin D.”  I’m looking at her like “What are you, psychic? You just touched me and you know I’m vitamin D deficient.” She goes, “No, you’ve got these dry patches on your elbow.”  I’d never had them and I reached over and touch my elbow like “What is going on?” I could like sand wood with this skin around my arm.  All the skin around my elbow was like sandpaper and she said, “Yeah, that’s typical vitamin D deficiency.” Sure enough, increase my vitamin D went away. I was like,” What? How can that does so cool?” You’re right. If someone doesn’t have their gallbladder, their diet and digestion isn’t allowing them to take in the fat soluble vitamins, digest them and absorb them and utilize them then we can end up with skin problems because those are the raw building blocks the body needs to create skin. What’s amazing about skin is that it is the reflection of our internal health and it’s the early warning system– it’s the canary in the coal mine. Instead of being upset when we have a skin problem, we can take on this level of excitement, “Oh, great. My body is telling me something’s wrong. There’s something that I can correct now, way before it becomes disease in the body.” I only have so much vitamin C and the skin needs it but the body is so intelligent that it’ll take the nutrients we give it and it’ll give it to the organs that are most important first. That’s why when we get thin hair, our skin starts to suffer and our nails start to become brittle. These lesser important systems of the body will see the effects of Nutrient Deficiency first before the heart and the liver does so we can correct it. The good news is it’s on our body where we can clearly see there’s something wrong.   [41:31:00] Jennifer Fugo: It is. One piece of this which is worth mentioning because it’s a term that has become more popular is Leaky Gut. A lot of people haven’t yet or are just hearing about a term called Leaky Skin. It actually doesn’t sound that lovely and it sounds awful.   [42: 01:00] Ashley James: It sounds like a zombie show.   [42:04:00] Jennifer Fugo: Yeah, it’s just not good. Leaky Skin is essentially where there’s so much inflammation happening within the body and at the level of the skin. It’s both internal and the outside.  I think we have to look outside in and inside out– that’s really the two directions we need to look with skin. Let me just break this down a little bit for people. How do I end up with inflammation on the outside? Yes, it could certainly be due to a microbiome imbalance. You could have staph infection or overgrowth of any number of things but also just itching– itching in and of itself increases the inflammation in the skin which is another reason why I said don’t just throw out your steroid creams because you do to some degree have to try as you’re working on the “alternative and natural stuff”.  You have to maintain some level of not just sanity but to decrease the amount of gashing that you’re doing to your skin trying to stop or quell that itch. When we think about what the skin really is– it’s like a bunch of bricks or the shingles of a house. We start to see a breakdown of the glue that holds the shingles together in one nice pattern that will help A. retain moisture within the skin but also B. keep things very smooth and lovely looking. What’s really fascinating is that there is this gene called Filaggrin. We see that there is an increased rate of Filaggrin dysfunction. Filaggrin is a gene but it also codes for a very specific protein called Filaggrin that helps keep the skin barrier nice and tight. When we start to see when inflammation elevates, it disrupts the way that the gene is coded and you start getting funky filaggrin that can’t really operate correctly. A lot of the research and the interviews that I’ve done show that people who have hand eczema have a higher increased risk of having just an actual genetic snip in Filaggrin. You don’t necessarily need to have a snip in it to have an issue with the way your body produces Filaggrin. I talked to Dr. Peter Leo who’s a very well respected and brilliant dermatologist. He had said that just any level of inflammation, whether it’s from scratching or its internal will cause a disruption in the way the body produces Filaggrin. It’s critical to try to reduce the inflammation no matter what you need to do because that is really a big deal. I just want to also specify that this isn’t just affecting people with eczema, it also affects people with psoriasis and I would likely assume that it probably affects people with other chronic skin rash conditions as well. There are other genes out there that we should be aware of per se but if you’ve got an autoimmune condition like psoriasis or scleroderma there are typically genes associated with those conditions. There is some level of genetic susceptibility. Filaggrin is probably the number one to really pay attention to but there’s no way inexpensively to get tested for this. I don’t know if you can find out from 23andMe test. At the end of the day, I’m not really sure what value would do if you even found out you had a snip on it but genes certainly play a role. When you have this Leaky Skin condition which most people have when they have skin issues, it’s really important to be judicious about what you’re putting on your skin and what you are eating. I don’t want to make people crazy with their diet— that’s always my fear. I don’t want to instill food fear in people because you’re always going, “What’s the next thing we can take out? What’s the next thing we should avoid? What’s bad for us?” We are oftentimes kind of get lost amongst the trees. I always think, “Let’s try and eat the most nutrient-rich diet humanly possible.” Cut out the junk, just cut it out– that’s the first step. Cut it out because if you came to see me, that’s the first thing that I’m going to tell you to do. We’ve got to make sure that its nutrient rich because that way we’re not just supporting the skin but our thyroid and liver. We’re supporting many different areas that require nutrients in order to function properly.   