Learn True Health with Ashley James

Dr. Michael Haley, an expert in gut health and medicinal aloe, shares profound insights on optimizing gut health. He emphasizes the importance of nourishing the gut microbiome with prebiotic and probiotic foods. Listeners learn practical tips like keeping a Food Mood Poop Journal to track dietary impacts on digestion. Haley discusses the healing properties of aloe in relation to various digestive issues and its potential role in cancer treatment. He also highlights the striking parallels between gut health and soil quality, urging mindful eating practices.

Psalm 23 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIrS3h7cH_A BOOK: The Survival Paradox https://amzn.to/3AkKkOL Modified Citrus Pectin https://amzn.to/33xG02N Medical Center, Amitabha Medical Clinic in Santa Rosa, CA: www.amitabhaclinic.com   The Survival Protein: Dr. Isaac Eliaz’s Integrative Approach To Healing Cancer & Other Conditions https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-survival-protein-dr-isaac-eliazs-integrative-approach-to-healing-cancer-other-conditions   Highlights: What is The Survival Paradox What is Therapeutic Apheresis Inflammaging   Dr. Isaac Eliaz is an integrative medical doctor that focuses treatment of cancer and chronic, degenerative conditions. He founded Amitabha Medical Clinic and Healing Center. In this episode, he talks about The Survival Paradox. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am particularly excited to bring this episode to you because the topic of healing cancer and other complex illnesses is near and dear to my heart. If you’ve been a longtime listener, you know my mom died of cancer—even though she was the healthiest person I knew—and my dad died of heart disease. I have conquered several major illnesses myself. I’m on my own personal journey, on my road to healing, and so are you. We’re all looking to become healthier, stronger, and the best version of ourselves. I share in this podcast that health is not just physical, that it’s mental, emotional, and spiritual. If we don’t nurture all these aspects of ourselves, then no matter how much we exercise or eat healthy, if we’re lacking in our spiritual health or spiritual growth, if we’re lacking in our emotional health, emotional growth, mental, or energetic, there are so many other aspects to just physical health. If we ignore those, then we can create a state of stress in the body that leads to poorer and poorer physical health, even though the root cause might not have begun in the physical. That’s one of the messages our guest shares today. Right before I started editing this show today to post it, I was talking to a dear friend of mine and he brought up a Psalm. We were discussing a Psalm in the Bible and it just hit me. I’m going to see if there’s a really good video on it and I happened to find a different video on a different song, but I was called to it. You know when you’re called to something, maybe you’re called to listen to this podcast, I had to hear it. I was like, okay, well, this is only a 4-minute and 40-second video. I can totally listen, and it really blew me away. It’s great. I’m going to put it in the show notes of today’s podcast so you can click on the description and you’ll see the link there. It talks about Psalm 23, which everyone’s heard of. It’s usually read at funerals, and it talks about how the Lord lays us down in green pastures as if we’re sheep and he’s our shepherd.  Of course, you’re probably imagining—as I did my whole life—that green pastures were these beautiful rolling green hills. If you’re a sheep, you’re just getting mouthfuls and mouthfuls, there’s no worry in the world, and the Lord is our shepherd. We’re just happy little sheep eating up all the alfalfa and we don’t have a care in the world. That’s what I imagined, right? Because I’m from North America, there’s lots of green grass. This one video, which you can totally go check out if you want to, it’s going to be in the show notes. It’s actually a man standing in Israel in the surrounding area. He explains what it was like back then and what it is now. You hardly see any grass. It’s very, very, very little. But the shepherds know where to take the sheep just to get one mouthful here and then one mouthful there, but if you look to the untrained eye, it doesn’t even look like there’s any green. He said, this is what it means by green pastures. Then he said a quote from a rabbi, “Worry is dealing with tomorrow’s problems on today’s pasture.” And then it clicked, right? So we often will worry about all the things that are coming up in our life, but we’re thinking about the resources we have today. For example, let’s say there are bills or there are some events that are coming up in the future and we’re worrying about them because they’re in the future and we’re not prepared for them with today’s resources. That’s the message that I wanted to share from a spiritual perspective because my guest shares how he helps people to heal disease by turning off the stress response.  I think a lot of times, our worry or anxiety, focusing on a future we don’t want to happen because we’re so worried because we don’t have these resources today. In the Bible, it talks about that in Psalm 23 that the Lord is our shepherd and he lays us down in green pastures, but these green pastures are not green. There are tiny little bits here and there, but the shepherd knows where to take the sheet so that it gets fed. So it’s not saying that life isn’t going to be a struggle, but it is saying that you have the resources today to get through today, you do. And focusing on that instead of focusing on all the things that could go wrong in the future, which is what we often do. We often focus on all the things that could go wrong, and that creates huge anxiety and stress in the body. That puts our body in a state of inflammation and disease. I teach a technique on eliminating anxiety, so if you haven’t heard me do it, please just internet search my name Ashley James and the word anxiety. I’ve been interviewed on so many, dozens of other people’s podcasts teaching this technique. I’ve also taught this technique on my show, Learn True Health, so you could also go to learntruehealth.com and type in anxiety and you’ll find where I teach this technique. It’s a very quick technique. It takes like 30 seconds, but I teach you how to turn off the stress response in the brain. Now, our guest today goes several steps further and teaches you that there’s a way to turn it off on a biochemical level as well. But if you keep doing the thinking, the anxiety thinking that constantly creates worry and puts the body in the state of stress, then you’re constantly creating that state of disease. So we have to address it with our thinking.  I hope you can just take a little bit of time to reflect on this message that worry is dealing with tomorrow’s problems on today’s pasture. God gives us enough. It’s not like everyone wins the lottery, right? That’s not what enough means. It’s that you’re given the resources for today. Be in today and focus on today. Focus on doing what you can to be healthy today. Focus on doing what you can to love yourself, love your neighbor, and love your family today. That ultimately, being in the now, being in a state of love is the highest form of healing, both spiritually, physically, and emotionally. If you’re thinking about the worries, concerns, the what-ifs and the what-ifs and the what-ifs for tomorrow, and you’re lamenting on that, then you’re creating a state of disease in the body. Meditate and pray on love for yourself, for your body, for your God, and for your friends and family today. Enjoy today’s episode. You’re going to love it. This doctor is awesome. He has so many degrees, my head was spinning. I just love that with all the medical training, he really does see that there’s a connection between our spirit, our body, and our mind, that it’s one, and we need to address it. He also takes all this wonderful information about the biochemical aspects of our meat sack that our soul is living in and how to take care of it on all these different levels. Enjoy today’s episode.  Please join us in the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. We’ve got so many wonderful listeners helping each other and answering questions. I answer questions there, and many guests also come in and answer questions, so it’s a really supportive community. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.   [00:08:38] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 473. Today we have on the show with us Dr. Isaac Eliaz. I’m very excited because what he teaches is the key. It is the key. You could be doing everything else right and still be sick if you don’t do the things that he teaches. I’m just so excited that he has taken what I think is the foundation, the fundamental foundation to true health and he’s put it in a book. It’s so, so, so monumental. I’m very honored to have you here today. Your website is survivalparadox.com, and of course, the links to everything that Isaac does are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Welcome to the show. I’m thrilled that my listeners get a chance to learn from you today because I think what you teach could be the key to so many people ending their suffering.   [00:09:43] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Ashley, thank you so much for inviting me. I’m pretty excited about this podcast. What you’re saying, there’s a lot of truth to it because The Survival Paradox really offers a new, fresh, and deeper paradigm shift in our understanding of what health is and how we can improve it.   [00:10:07] Ashley James: Can you tell us about what happened in your life? In terms of going to become a doctor, what happened that made you want to become a doctor, and then later, what happened that led you to discovering and writing the book, Survival Paradox?   [00:10:26] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Yes, of course. So this book is really a culmination of my life journey and my medical journey. I started my interest in the healing art really as a teenager when actually, my hobby was raising bees. I was like the youngest beekeeper in Israel. Just watching the bees, I made a deep connection with nature and understanding how bees cope with nature? And then at age 15, my father was a civil engineer and we traveled to South Korea. I got to learn and practice taekwondo with the Korean National Team because I had to learn English. So I was very fortunate to get trained, really, by, at that time, all the world champions. And I learned yoga and martial arts. When I went to medical school in Israel, which is a seven-year process, I already knew I’m going to do holistic medicine. It was really very early on like 1981 and I became a yoga teacher. I taught in yoga teachers’ courses. I learned shiatsu. I created a [inaudible 00:11:31] acupuncture school, so I can learn acupuncture, and I learned herbal medicine. Then I had a successful center for integrative medicine as a physician who does also Chinese medicine, but I felt it was too early for me to be successful. There’s much more learning I have to do, so we moved to the North Bay to Northern California where I obtained the Master of Science in Chinese medicine, became a licensed acupuncturist, and then, later on, got my medical degree here, my medical license. Throughout this journey, my focus medicine-wise was on integrative oncology, on how to improve on cancer treatments, and how to cure illnesses. I’ve learned, as part of my journey, classical homeopathy and a lot of naturopathic aspects. And so parallel to this, I developed a research career where I made a lot of the discoveries of the importance of blocking Galectin-3, our survival protein. So I had this interest in integrative medicine. I had the research part, but then I got also very deeply engaged in meditation practices and I spent decades learning and training in meditation. I spent 10 years doing a half-day meditation and 20 years going to the mountains for about 2 months a year. Some of my patients were really the most legendary meditation masters in the Himalayas. This all came together, my inquisitive mind, being an innovator, and spending time to really observe the fundamental principles of our health. I came to the realization after really learning a lot of esoteric practices of meditation and combining them with different medical methods and decades of clinical experience, I realized that the key to healing is having an open heart is love and compassion. And really, what prevents us from connecting with this infinite healing potential is our imbalanced survival response. This is really culminated with the book The Survival Paradox because it is a paradox that what makes us survive is the same mechanism that makes us sick, shortens our life, and causes a lot of suffering, pain, and illnesses, both acute and chronic. In the book, I take people through the journey of understanding what The Survival Paradox is, how it is driven biochemically, how it affects metabolism, circulation, and how to block Galectin-3 with Modified Citrus Pectin with PectaSol. Then the end of the first part or the chapter called The Heart of Survival where I really introduce the key concept that the survival of the heart is to allow us to heal and break free of The Survival Paradox. And then I go through different illnesses, organs, and systems starting with cancer, which is of course something I focus on through my career, and then talking about the heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, metabolic diseases, neuroinflammation, microbiome, and immune responses, It’s been an eye-opener on how to look at our health and our organ systems in a different way, and then I bring to the three last chapters really the solutions—detoxification, healing our scars of survival, and transforming the survivor paradox. And through the book, the book is full of stories of patients, really my heroes, inspiring stories of patients that really didn’t really change the expected outcome and how they did it, so the book is full of real-life examples.   [00:15:47] Ashley James: Through your sharing of your life, I think it’s so funny that a little footnote is, and then I became a medical doctor because some people that’s the highlight. The highlight of their life is they became a medical doctor, and that was sort of like one of the footnotes. You’re like, and then I got my medical degree. I wish every doctor was like you. I wish we could clone you. I wish every doctor had as much background and experience in all the different modalities that you’ve specialized in to really have a deep understanding of the human body and how it heals. That we’re not just meat sacks. That there’s so much more than just a physical body, and that our emotional, mental, spiritual, energetic—everything that happens in our life—affects the meat sack, and we have to see that this whole life affects the body. Now, I really want to know, what happened in your life that made you want to focus on cancer? Was there a specific decision or moment that made you want to go down that rabbit hole?   [00:17:00] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: No, it’s very interesting. I had an interest in it early on. My grandfather that I’m named on after—Isaac, his name was Isaac—he was a Holocaust survivor, and his story is in my book in the chapter about healing the scars of survival. I’ll talk a little bit more about the topic of healing scars of survival later, and he died from cancer at an early age, at the age 50. And then, towards the last year of medical school, my father got cancer. We jumped to integrative treatments, he was one of the first patients in the world to get immunotherapy and his cancer disappeared. Then he died from a side effect of a treatment in 20 minutes 3 years later. But he died really in good health. When you treat cancer, you really treat everything. People who have cancer are in a crisis and the crisis where your whole reality—everything you believed, everything you expected, you had planned and suddenly, you really see death in front of you, it’s very impermanent. And it really gives a profound opportunity for deep change. So it really fits my approach, and there are so many ways that you can help cancer patients from support, to after treatment, to maintain their good health for a long period of time, to supporting them in their dying process. It’s all part of the journey. It’s all part of healing. So I had a deep interest and I made some very important discoveries about the development of oncological nutritional support that are very important, the main one being PectaSol Modified Citrus Pectin, which I developed over 26 years ago and has over 70 published papers. So it’s a field that I’m really deeply involved in. A lot of the integrative treatments that I use today, I mean, some of them have been developed by me in my clinic, but as I got more experience, my interest shifted more and more into a deeper understanding. Because, the deeper our understanding of who we are of our health, the better we can help ourselves and others with less aggressive tools.  And it’s all about the right integration, for the right person, at the right time. And about being humble enough to recognize that we don’t know everything. What we believe in may be right and may be wrong. That’s a key thing that doctors have to remember, sometimes we forget. So that’s a little bit of an issue.   [00:20:02] Ashley James: So as you dove into oncology and helping patients heal when they have cancer, what surprised you? What began to surprise you in terms of helping patients heal cancer?   [00:20:18] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: You know, it’s a big question, of course, what helped. I think that if we look, again, we really can’t understand cancer patients unless we have cancer in one level because as one of my students told me, you are the best person who understands cancer who actually didn’t have cancer. But I still don’t know, it’s not my direct experience.  It’s to see how vulnerable a cancer patient is to the system, how sensitive they are, how every word makes a difference, how much power doctors have when they come into treating cancer. It’s just important for us, the health providers in us, to really understand the responsibility of supporting people who are really facing death and a big change in their life, change in their dreams and plans, and how we can support them in a genuine, honest, but optimistic way because there are always choices. There are always options no matter what is happening.  It’s about allowing the patient to make the right choices. When we are stuck in an automated survival response, which is a reactive response that is automated and immediate, we can’t really make the right choices. We can’t see our options. This is part of the value of recognizing the issue of imbalance survival response.   [00:22:08] Ashley James: I think that leads perfectly into what is The Survival Paradox?   [00:22:13] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: So, to really look into the survivor paradox, we have to first recognize the principle of the survival response. So, if I take a step back before I explain it and look at medicine and health, there is a greater recognition that inflammation drives every chronic disease and every acute disease. I mean, COVID is an example. It’s a strong inflammatory cytokine storm response. It is something I’ve been working on for decades, then people get organ failure and die. But if we look at inflammation, it’s often pointed out to be the cause of many illnesses. It’s really not the cause. It’s really a process. What drives inflammation, what drives inflammatory response is our survival response. So the survival response is innate and built-in to each of us from the beginning of time—our ancestors, animals, every living being. So if we look at the survival response, if it’s so innate in us, it has to be automated, we can’t really control it and it has to start on its own. So The Survival Paradox really demonstrates the same mechanisms that help us survive is the same mechanism that causes us to shorten our life. It causes chronic and acute diseases, and it will eventually also kill us earlier than expected. When we want to understand it and we understand how innate it’s in us, then we come to look at how it operates in our body. There is this automated system that it operates with, which is our autonomic nervous system. So our sympathetic response is automated.  We can’t control it, our pulse goes up, our breathing gets faster, our heart works harder, the [inaudible 00:24:20] constriction so more blood can get to where it needs to be so we can run away. The basic response is fight or flight. We run away or we fight, and the running away is physically running away and it’s also hiding, isolating ourselves. So this is an automated response and it’s built to really start within seconds and it’s also built to stop very, very quickly. So this is something that is within us. And then, on the second level, Ashley, there is a biochemical response. The biochemical response is really governed by a protein that we call alarmins.   [00:25:21] Ashley James: Can you spell that?   [00:25:24] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Alarmin is like alarm.   [00:25:26] Ashley James: Oh, alarmings.   [00:25:28] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Yeah. And the main protein that I’ve been researching for 26 years, Galectin-3. I call it the survival protein. So this protein really drives our survival. So in our embryogenesis when we are in the uterus, it helps to produce healthy organs. When we are in life, it protects us from injury, from stress, from danger. The mechanism it uses to protect us to reduce inflammation, fibrosis, dysregulations, immune dysfunction, cancer, autoimmune diseases, practically every disease, every organ. Why? Because it’s so fundamental in us. So when we understand this and we understand that there is this biochemical alarm clock that never turns off, we also understand that it can be turned on by different things—by traumas, by infections, by heavy metals, by toxins, by genetic predisposition, by epigenetics. We get a deeper understanding of what drives it and then we get a better understanding of how we can actually change the outcome.   [00:26:49] Ashley James: I have written down a quote from you. “Your body has an innate ability to heal from a disease as long as your fight or flight survival response doesn’t stand in the way.” So, I’m a little bit confused about this survival protein because it sounded like we need it for some things, but then when we have too much of it, it causes disease and early death?   [00:27:13] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Exactly. So one thing is having too much of it and the other thing, it gets activated for too long. So for example, we’ve done fascinating research. I just published two really important papers on acute kidney injury, on injury to the kidneys from an acute illness, either from infection from sepsis or COVID. Forty percent of hospitalized COVID patients have AKI and 50% of them will die. So we have kidney damage, it kind of makes us deteriorate fast due to either sepsis or problems in the circulation. We showed that Galectin-3 spikes much earlier than any of the other cytokines like Interleukin 6, which is talked about a lot. And when we block Galectin-3 in these very well-established animal models, then we can change the outcome, we can improve the outcome. So our ability to survive is innate in us, it will always be there. So Galectin-3 will always turn on when it’s needed. The problem is either we have too much of it, or it turns on too much and it doesn’t turn off, and this is when we get in trouble. So that’s the paradox. The reason why you say I can’t understand it is because it’s a paradox. But through the book, one comes to the understanding of what drives the survival response, what drives the survival paradox, and how to change it.  Our survival response is truly automated on an autonomic nervous system, and then it moves to the biochemical system, which is much more serious because we know if we have a sympathetic response and our breathing goes up and our heart rate goes up, when we just go outside, we just gaze at nature, we take 10 deep breaths, or sit for a few minutes and relax, we’ll feel relaxed because we’re able to turn off the autonomic nervous system very quickly.  But when it’s a biochemical response it’s a little bit more difficult, it goes a little bit deeper. It started many, many pathways, what we call downstream proteins, downstream cytokines, downstream molecules, downstream pathways that already start a cascade of events. In many ways, Galectin-3 is what starts the waterfall. So if you can shut down the waterfall from the top, there will be no waterfall. Once the waterfall falls and hits the bottom, you want to stop it, it’s not so easy, right? So we often chase the symptoms instead of understanding what is the origin. So The Survival Paradox offers us a window into the origin of illness and the origin of how to transform our health. That’s really the deep message of the book. That’s the feedback I get from people. It really shifted my understanding of my health and about my life.   [00:30:26] Ashley James: That’s fascinating. It’s been something that I’ve been focusing on with my clients for years is getting them out of that extended or period where they’re in sympathetic, they’re in the fight or flight too long and helping them with tools to change the way they think because the body listens to our thoughts. You can actually think yourself into anxiety.  Just like we can sit and watch a zombie movie and if we hooked ourselves up to machines, the machine would notice that our heart rate has increased, our respiratory has gotten shallow and faster, that we have a cortisol spike. We’re safe. We’re sitting in a living room watching a TV, our body isn’t under physical stress, but watching a scary zombie movie, our body’s listening to that, listening to our thoughts, watching it as if it’s real, as if it’s happening to us. So our body is reacting to what it thinks is a stressor, and this is the real kicker is that we’re not just a physical meat sack. What is going on inside of our body, our body responds to. And then like you said, there’s the nervous system response, but then there’s the cascading waterfall of physiological biochemical cascades that occur. One time I was working with a client and I noticed that so many of her habits were triggering her into a state of stress. I’d given her homework to do throughout the day to help alleviate that and she wasn’t doing the homework. I asked her, I confronted her, and I said, you’re doing everything else. You’re eating healthy, you’re doing everything, but you’re not doing this. Why is that? She goes, well, I don’t feel stressed. And I said, that’s right, it’s not an emotion. People often who are in a long term state of stress don’t even know it or if they grew up in a very rough environment, their norm is—   [00:32:42] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: It’s a great example, and I just talked about it in another podcast earlier today. It’s a great example, Ashley, because if we are caught in a continuous chain of stressors and stress responses, we don’t have the space between the thoughts, the space between our automated actions to connect with how we feel. So one of the first things that happen, for example, in meditation, when people start meditating for the first time, they feel, wow, really. Either they fall asleep or they feel very, very restless. Why are they feeling restless? It’s not because of meditation. They always felt restless. They just were not connected with it. Now that they slow down and they took a step back, they start noticing the stress. Actually, I get to this level of mind training in the last chapter of the book once the whole journey is complete. I have a diagram of pebbles. You make a distance between the pebbles, things start surfacing—feeling, emotions, insights, traumas—and we connect with our stress, we connect. And then of course, what we are interested in from my perspective is not what we experience, it is our response to the experience. Do we have a survival response, or can we have a transformative response? Our body, our physiology is built to do both. We are built to have a survival response, obviously. But we are also built to have a transformative response. We can talk about it when we talk about the role of the heart in healing. That’s a key role of the heart.   [00:34:32] Ashley James: How do we help people then if we go outside? We tell them, go outside, breathe in, be part of nature, ground yourself, do meditation. That’s helping them stop the waterfall at the top, but now we’ve got, like you said, your body’s still in that state of stress from a biochemical standpoint. What can we do from a biochemical standpoint to help regulate the survival protein so that we don’t exacerbate it, we don’t have too much of it, and end up creating disease and early death in our body?   [00:35:16] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: As you said, we are not just physical beings. We are an integration of the physical aspect, an emotional aspect, the psychological aspect, the mental aspect, and the psycho-spiritual aspect. It’s all within us. This means that all of these levels are also becoming doors to heal ourselves. Changing our lifestyle, changing our diet, changing our way of thinking, working with ourselves psychologically—all of these will have an effect. So on the physical level, the one thing that we do have to do is we have to block Galectin-3. That’s why it’s such a great value of PectaSol, of Modified Citrus Pectin because it blocks Galectin-3. So if we look at over 70 published papers on PectaSol, they cover so many different health conditions. How is it possible that it can be such nutritional support for so many conditions? Because it addresses this upstream molecule. So the first step is understanding the survival paradox, and then understanding it really affects our inflammation and it affects fibrosis. It creates fibrosis, it creates organ dysfunction, tissue dysfunction. And we understand this and we understand how the heart is the door to changing it, then we can start taking action. The actions are many different methods and I go a lot through it in the book, of course, but right now, within this discussion, if we allow ourselves to destress long enough, it will affect our physiology. When you do a one-hour yoga lesson, Qi Gong, or meditation, there are at least 100 different genes that open and close, and that’s the power of epigenetics. So we are made from endless people who have made us over multiple generations, and I talk about it in the chapter about healing this scar of survival. Our scars of survival are from this life, but also, we carry the scar of our ancestors—both their genetic scars, scars that affected their genetic makeup and were passed on, and even more important, the epigenetic scars. Epigenetics like above genetics because it’s very hard to change genetics, but we have a choice if a gene will express itself or will not express itself. One beautiful Talmudic Hebrew saying says, [Inaudible 00:38:07], which means, everything is predetermined yet we have a choice. The predetermination is our genetics. The choices are our epigenetics. So we have to recognize that how we feel, what we do, and how we respond is not always because of what we did. It’s often because of habits and traumas that we carry on through our ancestors. In my book, in the chapter about healing the scars of survival, I tell the story as the grandson of Holocaust survivor of my grandfather Isaac who I’m named after, my grandmother, a little bit my mother, and then me. I always, from a very early age like the age 11, 12, had this upper back pain, but the pain is the center of my chest in my sternum. Whenever I would touch it, I would jump. It would be very painful, and I carried it all my life. I knew it had a deeper meaning. When I finally connected with it through meditation, through deeper work, I realized I’m carrying the Holocaust trauma of my grandfather. When I healed it, I just opened up. A few years ago, like 50 years later, my chest is open, my posture is open. But interestingly enough, my grandfather is not alive, but it affected my mother without her knowing that I did this work, and that’s a multi-generational healing power of changing these very, very deep patterns. Galectin-3 is our biochemical driver, but our heart is really what allows us to change and to shift from a survival-based unhealthy response to nourishment, love, and compassion because of this physiology of the heart.   [00:40:11] Ashley James: That is so fascinating. I’ve heard that they can actually take like yourself, children, and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, that they can see in bloodwork higher cortisol, and they can see a higher state of stress just genetically passed down. There are other studies I’ve seen where they did trauma to mice or rats, and that for up to five generations, they could see the epigenetic expressions of chronic stress   [00:40:51] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Completely. So it’s interesting. For me, my grandfather died at a very early age. He came to Israel with my grandmother and my mother. They escaped through Romania, and miraculously, they made it to Israel and he died in 1950, maybe 1952 at age 50—very, very young. He died from stomach cancer. And then my grandmother who saved the family in the Holocaust lived to 98, overcame two cancers, and died, as I said, at the age of 98, like in 2000, whatever. Around 2008, I think. So, just on her graveside, my mother told us as a small comment, your grandfather, five out of his eight siblings, and his parents were killed by the Nazis. I never told this, so it was never spoken and he held his trauma in his stomach. That’s where he got his cancer. I could feel that I’m holding some of his trauma. I did before healing when I could feel my connection with him. But when I really released, when I released my trauma and my negative emotions around the Holocaust in a transformative way, and I gained this ability of freedom, my mother could never watch a program about the Holocaust ever. And then suddenly, two months later, like the day of the Holocaust remembrance, suddenly she turned on TV. Now she goes to ceremonies about [inaudible 00:42:40], about the Holocaust without her knowing what I did because by me healing the epigenetics that came from my grandfather, it affected his daughter, which is my mother. That’s the power of multi-generational healing because time doesn’t go just forward. Time goes backward and forward. We just can’t see it because we are stuck at freezing time. That’s really the root of the Survival Paradox is holding two things—not understanding that everything changes all the time. Once we start shifting in this direction, then instead of having a life that is just goal-oriented, we start living the journey, we start living the moment, and we start not holding even to the moment because everything changes all the time. This leads to one of my most favorite sayings, not everyone will be a miracle, but anyone can be a miracle. And why? Because everything is changing. Everything is changeable. Nothing is permanent. That’s the absolute truth that nobody can argue regardless of your belief system. It’s a fact. Now we understand this, we can look at the physiology of our body because if survival is so innate in us, it will be reflected in us. When you look at our body, we have, I’m rounding up, about 50 trillion cells. Trillion means a thousand times a thousand is a million, then a million times a thousand is a trillion times 50. Each of these cells can have up to 1 million reactions a second. Ashley, it’s incomprehensible, okay.   [00:44:31] Ashley James: It is.   [00:44:32] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Fifty trillion cells having a million reactions a second, and we all work in harmony. Why? Because we are all working together for the greater good, for the good of our whole body, right? We are holding, we are identifying with our body, with our being, with our ego as an independent entity and we want to support it. Every cell knows it’s going to be created, it’s going to do its work, and then it’s going to go away through apoptosis. But when a cell goes into an inappropriate survival response and doesn’t want to die, how can he do it if the body’s telling you it’s time to die? It has to change its biochemistry just to change its environment. That’s the same like the flight, running away. It creates a microenvironment by surrounding itself with a lattice formation made out of Galectin-3 that binds to different inflammatory compounds, and this environment now has a different metabolism. It’s no longer as responsive to oxygen. It doesn’t communicate anymore. And when it stops communicating, it becomes its own independent entity, and then it starts to proliferate, to grow, and it wants to take over. How do we call it? We call it cancer. Or it wants to attack other organs, how do we call it? Autoimmunity. So these diseases are a reflection of an abnormal survival response. When we understand it and we apply this principle to health, maintenance, and to treatment, if somebody has cancer, we naturally will get better results. So if we look at our body, if we look at our cell, our cell is a membrane, which is like the skin of the cell, and the membrane decides what comes in and what goes out. So the cell will take in what it needs and will release what it doesn’t want. It detoxifies and it nourishes. And in the membrane, you have to exchange the transformation. So the cell does it this way, the tissue does it in this way, the organs do it in this way. I don’t want to take too much to describe too many organs, but it’s a vital principle that organs take nourishment and let go of venous dirty blood. This is how the system is maintained because it’s being balanced by the heart. The heart works completely differently, and that’s why open heart medicine is so powerful. That’s why the healing power of the heart is so powerful. What the heart does as part of its survival, the heart has to get dirty blood. The heart does not get clean blood. It gets venous blood. It gets all the stuff that the body doesn’t want, all the stuff that comes from the perspective of the heart from the past because it was released from the organs and tissues earlier on and it arrives into the heart. What does the heart do? It doesn’t say, no, no, I don’t want to take it. The heart accepts everything. It connects with the universe through our lungs, through our breathing, exchanges, releases carbon dioxide, volatile toxins, absorbs oxygen, and then the heart gives blood without discrimination.  The aorta, the main artery that comes from the heart, is a rigid artery. It doesn’t contract. It gives blood everywhere. And who does the heart nourish first? The first organ that the heart nourishes is itself through the coronary arteries. So that’s the beauty. Our heart nourishes itself in order to nourish others and as part of nourishing others. That’s why from this approach, self-love and self-compassion come as part of love and compassion for others, very different from narcissistic focus. And if we look at the heart, one of the things which are kind of mind-blowing and again, for some reason, nobody has made this correlation until I came up with this image, but it’s obvious to me. The heart nourishes itself only after it finishes its work, only when it finishes accepting dirty blood—releasing the carbon dioxide and oxygenating the blood. Now it’s giving it to all the body only then, as really as a selfless organ, it also takes care of itself. Physiologically, anatomically, the coronary arteries could have been in the right, in the left atrium, in the left ventricle. There’s already clean blood there. But no, the heart takes care of itself only when it’s done with serving others. It’s done with sending the blood out. That’s a selfless survival power of the heart that allows us to transform our health, and that’s the transformation of the survival response. So how will it be, for example? So it’s done anyway even if we are anxious and we respond to everything with a survival negative emotion, the heart physiologically does this otherwise we won’t be alive. But because it’s done physiologically, it’s easier to take a ride on it and make emotional, psychological, mental, psychospiritual changes in a genuine way. So when you start applying it in different levels, when a situation in life comes, instead of responding with it with anger or fear, we respond to it with an open heart, with love, compassion, and empathy and it changes our physiology because the electromagnetic field of the heart is the largest electromagnetic field in the body. It’s 100 times bigger than the brain’s electromagnetic field. So the electromagnetic field of the heart at any given moment reaches every cell of our body and reaches the people around us. We are connected heart to heart. So just like cells are connected to each other and the heart is the glue that keeps everything together through the circulation, so we as people are connected to each other right now, and of course from a genetic point of view realizing how many generations made us, there is no way that each person have had a mutual parent, sibling, child, or relative at one time in the past because we have been made out of an infinite number of people. So this gives us a little bit of a different perspective about health and life, right?   [00:51:10] Ashley James: The analogy of the heart is so beautiful and so perfect. It doesn’t discriminate. It brings in the old and the past and it connects to the universe, detoxifying, bringing in the nourishment, and then nourishing itself first before other organs so that it continues to nourish other organs. It loves itself so it can love others. I think that it is beautiful, perfect, and so needed. We have to remind ourselves that self-love and compassion are how we’re going to have the most love and compassion for those around us. I love it. You talked about apoptosis program cell death, and another thing I’m interested in is autophagy, which is the body’s mechanism for digesting pathological tissue. I think combined with triggering apoptosis and triggering autophagy, that’s the cleaning mechanism to ensure we don’t develop cancer out of control. Does Galectin-3 turn off apoptosis and autophagy? Does it affect it in that way? Does it affect the mechanisms the body uses to prevent cancer?   [00:52:34] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: You know, Galectin-3 will speed apoptosis of normal cells, which we don’t want, but it will prevent apoptosis of cancer cells, for example, because they will move into glycolysis. Autophagy is really a repair mechanism of the cell and of the body. As you said, it’s a cleanup mechanism, and it’s often disrupted when we have an abnormal glucose metabolism. When we have normal glucose metabolism something called AMPK, adenosine monophosphate kinase, in the cell that produces energy from glucose by working properly with the mitochondria. When there’s not enough oxygen or when another pathway called MTO1 turns on, then you get abnormal metabolism, the mitochondria shuts down, the cell goes into a survival response. It moves into glycolysis. Why? It can produce energy 100 times faster but at a heavy cost. Only two molecules of ATP from one molecule of glucose instead of 36, and a lot of nasty byproducts—lactic acid, et cetera. So autophagy is key to clearing the system because it will reduce the activity of this MTO1 and will restore the activity of AMPK. And yes, Galectin-3 will have a harmful effect and when we block it with modified citrus pectin and we block Galectin-3, indeed it will support healthy autophagy. And of course, I talked about in the book in detail, what really supports autophagy is intermittent fasting.   [00:54:27] Ashley James: Yes. That was next question was about fasting. This is great. ​​ [00:54:31] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: I talk about it a lot in the book. So intermittent fasting and how long you have to fast depends on what food you eat. If you eat a lot of sugars, you have to fast longer because you have more glycogen. If you have less carbohydrates, then even at 13, 14, 15 hours, autophagy starts, and that’s why intermittent fasting is a very valid way of eating used by multiple cultures because you think in old times, it was too late. You would eat when it was early on, easy to cook, easy to prepare food. There wasn’t light, and then you went to sleep. You ate at 5:00 PM, 4:00 PM then ended the day. Then the next morning you wake up, you will do your stuff, and then you will eat once you do some activity like at 8:00 AM, 9:00 AM, 10:00 AM. So you had 16 hours of fasting and 8 hours of eating. So, really, intermittent fasting is a good strategy on a long term basis. It’s different from the ketogenic diet. It’s worthwhile mentioning it because when the ketogenic diet became very popular in cancer, I remember I was teaching at A4M in the integrative oncology module like certification, I was one of the teachers. When people got excited, I warned them. I told them, look, don’t overuse it because the ketogenic diet is a survival diet. A ketogenic diet allows us to survive on a long term basis. But if the ketogenic diet was our ideal diet, it wouldn’t be our alternate diet. It would be our day-to-day diet because the body is smart. The ketogenic diet is very useful on an intermittent basis. So for example, for my patient who will go through chemotherapy or radiation, I will use a ketogenic diet intermittently during the cycle, not all the time. But intermittent fasting is something that we can really adapt into our diet on a daily basis. You can do a longer fast, one day a week, every two weeks, or two days a month, but it really gives a break to the glucose pathways and it allows us to clean them up, to fix them. Meanwhile, if we need, then yeah, the fat ketogenic metabolism will kick in and things will be okay, and then we go back when it’s cleaner and it gets erased. It’s like giving a break. It’s like changing the oil on many levels. That’s really what it is. So it’s important to really recognize this very important role of intermittent fasting. It’s also important to recognize because I have a fascinating chapter on detoxification in the book, and really, honestly, it’s like a topic of its own because everybody talks about detoxification and detoxification, but detoxification is really something we do all the time. Our body is a balance between detoxification and nourishment. Where if we look at our lungs, the big detoxifier, the lung naturally contracts, when it contracts, it lets go of air, it releases. The exhalation is twice as long as inhalation, which means we detoxify longer than we nourish. When we come to this world, the first thing we do is we cry, we let go, we detoxify. The lungs let go. The last thing we do before we leave this world is we take an exhalation. So detoxification and letting go at our basis are innate to us, but we have to recognize that when we are detoxing, it’s a process and we’re going to get rid of things that we may have been hiding in certain places in our body, in certain boxes like I call it in the book. So when we open the boxes, when we throw everything from the closet on the ground, it’s going to be a mess. So we have to be equipped to clean the mess, and that’s part of what we do on a daily basis. For example, intermittent fasting is an example, right? The cleanup just like you mentioned that’s why I’m elaborating. Then when we do more concerted, longer, targeted seasonal detoxification all-around treatments and diseases, then it requires more support. But when done properly, it is effective and almost universally side-effect free, if done properly.   [00:59:11] Ashley James: How about longer fasts? Three- to five-day fasts or 21-day fasts. Is there any harm in doing a longer fast or do you find them to be helpful as well?   [00:59:26] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: No, there are a lot of spiritual traditions that use longer fasts and water fasts, and when we peel off, it’s a catabolic process. We break a lot of tissue and when we break a lot of tissue, we also break and release a lot of the toxins, a lot of the trauma that has been in the tissue. And if we clean them in nature with good food and clean water, it definitely can have a profound effect, but we are not built to shut down our system. If you look traditionally like in different religions, most of the fasts are one day or you’ll fast during the day like in Islam, which is for a month, which is pretty much intermittent fasting, right? So from a health perspective, it’s better to drink a lot of water when you fast so you can help the clean-up. But fasting has a profound effect because it really turns off our maintenance activities so our body and our being can tune into deeper things. I’m personally not a supporter of long term fasting. I don’t think it’s physiological. It’s much better to do it in a moderate way through intermittent fasting with a one-day fast with water. We just peel off gradually. The more we do things gradually, the more we create a gradual change, the more sustainable it will be.   [01:01:04] Ashley James: I’m all about making sustainable, gradual, healthy changes instead of trying something really big, blowing up on our face, beating us up, and then going back to our old habits that were hurting us, right? It’s good to do small steps that then get solidified into our daily habits.   [01:01:23] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Yeah. In The Survival Paradox in the chapter of detoxification, I really map the process of detoxification from preparation to exposure of what you want to detoxify, to binding the toxins, to processing them, to supporting the system, and I explain the phases and how to do it. So afterward, either it’s a health provider helping others or it’s somebody doing it, there is a better understanding of what’s happening. And then in the appendix, I provide a very detailed detoxification protocol. It’s about 80 pages in the appendix of multiple protocols, supplements, how to do, and when to do it. But the book itself is more about changing the journey. It’s about a really deeper understanding than the appendix that I give the different details.   [01:02:22] Ashley James: I hope that everyone that reads your book will take this as a life guide to helping them in the long term and integrating what you teach in the long term. This isn’t like one of those magazines that say 30 days to lose 30 pounds. It’s not a get quick, do something for only 30 days, get a result, and then go back to your old habits. This is something that is life-changing and you have to integrate so it takes time to integrate these changes. Can you give us homework? Give us some things we can start today, some habits we can change today to make a difference.   [01:03:07] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: So the first thing is to start by doing small changes. For example, try to make sure that your room is really dark when you go to sleep so your melatonin level goes up. Unplug electronics from your surroundings, especially your cell phone, put it away. When you wake up in the morning, start your day by drinking two glasses of water so you will hydrate. This is a simple thing also before bedtime. And then find the time for yourself to unwind in whatever way works for you. Whatever your belief system is, in whatever method you want.  If you have a very busy life, then start it for a few minutes in bed before you get out of bed. Sit in bed and meditate for a few minutes, and then before you go to bed, sit for a few minutes and meditate. Just allow your mind to expand, allow your breathing to slow down, and then open your heart to yourself into every other living being that wants to be happy. Everybody wants to be happy and then go to sleep with this energy.  The other part is actually, believe it or not, read my book. It really takes you through a process. And then when it comes to the clinical part from chapters 7 to 13, I mean, if somebody was really interested in medicine, in health, and specifics, it’s okay to skip it also. It has a lot of inspiring stories. The book is full of dozens of inspiring stories of patients, my heroes. But really, it will give you an understanding of how life is inseparable from our health and how intertwined, interdependent things are, and it gives us the power back to own our health, to own our well-being, which is so needed. I mean, self-empowerment is really not overly available these days. In a manipulative, divisive survival response, and negative environments. One thing why certain things are so important now is because when it’s very dark, one small candle can be seen really well. When there’s a lot of light, when the sun is shining, you can turn on a candle, nobody will see it. But when it’s dark, every small light will shine far away. That’s really the value of understanding what drives us and that we have the power to change it, we really do.   [01:05:49] Ashley James: We talked a bit about healing the scars of survival. Do you have specific tools? What tools did you use to heal that emotional pain that was showing up as physical pain near your heart and your body? Do you have any recommendations?   [01:06:09] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Yeah, of course, of course. So part of what I do, I teach meditation and healing retreats. I teach it very extensively in Israel where I have a few thousand students. But now with the book being out here, I’m going to have a one-week masterclass about transforming the survival paradox sometime in the second quarter of 2022. Then I’m going to actually have a summit about it with different guests in November of 2022. But when I do these few days of retreats, it’s what people go through profound healing, profound. But in general, we really have to address our being on these multiple levels and really find places where it’s relatively easy for us to change. Don’t be hard on yourself. I mean, life is not always simple, unfortunately.   [01:07:14] Ashley James: I studied a lot of these different modalities and my favorite one for getting to the root cause and healing unresolved negative emotions that are stuck inside us is Time Line Therapy, and I highly recommend checking out timeline therapy. It was created by Tad James, of no relation. I love him but we’re not related. We have the same last name. And then also, Emotion Code I’ve had really good experiences with as well. I’ve studied Time Line Therapy and done it for many years with clients, and I’ve seen huge results. Those are the two methods that I have seen help people resolve the root cause of negative emotions, but also release them from the body like when it’s trapped in the body physically.   [01:08:03] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Right, right. So let me expand on this a little bit. In the clinic setting, we addressed the scars with healing, with acupuncture, with different supplements, but I also specialized in a procedure called Therapeutic Apheresis, which is similar to dialysis. I’m really a disruptor in the field even on a global level where I use an Apheresis device. It is FDA approved. And Apheresis is similar to dialysis. It’s a fancy procedure where you take the blood, you separate the cells from the plasma, and you filter the inflammatory compounds, the [inaudible 01:08:42] lipids from the plasma. And what happens, you allow the body’s opportunity to recalibrate. That’s on a physical. That’s on one end. Most develop in our special column that will remove just Galectin-3. It’s a medical device project I have with some NIH grants. But on a healing level, it’s exactly what you talked about. It’s understanding the multi-generational and timeline events. The way we respond now is a result of things that happened in our past, happened in the past of our ancestors, and to make things really complicated, it’s a result of what happened in the future because the future goes backward just like time goes forward. I have a diagram when I present it and teach it usually in the context of retreats, and then I use a lot of scar injections where I will inject a scar with Procaine, it’s called neural therapy, with different homeopathics. Universally, scars will get smaller.  Universally, scars from laser, from surgery that have been there for 20, 30, 40 years and you put Procaine, the scar gets numb for 45 minutes and then it gets smaller and smaller by 10%, sometimes smaller and thinner by 60, 70%. Now what’s mind-blowing, it will never come back. How is this possible? Because the scar has a relationship with the nervous system where there is a message coming to the brain that there is a scar, that something is not functional there. When we numb it, we cut this ongoing automated response, which is part of a survival response on a neurological level. And then we allow the body to relearn, to create a new memory, what we call memory reconsolidation. It’s really a psychological system. It’s not my system, but I use it on a physiological level. So this healing of the scar, I do it on a physical level, and I do it with acupuncture, healing, and visualization, so it’s a little bit more powerful. But we also do it emotionally or with different systems like you described. But they all come to allow us to be ourselves. At the moment, as much as possible, without having all these strings to our past mainly that make us react in a way that is really not how we would react if there was no past that was affecting us.   [01:11:23] Ashley James: I love it. That procedure where you filter the blood, I want to do that. That sounds fascinating. How can we do that? Do we have to come to you in California or other places?   [01:11:36] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: No, no, no. That’s actually a very specialized procedure that I specialize in. It’s really what I do. It’s usually done more in hospitals for people with genetic hypercholesterolemia, but I specialized it for inflammatory purposes and I have a lot of publications in the field. And yes, it’s done in Amitabha Medical Clinic. But important is to do this in a larger context just like you and I talk today.   [01:12:10] Ashley James: Right you can’t fix it by going and getting a machine to filter it because if you don’t change your lifestyle, you don’t do the emotional healing, and you don’t change your habits it’s just going to come back.   [01:12:20] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Sometimes if you are in really bad shape, the machine will give you a chance to recalibrate because people try to heal and try to heal and it just gives you a break. You just get a moment where something else is doing the work for you and then suddenly, you finish the treatment and your blood is a way towards when you were like 18 years old, and then suddenly, the tissue can let go and changes can happen. That’s the power of the procedure.   [01:12:49] Ashley James: How can we measure that what we’re doing is working? So I know heart rate variability is a good way of measuring if the body is under stress. But that’s not measuring the cascade effect, like you said. Is there a way to measure or would you give us some examples of how we know the changes that we’re making from your book, right? Like I’d say we start integrating these changes. How do we know it’s working? How do we know we’re reducing our Galectin-3 and that we’re getting our physiology back into a state of healing?   [01:13:28] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: So the first thing that we see that we know is we just feel better. We’re not as tired, we are more spacious, we’re not as reactive, we are happier. We smile more. The same interaction doesn’t bring up negative emotions. We are more tolerant. That’s one thing. Our inflammatory markers go down if you’d see reactive protein or fibrinogen activity, et cetera. We can also measure Galectin-3, which is an FDA-approved inexpensive test that is done by all labs. It’s supposed to be paid by insurance, almost always is. If not, if you don’t have insurance, it’s one of these things where people who pay without insurance pay 10 times more than insurance, which anyway, I won’t get into this. I can’t solve it, unfortunately.  But when you look at Galectin-3, you have to be careful about relying on the level of Galectin-3 because of genetic differences, people can still have a damaging effect of Galectin-3 with low levels. But if you think that you are healthy, you do a blood test, and your Galectin-3 is elevated, then this can be like a wake-up call that something is going on in the body. And then following Galectin-3 is important. So one of the basic things and why this is my number one recommended supplement is the PectaSol Modified Citrus Pectin, not because I developed it. If you look at my programs 10 years ago or 15 years ago, let’s say, yeah, some of my patients got it, but not all of them. Now it’s the first thing I did, why? Because it blocks the Galectin-3, it helps to stop this damaging process. At the same time, it removes heavy metals, it regulates the immune response, and supports the microbiome. So it has this amazing benefit. So that’s why just like the starting point, you can take as little as 5 grams a day for maintenance, or if you have serious health problems, you take 15 grams a day, either powder or capsules. That’s a basic thing that we want to do. And then our pains get better, our memory improves because it’s all driven by the same inflammaging. This undercurrent of subclinical inflammation is not evident but it’s causing damage and rapid aging. Yes, so it’s a combination of how we feel and changes of course in our blood test also. It changes our perspective of life because when we are more tolerant, when we’re not as reactive, then some of our life dramas just go away because some of it, unfortunately, is objective difficulties that so many people have. It breaks my heart. Some of it is our reaction to our life, right? People can react to the same thing in different ways and shifting from reactivity to tolerance to what we call loving, compassionate, responsiveness instead of reactivity. It really shifts our physiology and our being. These days, Ashley, it is so critical to go to these places for all of us.   [01:16:57] Ashley James: You said inflammaging like inflammation and aging, and oh my gosh, that hit me so hard. I say this all the time on the show. If you want to be a statistic, live like everyone’s living. Go eat the same food everyone’s eating, go watch TV until one in the morning, binge on Netflix, or vape whatever everyone’s vaping. Just go with the mainstream flow, Hollywood, just follow what everyone else is doing and jump from fad diet to fad diet. Do what everyone’s doing and eat a ton of candy, drink a ton of alcohol, and you’re going to be a statistic.  But if you don’t want to be a statistic, and right now, the statistic is one in three people will have cancer. One in three people has diabetes or a prediabetic. Heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are the three top killers. Stroke is the fifth, I believe, top killer. That is your future and early death is your future if you live like how everyone else is living. We have to be a salmon and completely go against the grain and stop the inflammation and the early aging, right? Inflammaging, I just love that.   [01:18:16] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Inflammaging is very much driven by Galectin-3, by the abnormal survival response by the survival paradox. In the book, I just show how it’s driven through all diseases.   [01:18:30] Ashley James: But it’s never too late. Do you have any success stories you can share of people who were in their 60s, 70s, 80s and they turned themselves around and gave themselves a healthier living experience?   [01:18:44] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: A lot and a lot of stories about cancer patients. Of course, the book is full. Every chapter is between one and five stories. So there are dozens of stories of healing, absolutely. I mean, I share my own story of healing, absolutely. As I said, everything is changeable because nothing stays the same, everything flows, right? The moment the heart stops contracting and blood stops flowing, we are dead. There’s always a flow. There’s always a movement, nothing freezes. There’s a difference between ice and water, right? Everything flows.  So as long as things are changing, everything is possible, and this is really the key for tapping into our infinite healing potential [inaudible 01:19:39]. That’s why I mentioned already in this podcast, my favorite saying, not everyone will be a miracle but anyone can be a miracle. Because when we change our habits, we change our biochemistry, we change our physiology, and we change the outcome. That’s the beauty of the infinite healing power that each of us has.   [01:20:05] Ashley James: You brought up scar tissue and I think it’s really fascinating because every cell in our body is different within seven years. Every atom, every molecule of our body is new every seven years, right? We renew our body from the earth, from what we eat, we renew it from what we breathe, and yet, our body can remember to hold on to a scar. But I have actually seen people do emotional healing work and scars disappear. They no longer hold on to the memory of the scar and the body lets go.   [01:20:40] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Absolutely. That’s the idea, multi-dimensional. So you do the emotional work, you do the psychological work, you create space in the mind, and you do the physical work. That’s why amazing things can happen. That’s why anything and everything is possible.   [01:20:56] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. So I definitely encourage listeners to read your book, the number one most important book. We should be buying this for Hanukkah, for Christmas, and for the holidays regardless of what you’re celebrating. December is kind of the time to buy presents for our friends and family and those we love, and I just think your book, Survival Paradox, is a wonderful gift for those we love who we want to help them stop the inflammaging and live a healthier, happier life balancing all aspects of their life. Regardless of how long you’re going to live, it’s all about quality of life. Let’s increase the quality of life now and extend life but extend the quality of our life, and I think that’s so important. And of course, all the links are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been wonderful. I’m really looking forward to hearing the feedback from my listeners as they dive into Survival Paradox and begin to incorporate these practices into their life. Is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?   [01:22:05] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for having me and being interviewed by somebody who understands what I’m talking about makes it easier, of course, and I really appreciate it. It’s a process. I mean, the book is a guideline, but if you’re really interested, use the opportunity. I’m going to start teaching more, in classes more, and offering more of these. It’s like offering my heart. You can get a sense even in a recording, I’m coming from my heart, and I’m sharing decades of studies and experience. It’s not something that I just came up with after a few months. I’ve been in the healing arts for almost 50 years, so there is a lot of experience, a lot of fun observation, and multicultural different parts of the world. Like a sponge, I absorbed and absorbed. Now I distilled it and I really want to offer this important healing advice to as many people as possible. It’s my third act.   [01:23:15] Ashley James: Well, I’m looking forward to your fourth and fifth, and I definitely want you to come back on the show when you have more to share and when you have more to teach. Your summit in 2022 sounds fascinating. I’d love for you to come back and continue to share with us. Thank you so much for coming on the show.   [01:23:28] Dr. Isaac Eliaz: Thank you so much for having me. Have a great day.     Get Connected with Dr. Isaac Eliaz! Amitabha Medical Clinic & Healing Center  Website – https://www.dreliaz.org/ Facebook Instagram Books by Dr. Isaac Eliaz The Survival Paradox      