Coconut oil is not something that anyone with skin rashes should put on their skin. I even am at a point where I’m starting to wonder if it’s not the greatest idea for people who have perfectly clear skin as well. You’ve got to be really judicious about what you put on your skin. There are a lot of products at grocery stores and pharmacies that are geared toward super dry skin and their eczema formulas — those things are formulated in such a way that you constantly require the use of them. They actually dry your skin out so you keep using them. We go to the natural stuff and the first thing people read about online is coconut oil and it’s really not a good idea for rashes. [48:27:00] Ashley James: Why is that?   [48:30:00] Jennifer Fugo: Remember how I was telling you that the colon is an actually an acidic environment, the skin is as well. Your skin ideally should have a pH between 4.5 and five, maybe 5.5. It’s a tight little slice of the pH scale and that’s healthy. For those who think like everything’s got to be alkaline. It is actually healthy for certain areas to be acidic. Coconut oil– first of all, it’s way too alkaline. It comes in and around a pH of eight. When I said that it is important that the colon is acidic because if it gets imbalanced and the pH goes high or low, it invites in organisms that shouldn’t live there and the same happens with the skin– that’s number one. You might be thinking, “What if you have like bad bugs living on your skin? Wouldn’t you want it because it’s really antimicrobial?” It makes complete sense– that’s what I used to think but unfortunately, coconut oil is so incredibly anti-microbial that it decimates the microbiome on the skin leaving it wide open for opportunistic bugs to take up residence, which is not what you want. If you got the skin rashes, we know right there you’ve got some state of Leaky Skin. You’ve also likely got Dysbiosis on the skin. Is it really smart? Think about it. If you know you’ve got Dysbiosis, would you just throw antibiotics? You’d be like, “No, that doesn’t make any sense.”  I’m not saying Coconut oil is an antibiotic but you have to understand that the level of anti-microbial capacity of coconut oil is way too high for your skin. Oftentimes, people just put oil on the skin. The bugs don’t just like magically repack back up. They don’t reappear because it takes time to reestablish a microbiome. The last big problem is that the molecules are so saturated and the molecules of coconut oil are so large. It’s very difficult for them to actually penetrate into the skin which is why it oftentimes feels that coconut oil will stay on the surface of the skin. It does not absorb in and sometimes it causes hot situation on the skin which is very uncomfortable for people. It makes it difficult for the skin to breathe. I’ve even had a few people describe it to me as kind of felt almost like I had saran wrap around my arm or whatever. I just didn’t put two and two together. I will say just from a clinical perspective, I have had more and more clients who have discovered that it was actually causing almost like an allergic reaction. I have one client that had severe swelling across her face and her eyes were all red and super itchy. She already had a rash there and read online on someone’s website that you should use coconut oil. She started using coconut oil and it was getting worse and worst. She couldn’t figure out what the problem was and finally came across this article that’s on my website about the issues with coconut oil. I advised her to stop within about a week; she noticed such a significant improvement. She’s like, “I have almost no rash on my face anymore. I had no idea that it was actually the coconut oil.” We have a ton of comments from people who have acknowledged that coconut oil either made their skin rashes worse. I have one woman– a massage therapist that commented that she would always use coconut oil on clients and massage table. Her hands as a result have gotten so bad from using coconut oil. I love coconut oil. It’s not to demonize it or to say that it is bad but I think maybe we’ve gone a little too foreign assuming that it’s good for everything. I have talked with experts who have done testing on the antimicrobial capacity of coconut oil and they advised me that it was not a good option. I have also talked to aestheticians who have a lot of experience in formulation and working with people with chronic skin conditions. They too also said it is really one of the worst choices. You need to look at your skincare products with skincare ingredient labels, the same applies as food. The first ingredients are the highest concentration and the lower ones are the least if it’s really in. I would say the top two thirds in the ingredients are probably not a good product for you to be using. There are some instances where it may be okay for me, I wouldn’t mind if it’s one of the probably top two thirds. I wouldn’t use it if it was the first at all. I don’t have skin rashes anymore and I don’t use a whole lot of oils anymore on my skin aside from Ahava. If you have got skin Dysbiosis you should not go anywhere near coconut oil.   [54:14:00] Ashley James: I know everyone’s different because someone might react and the other person thinks it’s wonderful. There’s no blanket statement, we all have to do trial and error. What are your favorite ingredients that are helpful for supporting skin health when they’re also working on healing themselves internally?   [54:38:00] Jennifer Fugo: I love Ahava oil because it is the closest to the human sebum. It’s just very nice and inexpensive as well. Sesame seed oil, not the stuff you cook with but the actual stuff made for body care can be great. I find that if you’re in a cold environment or winter time it’s great because it’s very warming. In the summertime, it’s probably too heavy and it also has a really intense smell so you might not want to put that on as your daily oil. Avocado oil and Olive oil are really good options as well. There’s also some really interesting good research on sunflower oil and eczema. As far as herbs are concerned, Calendula is amazing. Assuming, you don’t have an allergy to the daisy family since it is a part of the daisy family. Just make sure if you’ve got outdoor pollen allergy issues, you just want to make sure that that’s not one. I love stinging nettles but more so to support the liver. Stinging nettles and Quercetin together can be a really amazing support for histamine. It’s a great antioxidant as well. As far as the skin is concerned, I think one of the biggest things is to stop showering every day. I know that sounds very simplistic but we oftentimes over shower and over sudsing. You do not need to suds your entire body– it is absolutely unnecessary unless you’re really filthy. A lot of times the water is enough and you should only be sudsing the armpits, groin and rear end. Showering every day can be really tough. Again, I’m not a doctor but my suggestion is to see if you can get down to showering every other day or every three days that way we’re just reducing the depletion of the healthy flora. Don’t be afraid to get outside and be in the dirt. There’s some incredible research that’s coming out about the circadian rhythm and being out in the sun assuming you can tolerate it, getting your hands in the dirt assuming you didn’t have some sort of hand eczema issue but exposing yourself to healthy bacteria. It can be super important and a lot of times the disconnection with the outdoor environment and excessive amounts of stressors in your life certainly play a role.   [58:04:00] Ashley James: Absolutely. Stress is huge. I like that you said to get out in nature. You’re getting vitamin D from the sun and you’re decreasing stress from bathing in nature. For example, digging in the dirt gardening– is there a link between interacting with the healthy bacteria in nature such as gardening and our skin’s bacteria?   [58:33:00] Jennifer Fugo: Absolutely. The more fascinating pieces that I’m constantly reading upon is the Microbiome and the Skin. One big problem is that we’ve reached over sanitizing everything. Everything is like kills 99.999% of bacteria. Why do we need to assume that all bacteria are going to kill us? It doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad. There are not friendly bugs out there but we used to have an abundant population of what are known as Ammonia-Oxidizing Bacteria on the skin.  They were considered the Peacekeepers of the skin. We’re now seeing this rise within the skincare industry of companies that are essentially engineering probiotic-based skincare products to help reestablish that microbiome. I know that Mother Dirt is one company that specifically uses those ammonia-oxidizing bacteria. I’ve come across a number of other companies as well that are integrating probiotics into their product. I think Skin Probiotics is one company that’s specifically all the formulas are generated around probiotics. The big companies, I think it is L’Oreal– I don’t remember which big company but they’re coming out with now ways to test the acidity of your skin. I wouldn’t be surprised within the next probably two to five years we will eventually have a really easy at-home test for you to check the microbiome of your skin since the ones for the Gut have done so well. Being outside is a critical piece. It can be hard for people who have a lot of environmental allergies, I do understand that. This is general advice and it may not work for everyone. You’re going to have to pick and choose what you can do and what will work for you. Stress reduction is important not just for the body as a whole but stress can be a major trigger for so many things. There are a lot of people that have found the connection between stressors and their skin rash flares. Even with psoriasis, there’s some interesting research showing that there’s a real decrease in serum melatonin in people who have psoriasis. When we have low melatonin it can make it very difficult to sleep at night. When you’re not sleeping well or you’re just so uncomfortable and you’re itching like mad because your cortisol has gone high in the evening. As a result, there’s this really cool correlation between elevated cortisol and increased itching at night. We’re just not regenerating within our body the way we should and it’s incredibly stressful. It depletes our micronutrients. It depletes antioxidants. It really wears down your mitochondria and taxes your liver tremendously and it makes it a lot easier for your gut to become leaky. We can argue that Leaky Gut comes from enzymes or gut infections or too much yeast. Stress plays a huge role in what happens in your Gut. It affects everything. We have to take that seriously and consider the solutions. “The solutions for stress reduction” as seriously as say the supplements you might want to go by because oftentimes what I find and I don’t know if this has been your experience as well Ashley, but a lot of times people are like, “Can I just take a supplement?” I’ll say, “Could you sit for two minutes a day and breathe? I’m really busy. I’ll try.” We’ll talk a month later I’m like, “So, how did the breathing exercises go?” “I do not like once and then I kind of forgot.” I assure you, they’ve taken all their supplements just fine. I’m not laughing at anyone, it just makes me chuckle that the thing that’s free, oftentimes tends to be the hardest things for us to comply with because we don’t perceive the value of them to be as great as something that maybe cost you 3995.    [01:03:27] Ashley James: Anyone who’s listening, I will charge you 3995 and I’ll sit with you for two minutes a day. We’ll get on the phone, you’ll breathe and you can just pay me.  I’ll just sit on the phone and we’ll breathe then you will value reducing your stress. People can pay to go to meditation classes and Yoga classes. You can pay for apps. There’s Calm Beats or something– they can pay for the pro version. There are things that we could pay to perceived more value. You’re right. The best ways of reducing stress are free– walking, journaling, breathing, hugging, laughing–.   [01:04:10] Jennifer Fugo:  Put on your favorite music, sing and dance in the comforts of your own home. Dance like nobody’s watching you– there is something so freeing and uplifting to that. Prayer, mantras, whatever faith you are, there are prayers and there are ways to meditate in any religion. If you’re really also feeling very down and out, reach out to someone who’s a professional and talk to them because the other piece to this is that these skin conditions are incredibly debilitating. They can be at times very painful. They are very embarrassing. They cause a tremendous amount of shame and there is a really sad increase risk of suicide associated with many of them. I’m on these Facebook groups and people say, “I know this sounds so stupid but I don’t know where else to say this and I just need to say it. My mother in law keeps picking on me about my skin or this friend of mine made some nasty comment.” Those are not little things when you’re in the midst of suffering and the people around you go about it because they can’t relate to what someone’s going through. It really isn’t helpful. For anyone listening to this too, if you’re like, “Oh, my sister has eczema or my husband has psoriasis.” If you’re listening to this, just understand that sometimes we just want someone to be present for us. We don’t necessarily want a solution or you to tell us how we don’t know to wash our hands or we don’t know what type of soap to use. It’s not really helpful. Oftentimes, you just want somebody to hear you and listen to you. You don’t necessarily want advice but if you’re really feeling very sad, one of the biggest pieces if you’re really feeling hopeless, go talk to somebody because there are people out there who understand. I think living with skin rashes which I did for about three years is really living in hell so I understand so acutely all the pain that people go through every day. On top of it, I work with clients now so I am privy to a lot of the things that they’re going through that I maybe didn’t. Stress and Traumas are big pieces to this. There is actual scientific research to back that up. Understand that all the times we have to go out in public and you’ve got rashes everywhere is traumatizing. Every time people make comments or they just have that stare and they won’t stop staring at you. They are not really looking at you. They’re looking at your skin trying to figure out whether they want to be near you. It is traumatizing and stressful. We just want to feel accepted. I’m not comparing it at all to people who have those more like hidden diseases like Hashimoto where people think you are lazy because you are tired but you are not. It’s just a different type of hell that people go through. Know that no matter where you are on your journey there are people that understand you and you don’t necessarily have to go it alone. There are other things that you can do even if you feel like you’ve hit a wall and the doctor or dermatologists just shrug and don’t know what else to tell you. There are other options out there. The big reason why I started Skinterrupt is that I felt that the way we were addressing these issues is so failed. It lacks empathy and understanding of the daily struggles that people go through. At this point, I cannot understand why it is acceptable to allow people to walk out of someone’s medical office time and time again in so much suffering and pain. That’s why I started Skinterrupt, I want to pull the curtain back and not just to help people find the alternatives that may work for them but to also say, “Hey, dermatology, we need to get with a program. This is not acceptable anymore. We need better options. You also have an obligation to tell your patients about all these other things that you’re not telling them.”  What is cool about The Healthy Skin Show is that it is the opportunity that I have. We’re connecting with researchers, doctors, nutritionists, dietitians and even people who have gone through it. You can talk about their story in an empowering and uplifting way. I’m sharing all of that with people because I don’t know what exactly your three to five root causes may be. I want to make sure that there is no excuse anymore and the research that’s out there doesn’t ever see the light of day. All of us deserve to know that there is incredible research going on that could impact our health. There are ways to do things that can dramatically change your daily experience living with skin rashes and maybe even help rebuild skin that’s healthy but we’re just not getting it from our doctors. Don’t get me wrong, we need them and I wish I would love to bring them into the fold. I’m collaborating with doctors right now who are working in a more integrative way and want to see this get out there. We as patients, we also need to demand better. What I’m just hoping is to not see another person suffer– that’s my goal.  If I can just help one person I’d be happy today and I’ll be happy tomorrow.  That’s why I’m doing this is because we deserve better.   [01:10:25] Ashley James: Yes, doctors have their place. Allopathic medicine has its place.  