Check out the sample class from IIN visit LearnTrueHealth.com/coach   Institute for Integrative Nutrition Health Coach Training Program, Jim Curtis  https://www.learntruehealth.com/institute-for-integrative-nutrition-health-coach-training-program-jim-curtis Highlights: What makes IIN different from other health and wellness schools Bio-individuality What’s new at IIN Jim Curtis is the Chief Revenue Officer & Head of Brand at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN). Before joining IIN, Jim helped develop WebMD, Everyday Health, and Remedy. He is also the author of The Stimulati Experience. In this episode, Jim shares what’s new at IIN and what you can gain from studying at IIN. Intro: Hello, true health-seekers and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. Back when I started this podcast, I had come really far in my healing journey but I wasn’t done. And you’re never really done, are you? But I had accomplished reversing type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and infertility, and that’s a lot. And I’ve been working on myself to get to a point where I’ve considered myself to have optimal health. I’m not there yet, but I am way closer to my goal than I’ve ever been. So when I started the podcast, I had already accomplished all that, and I was still working on solving some of my health issues, right? I did not know what health coaching was when I started my podcast. I was actually doing a lot of coaching with clients for years, but I didn’t really have a strong grasp on the definition of what it is to be a health coach. I kind of wrote it off as something froufrou or something really superficial like probably someone who tells you to go for walks and drink water. I didn’t respect it because I didn’t understand it. But as you know, if you’ve been a listener for a while, I am the most open-minded skeptic. I’m going to think critically, but I’m going to give things that maybe I just write off or just dismiss, I’m going to give them a chance. I’m going to have an open mind and try things on even if they go against my belief system because I want to grow. I want to grow outside of my own belief system, I want to learn things like the things you don’t know you don’t know. That’s the realm of possibility where you’re so open to learning about the unknown. You see, there are things we know we know, right? We know we know how to tie our shoes. We know we know how to drive a car, and there are things we know we don’t know. I know I don’t know advanced calculus or I know I don’t know how to fly a plane. Just taking the stuff you know you don’t know and learning it is only about 5% of your life. That is not nearly as fun as being open. Opening your mind up to the things you don’t know you don’t know. You don’t even know there’s this whole world out there of possibilities. You don’t even know they exist and you don’t even know you don’t know them yet. That’s where I like to live. And especially with my podcasts, I like to have guests that show me a world I didn’t even know existed and show me that it’s possible. It’s been through holistic medicine that what I didn’t know I didn’t know came to light. I didn’t even know there was this world where I could reverse disease naturally. That my body was deficient in nutrients that could reverse disease because I was raised in that same system you were where we waited to get sick, then we went to the doctor, and we were put on drugs to manage something but never cure it, never reverse it. I was, for many years, told by an endocrinologist and doctors that I would always have these conditions, always have these issues—diabetes, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and infertility. I was told I’d absolutely never have kids. That’s the reality that most people live in. But there’s this whole other world you don’t even know exists. And of course, you’re listening to this podcast so you do know that there is holistic medicine and that the body can heal itself. But there’s this whole other world that is waiting for us, and that’s 95% of reality out there is what you don’t know you don’t know. That’s the exciting part. So open your mind and let the unknown come in and show you that there’s another way of being that allows you to transform your life. With today’s guest, it’s a little bit different. I had Joshua Rosenthal on the show back in episode 106, so that was quite a while ago. Joshua Rosenthal is the founder of IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and that’s a great episode. You should go back and check it out, episode 106. When I first started the podcast, I had no idea what health coaching was. I looked down upon it because I didn’t respect it, I didn’t know what it was. And I had a health coach on the show. This was very early on, probably in the first 40 episodes. He told me about the school that he graduated from, IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and he said that it’s an online program. It’s been around since 1992 and they’re the world’s first health coach training program, also the world’s largest, and the most organized. So I looked into it, I spoke with them, and that same day I enrolled. I went from being completely skeptical, but you know, open-minded, to just absolutely feeling that this was my path, that this was the next step for me. I learned so much about myself and about how to help people through that program. What I loved is that health coaching is not just eating apples, drinking water, and going for walks. Health coaching, most of it, is actually emotional counseling. It’s helping people to peel back the layers and really help themselves to bring joy and expression, love and vitality into every single area of their life, and to help balance every area of their life with that experience of joy. The fun part about health coaching is that you help people—by asking the right questions—to uncover their joy in each area of their life. Even though you do learn 100 dietary theories in the health coaching program through IIN, most of the time you’re not even talking about food because so much of it is about our habits, behaviors, beliefs, and emotions. And so health coaching really is about helping someone achieve the goals that they set out for themselves. What I like about IIN is that they are the most authentic company I’ve ever met. What they teach they also practice. So behind the scenes, I’ve actually had the CEO on the show as well. I’ve had a few of the staff members on the show, kind of just getting a glimpse, pulling back the curtain. I kind of love doing that, pulling back the curtain and seeing what goes on behind the scenes? Well, today, we have another staff member who is high up in the company, and he gets to pull back the curtain a bit and show you what it means to have a truly holistic company. If you are a business owner, imagine how you can shape your business so that your employees and you have the most healthy experience. Now, they have a very low rate of attrition. They have a really profitable model because they actually invest in the health and well-being of their staff. And that’s really exciting because I see that they’re modeling something that is the wave of the future. If you can imagine every single business truly being holistic and taking care of their staff, how beautiful and how healed this world would be. So enjoy today’s episode as you listen from the perspective of imagining this world, imagine a futuristic sci-fi where every single company treated their staff like IIN treats their staff, how neat that would be. And then if you’re interested in adding tools to your tool belt, I highly recommend checking out the free sample class. So you can go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach, and there you’ll get a free sample class and you can check out IIN yourself. We do talk a bit about the program. They have a 6-month program, they have a 12-month program. It’s a 12-month program, you can do part-time or full-time. They also have smaller classes. They have newly adopted smaller classes, a few week-long classes if you are looking just to not become a health coach but looking to grow yourself. I love the health coach training program. About half of the people that go through it every year go through it just for their own personal growth and to help them become healthier and help them help just their family and friends. So that’s definitely something to check out. I highly recommend it. And of course, IIN gives the listeners a really great price. So when you do talk to them, you can mention that you heard it from me, Ashley James, the Learn True Health podcast. And also use coupon code LTH most of the time when I interview someone. I asked them to get us a coupon code LTH and give the listeners a discount. And when you do, mention my podcast. They do give all the listeners a really, really great discount. Awesome. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing my podcast with those you care about. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group, we’d love to see you there. Check out the IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition sample class. It was quite moving. I thought it was awesome. It’s free. Check it out. Go to learntruehealth.com/coach. Enjoy today’s interview.   [00:09:58] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 472. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have Jim Curtis on the show. Now, you are the Chief Marketing Officer, the Chief Brand Officer of IIN, is that correct? Is that how I say it?   [00:10:23] Jim Curtis: Yes. I handle the business side of things. So marketing, sales, community. I wear many hats here.   [00:10:32] Ashley James: Now, why that excites me to interview you is because this is a health podcast. We’re approaching 500 episodes. I’ve had many of the teachers that teach the students of IIN, IIN being the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, the school that I graduated from a few years ago. I graduated in 2017 I think it was. Time kind of flies. All of a sudden you look back and it’s been years and years, but I have interviewed many of the teachers that have made videos for the students of IIN. We’ve had actually hundreds of my listeners, either they already are graduates of IIN or they signed up and became students of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition after hearing my podcast, so it’s really exciting. What I love about IIN is I walked in thinking I’m just going to learn a lot about nutrition and I learned so much. That was just such a fraction of the piece of the pie. I learned so much about myself, about creating really true happiness, and balance in every aspect of my life. There’s so much more in terms of fulfillment, emotional, spiritual, and mental health. Doesn’t that just really make so much sense when it comes to health coaching, right? It’s not about how many carrots you eat and how many glasses of water you drink. At the end of the day, if every other part of your life is falling apart and you’re miserable but you’re eating healthy, you’re still not achieving health. So I love that I learned from my IIN how to help myself, my family, my clients, and my friends to find the things in each area of their life that they want to enrich and all the tools that I gained to help them do that.  What I was excited about having you on the show, I’ve had your CEO on the show who was so amazing. I had the founder of IIN on the show, who I’m such a big fan of Joshua, and then to have you on the show. And of course, I’ve had graduates and I’ve had other staff members who share fun stories like you guys have free avocados for your employees. There’s a yoga and there’s a meditation room. Your company believes in that work-life balance, and I think that if every company on the planet modeled themselves after IIN, we would have such a happier world. Companies would save money because they wouldn’t have such a high turnover rate of employees. I want to know more about you and the branding and marketing side of IIN because this isn’t like Amazon where you guys exhaust and work your employees to the bones. You are a company of the future. You are a company that I want to learn from because you’re a company that models holistic health for your employees and for your customers, for the students. It’d be really interesting, from a health perspective, to look at how IIN markets itself, brands itself, but also, I hear really exciting things are coming in 2022. I’m so excited to learn from you, welcome to the show.   [00:13:52] Jim Curtis: Oh, it’s so great to be here. I love all those things that you said about the business. It’s particularly important to me because, for 20 years, I’ve been a coach, a wellness teacher, and in business. I think that goes hand in hand for everybody who’s listening to this too who are both trying to run a coaching business or another wellness business and be the teacher in that business. So IIN is kind of a great example, and I think I’m a good example of my own career, how I brought the two together, and how we kind of help our students to bring the two together. I think that some of our employees would disagree with you about working them to the bone because we work people so hard here and they work so hard here. But what we know is that oftentimes, we’re sacrificing and working the weekends because it has such a profound effect on the health of people. We can see it from a one-to-one basis meaning we will get a story written constantly of a student or a graduate that we’ve changed their life so dramatically and had such an impact that the hard work, the sacrifice, the late hours, and the weekends are worth it. So that’s kind of what we’re doing. And yes, we do spend an enormous amount of money on avocados, more when we are actually in the office more often. We do have a chiropractor and acupuncturist. We cater a delicious lunch for everybody every day that people are in the office now. We’ll just shut the office for a week around the holidays or we’ll take all the employees on a trip where you don’t have to do any work or even meet. They just go out and have dinner. The last time it was in North Carolina. There are a lot of lifestyle elements, and of course, everybody in the company can take the courses. That’s some of the perks of IIN.   [00:15:53] Ashley James: I love it. Because when I was first looking into IIN, any staff member I spoke to when I called were also graduates, and I thought that that was really neat. I know it’s not every single staff member is a graduate, but more often than not, you throw a stone in IIN and you’re going to hit a graduate. They’re health coaches as well. So talking to them didn’t feel like a high-pressure sales call, which is what I was really expecting because I’ve called other companies who do online education and it felt like they were trying to sell me used car insurance. But with IIN, the conversation was more about my goals, where I want to see myself, how would this help me, and how would this help me help others. So the conversation was more about the ripple effect and the fulfillment that IIN can bring as a student and as a graduate.   [00:16:50] Jim Curtis: The authenticity in business is super important to us. I have so many students and grads writing to me just talking about how they position themselves as wellness pioneers and coaches with authenticity. Over the last two years since health coaching has become so popular, there’s been a lot of schools that pop up. We kind of look and say, are they walking their own walk? Are their employees actually trained health coaches, or is it you just sign up online and then go take your videos type of thing? Ninety percent of our employees are trained by IIN, and then when you come and start at the company, you can take the course, which most people do. And we really believe in a path to employment. When people graduate from IIN, our alumni services help get them and show them job opportunities. So we partner with companies like Wellory and many others so that IIN graduates get hired first, and then we hire our graduates.  We’ve hired hundreds of people who have graduated to be employees, and oftentimes, they don’t have the exact background that we need in business but we can teach them. We know that they’re amazing people and very well trained because they’ve been through our program for a year or in a very intensive six months. So that authenticity, that eat your own dog food type of saying is so true to us and important to us.   [00:18:35] Ashley James: You, before joining IIN, have been part of some major health brands that we would recognize. What was attractive about IIN that had you want to join and work for them? Because I think you could have had your pick of so many different companies.   [00:18:59] Jim Curtis: I was. I had started my own businesses and exited them. I’ve had a pretty successful career in business, and I could really choose where to go next. I was just a few blocks away in New York City from the IIN offices running a wellness center that I had started there with a partner, a med spa and a wellness center, and it was going well. Someone called me up and said this role is available at IIN and they’re interested in you. I was immediately interested because IIN is such a pervasive name and wellness for so long. They’ve created the health coaching field. They had all the major health influencers and leadership from the beginning and oftentimes built those careers, but they’re still relatively unknown. It’s kind of a niche thing that you get to know IIN when you get into that wellness world. I had been in the world and I knew what a great brand it was. I had so many people in my life who had gone through the program that I immediately was interested. It was something that I saw that this could be a great project, and this could get very big under the leadership that was in place. Not only that, we could really expand upon that mission of changing the health of the world. I could see how it wasn’t just like a media company or another company that started that puts out information and then people read it. This is a direct contact with a person whose life you’re going to change. I wanted to do that for millions of people, so it was a really exciting project.   [00:20:52] Ashley James: So you joined IIN and then and then you took the course. You hadn’t yet taken the course. So while you were taking the course and working for IIN, what really surprised you about going through the health coach training program?   [00:21:09] Jim Curtis: Well, I thought that I was the expert, right? I was the speaker. I had started the business, I had done everything, and I thought that I was really the expert and that I wouldn’t learn much from the course, but I was very wrong. And also, I had known of the IIN brand, but I was impressed by it but not connected to it. One, I learned firsthand that, okay, food really does change everything. I focused a lot on the mental aspects of wellness, the scientific aspects, or what’s trending in wellness in terms of devices or science or how do you change your mindset to be successful. I was what I thought was a healthy eater, but I started to cook more for myself. I started to incorporate far more whole foods, raw foods, and vegetables. I realized that I was eating out way too much. The oils that were inflammatory were a lot in my diet, and it just really changed everything in that respect for me. I started to really realize what food changes everything mean, so that really impacted me. I started to realize that IIN can teach anybody something even if you think you’re an expert because it really taught me also how to hone my coaching skills. You can be an expert, you can be someone who comes to for advice, but it’s a whole nother ball game when you’re trained in coaching how to listen, how to how to actually lead someone through the coaching continuum where you leave with a result. That was really interesting to me. And then I loved hearing Joshua talk about why the brand is the brand. What is integrative nutrition? That’s a term he coined. Nutrition is more than food. It’s everything that feeds you. It’s integrative from what feeds you spiritually, what feeds you in your relationships, what feeds you in your career, and how you move your body, what feeds you for exercise. And then, you start talking about what colors and foods are on your plate. That was a huge impact on me. And even all the way to Joshua’s story about the color red and why IIN uses so much of it. How he was in India and he had traveled there for many, many years. He would study with the monks there and they all wore red robes. Red really signified one, the color of our blood and how everything that we consume becomes our blood, and how we all have the same color of blood. It’s an equality. We all have red blood. Our economic status or the color of our skin doesn’t affect our blood. It’s the equalizer and a connector. He really wanted the red symbol—that is shaped like DNA, by the way—to be the hallmark of IIN and really stand for something. He also loved it because it was different. One thing IIN is always touted is fitting out. You don’t have to do what everybody does. Even though wellness is becoming much more accepted and much more mainstream, oftentimes, you’re kind of out there if you’re practicing Reiki and trying a new diet that only eats raw foods, vegan, vegetarian. He said it was important not to fit into the general society of the world that is pertaining to just one thing.   [00:24:55] Ashley James: I love that idea that the red represents what’s on the inside and everyone’s got the same thing. We’ve all got blood. I have a family member who’s in hospice right now and it’s having me really reflect on end of life and how none of us get out alive, right? Death is the real equalizer. It’s something that we’re all going to have at some point. What’s really important is how we live now. I think we get really caught up in the day-to-day minutia. We get dissociated from what’s in the now and we start becoming more like robots. They say human doings instead of human beings. And then all of a sudden we’re just highly unsatisfied. The unconscious mind, that’s where most of us are stored. The unconscious mind doesn’t want us to just go with the flow, go with the motions day-to-day. Go to a job, pay a bill, come home, go to sleep, eat. Eat, sleep, eat, sleep, repeat. The unconscious mind, that’s where our values are and our desires are. Sometimes we stuff that down and what pops up is depression, sometimes physical pain. Physical pain can manifest in the body when we’re really just not living our path. It can feel so uncomfortable in the body. If we’re disconnected from it, it can become uncomfortable physically, but then uncomfortable emotionally and we don’t know where to put it, right? Some people fall into illness because they’re not eating healthy and they seek out a health coach. And then if it’s an integrative nutrition health coach, that health coach is helping them analyze and look at all areas of their life and really listen to them. That’s what I love because it isn’t a program where you just are scripted and you’re just telling people what to do. You’re listening. You’re listening for the deepest layers of concern, right? You’re listening and you’re listening, and then you ask questions that help them dig deeper themselves. It’s not about you talking at them. It’s kind of funny how as a health coach, how little talking we do. When you’re doing it really well, you’re asking the right questions that drill down and drill down and allow a person to see what’s beneath the layers that they themselves have, it’s been in their blind spot. Then they have their own aha moments and oftentimes they’ll even tell you what their homework is. When you’re really doing it well, all you’re doing is just being this amazing listener. You said that that’s a skill or a tool that you learned when you went through the IIN program. I was so impressed with—before I did the program, I’m also a master practitioner and trainer of neuro-linguistic programming. I really feel like I’ve trained myself in listening, and IIN really had me slow down and listen even more, and listen even more, and listen even more. My husband who’s an introvert always says, God gave us one mouth and two ears so use them proportionally.   [00:28:15] Jim Curtis: Right. I love that. I mean, active listening is a real skill. You’ve almost become magnetic when you’re a great listener. When you’re listening more than you’re talking, it has more of an impact when you say something because people know that you’re really processing what they have to say, and that’s kind of what coaching is all about—learning those things.   [00:28:38] Ashley James: You said active listener. I’ve said in the show in the past (I think a few years ago), you know, some people have never ever actually been heard. And going to an integrative nutrition health coach, going to an IIN graduate may be the first time in their life that they’ve actually had someone truly hear them and truly listen without ulterior motive, without their judgments of their past. Just someone really authentically being 100% present to them. That in itself is so cathartic. It allows the person to slow down and really feel honored, respected, and heard as a human being.  I feel like growing up, we’re constantly comparing ourselves to others, comparing yourself to the Kardashians, whoever’s on Instagram, or whoever was popular in school. I think everyone has that in their mind, maybe the imposter syndrome, or maybe they feel like there’s always someone who is better than them and so they’re not good enough, right? They’ve never felt like just being honored as an individual because it is an even playing field. We all have the same color blood, and we’re all going to die. It is more about how we live in the now. We can cultivate physical things on the outside like I can have a lot of material goods, but that doesn’t leave me with anything that I’ve cultivated on the inside. But the more we cultivate on the inside, that’s something that can never be taken away from us. That’s what I love about the health coaching program because it’s like 99% of it was called feeding on the inside, and then 1% of it was here’s like 100 different dietary theories. I thought it was going to be the opposite. I thought I was going to learn just a bunch of nutrition stuff. Boy, was I wrong. I love the program and the impact that it has. What are some other skills that you were surprised that you learned like active listening? Were there any other skills that you were really surprised that you learned when you went through the program?   [00:30:46] Jim Curtis: There is something called bio-individuality, meaning we go through life getting taught that this is the right diet for you. This is the way you should eat, this is what a diet is, and then there’s always this pull between keto is right or vegan is right, and you have these two groups. What I love is that it kind of bridges the gap there. Diets are ways of eating. When we say diet, I mean nutritional diet, not going on a diet. Ways of eating that are right for many different people. Vegan may not be right for one person, but it could be right for another. As opposed to, okay, there’s this belief that everybody has to be vegan or everybody has to be keto. That was something that I learned. I was really impressed with the concept of crowding out, meaning we put a lot of pressure on good and bad, right? I’m bad, I didn’t exercise. I’m good, I exercised. I’m bad, I ate a doughnut. I’m good, I ate broccoli. There’s no good or bad, right? There’s food. You can start to crowd out foods that make you feel better or worse. Meaning, if you’re used to drinking 12 Diet Cokes a day, start to drink 10 Diet Cokes and 2 glasses of water, or 6 glasses of water and 6 Diet Cokes until you crowd out the food that is making you feel less good, right? Instead of getting really down on yourself for having the food, understand that you’re a work in progress and that what you’re consuming is just food and we put the good and bad on it, and that we want to consume more things that give our body and our cells more energy. I always really love those types of things, which I didn’t think of in that way before. I’ve always been, I feel guilty, emotional eater type of person, and that really set the stage for me. The other thing I noticed with the program is that you don’t have to become a health coach, right? A lot of people are doing this just for them. Although I did some coaching and I’ve always been a coach, I did the program and it affected me profoundly as an individual and how I was relating to people. I didn’t actually have to go and be a full-time health coach. By the way, integrative means that you’re also life coaching. This is not just food. This is life coaching and health coaching in one, but you don’t have to do that. A lot of people just do it to start with them. They’d use it to coach themselves, their families, or their friends. Some people write books. There’s a book in everyone, and some people say, I’m doing this so I can be more credible or have more information when I want to write my book, my health story. Some people nowadays even become health influencers. They start a content-driven media type of health influencing in the sense of they’re reaching millions of people on a massive scale or hundreds of people, it doesn’t matter how many people. It’s just how you’re reaching them with health information. That’s very much what you’re doing, which I’m impressed with. Those were all things that I learned very quickly.   [00:34:36] Ashley James: And hospitals are hiring health coaches, insurance companies are hiring health coaches. My insurance company offers me a free health coach through my insurance because they see it saves them money when someone is actively going through health coaching, they’re working towards achieving their health and wellness goals, and then they don’t end up going on a bunch of medications and costing them money. So they would rather pay upfront for preventive medicine, which is what health coaching can be because it can help us to go from feeling good to feeling great or feeling great to feeling awesome. But most people wait until there’s a pain point, and the pain point doesn’t have to be physical health. It can be dissatisfaction with their marriage, with their work, with their body image to be able to go to an integrative nutrition health coach and work on those areas. You’re not allowed to call it counseling because of how they define counseling now, but it was once called counseling back in the day before they changed the rules of what you’re allowed to call counseling and not call counseling. But like I said, with active listening, you’re really just guiding that person and helping them to get to the root. I love that. Take us to the environment of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and share with us what changes, what improvements have you made since you joined the team?   [00:36:25] Jim Curtis: Well, what can I say to that? The changes that I’ve really made since being here are accessibility, meaning we have provided a lot more content for free. People can come on our Instagram, YouTube, webinars, or lives that I do. So I’m constantly interviewing our visiting teachers so people can have access to them on a live basis, whether it’s a webinar, an Instagram Live, it’s a live event for the community, or it’s a special event for the community that people go to. So there’s a lot more access for people who aren’t students for free content. And then there’s a lot more community access for the graduates and the students so that they can interact, get information, and talk with me, so that’s one thing. We’ve gone a lot deeper into business. The folks that are like, I’m really good at coaching or I’ve learned a lot and I’m ready to start my wellness career but I really don’t know the first thing about business, we do a lot to help people along the way. You can now just sign up online. You know what we’re finding is that a lot of people are younger that are signing up and they’re of the generation that doesn’t like phone calls. They just want to sign up online, not talk to anybody, and communicate via chat and email. We accommodate and do that now a lot more. What has made the biggest impact here is that we’ve hired a lot more people at the company. The company’s size has grown so that we have a lot more touchpoints with alumni services, with student success. We are constantly creating new courses. We have two new specialty courses on Whole Person Health with Deepak Chopra and Detox Your Life so that we have more people to service the students more often, and we have more content that is either cheap or is less expensive and free. That’s the impact that I hope that I’ve made, that I’ve made it more accessible for many more people.   [00:38:48] Ashley James: Well, it sounds like there’s a lot more courses and content since I graduated. Back when I joined, there were I think three courses. It was the main one, you had to take the main one first, which was yearlong at the time. For me, I invested about 20 minutes a day, or if I got really busy in my life I would spend an entire Sunday afternoon once a week and Sunday afternoon evening going through and studying. But day-to-day, I could listen to the lectures in the car, while I’m doing laundry, while I was cooking. I was able to fit in the training for a whole year in my very busy schedule being a career mom and all the stuff I do. So many people have asked me, do you think I could do this? I have a family and a career, or I’m a student and they have a family or whatever? I say, yeah, I think anyone who wants to do this could do this because you can do the training while you’re doing tasks as long as you can listen. You don’t even have to necessarily watch. Although there are slides and there’s a person on stage sometimes. What I would do is I download the slides, I’d look at them, then I’d listen to the lecture, and then I’d go back and look at the slides. If I’m, for example, driving or exercising, I definitely do it while I was exercising like if I was on the machine. And cooking, I just have it on the speaker and then I’d go and pop my head over and look at the slide when they reference something. It is available to people. It is accessible to busy people, and it was designed for busy career moms basically, who could fit it in 20 minutes or 30 minutes a day. And then you guys came out with—and there’s a few other courses. There was a write your own book course and I think there was like an autoimmune. There are advanced courses that someone who was a graduate could take. And then after I graduated, you guys came out with a six-month-long program basically condensing it so someone could be considered a full-time student. Although, I still think you could have a career and be a “full-time” student with IIN given that it’s in six months. So now you have all these other trainings. Are there training that people can take before they become an integrative health coach? Could you explain that, walk us through that?   [00:41:17] Jim Curtis: Certainly. You’re absolutely right. I mean, you did a great job balancing everything, and I think that we try to make the program so you can. But also so that you still have contact with over phone calls and now a lot more virtual Zoom type of stuff. And then live events, we’re still meeting in person less but still doing it. Now there’s a Spanish course. So if you only speak Spanish, there’s Spanish Assist, so there’s been a lot of enhancements. You don’t have to go through the health coach training program anymore to say I want to take a course. We have short-form courses like Whole Person Health, which in over seven weeks you can learn from Deepak Chopra and others. It’s less than $500. I think Detox Your Life where you find out how to remove toxins from your food, from your home, and from the people around you, that is under $300. We also have courses on emotional eating, hormone health, gut health, and even business courses that you can take. Oftentimes, you don’t have to be a grad. There is an advanced licensing course that oftentimes graduates take so that they can sit for the advanced licensing of a third-party accreditation. You do have to be a grad for that. But there are many courses now that you don’t have to be a grad of the 6- or 12-month course to take, and that’s part of the accessibility that we wanted to offer this to more people in the world.   [00:42:58] Ashley James: That’s really exciting. For those shorter courses that are more specific, do you find that people then graduate and then join to become a holistic health coach, that they see the benefit in continuing to study with IIN?   [00:43:13] Jim Curtis: In some cases, yeah. In some cases, people work on their wellness a little bit slower, so it’s different for everybody and that’s really apropos to what we’re all about. We want to deliver the wellness that is right for you. So in some cases, people will go on and say that was amazing. I want more, and they go on to take the health coach certification course, which is the health coach training program and they do really well. Others say, I like that but I’m going to go on to take the Hormone Health course, or I’m super interested in the Gut Health course because I have gut health problems. I see you’re working with a company called Seed. I love that probiotic. They give a supplemental course to that too so they go on and do it. It’s really what meets your needs, and that’s important to us.   [00:44:11] Ashley James: I love it. Now your background is in business and so you’ve obviously had an impact on the new business training that IIN provides for health coaches. That’s actually something I’ve seen in my past. I’ve been in this industry since I was a teenager. Actually, I took all the courses that I could with Landmark Education and became a coach through many of their programs, and then I was hired to be on staff in my early 20s with Landmark Education. Then I went on to study neuro-linguistic programming and did coaching through that until I found IIN.  One thing I’ve learned working with training coaches because I did that through Landmark and then also through neuro-linguistic programming, I saw that the biggest problem was that they didn’t know how to market themselves. They didn’t know how to grow a business. There’s a stigma around money, business, and charging people. They felt kind of like, I don’t know what to charge people. Their tools would change someone’s life, would completely change someone’s life. I mean, you can’t quantify that, right? I mean, you don’t want to charge too little because they don’t take it seriously. You don’t want to charge too much. And then there’s a person worth, right? The health coach feels like there’s this, what am I worth? I don’t want to charge that much because I don’t want people to say no. They go through this fear because there are so many negative stigmas around money, charging, and knowing what you’re worth, but also creating a fair business model so that you have a mutual win-win. You really have to face a mirror and look at yourself, look at all the negative emotions and looming decisions around money when you’re getting into doing your own business. What kind of advice can you give health coaches when it comes to these kinds of concerns?   [00:46:13] Jim Curtis: It’s really common. First off, don’t feel like it’s just you. I did all the Landmark courses too, by the way. I love Landmark. I started with them when I was 19 years old and I moved to New York City. I took a year off of college because I was dealing with an illness and I moved to New York City and I started Landmark. It’s just, I mean, really wonderful and impactful. I can see how that would lead to IIN because it’s very much about rapid transformation. When people go through this course and they start to say, am I worth it? Am I ready to be a coach? And then if I’m selling wellness, should I really be charging? How do you combine those two? Because oftentimes, people see sales as a dirty word and wellness as the good word so they want to give it for free. But here’s the important thing. One is you’ve been through the training, you’re there to help someone, you deserve fair compensation for that.  Sales is really a service. I mean, if you’re selling something that’s hurting people, if you’re selling cigarettes or junk food, yeah, I can understand you’re doing the marketing that is tricking people into something that’s not great for them. But you’re providing a service. Your sales is a service that’s helping people change and better their lives, and then better the lives of the people around you. Knowing that your mission is really beneficial for the world is the first step. Knowing that you are uniquely positioned because one, you want to do it, you have a desire and a passion to do it, and because you’ve been trained to do it. But sometimes, you just have to go through the fear and know that you are the one, believe it, start to do it, and it becomes very real to you. And that you’re worth it. You need to be financially stable to make people financially stable. You need to be working on your finances and your health so that you can help other people with that. I always lead people to Marianne Williamson’s book called The Law of Divine Compensation. And in The Law of Divine Compensation, it really talks about there are real rules around exchange of energy and receiving payment for the service that you’re doing. That’s a great book to read for anybody that’s kind of struggling with this, and that’s kind of how I approach it. We work with a lot of students. I particularly work with a lot of students on that because it’s common, and if you’re feeling that, you’re not alone at all and you can overcome it.   [00:48:56] Ashley James: Do you have to be an IIN grad to take business training, or do you have business training at any health coach they graduate from anywhere take?   [00:49:09] Jim Curtis: We have business training that any health coach who graduated from anywhere take. We have the Advanced Business course. We’re constantly updating our course. It’s been around for 30 years, but every year, we add new content, change things, and we have more business in the course now. Then I do a lot of free training. People can sign up for webinars with me. I, on Instagram, every Thursday do business basics where I answer questions. We know that having confidence and understanding your value and how you’re contributing to the world is an issue sometimes, so we do a lot to help train people on that.   [00:49:50] Ashley James: Now what I loved about the IIN program, back when I took it it was 12 months long. Within the first half, you’re learning how to do health coaching, but then you actually start working with people halfway through. The rest of the program is like fine-tuning that and teaching you how to grow your business. It’s not like IIN just teaches you how to be a health coach then throws you to the wolves like, okay, grow your business, bye. You’re actually growing your business. Something that Juliet, she was the person that helped me on the phone because that was before you guys had a robot on the website.   [00:50:26] Jim Curtis: She’s still here.   [00:50:27] Ashley James: Juliet’s amazing. I love talking to her. For those listeners who just sign up online, you should just give them a call just to experience it because I really had a blast talking to Juliet. She was so helpful and I called her many times asking her questions. She was always a wonderful resource. I really love her. She said, you know, the most successful IIN students pay off their entire program before graduating. I said, really? She said, yeah, because you start working with clients halfway through, and so then you’ve got another six months of growing your business and being trained to. You have IIN teachers to talk to and to connect with. You get to grow while there’s kind of a safety net because you’re still in the school, and I thought that was really cool. Then of course, with your full time course, it’s after three months of doing it then you start growing your business for the next three months while you’re still in the program. I just like that IIN always creates a soft place to land while someone is completely changing their career path. Now, I’ve heard something like 50% of graduates don’t go on to become health coaches. They did it purely for their own personal growth, which I can totally see doing that or to augment it or just bring tools to what they already do. So about half of the graduates do go on to become health coaches, and many of them then want to start their own business. There are so many mediums, like you said. You could become a content creator, write a book, do social media, work for a hospital, or work for a clinic. I know so many clinics now where they have a health coach with a chiropractor, with a doctor because it’s looking at the person as a whole. There are a lot of opportunities out there, whereas I don’t think 15 years ago it didn’t even exist then, even 10 years ago. There are so many more opportunities now. I heard Joshua say about two years ago, he said that this is the number one growing field in the health space.   [00:52:39] Jim Curtis: Coaching is, if you look at the jobs report, one of the number one growing professions. We’ve transcended just health. It’s like, okay, coaching is something that people want to do, why? It’s because people are looking for a purpose in their lives. This allows you to make a great living while serving something greater than you, and that is other people serving a bigger purpose. That’s changing the health of the really sick United States. Although we’re in 175 countries, the United States is the most ill of 133 million people suffering from diabetes or obesity. It’s a place that really needs health coaches and so in demand. We talk about all the different things health coaches can do, and I always say set up multiple revenue streams, meaning see some clients directly one-on-one. Work part time. There are so many tech companies now hiring health coaches like Wellory or Kensho, wellness centers like The Well or even hospitals like Cleveland Clinic. Mark Hyman says he only hires health coaches from IIN, same with Frank Lippmann hires IIN health coaches. There are many different ways, many revenue streams, we say, as a health coach that you can become really financially stable doing what you love and something good for the world.   [00:54:10] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. Are there any testimonials that you feel really connected to? You say that people write in all the time. Maybe in terms of the business training that you give, do you have a testimonial that you feel you’ve earned because you’ve had a direct impact on the lives of the students?   [00:54:37] Jim Curtis: You know, we have so many of them. I just read a three-page testimonial yesterday about a woman who started IIN during a really difficult time because her daughter was diagnosed with cancer. She was ill, she was having trouble with what she was doing and her finances, and she knew she had to make some changes. She wrote literally a three-page letter about IIN and how it really gave direction and opened the doors that she took that changed the rest of her life. I hear that so often. We put them up on our site and we have thousands of people commenting on Trustpilot and that kind of thing. But even when I just interviewed some of these folks that have become superstars like Melissa Wood or the founders of Sakara Life, I could name even Bobbi Brown cosmetics, they talk about how IIN was really the jumping-off point that allowed their lives to change. They dedicated themselves to this study, and by opening that door, it opened up so many other doors. Whether it was in their career or in their health.  I wish I had them in front of me to read, but we have our admissions reps who are all IIN graduates and we go over every week, who did you speak with? Because we’d love to hear the stories. We have women that are grandmothers, they’re in their 80s. During the pandemic, their daughters and their grandchildren came to live with them and she took the course because she wanted to make sure that she was cooking right for them. She was into wellness, she had retired, and she wanted something to do. I love that story. There was one woman who had diabetes and she lost her fingers due to diabetes. Her daughter had juvenile diabetes and she’s like, okay, this stops here. I’m not going to see my daughter lose her fingers. She started the course. And then sometimes you see families go in together like mother and daughter to take the course together. Guess what, we even have some guys now. We have a lot more doctors and a lot more people from sports. We have Olympic athletes, we have ex-NFLers, and we have a lot more men signing on. Before it was 100% women and now it’s about 90% women. Even guys are getting into this a little bit.   [00:57:18] Ashley James: That’s funny because the person I interviewed when I first learned about IIN, it was on my show. It was the first year I was doing my show and I interviewed a graduate of IIN. He was talking about how he reversed his ADHD that he had had since he was a kid with food. At the time, honestly, I was really skeptical of this title health coach. I thought it was hokey. I thought anyone called themselves a health coach. I had no idea, I had no concept as to what it was. I asked him in the interview where did he learn from? He told me about IIN and I signed up that day after the interview. I talked to my husband. I mean, it’s a major commitment, right? For me it was a year-long commitment, it’s a financial commitment. But after that I called Juliet, I had a few conversations with her. I picked through the website—super impressed by all of the visiting teachers. I was like, oh my gosh, these are all the people I look up to and learn from anyway. I love these people. I read their books. I watch their YouTube videos. I talked to my husband, he was like, why are you still talking to me? Go, sign up. Start, do it. I was just in love with the program. But it’s so funny how that morning I woke up and health coaching wasn’t on my radar. When I heard the word, I don’t know, I poo-pooed it because I didn’t know what it was and so I thought it was hokey. By the end of the day, I’m like, yes, I’m becoming a health coach. This is amazing. It was so funny.   [00:58:51] Jim Curtis: That’s awesome. At one time, chiropractic and acupuncture were considered hokey too, and then insurance started covering it, it became more accessible to people, and they saw the real benefits from it. That’s what’s happening with health coaching right now as well.   [00:59:05] Ashley James: Right. Has there been any traction in terms of insurance covering graduates of IIN?   [00:59:14] Jim Curtis: Well, it’s in the process. Right now, one insurance is called CPT Codes. It’s in the code process where they’re collecting data. They will make the case that health coaching increases health outcomes. And then from there, they submit for coverage. So that usually takes a couple of years and it’s been a year and a half in. IIN, unlike any other school, has lobbyists in DC that are working on healthcare bills and getting health coaching inserted into those bills, and we’re making real progress. We’re, as a company, just trying to move it in general. We’re not setting up an online training with videos just so that we can make money. We’re trying to change the health of the world, and that includes hiring lobbyists and people that work for the company to represent health coaches in DC, in government, and move the insurance process forward. So it’s happening.   [01:00:19] Ashley James: I hope my listeners now understand. This is why I was excited to have you on the show because it’s not just a company that wants to make money off of you. When you look at other companies like I look at Amazon, you feel like they’re just like, give me your wallet. Just give me your wallet. You get convenience out of it, but there really doesn’t feel like there’s this huge humanitarian effort behind it. Whereas when you look at IIN, you guys want to change the world, and you’re doing it and you’re working on it. I know that when I first signed up that night, I have a really clear memory of watching the first modules crying tears of joy. My mirror neurons were just firing. I felt the oxytocin and the sense of connection and community as Joshua was starting the whole year. There’s a huge audience. Even though I’m watching a video, I felt like I was in that audience. I’m brought back to that moment just crying because I felt like this is it. We are here to make a difference in the world. This is my mission and I am on this path with all these people. Every graduate, whether they go on to be a health coach or not, they are part of that ripple that wants to make a difference in this world. That is so exciting to be part of this bigger picture together as a collective moving forward, having this common goal of helping people live happier, healthier lives in all aspects of their life. I would just love it if we could take the model that IIN uses and duplicate it for all companies in the world. In closing, I’d love for you to share—you’ve been with so many companies. You started companies, you’ve been with major, major companies, and what’s the difference? When you first walked into it IIN, walked into the building, what is the sense, the ambiance of IIN versus all the other businesses that you’ve worked with?   [01:02:33] Jim Curtis: Well, people really feel a responsibility. Everybody feels a responsibility, meaning the content they create, the people that we partner with, everybody is really concerned with, does this fit the mission? There’s nothing that we launch, partner with, teacher that comes on, or even if we’re writing something that’s about staff picks because the staff may love some products and we want to communicate them. There has to be a group consensus, meaning, is this to the benefit of the people that we’re talking to? Does this give a holistic view of it? Does it pertain to bio-individuality? People really feel that they can make a difference in the product and that their view matters because it does because everybody here has a health coach. So it’s really important that we’re living up to what we teach. It’s a business. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes we’re working really hard hours and we’re hitting deadlines. It’s for-profit for sure, so we have to be financially healthy just like our health coaches do. But what’s different here is that there is real care and concern, it’s not just a job, and that to me means everything.   [01:04:09] Ashley James: That is so cool. I love it. Thank you so much, Jim Curtis, for coming on the show and sharing about IIN. I know there’s a lot in the hopper, and I know that there’s a lot we can’t talk about, but is there anything you can talk about future projects that are in the hopper?   [01:04:25] Jim Curtis: Stay tuned. There’s more coming, that’s what I’ll say. There’s definitely more coming from IIN that will blow your socks off, just stay tuned.   [01:04:33] Ashley James: Yeah, I’m really excited and I’m bummed we can’t talk about it. But like you said, stay tuned, it’s happening soon. I’m very excited. Now, listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That takes them to a page where they can get a free module from IIN. They can check it out and get a feel for the training. I recommend listeners do that. Jim, is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?   [01:04:57] Jim Curtis: Well, I just want to say, thank you so much. I’m proud of you as a student that’s doing so many amazing things and inspiring so many people on the platform that you’ve built. It’s really impressive, and thanks for having me on.   [01:05:10] Ashley James: Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on. I know you’re super busy. You’re doing really great work. I’m very proud of IIN. Again, I keep saying that this is the model I wish all other businesses were, but could you imagine if all for-profit businesses looked at the ecology of their community, their customers, and the planet? Ecology means that it’s healthy, that it takes everything into account, right? If any company, if a farm, let’s say, said is this ecological for us to spray this on the food versus do a different kind of farming that doesn’t require any chemical. If every company really started with, is this an ecological decision for my community, for my employees, for the planet? Can you imagine if Amazon took into account the health of their employees and the health of their customers, how different would this world be? And so I love that IIN really for me, yes, it’s a for-profit company and that’s exactly what I want it to be because I want it to be the example that all other companies should look to to see that there can be a profitable business that takes care of its employees and its customers and looks to make the world a better place. Thank you so much for being part of this project, and I can’t wait to see what IIN can create in the future. I’m thrilled that you guys are shaping the health industry. There’ll be a day when insurance will pay for someone to see an IIN grad. And that level of satisfaction, growth, happiness, and balance that that person receives and it’ll all be because of the money that you guys invested in lobbying and that you guys invested in marketing. So I thank you for all the work that you’re doing now that’s going to have such a profound impact for generations to come.   [01:07:01] Jim Curtis: Thanks. I appreciate that.   [01:07:04] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview about IIN and looking behind the scenes, learning more about the health coaching training program. If you’d like to check out the sample class, go to learntruehealth.com/coach and check it out. If you have any questions for me, feel free to reach out to me you can join the Learn True Health Facebook group. We have dozens of health coaches in the Learn True Health Facebook group, probably hundreds now. We’re almost at 4,000 members. It’s a really amazing group of holistic-minded people. You can come in and ask questions and get a lot of fantastic feedback from me and from all the other people out there as well, the community, the listeners have joined the group. Several guests actually have joined the group and like sharing and helping out as well. But if you have any questions about IIN, you can ask it in the Facebook group, and not only will you hear from me, but you’ll also hear from a lot of listeners who’ve graduated from the program and have gone on to help their friends and family, have built careers around it. There are also people who are already in the health business in some capacity and used it just to grow their tool belt. You can use it as a launching pad to completely change your career path and start a new one, or if you’re already on a career path, you can use these tools to aid yourself. What I love about this episode though is this idea that we could take this model and we could replicate it for every business to flourish, to grow. Imagine if every business’s number one priority along with income, along with profit, right? Every business wants profit. But imagine if they said, okay, we want to make a profit and we want to take care of our employees as much as we value taking care of our customers. Could you imagine how better this world would be if profit, taking care of customers, and taking care of the staff was equally as important? Because the staff who feel taken care of then, in turn, takes care of the client, the customer better and takes care of the company better. Everyone’s healthier, everyone’s happier. I just think that this is such a needed thing. That’s why I love interviewing staff to learn more about IIN’s business model. Thank you so much for listening to this show. Thank you so much for sharing it with your friends. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. I’d love to hear from you. And again, check out the sample class. It’s awesome, learntruehealth.com/coach. Have a fantastic rest of your day.   Get Connected with Jim Curtis! Instagram Linkedin Book by Jim Curtis The Stimulati Experience

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Joan's Websites: Join the Online Addiction Reset Community: https://www.processedfoodaddiction.com Free evidence-based handouts: www.foodaddictionresources.com Food Addiction Books: www.foodaddictionbooks.com Food Addiction Reset: www.foodaddictionreset.com   471: Healing Processed Food Addiction with Dr. Joan Ifland Using Neuroscience, Mirror Neurons https://www.learntruehealth.com/healing-processed-food-addiction-with-dr-joan-ifland-using-neuroscience-mirror-neurons   Highlights: What is food addiction How do you get food addiction Processed foods attack cell function in eight different ways Processed foods impair major frontal lobe functions What are mirror neurons 11 behaviors in addiction diagnosis   Dr. Joan Ifland is a food addiction expert and the lead editor and author of the textbook, Processed Food Addiction: Foundations, Assessment, and Recovery. She has helped thousands of people overcome their food addiction and recover from diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, depression, fatigue, isolation, and obesity. In this episode, Joan explains what food addiction is, how it affects people’s lives with food addiction, and what you can do to overcome it. Intro: Do you have supplement confusion? Do you wish you could speak to an expert and figure out what you should take and why? If so, then you’ll definitely want to go to takeyoursupplements.com because they let you speak to a holistic health coach for free. Takeyoursupplements.com health coaches have been helping people gain their health back and dial in their supplement protocols for over 20 years. Our health coaches want to help you gain your health back naturally with the best holistic medicine. They work with the highest quality vitamins, minerals, and herbs to support you in increasing your health and achieving your fitness goals. More energy, mental clarity, balanced hormones, and blood sugar, better sleep, stamina, fertility, immune and digestive health, and the list goes on and on. Natural medicine gives your body the raw building blocks it needs to create new healthy tissue, repair, and heal. Everyone who supports their body’s ability to heal itself with the right natural medicine protocols feels and sees a substantial positive shift in their well-being. So if you want to feel and look healthier, go to takeyoursupplements.com, fill out the form, and one of our amazing highly experienced health coaches will speak with you for free and help you order the right supplements for you at the right price. They help you to order directly from the manufacturers so the savings are passed on to you. Plus there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee so you know you will get results or your money back. These are the exact same supplements that my husband and I have been on for years and then the same supplements that we give to our child. I love these supplements. They’ve really worked, of course, alongside a very healthy diet, which another benefit of going to takeyoursupplements.com is you will have the aid of your health coach who will help you dial in your diet and your supplement protocols to help you gain your health back and gain all of your health and fitness goals. So it’s really a win-win situation for you. Visit takeyoursupplements.com today and try them out. Give them a try and see just how amazing you feel with their help. Takeyoursupplements.com   [00:02:24] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 471. I’m so excited for today’s guest. We have Dr. Joan Ifland on the show who has groundbreaking research in how to recover from food addiction. She’s designed a program that helps people with severe processed food addiction overcome that. What I really like, Joan, is that you mentioned that those who have food addiction have been severely disrespected in the media, even from certain therapies. It’s a not well-understood addiction, it has a really negative stigma, and people feel a lot of shame and guilt about their food addiction. I’m really excited for you today to unpack what is food addiction. It’s such a strange thing to me because we have to eat, right? You don’t have to drink alcohol. You don’t have to smoke cigarettes. You don’t have to do heroin, but we have to eat. To have such day-to-day, moment-to-moment struggle with the internal desire for food, that hunger that never goes away, and all the body shame around that really eats the person alive. And then to feel like they can’t get any help because there’s such a stigma around it. I love the work that you do. You’re making such headway in this field, and I’m looking forward today for you to share some tools and for us to dive into this. I think that there are degrees of food addiction and there are degrees of recovery. And so I hope that for all listeners who have caught themselves realizing that for whatever part of the spectrum they’re on in their recovery or in food addiction, that they’re able to gain a foothold, some healing today, and some tools that they can take away and continue to grow. So welcome to the show.   [00:05:00] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yay. Thank you. Wow, that was the best introduction. Well done. You’re very clear on the issues and the context in which these issues have developed. Well done. Well done.   [00:05:16] Ashley James: I want to start by saying that this topic is no stranger to me. I watched my father struggle with food addiction. I watched my mother and I don’t know what flavor of food addiction she had, but she definitely had body shame, body issues. She was always dieting. It was like the last 15 pounds to lose. My mother was never overweight, but there was a lot of control around food. Then she would binge red jujubes and that was her secret. She would eat almost nothing. She would have almost nothing and then she would maybe eat handfuls of red jujubes. She believed low fat, so she bought into, okay, I’m going to grill a chicken breast and I’m going to have half a cup of broccoli and that’s my lunch. She believed that any starch was really unhealthy, so she would yell at me if we were at a restaurant and I ordered a fish with a side of rice. She did this one. She stood up at the restaurant and yelled at me. I was about 12 and she shamed me and yelled at me because I ordered rice. I mean, in her mind, she was so afraid that if you ate starch that you would get fat. So I grew up in this very controlling, food was very controlled, and she had a lot of emotion and upset around it. And then my dad on the other hand, snuck food and was always up and down 100 pounds and just yo-yoing. And then for me, I really have seen that food, and I don’t gravitate towards processed food because I’ve learned it’s so not healthy for me and for anyone, but for me, I have worked on the emotions around food, around binge eating, overeating, and food addiction. I’ve been working on that for years. I’ve seen people who are sort of worse off than me and people who are better off, and like I said, that’s what I feel it’s a spectrum. I feel that even someone who seemingly looks healthy could have a food addiction. Just like any addiction, in my experience—I’d love for you to fill in the details—we go towards an addiction, for that dopamine, for that sense of control, and that sense of relief. It’s a stress relief that dopamine in the brain. It is a coping mechanism, but it’s also like our blanket, our Binky, something that comforts us when we’re in high stress and it gives us that relief. What I’d love to dive in and find out, what starts food addiction? Why do some people go towards heroin and don’t have a food addiction and other people have food addiction? What is it about the people that end up with food addiction, why didn’t they end up with heroin addiction? It’s such a different thing.   [00:08:48] Dr. Joan Ifland: This is a really, really great way to start the interview. I do want to say I’m sorry for the modeling and the behavior of your parents. But it does answer your opening question, which is how the heck do we get this? You got it from your parents, the processed food industry, the health industry, and the diet industry. They all contribute to the development of processed food addiction in different ways. But let me start out with mechanics. So what is actually going on in the brain? This is a great gift that brain imaging technology has given us is an understanding of what’s going on in the brain. Because prior to a clear understanding of the mechanics, these brain cells are hyperactive, these brain cells are not active. Prior to that, people made up stories about addictions. This person was weak-willed. If they just had more willpower, they’d be able to conquer it. They don’t like themselves, they lack self-control, or they’re even immoral. So all these stories about addicted people have sprung up, and none of them are true. None of them are true at all. It’s simple in concept and thousands of complexities in implementation for recovery, but the concept is quite simple, and it happens in stages. So step one is the reward system brain cells are taught through Pavlovian conditioning to explode with feel-good neurotransmitters. How do you teach a cell to explode with feel-good neurotransmitters? You ingest substances that cause those cells to explode. Literally flood the brain with enough craving neurotransmitters to control behavior, and that is the key to everything. Once we have addicted brain cells and they are putting out this flood of neurotransmitters, that alone is capable of controlling behavior.  So those neurotransmitters go over to the motion center, the behavior center in the brain, latch on to the behavior of brain cells, and you are going to get the substance. So here’s what is not happening is the frontal lobe which is where rational thought lives—   [00:12:03] Ashley James: Yeah, where’s the frontal lobe in any of this?   [00:12:07] Dr. Joan Ifland: So the blood flow has been pulled off to the addicted brain cells and the frontal lobe is not firing. It’s literally not firing, so all the good things that you’ve learned, the determinations, all that stuff is not available. It’s like that part of your computer has crashed. There’s no data in, there’s no data out, and there’s certainly no control. Well, here’s the next step then. Anything associated with those substances is actually more powerful in being able to trigger the addicted brain cells. Maybe you have a friend and you go and you get addictive substances with that friend. That friend is now what’s called an associative cue, an associative trigger. That just seeing that friend can set those addicted brain cells off to creating this flood of cravings.  In the case of processed foods, there are so many different substances that all four of the major feel-good reward pathways have become addicted. So that’s dopamine, serotonin, opiate, and cannabinoid. This is one of the reasons why this particular addiction is so hard to give up. And then the other piece of it is that the processed food industry was really taken over by big tobacco in the mid-1980s. They have an addiction business model. They deliberately train those feel-good pathways to become reactive to cueing, so you associate processed foods with everything because they’re everywhere. They’re at your school, they’re at your faith organization, they’re at your workplace. They’re all over your house. Hopefully not anymore, but they’re on the road. They’re on TV. They’re everywhere.  You are constantly, by association, being stimulated to release those craving brain chemicals. If they build up enough, they will get control of behavior. That’s how you get an addiction. This substance is ingested, the substance causes this eruption, and then you begin to get the cued eruption. You’re not using the substance, but you have an association with it, and that starts setting off this flood that controls behavior. Let me just stop there. Does that help?   [00:15:15] Ashley James: That’s great and I have questions. When you said there’s an associated person, but that’s like the Pavlovian trigger, the anchor. It could also be a location. It could be smells. It can be marketing like you see the brands, you see the logo, or the box. o for me, location. I think back to a location where I would have ingested a substance that causes all of the feel-good or chemicals to go off. Then just even thinking about being back in that location for me.  It could be music if music was playing at the time of the heightened—so maybe not everyone knows what the Pavlovian response is. It’s when you’re at a heightened emotional state and there’s another stimulus around, your brain will then anchor those two together. A song is playing when you’re in a heightened state, the next time that song plays it will trigger that heightened state, not as much but it will trigger it enough for you to think back and maybe start wanting that again. My husband said something very interesting. He goes, the first time you do—I’m just going to say substance because it could be drugs, alcohol. Whatever the substance is, the first time you do it is not as good as the next time or the time after. He did a substance, let’s say it’s a chocolate chip cookie or whatever the substance was, he did it and he loved it so much. Then he did it 20 more times throughout a few months trying to chase that high and he said it was never as good as the first time.  Can you explain why is it that the first time is amazing and then we tend to try to chase that high of maybe in our memory it feels like it’s so amazing and then we get disappointed? I ate a chocolate chip cookie and it’s like, wow, this wasn’t as good as that other time. I’m going to keep trying to find the chocolate cookie that brings back that first time.   [00:17:38] Dr. Joan Ifland: You’re asking a super excellent question. Let me elaborate on the first part of what you just said, and then I’ll go into the kind of diminishing return. Why is it that the brain so easily picks up these associative cues? People, places, things, time of year, time of day? Why?  It’s because if you believe in evolution, every time a human for 7 million years found food, the brain would mark every, every, every, every detail of that moment because a year later with no ability to record anything, just relying on memory, that human would have to find that place again at that time of year and maybe even at that time of day. If for example it was maybe an egg and you needed to go up and get the eggs when the parent birds were off foraging. The brain timestamps every, every, every detail, and this is also true for addictions because these foods are not food. The sugar, flour, gluten, excessive salt, dairy, processed fats, caffeine, food additives, the brain is not registering those as food. They’re registering them as addictive drugs, but addictive drugs timestamping works the same way.  If you were a human a million years ago and you found food, your brain would timestamp every, every detail of that moment. The weather, the plants, the mountains, the path, the location of the stream, the time of day, who’s with you, the terrain, the soil, every, every detail so that you could find it again in a year with no ability to record any detail of it. So it’s every detail. I mean, you may think, oh, it could be a color, it could be anything, the brain will just look at every, every detail. And then, of course, the food industry exploits that by putting those associative cues in front of people all the time. Okay, so I just wanted to reinforce exactly what you were saying.   Now, why are there diminishing returns? This is called tolerance or progression. There are two easy things to understand. One is when the brain has had a big an over like an abnormal amount of anything, there is a counteracting emotion. When the feel-good pathways have had this extraordinary flood, the counteracting motion is for the stress pathway to release stress. It’s called the corticotropin-releasing factor pathway, and it sends messages to the adrenal glands to release cortisol, create some stress, and put the brain back into balance. That part of the brain also gets trained to respond, and it will respond sooner and sooner and sooner as it picks up the Pavlovian conditioning. That’s one reason why there is a diminishing return. The other reason is that the way two neurons, two brain cells communicate is across a gap called a synapse. The way it works is cell number one releases the neurotransmitter. Cell number two has a receptor. In the case of the reward pathways, the receptor is a C-shaped receptor, so the neurotransmitter actually hits like a ball into a C. What happens over time because those receptors are not designed to maintain that level of bombardment, the first time it happens, all of the neurotransmitters hit the receptors and the pleasure is transmitted through the nervous system. But the second time, the body is saying no, no, no, no, we cannot tolerate this amount of excitement, pleasure. We’re not designed to do that.  The brain will start to shut down receptors to prevent that surge. Over time, it just shuts down more and more and more and more. This is why you don’t get the pleasure from it, but you continue to pursue it because if you stop, then only the stress pathways are active and it hurts. It hurts to stop. That is withdrawal. That’s how we know that this is drugs. People continue to use processed foods. This could take months or years. At some point, you’re not getting any pleasure out of it at all. There are so many receptors that are shut down. We actually see this on PET scans, Positron Emission Tomography scans, where a healthy person has these bright red dopamine receptor fields. Obese people don’t have them and cocaine-addicted people don’t have them. It’s one of our strongest pieces of evidence that this is drug addiction, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with eating.  Just like the tobacco industry hid nicotine in cigarettes and addicted people by hiding the addictive substance. Once tobacco came into processed foods, they hired a consultant, Howard Moskowitz, to hide the maximum amount of sugar, fat, and salt in foods before people could detect it. It’s just diabolical, but none of it was our fault. In the progression, you feel worse and worse and worse, the depression and anxiety are increasing, but it’s increasing in response to the substances, to the mechanical almost like an allergic reaction now. You have this big flood of neurochemicals being released. There are fewer and fewer neurotransmitter receptors to send the message and you’re still having this stress reaction. So people’s emotional profiles just fall apart.   [00:24:43] Ashley James: A few years ago I was reading a study that talked about these PET scans. The TLDR was people who are not obese don’t think about food, they don’t really get pleasure from thinking about food or planning it, but when they eat, they actually receive pleasure. Those who had obesity or food addiction spent a lot of time thinking about and planning their next meal and planning their next snack and really getting stimulated. The pleasure center’s getting stimulated over thinking about it. But then when they went to eat, it was so disappointing.  Kind of like porn addiction, fantasy is better than reality and I thought that was fascinating. Is there a way to reverse it? Is there a way to reverse it so that those who have a food addiction and also cocaine addiction that those centers of the brain aren’t lighting up anymore? Is there a way to heal the brain and come back from this?   [00:25:55] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes. What you have to do is give the whole system a big rest. You have to stop stimulating it. Now if for alcohol or cocaine addiction, you avoid the cues. So you avoid the people that you used with and you don’t drive past the crack house, find another way. This is part of the complexity of recovering from processed food addiction is it’s everywhere. You have two pathways. One is to avoid the cueing and two is to neutralize cues. You can rewire the brain to associate the substances with pain and people are more driven by pain aversion than they are by pleasure-seeking. This is great research coming out of the economics field. In our programs, we encourage people to come into the program and talk about a lapse so that they can then immediately associate the pain with it. There’s a lot of pain from processed foods—physical, mental, emotional, and behavioral. It’s quite destructive. It’s just as destructive. It looks very different, but it’s just as destructive as any drug addiction.  The name of the game is to train the brain that when you think about that food you think about the headaches, stomachache, screaming at your children, fatigue, not able to sleep, racing thoughts, intense cravings, breaking out of the skin, stomach ache, asthma, inflammatory properties, infections, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Processed foods attack cell function in eight different ways. There are 144 conditions associated by research with processed foods. It’s not hard to come up with a very long list of things that go haywire when you eat processed foods.  Let me go back to something that you started out saying, Ashley, we have to eat. That would be saying to an alcoholic, well, figure out how to use alcohol because you have to drink. No. We all know how to divide the world of beverages into safe and alcoholic, non-alcoholic and alcohol, and then there’s really a third category, which is the druggie sugared beverages. We do the same thing with food. We have safe unprocessed foods and then we have addictive processed foods. It is the processing that concentrates natural endorphins in the food to the point where they’re strong enough to train these reward centers to release craving neurotransmitters.   [00:29:13] Ashley James: Is there a particular diet that helps us heal the brain faster or the fastest diet that doesn’t overstimulate the pleasure centers?   [00:29:30] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yeah. If it’s okay if I mention a website.   [00:29:35] Ashley James: Sure.   [00:29:36] Dr. Joan Ifland: Processedfoodaddiction.com and just sign up for the free information and you will get to two lists. One is the excluded food list. This is based on research. I wrote and edited the textbook for the field, Processed Food Addiction: Foundations, Assessment, and Recovery. I wrote the whole food plan chapter in that textbook. It’s based on 250 studies. We know—the research is clear—that there’s a whole range of addictive substances that have been added to our food or just presented through advertising that they are food. They’re not food, they’re drugs. It’s just like the tobacco industry was able to persuade us that cigarettes are sexy. Cigarettes are disgusting and repulsive. Cigarettes are rebellious. No, they’re killing you. Or that they’re sophisticated, they’re modern, or any of those things. They’re none of those things. So these are fantasies that the tobacco companies created in order to get people to use the addictive substances often enough to create the conditioning of the reward centers. They’ve done exactly the same thing with these drugs. They’ve created the delusion that they are food. They’re not food. They’re just not food. We do have the excluded list, and then we have the clean list. Now inside our programs, we teach people a rotation method to figure out which foods on the unprocessed list are harmful to that individual.  There’s not a food plan. My food plan is completely different from anybody else’s food plan. I’m 70 years old. When I was 44 almost 26 years ago, I had a completely different food plan. The commonality from all these food plans is a highly individualized personalized food plan is they don’t have drugs in them.  Step one is to get the drugs out of your food and step two is to use a rotation method to see if you’re allergic to any of the unprocessed foods. I can’t eat the nightshade group, I can’t eat the citrus group, and I can’t eat the gourds—the melons, zucchini, and squash. I can’t. Those are just three groups. I have had lifelong asthma and they kick up my asthma, so I don’t eat them.   [00:32:34] Ashley James: And for others, the symptoms might be not as obvious. Figuring out your food sensitivities is a fun game. You could benefit from working with an experienced naturopathic physician or functional medicine practitioner. There’s also evidence that suggest that leaky gut syndrome, which of course we can definitely develop from eating processed foods and particularly gluten, grains, barley, wheat, rye, and even oats, which contain gliadin similar to gluten. That causes leaky gut syndrome, which increases food sensitivities and the body overreacts to certain foods. Healing the gut and also the microbiome, and I have several episodes on that. Listeners could go to learntruehealth.com and use the search function to find them, but several interviews on healing the microbiome of the gut and healing leaky gut syndrome. There are ways to support the body in overcoming some food sensitivities, but then others are baked into the cake like for you, you’ve noticed that nightshades do not complement your physiology and so you avoid them. I think it’s really important to also listen to the body because problems with sleep, problems with concentration, mood swings, and even skin problems all can be from foods that we’re having sensitivities towards. But my big thing is whole foods. If it came from the ground or if it’s the whole form it’s not processed, and therefore, it’s much more likely to not trigger the hyper response that processed foods are designed to like designer drugs, right?   [00:34:30] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes, exactly, exactly, exactly. This is a business model that is used by alcohol, marijuana, vaping, tobacco, and processed foods. Even the pharmaceutical industry used it to start the opioid epidemic. The way they marketed it to doctors, very deceptive, were hidden addictive properties to the product, which they did not tell the doctors about so the doctors prescribed it freely and people became very addicted. It’s very, very sad. It’s very sad. Our government just stands by and lets it happen.   [00:35:13] Ashley James: No, the government actually invests in it but through food subsidies. We’re subsidizing crops that directly benefit the processed food industry. Not only that, the processed food industry lobbies so that these foods are fed to prisoners and to children in schools. I cannot even begin to wrap my brain around when you look at what public school children are fed, the amount of processed food they are fed, the amount of sugar, and then they’re given drugs for ADHD. It is just like the perfect storm.  Big food and big pharma got together and said, let’s both work together to lobby to increase our profits. Let’s fill children with sugar and with artificial dyes, and then we’ll create a drug that they need because they’re going to be so hyper off the wall because their brains are being put on a barbecue. They’re putting them in the deep fryer, basically. Their brains are so hopped up on all these excitotoxins and all the neurotransmitters that are so hyped up it’s like they’re on cocaine and then we’re going to have to give them drugs. When I was a kid, in a classroom of 30 kids, there’d be one kid with ADHD. One kid was on Ritalin, and now it is so much more common. These children’s brains are still developing and to put them on these drugs will affect them for the rest of their lives. The long-term devastating effects of being put on Ritalin or Adderall is incredibly harmful to a growing child. Food is the main culprit.   [00:37:06] Dr. Joan Ifland: Processed foods.   [00:37:07] Ashley James: The processed foods, I apologize. Yes, processed foods are the culprit that is creating this. I have several episodes on ADHD and overcoming it, healing the brain, healing the body, and correcting the diet for ADHD. We have to get the 30,000-foot view and we have to study the history of the last 100 years to really understand the amount of marketing, the creation of what we live in today. I’ve said this on the show before, so I grew up in the ‘80s. I was born in 1980. I’m 41 years old, and I grew up in Canada. So a little bit different than the states, but not much. I remember watching Kellogg’s commercial, “Milk does a body good,” watching Tony the Tiger, and all these different childlike characters for all the different cereals and it made me feel good. Now, I never ate any of these cereals because my mom wouldn’t let any sugar in the house. My mom was very controlling of our food. It did have its benefits. Once a year, on my birthday, I was allowed to eat whatever I wanted and you bet I ate cereal. I ate Honeycomb even though it tore my mouth up. I remember that. But once a year I was allowed to have Pizza Pops and whatever junk food, but the rest of the year there was no junk food. That’s a good thing. It’s a good thing, but I think that there needs to be a balance to teach a child how to make their own choices so they don’t rebel when they’re older like I did.  I remember watching the marketing and then going into the grocery store and seeing it on the shelves. You know what it instilled in me although I never ate them? It instilled in me a sense of safety. I remember because I grew up with all this marketing and then I walk past all these cereal boxes. Oh, the familiar faces. Look, there’s that rooster. There’s that little ghost character. There’s Tony the Tiger. It was like all these familiar faces, the branding. You see these companies, the tobacco companies, they don’t just mark it for the next 5 or 10 years. They are generational marketing. They plan on paying for marketing so that a four-year-old will buy their products when they’re 40. When you said that we have to take ourselves away from the stimulant and choose foods that aren’t going to create that stimulant but also just walk into a grocery store alone, you’re bombarded by all the logos even from your childhood.   [00:40:04] Dr. Joan Ifland: We have innovated a very, very new approach to this particular addiction. We get it deep, deep, deep down on the inside to spend three years full-time developing, editing, writing, and researching the textbook. There are two things I got out of doing that. One, we’ve never had such a severe addiction on the face of the earth because there are so many different substances, because we’re being bombarded with cueing because the illnesses to develop are so debilitating. But you hit on the thing that’s never really happened before. Once high fructose corn syrup was introduced to the market, the drugs could be cheap enough to be marketed heavily to children. So if you are born to parents using processed foods, the very first DNA replication will be of an addicted DNA strand, and you’d never have one minute. If your mother’s eating sugar, the sugar’s coming through the breast milk. If they’re not, then the baby formula industry has loaded sugar into baby formula, so it starts at a very young age. There are many complications of that. The blood flow is being pulled to the addicted brain cells and away from their frontal lobe. So all the major frontal lobe functions are now impaired, and that includes being able to pay attention, learn, make decisions, control impulses, and remember. So you see these epidemics of impairment in those areas.   [00:41:54] Ashley James: Can we pause for a second? Can you go back? I think that just really is something that needs to be underlined. What are the functions of the brain that are impaired?   [00:42:05] Dr. Joan Ifland: The whole frontal lobe is not getting blood flow. The very highly specialized cells in the frontal lobe that distinguish us from animals are things like the ability to pay attention to something for a long time. That’s not getting any blood flow. That’s an attention deficit. Learning is in the frontal lobe. This is very different from just mechanical Pavlovian conditioning of the midbrain or the primitive brain, so you have learning difficulties. Here’s the thing, if I’m going to assert that this is a very, very widespread addiction, then you have to show things. You have to show an agent who’s creating the addiction. Okay, we have the processed food industry and we have the complicity of the government. You’re absolutely right if you say big pharm. You have the blood flow being pulled away from the frontal lobe where you have attention paying. You have decision-making, and this is different from the reflexive behaviors that come out of the midbrain.  The frontal lobe is able to create conscious behavior if those cells have blood flow, but in the addicted brain, the blood flow is going back into the addicted brain cells, the stress pathways, and the locomotion pathways. If you don’t have good decision-making, which we see rampantly, you don’t have impulse control and you don’t have memory. Those are all frontal lobe functions, so you have an epidemic of Alzheimer’s and you have an epidemic of poor impulse control. I know I went into kind of the “online basement” of the US Department of Agriculture to write. Our research team published the first description of refined foods in addiction in the Academic Press. We got to name the disease.  But for that article, I said, I’ve got to show exactly which substances were increased in use through the obesity epidemic. I think I went to like 1970 and 1997, and these substances that were increased in use were high fructose corn syrup, gluten-containing flour, high-fat dairy, and potatoes, so frozen potatoes, french fries, fried potatoes. Beans did not increase, red meat did not increase, none of those real foods increased. They’re always trying to point, oh, see, carbs are bad or red meat is bad. No, no, the consumption of those did not increase in between those two years. If I’m going to say that processed food addiction is behind these cognitive impairments, this mental impairment, I’ve got to make all those pieces fit together and they do. The research is just incredibly consistent. If you say, well, these foods are causing the problems, then you better be pointing at epidemics of those problems.  At that point, in 1997, people were eating a pound per person per day of sugars, gluten-containing flour, high fat dairy, and fried potatoes. That was then. As we were just talking, the progression, the tolerance eating more of the substances over time, that data is from 20 years ago. Now we have new research actually coming out of Canada, showing that adolescents are eating 67% of their calories in these processed foods, and that probably doesn’t include dairy. People don’t know to include dairy in the category of processed foods.  If you’re going to say that processed foods caused these problems, then you’re going to have to point to epidemics of those problems at that consumption level, and there they are. There are the epidemics—diabetes, heart disease, stroke, obesity, Alzheimer’s, dementia, learning disabilities, attention span, poor decision making, poor impulse control, memory loss, and then all the rest of them you would have to see gut disorders. You would have to see inflammatory diseases, and they’re all there. They’re all epidemics.   [00:47:34] Ashley James: Everything that you mentioned makes them feel worse. This is the catch 22; this is the cycle, right? They feel bad because they have those conditions, and then they need that pick me up because they feel bad, so then they reach for one of these foods.   [00:47:52] Dr. Joan Ifland: It’s the insanity. It’s the mental illness aspect of it. You also have all the emotional disorders because of the downregulated—it’s called downregulated when those feel-good receptors start collapsing. They look like the head of a dead [inaudible 00:48:13]. Now you cannot process quick feelings. You see this very minuscule but very disturbing not yet statistically significant increase in suicides across all ages but among children.   [00:48:33] Ashley James: Yes. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among children today.   [00:48:39] Dr. Joan Ifland: It’s because their world, all the pathways in the brain that would bring reasons for optimism or some kind of future, has collapsed. It’s a mechanical problem, and so you have depression. Now you have all this extra adrenaline because remember, the stress pathways are compensating for these surges of euphoria. You have extra adrenaline, which is anger and anxiety. I got into this field 26 years ago because I got off of sugars and flours to solve a weight problem and my raging went away. I wasn’t expecting that. The sinus infection went away. The bloating went away. The weight was coming off easily. The cravings went away. The brain fog went away. All that stuff went away and I was thrilled. The allergies went away, fatigue. It was amazing. It was like I was winning the lottery every day. But when I got to the third week of that program, I realized that I hadn’t raged at my husband or children. I hadn’t yelled, I hadn’t criticized, I hadn’t found anything wrong with them. I got a new career.  I was a Stanford MBA. I had a corporate career, which I had to let go of because I was too sick, too allergic to go back to work, too tired, too brain fog. But instead of going back into the corporate world, I began looking for research. That was 26 years ago. The impact on the personality of these drugs is horrifying.   [00:50:28] Ashley James: Sorry to interrupt, you describe my mom. Ninety percent of the time she ate so strictly because she had to keep her figure. But then she would sneak these jujubes, she’d sneak these chocolates, and then she’d just rage at us, just snapped.  Like I said, she stood up in a restaurant and started yelling at me because I ordered a dish that had a side of rice with steamed vegetables and a grilled fillet of fish. I purposely made this really conscious effort. I really wanted to impress her with making a good choice on the menu and then she just stood up and screamed at me. She would throw things. She would just snap and start raging. That does really describe that. She had huge problems concentrating. I remember she couldn’t follow movies. She was wonderful as a businesswoman. She owned her own business. It was incredibly successful, so she had a lot on her mind. She admitted that when we went to plays or musicals, she couldn’t follow the plot. We watched movies, she didn’t really follow the plot, and she read all the time. I found her to be incredibly intelligent, but her concentration and her raging, I mean, I wonder if that was linked to her own food addiction.   [00:51:55] Dr. Joan Ifland: Totally. These are drugs. These are characteristic behaviors of people with cocaine addiction or alcoholism, these really vast mood swings. On top of the elevated adrenaline, these processed carbohydrates particularly get into the bloodstream all at once. They’re pre-digested, there’s no breaking down process. So you get these glucose highs, and then the pancreas can be conditioned to anticipate this surge of glucose in the bloodstream, which is deadly by the way.  If your glucose is too high, your brain goes out, so it’s deadly. The pancreas is on red hot alert, oh, it’s coming, It’s coming, it’s coming. It’ll start releasing insulin before the glucose even gets there so you constantly have these highs. And then in the crash, it’s the adrenal gland that goes back over to the fat cells and pulls glucose out so that you don’t die from low blood sugar.  There are two danger zones—the high blood sugar and the low blood sugar—and then there’s the safety zone in between. So when you are crashing, the insulin has been released and your blood sugar is falling, you totally lose control of behavior. Eighty percent of violent offenders in prison have hypoglycemia, not enough, so it’s unstable blood glucose. And then on top of that, you lay on the caffeine.  Caffeine works by blocking a calmness function on the nervous system. The part of the nervous system that is designed to emit messages of calmness, peacefulness, contentment, caffeine blocks that function. You can’t feel calm. Caffeine doesn’t work because you’re more alert. Caffeine works because you’re less calm. It’s a nasty combination.   [00:54:15] Ashley James: It blocks the part of the brain that tells you you’re tired. So your body is tired, but your brain’s not going to tell you you’re tired. It’s blocking the tiredness. I mean, that is just such a great example of our entire food industry, our entire processed food industry. It’s like, we’re going to jack you up. You wake up and you’re tired. Okay. Dr. Molly Niedermeyer is a naturopathic physician. She was the Dean of Naturopathic Medicine at Bastyr University. I think she was one of the first deans. She’s been practicing for well over 30 years. I had her on the show and she said a 5% reduction in hydration leads to a 25% reduction in energy production. ATP can’t be created as well if we don’t have enough water. So we wake up dehydrated and what do we do?  We’re tired, we’re cranky because we had a bad night’s sleep because we’re rolling on the sugar highs and lows and all the stimulants from the processed foods, and so then we reach for caffeine. Caffeine dehydrates us further and blocks the ability for us to even recognize and get in touch with our body and feel that we’re that tired. Then what you said is it blocks the calmness in the brain, so now we’re more agitated, then add sugar to that and we rage.   [00:55:46] Dr. Joan Ifland: Exactly. It impairs, it just makes painfully dysfunctional every system in the body.   [00:56:01] Ashley James: We don’t have access to the logic centers of our brain anymore, so we can’t think critically. And then we go around our life reacting to things instead of planning and controlling our behaviors. If we control our behaviors, we control our outcomes in life. If we don’t have control of our behaviors, we don’t have control of our outcomes, we feel out of control, and then we reach towards substances that allow us to, at the moment, feel like we have control, which furthers the cycle.   [00:56:28] Dr. Joan Ifland: Feelings drive the whole thing and feelings are now being controlled by the substances. But can I offer your listeners a ray of hope?   [00:56:38] Ashley James: Yes. I’m glad we’ve painted the picture though. I think it’s really important to really understand that someone who is involved in food addiction and possibly even their parents, their grandparents, this could be generational. It’s not because, like you said, they’re weak-willed, they don’t love themselves enough, or there’s something wrong, bad, and shameful about them. Their brain chemistry has been hijacked by an industry, for some people, since birth.   [00:57:07] Dr. Joan Ifland: Since conception. There’s one system in the brain in the body which works no matter what. No matter what else is going on, this one system continues to work, and the fact that it continues to work will either kill you or save you. I am talking about mirror neurons.  They’re quite a recent discovery. It was discovered in a monkey lab in Italy. What they do is they copy. They copy the behavior of the people they see the most. They’re the second most powerful system in the brain. The most powerful system in the brain is the autonomic system, which is making our heartbeat and our blood flow. Then there is, under one particular circumstance, the fear of famine brain, the food-seeking brain will become more and more powerful than mirror neurons. There has to be a pretty severe famine going on for it to take precedence over mirror neurons. So mirror neurons are the second most powerful system in the brain for a very good reason. For seven million years of human evolution, if you were accepted into a tribe of 7 to 12 other humans, you lived, you survived because they could find food, find shelter, protect your children, and protect you from predators. If you’re the kind of person who likes wandering off by yourself, well, the predators were waiting for you. The evidence on this is kind of shocking. But in prehistoric hyena caves, anthropologists and archeologists have found human bones in the bone piles. So we know that at least hyenas ate humans. In evolution, if you had really good mirror neurons you would live. So in the evolution of humans, mirror neurons take just increasing precedence in the hierarchy of the brain.  Now, the food industry knows this tragically well, and this is why you will see commercials on TV that feature people sitting on sofas watching TV. When you see one of those commercials, your mirror neuron says, oh yeah, that’s my tribe. I’m going to the kitchen because I need something to eat. The opportunity to get free of all of the brain malfunctions, all the brain dysfunction is to find a tribe of 7 to 12 people that you are going to spend most of your time with. This is the breakthrough that we have incorporated into our online community. We offer 15 hours a day of live programming. There is a real trained person on that Zoom screen. Because you can just pop in, you can pop in for five minutes, you can pop in for an hour, you can pop in for all 15 hours, and then you can fill in the gaps through the day with videos from our video library that we have made ourselves. And it’s pretty cool. I mean, it’s just so cool.  So hopeful is what a short period of time it takes for mirror neurons to swing away from the unhealthy people in our lives over to the healthy people. We are seeing that screens work perfectly well. Only 2% of the brain is the frontal lobe. The frontal lobe is teensy, teensy, teensy tiny. The frontal lobe cannot win in any kind of competition with any other nodules, nodes, cortexes in the brain. It’s too tiny. It’s way too tiny. But what the frontal lobe can do is it can control the messaging that reaches the other 98% of the brain, and that’s the hope of the world.   [01:01:53] Ashley James: Fascinating. So throughout the day, if someone is struggling or catching themselves in the middle of a food choice, they could login. What does that look like? They log into the group video chat. What does that look like?   [01:02:13] Dr. Joan Ifland: It’s a Zoom Room. We have a Zoom Room for those 15 hours. One of those hours is a conference call because then we can record the conference call. We don’t record anything on Zoom for confidentiality, but we do record the conference call. They can listen to that conference call then any time of day. The idea for this came from writing the textbook. There are 11 specific signs for addiction and I wrote a full chapter on how present those signs are in overeaters. There are 11 chapters in the textbook describing each one of those diagnostic criteria as they manifest in overeating. They are criteria that are adapted from diagnosing the existence of alcoholism, so they’re adapted to overeating. That’s also on the processedfoodaddiction.com website. Once I got that, oh, it’s a severe addiction. Oh my gosh. And people are severely traumatized by having had it, the addiction itself alone would be traumatizing. It creates so much pain. But then you get all this insanity out of the health industry. The diet industry is working away to wake up your fear of famine brain. Now you have fear of famine on top of the addiction. It’s another reason why it’s so severe. Well, I’m in the middle of researching what do you do for severe addiction? You go to residential treatment for a couple of years. You go for a fully committed year and then you go maybe on a work-release program where you go to work during the day and then come back to the facility at night. And then maybe you go to a halfway house for another couple of years. We’re not doing that for the hundreds of millions of people who are addicted to processed foods.  The next level of treatment is something called intensive outpatient (IOP). Well, hospitals don’t have a clue and hospitals are profiting from this, so they don’t want to fix it either. I mean, they do, but the pharmaceutical industry has got their claws into the medical community. They’re trained to believe anything outside of the pharmaceutical is quackery, so they’re not going to be supporting this. But right at that time, Zoom came along. Literally, I turned in the manuscript for the textbook in May of 2017. I was already doing a daily phone call, which wasn’t working. A daily phone call was not nearly enough to rewire 100 billion brain cells. I mean, I’m serious, you need to rewire every friggin’ brain cell, and there are 100 billion of them. Zoom came along and I thought, wow, I wonder if this would work. We did a beta the first week of January 2018. These were people who had been on my daily phone call and they were all eating clean by the end of the week. They had not been able to get to eating clean going through withdrawal from all these different substances, maintaining the elimination of these. They hadn’t been able to do it with a daily phone call for two years. But boom, within one week, they were all eating clean. I had scheduled a pay the public week the following week, same thing, same friggin’ thing. Even at the end of day one, everybody from the outside—so we had the people from the beta who were on and that. I didn’t know about mirror neurons at this point, but the fact that there were people eating clean from the week before, you need at least five people to fully engage brain cells. The more similarities between the people the better this works. But by the end of the first day, I think we had 7 or 10 people from the outside, they were all eating clean. I was shocked. Ashley, at that point, I had spent 22 years looking for a reliable method. I’m going to start tearing up here. Twenty-two years looking for a reliable way to get people off of processed foods. I mean, I started out with a handout. I’m sure that once people know they should eat this and all that they’ll just do it. No, no, no. I went through 14 different really highly committed efforts to get people off of processed foods, and there it was. It was probably January 7 or January 8, 2018. There it was. After 22 years of looking, there it was, the mirror neuron engagement.   [01:07:24] Ashley James: So the mirror neurons don’t engage when it was just auditory, it needs to be visual as well?   [01:07:31] Dr. Joan Ifland: So you can get some mirror neuron engagement from auditory, but getting the visual, the eye-to-eye. When you think about how these brain cells developed over seven million years. For 7 million years until humans developed language capabilities, everything they saw was true, so that’s why in 98% of the brain, there is no filter. The brain absorbs messaging and files it away as if it were true.  This is how the food industry has made—they kill a million Americans every two years. A million Americans die of diet-related diseases every two years. The epidemic of COVID would not have happened unless it was coming in on top of processed food addiction with compromised immune systems. How is the food industry able to do that? How was it able to persuade those reward system brain cells to accept this messaging? It’s because only this little tiny frontal lobe, 2% of the brain, has the ability to tell the difference between something true and something not true. The only reason that capability developed is because language developed. Until you had language, there was no way to lie or deceive another person. Once you stop bombarding the addictive brain cells and the blood flow stops being taken up by the addicted and stress pathways, it will return to the frontal lobe. It’s the coolest thing. I mean, people think losing weight is the coolest thing, no. Getting your frontal lobe online is really cool.  People have been told, for example, that they’re stupid. They’ve been told that they’re slow. They’ve been told that they’re dumb. Boom, the frontal lobe starts getting blood flow and they’re brilliant. These are the kinds of very, very cool fun things. This is why it is worth it. It is worth it to get off the processed foods and get off the messaging. Get off the cueing, get off the triggering. Train the brain to go to the pain rather than the deceptive pleasure. Retrain the brain. It’s like learning a language, and it takes years. This quick weight loss thing, all it does is to fire up the fear of famine brain.   [01:10:25] Ashley James: Right. They certainly know how to market us to keep us cycling through this endless loop. We really need to step back from the dieting industry, the food industry, and all of the marketing and messaging. I think it’s so good to go back actually closer to 150 years. Go back and really understand the history of modern medicine and understand the amount of marketing and it’s generational marketing. Understand Edward Bernays and the history of propaganda. Since your grandparents, it has been in place and it’s a machine. It really is akin to The Matrix, isn’t it? We are plugged in, you are doped up, and you are plugged into a matrix where it is designed to keep us as cattle. We are fighting amongst ourselves. When I came from Canada to the United States and saw the difference in our political systems, I’m not saying that a parliamentary system is any better or any worse, but I am saying that is just a new perspective as an adult coming into the United States going, oh, okay, two parties. That’s interesting. Two is not a choice. Two is a dilemma. When you’re only given two, it’s a dilemma, right?  What I really clearly saw was that the way they set up the two-party system is it’s moral- and value-based arguments so that they keep us, the 99%, fighting amongst ourselves because how do you control a population when there’s less than 1% of the people controlling us? You keep fighting amongst ourselves. How do you control the cattle? If they constantly keep up abortion, and I’m not saying these issues aren’t legitimate issues. But the way the politicians fight on camera and then go behind the scenes and shake hands and they’re all buddy, buddy behind the scenes, it’s professional wrestling.  We need to use that very small 2% of our critical faculty of our frontal brain and we need to get the 30,000-foot view of how the entire society is set up to control you, to suck money out of your wallet, and to keep you sick and suffering. Not to do that to depress you but to free you. When you see the matrix you can free yourself from it. Another point is you touched on the autonomic nervous system, and one thing that happens when our body goes into fight or flight, which is a sympathetic response, is that it shunts blood away from the logic centers of the brain. We think, oh, well, I’m not in fight or flight. I had a client once tell me, because repeatedly she would do all my homework except do the homework that surrounded calming her nervous system, getting her out of fight or flight. She wouldn’t do that homework. I thought it was really interesting. She’d eat a pound of broccoli, but she wouldn’t take five deep breaths, go for a walk, meditate, or whatever.  After five sessions I said, there’s a lot of stress in your life. Why aren’t you doing this homework? She said, I don’t feel stressed. At the time, her mom was dying of cancer, she had a very busy job as a manager, then she came home and she had a daughter and a husband to cook and clean for, and there’s a lot of symptoms that she was expressing were unmanaged stress-related. Physical stress, her body was in the sympathetic nervous system response.  I said, I’m glad you said that because stress isn’t an emotion. Your physiology is switched over into emergency mode. Certain enzymatic processes stop happening so your body is not healing. Your body shunts resources. The analogy I like because I’m a big sci-fi fan, if you’ve ever watched Star Trek, Captain Picard will say when they’re under a Borg attack they’re really losing, that he needs to shut down the floors that are in use and divert all energy to the shields. That’s what this is.  So being in stress mode, your body is shutting down anti-cancer properties, immune properties, healing the lining of your stomach and your intestines. All these properties that aren’t essential for immediate survival get suppressed.   [01:15:36] Dr. Joan Ifland: They’re deprived of blood flow. The blood flow is going to the muscles.   [01:15:41] Ashley James: Yes, so that you can fight, flee, or survive in some way. The problem is people think, well, I wasn’t in any “stressful situation” today. I wasn’t in a car crash, I didn’t fight a bear. Yet what people don’t know is that you could be sitting here listening to this podcast and already be in fight or flight because your thoughts can trigger it, the processed foods you eat can trigger it. There are so many things. You don’t actually have to do anything external to trigger your ancient mechanism of survival.   [01:16:22] Dr. Joan Ifland: It can be habitual.   [01:16:25] Ashley James: Yes, habituated to it. Right.   [01:16:26] Dr. Joan Ifland: All your glands and organs are trained to be in that state and you might not even be aware of it. But it’s just what you’re saying.   [01:16:37] Ashley James: What do you do to help turn that off, get us out of sympathetic nervous system response, get us back into parasympathetic nervous system response of rest and digest, and get the blood flow going back into the frontal lobe so that we can begin to really make behaviors consciously?   [01:17:04] Dr. Joan Ifland: The big thing about our program is called the Addiction Reset Community. The very first stressor that is vastly relieved by coming into the program is isolation. You immediately get oxytocin releases, so those systems in the brain, that feel-good systems in the brain aren’t working too well. But being among a community releases oxytocin, and oxytocin will help the dopamine system start to work again.  Immediately, the fear of being eaten by a predator, which has been instilled for over seven million years, is gone because you now have people around you, and 98% of the brain doesn’t know that those people aren’t right there. Ninety-eight percent of the brain does not understand screens. It really does believe that those people are right in the next room or they’re right in front of us, but they’re in our house. They’re a couple of feet away. So immediately, the stress of isolation, and not just physical isolation, but processed foods cut off our ability to connect to other people. We have brain fog, we have cravings, we have shame, and we have a body shape that people are eyeballing disdainfully. We are raging, we are anxious, we are making up stories about how they don’t like us. We’re not connecting. You come into the ARC, the Addiction Reset Community, and people in the ARC, the managers are trained to let the members know that we understand what’s going on with them. We also have been through periods where we have lost control over food, where we have this deep depression. Just almost immediately, that mirror neuron engagement, oh, this person is like me. They understand me. They’re not telling me to push back from the table for heaven’s sakes. Now, why is that so important? Go back. Go back to the 7 million years of evolution and if you were able to communicate to another person, if you could look them in the eyes and make enough sounds to say there is a tiger behind that bush you would live. If you went to that person and you signaled with your eyes and your fingers that there was something wrong there and that person just said, oh, calm down. Let’s see. Oh, you have hyperexcitability. Let’s give you some medication for that, then you would die because the tiger would pounce. The ability for another person to see exactly what is going on with you, acknowledge it, affirm it, and agree that it is a huge relief. From there then you get into the complexities of changing your food. What we’ve learned over these 26 years is that there may be other problems that have to be solved before you can start eating in a different way.  You might have emotional, mental, or physical abuse going on in the household. You may have to work on relationship boundaries before you can even begin to go grocery shopping. You may be subjected to cueing, you might be working in a food environment, you may have a saboteur at home, or you may be too tired or brain fogged and it may be that somebody else is going to have to get on and order some groceries for you. You may have to start with sleep because fatigue and sleep deprivation are huge cues.  You may have to start with turning off screens earlier and earlier in the evening before you can have enough mental clarity—because screens are there to also scramble your brains—that you could actually put in a chicken breast and some broccoli. We give people the option to use starches or not just to make a meal. Get a couple of scrambled eggs going. You may have to solve other problems before you can even start on the food. But the thing that’s so cool is no matter how deep the cognitive impairment, the brain fog, the confused thinking, and the cravings, mirror neurons will take you there. The whole rest of the brain can be just so badly addicted and the cognitive impairment can be so severe you cannot think. Inflammation because these foods are inflammatory and they inflame the brain. The inflammation cuts off the ability to think. But through all that mess, through all that fog, mirror neurons are working.  People would just be so surprised. I ordered groceries and I made clean meals. I have been trying to do that for 20 years. I did it today. I’ve only been in here two or three days but I did it today. I made clean meals today. I’ve been trying to do this for 20 years. What happened? Oh, see, you were on the Zoom. You were on the ARC all day Monday and Tuesday and so Wednesday you made clean meals. It’s just so incredible.  