We need to stop putting them on a pedestal and treat them like they are on our team of health professionals. They are not. We hire them not the other way around. We hire them as professionals and we need to make sure we find a doctor that doesn’t have hubris, doesn’t put their ego first, isn’t upset that we do our own research and doesn’t feel challenged when we advocate for ourselves. We need to find doctors and put them on our team and we need to make sure we have a team of professionals. We don’t just have one doctor, we have a team of professionals that we work with that advice, guide and help us. We’re the experts of our own body because we’re the ones living in it. We listen to our symptoms, we may not understand what the symptoms be that’s why we go to our experts for the tests and for the information just like people can go to you and work with you to do tests or you can go to your doctor and you and in naturopath. We can have multiple health professionals on our team. Let them know all what’s going on, get all of their input and do all of the tests we want to do. I want people to be empowered to know that we should never put a doctor on a pedestal. They are not the end-all. They get almost no training in nutrition and a lot of doctors have been brainwashed in a sense to believe that food and nutrition are not really important. Now, a lot of doctors are waking up. They are getting more education outside of the mainstream MD Education. They are going towards integrative or functional medicine which is fantastic. We can also see professionals like naturopaths who always want to be on the cutting edge of the research and studies around how we can heal the body at the root level which is exactly what you’re doing. I love the list you outlined today. I think we have 18 things now because we included parasites.  Your list keeps growing. It is important to see that it is not just cut out the gluten although that really helps. I recently had a naturopathic dermatologist in from Toronto on the show and she did say that she has never helped someone heal their skin if they stayed on gluten.   [01:13:05] Jennifer Fugo:  I agree.   [01:13:07] Ashley James: There are certain things you need to stop eating like fried food. You can’t heal the body if you’re eating fries every day because the oils are horribly damaging. Gluten is damaging. People say, “Well, I got tested and I’m not celiac. I’m not allergic to gluten.” Our body can’t digests the proteins. They’re mechanically torn through the Gut and rip apart the microbiome, increase the leaky gut and do damage to the microbial. I know you’re absolutely in agreement that there are certain foods that we need to be diligent about when healing our body, our gut, and our skin. In case someone’s listening to this and never considered cutting out junk food. I honor everyone listening wherever they are on their journey because I was there too, so was Jen. We’ve all been there and we’re all going to be on our healing journey together. What are the top junk foods that everyone benefits from removing? What are the top healing foods that everyone within reason benefits from because of the nutrient density of those foods?   [01:14:37] Jennifer Fugo:  As far as junk foods, definitely fried, fast foods, and lots of packaged and refined. The standard diet here is pretty much not going to work. If you can get more healthy whole foods into your diet that will certainly help. It is just to crowd things out instead of being like, “Oh, my gosh. If you take everything away from me, what am I going to eat?” Super high sugar, sodas and fried foods are not great. Cured products like hot dogs and things. I’m not anti-hotdog. I eat meat but we have to look for better quality. We are looking at price over quality and then we’re over eating as a result. We’re taking in and consuming a ton of really refined junky inflammatory foods as a result. I’m not trying to make any health claims about this. These are just foods that I find that a lot of people can be helped with as far as skin issues.  As far as something that is healthy to add in, Ground flax can be really helpful however with a caveat. If you have diarrhea, it will probably not going to work for you and might make things worse. Avoid ground flax if you have diarrhea but if you don’t, one to two tablespoons a day is great. You can add it into a protein shake or your oatmeal or whatever it is that you’re consuming.    [01:16:25] Ashley James: Drink lots of water and get ready to poop.   [01:16:28] Jennifer Fugo:  Yes. Oats are great for the skin.  A lot has to do with the Beta-glucans that are associated with oats but just get certified gluten-free oats. Oats are contaminated with gluten as a result of the way that they are harvested and processed on machinery. It increases gut permeability which we don’t certainly want when we’re dealing with gut issues. I love collagen. For people who do eat meat, or at least open to the idea of consuming collagen look specifically for types one and three. Those are the most beneficial for the skin as well as for your Gut. There’s some great research on that. I just want to specify that there is no such thing as a vegan or plant based version of collagen, even if you see that– that’s not collagen. They basically put together the raw ingredients like vitamin C and glycine and a bunch of other things and say hope that your body will remake collagen. I have yet to see research that those vegan collagens actually really make a big dent on the areas that we’re looking for. You can typically find beef, sometimes chicken but mostly beef and fish derived collagen products are what are on the market these days. The other one is Ghee– believe it or not, is a really great skin food. Not to apply topically but to eat because it is pretty high in butyrate. We had talked about the butyrate being really important for your Gut and Ghee is high in butyrate. If you have a dairy allergy, that’s a completely different story. I would probably avoid Ghee if you have an allergy to dairy but if you just have sensitivity to dairy, or you’re lactose intolerant, Ghee will probably be okay because the milk proteins and the sugars are removed. I love adding Ghee to my food anywhere from one to four teaspoons of Ghee a day can be really great. Beats are also amazing because they have a lot of vitamin C. Beats have high levels of salicylates and if you have problem processing salicylates rich foods that would be an issue. It’s not a food problem but a liver detoxification issue. If you’re finding that beats and other high salicylate foods, trigger flares then you may need to increase the amount of glycine and B6 in your diet and even some magnesium to help your liver process the salicylates which are phytochemicals naturally occurring in these foods. If you’re on methotrexate because you have psoriasis, beats may be something best to avoid because it actually can interact with the medication. Last but not least, salmon. I love salmon. It’s a really great option because of the omega 3.  