It’s like you’ve been swimming in these rough cold seas for your entire life. And finally, the lifeboat came along and threw you a life preserver and somebody on the boat instructed you to grab onto the life preserver. When you got dragged over to the side of the boat you decided to get in. It’s so incredible, Ashley, now I’m crying here but it’s amazing to be able to get somebody to safety in just a few days.   [01:23:51] Ashley James: Yes. I’ve heard this quote several times from different people so I don’t know who came up with it originally, but whoever it is, mirror neurons describe it. You are the summary of the five people you spend the most time with.   [01:24:08] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes, that’s exactly right.   [01:24:10] Ashley James: JLD is a podcaster, Entrepreneur on Fire, and he was one of the people I modeled learning different technical things about podcasting and editing. It was about six years ago when I was studying. It was six years ago so it’s December, so it has been six years. I started studying how to do podcasts and I looked to him as well as Andrew Warner of Mixergy. Those are my two biggest models. JLD, with almost every episode, would say, you are the summary of the top five people you spend time with, meaning it can also include the podcast you listen to, it can also include the content you are consuming, right? As I’ve been listening to you, I’ve been thinking about reflecting on the last few years of my life because as I said in the intro, I’m on my own journey of overcoming my negative relationship with food and healing my body. I’ve healed my body from a lot of things. I used to have type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections for which I was on constant antibiotics for, and I had polycystic ovarian syndrome. I was told by an endocrinologist after a battery of tests that I would never have kids, that I’ve conceived naturally twice. I don’t have diabetes anymore and don’t have chronic adrenal fatigue anymore. For the last several years, I do not have polycystic ovarian syndrome, but I just got my blood work again because I do that bloodwork once or twice a year with my naturopath. Sure enough, there’s zero evidence of polycystic ovarian syndrome and yet it plagued me for over 20 years. If you go to an MD or an endocrinologist, they’ll say you have it for the rest of your life. It’s a falsehood just like diabetes, you don’t have to have those things. What I’ve been working on is weight loss and my problem has been my liver. I couldn’t figure out why every time I went to do—I have done over 30 diets my entire life, and I’ve shared this on the podcast before. That has definitely negatively impacted my body and I’ve learned from that and learned about how it harms the metabolism, the body goes into freak-out mode.  But even with healthy diets, when I started to lose weight healthfully, my liver would become inflamed and would stick out and become distended. You could actually see it pushing out. I went and got ultrasounds. What I finally figured out is that my phase two of liver detox is so gummed up, I have some genetic SNPs like MTHFR. So for me, in the last three or four years, I’ve been really working on heavy metal detoxification and lots of interviews about it.  But since I started the podcast, my mirror neurons have really benefited from these interviews. They’re not video interviews, but I have found myself after an interview about food addiction or about healthful eating, eating to nurture the body, and eating to bring stability and balance to hormones or to emotions, I’ve always found myself making better and better choices and then celebrating those choices. What really also helped me, because I’m just seeing this now, is that I did take a yearlong health coach training program through IIN, Institute for Integrative Nutrition, where it was videos but they were recorded videos of the audience and of the lecturer. Then they would break out and they would show the audience. I always felt like I was in the audience. I’d cry with everyone, I’d laugh with everyone. I felt like I was in the community and they were recorded videos.  My food choices and my health choices like going to sleep at a better time or removing certain things that were not healthy, adding certain things that gave me vibrance, joy, and health, and activities that improved my health. All these little steps, every baby step I felt like was definitely easier. I felt like I was celebrating it with this community as I’m watching this video. It makes so much sense that your Zoom calls live would create that sense. I can feel this warmness in my stomach, I can feel it even now in my body.   [01:29:07] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes. You’re getting an oxytocin release.   [01:29:10] Ashley James: Right. Last year we had such a hard time, everyone did with COVID, but we have a child who is such an extrovert. He craves other children’s attention, and so I found a small community of moms—like-minded, very holistic. I called us crunchy moms with very holistic organic eaters, gluten-free, and all that kind of stuff. They all have kids and they all wanted to create a community where the kids can play freely in the parks.  We’ve been doing that together for a year and a half now and I noticed that I’m almost addicted to going to the park and doing our weekly meetups because I feel so good in their presence. We just gab about whatever, give each other ideas, and share with each other. But that sense of that oxytocin, that sense of community, there’s nothing like it. It’s just wonderful. I can totally see why your Zoom calls would be so quick to help people start to make better and better choices.  Okay, so they step into the Zoom call, their mirror neurons are firing. It really does help them overcome the withdrawal, the physical withdrawal. Can you walk us through more of the biochemical or what’s happening in the brain when someone is stepping into these Zoom calls?   [01:30:38] Dr. Joan Ifland: So the dopamine is working better. Oxytocin actually works by supporting the dopamine system. If your dopamine system isn’t working at all, you get an oxytocin release that you will feel better for sure. Withdrawal avoidance is one of the reasons why people can’t get off particularly of the refined carbohydrates. But one thing I hope all of your listeners know is that withdrawal from refined carbohydrates—so sugars, flours, and sweeteners—is four to eight days. People will get to day three and maybe their cravings intensify. Day four, their cravings are still just unbearable. Hang on because that is going to go away. We also encourage people to take that list very slowly. It might take a couple of years to get off of the seven major categories of addictive substances because they are affecting four different pathways. The other thing to remember is that it only takes about three weeks for the dopamine receptors to open up again. People feel better within a couple of days because the pancreas is no longer pumping out vast amounts of insulin which is driving down blood sugar, which is releasing the adrenaline. So the anxiety levels start going down and getting better within a day or two or three or four. So people do start feeling calmer. They’ll say that. They’ll come on day two and say, wow, I can’t believe this just happened and I didn’t blow up. They begin to like themselves more. There’s a lot of self-hatred, self-blame, self-stigmatization. We use a lot of science to explain to people what happened to them and disengage them from the mythology that the recovery industry, the therapeutic industry has created. Because when therapists can’t get on top of this addiction in their patients because they’re not giving the patient enough immersion recovery. I think there are 167 hours in a week. One hour versus 167 hours, you are not going to retrain 100 billion brain cells by that approach. You need hours and hours and hours per day. You need a residential level of recovery.  Mirror neurons are watching other people get off of sugars and flours. We do have a pretty sophisticated method for managing the headache, the lethargy, the depression, the anxiety that comes with withdrawal. We know how to manage those and make it not quite so painful. It’s very important that withdrawal not be painful.   [01:33:57] Ashley James: Right, then you’re training the brain to not like it, to not like being off of those things like you said earlier. That makes so much sense.   [01:34:04] Dr. Joan Ifland: The cueing is so intense and the addictive brain cells are so sensitive, if you have a lapse, you want to be able to go straight back into withdrawal. You don’t want that lapse to drag on for days or even years. You want to have a lot of confidence, okay, I’m really good at managing withdrawal. I’m going to put the rest of this down the disposal and get back into withdrawal. So yeah, it’s part of the training. I feel like the Addiction Recovery Community is a training community. What happens when children are born addicted is that they’re trying to get life skills through an addicted brain—an inflamed brain, a craving brain, a brain that’s impaired cognitively, and it just doesn’t happen. I remember I said, oh, you know what, I’m going to start trying to describe all the skills that we teach in this community. The spreadsheet got longer and longer and longer. Finally, I sat back and I said why? Oh, it’s because it is one of the tenets of addiction that when the addiction starts, personality development stops. So if you started drinking at age 13, you have a different recovery than somebody who starts drinking heavily in their late 20s. You’ve just missed 15 years of personality development. Well, we never get any. I’ve been in New York now for four years. I have a very, very traumatic upbringing. I had that raging mother, I had a raging father. I had a raging older sister. This is in the 1950s and already women were being positioned, oh, modern women use convenience foods. We had Crisco, cake mixes, Tang, juice concentrates, jelly, white bread, and Velveeta cheese. We had all those processed foods already in the 1950s. Now, we were skinny as rails because we didn’t have the 15-pound packages of potato chips in our house, but we had personality disorders. We were always fighting, all five of us. I didn’t get life skills. Now, in the ARC, we lead with compassion. We lead with gentleness. We never tell our members what to do. We’re using a form of communication called motivational interviewing where we are listening carefully to the person’s strengths, the member’s strengths, and then we’re really discussing in detail their strengths.  What’s happening there is you are literally rewiring the part of the brain that says I can’t do this. You’re rewiring that part of the brain that says I can do this. Look, everybody around me is doing this. I can do this of course, and you’ve got the cooperation and the collaboration of the mirror neurons to do that. It works like gangbusters. It is shocking how well it works. Four years later, I’ve thrown off I don’t know what percentage of my parent’s’ negativity because their own self-confidence, self-esteem were so low they were using caffeine, sugar, processed foods, alcohol, and cigarettes every day—typical 1950s. He was a corporate executive, a Ph.D. biochemist, and a commander in the Navy, so he was a very authoritarian person. And then my mother was always drinking caffeine and sugar and she had that totally wacko emotional profile where you never knew—she could go from calm to belting you in 60 seconds. So growing up in that kind of a traumatic household, I was carrying a tremendous amount of fear, self-loathing, and self-doubt. But over four years of being in the ARC, we do a lot of what we call ARC exercises where we rewire a brain and it’s so simple. It’s so incredibly simple.  So an example would be what we call the because card. Because of ___ I used to ___, but now because of ___I ___. So when you say because of ___ I used to ___, you are opening up the synapse between two memory cells. And when you do that, you can put new information in there so that if the memory comes up, it doesn’t control behavior anymore. The new information controls behavior. So if I say because I was addicted to processed foods I used to rage, but now that I have eliminated processed foods, toxic media, toxic behaviors, and toxic people I am calm in all circumstances. So if something should happen to trigger a memory of raging, instead of being pulled back into raging, no, there’s new information there. I am calm in all circumstances. It works. It’s incredible. It’s so simple.  None of us are therapists. We’re not providing any therapy. We’re providing peer support, a structure, an environment, and a community in which people can get back in touch with how wonderful they are. So the way advertising works is it wants to persuade us that we have a pain, there’s something wrong with us, and we need to buy a product to fix it. None of that is true. We are incredible. We’re spectacular. We have incredible resources inside of us. We need very little. We need shelter, transportation, clean food, and good company. It just works, but that is how you do it. We have members all over the world. It’s a 24 hour a day operation. That 15 hours of live programming is extended over 24 hours.   [01:40:47] Ashley James: I love it. Oh, it’s so exciting that you’re having these results. The question that’s been on my mind is because we talked about your recent work and all the work that led up to these breakthroughs. I’m really curious though, what was your thesis when you earned your Ph.D. in addictive nutrition?   [01:41:05] Dr. Joan Ifland: So it was to validate the DSM, that’s the Diagnostic Manual for Mental Illness. Addictions are considered a mental illness. It was to validate the DSM for diagnostic criteria for alcoholism, for overeating, and we did it right out of the box and went to go with a really small sample. I’m teary because I remember, I had to go to school for new fields to get that Ph.D. I went to Union Institute & University in Cincinnati. The way it works is you have to collect faculty from other schools because you’re in a new field so there’s no existing faculty. I got the greatest people to work with me. Yeah, it was only 64 people. We got statistical significance, no problem. These characteristics of alcoholism are running rampant in overeaters.   [01:42:16] Ashley James: Where would the food addiction field be if it wasn’t for your work?   [01:42:26] Dr. Joan Ifland: Oh, Ashley. Oh, dear. It would still be in the dark ages. I have to tell you this little story if you don’t mind.   [01:42:41] Ashley James: I’d love to hear it.   [01:42:46] Dr. Joan Ifland: I have to think about how old I was, but  mid-60s, how in the world do I carve out three years full time to research and write? The textbook is 240,000 words. It’s built on 2000 studies. I wrote 70% of it and I persuaded other scientists to write the other 30% and I edited the other 30%. I persuaded food addiction practitioners to co-write the chapters on behaviors. It was just such a confluence of factors. My dad died in 2014, the same year that CRC Press came to me and asked me to write the textbook. One of my failed attempts to get other people to recover was a prepared meal company. There I was in Houston spending my divorce settlement to run this company. I thought, just give people clean food. They’ll feel so great they’ll want to continue, which is like saying to an alcoholic, oh listen, I’m just going to give you this nice clean water. Just drink this water in place of the alcohol, you’ll see how great you feel, and then you’ll just want to do it.   [01:44:10] Ashley James: I love your intentions, though. I think they were the best of intentions, but like you’ve outlined, it’s not that simple. It’s not a matter of just making good food choices. I mean, that’s like saying to all the people that have a food addiction, why don’t you just eat healthy? You know what to eat, just eat fruits and vegetables. Just go eat healthier.   [01:44:32] Dr. Joan Ifland: Why didn’t I think of that?   [01:44:34] Ashley James: There’s so much, like you said, stigma and shame around it.   [01:44:41] Dr. Joan Ifland: There’s all this mythology.   [01:44:42] Ashley James: Mythology, yes.   [01:44:44] Dr. Joan Ifland: All this insanity, this confusion. People have made up stories about what’s going on for they’re not—I’m not going to say this. I was going to say for their profit. But I know my daughter, my MD daughter, I have a daughter who’s an MD. She’s also an MBA, fortunately, because she finally said to me one day, mom, I cannot fix people in an eight-minute office visit, and I’m not going to spend the rest of my life trying. She has now left practice. She’s now a full-time consultant. She’s a well-intentioned person, and she left behind in her clinic well-intentioned doctors. The whole system is set up so that the only thing that doctor can do is be a marketing person for the pharmaceutical industry.   [01:45:40] Ashley James: They’re trained drug dealers, and like you said, MDs are not bad people. Inherently, they’re good people. The system is corrupt that it has been since its birth, and that’s why it’s so good to go back and study the history of the modern medical system and see that from day one, the universities that teach the medical schools, the pharmaceutical companies have been funding them and have been controlling what they can do.  All of that is designed to keep out real cures. Doctors who’ve come up with systems that have actually cured cancer more successfully than the cut, burn, and poison method have been run off to other countries basically time and time again. You’re not allowed to have a cure. One of my mentors, he’s in his late 80s. I’m not sure how old exactly, but I think it’s 86. Thirty-five, 40 years ago, around then, he worked at Yerkes Primate Research Institute. He has multiple degrees. He’s a pathologist. He’s a veterinarian. He’s a naturopathic physician now, but he started out as a large animal vet and then was into the research. He’s written many papers. He discovered by accident the cause and cure for cystic fibrosis. Other pathologists confirm his findings. He brought it to the Yerkes Primate Research Institute, and they fired him and blacklisted him from the research field. He went back to his alma mater and was going to be a professor. He was unpacking and the dean came in and showed him a letter that said that the university would lose all their funding if he would remain there because he discovered a cure that basically, in one generation, we could completely stop and never again have cystic fibrosis. Get this, it’s a selenium deficiency in utero, just like neural tube defects are caused by folate. Well, we know that. He also discovered, at the moment of conception, zinc deficiency causes Down syndrome, and selenium deficiency can also cause muscular dystrophy, it depends. It causes one or the other. A lot of his research was around nutrient deficiency in utero and the diseases it causes, but all of it was completely suppressed. He fought and fought and fought and fought and all the doors were closed because that would have cost the pharmaceutical companies billions. Now, your daughter, the MD, is not taught this. She’s taught how to prescribe drugs. She’s not taught that there’s a cure and that there’s a way to prevent these illnesses in the first place because MDs are not trained in this.   [01:48:39] Dr. Joan Ifland: She’s taught that everything you’ve just described is quackery. It’s very bad out there. Well, anyway, my dad died and CRC Press appeared at the same time, and he left me enough income. My stepmom was living in Cincinnati, so I moved from Houston back to Cincinnati to get her through the end of her life. I walked into the first apartment I looked at—a beautiful little tiny apartment overlooking the Ohio River.  Three years, I turned in the manuscript and my stepmother died, and I moved out here in Seattle. But it was just like the universe cleared out three years of my life where I could sit full time and write and edit that textbook. Today, anybody who says, oh, it’s so controversial. They are lying. You just open the textbook and there are 2000 citations. Why is there so much research on this? It’s because of the amount of research on obesity, eating disorders, and drug addiction. We have brain imaging technology, we know exactly what an addicted brain looks like. Overeaters’ brains are addicted brains. All that obesity and eating disorder research is actually describing aspects of the addiction diagnosis. The addiction diagnosis is 11 behaviors. Its unintended use, failure to cut back, time spent, cravings, unfulfilled roles, relationship problems, activities given up, hazardous use, use despite knowledge of consequences, tolerance or progression, and its withdrawal. All of those things are used to diagnose alcoholism and they are all rife. They’re everywhere in overeating.   [01:50:51] Ashley James: One thing I’d like to clarify because we use the term overeating. Like you said, you guys were skinny when you grew up, but it would have been considered food addiction. Some people overeat and are obese, but my mother was never obese. Sometimes she’d say she’s 15 pounds overweight. I think she was five. She’d point to her tummy and she had a little tiny pooch that could not have been more than the size of a kitten. She was always a size six, just a very, very fit woman. She did step classes. She was kind of addicted to exercise and really controlling food. And then, like I said, she then had these side projects of sugar that she had to dig into secretly. And then there was alcohol every night socially. My parents would split a bottle or two of wine. So there were these things, which also leads to the sugar going up and down. A lot of times, there are similarities between bipolar and sugar spiker. It’s really important to understand oneself and also one’s partner in life.  My husband, and I’ve said this on the show before, he gave me permission to say this. We noticed that every single argument we’ve ever had—I mean, I’m not perfect. In arguments where he’s being irrational and I’m calm and he’s freaking out, I’m like, why are you doing this? We figured out it was low blood sugar. That’s when we really started to dig into—this is 2014.  I said, okay, but at the time, he had chosen to be a vegan. He’s now a vegan, but back then, so let me scramble you some eggs and then let’s talk in 20 minutes. He’d eat some eggs and two minutes later and he’s like, I don’t know why. He said to me, I feel like Jekyll and Hyde. I’m watching myself and I can’t even control myself being that way, being so nasty, and he’s not nasty. He’s a very sweet and loving person, but when he’s low blood sugar, watch out.   [01:53:01] Dr. Joan Ifland: That’s exactly why I got into this field 26 years ago. It’s personality.   [01:53:09] Ashley James: I think the term overeating is people go, well, I don’t overeat. I don’t overeat at all. I’m not fat. Maybe you could just distinguish the difference between overeating, emotional eating. There’s binge eating, right? There’s binging, but they all fall into the category of food addiction, is that correct?   [01:53:33] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes. I think the American Psychiatric Association, which is the author, of course, of this Diagnostic Manual, they cannot get their brains wrapped around the idea that processed food addiction exists, so they’ve tried to describe other syndromes. Let’s just take binge eating disorder. It’s very interesting but binging is not a requirement. The word binging does not appear in any of the diagnostic criteria for addictions for any kind of addiction. How did the American Psychiatric Association decide how to diagnose an addiction? It’s through behaviors.  So when you don’t have your frontal lobe and the addicted brain cells are controlling behavior, very specific things happen. You have relationship problems. You start dropping activities because you’d rather go home and use. You have relationship problems for the reasons that you just described. You have this Jekyll and Hyde personality. You can’t fulfill your roles because you’re too tired, drunked, drugged up, or passed out from processed foods, so you have behaviors. As it turns out, the first four criteria are things that are going on inside the person. You have a plan to use a certain amount and you don’t follow the plan. That’s unintended use. You’ve tried to cut back, and this is again where you see prevalence. So over 70% of Americans are overweight or obese. They don’t want to be that way. They’ve tried to cut back and failed. This is something else you would have to see. We’d have to see really widespread prevalence.  Time spent. They might stop at three fast food places on their way home from work. And then when they do get home, they might go back out in the evening and get more grocery items. Cravings, everybody has cravings. Cravings are so prevalent that people don’t even know that it’s possible to not have them. You have it starting inside the person with those first four, and then in the next three, you have it affecting their behaviors—failure to fulfill roles, relationship problems, and activities given up.  And then the last four are measuring progression. It’s getting worse. You are getting sick from it. You use in spite of knowledge of consequences is a very common manifestation of addiction. You know you shouldn’t be. You start to say it, I know I shouldn’t, but, and then you go and use it. That’s a sign of an addiction. Eating more of a substance, you see that over the years and the manufacturers are just making larger and larger containers of these substances.  And then withdrawal. You’ll see people using processed foods, not because they’re hungry, it’s because they’re tired, they’re irritable, they’re anxious, they’re depressed, or they’re foggy. Those are withdrawal avoidance. They have a headache, they have a stomachache, they’re lethargic, they’re bored, or they can’t think. Those are withdrawal avoidance. This is how you decide, and you’re right, I say overeaters, but they’re people who are using processed foods in those 11 ways. You’re right, 20% of diabetics are not overweight. Twenty percent of people accumulate fat around their organs and not under their skin, you can’t see it. But the way the American Psychiatric Association trains psychiatrists and therapists of all varieties to tell whether the person in front of them is suffering under an addiction, they ask those 11 questions. That’s how you know, and it’s not a weight issue. In fact, thin people who have food addiction are more traumatized in some ways because they have sought help from the health professionals and the doctors or whoever just look at them and say, you don’t have a problem. Get out of here. They are being traumatized right in front of their very eyes.  I don’t know if your listeners would relate to this phenomenon, but I call it the robot. The remote control robot phenomenon where your frontal lobe is screaming, no, no, no, no. But the addicted brain cells in the midbrain have control over behavior. Like a robot or like a zombie, you are walking to the kitchen, out to the car to go for fast food. You’re two different people. It’s terrifying to have that experience, and thin people have that experience.   [01:59:24] Ashley James: I’m so excited about your program. The more I think about how someone could plug themselves in and get those mirror neurons firing, get the oxytocin of community firing to their advantage to help them overcome it is amazing.  Little things that I’ve seen work for me is I order my grocery. Now, I love going to the grocery store like picking up my own fresh produce. It’s not that I don’t like going to the grocery store. But what I noticed is I’ll add a bunch of stuff to my cart online, then I’ll stare at the cart, and I’ll ask myself with each item, do I really need this? I get to slow down. I kind of have that internal dialogue. Because what you described that robot, for me it’s more like a possession, right? It’s like an entity, like a satanic possession trying to force you, overcoming your own consciousness to do bad to you.  So I look at that list of foods and I’m like, okay, I’ve got my vegetables there, and then, oh, wait, okay. I’m going to say cookies. I don’t add cookies, but I can’t think of something bad at the moment. Okay, there are those cookies there. I’m like, do I need that? Do I really need that? How am I going to feel after I eat that? Does that really serve me? Does that really help me and my family? Because whatever I’m buying everyone’s eating. And then I hit the delete button.  Then there’ll be that, no, wait, you’ll… And then the fear of missing out, that FOMO kicks like, you’ll feel bad if you don’t. You’ll regret not having it in your cart. You’ll regret it. It’s like a conversation I have with myself.   [02:01:08] Dr. Joan Ifland: It’s a battle.   [02:01:09] Ashley James: It is, it’s a battle.   [02:01:10] Dr. Joan Ifland: It is a battle between the addicted brain cells and the frontal lobe. People don’t realize that different cortices of the brain can battle each other. And that addicted cortex, it does not want to give up control, and it’ll keep coming back. It sleeps with one eye open, and it will never go away. That programming is there permanently. This is something that we have to protect ourselves against for the rest of our lives. The thing is, it’s not just food addiction, it’s screen addiction, and it’s porno addiction. The addiction will happily slide over to some other source—shopping, addiction, gambling, whether it’s a behavior addiction like a process addiction or whether it’s a substance abuse like alcohol, prescription drugs, or any of the other recreational drugs, it’ll happily slide around. This is something else that we’re very aware of in our community. We are creating a very fundamental foundation of self-regard, self-respect, and from that self-caring, self-likings, self-loving. From that comes the urge to protect ourselves. So we’re starting in the right place.   [02:02:27] Ashley James: Your work is tremendous. If it wasn’t for you, we would be in the dark ages still, like you said, with understanding food addiction and understanding what’s going on in the brain and really acknowledging it, and taking the stigma away. There are so many people needlessly suffering.  We need not look farther than the statistics of disease. In the United States alone and every other country tends to follow. We’re the worst in the United States. We really are, it’s unfortunate. The United States spends the most money in the world on “healthcare” and yet it’s the worst for many outcomes. We have to acknowledge that this system is broken and we need to take ownership of our health. That’s why you’re listening. Anyone who’s listening is taking ownership of their health, not waiting to get sick, and then go to a doctor to be given a drug. They’re taking ownership of their health. If it wasn’t for you, we would still be stuck in the dark ages when it comes to understanding how processed food, there is an addiction. It is designed to be addictive like cigarettes.  Literally, the cigarette companies went, well, how are we going to use addiction in other places, right? It’s just phenomenal. So thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for the groundbreaking work that you do. I’m so excited for our listeners to check out foodaddictionresources.com, which is your website. It provides free evidence-based handouts, and then you have foodaddictionbooks.com as well.   [02:04:13] Dr. Joan Ifland: Hang on. The best place to go is processedfoodaddiction.com. That’s the hub of all of our other websites. Go there, take the self-quiz to see if you’re experiencing the signs of processed food addiction, then sign up for the free information, and just get on our email list. Then you can start to consider the programs that we have.   [02:04:41] Ashley James: Awesome. I’d love to have you back on the show at some point to continue sharing. It sounds like you’re constantly learning. You’re tapped into the research when it comes to the brain and all the latest research. Your community, which started in 2018 and it’s just taken off, and you’re seeing that people, within three days of being in the community, are able to finally start to cook healthy foods. Just that oxytocin in that community is helping them overcome the four- to eight-day withdrawal period. So I’m very excited about that. It’s processedfoodaddiction.com. Everything that Dr. Joan Ifland does is going to be the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?   [02:05:33] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yes. This is not your fault. These are things that were done to you for profit. This is not your fault, not the weight regain, not the loss of control, not the hiding, not the binging, not the weight, not the diet-related disease, none of this is your fault. It requires a lot of skill-building and training to get out of it, but it’s not your fault. It’s not because of your child’s issues. It’s because you have an addiction to substances.   [02:06:11] Ashley James: And through Joan’s program, I’m very excited that she’s getting results, and you can get results too. I love that there’s a supportive community that can help you. I’m excited to check it out as well.  I like to say, keep your mind so open your brain can fall out, right? I’m an open-minded skeptic. Try everything. Try everything. Obviously, you have to go but try everything. I’m all about growing. It sounds like your community helps people to learn new life skills. If I can figure out where my personality stopped developing because of addiction, I don’t know what age. I’ve seen it in others, but we have blinders to our own self, right? So it’s easy to see in others, we can’t see it ourselves. But if I could learn more new life skills to grow, I’m all for it. Thank you so much for coming on the show.   [02:07:06] Dr. Joan Ifland: Thanks for having me. This was amazing. Truly amazing, Ashley. You’re a gifted podcaster.   [02:07:13] Ashley James: Thank you. I really appreciate that and I can’t wait to have you back.   [02:07:16] Dr. Joan Ifland: All right, take care.   [02:07:18] Ashley James: Awesome. That’s a wrap. How do you feel it went?   [02:07:21] Dr. Joan Ifland: Oh my God. This might be the best interview I’ve ever done. I don’t cry very often during interviews, but there’s something about your understanding and your own knowledge that made it safe for me to feel my emotions in this situation. We are saving lives.   [02:07:44] Ashley James: You’re saving lives. You are saving lives.   [02:07:47] Dr. Joan Ifland: Yeah. And saving people from really, really painful lives. We’re not just preventing them from dying. We’re also preventing them from missing out on their lives.   [02:08:02] Ashley James: Do you feel like you’re missing something? Are you searching for the right answers to solve your health issues? Do you feel like you should have more energy and mental clarity? With everything you’re doing for your health, you may be missing one key component. Our body needs 90 essential nutrients every day to function optimally—60 minerals, 12 amino acids, 2 fatty acids, and 16 vitamins each and every day. 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Without these 90 essential nutrients, things start to break down.  Now, you’ve experienced these breakdowns. Maybe you get migraines, maybe you’re exhausted, maybe your hormones are out of balance, your digestion is out of balance, or you have some aches and pains. Maybe you’ve even been diagnosed with something. You have a series of symptoms and if those symptoms all look like something, then we can diagnose it right? That’s what MDs can do. MDs will treat these breakdowns with drugs and mask your symptoms. But if your body has a nutrient deficiency, no amount of drugs will fix the problem. Seven years ago, I embarked on a journey to cure my diabetes, infertility, PCOS, high blood pressure, and chronic adrenal fatigue. I felt like I was a mess. Through my research, I found a company that made natural supplements to address these nutrient needs. They formulated their supplements to exceed all standards of quality. Their minerals are the most bioavailable and absorbed by the body that I have ever found.  After getting on their protocols for healthy hormones and blood sugar along with their dietary recommendations for better health, I reversed my type 2 diabetes, I reversed my infertility. I no longer had high blood pressure. My energy and vitality came back. After six years of trying to get pregnant with my husband before we found these supplements, once we got on the supplements, we were able to conceive our wonderful healthy son who’s now three years old and he is amazing. We would have never had that had we not found this company. Speaking of our son, he’s also taking these supplements for optimal health. His pediatrician thinks they’re amazing. If you’d like to give these supplements a try and see for yourself if you’re experiencing a nutrient deficiency, please go to takeyoursupplements.com. That’s takeyoursupplements.com. Their health coaches are phenomenal. I personally know all of them, they’re amazing people.  I just want you to know, as my listener, I feel like I need to protect my listeners. I would never promote anything that I didn’t 100% believe in and I didn’t feel was healthy or good for you. I feel like you’re my tribe, and I’m sharing this information. In fact, I’ve been doing this podcast so that I can help as many people as possible gain their health back. The health coaches at takeyoursupplements.com I really trust that they will make sure that you’re well taken care of. They will work with you to help determine the best protocol for your nutrient needs and work within your budget. They will also help to implement a holistic protocol that includes supporting a healthy diet and lifestyle.  Go to takeyoursupplements.com, fill out the form, and one of their health coaches will get back to you really shortly. And then you guys can schedule a time to talk on the phone and they will work with you to help you dial in all your nutrient needs. I really look forward to hearing about your experience with them. Please feel free to reach out to me. You can reach out to me on our Facebook group. Go to Facebook, search Learn True Health, and join our group. Let me know what you think about the wonderful health coaches at takeyoursupplements.com.  By the way, when you go to takeyoursupplements.com and you get assigned to a health coach, they’re your health coach. You’re not going to keep getting a different person every time. You get one person, they work with you, and they hold your hand for months down the road. They’re there for you to support you month after month while you’re on your nutrient protocol and they’re helping you dial in your nutrient needs. They’re really wonderful like that. I know you’ll enjoy your experience with them, and I’d love to hear about your experience with them. Please feel free to email me as well, ashley@learntruehealth.com. I love hearing success stories. Like I said, I’ve been working with this supplement company for my own health. I love sharing this information because I think that many of you will be able to resolve your issues with nutrition just like I’ve seen many people do.  With that said, go to takeyoursupplements.com, fill out your information, and a health coach is very excited to start working with you and helping you get your health back.   Get Connected with Dr. Joan Ifland! Website – Processed Food Addiction Food Addiction Education Facebook Group Instagram YouTube Twitter Book by Dr. Joan Ifland Processed Food Addiction Recommended Reading by Dr. Joan Ifland Metabolical – Rob Lustig

Go here for Sabrina's book and bonuses: https://www.learntruehealth.com/eo   470: Essential Oils Apothecary, DIY Natural Remedies with Sabrina Zielinski https://www.learntruehealth.com/470-essential-oils-apothecary-diy-natural-remedies-with-sabrina-zielinski   Highlights: 10:10:10 method Immune boosting essential oil blend Detox bath recipe Deep sleep blend Liver cleansing essential oils   Sabrina Zielinski, otherwise known as Mama Z, is the co-author of The Essential Oil Apothecary. Mama Z has created allergy-friendly food recipes and do-it-yourself remedies featured on Natural Living Family. In today’s episode, she gives some tips and advice on living a healthier life. She also shares how they incorporate the Bible in their health and wellness journey.   Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today we have with us. Sabrina Zielinski, otherwise known as Mama Z. Really excited for her to share some very fascinating stories with you, as well as recipes using a type of herbal medicine called essential oils in your life and powerful ways to support you day-to-day. Now, Sabrina and I had a really beautiful heart-to-heart talk in this interview, after which she asked for my mailing address and she sent me the most beautiful care package, so I have to thank her for what she sent. She sent me a big bag with all of her own recipes that she makes in her kitchen for her family, and she talks about a lot of these recipes on the show today, so you’re going to get a treat. But all the recipes that are in her book, and I highly recommend getting this book. This is a great book to get for Christmas.  So go to learntruehealth.com/eo. That’s learntruehealth.com/eo as in essential oil. That just makes it easy to get to right now. So you can go to learntruehealth.com/eo. That takes you to a special landing page on Sabrina’s website. Her and her husband, Dr. Zielinski, who I’ve had on the show as well. They write these books together. She brings in the perspective of a mom of several beautiful children. So she’s got this wonderful homemaker aspect raising kids, and all of the problems, all the dilemmas to solve using that from upset tummies, to trouble sleeping, to needing more energy, needing less energy, just across the board, bumps, bruises, and scrapes, and all the different things all different ways that you could use essential oils in your life. We do talk about the emotional aspect of how essential oils can be used. I myself have had quite a roller coaster this year, as many of you have. So just processing and creating healthy strategies for managing, dealing with, being in, and working through emotions of grief, loss, stress, anxiety, and all the emotions that we are facing for some of us during these difficult times. This has been one of the most difficult years of my life, and she shared with me different essential recipes that can help. Now, it’s not a cure-all, but this is something that if you learn to use essential oils on a daily basis, and her latest book teaches you. It’s an apothecary that teaches you from A to Z how you can use essential oils in all aspects of your life to help you improve the quality of your life, and that’s why I love her books. So go to learntruehealth.com/eo and check it out. When you go to that link. There’s a ton of freebies and stuff. They’re so generous. So like I said, she sent me this big, and she even embroidered my name on the bag. I was really taken aback and just in awe of her generous nature. So what was in the bag were a bunch of really popular recipes that’s in her book that she uses on a daily basis with her kids, with herself. There’s a handmade, non-toxic hand sanitizer that has essential oils and aloe in it. There’s a room spray for sleep, and that has helped me so much now.  I have a fairly good sleep, but you know when you’re under high stress, and I’ve been at times in this last year under high stress. The cortisol levels are running high even late at night, and using that room spray and it’s a combination of different essential oils that really helped to bring down the adrenals, calm the nervous system, and prepare for sleep. My husband enjoys the smell as well, so that has been really nice. And then there were a bunch of different salves for pain, for sleep, for comfort, for emotional stress, all the things I had shared with her that I was going through. I loved her big gift bag so much and it really touched my heart. The quality that I got from the different gifts are all her recipes that are in her books, so that’s why I’m just so excited to share with you. I really think that if you get her book and you actually make some of her recipes yourself, you’ll really enjoy it because I really enjoyed what she shared with me. Having said that, I want to thank you. Thank you for being a listener. Thank you for sharing this podcast with those you care about. This is an episode to share with your friends who love essential oils and also for your friends who are open to learning more about how they can incorporate herbal medicine in a safe way.  That’s another thing I really like about Dr. Zielinski and his wife Sabrina is that they really take the time to outline how to use essential oils in a healthy way. They don’t align themselves with any one company. There are so many essential brands out there, but they do tell you—and we talk about this in our previous episodes—how to pick an essential oil, how to pick one that is high quality, and they definitely explain what to look for in an essential oil company, regardless of where you’re buying it from because there’s so many on the market. I always want to go for the ones that are the purest, organic obviously, and have the strongest medicinal qualities, as do you. So they explain how to use them safely. Things not to do, things to do. There are certain essential oils that are not safe for pets, that are not safe for babies or children. These things we need to know. If you know how to use them in a safe way, then they can really enrich your life. So go to learntruehealth.com/eo, check out their book. Enjoy today’s interview. It’s a really beautiful story, and you will see how big her heart is. I know you’re going to love my guest today. She’s such a big heart, and they have a fantastic community that you can plug into and we talked about that as well. If you want to keep learning from her after this interview, definitely go to learntruehealth.com/eo and sign up for their community as well because they really take the time to educate and to spread this information in such a compassionate way. I really appreciate that about them. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and enjoy today’s interview.   [00:07:16] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 470. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have with us Sabrina Ann Zielinski, otherwise known as Mama Z.  Now, we’ve had your husband on the show, Dr. Zielinski, a few times, and what I love is that you guys take essential oils and teach us how to use them safely and effectively. What most people don’t know about essential oils is that they’re the most potent and concentrated form of herbal medicine. So you don’t need a lot, it’s very powerful. Yes, essential oils, when you use high grade, medicinal quality, and use them correctly, it is very potent, powerful, cathartic herbal medicine.  We have to remember that drug-based medicine was created to mimic herbs. So herbs were the first form of drugs for thousands of thousands of years. And then chemists came along and said, well, let’s patent something and let’s try to make a man-made version of this. So willow bark being what they mimic aspirin out of. Aspirin can kill you if you take too much, whereas willow bark, because it has all of the different components within nature. God is so intelligent that if you took too much willow bark, there’s a component in it that before you take too much to the point of killing you, you would start vomiting and you wouldn’t be able to keep it in you. Herbs, when in their natural form, for most of them, have sort of a safety mechanism to prevent us from going too far overboard. Whereas drugs, as we know, don’t. With anything in nature or manmade, we need to make sure that we’re doing it safely so that we could get the medicinal effect without harming ourselves, and that’s why I love, love, love Sabrina, I love what you do, and I love what your husband does. You guys write these books together and your latest book, which is the Essential Oils Apothecary.  Now, the link to your latest book, I have a little redirect to make it easy, learntruehealth.com/eo as in essential oil. So learntruehealth.com/eo will take you straight to their website to purchase the book and check out all of the cool videos, articles, and just amazing resources on the website. I’m really excited to have you here today because my understanding is you are the essential oils expert. You introduced your husband, Dr. Zielinski, to essential oils.  The two of you really help so many people detox, balance hormones, mental and emotional issues, I mean, the list goes on and on. We’re going to get into it. You’re going to teach us recipes and stuff today, but I love that you’re helping us learn how we can introduce essential oils into every aspect of our life to help uplift us and help us achieve our health and wellness goals. So welcome to the show.   [00:10:33] Sabrina Zielinski: Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here. And yes, using essential oils, the concentrated plant-based medicine, and some people don’t realize, it’s even more powerful to use less because when you’re using it with a carrier oil and whatnot, then it spreads throughout the body and it’s not evaporating. So you get more surface area, you get more penetration into your blood vessels, all of that stuff, and it’s all important. I’m excited to tell you how I got Dr. Z turned on to essential oils. He thought it was just smelly stuff underneath the sink. Back when I was in the sixth grade, I had gone to my grandma’s house, she had well water. I had bought two over-the-counter products for my face, and they were obviously chemically-based. They had a reaction with her well water, and it literally left a huge chemical burn on my face. It was three-plus levels of skin deep, some places more. And it was completely from under my eyes all the way down to my chin. It was a complete scabbing over my entire face. And my mom—   [00:11:53] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [00:11:54] Sabrina Zielinski: I know, it was crazy. And especially at that time in your life, it’s one of those things where you don’t forget that. At school, because I went to a public school, kids are mean. I had to wear a lot of makeup and then come home and literally soak my face just to allow the scabs to come off because of all the makeup. It was just terrible. But my mom’s best friend was an Ojibwe Indian, and she had taught me and got me my first essential oil kit in the sixth grade. It was a Christmas gift, she gave me a book of aromatherapy, and it came with three essential oils. I know it was lavender; peppermint; and eucalyptus, tea tree, or something like that.   [00:12:45] Ashley James: Those are gateway essential oils. Lavender and peppermint were my first two essential oils, and then the eucalyptus was shortly thereafter. That’s so great. There are so many applications for those three, it’s pretty amazing.   [00:13:08] Sabrina Zielinski: It is. And so when my face had burned off like that, I sent myself right to the research looking for anything that would help, and of course, we know that vitamin A and E helped to feed the weave of the collagen and elastin under the skin.   I really started, before I knew what I was developing, and using the essential oils, I was using those things on my face with the lavender because I knew it would help calm it down. I used aloe vera, and eventually, years later, I ended up coming up with the skin healing serum, which I’ll share today. My dad ended up using it to help heal skin cancer. It healed my face, and it was more for me because there were lots of scars, so I needed not just the face to be healed, but also the scarring. Within six months, everything was completely gone. I had terrible marks on my face, you would never know that today. Thank God for that, of course. But I grew up using essential oils, teas, tinctures, and all of those things. We would exercise our lymphatic system. In front of the TV. We would switch our legs back and forth to crisscross them just to make sure if we were not feeling well that we were moving stuff in and out of our body quickly. When I met Eric, he just thought that I had this smelly stuff under the sink. And even having our first home birth, I used all essential oils and my mom’s best friend came up with oils for every phase of labor. Once to prep the house, once for afterward, once for healing, so we came up with my birth blends. And every single important phase of my life she would come up with different blends. I grew up making my own blends and doing all of those things, and he just thought it was smelly stuff until he had to start writing research regarding essential oils. And then he’d come home and go, oh my gosh, did you know that this did this and this did that? And I’m like, yeah, I did.   [00:15:35] Ashley James: Why did he have to start writing research?   [00:15:37] Sabrina Zielinski: He had taken the research route with his doctorate, and he had started a writing business because the writing was in his past as well. Once he started the writing business, one of his clients needed research articles on essential oils because they were going to be using it all over their website. So it was all topically based, and he was a ghostwriter for essential oil topics. But it was so funny because he thinks he just found out who hung the moon, and I’d be like, I know. That’s why I have this recipe or that’s why I have this recipe. So it was super fun to work it out with him, of course.   [00:16:30] Ashley James: I love it. When I was a teenager, I had summer jobs since I was 11. Mom thought it was a really good idea to have a strong work ethic, and I didn’t even care about the money. I just love that I got the experience. It was just for me, that was fun. So one of the jobs that I repeat that I came back every summer, and I had several jobs during the summer. I was kind of a workaholic as a kid, but it was fun. It was like seven days a week. One of my jobs was working at an all-natural day spa up in Muskoka Ontario called Beauty Comes Naturally, and it’s a cute turn of phrase because it’s all-natural products. You go for your aesthetics but you’re using all-natural products.  There are these smelly oils. I thought nothing of it. I’m about 15 years old. One day, I woke up and I had a stomach bug and I cannot go to work. I’m throwing up, I have a fever. I’m just really, really crummy. I’m in bed and my mom calls my boss and tells her. My boss says, come over and get these two oils and go home with them.  My mom brings these oils home and I remember lying in bed. I’m just miserable. And she takes olive oil because it’s the only oil we had in the house, we used that as a carrier oil, she rubs lavender on my chest and my stomach, and then she makes a pot of hot water from the coffeemaker and puts one drop of peppermint in the entire pot and has me inhale it and sip it. Well, the moment I started inhaling it and sipping it, I stopped throwing up. My nausea goes away. I’m done throwing up. I fall into a deep, deep sleep, and when I wake up, my fever has broken. By the next day, I was back at work and I was fine. I was such a believer from that moment on. So then my boss hands me a bunch of CDs to listen to and books to read. I became such a huge believer of essential oils that everyone that walked into the spa, the moment they walked in, I was like, oh, you got to come over here and smell this. This does that, this does that, and sample this. I ended up being the number one salesperson for the essential oils just because I was so passionate about it and I was excited. I was excited about their health benefits. The last time I had your husband on the show, when I interviewed him, I was still pregnant. This was the beginning of March, and I actually just published his episode. When I was interviewing him, he was sharing one thing that you guys do to lift spirits, and that is orange and vanilla blend.  Well, as many listeners know, I lost our daughter during childbirth. We don’t know why. We think maybe her cord got impinged right as she was coming out, but she was alive right until she came out. That was devastating to me and to my husband obviously. I’ve been dealing with recovering from postpartum, also recovering from grief, and moving through my grief.  Then, a few days later, I got COVID, and then a month later, we had to pack up our house that we lived in for seven years and move. It’s been like bang, bang, bang, bang. Working through all these emotions, I notice that there are days when I feel the grief and the sadness, and I feel the overwhelm. So I turn on my diffuser and I put in the wild orange because that’s what I have. I haven’t found vanilla yet, but I have wild orange and I put that in. Clary sage is another one that’s one of my favorites. But during our birth, I also was using essential oils. One thing I wanted to share is I was really excited to breastfeed and I was so happy that my milk came in, but also very sad because our daughter had died and I couldn’t breastfeed. My midwife was really nervous that I would develop mastitis because here I am, I’m sick in bed grieving and recovering being postpartum, then all sudden COVID, and now my milk has come in. She was just worried that on top of everything else, my body is so taxed. On top of everything else, she was really worried I would get mastitis.  I remember reading that jasmine essential oil can actually stop milk, and so with a carrier oil, I used Jasmine essential oil and it immediately, like that same day, my milk would decrease so significantly that within days it had shut off and I felt a difference. So I want to say, there are times when we wouldn’t want to use jasmine oil when you want to have your milk come in and be healthy. But if you need to turn it off in a safe way to prevent mastitis, like if you’re done nursing or if you’re in my position, then I was so impressed with how quickly jasmine oil turned off the manufacturing of breast milk.   [00:22:08] Sabrina Zielinski: And just the opposite, before you go into labor, it helps to drop in your milk supply until the baby’s born and then it does the opposite. It’s incredible. The last two weeks of pregnancy, I’ve never seen a due date for me. I’m always really, really late.   [00:22:36] Ashley James: I don’t understand having a due date thing. I mean, I think this is just a bunch of men made this up. I mean, I do not think women doctors got around and made up this whole idea of a due date. I think it’s totally made up by men. Listen, I love you, men, but butt out of women’s health because this idea that we’re supposed to give birth at 40 weeks is absolutely ridiculous. I can’t remember the statistics, but it was something like 70% something of births are 41+ weeks. This whole idea of 40 weeks is the cutoff and anything else is considered “late” is completely ridiculous. My aunt who’s 85 I think or 86, oh no, is she in her 90s? Oh my gosh, my aunt, I love her, I love her to death. She’s amazing and she gave birth to two amazing guys who are just so wonderful. But both of them were close to four weeks. She baked them for a very long time.   [00:23:35] Sabrina Zielinski: My last one, 10 ½ months and I’m not joking. We conceived him January 4th, he was born October 17th, so that wasn’t even considering the two weeks where the egg comes down and stuff. But yeah, sometimes there’s just a different clock going on there.   [00:23:56] Ashley James: Right. So in the last part of your pregnancy, you don’t exactly know when real labor is kicking in, but you use jasmine essential oil. You used it the whole last trimester? At what point are you going to start to use it?   [00:24:12] Sabrina Zielinski: No, 38 weeks. Thirty eight weeks I use jasmine and clary sage together, it helps to drop in the milk supply. But as soon as you have the baby, you can’t use jasmine, just sage oil, or anything that has sage in it. Sage will dry your milk up immediately. So you can’t have turkey stuffing because that usually has Italian seasoning or sage in it. You always have to be mindful. So for me, because I do organic gardening, I have to make sure I have gloves on even tending the garden with all the sage plants that I have. Because I have a variety of different sage plants outside. It’s very interesting, and it really does work. It’s amazing because it also helps to facilitate labor if your body’s ready. Well, my body, for whatever reason, never seems to be ready at any kind of 38 weeks. It’s like yeah, no, we’ll talk to you a little later. But this time, I had had COVID at six to eight weeks in utero, and it calcified the placenta, but we didn’t know it at the time. And so any upper respiratory infection would have done that, but we had no idea because we kept just checking with my backup care and whatnot, so it was a little crazy. Between my third and my fourth baby, I had a molar pregnancy. It’s an improper duplication of twins. The baby instead of two, it’s one with 69 chromosomes. We had no idea that anything was wrong or anything, and then I had massive amounts of hair falling out. We’re talking I got up off the couch and there was like a ponytail’s worth of hair on the couch. I thought, man, I remember I’d lose a little extra hair there during pregnancy, but not like that. Then I started hemorrhaging. When we found out that it was a molar pregnancy, I had been pregnant for a full three months. It messes up your thyroid, it turns your body into hyperthyroid, And then it’s also a precancerous condition. You have to do whatever you can to get down to zero hCG. Some people have had to use chemotherapy. Well, that would never happen over here.   [00:26:48] Ashley James: Wait a second, what?   [00:26:50] Sabrina Zielinski: Yes. I don’t know if you remember there was a show called The Little People, and the lady had a molar pregnancy. So if you have a partial molar pregnancy that a baby was present, if you don’t, if you had no baby present, then it’s a full molar pregnancy. We had already seen the fetal pole and whatnot, so we knew that mine was a partial, but your pregnancy continues on even after the baby’s gone. The hCG grows just not at the same rate. it’s supposed to double every two days. Instead, it grows at a very interesting rate. It’s giant masses of cysts in there. They told me it would probably be a year before my hCG would go to zero. But it was only six weeks doing this the natural way, believe it or not. But you have to balance your thyroid, I had to balance my hormones, and I also had to balance the emotions and all of the other stuff because, obviously, it was a loss as well. You’re just getting done with the first trimester thinking, okay, well, we’ve made it through the first trimester, we’re good to go, and no, we weren’t. So I was able to balance the thyroid, balance the emotions, and go down to zero hCG in six weeks, and they told me it’d be a year. So we used the essiac tea, and then we used clary sage, geranium, and ylang-ylang to help with balancing those emotions and all of that stuff. And then with the thyroid, we had to get right in there because it’s interesting how the thyroid works, especially with essential oils. If you have dysfunction, you’re going to use clove, and then you want to add myrrh and lemongrass, and then also peppermint if you have the imbalance, but it works both directions. So you’ve got something that helps with hyper and something that helps with hypo, and they work together to balance everything out, which is amazing. I combined those essential oils together and use six to eight drops total for every one ounce of carrier oil. I purposely love to use a blend of different carrier oils because one of the things that I found is that when you use the different viscosities of oil, it goes to the different depths of your skin. So I use 54 ounces of coconut oil, 16 ounces of almond oil, 8 ounces of jojoba, and 4 ounces of vitamin E, and I use pure vitamin E now. If you have other things going on with your body, you can always add shea nut oil, especially in the wintertime to keep it liquid. You can add rosehip seed oil, your natural vitamin A, and you can add other things to it. If you have allergies, you can always make changes, but that’s my basis for my carrier oil, which we call Mama Z’s oil base. I find that it’s super effective especially with balancing the thyroid and the hormones. Now, just like you mentioned, the orange and vanilla, that’s what we call our joyful blend, and absolutely so powerful. You can use a CO2 vanilla, you can use a vanilla oleoresin or vanilla absolute. There are a few different options when you use the essential oil together with other oils. At first, I didn’t know that there was a difference. So I went and got some organic vanilla extract. Let’s just say, you can’t use that and substitute for vanilla essential oil.   [00:31:08] Ashley James: Is vanilla essential oil made from the vanilla bean or from the vanilla flour? What part of the plant is the vanilla essential oil from?   [00:31:17] Sabrina Zielinski: You know, that’s a Dr. Z question. I just know how to use it, and I actually do make my own vanilla extract. That’s a great gift, by the way, is you get 10 organic vanilla beans. You buy organic vodka, and you fill one of those old bottle top containers. You put all the beans in, you fill it to the top, you literally wait three to four months, then you switch it out, and you fill the container up again. It’ll go on for years. It’s like the gift that keeps on giving.   [00:31:57] Ashley James: Really, the 10 vanilla beans will just keep?   [00:31:59] Sabrina Zielinski: Yeah. It is. It’s such a great thing. Let’s say one day, it’s a little lighter. So all you do is cut one bean in half, don’t do anything else, no joke. You just keep using it. So what I do is I take canning jars and I’ll fill them up and then have another one. I just always put the date on it, that way I know it’s three months or whatever because we go through a lot of it the way that we bake and stuff using all anti-inflammatory ingredients. So because of the natural sweeteners that we use, instead of using a teaspoon like a regular recipe says for vanilla, we use a tablespoon. So you can see we go through a lot more of that organic vanilla, but it works, and it works great and that’s a great gift. With my mom’s company, because she’s known as the herb lady, she does cooking with herbs. I would tell you, we probably sold hundreds of those kits because they’re so effective, and they’re such a great gift that you can use them for so long. And once they had the vanilla bean shortage then a couple of years ago, we were grateful that we had bought so many vanilla beans in the rears. We didn’t have to really worry about that.   [00:33:22] Ashley James: Besides baking, what do you use vanilla bean extract for?   [00:33:27] Sabrina Zielinski: Well, we do a lot of baking, and we do a lot of recipes. We make even a butternut squash souffle, totally anti-inflammatory, but just that little bit of vanilla helps that we make a lot of our own. We use matcha green tea and we make a fat-burning matcha latte, and so we add vanilla to that. And of course, you can always do a liver cleansing one, and instead of adding peppermint and cinnamon essential oils to it, you can always go with spearmint and put an immune-boosting essential oil in there, but we always incorporate essential oils. Anytime we do it with food, we always make sure that there’s fat to mix the essential oils with, that way it properly dilutes it. But we use that in a lot of the beverages that we make. We play beach volleyball, and so we have a lot of friends that really enjoy coffee. I’ll have coffee every so often, and I always like to make sure it’s a very clean and pure deal. But for them, they love it. So I’ll make homemade nut milk and I’ll match the stevia with the nut milk that I use. And then I’ll add a little bit of vanilla as well. And then I make our own ice-cold coffee lattes that are stevia-sweetened. So we use that in a lot of the different things that we make just on a weekly basis. I always said I was really cut out for the assembly line with having five kids. We pump things out kind of like that. And so, because of that, we make a lot of things in advance. Also, for instance, at our school, they know that our kids can only have Mama Z-approved snacks. So if somebody has a birthday coming up when one of our kids has a birthday, I’ll make cupcakes that way we freeze all the other things because we don’t eat a lot of sweets, but we bake a lot and we give a lot of that away. And so we end up freezing all these cupcakes, and then when it’s Susie’s birthday I put the frozen cupcake in a little cupcake container, and then it goes in the front of the bag the day before. So when they go to school, they have their own Mamas Z-approved snack for that special birthday. And the same thing if they go to a birthday party or any of that, we always bring our own version of whatever it is that they’re having at the party.   [00:36:14] Ashley James: I do that too. I love it. Our son has allergies. We’ve been gluten-free for, gosh, 11 years now. We’ve been gluten-free for so long I forget when we started, but it’s been a long time. And then dairy-free. My husband and I are both allergic to it, to begin with, and then I found out I have an egg allergy and then our son has all these different allergies. He’s got all my husband’s and my allergies combined, plus a few ones he invented himself. Luckily I’m seeing he’s growing out of it, and a lot has to do with histamine. We’ve been as natural as possible, let’s just say. We’ve been as absolutely as natural as possible, and so it always perplexes me why he had these issues, but I think it has to do with gut health because the more we look to strengthen gut health, the better his histamine is getting. So we’re on the way to reducing histamine naturally. I do the same thing where we bring our own version of a healthy fun snack to birthday parties, and he looks forward to that. I’m so, so grateful that he gets it because he doesn’t like feeling sick. My mom was very strict and so I rebelled in my teenage years and gave myself all kinds of health problems through food. I gave myself type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, and polycystic ovarian syndrome. And then in my 30s, I worked on reversing all of it, and I did. I reversed all of it. I was told I’d never have kids, I’d never conceive naturally. I was told by an endocrinologist that I was completely infertile, and changing my diet, supplements, and coming back to rediscovering natural medicine is how I healed myself. I no longer have those problems. But I rebelled, and so I don’t want to create that same thing for my son. I’m looking at, how do I create this balance where I teach him the benefits of eating healthy so that when he’s on his own, he will make that choice instead of my mom just was like the sergeant general, do what I say, and then I rebelled. I’ve allowed him sometimes to try something, and then it’s like, okay, that’s the consequence of what it is to taste that because then he feels sick. And then the next time he goes, I don’t want to feel sick. He’s like 100% will never ever eat anything from McDonald’s. He wants to go there for a toy because he knows they have toys there, but he’s almost six, and actually six and a half years old this month, and he’s told me, no, I absolutely will never eat anything else because he knows it’ll make him sick. I’m glad that he’s deciding this for himself. But learning how to make these little changes, it’s overwhelming when someone’s coming from the more mainstream, wait to get sick, and then go to a doctor. Eat whatever at any restaurant, eat whatever, right? Eat whatever that has been handed to you without question and you suffer. Maybe you have bloating, you have some weight issues, you have metabolism issues, you have hormone or thyroid issues, and skin problems or eye problems.  You’re just sick of being sick, you’re sick of being in pain, you’re sick of being fatigued, and then you discover natural medicine, and all of a sudden, this whole new world opens up. Now it’s like, okay, now I have to really be picky about what goes in my body, what goes on my body, and what comes into my house. Yes, we have to be picky, and it can be overwhelming if we think of everything that needs to change, but make little changes one step at a time. The first change I ever made was going 100% organic. My husband and I decided to shop—well, two changes, shop the perimeter of the grocery store, and only choose organic. That was something we did back in 2008, and I was incredibly sick at the time. I was suffering so hugely, and I was on constant antibiotics. After one month of just shopping the perimeter of the grocery store, we were still eating dairy. We weren’t gluten-free, we were still eating dairy, but we went organic and shopped the perimeter of the grocery store. I hadn’t even cut out sugar, and a month into that, my chronic infections went away.  I thought, if I could change something so significant in my health by making this one change, what else can I do? That’s what led me to mentor under naturopaths and change my diet and supplements to the point where I reversed all those conditions, and then that’s why I started the podcast to get this information out there. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the people who need this the most, the listeners who let’s say are in overwhelm because I’m in overwhelm on a daily basis managing being a mom, now being a teacher because we homeschool. We’ve started first grade, doing the podcast, and everything else. Just life and managing everything that happens. We’re managing so much right now especially as parents and as moms. Our routine has completely changed. Food is getting more and more toxic. You know this because you shared with me, maybe you can share with the listeners in a moment why you know this. But here’s the thing, I’m in my early 40s and the food that we grew up with in the ‘80s is not the food that we have today. We have to remember that.  Cheerios is not the same, right? The Cheerios that you had in the ‘80s is not the same Cheerios now. Cheerios now has glyphosate in it. Glyphosate is a chelator that has bound to heavy metals and will release them when pH changes. So the pH changes when blood goes to urine and when blood turns to the cerebral spinal fluid. It’ll cross the blood-brain barrier. Glyphosate deposits heavy metals such as aluminum into the kidneys into the brain. I have interviews on this. The evidence and the proof are there. An entire country banned glyphosate because it was killing their farmers. We have to get that what is banned in other countries is on your shelf ready for your kids to eat in our country. We have to be like the gatekeeper. You have to be a gatekeeper. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the most overwhelmed and those who need it the most. Please, can you walk us through, give us some steps. So talk to those listeners who really, really need some steps, need some direction, need some guidance so that they can take those baby steps to start feeling better.   [00:43:26] Sabrina Zielinski: Absolutely. And I completely understand how that is because I was on 11 different prescription medicines. A lot of them for my stomach and other things growing up because even though my mom was the herb lady, she focused on culinary cooking, so it wasn’t necessarily healthy, but it had incorporated a lot less of the fats because again, that was more of the ‘80s and a lot more of the herbs for the flavor. But my dad created GMO corn, that’s what he did. When they were told about the project that they were working on, they said, no, this is going to cause more allergies, and some of the food is not going to be as nutrient-dense, but we are going to be able to feed the world was what they told them. Well, I just happened to be one of those people with lots of those allergies.   [00:44:16] Ashley James: Maybe that’s why my son has allergies.   [00:44:22] Sabrina Zielinski: Our grandparents, they didn’t go through this kind of stuff. They don’t have all of this Roundup in their stomachs that is just staying around. They don’t have all of these heavy metals. They didn’t because things were done differently. But anytime you try to play God and do something a little bit better than what God has done, you always have to pay the price. When I first got off of the prescription drugs, I really prayed about where would I even start? I did end up doing a 10-day water fast, and I felt that that was the key for me. I don’t recommend that unless you are being observed by a natural healthcare professional. But I did and I did get off of all of those medicines. I had weaned myself off of one, and then it was the other 10 during that 10-day period. I also wasn’t as smart about figuring out what I was allergic to before I met Eric. I thought, I think I might be possibly allergic to dairy. So I went out and I got two pints of ice cream and I ate them both back. I thought, I am going to check this out. I’m going to see what happens. Oh my goodness. Well, let’s just say my stomach was probably not the same for a couple of days after that. Then I thought, I really think I have some kind of an allergy to sugar. So I decided to eat two bags of Tootsie Pops just to see what would happen, and also not a very smart idea. I realized that both of those were a trigger. I thought, you know, that probably wasn’t smart. I don’t think I’m going to do that kind of stuff again, but at least I know that those are probably not good ones. Then learning about gluten and all of the other inflammatory ingredients that are in our staple food that is available. Then that’s when we started cutting out all these other things, but that’s when I met Eric. He was really the key to learning about some of those other inflammatory ingredients. Like you’re saying, starting small, for Eric, that was throw everything away in the pantry and start over. For me, I was like, well, when that’s gone, we’ll replace it with good things. Not everybody can throw everything away in their pantry and start from scratch. Eric was like, at all cost, throw everything away. I’m just like, well, we’ll just substitute with better ingredients as these things are gone. You can do it either way, but the end goal should be the same to get all those inflammatory ingredients out of your pantry and your staple goods. The other thing is, is when we focus on detoxing the areas of our home, we’re talking the pantry, the kitchen, the laundry room, the bathroom, and your garden spaces, once we hit all of those areas, and it’s really one by one by one by one by one is the way to do it. We did a toxic-free healthy homemaker over with our house. We ended up filming it because people were like, well, how do you do that and what do you do?  But the bottom line is you start small like you said. The biggest thing is to throw any of the smelly stuff and perfume away, you have to. They all mess up your hormones. They’re all toxic. All your plugins and things—toxic. Focusing on essential oils, and I’ve dedicated my time and my life to making sure that I have the healthy scents and the other things that we used to look forward to as the seasons change. You can make healthy alternatives for everything. The other thing is that hand sanitizer has been pushed down our throats like we’re supposed to literally bathe in it, which is terrible because not only do we have our gut health that we have to worry about, but we also have our skin microbiome that we have to worry about as well. And those products are filled and filled with chemicals and pesticides that are wreaking havoc on the layers of skin. We tell people to do the 10:10:10 method. So that’s 10 drops of essential oils. We love an immune boosting essential oil blend as we talked about in the Essential Oils Apothecary, and that’s equal parts of cinnamon, clove, eucalyptus, lemon, orange, and rosemary. Let’s say you have an essential oil bottle, it’s empty or you buy some empty bottles. Then you mix your own essential oil blend for boosting your immune system.  So you use 10 drops of that blend. Then 10 drops of aloe vera gel, organic of course, and then 10 drops of a high proof grain alcohol. You can use the highest that you have, and then you fill up a one-ounce bottle with those things, and the rest of that bottle up with purified or distilled water. You shake it and go. You can use that for a variety of different things. How easy is that?   [00:50:11] Ashley James: So like a hand sanitizer, perfume, when you say a variety of things, what do you mean?   [00:50:16] Sabrina Zielinski: Yup. All of those ingredients are also edible. I spray it on the kids when we roll up in the car line. It’s really funny because the people that take the kids out, they’re like, you know, your car doesn’t smell like the other cars. I’m like, well, thank you. I do not want it to be a microbiology experiment over here. The kids are part of it, and they know they’re not allowed to use any of the hand sanitizers. I also make that same blend of essential oils. You can DIY your own hand wash, or you can get an organic unscented hand wash and you can add eight drops to every one ounce of your hand wash with those same essential oils, shake it up, and go. So I actually make hand soap for every sink that each one of my kids has, and the other teachers liked it so much that I ended up just making so much hand soap, and then I made so much hand sanitizer that the administrative people wanted their own hand sanitizer too. Even though the kids didn’t have them for teachers, they wanted the same thing. And then they were like, well, can you also make some for my nephew as well if you’re already doing it? So our school is covered with our hand soap and hand sanitizer because it’s so much better for you. That’s the thing, you have to start small, but you’d never know where your influence ends. Now they want us to come and teach people how to naturally boost their immune system. We count it all joy because these are things that are super simple that you can do today. Doing a detox bath before you go to bed is one of the best things that you can do whether you’re a child, you’re pregnant, or you’re just an older gentleman, it doesn’t matter. Using Epsom salts and Bragg apple cider vinegar, lemon, and lime essential oils, I’m going to give you the recipe for it, but those will help to detox some of those heavy metals. Using a cup of Epsom salts, a fourth of a cup of Bragg apple cider vinegar, one tablespoon of a carrier oil that is liquid the whole time with one or two drops of lemon essential oil, six to eight drops of lavender helps dilate those blood vessels. Lemon helps cleanse it through with the Epsom salts. And especially if you have skin irritations or other things going on because we know that there’s that brain skin gut connection, then that’s going to help gently exfoliate those skin cells. You’ll actually see pieces of skin that float around the outside of your bathtub. You’re like, what is that? Well, that’s your skin just naturally detoxing. You want that, we need that. We need to make sure that our bodies are less burdened because we live under webs and webs and webs of Wi-Fi, 5G, and all of those other things that we don’t have any control over. Some we have little control over. Doing what we can to naturally detox our body and increase our immune systems are some of the only things that we have control over. It’s something that you can do regularly. Our kids, if they are starting to feel like some symptoms or whatever, we’ll do that same recipe. We’ll half that recipe for the younger ones, then still fill up the bathtub and they know they just soak there. Our son broke his collarbone twice actually in the exact same spot—once at camp and once when he was playing tag at school. Well, they weren’t supposed to be playing tag, but it was the same eight boys. So I soaked him and that helped him feel a lot better. So he wasn’t sure that he was even injured because he felt so much better. And then, of course, we did end up taking him in there because his shoulder did not look right. He did have it broken, but he healed within a couple of weeks and it was great. So using essential oils for those kinds of things, that’s the great thing about plant-based medicine is you get a lot of options, and you get a lot of different kinds of essential oils that you can work together whether you make your own blends or if you use a company’s blends. A lot of the things that we do are non-branded because we want you to feel comfortable with whatever you’re using to be able to incorporate it into your health. In the Essential Oils Apothecary, we kind of take a deeper dive into some of these other chronic diseases really to help you navigate at those starting places. Because I think it takes looking at those areas of the home that I mentioned, but I think it also takes us looking at what are our pain points right now? Is there anything that we can try to do to manage some of those things to start with because it does us no good to detox everything if we’re still not sleeping? So we want to make sure, yes, we’re detoxing everything because that will help. But then using some good oils for sleep. We love our deep sleep blend where you have your equal parts of lavender, chamomile, and vetiver. We incorporate stuff for our kids. We alternate the essential oils that we put in their diffuser as well because just like we don’t go to the gym every day and do the exact same workout, essential oils are like that too. We don’t want to have a mono diet. We don’t want to have a mono essential oils diet, so to speak, so we want to make sure that we vary. The nice thing about essential oils is there are so many different ones that work for different ailments. You and I have our own bio-individuality, so certain ones may work really good for you and maybe work okay for me, but you still got a whole other list of things to try and find out what works best for you and your family. So all of our recipes are a great starting point. I always tell people, I love it when they take our books, write all in them, and make it theirs because that’s really what it takes to have us work together as a team to find out what’s best for each and every person.   [00:57:29] Ashley James: I love that you said your pain point. You could totally revamp your life, but like you said, if someone’s not sleeping or what if you have pain? Like for me, I’ve had to really do some triage work in the last few months. And so looking at, are you in physical pain, are you in emotional and mental pain? Is your pain point that you’re struggling with eating, making healthier choices around eating or maybe you don’t know what you’re allergic to? Is your immune system your pain point, your hormones your pain point? What is your pain point and then let’s start with that. If we can really get a leg up on feeling better about where you’re suffering, I don’t use that word lightly.   [00:58:25] Sabrina Zielinski: You get hope.   [00:58:26] Ashley James: I think everyone listening has a section like a little piece of the pie, right? If you break down your life into pieces of a pie, there are pieces of the pie that are really fulfilled. Maybe you are really fulfilled spiritually and have a great connection with God and a great connection with your Creator, but your career feels really empty and meaningless. Or maybe you’re struggling with your relationship with your kids, your spouse, your parents, or your siblings, but you have really great relationships with your friends, right? If you’d write down sort of like a pie all these different pieces in terms of your health, so you have your mental health, your emotional health, and your physical health. Then physical health can be broken down into how’s your sleep, how’s your energy? How’s your eating? Do you eat at home or are you eating all takeout? How’s your home cooking kind of thing? And then how’s the quality of your relationships? You’re moving your body every day in a way that brings you joy. Are you feeling stiff, are you in pain, or are you feeling like you have mobility? Do you feel younger in your body than your actual biological age? Because that would be great if younger, and I want everyone to know that they can. They can make little changes to get to the point where their cells are expressing themselves in a younger, more youthful, and energetic state than their biological age, which is what we want everyone to have. I felt like I was 100 years old in my 20s. I felt so bad. I’m still working on my health. It’s like a work in progress. And it’s something I highly, highly value. Every choice I make, everything I put in my mouth is either hurting me or healing me, and that’s the level of seriousness we need to take. That’s why I love your book because the Essential Oils Apothecary is something where we can identify where is my pain point?  If I could take a magic wand and give you this one wish. If you can rub Aladdin’s lamp and ask for this one wish that changes one part of your health, what would it be? Or maybe three things in your life, what would it be? And then open up the Essential Oils Apothecary and find the guidance around improving those areas. And then, once you get a leg up, now you’ve got more energy, and like you said, hope and drive. And then you can start doing things like looking in the cupboards and clearing away what’s no longer serving you. We have to remember that sometimes we turn to substances like sugar and alcohol because it makes us feel good at the moment. It’s really harming us in the long run. A lot of us self-medicate because those are our coping mechanisms. If we can self-medicate with a healthier coping mechanism like taking a few minutes to rub essential oils with a carrier all over our body, inhale them, put them in our bath, put them in our foot bath, put them on our clothes, or spray them on, and just take a few moments to take really deep cleansing breaths, it changes the biochemistry inside you. It makes such a huge difference on a mood level, on an emotional level, but it also changes your biochemistry and helps you with your hormones, your metabolism, and your immune system. So I really recommend looking at what are my coping mechanisms? Do I turn to sugar every night? Do I turn to a glass of alcohol every night? Those things are pro-inflammatory. They disrupt sleep. They disrupt your detox. They disrupt your immune system. It actually makes your white blood cells go to sleep, it’s actually really scary what sugar does, and alcohol is sugar. Also, your body burns through its vitamins and certain minerals, it burns through, so we ended up becoming depleted of vitamins and minerals when we consume sugar and alcohol. So if you do consume sugar and alcohol, try to maybe commit to let’s say seven days without sugar and alcohol, and instead, use essential oils to create a healthier coping mechanism for destressing and bringing yourself back into a place of joy.  Coming from someone who, this year, I have been working heavily on managing my grief, healing sadness, and increasing my joy through all this. I can tell you that alcohol and sugar ultimately will lead to your devastation, whereas a connection with source, with your Creator, a connection with your family, with your loved ones, building a connection with your body, and finding things like the right essential oils you can utilize makes a world of difference and will actually decrease inflammation and pain, increase sleep, and increase productivity. You’re either spiraling in the wrong direction or spiraling in the right direction. You’re getting compounding interest. Way back in the ‘90s when I was really, really first getting into essential oils, I’d read a study. So this is a long time ago but it is so fitting. In Japan, and I’m sure most people know that the work ethic in Japan is outstanding. They never want to take a sick day. There’s a banking company that decided to diffuse lemon essential oils in the air at all their branches to see if it would make a difference. What they saw was that it significantly reduced sick days taken. In Japan, they only take a sick day if they’re actually sick, and I thought that was really interesting. Lemon is also uplifting in terms of your emotional state, but it actually significantly reduced people getting sick and spreading infections like colds and flu. How interesting is that? That’s something so easy, lemon essential oil. It’s not like frankincense or ones that are not as typical, right? Everyone knows what lemon is. Everyone knows the smell of lemon. If you’re just getting into essential oils, then lemon would be very familiar to you. I love that you said that your detox bath contains lemon because lemon and lime are something that is so supportive of the immune system.   [01:05:41] Sabrina Zielinski: It is. When you were talking about other ways to cope, being outside barefoot in the garden is so powerful. When you think of aromatherapy and when I’m outside with all my herbs and spices, I mean, it’s a beautiful thing. Really taking time to connect, to put your cell phone away, and really connect with the people that are around you—your family, your loved ones. If you don’t have a lot of people really close, going outside in nature, but we try to take our family walks. I have the kids, they all do their jobs because I want them very invested and know how to do all of it. I had two sisters growing up. I cleaned up after them in the bathroom, and wouldn’t you know, both of them, they don’t keep house the same way. I realized that back then, I had to make sure that I kept the kids involved with everything so that they kept that standard in their own life. If we don’t teach our kids to spend time with one another, and let’s face it, every single thing that we have around us—the television, the phones, all that stuff—is really eliminating a lot of the personal connection time. It’s really important that we make sure that we keep that connection time. It’s also important that for our spouse and whatnot, that we also keep that date time. We make sure that we do have babysitters that come a couple of times a month so that Eric and I can continue to date one another. All of those things are important. I’ll know he’s excited for a date. He’s got his essential oils on, he’s got his favorites. I’m like, oh, he is ready for a date. I can already smell him over here. There are certain things that make you happy. You’ll find certain blends that really speak to you, and that will change over time because we change over time. I love combinations that have spearmint, citrus, peppermint, and stuff. All those are uplifting, and you’ll find that certain ones just speak to your soul at that time. Because we are ever-changing, those things can change. I’ll tell you, I never liked the smell of clary sage, geranium, and ylang-ylang until I had the molar pregnancy. I did not like them, and I needed them. I lived off of those. I needed them for my body at the time. I use that when I’ve come off of my pregnancies and I’m trying to shed some of the extra hormones. But at that time, it was literally food for my soul, besides what I was eating. That brings me to tell you, some people think I’m going to just do without. I’m going to do without all these things that are my favorites. I’ll never forget my mom. Our book before this is called The Essential Oils Diet, and it really is the essential oils lifestyle, ultimately. She really changed all her diet and different things, and my dad was like, well, when are you going to go back to eating normal? I was trying to tell my dad, because he’s the only person that probably should have his Fitbit taken away because he like reports to that Fitbit like somebody reports to a boss, and I think it’s because he’s retired, so he wants to give updates and stuff. So he sends us all his stats. We’ll be like, dad, what is this, your sixth bike ride today? Because they close their gym in Michigan for 18 months or something like that. He and my mom would go to the gym first thing every morning. And so instead, he was riding his bike. He’s like, oh no, this is my third bike ride. I’m like, dad, listen. You do not have to check in with your Fitbit so much if you actually eat good food and not crap. He said, well, I like to eat the crap, that’s why I exercise like I am. We can’t look at it like that.  There are so many good alternatives that when I was making baked goods, I tested them all out on him. Why? Because he’s the sugar guy. He wouldn’t even say, I like that. He would just say, yeah, I’ll take another piece of that, or he’d say, yeah, you don’t have to make that one again. On our website, naturallivingfamily.com, we have so many recipes. So if you’re starting out and you really just want to make some of those changes, or look at what you have and find out what some of the alternatives are to the things that are staples that are in your pantry, then you won’t have to feel like you’re starting from scratch. Because right now, there are so many more alternatives than there were 20 years ago when we were doing this, and it is amazing. A lot of things have come so far. I’ll tell you, my favorite thing is the almond cow. I would grind up the nuts with distilled water, add a few other ingredients, a little vanilla and like a pinch of stevia. You’d buzz it up, and then you get a nut milk bag—organic, of course—then you’d squeeze the nut milk bag, and then you’d have nut milk. Oh my goodness, walnuts or pecans, sign you up for some carpal tunnel. It is like quite a workout.  The almond cow, you literally put nuts in, you put the water in, and you push a button, and it comes out with nut milk and not meat. So you have both things that you can use and tons of different recipes. And so really, doing something like that is easy really and then you get such a much better product. Because a lot of these shelf-stable things use bad oils. They use other products that you wouldn’t want to put in your body. And over time, a lot of these small companies have been bought out by big companies that own other products that we wouldn’t want to ingest, and so they’ve changed the products. Like you said, the food isn’t as good as it was even 10 years ago, let alone 20 and 30 years ago. Really being mindful of those things and knowing that there are so many good alternatives out there. One of the best places to start is on the foods that you would like to consume, some of your favorites. Looking at our family recipes that have been staples for decades and decades, I went back and really converted them to an anti-inflammatory diet. It’s one of those things that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but you sure can. You can go back to all your favorite recipes and eventually make positive substitutions for each of those ingredients that may not be on the top 10 positive list.   [01:13:51] Ashley James: I love it, and your website, naturallivingfamily.com, it’s an online source for biblical health and non-branded essential oil education. What do you mean by biblical health?   [01:14:05] Sabrina Zielinski: Sure, we follow that John 10:10 that God really wants us to live an abundant life. We focus on some of the promises that are in the scriptures. We know that the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations. We really believe that essential oils are the epitome of that. We take it back a step to when things are a little bit more simple than we are now and focus on the principles that the Bible teaches regarding that. We try to let people know what the Bible does say, how that really relates to our health, and maybe some other areas that might help people connect on a spiritual level.   [01:14:58] Ashley James: I love it. Is there any scripture relating to health that you feel called to share today?   [01:15:06] Sabrina Zielinski: Yeah, it’s Psalms 138:8, God will perfect that which concerns you. When I was going through trying to figure out, I know my body can heal itself. I’m on 11 different prescription medicines. This is ridiculous. I learned about true fasting in the Old Testament, and it kind of walked you through how to fast. I did just what it said. I really clung to that scripture because I knew that God would perfect those things that concern me. Another scripture says, where things are impossible with man, all things are possible with God. I’ll tell you, at that time, it was music to my soul. I’m like, I know there’s got to be a way that I don’t have to live every single day on medicine. There’s got to be another way. This is ridiculous.  I was on ADHD medicine when I was in second grade. The Ritalin and all of that stuff, I would literally have to time out because I competed in pageants. I’d have to time out my interview time with my medicine time in order to make sure that everything would be optimal at the time that I would interview. That’s bondage. If you have to figure out all that stuff in order to do what you need to do, then you’re not doing what you need to do. Your body has the ability to heal itself.  Especially with fueling it with the right fuel, Eric will always say, you can try to live the essential oils lifestyle, but if you also try to live the McDonald’s lifestyle, then it’s like two steps forward with the essential oils, and three steps back. He’s like the dad that will spank you on that one, but it’s true because we have to look at what we’re fueling. And really, the things that I was fueling my body with were not helpful. They were not helpful for my brain health and development at the time. I didn’t know any of that. I ate what every American person ate—crap. But I thought that that was good.  Even though I had home-cooked meals, they had inflammatory ingredients in them, and my body started just rejecting everything. At one point, I got down to eating about four to five foods that I knew that would make me sick, and I could not figure it out because most people are like, oh yeah, I’ll just go to the restaurant and I’m going to just order some salad. Okay, well, that’s great, except for the fact that they spray preservatives, and many restaurants have licenses to spray the preservatives on the greens so that they will last longer.  I would have to ask everywhere I went because I realized that 20 minutes after I ate a salad, I’d be running for the restroom, and that’s not even putting dressing on because if we’re talking about dressing, then that is the number one area that has all the inflammatory ingredients together. You got your soy, you got your gluten, you got your sugar, you got your dairy, all this like concoction. Now you’ve turned a healthy salad into a Big Mac right in front of your plate. They’re like, all right, well, where do we go from here? Well, let’s say you did have to go to a restaurant. Let’s say they didn’t spray the greens with preservatives. So you got yourself some greens and you got some steamed salmon, have them put that on top of the greens and have your main dish be your salad dressing and do that at home. You’re taking a bite of that with a bite of that and you’re having those good leafy greens, that way you’re getting in those micro scrubbers for the gut, you’re doing the things that you need to do, you’re allowing your body to be more freed up. Even for me, I even take sabbaticals on my supplements. I do that because I want my metabolism to be freed up for a little bit, and I don’t want it to get too used to some of the things that I do. I go right back to some of the things that I need. Obviously, that changes over time, whether I’m breastfeeding, not breastfeeding, pregnant, not pregnant. All those things factor in because our body changes and our needs change. But making sure that you’re just always free that you live free. And it says in the Bible that whoever the Son sets free is free indeed. We want to make sure that we’re free. We’re free from feeling like we’re bound by our medicines, and then equally, we want to make sure that we don’t feel like without our supplements we can’t go on for the next day. Yes, we want them to be a benefit to us. But we don’t want to change one thing for another. We want to stay as free as we can from technology as well because we’re only going to be bound by the vices that we have and making sure that we try to stay as free as we possibly can.   [01:20:34] Ashley James: I love it. Now, you have many books, and the latest, which is my favorite of all your books so far, although all your books are fantastic. The Essential Oils Apothecary can be found at learntruehealth.com/eo as in essential oils, learntruehealth.com/eo. You had mentioned to me that you are also a big fan of the sauna. I love my Sunlighten Sauna. For those who have a sauna or go to the gym and use a sauna, although you have to be respectful when in public spaces. In my gym, this is of course pre-COVID. Gosh, isn’t that weird? We’re going to be doing that for a while. The BC and AC—Before COVID, After COVID.  But before COVID in the steam room of the gym I went to, I’d bring some kind of respiratory like eucalyptus or some kind of respiratory blend that had eucalyptus in it or Olbas. I love Olbas. It’s a blend for sinus and respiratory. Just as a side note, I used to get sinus infections, and then I discovered Olbas way, way back when I was a late teenager. You can find it in most health food stores. I just put a few drops of that in a big bowl of really, really hot water like that just comes from being boiled with a towel over my head, inhale, and then of course have the tissues nearby. I do that a few times a day, and then after I blow my nose and blow everything out, follow it up with colloidal silver nasal spray.  Now, I don’t get sick, knock on wood. I don’t really get sinus infections often anymore, thank God, but I used to get them more frequently in the past. And then when I use this system, I no longer needed antibiotics. That my sinus infections would come and go very quickly. The combination of using essential oils and then colloidal silver nasal spray. I’ve done neti pot a few times.   [01:22:41] Sabrina Zielinski: Yeah, me and the neti pot don’t get along well either.   [01:22:44] Ashley James: Me neither. If I have to, if it’s kind of real deep in there, I think once or twice my entire life I’ve gotten the neti pot out because I was kind of desperate. But for me, it’s like waterboarding. Some people love it, dude, but it’s not a pleasant experience. It’s kind of like nasal waterboarding. But what I do love is taking my sinuses to the spa.  So if you have irritated sinuses from wildfires, smoke, and all that, pick your favorite essential oils and maybe even just eucalyptus or frankincense, that’s great for the lungs. But one or two drops in a big bowl of really hot steaming water, put a towel overhead, make a tent, and just inhale through your nose out your mouth, and then blow out your sinuses. It’s so wonderful. It’s antimicrobial. All essential oils are antimicrobial, so they kill fungus, viruses, and bacteria, but some are more antimicrobial, more anti-viral, for example than others. Which of course, the Essential Oils Apothecary Book is going to tell you all about that. You can go to learntruehealth.com/eo.   So back to talking about saunas. So in my private sauna, I have my own sauna. It’s Sunlighten, and I’ll do whatever I want there. But in public saunas, I’ll take my bottle and I’ll ask if I’m in there with someone, is it okay if I use some of this? I’ve always gotten a yes because they love it and they enjoy it too. But you got to be cautious of people around you and their preferences if you’re in public using essential oils. So in a sauna, what do you use in terms of safety, right? Because we don’t want to go overboard because we’re already opening up all of our pores. They’ve tested sweat, this is something you can even look at Wiki. They’ve tested the composition of sweat and there are traces of heavy metals in sweat. This is one of the ways that I healed my liver. My liver was incredibly damaged. I did the ketogenic diet and I damaged my liver hugely. My liver was actually sticking out. You could see it sticking out. It was so inflamed. My naturopath wanted to do a biopsy of my liver. She was very concerned. My liver enzymes were through the roof, and so I ended up getting a sauna as one of the things to detox and help support my liver. I did successfully heal my liver from that because anytime you sweat, you’re helping your liver by removing toxins through the skin instead of having the liver have to do it. Not all the toxins the liver does, but some of them. [01:25:15] So here you are, you’re hot, you’re sweaty, you’re doing some great things, especially if it’s infrared with the light because infrared light is so good for you. What essential oils and how would you use them? Is it during sauna, after sauna, or before sauna? Maybe you can walk us through what’s the best practice for utilizing essential oils with sauna therapy?   [01:25:42] Sabrina Zielinski: Absolutely. And the other thing too is that our sauna has like a little cup that you can actually, with the heat in there, have a blend of essential oils. It’s in glass so you just rinse it out with some soapy water and put a new blend in. I love any respiratory blends. Your favorite company has its own. I love the combination of eucalyptus and peppermint. You can always add sandalwood, frankincense, a joyful blend, that immune boosting blend. You look at different times in our lives and I think back to when I had headaches and stuff. I would do cold compresses. I purposely make up cold compresses that have peppermint essential oil on purpose, and of course, lavender ones as well, so that I can put those on my head even when I’m in the sauna. Now, in our book, we talk about that a little bit. You can take—just like you had the bowl of water and add essential oils and some carrier oil, mix those things up, and allow your washcloths to absorb that and then you squeeze them out. Not like you’re squeezing out the one from washing the dishes, but enough that it’s still together, and then I put them in Ziploc bags and put them in the freezer.  Those are really good because in the sauna, and ours goes very high temperature, but you get in there and Eric works out in the sauna. My husband works out in the sauna. When I’m there, it is really hot. I mean I like it, but it is really, really hot. I want to make sure that I can do what I need to in order to stay there.  I’ve done everything from an infrared sauna suit to being in the regular infrared sauna. I like to incorporate vibration therapy before I go into the sauna, so I’m really getting that stuff stirred up in the lymph system, and then when I go in there I’m sweating it out. I even have a red light therapy machine that I have in front of the sauna that I get on the vibration plates, and so I have little goggles on and I do that. But the great thing is that a lot of gyms have what’s called a Beauty Angel. It’s this thing in the corner that nobody uses, and it literally incorporates vibration plates and red light therapy altogether, and there are so many gyms that have it. I remember talking to someone and they’re like, oh, I think I saw one of those in my gym in the corner, but I’ve never seen anybody use it. It’s the best machine in your gym besides the sauna and the steam shower. I like to incorporate that. When you mentioned about the liver, I love incorporating colonics and utilizing a liver gallbladder cleanse. I like the Dr. Hulda Clark method. I’ve incorporated that regularly. I really feel like when you are cleansing that liver, it is like an oil change for your body, so there are ways to help that. That sauna is like your number one way—besides your sweat—to really get your body to move those toxins out. I also really like the ionic foot baths as well. The ionic foot baths are almost like a test for your body. Well, after 30 minutes, it’s all going to look like junk anyways in there, but in the first 10 minutes, the stuff that comes out, if you’re really dealing with the heavy metals, you’ll see particles that look black that come out. I usually wait until about six weeks postpartum and then I’ll do my first colonic.  The one pregnancy that I was on bed rest for a long time, I had a lot of blood mixing. I almost lost the baby because I had half of the womb hemorrhaged out. It was a full placenta previa and God completely healed my body. I was still able to have the baby at home. But there was a lot that happened between point A and point B. Well, when I went for that colonic and then that foot ionization bath, and I always like to do the sauna in between if I can. When that happened, I had little blood droplets in the water within the first few minutes, and my body was just cleansing the blood. So different things, different markers will pop up, and it kind of will show you if there are other things that you need to deal with. One of the times a few months ago, joints popped up. So you’re like, oh, I might need to do a joint cleanse or something like that. I find it’s like a test for the body. Yes, it helps to detect some of the other stuff going on after the sauna. But then you can see if there’s something else maybe you want to attack next. Your body will tell you the game plan of where we should go from here.   [01:31:41] Ashley James: Oh, I love it. I’ll share with you. The ionic foot spa that I love is called Platinum Energy System. I’ve had Kellyann on the show several times talking about the PES. She does give listeners discounts, but what I love about her—Kellyann is amazing. She’ll spend hours on the phone with you. When your foot spa arrives, she spends an hour or more on the phone with you walking you through how to set it up, and while you’re taking your first one—she also has these little pH test strips that she gives you and you take your saliva and you see where your pH is.  Then right after your foot spa, after you’ve washed your feet, and you wash the system, she says you have to wash it and descale it, then you take your pH again and it always drops to three points right into alkaline. It’s absolutely amazing. Every day I was tasting heavy metals in my mouth. My body, I could smell like this garbage smell coming off of me. Colonics are helping a little bit, but my liver was distended and painful. I started doing three sessions a week of the PES, the Platinum Energy System and it was such a game-changer. I saw those big floating black things in the water. She said, that’s heavy metal. I’m thinking to myself, what do you think, I’m stupid? Giant things don’t come out of my feet, right? Do you think I’m gullible? I’m the biggest open-minded skeptic. I’m willing to try it, but I’m also not going to be like just because it’s natural it’s good. No, I’m going to question everything. What happens is you get really close to that water with the end of a pencil like with an eraser. I took it and I tried to pick up the giant floating flakes of black stuff. What happens is when you touch it, obviously you don’t want to touch it with your skin, with your hands, putting your finger back in the dirty water, it dissolves. Because the water is really hot so it opens the pores.  What she said is the electromagnetic frequency—and these heavy metals are also magnetic—pulls the particles out of the lymph system from your feet, our lymph system. And then because it’s magnetic, they bind to each other. They find each other, they bind to each other, and they create these kinds of clumps or flakes in the water. But if you touch them, you’ll watch them dissolve right in front of your eyes because they’re actually tiny, tiny particles so small that they could go through your skin from your lymph system out of your body. She has done tests. I interviewed her and she talked about it, but she’s done numerous tests. She proves, she published all these tests, and she has all them that she can give you showing that there’s so much cadmium, lead, aluminum, and the list goes on and on of these heavy metals in the water after a 30-minute session. There’s a lot of really cheap knockoffs from China. I would not recommend anyone get a cheap sauna or a cheap ionic foot spa. It’s like cheap essential oils, don’t even. Not only is it going to cost you money because you’re wasting money on something that doesn’t work, it’s going to hurt you. The cheap stuff is knockoffs that will hurt you. I’m not asking you to spend millions of dollars. Yes, these machines are expensive, and it also does something so amazing that you end up with these amazing health benefits.  This is how I learned about her but because I interviewed a doctor who’s actually local to me, but he’s known worldwide. He’s been practicing for over 40 years. He takes children who are nonverbal who’ve been diagnosed with autism. They’re beating their heads against the wall, and he detoxes them of heavy metals. One of the things he does is he uses Sunlighten Sauna. He also uses the PES, the Platinum Energy System. He does a bunch of other things like these green smoothies with spirulina and with different herbs. Get some away from Wi-Fi, change their diet, and sometimes get some homeopathic or supplements. These children detox from heavy metals and now they’re completely able to speak, they’re hugging their parents, they’re looking them in the eye. The question is if they were on the spectrum and then after all the detox, a year later, they’re no longer considered on the spectrum, was it actually autism? How many children are suffering out there right now with heavy metal poisoning in their brains because of glyphosate in the food. And also, Dr. Stephanie Seneff who’s been on the show says that glyphosate is in the MMR vaccine. It’s been proven that it’s in there. Glyphosate is dropping heavy metal straight into the brain of these children, and then this is how the nervous system responds, it’s how their system acts. Basically, it mimics autism symptoms. That’s why we went from 10,000 in 1 children when I was in school having autism, to now it’s 1 in 26 are something, which is so sad for these children and so sad for the parents who are frustrated. I learned about Sunlighten and the PES, the ionic foot spa, from Dr. Klinghardt who I interviewed, and then I went on to find the creators of those and had them on the show. Those two companies made such a huge difference in my detox that I just had to keep interviewing them and sharing it because it made such a big difference. I love that you also do the same thing. But incorporating essential oils in your care with sauna, that amps it up to a whole nother level. And then my third thing, which I don’t know if you know about, what you could do in the sauna, and this is one of my favorite things to do in the sauna is doing a magnesium foot soak. Kristen Bowen, who I had on the show, was 97 pounds having 30 seizures a day almost nonverbal in a wheelchair at her worst, and she shares her story of how she got her health back. Soaking in this very bioavailable magnesium from the Zechstein Sea is one of the things. She doesn’t say it’s like this cure-all miracle, but magnesium is the most needed mineral of the body, and we are so depleted because it’s not in our food in the quantities we need it. And so by soaking in it, you get about 20 grams. Between 20 and 24 grams is absorbed in one hour by soaking in it. I incorporated that and you could just put your feet in it and soak in it while you’re in the sauna. That is the coolest thing. Then you could add some essential oils to the little foot spa and take it to the next level. That’s what I did to detox heavy metals and heal my liver.   [01:38:55] Sabrina Zielinski: And there are some great oils for that for cleansing the liver.   [01:38:59] Ashley James: Please share them.   [01:39:01] Sabrina Zielinski: Yes. Clove, geranium, Helichrysum, and myrrh. I like those because they help to stimulate that function so that you can move the junk that’s in the body out. Many people are like, why the feet? There are over 10,000 pores on the bottom of your feet. The second part of that is if you look at the reflexology chart, not even if you care about reflexology, let’s just look at blood supply alone. That’s why when I look at the reflexology chart for both hands and feet, especially with all the stress, upper respiratory, and all these other things going on, if there are areas that are ailing you, I like to make sure to utilize those areas because it’s like a pathway right to the blood supply in those areas. Now, there’s a caveat to that. I have seen some feet that I don’t know if anything would be carried up to the system because the feet are not properly taken care of. We really need to take good care of our feet. We need to make sure that we’re getting the calluses off, that we’re maintaining the skin in our body. I love utilizing the shower gloves for the body. I have a pumice stone for my feet, and I try to do that every day.  That’s one of the things that when I was in the shower one day, I’m working all of this stuff, trying to work my lymph system and keep everything cleansed and clean, and all that stuff. One thing that I really felt God say to me was, you know how much time and energy that you’re putting into this, we also have to make sure that we do the emotional work too. We need to make sure that just like we’re taking this pumice stone to the feet, we got to do that to our heart too. We got to keep our own little pumice stone there in the heart because if we’re going to do all this physical work, we got to do the emotional work too. It’s important to address the emotional concerns and things that are going on and not just stuff them down because there’s a reason why certain things are ailing our body. As we’re opening, available to the healing of our bodies and to the healing of our souls, we’re going to get not just closer to our Creator, but we’re going to be able to connect and be available to our family, but our bodies are going to take that next level.  Just like you and I were sicker than dogs in our 20s, we wanted to have a much better 30s and an even better 40s. I’m 43 and I think God that I’m in such good health now, but we can’t just rest on our laurels as you know. We have to continue to strive to do something different. So as you hear things in Ashley’s podcast and it resonates in your soul, incorporating these little nuggets of knowledge is huge because it’s going to be what helps take you from good to better to best over time. That’s how all this happens is over time. All of these tools that she and I have mentioned are all wonderful things. We’ve added slowly over time that ended up changing our life and our frequency and the things that we do to keep our bodies as less taxation as we can possibly have on it. I would encourage you, yes, we can totally use the essential oils to cleanse those areas, and each ailment that we have when we talked about those pain points, we’re talking about some of those essential oils, utilizing things like the foot soaks, and incorporating some of those essential oils that go with those pain points are also going to help therapy that. Our goal is to have you not just feeling better, looking better, but functioning better and being more available to your family.   [01:43:34] Ashley James: I love it, I love it. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Sabrina, and sharing just so many nuggets of wisdom. It’s such a great reminder to look to the Bible for reassurance, look to God. I mean, there are some listeners who maybe don’t have a close relationship with God or that’s not their wheelhouse. I have found it so comforting at times when I haven’t gone to church in a long time and then all of a sudden I just hear a scripture and it just reminds me to ask God to be in my heart. It’s nondenominational. I sort of walked on that fence. I don’t want to offend anyone, but at the same time, there’s this beautiful healing that comes from handing your life over to your Creator and asking for divine guidance, asking for support, and asking for that intuition. Please, please share with me, please guide me, handing your life over. So I love that in naturallivingfamily.com that you incorporate biblical health because looking to strengthen our spiritual health is another piece of that pie. It’s a Vesica Pisces, right? Our physical body, emotional body, mental body, and spiritual body, right?  If we’ve ignored our spiritual body our whole life, that’s 1/4 of our being, right? Some people would say it’s all of our being because it’s a pretty empty world if you don’t have strong and healthy spiritual health. It just takes a mustard seed. It just takes a little bit. You don’t have to quit your job and go live in a cave and dedicate your life to God. But sometimes, it just takes a little bit.  I do have several friends that will just open up the Bible at random and read. God, just guide me and they just flip over the Bible, put their finger there, and it’s the exact thing they needed to hear, and I’ve done that too. Just go to a website that gives you random scripture and just meditate on it and see if that brings you any peace, guidance, or joy. It’s a beautiful exercise. I have been surprised because I was raised Anglican and raised to believe that communication with God is one-way communication. That you pray to God and that there’s zero talking back to you. You don’t hear back from him. You just have to have faith that he’s there, and there’s no communication coming down from heaven. But I’ve met so many Christians, Catholics, Mormons, and other denominations as well who have shared with me that in prayer, they receive messages from God. That in their heart, they receive intuition, they receive guidance, and I have been amazed. I’ve had interviews on the show where people talked about in prayer, they receive divine guidance, and that is so beautiful. So there’s so much of this in this world that we don’t know, right? You don’t know what you don’t know. Sometimes our suffering is because of something we didn’t know was even there like maybe someone didn’t know mold was an issue, parasites were an issue, heavy metals were an issue. It might be that we don’t know that our connection to Source or to God is missing, right? I love that you incorporate biblical health along with all your essential oil guidance on your website. Is there anything that you’d like to say or teach or share to wrap up today’s interview?   [01:47:39] Sabrina Zielinski: Yes, you were mentioning that prayer, and sometimes it doesn’t have to be like your eloquent prayer that you see on the TV, at your church, or whatever. You don’t have to be a biblical scholar to come up with a prayer. Sometimes the best prayer is just help and help me God. I’ll never forget, it was 20 years ago, it was before I met Eric. I was like, God, I know I need to make some changes. I do not know what I’m doing, and I just prayed over my hands. I’m like, God, anoint my hands because I do not know what I’m doing but you do, and help me to make the decisions that I need to in order to help my body. Literally, once I made that relationship, and I grew up in more of my mom went to church and my dad didn’t, but I never had a relationship. So when that happened, I really felt like that’s when the doors kind of opened. That’s when I was reading the Word in Isaiah 54 about true fasting. I read exactly what it said there. It said, give all the food that you would have eaten to the poor. It talked about that healing will come forth speedily and all of these things will happen. I did exactly what it said there. And in fact, I read it like it was, and it’s kind of funny. Where we lived, there weren’t a lot of people. There was this one area where there were homeless people. So I put every canned good I had, again, I didn’t know that canned goods were probably not the best idea. But I got all the canned goods that I maybe would have eaten and a can opener and I did all that during that fasting time. But even though that was maybe not the best idea and I gave those things away, God still honored that because as I knew better, I did better. As we know better and we’re doing better, that’s where that accountability comes in. We have to be in tune with those things.  I just really encourage you that you know, yes, the Bible has been around for many, many years, but when we say it’s the last will and testament of our Lord, there’s definitely some nuggets of knowledge in there whether you believe it or not. When you put those things to work, they work for you. Not for that reason because God really wants to be in fellowship with us. But I have seen where so many of the scriptures, like you said, just opening up the Bible and finding something for that day.  There are so many nuggets of knowledge in there that it says basically in Proverbs that if you ask for wisdom, knowledge, understanding, and all things, God will give it liberally, which means without restraint. We need to pray for that knowledge and wisdom because God will show us. He will show us some of the things to come and really help to arm us with the knowledge that we need in order to tackle not this day but the days coming ahead. I think that’s important, not just for us and our health, but also for our family too.   [01:51:27] Ashley James: That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that. I feel compelled to ask, would you pray over our listeners?   [01:51:37] Sabrina Zielinski: Yes, absolutely. Heavenly Father God, I pray right now over each and every person hearing this message, Lord, and I just thank You, Lord, for the people that are listening. I thank you, God, as they’re putting their works to their faith, God, that you will bless and multiply the works of their hands, God. That whatever they put their hands to, Lord, will prosper in their health, mind, soul, and body. And God, I just thank you for that Psalms 138:8 that you will perfect those things that concern us. So I just thank you, God. It says in your word, Lord, that when we decree a thing, you will establish it. So as we decree over our health and we make good affirmations, God, I thank You, Lord, that you’ll establish those in our hearts. And, God, I just pray right now for people who if you’re in the thick of everything that’s going on, and I just pray for peace—peace in your body, peace in your heart, and in your soul. I thank you, God, that you release any of the burdens, God, that they will roll-off. And I just thank you for freedom in every area, God, mind, soul, and body. I thank You, Lord, that you want us to be healed and whole, and that’s from the top of our head to the soles of our feet. I thank you, Lord, that our whole body will line up to your will and your way. And it says in your Word that you promised your beloved sweet sleep, and we need that for our bodies to renew just like the wings of the eagles. And so I just thank you, Lord, that you will renew each and every person listening, Lord, with that strength. We know that your mercies and compassions are new every day. And so as that example, God, we just thank you, Lord, that you will help us, not just see with what’s going around us, but God that you’ll give us your eyes, your view over it, which is a much higher view than ours. It’s just like us looking down from an airplane. You see the beginning and the end of all of it. So we just thank you, Lord, that you will help us to be able to navigate and be good stewards over the bodies and the souls that you’ve given us. And we just thank you, God, for being with us. As we look at things that could be impossible, God, we know with you all things are possible. And even with that mustard seed size of faith that I heard my dear sister mention, God, you can move mountains with that. And that’s to your heart, to your liver, to your emotions, to your mental capabilities. Every single area, you know the very hairs that are on our head and how many there are. So, even more, you want us to be, to live to the full that John 10:10 abundant life, and I pray that over each and every person that is hearing my voice, God. That you would allow that freedom to come and just break off any chains that there could be that would be keeping these people from it. God, I just thank you for your abundance and your blessing. You promise to do exceedingly abundantly beyond all we could ask or think, and that’s according to the power that lives within you. And so I just pray that over each and every person here today, and I just thank you, God, that with you we know all things are possible. In Jesus’’ name, Amen.   [01:55:10] Ashley James: Amen. Thank you so much Sabrina Zielinski for coming on the show. I highly recommend listeners check out her and her husband’s website. We can’t forget your husband, Dr. Z, naturallivingfamily.com. And for their wonderful book, go to learntruehealth.com/eo as in essential oils. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show, Sabrina, and I’d love to have you back. This was just such a treat. Thank you so much.   [01:55:39] Sabrina Zielinski: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s such a blessing.   Get Connected with Sabrina Zielinski! Natural Living Family – Website Facebook Books by Sabrina Zielinski and Dr. Eric Zielinski The Essential Oils Apothecary The Healing Power of Essential Oils

Use the coupon code LTH at livingthegoodlifenaturally.com for the biggest magnesium soak and cream sale of the year! Dr. Tom's Books & DVDs: Betrayal -- The Autoimmune Disease Solution They Are Not Telling you About -- 7 Part Series Plus 2 Q&A's -- Dr Tom O'bryan -- DVD Set https://amzn.to/3HIqno9 You Can Fix Your Brain: Just 1 Hour a Week to the Best Memory, Productivity, and Sleep You've Ever Had: https://amzn.to/3DITVQh The Autoimmune Fix: How to Stop the Hidden Autoimmune Damage That Keeps You Sick, Fat, and Tired Before It Turns Into Disease https://amzn.to/3FE2uw9   Dr. Tom O’ Bryan on The Natural Solution to Gut Healing, Autoimmune Disease, and Restoring Brain Functions   https://www.learntruehealth.com/dr-tom-o-bryan-on-the-natural-solution-to-gut-healing-autoimmune-disease-and-restoring-brain-functions   Highlights: What is Intestinal Alkaline Phosphatase (IAP) Benefits of eating organic fruits and vegetables The pyramid of health Phthalate-free vs. BPA-free   Dr. Tom O’Bryan, gluten expert and founder of theDr.com, talks about the importance of eating more whole foods and going gluten-free. He shares how to make fresh applesauce and why we should eat them daily. He also talks about phthalates and other toxic chemicals off-gassed by the things around us. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Well, it has definitely been a few weeks since I posted an episode. You know, when I started the podcast, I was very consistent with posting three episodes a week. I want to get back in the swing of things. My goal is to definitely start doing two a week. I’d love to be able to do that. Unfortunately, my old computer broke, the one that my husband built me, and so he had to build me a new computer and that’s what’s taking so long. So finally, I’ve got a new computer. I’m back up and running, and I am so excited to bring you today’s interview. This last week, I’ve interviewed some really amazing guests. And this interview today that you’re going to hear is probably up in my top five, and that’s saying something. Dr. Tom O’Bryan has got some really interesting things, we had such a great conversation, and he’s definitely going to be back on the show. Strap in your seatbelt and get ready to have a fantastic time listening to this episode. I know you’re also going to want to share it with your friends because it’s a great one. Another thing you’re definitely going to want to know and share with your friends is that my favorite Magnesium Soak has their biggest sale of the year going on right now and for the next week. Check it out, go to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com, and you have to use coupon code LTH to get the discount. That’s coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health. It’s going on from November 20th to 29th. The sale is 30% off plus, for certain orders, they’re going to get a free gift. I’m excited for you to get that. We have over 200 testimonials of listeners sharing their stories about how this Magnesium Soak has changed their lives in the Learn True Health Facebook group. I have absolutely just fallen in love with this Magnesium Soak over the years. Our son who always used to fight sleep, we would put it in his bath, and he would ask to be put to sleep. He would ask to be put down. After a bath he’d say, mama, I’m tired. I’m too tired to read books. Let’s just go to bed. I was like, whoa, this is amazing. My kid who will bounce off the walls until 1:00 in the morning wants to go to bed on time after using the Magnesium Soak in his bath. So that was the biggest conveyancer for me. But I’ve had friends who no longer have migraines after using the Magnesium Soak, who are no longer in chronic pain. It helps balance hormones. It’s so phenomenal. Magnesium is the number one most important mineral. We need 60. There are 60 essential minerals the body needs, and magnesium is used the most by the body. I have a really long and amazing episode about magnesium with Dr. Carolyn Dean who is both a naturopathic physician and a medical doctor. She’s been practicing for 40 plus years, and she’s really well known as the magnesium doctor. When she came on the show, I think it was something like a three-hour interview. It is really long and amazing, just filled with great information. You can find that by searching learntruehealth.com if you want to search for that episode, a great listen. And what she shared was that magnesium is used in over 1800 enzymatic processes in the body as the number one most used mineral. The second most used is zinc at 800 enzymatic processes, so that’s a really big gap. Calcium is not even in the top two, and we always think calcium is the most important. Well, it is important, it’s just not the most used. So magnesium is the most used. Actually, magnesium is also the one that we’re most deficient in or the most common deficiency. We talk in episode 294, which you definitely want to go listen to with Kristen Bowen, as she shares information on how you can tell you have magnesium deficiency, the best blood test to get if you want to test for it, and then talks about her experience with soaking in this magnesium. Now she also has a cream for applications if you have a specific pain or tension. My favorite is the Magnesium Soak, but I love the cream as well for local applications. If you just have tension in your legs or in your shoulders, it’s fantastic. If you know anyone with restless leg syndrome, that is a magnesium deficiency. We’ve heard from listeners saying that their Restless Leg Syndrome has disappeared after using this Magnesium Soak. Kristen Bowen did some lab tests and discovered that we uptake grams of magnesium from this magnesium soak. It’s different from soaking in flakes or Epsom salt. It is far more efficient for the body to absorb it in the form that it is in. In the natural format it is in, the body uptakes it very easily instead of those other forms. And so, we see that people absorb grams. We’ve even seen people absorb 20 grams of magnesium in a one-hour foot soak, which is phenomenal. Now I’ve had intravenous magnesium before and I know what that feels like. And when I use the magnesium soak, it feels very similar to that. I can actually feel it enter my body. So I definitely want you to try it. If you haven’t tried it already, you should absolutely go to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com, and you have to use coupon code LTH to get the listener discount. You want to use that to make sure that you get the best price you’re going to get, the 30% off. You might get that gift. She’s giving select orders a special gift, so I’m excited about that. So go to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and use coupon code LTH. Do that between now and November 29th. And if you’re listening to this after November 29th, you should still get it anyway because the LTH coupon code will give you a discount. Black Friday sale will be over after the 29th, but you’ll still get a discount if you use the coupon code LTH after the 29th, and it is still worth getting the Magnesium Soak and try it for yourself because of how amazing you will feel. You can also join the Learn True Health Facebook group and check out over 200 testimonials that we have written there. Listeners, over the years, have been sharing their experience with it and how fantastic it is. And if you want to learn more about it, you can listen to episode 294. You can also listen to episode 381, but listen to episode 294 first because Kristen Bowen shares her story about how she was so sick she was about 97 pounds having 30 seizures a day in a wheelchair barely able to talk, and she went from that to being so healthy that she has also turned her life around, and now she’s helping others do the same, kind of like me. I was really sick. Natural medicine I used to turn my life around, and now I’ve dedicated my life to spreading this information so that other people can no longer be suffering. Suffering should be an option. It should be optional because this information is out there. We just have to spread it. That’s why it’s so important to take these episodes and share them with your friends and family, those who no longer want to suffer who want answers.  Listen, MDs, medical doctors, they have their place, right? Drugs have their place. But the problem is, we’re raised to believe that they’re the only thing when they’re not. They’re just one small piece of the puzzle when it comes to healing your body, and there are real remedies out there, there are real solutions out there to support your body’s ability to heal itself. And that’s what this episode is about today. And magnesium is one of those huge, huge fundamental keys because if you have a magnesium deficiency, there are over 200 different symptoms of magnesium deficiency. Think about it, if your body uses magnesium in 1800 enzymatic processes, you could have migraines, you could have digestive problems, you could have muscle problems, you could have nerve problems. Magnesium is used in every system of the body. If you go to an MD, they’re not going to look at you and say, oh, your migraines are caused by a magnesium deficiency. That’s not how they’re trained. They’re not trained to look at nutrient deficiency like that. They’re trained to go, oh, you have a migraine. Here, take this medication. Medication helps to mitigate a symptom, it doesn’t get to the root cause and supports the body’s ability to heal itself. My show is all about the tools you need and the things you can learn to achieve your true health. And the Magnesium Soak is one of those huge tools that I believe can help everyone because magnesium deficiency is such a common thing, it causes so many symptoms, and has a very simple solution. This Magnesium Soak, you bypass the intestinal tract so you don’t have to take it orally so your body can absorb more through the skin into the lymphatic system. Check out those two interviews, 294 and 381, to listen more about the Magnesium Soak. Use coupon code LTH when you go to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. Get the Magnesium Soak. And then come join the Learn True Health Facebook group and check out all the testimonials and share your own. I’d love to hear your story, especially parents who go, oh my gosh, I can’t believe my kids. I put it in their bath and I can’t believe I’m noticing they’re calmer. I’m noticing they’re happier. Or children who have aches and pains from growing pains, oh yeah, this is fantastic. When your kids are in pain, you don’t want to fill them up with drugs, right? Pain receptors are turned off by magnesium. When there’s a magnesium deficiency, pain receptors can’t turn off. Just like muscle cramps, muscle uses magnesium to relax, and it uses calcium to contract. So when you have a magnesium deficiency, it can actually have a hard time relaxing and so the contraction stays there, which causes a buildup of lactic acid and ischemia, and that’s incredibly painful. So there are simple solutions, and these magnesium products are something I believe in fully because they’ve helped my life, they’ve helped my family, they’ve helped my friends. You don’t even know how many friends are now lifelong customers of Living the Good Life Naturally because I will always carry Magnesium Cream on me. I always soak my friends’ feet in magnesium when they come to visit. I even bring it over to their house sometimes, their homes. It’s been a wonderful gift and a blessing to share this. And then of course hearing over 200 listeners who’ve shared so far. Listeners keep sharing with me the benefits that they’ve seen. This episode is in my top favorites. I’m very, very excited for you to hear it today. Dr. Tom O’Bryan has some wonderful insights to share, and I hope that you get a chance to listen to the whole episode and also share it with your friends because I just know this episode’s going to make a big difference in many people’s lives. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. I’d love to see you there. It’s a fantastic community where we all uplift each other, support each other, answer each other’s questions, and increase about holistic health issues that we’re all looking to heal. And thank you. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast. I feel truly blessed to be able to continue to spread this information to help you learn true health. Enjoy today’s interview.   [00:11:21] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 469. I am so excited for today’s guest this is something that my listeners have been begging for, have been asking for. To answer the question, where did my disease come from and how can I reverse it? How can I get to the root and stop being given prescription after prescription? I can’t tell you how many listeners are told by their doctors that they will always have to be on medication for the rest of their life, only to find out later that that’s not the case. That’s not the truth. And it’s not that their doctors are evil. It’s that their doctors are misinformed because the entire medical system is filled with myths, and frankly, medical lies. And what I love about what our guest today does, Dr. Thomas O’Bryan, is he cuts through those lies, he cuts those myths. And with real grounded science, he shows you the root cause of disease and how you can finally get a grip, a foothold on your health. I am so excited to have you on the show because your latest endeavor is Betrayal: The Autoimmune Disease Solution They’re Not Telling You. There are so many myths, and they’ve really muddied the waters when it comes to autoimmune disease because that is such a cash cow for the medical system, frankly. They don’t have any stake or any desire to reverse it, to prevent it, to stop it, but they’d love to test for it and to prescribe medications for the rest of your life. And again, I don’t see any one individual doctor is evil or has this malicious intent, but the system as a whole is designed to keep us sick and suffering, not designed to make us healthy. So we have to seek out doctors like Dr. Tom O’Bryan in order to learn how we can achieve true health. Dr. O’Bryan, it is a pleasure to have you on the show today. Welcome.   [00:13:33] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Thank you, Ashley. It’s a pleasure to be with you. It truly is. I don’t think I’ve ever had an introduction like that before. That’s perfect. That’s right on the money.   [00:13:44] Ashley James: I’m on fire. I’m on fire. You lit me up. We had a great conversation before we hit record, and you lit a fire under me. I got a little preview today before we hit record of what Tom is going to talk about here, and boy oh boy are we going to have a fun show. Strap yourselves in and get ready to hit the share button, copy and paste, and just send this to every single one of your friends because they’re going to want to hear today’s show. Now we keep hearing gorgeous birds in the background. I’m super jealous, but Dr. O’Bryan lives in Costa Rica. Is that right?   [00:14:20] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Yes, yes. My wife and I used to live in Northern Italy, a very beautiful area called Lago di Garda or Lake Garda. In March of last year, I was on a speaking tour in the US, and so my wife went to Dublin to visit friends. We heard that the epicenter of this viral scare outside of China was Northern Italy. And we said, what, what? It turned out, it was about an hour away from where we lived. I didn’t know what this thing was at the time, but I said, honey, we are not going back there. Let’s go to Costa Rica. She said, okay. Because I can be anywhere as long as I have a good internet to do my work, aside from my traveling and teaching. And so, we came back to where we spent our honeymoon, which is in the Blue Zone of Costa Rica. And for those that don’t know what the Blue Zone is, it’s the one book that everyone must read if you want to be healthy and vibrant in your 80s and 90s and cross a century. This is where the pedal hits the metal. It’s called the Blue Zones. I’ll just give you a little background on that so people will go get the book. Scientists noticed that there were cultures in the world where there was a large percentage of people that lived into their 90s, over 100 fully participating in society—still working, still active members, not put out to a retirement home. And they identified on a map of the world, they circled these places. And it was Okinawa, Sardinia, Costa Rica, and they call them Blue Zones. And they found a Blue Zone outside of Los Angeles. Everybody said, what, what? Because in LA, if you run a 10-kilometer run, you breathe in as much particulate matter as if you smoked a pack of cigarettes. That was the air quality in LA about, oh, this was maybe 15 years ago. I don’t know if it’s changed. I’ve not looked into it. But that’s how it was around the turn of the century. You run a 10K run, so you’re out there for about an hour, a little less, a little more. You’re breathing in, inhaling into your lungs as much particulate matter as if you smoked a pack of cigarettes. So you’re trying to be, but you’re sabotaging yourself. But they found this blue zone area, and it was Loma Linda outside of Los Angeles, which is the home of the Seventh Day Adventists. And so, they realize that it’s not, because I heard Blue Zone I thought oh, blue like the sky. Oh, it’s pure air. Yeah, air pollution is a problem. No, it wasn’t the air. Okay, blue. Oh, water. Maybe it’s clean water. Maybe there are minerals in the water. Well, no, that wasn’t it. They used the blue highlighter on the map. When they circled these areas, they called them Blue Zones. I love that little geeky stuff in there. But it turns out, it turns out that there are nine factors that are consistent amongst all Blue Zone cultures where people are living into their 80s, 90s, over 100 fully functional, fully active, not on any medications. And the 55-year-old researchers are trying to follow the 90-year-old guy as he goes up the hill, and they’re huffing and puffing. This 90-year-old is just way ahead of them and they can’t keep up with them. These Blue Zones had nine features. So I’m going to tell you the nine features, but I hope that you all read the book because once again, this is where the pedal hits the metal. You could read hundreds of studies about vitamin C and how helpful it is for you. I would not argue with that, but there are no studies that show long life longevity consistently amongst different cultures around the world except the Blue Zone. And when you read about these nine features of a Blue Zone culture and how do you start transitioning over to some of those, it changes your life. It’s a paradigm shift. So the nine features. First, move naturally, which means walk, be active outside, not pumping weights. Pumping weights are okay, but that’s not natural to the body. You want balance. Move naturally. Second, the Japanese term, hara hachi bu, which means eat 20% less. So the way that I have my patients do that is buy smaller dinner plates. Because you’re always going to want to fill your plate to whatever you’re accustomed to, so get smaller plates. Third, a plant slant, meaning all these cultures eat lots of vegetables, lots of fruits, lots of vegetables, some fruits. Fourth, grapes of life, meaning a little red wine is great for you. Five, have a purpose. Now that you’ve got a passion and a purpose in life, it may be you’re 92 years old, and every day or three days a week, your job is you go to the local orphanage and you sit and hold these little babies, and just being beloved to them. But that’s your job and you love your job. It doesn’t matter what it is, but you’ve got a passion for what you’re doing. You’ve got a purpose in what you’re doing with your life. Six, downshift, means whether you call it prayer, whether you can call it meditation, but having a little quiet time for yourself. Slow down, you allocate a little time for that. Seven, belong. Belong to a community. Be with like-minded people. It might be the old guy sitting at the coffee shop drinking espresso watching all the pretty young girls walk by, and you feel like Waldorf, and what was the other guy’s name in the Muppets? The two old Ben on the balcony? Whatever that other guy’s name was, I can’t remember right now. Eight, loved one first. That there’s a primary in your life where they witness you and they witness your life like no one else can. And ninth, the right tribe. That you are a welcomed member of the family and you are not put out to pasture. That’s the Blue Zones. And when you read the Blue Zone book, it starts to make sense and you start evaluating how you’re living your life right now.  But I tell you all that because it turns out, where we came for our honeymoon is the Blue Zone of Costa Rica. And so, we are living in the Blue Zone now. And the pace here, there’s no great surf towns where we are. With people coming from all over the world to go surfing and to party. This is the quiet. We have butterflies, hummingbirds, dragonflies, and monkeys here. It’s just very peaceful and quiet. And what I’ve noticed in the last year, so we came here for our honeymoon in March of last year, and we got pregnant within two weeks of being here.   [00:22:05] Ashley James: Oh, congratulations.   [00:22:06] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Oh, thank you. So our son was born here, on New Year’s Eve. And he’s a Tiko, and we now are here and just loving life here in Costa Rica. And understanding more and more about why this is a Blue Zone environment. Why there are so many elders here who are fully functional and dynamic? Maybe we’ll get into a little more of that. But yes, we’re here in Costa Rica today.   [00:22:33] Ashley James: Apart from living longer or the average person living longer, is there evidence to show that there is considerably less disease? In Blue Zones, are there less rates of autoimmune disease?   [00:22:51] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: I’ve not seen epidemiological studies on the Blue Zones and disease across the culture. But what you do see in these people that they’re looking for to qualify and be categorized as Blue Zones, they’re not on any medications. They’re still working. They’re still active in their life. They’re vital people. They’re authentic with life, and they’re not sitting in front of what my father used to call the idiot box just zoning out to the television all day. They’re not doing that. They’re active members of society. So in terms of the number of diseases they get, we can only assume. If they’re living into their 80s, 90s, and over 100, high percentages of them and they’re not on any medications, we have to assume that they’re not walking around full of disease because of the quality of their life that you can witness.   [00:23:47] Ashley James: It’s so exciting. We’re raised in a system and we have to become these observers. Leave your body mentally, leave your body and get this 30,000-foot view of your life and start to question the status quo. Because we were raised in a system that makes us believe the doctors have all the answers, we wait to get sick, and then we go get a pill.  And one of my mentors, I’m sure you’ve heard of him, Dr. Joel Wallach, he grew up on a farm. He said to his dad when he was a kid, why do we give the calves these pellets to prevent disease? Why don’t we give them vitamins and minerals to prevent disease so they don’t get sick? Because it keeps the cost down. But humans wait to get sick, which keeps the cost up. Why don’t we use the same methods to keep the animals’ costs down for farming? Why don’t we keep that same mentality of let’s prevent disease in animals to keep the cost down, why don’t we also prevent disease in humans by taking the right vitamins, minerals, and eating the right feed for humans?  And that’s what really struck him. And I actually heard his lecture when I was about 12 years old, and it just hit me like a ton of bricks. That totally changed my perspective. I started to see the marketing. I started to see we are constantly marketed to fast-food restaurants, brand foods like Kellogg’s, for example. Were marketed to from a very young age so we grow up believing and we feel good. Oh, we see that familiar brand our whole life. We feel good going there. We get nostalgic. That’s very intentional the, I want to say, brainwashing that takes place.     [00:25:51] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: When you said Kellogg, what went in my mind immediately because I was born in the early ‘50s and so I grew up with all of that. What went in my mind when you said the word Kellogg? K-E-double-L-O-double-good, Kellogg’s best to you. I mean, it’s so burned into my brain listening to that marketing that it automatically came up when you said the word Kellogg. And we all are prey to that kind of subtle input. What do you call the box that hangs on the wall in the bathroom? It’s a medicine cabinet. The medicine cabinet. Why isn’t it a health cabinet? Why isn’t it a health cabinet? It’s a medicine cabinet. We are brainwashed from day one to accept the healthcare system that we were born in. And unfortunately, usually, the vast majority of people have to get sick enough and frustrated with how the protocols that they’re trusting their experts gave them don’t work, and they have to get so frustrated and sick enough or their child has to get sick enough that they start looking for other alternatives. And then they find what looks like common sense like Joel Wallach was saying about farmers to keep the animals healthy, common sense basic things that completely turn around the way they look at the healthcare system, and we get hardened at times. It’s kind of like a sequential order of development in getting to the light and stop drinking the Kool-Aid. There is a sequential order that happens for most people, and it’s shows like yours, hopefully, that help people accelerate through all of that so that they don’t have to suffer as much before they’re willing to question their pre-consumed beliefs. I mean, here’s one that everybody should know. It should have been on the front page of every paper in the country. The New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most prestigious journals in the English language, published a study. They looked at over 30,000 people taking an aspirin a day to prevent cardiovascular incidents. And they followed them for, I don’t recall if it was 7 or 11 years. Somewhere over seven years. I’m not quite sure how many more years they went out. It may have been 20, I just don’t recall.   [00:28:26] Ashley James: It’s a long time, significant.   [00:28:28] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: A long time taking aspirin every day, and what did they find in the reduction of people who were taking an aspirin every day and people who did not take an aspirin every day of the same age, same socio-economic class? What did they find in terms of incidence of strokes, heart attacks, and mortality from cardiovascular disease? Absolutely no difference. Taking an aspirin a day doesn’t work to prevent cardiovascular disease.   [00:28:55] Ashley James: No, it doesn’t work for that, but it does work in that Bayer has made a lot of money.   [00:29:02] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Oh, sure. They were able to spend billions and buy Monsanto.   [00:29:06] Ashley James: They sold a lot of aspirin, but it has not prevented cardiovascular disease.   [00:29:12] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Exactly right. And you take one aspirin and you create pathogenic intestinal permeability in your gut, meaning its slang term is leaky gut. From 1 aspirin, not taking aspirin for 10 days. From one aspirin you get a leaky gut and you alter your microbiome, and it takes weeks and sometimes longer for all of that to heal, if it even does heal. But when you take an aspirin every day, you develop pathogenic intestinal permeability, which we’ll talk about today, the leaky gut, which is the gateway into the development of autoimmune diseases. But we all believe an aspirin a day is healthy for us because they market it to us that way, and it’s just not true. The epidemiological studies are now very clear about that.   [00:30:03] Ashley James: I believe that if they have to market, if they have to sell something to you for your health, run the other direction. If they’re marketing food to you, there’s a profit to be made and the cost is your health. No one’s running around going make sure you eat apples, make sure you eat kale. Make sure you drink enough water, drink enough clean purified water.   [00:30:30] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Can I tell you about apples for a minute? Can I tell you about apples?   [00:30:33] Ashley James: Yeah.   [00:30:34] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: You just hit a point. First, they’re usually number one or number two on the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen, meaning they are some of the most polluted fruits or vegetables you can eat with pesticides and insecticides. So you cannot eat conventional apples, and you’ll see why in this talk today. But organic apples, the biological value of organic apples is 34% to 52% higher than conventional apples, meaning they’ve got more of the good stuff, the meat in them. When we have all of our patients, when you need to heal leaky gut, there are many steps you have to take, but one of them, Mrs. Patient, when you go shopping for your food, always buy organic. But buy about a dozen or a couple of dozen apples. Wash them, don’t peel them. Cut the seeds out, dice them up, put them in a pot, add water to a third the height of the apples in the pot. Throw a little cinnamon in there, maybe a couple of raisins. If you got kids, they like a little sweeter. Turn it on high to boil. In 10 to 15 minutes, you got applesauce. That’s how easy it is to make applesauce. And you make sure that everyone in your family has at least a tablespoon a day. Why? Because the pectin in applesauce increases, arguably, the number one enzyme in your gut is called intestinal alkaline phosphatase, IAP. And what IAP does, it lowers total cholesterol if it’s high. It lowers total cholesterol triglycerides if they’re high. It stabilizes insulin sensitivity so your blood sugar stabilizes. It increases the good bacteria in your gut. It produces bacterial [inaudible 00:32:26] that kill the bad bacteria in your gut. And maybe most important, it also stimulates healing the leaky gut, so you make new cells, healthier cells. And arguably, most important, it grabs on and binds to what’s called lipopolysaccharides, LPS, which is the exhaust of bad bacteria in your gut. If you exercise too hard and your muscle is sore the next day, you know that that’s lactic acid. Okay, it’ll go away in a day or so. Lactic acid is the exhaust of your muscle cells. LPS is the exhaust of bad bacteria in your gut. And what happens is the LPS goes right through the leaky gut into the bloodstream, and it gets stored in your spleen, your liver, and your lymph nodes, and it accumulates and it’s inflammatory in your body over time. LPS accumulates day after week after month after year after year. You accumulate more, you’re more inflamed. You accumulate more, you’re more inflamed. Until eventually, you develop what’s called sepsis.   [00:33:33] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [00:33:34] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Sepsis is the number one killer of elderly in the hospitals, 1.7 million people a year, get sepsis, of which 250,000 die every year, and it’s just accumulated crud from bad bacteria that’s been building up over the years that nobody ever checked for. When you eat a little bit of applesauce every day, you increase intestinal alkaline phosphatase, which acts like a sponge to grab the exhaust of that bad bacteria and escort it out in the poop. Until you get rid of that excess LPS, in the meantime, you’re using a healthy sponge to grab that crud and get it out of there. So everyone needs to eat at least a tablespoon a day of fresh applesauce. The commercial stuff doesn’t work, but the fresh does. Organic, you got to get organic. But you see how many steps I gave you in that one recipe? First, you can’t eat regular apples because they’re at the top of the list of the Dirty Dozen, meaning every year, they’ve got the highest amount of pesticides and insecticides that cause inflammation in your cells and build up over the years. And you get cancers and autoimmune diseases from it, and we’ll talk about that today. So that’s first. Second, it’s really simple to make this stuff, and especially with your kids, you make it a family thing. Third, it doesn’t taste like cardboard. I mean, it’s really delicious. And you just have to have a little bit every day. But fourth, is the daily habit. If you forget a day, you forget a day. But the idea is small doses over time because your body is going to thrive and build up more intestinal alkaline phosphatase, which lowers cholesterol, lowers triglyceride, stabilizes insulin sensitivity, stimulates more production of good bacteria, produces bacterial [inaudible 00:35:29] to kill the bad bacteria, and acts as a sponge to grab this LPS from all the bad bacteria in your gut and escort it out in the poop. That was a profound recommendation I gave you. Excuse me for being bold about it, but it’s a simple thing that has so many cascade benefits for you and your family. That’s the way you turn around your health is by learning more of those little pearls again and again and again.   ​​[00:36:00] Ashley James: Oh, absolutely. Applesauce, can you eat more of it? Could you have it for breakfast? Eat like a cup and a half of it every day for breakfast?   [00:36:09] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Of course, of course.   [00:36:10] Ashley James: So you can eat more.   [00:36:11] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: No, no, no, no. Yeah, it’s always good to have more, but just a little bit every day is going to set you in the right direction. Now the problem with having more is that most of us grew up on Coca-Cola and three Musketeers, or for me, it was Mountain Dew and Kit Kats. But most of us have grown up on that garbage food, those garbage sugars that have thrown our blood sugar way out of balance, way out of balance. Our blood sugar-regulating systems are functioning on a 1 to 10 scale. Most of us are functioning at 5.4 to 6.2, meaning we’ve got blood sugar imbalances whether or not we’ve been diagnosed with diabetes or pre-diabetes. We’re already on the road of not functioning adequately, blood sugar levels, and we have to rebuild our blood sugar-regulating system. So that’s a whole nother dimension of discussion to do that. So I like to start people on just a little bit of a great habit like having a tablespoon or so with applesauce every day. You want more? Have more, it’s fine. But you don’t want to eat too much because it’s naturally sweet, which is okay, but your blood sugar-regulating system has been so beaten up by what we accepted. Trix cereal when you’re a kid, Trix are for kids. Every spoonful of Trix is 50.4% pure sugar, every spoonful, and so our blood sugar-regulating systems get knocked out of balance very early in life. You have to have a big picture on that so that you don’t assault it further by eating good food, applesauce, but eating too much of it for your blood sugar-regulating system to control.   [00:37:59] Ashley James: I want to point out that you have other recipes you want to give the listeners. They can go to thedr.com/getrecipes. So you’ve got some other really useful healing recipes, and that one I’m absolutely going to do. The other day, we bought a bunch of organic apples from a farm locally, and so they’re fresh, big, big box of them. Unfortunately, we peeled them and we made our own apple butter. We just simmered down to where it was like a thick concentrated apple sauce. But oh my gosh, this stuff’s amazing. My son loves it. So I’m just going to take your advice. I’m going to get more of those apples from the local farm and keep these peels on because the peels are great fiber as well, and then we’ll start making our own applesauce every day because I love all those benefits you just mentioned. Now in terms of clearing that gunk that can lead to sepsis as it builds up in the body, is there any way to clear it from the spleen, from the liver, and from the lymph system?   [00:39:11] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Oh, yes, yes. You know, when people want a different result, so when I moved from Chicago to Southern California, I needed a map to get there. I mean, I’d love to drive, and so I drove cross country, you need a map. And sometimes you’re on the map, oh, there’s a detour and so you got to go around, there are obstacles, but you need a map. So when your level of health is at (I’ll make up a number) 6.2, and you want to get to an 8.4. I mean, everybody wants to be at 10, but be realistic. You just want to have a vibrancy and good function, every year be a little bit healthier if you can, but it takes time. But you’re at a 6.2, how are you going to get to an 8.4? You need a map. You need a map. When you want to learn how to read maps, when you want to learn how to read your body, you have to start with a 101 information. And then you go to 102 and maybe 103, then you go to 201, then 301, and then 401. Now you’ve graduated with a bachelor’s degree in taking care of your health. Maybe you’re going to go on to the master’s level and really dial down on some particular areas. And a few will go to the Ph.D. level and be a world expert in one particular topic that you’re learning about in terms of health. So what you’re asking about getting rid of stored lipopolysaccharides, LPS, is absolutely true. When you get to about the 400th level, you realize, wow, I really need to learn what we do to detox as a family on a daily basis. How do we start getting rid of all this crud? Because there’s so much to learn. It’s the baby steps you take over time that cumulatively make the difference? Because as you go from 101 to 201 to 301, the information gets more disruptive. It’s like, what? What? What did you just say? I’ll give you an example. Chicago 2016, 346 (I think it was) pregnant women. They checked their urine in the eighth month of pregnancy, and they were looking for five different phthalates. Phthalates are chemicals used to mold plastic. The one that we’ve all heard about is BPA, Bisphenol-A. Oh, I use BPA-free bottles. I buy my water in BPA-free bottles. Well, that just means that they’re using BPS and they don’t have to tell you, and it’s much more toxic than BPA. But it’s going to take years before people understand that BPA-free is not safe. Phthalate-free is safe, but very few plastic bottles will say phthalate-free. But those are the companies that are really putting out the effort, not BPA-free. You see that, that’s alarm bells for you. They measured the phthalates, five different phthalates in these 346 pregnant women. And there are many more than five, but they measured the top five. They categorize them into quartiles, meaning the lowest quartile, the lowest fourth, the next level of phthalates in urine, the third level, and the highest level. So they put these 346 women into one of those four categories, the lowest to the highest. They then followed the pregnancies and the offspring of these pregnancies for seven years. When the children turned seven years old, they did Wechsler IQ tests on them, that’s the official IQ test. There’s not much in medicine that’s all or every, but this was every. This is what? Every child whose mother was in the highest quartile of phthalates in urine in pregnancy, compared to the children whose mothers were in the lowest quartile of phthalates in urine in pregnancy. Every child in the highest quartile, their IQ was 6.7 to 7.4 points lower than the kids whose mothers were in the lowest quartile of phthalates. What?  Now, that doesn’t mean anything to anyone until you understand a one-point difference in IQ is noticeable. A seven-point difference is a difference between a child working really hard getting straight A’s in school, and a child working really hard getting straight C’s in school. This child doesn’t have a chance in hell of ever excelling in school because mom was high in phthalates in urine in pregnancy. Then you go to Google, the great library in the sky, and you type in phthalates and neurogenesis, nerve growth. Here come the studies of how phthalates inhibit brain cell and nerve growth. So the higher mom was in phthalates in her urine—meaning in her blood and then filtered into the urine—the lower the baby’s IQ seven years later. Where does mom get phthalates? Well, you read my book, You Can Fix Your Brain, it drops your jaw because you see the studies that say, do not store leftover food in plastic containers in your home. Because if you put the leftover chicken in a plastic storage container in the refrigerator, the next day, the chickens got phthalates in it. The phthalates, the chemicals used to mold plastic leach out of the plastic containers. Do not buy coffee in a coffee shop and put a plastic lid on it because the steam rises, it condenses on the inside of the lid, it drips back down into the coffee full of phthalates. You put that coffee cup up to your lips, the hot liquid hits the underside of the coffee lid, tapers down into the opening, and you drink it through the opening full of phthalates. You start learning about these plasticizers—chemicals used to mold plastic—that are in our environment. You read the studies that show that when you apply nail polish, the phthalates in your nail polish are in your bloodstream in four to five minutes. Now, there’s no evidence that the amount of falsehoods that leach out of nail polish into your bloodstream, the amount of phthalates that leach out of plastic containers into your food, or the amount of families that leach out of a plastic lid into your coffee or tea are toxic to humans. There’s absolutely no evidence of that, and that’s very true and that’s how they get away with this. It was the Toxic Substance Control Act where they paid off the senators, they paid off the representatives to pass this legislation that says you have to show the amount of phthalates that leach out of plastic are toxic to humans. There is no evidence that the amount of phthalates that leach out of a plastic storage container is toxic to humans. There is no evidence, that’s how they got away with it. And at the time that this legislation was proposed, consumer groups were saying you can’t use that as the benchmark if it’s toxic to humans because this stuff accumulates in the body, and it’s the accumulated cumulative amount of these different chemicals interacting inside your cells. Immune system trying to protect you. So give me a little girl who puts nail polish on her 10 little fingers and her 10 little toes starting at five years old. Give me 25 years of that little girl applying this nail polish with minute amounts of phthalates leaching into the bloodstream that accumulate in the body in her fat cells. Now, she’s 25, 30 years old, she gets pregnant, hopefully she has a healthy pregnancy and a healthy delivery. Now seven years later, you check that baby’s IQ, they’re seven points lower than the moms in the lower level of phthalates. That’s what’s happening in our world today, and the statistics I’m going to give you about brain function today are because of this. Because of the accumulated amount of toxins that we are exposed to and the level of chemicals is rising every year in our water, in our food, in our air. Let me just jump to the study that I told you about earlier. I’m going to go out of sequence here.   [00:48:06] Ashley James: Oh, please. Oh, yes. Let’s do it. Absolutely.   [00:48:08] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: This is from the Journal of the American Medical Association. This is in the Journal of the American Medical Association, arguably the number one most prestigious medical journal in the English language, arguably. And the editors wrote a comment before the article. This is the quote, I’m reading the quote, “an elegant example of a prospective epidemiological study,” meaning the possibilities of what happens across time for people, “that uses sophisticated biological markers,” meaning indicators, “to identify a subclinical,” meaning you don’t get any symptoms, “effect of pesticide exposure on human health.”  So I’m going to read that sentence again because it’s a geeky, JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association sentence. But what they’re saying, “an elegant example of a prospective epidemiological study that uses sophisticated biological markers to identify a subclinical effect of pesticide exposure on human health.” And what did they do? They looked at pregnant women, a large group of pregnant women, and they compared pregnant women who were eating high levels of fruits and vegetables and those that were not eating fruits and vegetables every day. And they were looking at conventional fruits and vegetables, meaning what you buy in the supermarket that’s not organic, which means it’s got high pesticides on it. So many of our fruits and vegetables now are GMO, which means they bred these plants in a laboratory to live after they’re exposed to lots of pesticides and insecticides so they don’t die. But they’re loaded with these chemicals now to kill the bugs that were growing on the plants. And what did they find? They found that compared with women in the lowest fourth, once again, they divided these women into fourth. The highest fourth of fruits and vegetables, the next level, the next level, and the next level. So they compared women who were eating less than one serving a day of conventional fruits and vegetables with women who were eating more than 2.3 servings per day. Now that’s nothing. You give me a salad. It’s got lettuce, tomato, cucumber, carrot, maybe some sliced radish, that’s more than 2.3 servings of fruit and vegetable per day. And so they compared the lowest amount—less than one serving, to the highest fourth—more than 2.3. If you were in the highest quartile of eating fruits and vegetables, which we all think is good for us, more than 2.3 servings per day, you had an 18% lower probability of getting pregnant and a 26% lower probability of a live birth.   [00:51:18] Ashley James: Meaning miscarriages or stillbirth.   [00:51:21] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: That’s exactly right.   [00:51:23] Ashley James: So women have a harder time getting pregnant, and if they do get pregnant, they very likely lose the baby.   [00:51:34] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: And one out of four of them lose the babies, one out of four by eating fruits and vegetables.   [00:51:39] Ashley James: Conventional. And the key to this is that they were conventional, which is the opposite of “organic”. So conventional is you go to a restaurant and you get a side salad. You go to a smoothie bar, you get fruit in your smoothie or whatever. But if you’re eating out at a restaurant, 99.9% of restaurants aren’t going to choose organic. It’s going to be conventionally grown food. Or if you just go to the grocery store you don’t discriminate. You pick up an apple, some avocado, and some carrots because you were told you should eat more vegetables because you’re pregnant. Most women increase their fruits and vegetables when they’re pregnant, but most women also don’t buy organic. So we’re leading into, and we have been for a while, a huge problem where the women have problems conceiving and carrying a child to term, and they end up turning to medicine for major drug interventions, fertility treatments because they think it’s something wrong with them when it’s actually the chemicals being sprayed on the food.   [00:52:59] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: That’s exactly right. And that these chemicals accumulate in your fat cells. They have an affinity for the fat cells in your thighs, your hips, and your lower abdomen. These toxins accumulate over the years, 10 little fingers and 10 little toes of nail polish starting at 5 years old for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. When you read my book and you read the studies that show plastic blinds in your bedroom outgas phthalates into the air and you’re breathing this stuff for six, seven, eight hours when you’re sleeping all night every night. You’re breathing minor amounts. Now, there’s no evidence that the amount of phthalates that leach out of plastic blinds is toxic to humans. That’s how they get away with this, or the flame retardant chemicals in your sheets, your blankets, and your comforters. You wash them 20 times and they still outgas flame retardant chemicals into the air. Now, there’s no evidence that the amount of flame retardant chemicals that leach out of your sheets is toxic to humans. That’s how they get away with this. But this stuff, these minute amounts, are accumulating in us. That is the primary reason why all of our autoimmune diseases are exponentially skyrocketing in the last 20 years. You look at the amount of chemicals coming into the environment, the amount of chemicals in your drinking water year after year after year that increase the amount of chemicals in the air that we’re breathing, and you look at the graph of that and you look at the graph of autoimmune disease increase, year by year, they’re neck and neck. I mean, it’s not rocket science to look at this stuff. And when you see this and when you go, oh my God, how can this be? They wouldn’t allow it. Of course they allowed it. They got paid off to pass legislation that doesn’t have any teeth. So this is what we’re up against. Now, let me give you another statistic, just to drop your jaw a little further if it hasn’t fallen far enough yet. Excuse me, but we all need to know this kind of information. Blue Cross Blue Shield—arguably the largest for-profit health insurance company in the English language—published a paper last year entitled Early-Onset Dementia and Alzheimer’s Rates Grow for Younger American Adults. And they show that between 2013 and 2017, that the incidence of Alzheimer’s in the ages 30 to 64 tripled in four years. It tripled in four years, and when they broke it down by decades, the 30- to 44-year-old people from 2013 to 2017, the incidence of Alzheimer’s went up 407% in four years. Now, this is all the people out there saying, oh, you know, I’m getting older. I don’t remember the way it used to, haha. Well, how old are you? Well, I’m 38. No, that’s not supposed to happen ever. Somebody has a heart attack, unfortunately, they have a heart attack, but they survive. They change their diet. They start exercising. Six months, a year later, they look better than they’ve looked in years. You look great. I feel great. I feel really good. Unfortunately, someone gets diagnosed with cancer. They go through the protocols, they put the cancer into remission. Hey, how are you doing, man? Oh, I feel great. I’m doing really good. No one knows anyone diagnosed with a brain deterioration disease who’s doing really good. So when you start talking about the brain to people, they check out. It scares them, and they make silly jokes about it because they just don’t know what to do. I’m telling you, you have to learn to read the map of what’s going on right now in your brain. And when you understand that in this last decade, the incidence of Alzheimer’s is exponentially going up every year because of all the toxic chemicals we’re being exposed to. Our friend, Dr. Dale Bredesen, who wrote the book, The End of Alzheimer’s, and it’s an excellent book to read. He tells us that of the five types of Alzheimer’s, the most common type is inhalation Alzheimer’s. 60% to 65% of all Alzheimer’s cases are inhalation. It’s what’s your breathing that goes straight up through your nose, the olfactory nerves right back to the memory center of the brain and causing inflammation. Your immune system gets activated trying to protect you from what’s in the air you’re breathing, and you get all this inflammation in the memory center of your brain killing off brain cells, killing off brain cells, killing off brain cells. This is no fluke. When you walk out to the parking lot of the shopping center you say, now, what lane did I park my car in? Where are my keys? That person I walked into, what’s their name? What’s their name? It’s no fluke, and it’s not stress. It’s that the hippocampus, the memory center of your brain, is on fire. It’s inflamed, and you’re killing off brain cells, killing off brain cells, killing our brain cells like never before in history. And in four years Blue Cross Blue Shield tells us 30- to 44-year-olds, their incidence of Alzheimer’s went up by 407%. This is what we’re up against. This is like, wake up, world. Wake up. If we don’t understand this toxic world that they’re always telling, oh, it’s safe. Don’t worry about it, it’s safe. No, it’s not. No, just read the science. There’s so much good science now. Like this thing about conventional fruits and vegetables and pregnancy. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know about that study. I’m so embarrassed because I found it. That study came out in 2018. That was three years ago, and I didn’t know about this study. I now know and I’ll make sure that everyone in my audience hears that study. And that you start heading in the direction of growing more food yourself. Get a little bay window in your kitchen and grow some herbs, right? And maybe get some pots. They’ve got these things now. You can put it in your backyard, these stands, and there’s a hose that water runs through and you grow your lettuces and your cucumbers out of these stands now. You don’t even need a big garden space. You can grow it on a balcony.   [01:00:05] Ashley James: Yeah. I have a friend that sells those and she filled an entire room. It’s like a sunroom off of her house. She filled the entire room with those stands, and she grows all of her family’s fruits and vegetables in their house, basically. That’s what she does for a living. It’s really interesting to watch what she does. If anyone, any listeners want her contact information, feel free to contact me and I’ll pass it along. This year has been hellish for me, and my listeners who’ve been listening for a while know my story, but I lost my daughter during birth. She passed away while I was giving birth to her in April. And then like three days later I had COVID. That was a fun whammy. I have noticed that since COVID, and for me it was like a triple whammy recovering postpartum, recovering from grief, and recovering from COVID. I noticed a significant decrease in my cognitive abilities, and I’ve noticed a significant decrease in my memory, specifically nouns. I’ll be like, can you pass me that thing over there? Oh, yes, a spoon. And also with names. I’ll be like, oh, I interviewed this doctor. His name is, and then I can’t remember his name whereas I could before. It’s been slowly getting better, but it’s definitely concerned me. And I’ve looked into and seen that a lot of people, post-COVID, say that they have a cognitive decline. And even they’re showing the brain scans, the smaller brains. The brain shrinks during COVID. So I think that not just for me, but for a lot of listeners who have had COVID, and of course your book, I definitely recommend that listeners read it because it’s not just this one thing, but it is everything. It’s everything we’re eating, it’s everything we’re breathing that we need to take into account in order to heal our brain. For people who’ve had COVID, what can we do to really make sure we’re supporting our brain health and getting it back as much as possible?   [01:02:30] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I don’t want to ignore what you said. Thank you for sharing that, and I’m very sorry for the loss for your family. And I know that something is integrating into you. That never goes away, it just becomes a part of who you are, right? And it’ll fuel you to carry you forward to talk about health issues.   [01:02:55] Ashley James: Thank you. Mental and emotional health is also physical health, and it definitely affects it. I think it’s important that we talk about and we acknowledge the losses that we have instead of burying it deep inside.   [01:03:10] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Critically important.   [01:03:11] Ashley James: Yeah, don’t bury it inside. Have the courage to talk about it and to ask for support when you need it. We need to do that. So yeah, healing the brain after COVID.   [01:03:25] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Yeah, I’ll get to that. Let me just say one thing here with what you’re talking about. In my book, You Can Fix Your Brain, I talk about the pyramid of health. And there are four sides to a pyramid. No, there are three sides to a pyramid. No, there are four. There’s also a base. And so, you have to look at any health condition from four sides. First, the base and that’s your structure. That’s the home of chiropractic, osteopathy, exercise, massage, yoga, posturing, your car seat in the car—all of the things that affect your muscles, bones, and ligaments are critically important for any health condition because that may be the trigger causing any health problems that you may have. So that first is the base. Next, one side of the pyramid going up is your biochemistry. That’s what you eat, what you drink, what you breathe, the medications you take, the nutrition you take, the foods you choose. Next is the emotional or spiritual side, as you were just starting to talk about. And the last one is the latest one. In the last 15 years, it has become just as relevant as the other three, and that’s electromagnetic pollution. That all four sides of the pyramid of health have to be looked at when you’re dealing with a health issue and you’re not getting the results that you want. So many people that we see over the years, not exaggerating, so many of them and they’ve been to many doctors—complementary medicine, alternative medicine, functional medicine doctors—and they’ve gotten better, but they’re not there yet. And they get to us and where do we find the problem? It’s in the mental or spiritual side of the pyramid of health. They buried something and they haven’t integrated it into their lives stepping forward, and it’s the emergency brake. If you back out of a driveway and you say, what? What’s wrong with this car? It’s moving but it’s so slow. Oh, the emergency brake. And you let go of the emergency brake but then you back up just fine. It’s the emergency brake in your pyramid of health that doesn’t get addressed because we think it makes us weak if we’re talking about our issues, our upsets, or something. We have some preconceived notion so we hide it or we bury it. I am really impressed with you, Ashley, and I don’t know you at all. This is the first time we’ve met today, but you can reference such a traumatic event in such a healthy way in this short period of time since it occurred. What that tells me is that you’re integrating, you’re really working to integrate. And I honor that baby, that spirit, and who’s always part of your family in this lifetime, but you’re integrating it. And so, kudos to you for that.  And you’re modeling for everyone out there, if this woman can do that with what she has just gone through, you can do it with a divorce where that idiot was treating you so poorly years ago, and you still have fears and apprehensions about relationships. Meaning, you can integrate whatever has happened to you, you just need some coaching and some help, and you got to find the right people to do it. But you work to integrate the emotional trauma so that you detox from it. That’s how you detox. The detox is not just chemicals you got to get out of your body. It’s any emergency brakes that are holding back your health.  I did not want to miss the opportunity to acknowledge you for how you’re modeling this, and I want everyone to understand what they just heard. Maybe go back and listen to this again and listen to her voice. Listen to how she stuttered a little bit in her voice because this is extremely painful, and that she’s not just breezing over it like la la la, but she’s present as she’s talking to us about it. And she’s not sobbing right now, and she may at other times during the day, that’s very healthy to do. But she’s making it present for us. That’s what we all have to do with whatever the emotional traumas are on the mental-spiritual side of our pyramid of health. So now, back to the brain question, what do you do? What do you do if you’ve had COVID and you’re noticing brain dysfunction or brain dysfunction in general? First, you need a map. You have to understand where you’ve got to go to get through to the destination of better brain health. What am I referring to? The rule is test, don’t guess. So you have to test, is my brain inflamed right now? Do I have inflammation in my brain because then I thought I was going to do a sequential presentation here today, but you and I are just flowing, which is really great.  The first point I was going to bring up today is that every degenerative disease, without exception, that comes into your practice doctor or that comes into your home mom is a disease of inflammation. The cell is on fire. The question is, is it a kidney cell or a brain cell? Is it gasoline or kerosene? But it’s always inflammation. So I’m going to tell you now and I’ll get to the brain question, I’m leading into it. I’m going to tell you now about Professor Alessio Fasano. Professor Fasano, he’s my friend and my mentor. We think he’s going to win the Nobel Prize one day, we truly do because this is the guy—he and his team are the ones who identified the mechanism that causes this thing we now call leaky gut. They identified how it happened back in 1997 they identified, and they’ve been studying it and writing papers about it for over 20 years now. There’s no question that this is the gateway to the development of autoimmune diseases. So Professor Fasano, he is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, Chief Pediatric Gastroenterology Mass General Hospital at Harvard, the Director of the Mucosal Immunology Center—that’s the lining of your lungs, the lining of your gut, the lining of your brain—at Harvard. The director of the Celiac Research Center at Harvard. This guy has five titles. Any one of these titles is a lifelong goal for someone at the top of their field, and he’s got five. This guy is in another dimension in terms of the contributions he’s giving to us, and what I’m about to tell you is what they’re teaching at Harvard Medical School right now. This is what our future doctors are learning right now. Professor Fasano wrote this paper last year for all of us, and you can google it. You can google the paper and download it. The title of the paper is, All disease begins in the (leaky) gut. All disease begins in the (leaky) gut. The role of zonulin—that’s the protein that causes leaky gut—in the development of pathogenic intestinal permeability and chronic inflammatory diseases. And what he tells us is that there are five pillars in the development of inflammatory diseases. Every disease that comes into your office doctor is an inflammatory disease, and there are five pillars in how they develop. First is your genetics, and you can’t do anything about your genes. That’s the deck of cards that you were dealt. And some people say, well, I can turn off the gene. You cannot turn off genes. Genes don’t operate on an on-off switch. Genes operate on dimmer switches. And you can dim down the genes of inflammation, but they’re still there. They need to be there. And you can ramp up, turn up the genes of anti-inflammation. For example, many doctors have heard about the studies, you eat one cup of blueberries a day (organic) for three years and your brain’s working as well as it was 13 years ago at one cup of blueberries a day. Why? Because the blueberries dim down the genes of inflammation, and they turn up the genes of anti-inflammation regeneration in your brain and other parts of your area. But the first is your genes. So you can’t turn them on and off but you affect the dimmer switches. How do you affect the dimmer switches? By number two of the five pillars, environmental triggers. What your body is exposed to from the environment is the hand on the dimmer switch turning on your genes to brighter or turning down your genes to less bright. It’s the environmental triggers. And the most common environmental trigger is when the end of your fork. That’s most common, but it’s also what’s in the air, what you put on your skin, all the environmental exposures to our body come into play here. And also, what’s happening inside your body. The geek word is endogenous, meaning inside the body. The endogenous triggers, what are those? The stress hormones that you’re producing on a daily basis ramp up your genes of inflammation. Stress hormones turn up inflammation, that’s their job. That’s what they’re supposed to do. Excess stress hormones cause disease. Normal levels of stress hormones keep us alive, that’s why we make them, they’re good for us. But it’s the excess that causes disease. That’s the environmental triggers. Also, internal endogenous is all the chemicals stored in your body, the lead in your bones. Why do you think postmenopausal women, their brains go down so quickly compared to before menopause? It’s because when they go through menopause, they’ve worn out their adrenal glands and the adrenal glands can’t handle the stress of life anymore. So now, they’re in a state of depletion, and you start losing bone because you’ve got more inflammation and you’re in a state of depletion. The adrenal glands are supposed to make 1/10 the estrogen that your ovaries used to make. When you go through menopause, the adrenal glands are supposed to take over, but if the adrenal glands are dysfunctional, they’re deficient because they’ve been worn out. Because they’re the gland called the stress glands, the stress of life. And they’re worn out and they can’t make that 1/10 the estrogen that your ovaries used to make, now you develop estrogen deficiencies because the adrenal glands are not doing their job.  And when you have estrogen deficiencies, you get bone loss. And when you get bone loss, what’s inside the bones is the lead that you’ve been exposed to for the last 50 years in minute amounts. And when it gets in your bloodstream and the brain says get that stuff away from me, it’s stored in your bones. Petrochemicals are stored in your fat cells, heavy metals are stored in your bones and other areas. But now, you’re postmenopausal and you’ve got an estrogen deficiency because the adrenal glands are worn out, and now you started losing bone and in that bone is the lead you’ve been exposed to.  Now it’s in the bloodstream, lead goes right to the brain, causes inflammation in the brain, and your brain deterioration accelerates. That is the most common mechanism for postmenopausal loss of cognitive function. This causes this causes this causes this causes that. So anyway, so that’s the environmental triggers, that’s number two from Fissano. Number three, altered microbiome. The environmental triggers that we take in that cause so much stress, so much inflammation destroys the good bacteria in our gut and creates a space for more bad bacteria to grow and prosper. That’s called dysbiosis, and that’s where the LPS comes from, the exhaust of the bad bacteria. But now we’ve got this altered microbiome, dysbiotic microbiome, which creates number four of the five pillars. And number four is the inflammation from the dysbiosis in your gut creates the leaky gut. Mrs. Patient, your intestines are a tube from the mouth to the other end, one big long tube about 20–25 feet long, winds around in the center there. The inside of the tube is lined with cheesecloth. And so when you eat food, when you swallow a bite of steak, for example, you chew it four or five times and you swallow it. You should do it 15 to 20 times, but we don’t. So you guzzle it down a couple of chews and you swallow them. Those shreds of meat fiber can’t get into the bloodstream. They’d be very poisonous to the bloodstream. Your digestive system has to break down the meat fibers. How did they do that? Your enzymes act like scissors. If you think of protein like a pearl necklace, you chew, swallow, the acid in your stomach undoes the clasp of the pearl necklace. Now you have a string of pearls. Your digestive enzymes act like scissors to snip that pearl necklace smaller, smaller, smaller, snip, snip, snip, snip, snip until you’re down to each pearl of the pearl necklace. That’s called an amino acid. The amino acids, the pearls of the pearl necklace, go right through the cheesecloth. They’re small enough to go right through the cheesecloth into the bloodstream. Now those amino acids in the bloodstream are called the building blocks, and they build new bone cells, new brain cells, new muscle cells. That’s how we get our raw material to make new cells is by our enzymes snipping them down smaller, smaller, smaller until they go right through into the bloodstream. The problem is when you’ve got inflammation in your gut, you tear the cheesecloth. That’s called leaky gut. When you tear the cheesecloth, now bigger molecules of this food that’s in the process of being digested, but bigger molecules slip through the tears in the cheesecloth into the bloodstream before they’re supposed to get through. Now these bigger molecules in the bloodstream, they’re called macromolecules, big molecules. Now your immune system says, whoa, what’s this? This is not good for me. This is not safe. I better fight this. Now you make antibodies to wheat, to dairy, to beef, to chicken, or to tomatoes. It doesn’t matter what the food is. If a macromolecule gets through into the bloodstream, now your immune system trying to protect you is going to fight that. And so leaky gut is number four, and the activation of your immune system is number five, systemic immune activation. Now your body, in your bloodstream, there’s lots of inflammation, and depending on your genetic vulnerability, if you’ve got the gene for Alzheimer’s, the inflammation is going to your brain. Other areas, but it focuses on your brain. If you’ve got the gene for breast cancer, the inflammation is going to your breasts. If you’ve got the gene for rheumatoid arthritis, the inflammation is going to your joints. If you’ve got the gene for MS, it’s going to your nerves. It doesn’t matter. All diseases are inflammatory, and Professor Fasano is showing us these are the five pillars in the development of chronic inflammatory diseases. So when you understand this, then as a consumer, you start asking the question, okay, so what environmental triggers are inflammatory in my life, or what’s the state of my microbiome right now? Do I have intestinal permeability, the leaky gut that I have to rebuild the microbiome so that I calm down that inflammation? Do I have elevated antibodies to gluten right now, to dairy, to beef, to chicken, to Klebsiella, to staff, or to strep bacteria that you’re exposed to? What is my immune system fighting right now? This is the pathway, this is the map that you have to look at and you have to start exploring to figure out, where do I need to direct my attention? So the concept from someone who comes from the paradigm that we were raised in where their home has a medicine cabinet and they come to me and they say, what do I take to get rid of my rheumatoid arthritis? We have to have this discussion over a number of visits to say, you need to change your questioning. We need to change your paradigm, and you need to understand, this is going to be a six-month to two-year journey to figure out why you’ve got osteoporosis right now, why you have cognitive decline, why is your sense of smell going, or whatever that condition is. But you need to change the paradigm of how you think about that, then we start teaching you how to read your map as to what’s going on in your body right now. So that’s the five pillars from Fasano that every medical student at Harvard is being taught right now to think about these five pillars. So the question about your brain function, and what do I do? You need the map. And the first thing you look at is, is there inflammation in the brain? Well, obviously there is because it’s not functioning properly, all right. How do I identify the inflammation? And the test is called the Neural Zoomer Plus because you zoom in on the problem. The Neural Zoomer Plus.  The laboratory also offers the Neural Zoomer. That was the first test and that’s got eight markers on it of brain inflammation, but the Neural Zoomer Plus has 48 markers on it. So you get this blood test done, and you look to see how bad is it right now? And it’s going to be bad. You want it to be bad because if you see, oh look, I’ve got 18 antibodies elevated in my brain right now killing off brain cells, by definition, when the antibodies are elevated, they’re killing off brain cells. Okay, so I’ve got 18 right now, how do I deal with it? So I’ll give you a couple of examples. One of the antibodies that I look for is called gangliosides. Ganglioside is a component of your nerve fibers. And if you have those antibodies elevated, you’re killing off the nerves. Well, we know that gangliosides when you start losing gangliosides because of elevated antibodies, one of the symptoms of peripheral neuropathies. That’s numbness and tingling in your fingers, your toes, your cheek, and your tongue. It doesn’t matter where it is, it’s peripheral neuropathy.   [01:24:06] Ashley James: Sorry to interrupt. That’s a common symptom that people have been complaining about after having COVID.   [01:24:14] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: You think? I’m from Chicago and in the immortal words of Rosanne Rosanna Danna, “you think?” Of course, of course. So, you want to know, do I have elevated antibodies to gangliosides? Okay. You do in this example. What do you do? Well, the first thing, where are they coming from? And we know, if you just read the science, and I’m this geek that I’ve been reading the science now for 30 years, wheat and problems in wheat. And when you read the science, I show you the studies that say peripheral neuropathies are the most common nerve symptom when you have a sensitivity to wheat—most common. And 22% of all celiacs have peripheral neuropathy. Every single one of them with peripheral neuropathies has elevated antibodies to gangliosides—100% of them. And when you get gluten out of the diet in those people, the ganglioside antibodies go down to normal. Take six months to a year, it depends on the individual, how well they comply, and how successful we are in teaching them. But every single one of them, if they’ve got peripheral neuropathies and they have a sensitivity to gluten, put them on a gluten-free diet, the ganglioside antibodies go down. That’s how you deal with gangliosides, you just check. Do I have a problem with wheat? And that test is the Wheat Zoomer, the most comprehensive test in the world. I traveled the world teaching. I was on stage in Lisbon six weeks ago in Milan and Georgia last weekend, and it’s the most comprehensive and the most accurate test in the world. Just read the science, I just won’t take the time to explain all that to you guys right now. Read about it. So you do the Wheat Zoomer and you do the Neural Zoomer Plus. Now the Wheat Zoomer, it’s the most accurate test for intestinal permeability that’s out there. So with those two blood tests, Wheat Zoomer and Neural Zoomer Plus, now you have an idea, do I have leaky gut right now? The gateway in the development of autoimmune diseases, do I have leaky gut? And the answer is yes, you probably will. Do I have a sensitivity to wheat? And the answer is yes, you probably will. Even those who are gluten-free for two years still have elevated antibodies and it shocks them when they find out, and then they start to learn why. We teach you all of that how the inadvertent exposures add up.  And some doctors out there say, well, just have a low gluten diet. I have no room for that kind of gobbledygook, and I am in their face. Hey, doc, can you show me one study where a low gluten diet was safe to the immune system, that the immune system was an activated low gluten diet? And they can’t, there’s no such thing as a low gluten diet calming down the inflammatory cascade. They made it up because they want to be nice guys, and most patients won’t comply gluten-free unless you teach them how to do it properly. And these doctors just don’t take the time to learn how to do it properly. Excuse me, I’m a little worked up on that one. I need to calm down and be more politically correct.   [01:27:36] Ashley James: No, I absolutely love it. I love it because about 11 years ago, my husband and I learned about this and we cut out barley, wheat, rye, and oats because oats contain gliadin, which is similar to gluten. Might as well just get rid of them too while you’re at it. We didn’t do many other changes in that one month, just cutting out barley, wheat, rye, and oats. I lost 25 pounds of water weight, and my husband and I, both of our wedding rings, which we had custom made, were flying off our fingers. And so we waited six months before we had them resized because we were like well, we don’t want this to all of a sudden bounce back and that our rings don’t fit on our fingers. When we had them resized, I went down 1.5 ring sizes and my husband went down 2 ring sizes, and that was from cutting out barley, wheat, rye, and oats. It was going gluten- and gliadin-free. I come up against people who say, well, I tried that for a few months and I didn’t notice a difference, so I just went back to eating it. And I get it.   [01:28:43] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Here’s a problem with that one. It’s called the tacks rule. Sit down on four tacks, you jump up really quickly. Take two tacks out and sit down again, it doesn’t reduce the pain by 50%, you understand? I mean, there’s more than just wheat. You may have a dairy sensitivity. You may have lectin sensitivity. You may have bacteria. You may have an abnormal microbiome. The tacks rule says you have to be comprehensive. You can’t do it piecemeal. You have to find out where is the inflammation coming from, you can’t do it piecemeal. So back to your question about the brain, you do the Neural Zoomer Plus and I’m going to give you one more example of 48 antibodies and many of them come back positive. I’ll give you one more. It’s called the RAGE antibody. When it’s elevated, that’s a sign of brain inflammation and deterioration. And where does that come from? We’ve known for a long time that when you cook food, when you add heat to protein, you brown it, you change the shape of it like barbecuing. Beef, when you get those black lines from the grill, you burn the beef. They’re called advanced glycation end products, AGEs.  Bread, when you knead bread, it feels really good in your hand. You get that nice elasticity to it. I used to be a baker in another lifetime, you get that nice elasticity. But when you bake it, there is a crust. That’s advanced glycation end products. And when you eat advanced glycation end products, they’re a little bit of gasoline on the fire. There is no way to avoid having any inflammation in your life, that’s not possible, but you can certainly reduce excessive inflammation.  But when we eat foods that have been cooked at high temperatures and change the structure of the food, they produce advanced glycation end products. That’s an argument of why more raw food in our diet is a good thing or lightly cooked foods. Not a raw food diet, I’m not recommending that, but most people rarely eat raw foods like having celery as a snack or peanut butter on celery for your kids as a snack is a great idea. But these advanced glycation end products, they’re in your bloodstream. Now, the way that hormones and some other substances get inside your cell is that there are receptors sitting on the outside of the cell. The receptor is like a catcher’s mitt facing the bloodstream, and the pitcher throws the ball to the catcher. So you have estrogen receptor sites sitting outside the cell, and estrogen in the bloodstream goes by, it gets magnetically pulled into that receptor site for estrogen. Thyroid hormone will not go into an estrogen receptor site. It goes into the thyroid receptor sites. Testosterone will not go into a thyroid receptor site, an estrogen receptor site, or a progesterone receptor site. It goes into a testosterone receptor site. So receptor sites sit on the outside of the cells facing the bloodstream and act as magnets to pull in whatever they’re supposed to. Well, there are receptor sites on our cells called receptors for advanced glycation end product. And what’s the synonym for that? RAGE, receptor for advanced glycation end products, RAGE. And when the RAGE receptors get activated by advanced glycation end products, it turns on lots of inflammation inside that cell. So the more cooked foods we eat that have changed the protein structure of the food, meaning high temperature, the more advanced glycation end products we eat, the more inflammation we turn on inside ourselves. So RAGE antibodies are one of the antibodies on the Neural Zoomer Plus test. So if you have elevated antibodies to RAGEs on your brain function test, what do you think you’re going to do? One of the recommendations we give is, let’s get more raw foods and slow-cooked or low cooked foods in your diet, Mrs. Patient, and the RAGE antibodies come down in six months. But you have to learn all of these little steps that go with every one of these 48 antibodies to your brain to reduce. I’ll give you another one, Herpes Simplex 1, the herpes virus that causes cold sores on the mouth for so many people. You get a cold sore in your mouth, it’s a herpes virus sore, you’ve got inflammation in your brain. It’s almost guaranteed. Why? Because your immune system can’t keep the virus under control and you’re having an outbreak, meaning there are elevated levels of the virus in your bloodstream. So you’re likely going to have elevated antibodies to Herpes Simplex 1, HSV-1. That’s another one of the markers on the Neural Zoomer Plus. So if that comes back positive in your Neural Zoomer Plus test, Herpes Simplex 1, now we have to look at how is it that the bank account of your immune system is so low that you’re overdrawn and your immune system can’t keep this virus under control? How is that happening? Where are you draining the bank account of your immune system? And how come your immune system doesn’t have the energy to keep this virus under control? So then we start looking for other bacterial infections in your body like Klebsiella, Proteus, or E.coli. Klebsiella is the number one infection in hospitals for people with lung problems. If you develop pneumonia in the hospital, it’s very likely a Klebsiella infection. So what do you look at? We have to look to see what other bacteria and viruses your immune system is fighting right now. And then we have to go after Klebsiella. So of course, we give natural products. We do a sensitivity test to see will your Klebsiella be killed by olive leaf extract or by some herbs, or do we need to use the big guns and bring antibiotics? Sometimes you need to. That’s called a sensitivity profile to find out how are we going to kill your Klebsiella. And then you have to look at where the Klebsiella coming from that’s inside your body. And where do you look? We teach people about their showerheads. Those showerheads form biofilms that accumulate behind the showerhead right up in there, and every time you turn that shower on, you’re blasted with millions of bacteria, especially if you live in warm climates.   [01:36:00] Ashley James: And breathing it in.   [01:36:01] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: And breathing it in. Every time you turn that shower on, the aerosol in the air, you’re sucking in lots of Klebsiella, Proteus, or it just depends on what’s in your showerhead. So it’s so overwhelming and it’s so comprehensive to do this. But that’s why the subtitle of my book, You Can Fix Your Brain—I’m going to get to that. But that’s the answer to your question about how do you determine what your current brain status is. You do the Neural Zoomer Plus and the Wheat Zoomer and you find out and then you have to explore, all right, now I see the map and I want to get from here to there, how do I get there?  Well, that’s going to take you six months to a year to do and you read my book and you start to understand all these little steps. Like phthalates in your plastic storage containers, in your nail polish, or in the air. If you go to my site, thedr.com/plant, you download the article from NASA that two six-inch house plants in a room absorb 73% of the toxins in the air so that you’re not breathing it all night, the House plant breathes it in.  You just have to learn all of these little steps. And that’s why the subtitle to my book, You Can Fix Your Brain is, Just 1 Hour a Week to the Best Memory, Productivity, and Sleep You’ve Ever Had. Now, what do I mean by that? That’s not some cute little moniker. It is the only way that you will be successful in stopping the deterioration in your brain. I believe it in my heart and soul, it’s the only way. Well, what the hell do you mean by that, doc? Every Tuesday night after dinner, every Sunday after services, whenever it is, but every week, without exception, you allocate one hour and you tell your family, don’t bother me. I’m going to study to learn a little bit more about how to make us healthier. And you’re going to go back to my book, you’re going to come back to this podcast, you’re going to listen to it again, and you’re going to listen to this thing about nail polish. Oh, that’s right nail polish. And you’re going to look for organic nail polish.  You’re going to go to my book and you’re going to open up to glass storage containers. I give you three URLs: mileskimball.com, amazon.com, and whatever the third one is, I don’t remember. And you go to the one, you say, oh those, I really like those. And you order three round ones, two square ones, and one for the pies. You pay with your credit card, you hit send, and you’re done. It took an hour. You’re done for the week. But never again are you going to poison your family by storing leftovers in plastic storage containers. You’re going to start using the glass storage containers, and then you’re done with that one. Next week you’re going to tackle nail polish. Next week you’re going to look at this house plant thing, and you go to the nursery. I give you the list of plants, and you’re going to go get some plants. Oh, I don’t have a green thumb. They’re going to die. Well then you’ll buy more so that your kids are not breathing these toxins, right? And every week you just learn one more thing. Now you can do two hours a week if you want, but the concept is you have to be patient with yourself. You have to be kind to yourself because this is so overwhelming. It’s a paradigm shift from what you thought was safe.  What they’ve told you out there in the marketing to buy their stuff, they don’t tell you that the nightstand next to your bed, if it’s not solid wood it’s pressboard. Pressboard is soaked in formaldehyde. And it outgases formaldehyde for years in your bedroom. You’re smelling formaldehyde every night. Well, I can’t smell it. That doesn’t mean a thing. Or the kitchen cabinets, if they’re not solid wood, they’re pressboards and they’re soaked in formaldehyde, and the varnish that you’re breathing. And when you start learning about air pollution, oh my God, I need an air filtration system. Yes, you do. Well, what do I get? Well, you go to my website and we tell you all about air filtration systems or you just start doing your research. But every week you take one more thing. And in six months, you’ve dialed this down, you’ve got it, and you really are on the path now and you’re calm. And you get frustrated when you learn things like this article in the journal the American Medical Association about pregnant women and conventional vegetables. I was so upset that I didn’t know about that because this came out three years ago. You’re still going to get rocked every once in a while, but now you have a paradigm to hold all this in. You understand that it’s you and your family against the world out there, against the commercial world of what you’ve been told is safe. It’s not you and your family against the world. Don’t ever social distance ever. You may have to physical distance, maybe, but not social distance. But it’s you and your family against the commercial world out there.   [01:41:12] Ashley James: Against the mainstream media. Use your own brain, learn critical thinking. A free website is triviumeducation.com. Pick through it, begin to study critical thinking. It’s called the Trivium and the Quadrivium. It’s a 2500-year-old way of critical thinking that was taught for 2500 years, but it was systematically taken out of the education system 150 years ago when they invented what is now the modern education system, the Prussian education system. Because the education system now is meant to make good little factory workers or good little citizens that comply, not free thinkers with critical thinking. But the Trivium is still taught. It is the best way to learn very quickly, and children can learn it too, how to critically think and how to listen for the linguistic fallacies. And when you learn it, you will see the matrix. The matrix, the little green numbers will start to come down as you watch mainstream media and you read the titles of articles, you will see the fallacies, the linguistic lies, and manipulations. And then go read books by Edward Bernays and you will learn the propaganda that they have been stringing us along, and they’ve been getting better and better and better at it—at manipulating us with words and controlling our reality with their marketing. Everything is marketed to us. Every channel you turn on the TV, it’s all marketing. Every news story is marketing. We have to train our brain to filter information and not blindly take it in and allow this information to bypass our critical faculty. We have to train our critical faculty. I recommend studying the Trivium so that you can learn linguistic fallacies and then you can start thinking for yourself and identifying when they’re trying to do the thinking for you. I wanted to point out, I did an interview with Andrew Pace. I’m going to give you his information. I think that you guys should hook up if you haven’t already. He is a third-generation building contractor who in the late ‘70s had a very intense incident where his workers fainted after using what is a “non-toxic” substance to seal a sealant from concrete. And that’s when he dove into this world and realized that all the materials that are rubber-stamped by the EPA are not healthy, are incredibly toxic, and harmful. And he shares a story about how the EPA 10 years ago built a new building, a new headquarters for themselves. Out of all the building materials that you could go to Home Depot to buy, or Lowe’s or whatever, that are all rubber-stamped and approved by the EPA, so, therefore, we believe they’re safe, that you could go and build your own home or your own office with them—commercial or residential. And their building was so toxic that 100 of their workers 10 years later are still permanently disabled from the off-gassing of all of the building materials of their brand new headquarters. Now, these are the same people that said they were safe, and what they admit themselves is over 90% of what they approve 100% never gets tested for safety. So in that interview I did with him, he goes into detail about that, episode 453. I think that that is really important because he also talks about formaldehyde and how prolific it is in every home and every office. And we have to really be conscious about filtering it and getting rid of it. And then I also have a similar—this reminded me of it, I wanted to tell you about him. Dr. Troy [inaudible 01:45:07] who is here locally to me in Seattle, and he has personally saved his own money and spent tens of thousands of dollars of his own money. Almost every year he does a 30-day fast and he tests his own blood for all of the major chemicals that you mentioned, all the environmental toxins. And what he’s trying to show is that certain types of fasting can actually remove these forever chemicals. And what he discovered is that it has to require a binder.  Fiber is a binder, heated activated charcoal, but that our liver will try to get rid of them, but then they’re immediately re-uptake by the colon because bile is reabsorbed, and bile is what these forever chemicals are bound to. And so a binder, when he did these blood tests, found that when he did activated charcoal during his fasts, he had significantly lower levels of these forever chemicals. He’s trying to get that study off the ground, but it’s just him and now another one of his friends is doing it because he’s not interested in making money, he’s just interested in getting this information out there. But he goes around and learns from all these doctors and figures out how to get rid of these forever chemicals in the body. I just thought that was right up your alley because this is what you’re talking about.   [01:46:36] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: You bet. Yeah, please send me the contact for Andrew and Troy   [01:46:41] Ashley James: Absolutely, I will. And I have to tell you, and this is not to toot your horn, I don’t say this to guests, you’re definitely in my top 10, probably my top 5 interviews I’ve ever done, so I have to have you back on the show. I said it at the beginning of the show, but I really did mean it. You take the science, the real science, not the quack trying to sell us more garbage science, but the real science of how our body works and how we can get to the root cause. Inflammation is at the root of disease, but before that is what is causing the inflammation, and that is exactly what you’re exposing. And I love that you’re realistic. It takes some time, years. I’ve been on my health journey, 2008 is when I started my health journey. I was incredibly sick, very, very sick with many illnesses. I was told I’d never conceived naturally, I was on constant antibiotics. I had adrenal burnout, polycystic ovarian syndrome, type 2 diabetes.  I was so sick in my 20s, and when I was 28 years old, my husband and I sat down and watched some food documentaries on Netflix and we started to shop the perimeter of the grocery store and eat organic. And eating organic that first month, my chronic infections went away. And I thought, if I can change my immune system, in one month my chronic infections I no longer need to be on constant antibiotics because I chose to eat organic. And I hadn’t even cut out gluten or dairy.  I just shopped the perimeter of the grocery store, ate more whole foods, and ate organic. That’s what led me on this long journey of mine where I’ve healed those issues, and I’m still healing, I’m not done yet. But I’ve come so far, and I know that the keys you’ve given us today. Everyone who applies them is going to go light-years with their health, myself included. I feel so blessed to have had you on the show today to shed light on this information. Now, you have this book about healing the brain, and then you have Betrayal: The Autoimmune Disease Solution. Now, you have more than a book though. Don’t you also have videos? Can you talk a bit about how we can plug into you and learn more from you ongoingly?   [01:49:11] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Sure, thanks so much. Yeah, I’m awkward in trying to say this information in a way that people can hear. I should preface by saying, don’t shoot the messenger.   [01:49:37] Ashley James: Right. People are in love with their gluten products. I get it. They don’t want to give up. Now, here’s the thing. We didn’t even touch on that most of the foods that are harming them also trigger the dopamine response, so they legitimately have an addiction. They have a biochemical addiction to the foods that are hurting them. And so, yeah, they’re going to get upset when you take away their [inaudible 01:49:59]. You’re taking away the thing that brings their brain joy.  I can tell you how I’ve been gluten-free for so many years, now I’ve messed up once in a while. Listen, I don’t blow up, I don’t break out in hives. My hair doesn’t fall out if I have one meal with gluten in it, but I can tell for over a month after one meal with gluten in it, I can tell I have inflammation in my body. I do my best to be 100% gluten-free.   [01:50:25] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Well, I’m glad to hear that. It’s one of the things—my 10-month-old son is crying for me or reaching for me, so I just told my wife I’ll be done in a few minutes. The problem with wheat is not wheat. I mean, for most people the ratio is 8:1. For every one person that gets gut symptoms from eating wheat, there are eight that don’t. They get brain symptoms, joint symptoms, kidney symptoms, or bladder symptoms. They don’t associate what they ate with having a migraine the next day or having a seizure. But just google seizures and celiac or seizures and gluten, here comes studies when you read this. So the ratio is 8:1. And so, the real danger is that when you have a sensitivity to wheat and if your genetic vulnerability—number one of the five pillars from Fasano—is to the collagen of your joints, when you make antibodies to wheat, those antibodies go into the bloodstream looking for wheat, looking for wheat. They’re looking for a protein signature of wheat. I call it an orange vest, so they’re looking for the orange vests, that specific protein structure of a wheat molecule to identify and to kill it. And unfortunately, that protein signature of wheat is very, very similar to the protein signature of your joints, the collagen in your joints.  So the antibodies looking for wheat, if your genetic vulnerability is to collagen, those antibodies start attacking your collagen. It’s called molecular mimicry, or if your genetic vulnerability is to MS, those antibodies to wheat will start attacking the myelin, the saran wrap around your nerves is what causes MS when you lose myelin. So when you have exposure to wheat and the antibodies get turned back on to wheat, so you’ve turned on the assembly line to make antibodies, that assembly line stays on for anywhere from four to eight weeks. From one exposure, you’re making antibodies now. If you get a vaccination, if you’re going to Africa, you need vaccinations months and months in advance for yellow fever, Dengue fever, and all these crazy things because it takes months to build the assembly line to make the soldiers, the antibodies for yellow fever and Dengue fever, it takes a couple of months. But then when you go there, if you’re exposed, you’ve got the antibodies in your bloodstream. Great. If you go back to Africa 15 years later, you just need a booster shot two weeks before you go. And everyone has heard booster shots, well, you just have to wake up. You just have to flip the switch to turn the assembly line back on. You don’t have to build the assembly line again, which takes months. You just have to turn the switch on, and within a day or two, you’ve got antibodies to yellow fever and Dengue fever back in your bloodstream again. The same thing happens with wheat. You give up wheat, you feel better, everything is great. I’m going to have a little at the holiday, it’s no big deal. I’ll feel bad for a day or two. You say, you can tell for a month, that’s how sensitive you are. So you have an exposure, the assembly line gets turned back on making the antibodies to wheat, but that’s not a big deal for most people. They don’t feel it when that’s going on and they get back on the wagon again and they get off of wheat, they’re fine. But the assembly line is going to stay on for a couple of months. It doesn’t go away the next day, it stays on for a couple of months. And the lifespan of the antibodies that are produced towards the end of that six- to eight-week period is four to six weeks themselves. So now you’ve got these antibodies to wheat continually in your bloodstream for three, four months from one exposure. Just read the science and you go, holy cow. And if your genetic vulnerability is to MS, those antibodies are attacking the myelin in your nerves. And for three or four months, you’re killing off more myelin, killing off myelin, killing off myelin as a result of a single exposure. That’s the OMG that nobody knows about until you start reading the science. So these doctors that say, well just cut down, go low gluten, you’ll be okay. Nonsense. There is no science behind that at all, and the science says that’s absolutely false, and you’re accelerating their degenerative disease and their vulnerabilities from number one of the five pillars, your genetic vulnerability. You’re accelerating. You’re turning that dimmer switch up brighter for MS, for rheumatoid, for chronic fatigue, for seizures, for psoriasis, for thyroid problems, Hashimotos, or for lupus.  I mean, just read the science and you see that for some people, the weak link for them, their genetic vulnerability is to XYZ disease. And then just type in XYZ disease and gluten, here come the studies that for some people, you take gluten out of their diet, their psoriasis goes away. Well, this is why. This is why. So you can’t be a little pregnant, you can’t have a little gluten once you’ve crossed the line. I couldn’t let that slide, I have to say.   [01:56:41] Ashley James: Yeah, no, thank you. Like you said, don’t shoot the messenger. But here’s the thing, once they learn how to make these changes, and you said, if you can do one hour a week, baby steps. A year from now, you will have a whole different body, a whole different life. You will feel so much better if you do baby steps. I’m sure you teach in your book the baby steps we can do. Your website, which is thedr.com, right? Thedr.com, fantastic information there.   [01:57:22] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Excuse me, I forgot to answer your question about Betrayal, I forgot. I got diverted. So let me tell you about that and that’s where we’ll wrap it up. My wife and I went to seven different countries and I went looking for the world experts in immunology. And I know who these guys are and these women because I’ve read their papers. And so, I knew what to ask them. I didn’t say, well, doctor, please tell us how you got interested in this field. I didn’t do any of that garbage. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say that.   [01:58:00] Ashley James: I need to stop asking that question.   [01:58:01] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: So Professor, you are world-renowned in reversing type 2 diabetes, and sometimes type 1 diabetes. How is it that an acetylcysteine can impact on the development of type 1 diabetes? And that’s where I started, with questions like that. And they go, oh. Not many of them get excited. They’re not animated. They’re geeks and they’re very calm, but they talk about it. Then I went to the clinicians around the world in seven different countries who were studying this work and applying these principles, and I asked them to invite two or three of their patients who would follow their recommendations. And then I interviewed the patients who reversed their MS, reversed their rheumatoid, reversed their chronic fatigue, reversed their multiple chemical sensitivities, reversed their major depressive disorder. It didn’t matter what the condition was. Eighty-five people we interviewed, and we put it together as a docu-series. You hear three minutes of this person, seven minutes of that one, nine minutes of this one, and two minutes of this person back and forth as a story. I’ll never forget the woman in London. She said, I took the tube to come here today, the underground train. And she said, I walked the seven blocks from the tube station to here, that’s not a big deal. But then she got a little teary-eyed and she said, but it is. And then we show you the pictures of her two years ago in a wheelchair, she can’t walk because her MS is very severe. And I show you her MRIs with seven lesions on her brain causing the MS. And then here she is two years later, no symptoms whatsoever, and the MRIs are two lesions left on her brain.  That’s the power of this work when you find the map and you understand there are many detours and you have to find, according to Fasano, the five pillars. We put all that together in a docu-series, it’s called Betrayal: The Autoimmune Disease Solution They’re Not Telling You. We’ve had over 600,000 people watch this. It’s free. You just go to thedr.com/betrayal and it’s right there for you. You watch this and then you understand the journey that’s in front of you. Okay. You say, well, I really need to read these books. All right, I’m in. Wow, that’s great.  You see these real people in real-time, many of them are crying when they talk about how hard it was for them, they lost a child, or whatever their story is, but they’re authentic. They’re authentic people. Jesus, I got tears in my eyes now because I sat with each one of them. I just listened and asked the questions, and I explained to them before they were on camera, I said, we probably will talk about some upsetting things here, but there will be thousands and thousands of people who may benefit from you sharing your heart, sharing your experience, and how difficult it was. That’s Betrayal, and it’s free for everyone to see at thedr.com/betrayal.   [02:01:40] Ashley James: I love it. I love it, I love it, I love it. Imagine the entire world has the information in your head. Just imagine if everyone in the entire world had the access to the information in your head, in one generation we could end disease. This entire world would be turned upside down. We’d no longer create those chemicals that are killing us. The entire commerce, all of manufacturing and commerce would be changed to have ecology for ourselves, for our community, and for our planet. Ecology means is it healthy for you, is it healthy for your neighbors, is it healthy for the soil, is it healthy for the air? And if the answer is no to any one of those we don’t do it. We don’t do it. We have to make products that are ecological for every sphere, right? I’m not talking about climate change. Climate change is a terminology that is a part of their carbon credit taxation, all that stuff. It’s politicized. I’m talking about actual toxins and pollution. Notice that they don’t mention acid rain and they don’t actually talk about pollution anymore. They don’t because they have an agenda, right? So I’m not even jumping on that train. I’m not saying there is or there isn’t climate change. What I’m saying is you know what there is, there is pollution. There is pollution and it is killing us, and you are teaching us how to avoid this pollution that is in our food, in our water, in our air, and how to heal our body. And these people are suffering. There’s suffering happening everywhere. And if everyone had the information that you give, then we would change this planet in one generation. So that’s why I’m so excited for the work that you do. I’m excited for my listeners who are hearing this and who are sharing this episode with those they love. Now, I’m going to have the links to your books and the links to everything that you do, that Dr. O’Bryan does in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Your books are absolutely going to be the best Christmas gifts, Hanukkah gifts, holiday gifts that people can receive. So buy it now, buy it early, wrap it up, put all your friends’ names on it, and give possibly the best gift of all. The path towards their true health, the path towards them making these changes that are life-altering to get their brain back. Oh my gosh I can’t wait.  I’m so excited learning from you today, and please come back on the show. I want to have you back. We have so much more to talk about. I can’t wait to have you back. Go cuddle your 10-month-old, he sounds adorable. Thank your wife for us also for lending us to you. Go enjoy the rest of your beautiful day in Costa Rica. We’re all a bit jealous of you. We all want to move there and live in the Blue Zone with you, I think that would be wonderful. But we’ve got to create our own Blue Zone in our own household, right? And we can do it. We can take on and copy the same changes that everyone else made that live in those Blue Zones. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?   [02:05:10] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Just be kind to yourself in this process. It’s so overwhelming, it freaks people out. There’s a Tibetan word, and I don’t know if I’m going to say it correctly, but this is the operating dynamic to be successful in this journey. The word is maitri, and it translates as loving kindness and an unconditional friendship with one’s self. Just know that you’re doing your best. You’re your best friend, just lighten up a little bit, and don’t think you have to get it all right now. Just be kind to yourself, but just be consistent. And the last thing I’ll tell you is the other end of the spectrum from the [inaudible 02:05:59] talking about maitri. There was a guy in Chicago, a writer at the Chicago Tribune. His name was Studs Terkel, and he wore a fedora cigar in his mouth all the time, and was just a gritty, guttural guy, a great writer. He’d hung out in this local bar and was an icon in Chicago. When he leaves the bar every time, apparently, I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s the story. It may have gotten exaggerated a little bit, but he’s walking out, he puts his fedora on, he’s walking out. He takes a cigar. He turns around, takes a cigar out of his mouth, and says, take it easy, but take it. And then he walks out. So everyone, take it easy. Be kind to yourself, but take it one hour a week, every week. And thank you so much, Ashley, for the opportunity.   [02:06:56] Ashley James: I love it. Dr. Tom O’Bryan, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. I can’t wait to have you back. This has been quite a ride.   [02:07:05] Dr. Tom O’Bryan: Thank you.   [02:07:07] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Tom O’Bryan. Wasn’t he wonderful? I can’t wait to have him back on the show. Be sure to stay tuned. We’ve got more great interviews that I am just itching to release that I’ve done lately and I’m excited for you to hear. Remember to get the Magnesium Soak I was talking about, the absolute, amazing Magnesium Soak, and also the Magnesium Muscle cream, which is wonderful for pain and for relieving tension. So many listeners have said that they rub it on their shoulders, their neck, and their jaw right before sleep and they notice that they relax and have better sleep afterward, so check it out. Go to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and you have to use coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health to get the fantastic sale that’s going on right now. Use that coupon code anytime though because we get a fantastic discount on top of any sales that happen. So that is livingthegoodlifenaturally.com, coupon code LTH. Have yourself a fantastic Thanksgiving if you’re in the United States and you’re listening to this before Thanksgiving. And if it’s after Thanksgiving, I hope you had a great one. And wherever you are around the world, whenever you’re listening to this, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day.   Get Connected with Dr. Tom O’Bryan! Website Facebook Instagram Twitter Pinterest YouTube   Books by Dr. Tom O’Bryan Betrayal: The Autoimmune Disease Solution They’re Not Telling You The Autoimmune Fix You Can Fix Your Brain        