I would encourage you to get wild caught salmon as opposed to the Alantic salmon simply because wild caught is typically better and has more omega 3s than farm raised salmon. Those would be my go-to as far as superfood for skin.   [01:20:0] Ashley James: My husband I have been allergic to dairy but we cannot tolerate dairy because it is hidden in food. I am in massive pain. We don’t eat it anymore but when we did, everything was fine. It was really cool because you can get Ghee that says does not have any lactose.   [01:20:34] Jennifer Fugo:  Yeah. What’s really funny is that I recently discovered that there’s such a thing as Goat and Yak ghee– it doesn’t have to just be from cows. You can order it online and it actually tastes very good. It’s not quite the same taste as cow’s milk but it does taste like ghee. It was just different. If you’re afraid of cow’s milk, you could certainly try those versions as well.   [01:21:00] Ashley James: What about the Gaps diet? It’s meant to heal the Gut that has really high in collagen and lots of bone broth. Are you in alignment to the Gaps diet if someone wants to heal their gut?   [01:21:14] Jennifer Fugo:  I’ll be honest with you. The only problem with diets to heal the gut is if you have infections they are not going to do much. I just see such a high incidence of infections and the same goes with AIP. It’s great but if you’re not seeing results after three months, you have something else going on. I’ve talked to Mickey and she’s like, “People keep pressing on and on, hoping that something’s going to change.” In reality, the whole time they have had gut infections and the diet is not going to fix that. We have to put some practical cut-offs here saying that maybe there’s so much I can do and try up front. If I’m really not seeing results or I’m getting worse, I actually need to reach out for health because it’s more complicated, to be honest with you and to be entirely transparent. If you would ask me to tell you all of this stuff three years ago, even five years ago before I started my master’s program, there’s no way I could have rattled all of this stuff off. I have learned so much about biochemistry and the way the body works. I’m not saying I am the smartest person out there. There are some people out there in the world that are brilliant people and I love listening to them. You can’t expect to be an expert in every single thing. I’m not messing around with my pipes If I think I got a leak or if I think there’s a problem with my electricity in my house, I’m calling electrician and so there’s no shame in reaching out and asking for help. Be careful if you start eliminating a lot of food from your diet and you don’t know what you’re deficient in. You’re not bringing those specific nutrients back, you just dig the hole deeper and it takes a lot longer to dig yourself back out. Sometimes if you’re just like “I don’t know what to do, I’m overwhelmed.” It’s good to ask for help and know too that there are psoriasis diet and eczema diet. I know many people who have been on them that I worked with and they’ve changed their diet. They’ve done all sorts of low salicylates, no histamine, low histamine, and gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, sugar-free, whatever. They’re on such little foods and they’re not getting any better. I’m not saying that food doesn’t have power but because sometimes the chronic skin issues are so complicated. You can’t just assume that food will fix them all. If it does for you that is awesome and kudos to you but it does not for everyone.   [01:23:51] Ashley James: Right and that’s why there’s 18 things that we need to look at. We have to look at all them and like you said, most people have four or five or six issues at once. Everyone is stressed. We just have to go through the list and go, “How can I support? How can we all support our liver?” I think we could all benefit from liver support. “How can we support detoxifying? How can we support the diet in a way that’s the most nutrient dense? How can we support getting the good bacteria back in alignment on our skin and in our gut and get the parasites out and heal the gaps so that we don’t have the leaky gut or the leaky skin?  It’s everything; it’s a holistic. I have a friend and I’ve mentioned this story before on my show so listeners have listened to a bunch of episodes might have heard it. I have a best friend in Toronto, she’s in her 60s and she was born with Ichthyosis. It’s a very rare skin condition where 70 or 80% of her skin was covered in very thick scales. Chunks of skin would fall off her and bleed. It was sort of piles of what looks like sandpaper around because they would fall off of her. She’s such a wonderful woman but she was born with this and her father had it. If you look at the old textbooks on Ichthyosis, all the pictures of the condition are her father because in Canada they studied him. They took pictures of him and put them all the textbooks. They said it’s genetic, there’s nothing you can do. She’s always been into health so she eats healthy as she could. She’s been taking supplements for over 30 years, probably over 40 years. She noticed that she could kind of calm down a bit and she had to do a morning and a night routine. She would make her own topical agents and rub herself from head to toe at morning and night. If she didn’t do this then she would not be able to walk. It would be so horrible to her hands or feet and she couldn’t move her hands. Back about eight years ago, I had met one of the naturopaths that trained me that I mentored under and he was actually in intro of the time giving a lecture. I called her up and said, “You have to go see him and suck his brain out and just absorb as much as you can. This guy’s amazing.” She raised her hand when it came to question time and said, “I have Ichthyosis.” He stopped her and said, “It’s not genetic. Don’t listen to them. Here’s what you need to do. You need to stop eating gluten.” He gave a list of about 12 foods just actually the same he tells everyone to avoid. They’re generally unhealthy which you pretty much went through the list. Then he says, “Here are the good things you can eat. You need to take very high doses of all the fat soluble vitamins.” She had her gallbladder taken out in her 20s . “We need to help your body digest fat.” He gave her the rundown. She’d already done years and years of research on her own and health stuff. It was under control and was managed but it was still there. About five years of doing his program because it’s something that takes time, she’s been totally 100% of remission for a few years. It took about four or five years but she saw that slowly the Ichthyosis crept away and new healthy skin grew where she had never seen healthy skin grow before. Now, the only thing she has is some dry skin in some places and that’s it. She still eats incredibly healthy, takes her supplements, takes her digestive enzymes and manages her stress– she definitely seen that that’s an issue, and exercises. At Morning and night she covers herself from head to toe in the things that she created in her home. You would look at her hands and they look like everyone else’s hands. When I first met her it was not the case. It was very similar to what you described where she’d move her hands and they crack and bleed and fall like pieces of her would fall off. To see that transformation it took about four to five years of doing the the right program. They say that every year you’ve had the problem, you need a month to work through the issues. She had the problem for 40 years, you got to give yourself 40 months. Anyway, it was like watching Ice Melt in the springtime. When you look at it every day, it doesn’t feel like it’s melting but eventually it melts away. The message I want to leave is that when we’re giving the body everything it needs, it does definitely feel miraculous at how it heals. It takes time. We need to be patient and stick to our program. If we’re getting no results at all or if it’s worsening, we need to work with a professional like you said work with you. To make sure we are on the right path, we need to stick to it because the body takes time. Other naturopath say that the body does triage work. If you’re Vitamin C deficient, it’s going to take the vitamin C and put it to your heart, liver, kidneys and everything else that’s more important than skin first. Sometimes, taking in nutrients, nutrient dense foods and supplements, you’re eating healthy, you’re doing everything right and you might not see results for three months because the body’s healing internally. We also have to look at how we feel and the other parts that make up our quality of life to make sure we’re going in the right direction. I’m very inspired by the work you’re doing and I really feel that you are on you’re calling, on your path. I’m really looking forward to hearing back from the listeners how much this has made a difference for them. I know that my listeners are going to jump over and listen to you on The Healthy Skin Show. There wouldn’t want to check out your website skinterrupt.com. Everything you do is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast learntruehealth.com Tell us about your services, about everything so that listeners who want to connect with you know how they can.   [01:31:08] Jennifer Fugo:  Absolutely. The best way to get in touch with me is to go to skinterrupt.com From there if you’re interested in learning more about me, you can either read my about page to get a sense of what I’m about and it’s more than just my skin condition. When you are interested in working with someone; you should try to get to know who they are and what their values are. If that does resonate with you either get Help page where it describes how I work wit clients. I do one on one consultation. I also have some group programs that we’re working on but we also have some really great incredible resources as well for people to check out that you can utilize them in your own home. If you’re looking for protein shakes that are really great for soothing skin conditions, we have a really great download for that or if you’re looking for the best tests to ask your doctor for, we’ve got resources for that. Looking at supporting you in any way shape humanly possible and if anybody has any questions, I’m happy Ashley, if you want to let me know or wherever the post is, I’m happy to come back and answer questions. I have blogs that are really extrapolate upon what we’ve talked about even further, just so that people have an opportunity to really dive deeper into these topics on the Healthy Skin Show. If anybody has specific questions, they can submit those questions to the podcast and actually get them answered on the show which is really cool. It’s just part of my commitment to make sure that people in this community feel heard and that they have ways not only to help themselves in their daily life but also to get that added support should they need it. I have a virtual practice. While I live in the US, I see clients worldwide and I work with clients over the phone or by Skype to be able to support them.   [01:33:05] Ashley James: Excellent. We’re going to make sure that once this is up, I’m going to make a post in the Facebook group The Learn True Health Facebook group and so we can all jump in there and chat with you. We just started transcribing all of our interviews at LearnTrueHealth.com so this interview is going to be fully transcribed so people can go back and see the full list of 18 things and counting of the different areas they need to focus on. Can see everything that you said today in the show notes because it’s all transcribed there and all the links to everything you do. Listeners can come to the Facebook group and chat with Jennifer. Check out the first episode where we had Jennifer on which is Episode 198. I know on your website skinterrupt.com you also have a fun quiz that people can take?   [01:34:04] Jennifer Fugo:  Yes. Actually, it’s not a quiz, there are a couple of things you can do. As I was saying, you can find out what are triggers for your skin rashes and that you can do through testing. I’m a really big proponent of doing a low stomach acid test at home because as I said, having enough stomach acid is the second point of the digestive process and it’s critical. I find that a lot of my skin clients actually have low stomach acid. We’ve got a great download to walk you through how to do that. It doesn’t cost anything except for some water and some baking soda. It can really give you a lot of fast information in about 10 or 15 minutes. We’ve got a lot of great resources over on the website that will help you dive deeper.   [01:34:55] Ashley James: Very cool. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything you would like to say to wrap up today’s interview?   [01:35:03] Jennifer Fugo:  I would just like to say that wherever you are right now and whatever you choose to do is entirely up to you. It’s okay if you choose to stay and do the conventional route of addressing your skin. It’s also okay if you choose to start integrating in some more natural or alternative options. Whatever you choose to do, don’t let anybody make you feel bad about it. It’s ultimately your choice. It’s based upon your health values. The goal is always to figure out a way to help your body rebuild healthier skin by rebalancing yourself from the inside and the outside. I hope that this is a really great jumping off point for some people and just know that it is possible to support your skin better. There are more resources out there and I hope that I can be a co-pilot with you on that journey and I just appreciate you for tuning in and also being a part of Ashley’s tribe because I know how passionate you all are about living your best lives. I’m appreciative for the invitation to be here.   [01:36:09] Ashley James: Wonderful. Thank you so much. Hello, true health seeker. Have you ever thought about becoming a health coach? Do you love learning about nutrition? How we can shift our lifestyle and our diet so that we can gain optimal health and happiness and longevity? Do you love helping your friends and family to solve their health problems and to figure out what they can do to eat healthier? Are you interested in becoming someone who can grow their own business, support people in their success? Do you love helping people? You might be the perfect candidate to become a health coach. I highly recommend checking out the Institute for integrative nutrition. I just spent the last year in their Health Coaching Certification Program. It really blew me away. It was so amazing. I learned over 100 dietary theories. I learned all about nutrition but from a standpoint of how we can help people to shift their life and shift their lifestyle to gain true holistic health. I definitely recommend you check them out. You can Google Institute for Integrative Nutrition or IIN and give them a call or you can go to LearnTrueHealth.com/coach and you can receive a free module of their training to check it out and see if it is something that you would be interested in. Be sure to mention my name Ashley James and the Learn True Health podcast because I made a deal with them that they will give you the best price possible. I highly recommend checking it out. It really changed my life to be in their program and I’m such a big advocate that I wanted to spread this information. We need more health coaches. In fact, Health Coaching is the largest growing career right now in the health field. So many health coaches are getting in and helping people because you can work in chiropractic offices, doctor’s offices, you can work in hospitals, and you can work online through Skype and help people around the world. You can become an author, you can go into the school system and help your local schools shift their programs to help children be healthier. You can go into senior centers and and help them to shift their diet and lifestyle to best support them in their success in their health goals. There are so many different available options for you when you become a Certified Health Coach. Check out IIN. Check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, mention my name, get the best deal, give them a call and they’ll give you lots of free information and help you to see if this is the right move for you. Classes are starting soon. The next round of classes is starting at the end of the month. So, you’re going to want to call them now and check it out. And if you know anyone in your life who would be an amazing coach, please tell them about it. Being a health coach is so rewarding and you get to help so many people. Get Connected with Jennifer Fugo: Official Website Podcast Facebook Twitter Pinterest Instagram Youtube Book by Jennifer Fugo: The Savvy Gluten-Free Shopper Book