Dr. Ruby's website: drjaneruby.com Become a Certified Health Coach Through IIN just like Ashley James! Get their Valentines Day Special! Experience a free sample of their program: learntruehealth.com/coach Contact Sunlighten Saunas for their Special Listener Sale during the month of August! Call 877-292-0020 and mention Ashley James and the Learn True Health Podcast! Check out the supplements Ashley James recommends: takeyoursupplements.com Magnesium Soak: Use coupon code LTH at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com Medicinal Aloe for gut healing - LearnTrueHealth.com/aloe - Use coupon code LTH Dr. Jane Ruby Drug Development Expert Explains Vaccine Trials https://www.learntruehealth.com/dr-jane-ruby-drug-development-expert-explains-vaccine-trials   Highlights: Difference between each phase of clinical trials Nuremberg trials and informed consent What are nanoparticles   Dr. Jane Ruby, former pharmaceutical employee and drug development expert, explains the different phases of clinical trials and why we should be alarmed at how the current vaccine trials are progressing. She also shares how the COVID shots could potentially harm us. [00:00:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 468. I am really excited for today’s guest. In exploring all of the crazy information that’s out there, I came across Dr. Jane Ruby. I find that Dr. Ruby’s information is eye-opening, and I love that because this podcast is all about teaching people all the information they need so that they can make the best decisions for their health on their health journey. Dr. Jane Ruby, it’s such a pleasure having you on the show today, welcome.   [00:00:46] Dr. Jane Ruby: Thank you so much, Ashley. I’m really looking forward to this discussion.   [00:00:50] Ashley James: Absolutely. Now, before we dive into what you do today and how we can continue to plug in to you and learn from you today, I’d love to go back and understand your background. What happened that led you to do the work that you’re doing today?   [00:01:10] Dr. Jane Ruby: That’s a very frequently asked question, actually. I’m a Licensed Nurse Practitioner. I specialized in internal medicine with a subspecialty in surgical and medical cardiology. I have had full prescriptive privileges when I was treating patients, including the full federal schedule of narcotics, and I had an independent license to practice medicine in a limited specialty. So I took all my courses at the med school, not the nursing school, at the prestigious University of Rochester. I have two doctorates and two master’s degrees. The two doctorates are in psychology (non-clinical) and education. And the two master’s degrees are in nursing, of course. And then, international health economics. I think it might be helpful for people to understand that in order to be at the level that I have been in 20 years of experience after my clinical work in taking care of patients in hospitals and ICUs, I then went on through a series of interesting happenings in the research world. I went on to spend 20 years in pharmaceutical drug development, on the inside if you will, across several different companies.  And so, in order to do what I did until recently, you have to have complete working knowledge of biochemistry—organic and inorganic chem—pharmacokinetics, receptor physiology—some really interesting esoteric stuff. My experience includes 20 years of experience in interfacing with the US FDA, in terms of their regulatory processes and things like that. I’ve worked on the human research studies to launch some of the most famous compounds in the world in both the United States and in the rest of the world, which would be Europe and Asia, particularly in depression, anxiety, Alzheimer’s, opioid addiction, and some internal medicine areas like cardiopulmonary diseases, diabetes, and kidney disease. I am peer-reviewed journal published multiple times. My work can be found on PubMed. Most recently, it’s in Health Economics. So that’s my background. It’s really eclectic and it’s very unique in terms of having that high-level clinical piece, but yet 20 years of understanding kind of how the sausage is at least supposed to be made. And now we’ve seen a drastic change of course in our institutions and how things are being done. I’m sure we’re going to get into that, so that just gives you a little background.   [00:03:45] Ashley James: As you worked in the big pharma, as you worked with them, were there ever times when red flags came up and you’re like, wait a second. Was there anything that alarmed you where you realize that there’s something not right here?   [00:04:04] Dr. Jane Ruby: That’s a great question. In my early years—I won’t name companies right now because I’m not here to be a whistleblower and there were things that I might not have been privy to at my level for the total picture, in all fairness. But in my early years—20 years is a long time to spend in one industry, so I’d say for the first 10 years—there were times when I saw maybe not enough data came down. I was in medical affairs, so I wasn’t on the business side of things.  Sometimes we were made aware that hey, the commercial sides, which are always like mavericks. They’re incentivized heavily by prescription numbers, money, revenues, and things like that. So they tended to practice out on the line if you will. And we were kind of, I wouldn’t say the police, but we in medical affairs on the research side, we’re kind of like, okay, slow down. You can’t say this and that, that’s a claim. You got to be careful. Let’s be true to the data. It is what it is. We’re not incentivized by that. So occasionally I’d see some overreach on the commercial side, and sometimes it was very blatant and it was wrong. I myself reported it internally. That’s really how that came about. What I’m seeing now, Ashley, is not just an occasional deviation, shall we say, from general good practices or FDA guidance documents, things like that. I’m seeing a 180 degree flip from what should be happening to a few pharmaceutical companies that are representing these four injections. They’re just running rogue. I have never seen anything to this degree in all of my 20 years, not anything even close to it. What I’m suggesting is that something has collapsed, the institutions that we’re used to—I’m sure you can think of your own equivalence in your various countries from wherever you’re listening. In the United States—this is my opinion—I’ve seen what I think is the literal collapse of the FDA. It has been usurped and it appears to be performing or acting as a department in these pharmaceutical companies. They’re just a rubber stamp. When I say the collapse of institutions, I’m seeing the absence of safeguard and oversight bodies like human subjects review boards, which originally emanated out of the Nuremberg trials and they are for the protection of human subjects. They appear to be absent in all of these processes. And then where you have literally crimes, in my opinion, being committed on many levels. We have the Department of Justice in the United States appears to have collapsed or been usurped by these same entities and they’re silent. They’re going after people who went to hear people speak at the Capitol in Washington DC on January 6 who never even walked down to the Capitol. We have some of those people that are in jail right now because the DOJ, I don’t know if they’ve been indicted or what but they’re in there.  Whereas you have these kinds of crimes going on—illegal approvals, illegal emergency use authorizations, the overreach of police state powers—and there’s not a peep from an institution like the DOJ that traditionally would be investigating. And in fact, our own politicians appear to be bought and paid for because they’re very quiet. They rattle the cage now and then by calling for an investigation. There’s an old expression down in Texas that is all hat no cattle. That means you’re a big shot, you blow your mouth off, but you really don’t have any money or cattle. That’s how you measure wealth down there.  These politicians in the United States that I could name them all that come to mind foremind, but I think you see them in the news. They’re calling for an investigation, an impeachment of Biden, or they’re going to bring Dr. Fauci back for another hearing, but I conform the term to their all hearings and no indictments, no call for a criminal referral.  Everything seems to have collapsed and it seems to be what Dr. Shiva calls a swarm model. People say, well, is it George Soros, is it Bill Gates, or is it this cabal or that cabal? It seems to be rather than a top-down, I’m starting to figure—I’m an analyst by trade, so I like to know what’s at the top of the food chain that I’m fighting, and it seems to be more of a multilateral swarm model. I kind of agree with his theory. That a lot of these entities are just coming in from many, many angles and many people are part of it and profiting off of it that we never would have thought of before. That’s a long answer, but I hope I gave some interesting pearls in there to your question.   [00:09:37] Ashley James: Absolutely. My understanding is that to approve a drug for human use and to approve a vaccine for human use are two very different things. Maybe you could explain that. That for example, pharmaceutical companies are held liable when it comes to drugs, but they’re not held liable when it comes to vaccines. And also, my understanding is—and please correct me if I’m wrong—they don’t do double-blind studies of vaccines or maybe you could explain. Because they don’t ever just use saline solution. They’ll use a different vaccine as group B, from what I’ve seen. So maybe you could just explain the difference of the approval process to find a drug both safe and effective versus to find a vaccine to be safe and effective.   [00:10:41] Dr. Jane Ruby: I’m curious, before I untangle that, can you give me a category for the source of these things that you’re trying to distinguish? Was it popular press? Is it just something that people have said to you?   [00:10:58] Ashley James: I think it’s a combination of guests that have talked about that when a drug goes through trials and when a vaccine goes through trials, it’s different, that it’s not treated the same.   [00:11:16] Dr. Jane Ruby: Let me try to unpack that. Let’s take the vaccine manufacturers’ liability. Initially, there was no difference. They were liable. They were liable for injuries, especially if they didn’t follow human subjects review, safety surveillance obligations, protocols. You have to follow your own protocol or it’s a protocol violation, and it’s reportable to the FDA as well as your human subjects review board, which I will talk about the IRB because I think it’s important to understand that as a foundation because it’s totally missing here. So, okay. So there’s the liability issue. What happened is there was a series of politicians including President Reagan, who apparently during their terms, they wrote laws, executive orders, or whatever that shielded pharmaceutical companies under the guise of, look, we don’t want to discourage them from developing important treatments and vaccines, so we’re going to like let them off the hook. If that sounds dirty to you, it should. It was wrong, it never should have happened. When it comes to that liability, what I’m seeing now—and I’m sure we’ll get into it when we start talking about these injections—these injections are not vaccines because they do not confer immunity, they do not confer protection. They are not for your health. I’ve seen enough evidence, data, and whatever you want to call it that to me, I’m comfortable saying that these injections and the materials in them are meant for harm on a mass level. We’ll talk about the details of that. But the reason I’m saying it now, Ashley, is because if that’s true and it appears to be I mean out comes razor, right?  If you’re coming at me with a knife, you’re not coming to hug me because you’re happy to see me. So let’s just say it’s so blatant that I can say that it looks like premeditated murder. And as far as I know, in the United States, across all of our laws—our federal laws as well as most or all individual state laws—there’s no immunity for premeditated murder. So let’s start there, that’s my answer to the vaccine liability issue. The second point, and it’s near and dear to my heart, is the pharmaceutical drug development processes that have been laid out and used for years that were designed to develop good treatments to help people, but designed to do it in a deliberative protective way because you have human subjects that are volunteering themselves to test these things for future recipients, and they deserve to be protected.  And after the Nuremberg trials, we had developed what were called Institutional Review Boards. They’re also known as Human Subjects Review Boards, and these are federal. They’re independent, but they’re federally registered groups. They stamp a protocol and an informed consent that always is joined to that protocol, and I know because I’ve written hundreds of human subjects protocols and I’ve written the accompanying informed consent, which is often 20 or 30 pages. I don’t think when you go into get one of these jabs in your local drugstore or grocery store that you’re getting an IRB-stamped informed consent. That alone should make you turn around and walk out. But getting back to this, these are groups or panels that some of them are independent in the community but they are registered. Most universities that do research will have their own IRBs. They are an eclectic group of researchers, medical ethicists, attorneys—it’s a very interesting group. They will many times send back your draft of your informed consent and say, you don’t have enough information to protect children. You don’t have enough disclosure for this group or that group. And so you go back and you refine it and then finally they approve it, and they approve your protocol because you can’t just say well I’m going to stick knives into people’s heads, okay. I’m using extreme examples, obviously. So they have to approve the protocol, your methodology, how are you going to treat people, how are you going to measure, and most of all, what safety features oversight are you building in and putting upon yourself as a manufacturer who’s testing these, right?  Because the testing theoretically goes on in multi centers, universities, or independent research centers like one that I ran for a few years in New York. And you recruit subjects and they come in. You have to read everything in that informed consent document. Before they sign on and say, yes, I’m going to let myself go through this, they have to know all the risks, any potential benefits. They also have to understand that they can get out any time and that they’re entitled to know exactly what they’re getting. Now if it’s a blinded study, and we’re going to get to that because you mentioned randomized placebo-controlled trials. What they can know is that if I get the active treatment, I’m getting X, Y, and Z including the excipients. But I don’t know if I’m going to get product A or if I’m going to get placebo. Let me jump to the process of developing drugs for human beings. It starts in phases. The first phase is what we call preclinical. Preclinical is Petri dishes and animals. That’s it. And that can take five or six years. And let me just tell you that the information you gather, it’s very important the preclinical phase because that informs the entity previously known as the FDA—and I’m being a little facetious—that preclinical phase, those results inform the FDA as to whether or not they would give the company, the right to move on to human trial, which occurs in four distinct phases. But before I get into that, let me just go back to the preclinical. There was a company that I worked for in the early 2000s, but before I got there, they had a drug, a very famous antidepressant called Celexa. And this drug was going through preclinical trials, and it was being given to animals. And in the process of these tests, five Beagle dogs died of a heart attack. And so the FDA said, shut everything down and told this company, go back and find out what it is or you’re not going forward in human trials. I’m not saying the FDA was angelic 20 years ago, but they were surely activists in terms of following their own regulations.  This company, it took them a couple of years. They lost money, they lost time on the patent, but they were able to determine and show proof that it was just a genetic anomaly in this particular breed, not even all dogs. But look at how sensitive this was that they shut it down for two years—hadn’t even gotten to humans yet. We have anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 plus. it’s probably more in the millions, to be honest with you, if you use the Harvard Pilgrim study to multiply the real numbers of reported vaccine adverse events in the United States, but whatever. Whether you want to use 10,000 or 50,000, I always laugh when people challenge me. Really, would you feel better if it’s 50,000 deaths and not a million? Okay, whichever. My question is still valid. We shut down a study for five Beagle dogs that had a heart attack in 1990 something, but we don’t have a threshold for five figures of deaths directly related to this thing? Okay, so let me just wrap up on the phases of humans. So let’s say you successfully make it through your preclinical. You then are able to go into phase 1 of human research, and anybody can look this stuff up, Ashley. You can look at it. You can just google phases of clinical trials, you’ll be very, very educated. It’s fascinating. Once you get into phase 2, here’s the problem, and this is why I’m telling you this. If you look at Pfizer’s protocol, I’m going to say the number so that if people replay this later on multiple times you’ll have the number. The protocol number is C4591001. The title of this protocol, which is the main protocol for Pfizer’s injection, is called—and there should be a red flag the minute I give you the first few words—A PHASE 1/2/3, PLACEBO-CONTROLLED, RANDOMIZED, OBSERVER-BLIND, DOSE-FINDING STUDY TO EVALUATE THE SAFETY, TOLERABILITY, IMMUNOGENICITY, AND EFFICACY OF SARS-COV-2 RNA VACCINE CANDIDATES AGAINST COVID-19 IN HEALTHY INDIVIDUALS. Now let me stop myself. A phase 1, 2, and 3 simultaneously? Okay, hold on. Phase 1 uses maybe 10 people. Ten healthy 25-year-olds. Why you ask me? Those people get paid very, very high amounts of money. Why? Because they’re taking something that’s never been given to a human. There’s a fair amount of safety data from preclinical that’s factored into it. Now, each phase has its own design, its own protocol, or should. And it’s very few numbers of people, and it’s in phase one that we collect the mechanism of the drug’s action—metabolism excretion, pharmacokinetics, where does the drug go? How long does it stay? Where does it accumulate? What organs get rid of it? What organs concentrate it? We need to know what the half-life is because that’s how you know if you have to take it twice a day or once a day, okay. It’s very important. Now, you can’t go to phase 2 without your phase 1 data. You get into phase 2, you’re talking about maybe a couple of 100 people. Now you got people either with the disease you’re trying to prevent, or you’re testing against placebo to get efficacy. Is this thing working? Okay. You can’t know that the light’s on if you don’t compare it to a dark room.  And it goes up to phase 3, which phase 3 becomes very critical because it is built on the safety and efficacy of the three previous phases, and it is what we call the pivotal trial, it has to be designed a certain way, Ashley. It’s got to be very tight, it is randomized, it is double-blind. That means you don’t know and the investigator gives it to you doesn’t know. It has to be placebo-controlled. You have to have a control arm, otherwise, what are you measuring it against, okay? I mean, you can do a trial without a placebo, but that’s not the standard and that’s not what the FDA traditionally had required for drugs or vaccines, okay. When you get to phase 4 that’s after your drug is approved because the FDA has evaluated your phase 3. It evaluates everything from preclinical up to phase 3, but your phase 3 is critical, and let me tell you why because this is going to be a startling revelation to your audience. In phase 3. when you design that randomized placebo-controlled trial, you have to pick one—not more than two—what we call a primary endpoint. That’s the thing you’re going to measure placebo against whether it’s my nails are going to turn blue or not. I’m going to get COVID after getting this injection or not because then you can say prevention of COVID, okay. The reason the primary endpoint is important is because that’s going to translate if you get approval from the FDA to your indication. That’s what I wanted to finish. The indication is the lifeblood of any pharma company. Why? Because that’s your marketing authorization label. You’ve heard people say on-label off-label. A pharmaceutical company, it’s illegal for them to market or promote their drug for anything other than what the FDA approved it for.  Here’s where the rub comes in. As a prescriber, doctor, or nurse practitioner, I can prescribe a drug for anything as long as I take responsibility for it in terms of, I think it’s got some mechanism of action. I’ve seen it work over here. Somebody wrote a paper over there, right? It’s not illegal for me to prescribe. This is where the hoax came in around, oh ivermectin and HCQ. It wasn’t approved for COVID so we can’t use it, and the doctors that are going along with that when they know that they have every legal right to prescribe off-label. They should be in Gitmo right now. Okay, well, let me just finish up on the phases. I’m sorry for the digression.   [00:24:47] Ashley James: No, it’s perfect.   [00:24:47] Dr. Jane Ruby: Those are the four phases of human research, so what did Pfizer do? If you go to a website called clinicaltrials.gov, I believe it’s worldwide but it started out as the US government’s repository for human research studies. We have to register your trial there. Pfizer’s registration and I’m going to read the number again, so people get a pen if you want to replay it. You go to clinicaltrials.gov and in the search box, you don’t have to put a word, just put in the following: NCT04368728.  That identifier will get you to the clinicaltrials.gov for the Pfizer study and it’s entitled, Study to Describe the Safety, Tolerability, Immunogenicity, and Efficacy of RNA Vaccine Candidates. Now, that is the corollary to the protocol I just read to you guys before that. Why is that important? Because that’s where you’ll find the primary endpoint. You can have a million secondary endpoints because that’s not what you’re going to be measured against. If your primary endpoint does not supersede placebo by a statistically significant separation, you are not going to get your label or you shouldn’t. You’re not going to get approved by the FDA. Say you have 50 secondary endpoints, even if you meet all of those perfectly, you’re not going to get that indication. Well, here’s the problem. In clinicaltrials.gov for NCT04368728, you will see 35 primary endpoints. I’m like, what? Okay, okay. None of them were for the prevention of COVID, but watch this. Initially, that primary endpoint—because they’ve changed it around. They’ve updated it. You can see different versions. I think everybody remembers because it was in the news all the time. Hey, they’re testing it to minimize COVID symptoms and to minimize hospitalization rates, right? And they had 95% efficacy on reducing symptom severity. When they approved it, when the FDA approved the sham approval of Comirnaty, which they say is the same formulation as the other injection, it’s the same, same chemicals. The other injection was called the Pfizer-BioNTech—the German company they’re in business with—COVID-19 vaccine. They’re supposed to be the same. The company and the FDA say publicly on their websites that they’re interchangeable. People argued, oh, Dr. Jane, it’s not approved. Trust me, I’m in pharmaceutical drug development for 20 years. I know something when it’s approved, so here’s the point. The sleight of hand was they said, oh, Comirnaty is approved, but the other one, the no-name, the Pfizer-BioNTech one is going to be under emergency use authorization. Okay. When the approval came out, and one of the ways you know something has been approved is because all of a sudden there’s a package insert with information on it. Remember all that stuff that was going around a few months ago? You went to a pharmacy, opened up the package, and it was empty, it was blank the package insert? Well, now you have a package insert, right? And that package insert you can download from Pfizer’s website. And in that package insert it says on the front page, upper left-hand corner, the indication. I waited for that package insert for weeks. When that came out and I looked at it, it said, Comirnaty—don’t forget, by the FDA and Pfizer’s own words on their websites is interchangeable with Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine—is approved and indicated for—ready—the prevention of COVID-19. That was never ever a primary endpoint. In fact, I don’t even think it was any endpoint. So that’s illegal, number one. The other thing is, and I’ll wrap up really quick on this point. The package insert is important because every word, every letter, every number is hammered out. It’s a contract between the FDA and the pharmaceutical company. That label is everything. That’s going to become their moneymaker. But here’s the point. I challenge anyone, get grandma’s favorite high blood pressure medication. Look it up online, the company. Download the package insert PDF. You don’t have to be a scientist. Just compare that document—in terms of the categories as it goes down the line—with this one for Comirnaty. You’ll see the absence of so much information. There’s no disclosure in pharmacokinetics.  Remember, I said before, how long does the drug last in your body, where does it go? How does your body break it down? What are the drug interactions because in the real world, grandma’s taking or anybody—not grandma, Uncle Ned, your mom—could be taking a number of different drugs. We need to know as prescribers, hey, what are the interactions with some key drugs that interact with the liver and the kidneys because we might want to do a dose adjustment? We got to protect our patients. That’s all missing, Ashley.  If you compare line by line, category by category with a bonafide-approved drug, you’re going to see so much missing. Under pregnant women, I can quote it for you, “Insufficient data to establish efficacy and safety.” Well then, how the heck do you not put pregnant women over under the category called contraindications, which is the signal to us as providers, not to give it to those populations, and it shouldn’t be given to populations in which you have never tested it. I want to go back to the placebo thing really quick. The standard for testing a drug or a vaccine is to get to phase 3 if you pass all your safety musters and to compare it to placebo. Now, on page seven, at the top of the package insert for Comirnaty, which you can download from the Pfizer website, they tell a little story about how somewhere in the early part of 2021 they had about 44,000 people in a “study” that was a randomized placebo-controlled that goes with this protocol I just read to you guys. And they claim that they unblinded the study from the placebo people and then gave them the opportunity if they wanted it. They were supposedly contacted to be then offered the real injection. What they did, Ashley, essentially in my world is they converted their randomized placebo-controlled trial. The bare minimum controlled trials, specific good research practice design. They converted that into an open-label—because everybody knows what they’re getting—observational trial. And then eight months later they claim they approved it based on the very little data they had when they broke their blind, and then secondly, they don’t bring any data to those categories in their package insert.  So I have maintained that in my estimation and my expert opinion, the entire emergency use authorization was illegal and the approval and the extension of the EUA for the non-name product were all illegal. And this is the basis upon which I’ve submitted affidavits to a lot of different legal groups that are bringing suits against our Department of Defense because this is designed to take out our military. I’ve given you a lot of information.   [00:33:15] Ashley James: No, I love it. So many questions. Back in the 1970s, the swine flu vaccine was fast-tracked and then taken off the market when was it 25 people died from it?   [00:33:31] Dr. Jane Ruby: Yes.   [00:33:32] Ashley James: It was taken off the market. How does that compare to what’s going on right now?   [00:33:36] Dr. Jane Ruby: Well, as I said, I did mention, if you look at VAERS, which is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, it’s situated on the CDC website. The CDC in the US that is virtually a patent-holding vaccine patent company. They’re a joke as well. That’s an institution that’s bought and paid for you. This is a self-reporting system. Doctors and nurses are supposed to be aware of their obligation to report. It’s not their role, Ashley, or their obligation, first of all, to determine if it’s related to the substance or the injection. That’s not what they’re asked to do. They’re asked to report anything that is in proximity temporally to a given drug or injection. That’s number one. Number two, family and patients themselves or friends who become aware of it are able to report to this thing, but it’s really all we have as the public, okay. Now, when I mentioned the Harvard Pilgrim study before, there’s a study. This was paid for by the National Institutes of Health in the United States. This is paid for with federal tax dollars. A study, about 10 years ago, was done to look at how accurate VAERS is in terms of capturing reports of adverse events for drugs in general and vaccines. And what they found—this was their own thing. This was long before this. What they found was, and this is the quote from their study their published study, “less than 1% of all vaccine-related adverse events actually make it into VAERS.” Now, some people have misquoted that paper and said, oh, it’s 1% to 10%. Well, that’s because they didn’t read the paper properly. I’ve made my living for 20 years reading scientific publications and papers. They were using a sentence that was preceding that that stated that 1% to 10% of all regular drug adverse events were reported. And then if you follow down two or three sentences after that, it says that, “less than 1% of all vaccine adverse related events are reported into VAERS.” So any of these numbers you get, if you get VAERS right now, oh yeah, but it’s all self-report. They could be doing doubles and things like that. First of all, the CDC by their own admission goes through it, they throttle numbers left and right all the time. Oh, this doesn’t look right. You didn’t fill out line four, okay so that’s a joke. But let’s just say the numbers that they’re releasing, maybe, I don’t know what are they up to now 9,000 or 10,000? According to the government’s own study, that number of let’s say it’s 10,000, add two zeros to that. That’s a million people dead. So, let’s start there. Now in Europe, you have EudraVigilance, which I don’t know if it captures Canada or not. I think it might. Their numbers are staggering, and it’s the same, self-reporting. They’re up to about 60,000 deaths. It’s just atrocious. You mentioned the swine flu, 25 deaths, boom, shut down. No questions asked.   [00:37:11] Ashley James: They’ve shut down the vaccine. They took it off the market. They said, no, we’re not doing this anymore. Twenty-five deaths are enough. We’re doing something wrong and they took it off the market. And here we have thousands of known deaths. I know two people that died within days of getting one of the shots. One of them got a blood clot, the other one just didn’t wake up. Otherwise healthy people and their doctors will not report to VAERS, but I talked to the families.   [00:37:44] Dr. Jane Ruby: That’s terrible. That’s a topic that I get very passionate about. There are countless doctors in the United States, Canada, across Europe, across the world, Asia, Africa that are complicit, and it’s either one of two things. By now I don’t give them the benefit of the doubt anymore. There’s too much information for them not to at least know there’s something wrong, but I think it’s mostly because they’re incentivized.  I’ve seen insurance companies, Blue Cross and Blue Shield—I’ve seen that so I’m just going to speak to that, I’m sure there are many more—that have sent notices to doctors that have been leaked to us on the Stew Peters Show. And they’ve said, you know, doctor, if you can get 60% of your practice injected, you will get a bonus at the end of the year of $75,000. That doctor telling you, yeah, you should get it. But doctor, I have lupus, I have fibromyalgia, and I had breast cancer five years ago. Do you really think I should get it? Yes, you should really get it. I call them zombie doctors at first because they seem to be going around in lockstep saying, yeah, get it, get it, get it. There’s no way they don’t know something’s wrong right now. There’s no way anymore. There’s too much.   [00:39:11] Ashley James: We’ve talked about the safety a little bit, let’s talk about efficacy. I had Dr. Richard Fleming on my show, episode 463. He’s very pro-vaccine. He’s very pro-drug. I respect his work because he wants to share the truth. Whatever science he uncovers, he’s a research cardiology for the last over 30 years.   [00:39:37] Dr. Jane Ruby: Yup, I know him. I how who he is.   [00:39:39] Ashley James: Okay, cool. So what I love about him—I’m a huge crunchy holistic person. Drugs are the last thing I’m going to take. I believe in drugs, I believe they have their place, but I will do everything I can first to try to mitigate something or support my body’s ability to beat something like an ear infection. I’ll do everything out so first before I’ll go to a drug, but I won’t wait too long until it gets so bad that it’s unmanageable, right? I appreciate holistic medicine very much, but I really like his stance. He is all about the drugs, he’s a great scientist. He’s very pro-vaccine, but in our episode 463, he says, let’s not even talk about the safety. Let’s talk about the efficacy because if it’s not effective, then we shouldn’t even be having this conversation. It should not be on the market. So he went through the numbers and says that they’re completely lying. That it is not 96% effective. It’s actually less than 1% effective and he goes through their own data and sees that it’s not in any way effective. Now I love what you’ve pointed out here. We’ve talked about the safety and the fact that there are—is it loopholes are they using? They’re just being fraudulent. They’re not following the standards that they’re supposed to be held to. And what body is supposed to be holding them to these standards? The FDA? They’re just stepping back.   [00:41:26] Dr. Jane Ruby: Yeah, as I mentioned before, all these institutions have collapsed. I think there’s a question in there about Dr. Fleming and the efficacy issue and all that. Before I address that, I want to just ask people to think for a moment, now companies are normally very concerned about public relations.  If you had a company where the information was spreading around—at least through social media and alternative media, there’s enough of it going around regular life without the MSM, mainstream. They were saying that your medication was causing acute cardiac death in teenagers, was filled with stainless steel mechanical parasites, toxic industrial chemicals, don’t you think you’d want to hold a press conference and vindicate yourself? Don’t you think you’d want to come forward and provide as much information as possible to dispel this despicable rumor about your product that you worked so hard on, that you put in billions of dollars—billions?  They know what they’re doing. You don’t spend that kind of money and not know what you’re producing. You haven’t heard one of these four companies come forward. There’s been no defense. There’s been no press conference. Even the FDA doesn’t hold press conferences. They don’t care. They don’t care. I just want you to think about that. Let me address the efficacy thing. Let me start from the beginning. This is Dr. Jane’s beginning. This is not a vaccine. If you notice the majority of my language has been the injection, the jab, the shot. This is not a vaccine. If you continue to call it a vaccine, you’ve already lost your ability to research this, to really get information that will educate you and inform you. You’ve lost the argument. These are not vaccines, okay. This is a lot of things. Let’s go use the words of the criminals. This is an mRNA. It’s computer-generated, never before seen in nature. Want to talk about being crunchy and alternative, I spent the first half of my life studying alternative medicine. I hated allopathic medicine as a child, so I came up through the crunchy life, so let’s go back. This is a computer-generated non-biologic chimeric—when they call it a Frankenshot, it’s because the computer and the computer starting point was from what Wuhan lab released in December of 2019, which was what they called “a facsimile” stay with me everyone, “of a protein sequence representative of a portion of a spike protein on a natural coronavirus,” which is why people say in the know this whole virus that is SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated and purified from an ill individual.  They’re not saying that’s a hoax, they’re not saying that no one’s gotten sick, okay. I just want to throw that out there for later if you want to talk about it, but let me get back to what this is. It is a computer-generated chimeric, and when I say chimeric it means that it is pulled information from very old dated aborted fetal cell line. It’s one person that was aborted. Macaque monkey, I believe it’s two cell lines, and God knows what else. And use those as models (parts of them) to replicate this mRNA code.  So this mRNA has never been tested in humans before this rollout, and why? Because in the preclinical studies for SARS-CoV-1, which was similar, they gave this to the animals—animals have a shorter lifespan, so when we see safety signals, it happens very fast. It doesn’t happen over years. It happens over weeks or months. So these animals, when they were rechallenged in the wild with natural coronaviruses, they died. And basically, all of them died. Those are preclinical publications. Let’s go back to what this is. So now you have this computer-generated model of a genetic code, which as I said, you go to the Moderna website—don’t believe Jane. Go to the Moderna website and they tell you they’re going to reset your operating system. They tell you this mRNA will embed with your own DNA.   [00:46:44] Ashley James: I have a question. I’m sorry to interrupt, but you explained earlier that pre-clinical phase trials are in Petri dishes and animals. And you’re saying that in the testing of these poisoned concoctions that all the animals died during the preclinical phase. How did it get approved for human use then if the animals died?   [00:47:12] Dr. Jane Ruby: Let me clarify. They died when they were doing the preclinical animal work in SARS-CoV-1. Okay. So just know that. So they knew when they had what they were going to test for SARS-CoV-2—whatever they called that or whatever that was supposed to be—they were allowed to skip over that. That’s another piece, argument that makes this approval illegal. Do you see what I’m saying?   [00:47:39] Ashley James: So they never did for SARS-CoV-2.   [00:47:42] Dr. Jane Ruby: Correct.   [00:47:43] Ashley James: They never did a preclinical phase trial with animals and Petri dishes. They went straight to human trials.   [00:47:51] Dr. Jane Ruby: Correct.   [00:47:53] Ashley James: And then they messed up the double-blind placebo by then contacting all the placebos and saying, hey—   [00:48:03] Dr. Jane Ruby: By breaking the blind.   [00:48:05] Ashley James: They broke the blind so that we couldn’t actually get a true understanding of the efficacy.   [00:48:12] Dr. Jane Ruby: Correct, beautiful.   [00:48:14] Ashley James: But then they also had like 30 primary endpoints, none of which was to prevent getting COVID-19.   [00:48:26] Dr. Jane Ruby: Yeah, and then they got approval for preventing when they didn’t even show efficacy on it. So let me go back to what this thing is when I say to you it’s not a vaccine. If you’re on the fence about it, get off the fence because you’re not on the fence about a vaccine.   [00:48:44] Ashley James: It’s the marketing.   [00:48:46] Dr. Jane Ruby: So here we go. So you got this molecule that’s computer-generated based on everything. I won’t repeat myself. Genetic material outside of the human cell cannot survive. It gets attacked by the body’s defense system. It’s called ectopic and abnormal and it doesn’t survive. So in order to get this thing into every cell in your body, it has to be in something that will protect it. Enter the lipid nanoparticle that you’ve heard so much about, and that lipid nanoparticle can be made of many different things. In fact, some of the disclosure—I don’t believe these companies have fully disclosed, but some of the disclosures on ingredients have included dangerous substances that they’ve utilized in part to construct their lipid nanoparticle.  Polyethylene glycol you’ve heard of and some of them I’m sure by now. SM-102, which is on the website of chemical companies where it says this is not intended for a veterinarian or human research, but those are in our shots. What I call the lipid nanoparticle, Ashley, is the transporter. But the keyword is nano. You have to understand that nano, at the level of nano, you need an electron microscope to see it. It’s at the atomic level, okay? It doesn’t need to get past a barrier. Your cells have lipid or hydrophilic barriers. Sodium and potassium go through certain types of barriers because your body regulates what goes in and out to regulate other systems. The blood-brain barrier is the famous one that I think laypeople are most familiar with, and it’s a very powerful barrier because very little should and normally does get into the brain. But nano, nano is another story. You can inject this thing into your foot, into your arm, into the fat of your belly. When you would inject normal molecules into those areas, you get different rates of absorption. It’s by intention. If a doctor, I prescribe something intramuscular, that’s because that’s the way it’s supposed to be given to be absorbed into the body over a certain amount of time. If I give it insulin, you squeeze the fat and you stick it in at a wide angle because you want to slow absorption through the fat. If I put something into a vein, you’re in, you’re in the system. You have immediate into the compartment, we call it, okay. By giving a nano substance, forget detoxing, okay. This is where the detox myth comes out. Within minutes to hours, you can now understand how this is in almost every cell in your body. It’s pretty, pretty, pretty spread prolifically. And when it gets into every cell, it disrupts the cell, the cells are out of their minds. You have all kinds of inflammatory transmitters, trans factors—you have all kinds of materials that are screaming out danger, danger, right? But this material integrates with your DNA and it tells your DNA to use this plan, this blueprint, and you need to make billions of these spike proteins.  Now in a normal natural coronavirus—the common cold is a form of coronavirus—there are these spikes, but they’re natural and they’re part of that organism. These, that your body are told to make, are the synthetic version. We have no idea what this is. We have no idea how potent. And by the way, you see a lot of preclinical work that shows in natural coronaviruses, if you get infected, the spike protein is the pathogenic part. That’s the part that makes you feel like crap, like you’re sick.  In a natural coronavirus like the common cold, because your body’s being hijacked to make viral load, you might make like 100,000 spike. That’s enough to make you sick. But this encoding forces your body to make them in the billions. Why am I not sick every minute? Why is everybody not sick? Well, that’s another question. That has to do with timing, the lack of truth. We know about what’s really in these at any given time. Remember, anything under an emergency use authorization, they can change the formulation, they can change the dosage, and remember this is phase 1, 2, and 3.   [00:53:37] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. We’re all sitting here thinking everyone’s getting the same. You go for the Moderna, you’re getting the same shot that everyone’s been getting for months. But what you’re saying is they can change it, they can change the dose.   [00:53:54] Dr. Jane Ruby: Any minute.   [00:53:55] Ashley James: And so you go for your second shot you’re maybe getting something different. Now we’re talking boosters for people 65 and up, you could be getting something different. If it’s still in trial, how are they tracking any of this data? Are they?   [00:54:09] Dr. Jane Ruby: They’re not that we know of and they’re not disclosing it if they are. And let me tell you a couple of other tidbits. These things have lot numbers on them. I just saw something the other day, oh Pfizer doesn’t track it. Come on. This is creepy, Ashley, they know who got what, when, and where because why? Because you get your little card. All these people that are proud of it. I got the COVID shot, and they’ve got their card. The card has the lot number on it. Well, that’s refiled back. When you come in, they don’t know you’re coming in that day to the Walgreens, okay. But when you do, that lot number, they record who got out of that lot.  Look, a lot of this stuff that’s evil is happening in plain sight. Go to the protocol that I told you about. You can go to clinicaltrials.gov, that would be the best one. Remember that NCT number I gave you?   [00:55:03] Ashley James: it’s going to be in the show notes of the podcast. We transcribe everything.   [00:55:06] Dr. Jane Ruby: Okay, good. You scroll down you can see different arms of the study. When I say “the study,” that’s what’s going on right now. Everybody is aware or should be, if you take one of these shots, even one, you are in a trial until 2023. Do you know it? Not really because you haven’t been fully informed consented. Normally, if you were in a trial for a year or two, you’d be contacted every 30 days, every 60 days, or whatever. How are you feeling, Ashley? Can we take your temperature? Can you come into the….? There’s a protocol for patient visits, subject visits. Everything’s been thrown out the window. This is all the stuff that I see from my wheelhouse that’s missing. Okay, so let’s go back to this. So if you look at that clinicaltrials.gov, there are arms of the study, and here’s the point, this is this will shock you—another epiphany. The dosages, and it’s micrograms of what, okay? But the dosages are 5 micrograms, 10 micrograms, 20, 30. There’s also an arm, two arms actually. When I say an arm, that means a portion of patients or subjects will be given. In other words, they’re going to send out lots that they anticipate a certain number, okay. Now watch this, there are two arms, and you can look at it yourself on clinicaltrials.gov, that are going to get 100 micrograms. God help those people and please God don’t make it be a 5- to 11-year-old, please.   [00:56:46] Ashley James: My heart breaks for these children and their parents that don’t know any better because they’re listening to the mainstream. And the children that are going to die.   [00:56:56] Dr. Jane Ruby: And they get all indignant, I’m going to get my kid. Hey dude, back up a little bit. I got notified by a Nashville singer-songwriter, an award-winning songwriter named Shawn Gallaway. He’s a wonderful man. Great patriot, great Christian, loving man, very sweet. I’ve worked with him in business. He’s just so kind, it seems rare. But anyway, he said to me, in the early part of this year I was saying on Stew Peter Show just wait, just wait. What do you have to lose? This is a flu with a 99% recovery rate, for God’s sake. Snap out of it and just wait. And so it got to be this little moniker thing. So he calls me one day and he said, Dr. Jane, he said, I love what you did with just wait. He had written a previous song that’s really beautiful, Ashley, it’s called Hands Off! And it goes, hands off, hands off our children.” It’s just beautiful. He’s got it uploaded. You can all find it. That’ll make you cry, but in a good way, right? So he says to me, I would love to write a song with you. I said, oh, Shawn, I’ve got talents, but singing, music lyric writing, that’s not me. And he said, no, no, no. I need you to help me write it because I need to know what’s behind just wait, I like it, I got a good instinct. Anyway, long story short, we write this song. And we kind of homemade the video that goes with it, now it’s a music video called Just Wait. And it’s got a lot of children in it, and they’re standing there holding a sign that says, just wait. And they flip it in the air and they run away like run away from this thing, right? And it’s a beautiful melody, and it’s lots of fun, it’s catchy. So it gets back to that whole point, to the parents right now, what are you doing? These kids don’t get it. They don’t give it much less to anybody, much less grandma. You’ve been sold a bill of goods. These are your babies. I want to get back, if you’d indulge me one minute, back to this mRNA and this lipid nanoparticle because it’s important relative to the children. This is going to change your DNA. You’re going to permanently and irreversibly—listen, everything I’m saying I say with the caveat that look, if some genius comes up in a month and says, hey, I found the antidote or I found the reversal of how to do this thing, I’m all for it. I’ll say, well, I wasn’t aware of it at the time. But from what I know now and understanding what this thing is doing, it is irreversible.  This is not like taking a mercury-based traditional vaccine where you can chelate off the metals. This is a totally different animal. We don’t even know. We don’t even have short-term data. Forget long-term, right, We have speculations from Nobel Peace Prize nominees like Dr. Luc Montagnier and Dr. Vernon Coleman who are making these predictions. But we don’t really have that data on this particular thing. But I will tell you that if it gets into your cells and it’s directing your cell’s machinery to produce something, that you can’t chelate off a genetic material once it’s inside your cells. So use your own common sense.   [01:00:06] Ashley James: If you could, there would be a cure to cancer.   [01:00:09] Dr. Jane Ruby: Of course, of course, of course. Now, let me read something. I think this is worth reading, Ashley. By the way, I actually got, just in case, because we’re really getting deep into this and I’m able to stay for your entire show. So the duration that we originally talked about, if that helps.   [01:00:32] Ashley James: I’d love that.   [01:00:33] Dr. Jane Ruby: Yeah, yeah. I’m happy we could do that. I wanted to read something that’s really important. I’ll tell you where it’s from after I read it, okay. “We’ve been told that SARS-CoV-2 mRNA (vaccines) cannot be integrated into the human genome because messenger RNA cannot be turned back into DNA. This is false. There are elements in human cells called LINE-1 retrotransposons, which can indeed integrate mRNA into a human genome by endogenous reverse transcription.” Write that down you guys, you can go look it up.  “Because the mRNA used in these injections is stabilized, it hangs around the cells longer increasing the chances for this to happen. If the gene for SARS-CoV-2 spike is integrated into a portion of the human genome that is not silent and actually expresses a protein, it’s possible that people who take this injection may continuously express SARS-CoV-2 spike from their somatic cells for the rest of their lives.”  It finishes up with, “By inoculating people with a material that causes their bodies to produce Spike in-situ,” like in different places in the body, “they are being inoculated with a pathogenic protein. A toxin that may cause long-term inflammation, heart problems, and a raised risk of cancers. In the long-term, it may also potentially lead to premature neurodegenerative disease.”  That’s from a scientist who has anonymously come forward but put together all of this logic in a beautiful publication called the Spartacus Letter that just came out. And I can tell you, as a research scientist myself, that the science makes perfect sense. I can vet the science. And the most important thing to remember is that this thing that your body’s being forced to make, this material, and it’s all four injections, whatever you’ve heard. People ask me all the time, is one safer than the other? They might go about producing the material to tell your body to make the spike protein, but it’s all basically mRNA, and it’s going to get you to the same place. None of the four are better than the others.   [01:02:56] Ashley James: Right. They’re saying J&J is better. That’s what people have been saying.   [01:03:02] Dr. Jane Ruby: I don’t know where they’re getting that.   [01:03:03] Ashley James: Is J&J doing the same mechanism in the body?   [01:03:07] Dr. Jane Ruby: Okay, I’m happy to clarify. So the J&J and the AstraZeneca injections use what’s called an adenovirus vector for genetic material delivery instead of the lipid nanoparticles. So you see what I’m saying? You’re getting to the same place just a different transporter.   [01:03:25] Ashley James: So it’s changing the RNA of the body, causing the body—like the Spartacus Letter—to potentially make spike protein for the rest of their life. Different organs, different tissues of the body will continuously produce it. And the spike protein is what causes the inflammation, and that’s something that listeners can go back to Episode 463 with Dr. Richard Fleming and he explains what the spike protein does because he studied for many years—as a research cardiologist—different viruses and their effects on cardiovascular health. He saw that viruses cause inflammation, and in this case, coronaviruses often caused micro blood clots. What you’re saying is you’re essentially continuously having the symptoms of it.   [01:04:15] Dr. Jane Ruby: Yeah. Let me go back and complete the clarification on J&J and AstraZeneca because I really want to clear this thing up that it’s safer because it does something different. Remember I said the lipid nanoparticle was the transporter? It’s the car that gets the mRNA into every cell in your body. The J&J and AstraZeneca, they use a different transporter but they get the mRNA into your cells and they get the spike protein production every bit as high. And here’s the bottom line, the synthetic SARS-CoV-2 spike is a highly pathogenic protein all by itself. It doesn’t need to be part of a virus. They soup this thing up, the computer-generated model for it that then they build it on. What this scientist said, and I highly agree, it’s impossible to overstate the danger presented by introducing this protein into the human body. I don’t want people to despair, Ashley. People say to me, well, should I kill myself now or what? I was stupid, I took this thing. Here’s your hope. You took one, don’t take the second part. If you took the two parts of Pfizer or Moderna, don’t take any more. Do you see how they’re coming after you with boosters?   [01:05:33] Ashley James: You might be the 100 micrograms one.   [01:05:35] Dr. Jane Ruby: That’s right, and let me back up. Do you want proof that these companies are lying? Ashley, they told you at the beginning of the year, 100% certainty these are 95% effective. Oh, but six months later they want to give you a booster because it’s waning. I’ve never even heard. You’re either efficacious or you’re not, Ashley. You don’t have waning efficacy. Oh, my insulin doesn’t work anymore. It just doesn’t work like that. This is proof that they’re lying.   [01:06:13] Ashley James: What came about because of the Nuremberg trials? That we get to have informed consent. Can we talk a bit about that? That is the history of informed consent, its creation. In my opinion, it’s a human right. It should be part of our human rights. Isn’t it illegal to not give informed consent?   [01:06:44] Dr. Jane Ruby: Yes, but a lot of things have happened that are illegal. I’ve laid some of them out today, and I will get to the informed consent in one second. But there’s no oversight body. Who’s going to adjudicate it? You don’t have a Department of Justice, you don’t have an FDA. You have an FDA that is down on its knees. When I tell you, in my opinion, it’s performing like a department at Pfizer. It’s an approval body with no oversight. There’s no restriction. It’s carte blanche. So let’s get into informed consent. The Nuremberg trials, just in general for people, came out of the Nazi atrocities because people were in the camps and there were these sick Nazi doctors who would bring them in, take an organ out without anesthesia just to see how the person reacted—really, really horrible things. And when these things came out into the public light after the liberation and World War II ended, the International Court at The Hague conducted these trials. A lot of Nazis escaped. The famous Dr. Mengele, these people, some of them were never found, some of them were prosecuted. They were hung in the streets all over the world. The problem with the International Court is it is now the judicial arm of the UN, okay, and that’s a topic for another day. You’re not going to go anywhere with that right now. It’s got to be a different international tribunal, but I digress. They came up, they had these trials, and from the trials, they had certain plans of action, action items, and things like that. One of the wonderful things that came out of it was the code, the Nuremberg Code, which is their list of 10 unequivocal, non-negotiable requirements before you do anything to a human being from a research standpoint. And that’s how those human subjects review boards came about. They were an offshoot because you got to have an oversight body. And so, certain thing, I don’t have it in front of me, the Nuremberg Code, but if you look it up, it’s everywhere on the internet. Print off a copy of it because you may need it with your employer or other entities. But it says things like, you are entitled to know what you’re getting. You’re entitled to know that you can leave at any time. You’re entitled to know if something is irreversible and permanent, not walk into Walgreens and be given a one-page sheet that says, you might get a little fever, some arm soreness, and that’s it. You want it or not? Yeah, I’ll take it. It’s a vaccine. It’s going to help me.   [01:09:39] Ashley James: I was in the hospital with COVID. Five months ago, I was pregnant, and during labor, I lost our daughter. We actually don’t know why she passed away, they couldn’t figure it out. It was right at the very end, and we think that her record got pinched right as she was coming out. I was in shock, obviously, but the paramedics were there. I might have caught it from the paramedics. But days later, I was positive with COVID and I was having problems breathing. The concern was that I had a blood clot from the pregnancy. I went in to get checked because I was having such difficulty breathing that it was like, okay, well, yes, I understand you have COVID, but you could also have a blood clot on top of that, right? And luckily it wasn’t. But as I’m in the hospital, the doctor wants to put me on a trial drug. And I said, give me the big long list of side effects and show me the information about this trial that’s supposed to be amazing. He’s like, you absolutely are a candidate for this. I’m concerned that if you go home, you’re going to die. He was trying to really sell it to me with fear, I was pretty impressed. He hands me over one page—one page—and I’m sitting there in a hospital bed looking at it like, are you kidding me? Nothing on this page says that there’s anything bad except you might get some nausea. I’m like, this is not the truth, right? And so my midwife, this was like 3:00 in the morning we’re texting each other. I text her the information, and we’re both poring through the data of all the studies. One study just stopped me in my tracks that I had a 1% more chance of dying if I was hospitalized and received this drug than if I was hospitalized and not receive the drug. I’m like, how are they continuing this study? They saw that more people die. The two groups of people both hospitalized, the people that got the drug died more. I said, no thanks. Two days later I’m sitting up on the couch, I’m doing much better and I get a phone call. It’s the pharmacist of the hospital calling me saying, we’re really concerned. You should come back and you should get this drug. Now, remember, it’s a trial. It’s a trial drug for increasing the antibodies for fighting COVID. I said, I’m fine, I’m doing great. He’s like, no, your chart said you’re really bad. He was trying to sell me on it, I thought that was really weird. But you’re right, they didn’t do for informed consent. And I started quizzing the doctor and he had no information that could give me informed consent, other than this is good, you should take it. So, not only with the vaccines, but also with the other trials that they’re doing for drugs, they’re not giving true informed consent, and that’s really, first of all, blows my mind. Second of all, very concerning. How many years are going to have to go by for us to turn around and realize how much we’ve been lied to? Everyone’s going to wake up and look back and go, this was the biggest disaster we’ve ever seen medically for human rights, for medical freedom. It’s mind-blowing.   [01:13:22] Dr. Jane Ruby: Somebody asked me on my Telegram channel this morning, what do you think is going to happen to the medical complex after this? And I’m thinking to myself, right now, I’m just focused on stopping as many people, children, and babies as possible from getting this thing so that we have people to fight this thing. Do you think the medical complex will change? I actually did sort of a coffee chat live with them later on and I addressed the question. I said, I pray to God it does change into something else because it has been overrun. That doctor who was really hard selling you should have known better with the lack of informed consent that he or she was pushing on you in trying to get you to accept without adequate information. He or she should have known that. That doctor, I can almost guarantee you, was incentivized by pharma to do that.   [01:14:19] Ashley James: It felt like it. It felt like they were absolutely. I mean, a hospital calls you two days later, you should come back and get on this trial. I’m doing fine now, I don’t need it. No, no, you really need it. Your chart says you’re really sick. I’m like, I’m not sick anymore. So how do we follow you on Telegram? I know that you’ve been kicked off of all the social media that are cracking down. That’s a whole other topic. This is while these shots were in trial, right? They have emergency use authorization. When you’re in trial, we don’t know if it’s safe and effective, yet they’re already telling us it’s safe and effective, right? So they’re putting the cart before the horse so many times, and you’ve demonstrated and pointed us in the direction where we can go see that for ourselves on clinicaltrials.gov and on the websites, the different pharmaceutical websites. We can go look them up and see that for ourselves that they’re putting the cart before the horse many times, then the media runs with it. And so we’ve got that. We’ve got the media. We have to be careful where we’re getting our science from. If you’re getting your science from a news channel, from the media, then what you’re getting is you’re getting propaganda. I really recommend reading the book Propaganda by Edward Bernays to understand how media works. And so you’re on Telegram because you’re not being censored there. And the fact that we’re being censored by other organizations makes me wonder about their agenda.   [01:16:04] Dr. Jane Ruby: Well, there is no media anymore. None of this would be happening, you have to understand, without a complicit bought and paid for media. The media is a corporate entity now. I guess back to the original question, I was banned from Twitter twice, now it’s permanent because when they register your IP address, and it’s just not even worth it because half the people on that channel who have been good people that I would want to hear from have been banned. I mean, they took out a sitting US president, so who cares about me, right? I am still on Facebook, although I don’t get really the following and the traction. Facebook, it doesn’t know what it wants to be. It’s too socially and everything, and I’ll probably shut that down soon. I’m really pushing the envelope so they’ll just ban me. Yeah, I found a really good home at Telegram. For those of you who are not on it yet, everybody hates change, but it’s great for breaking news and lots of conversation with people that really are soaking in information from all over. So I’ve got a pretty good channel. It’s now up to about 45,000 people. It’s not about the clicks and the fame or anything because to be honest with you, Ashley, I was sort of at the end of my career anyway and I just wanted to just sail off and party in the tropics or something. God had a different idea because the world was shifting over. I’m on Telegram. I get a lot of reach in terms of educating people, and they get to use it. They’re smart, they put it out exponentially. It’s t.me/DrJaneRuby. All of the media that I have left is @DrJaneRuby. I am on Instagram, but that’s another one. It kind of axes and wanes between socially stuff. It’s nice. I think politically or medically people want to go there, but I’d say Telegram. I’ve tried to do some stuff on Gab, Gab had some technical snafus in the beginning. I like the thinking, but I don’t focus so much there. I’d like to just do one thing and you can find me there. I guess that’s it for social media. I mean it’s Telegram. Like I said, I left the industry a few months ago out of good conscience. Then I had this opportunity through Stew Peters, who’s an incredible patriot, a great American, and he’s the real deal because believe me, we work together every day. We talk, we share our stuff, we prepare the shows. I’m really grateful because people are responding to his network, and he’s asked me to do my own show in addition to being the medical contributor to his show, which has millions of viewers worldwide. So I’m very grateful for that connection and the chance to get the word out. Even more so, on Patreon, if people want to support me, everything that we collect from there goes into the studio and the production of the shows. It takes a lot of time to do all that. I do the engineering and the production. If it gets too big, I’m going to have to get some volunteers or hire somebody. But anyway, so the same thing. Patreon is @DrJaneRuby, and yeah, that’s about it for social media. Just two important things. Just follow the news and the information on Telegram, and if you are in a position to support, Patreon @DrJaneRuby.   [01:19:36] Ashley James: I love it. Your Telegram is where you also like to talk about it and help people understand breaking news through your lens of understanding behind the scenes in the world of FDA and big pharma. So I appreciate that. I have learned so much today and I’ve been in it with all kinds of doctors learning about this since it started. I’ve learned so much from you.  My episode 462 with Dr. David Brownstein, he’s a holistic MD and he chose to treat. He has over 500 patients that he treated that were positive for the coronavirus and the COVID-19. He chose to use the same formula that he has used for the last 20 plus years for any upper respiratory virus. He just uses the same formula. He talked about on the show, high dose vitamin D and there’s something that you inhale. He does ozone, iodine, and basically, everything that supports the body in fighting off a virus and keeping the lungs healthy. He had such great success, everyone survived. He wrote it on his website. He’s been doing a blog since the ‘90s just sharing, sharing, sharing, sharing not charging anyone just so maybe other holistic doctors would be able to copy his information and it could help more people, which is how it how science and medicine should work. We should always share when we get really good results, right? And so we can all learn from each other and better humanity. He was then contacted by the FCC to shut down his blog. And he said, wait a second. You have to shut down your blog because there is no treatment for SARS-CoV-2. There’s no treatment. And so you are doing something illegal. He’s practicing medicine, what are you talking about? And so he got a constitutional lawyer and the lawyer said in every case I would tell you to fight except for this one. You should absolutely take your blog down. And this is crazy. So what he figured out was that they are not allowed just like hydroxychloroquine, just like ivermectin and others. They are saying you cannot treat it because if you can treat it, then they would lose the emergency use authorization.   [01:22:16] Dr. Jane Ruby: That’s exactly right.   [01:22:18] Ashley James: In that interview, he shares what happened, and then what they did is they said if you have a study you can keep it. So he actually published the study in a good journal, and he had even more success, he even have more patients and he published a study. And then they came back and they said no, you need a double-blind study. And he said, that’s unethical. I’m not going to take half my patients with COVID and give them a placebo. That’s unethical. And they said, well, then you have to take it down. So anyway, he ended up publishing a book with the information because apparently book is still protected by First Amendment rights but his blog wasn’t. I don’t quite understand the logic there. But that is the heart of it is that this is the weirdest thing we’ve seen in the last 19 months where doctors have been told for the first time ever, you can’t practice medicine. You can’t treat this. You’re not allowed to treat it. And how many people have died because of that? We don’t know the numbers, but how many people have died because doctors weren’t allowed to use their best judgment, look at what other countries are doing, and mimic what other countries are getting success doing and do that.   [01:23:35] Dr. Jane Ruby: But Pfizer can get a drug approved without a standard control trial and without informed consent.   [01:23:44] Ashley James: At the very beginning of coronavirus back over a year ago, right at the very beginning I was interviewing a doctor and I said, I just got a feeling that maybe it’ll be 10 years, maybe it’ll be 100 years, but humanity will look back on these times, we’ll see the truth, and it will be one of the greatest atrocities, the biggest lies across all the board. Like you said, there’s no governing body. What’s going on? Who’s protecting us?   [01:24:19] Dr. Jane Ruby: It’s only us, Ashley, and that’s what people are having a hard time seeing. We had a little bit of a come to Jesus meeting in my live thing this morning. I get tons of people saying in the channel, Dr. Jane, when is somebody going to? Why isn’t this done yet? And I’ve said to them, guys, you’re at the frontline. You’re at the frontline. Your institutions have collapsed. Politicians aren’t going to get you out, they got you in. They got you in. You guys should watch the interview with Dr. David Martin. Forgive me, I can send you the link later but it’s with a Canadian interviewer, and it’s stunning evidence of Trudeau’s business interest in either the mRNA technology or the lipid nanoparticle technology. Like a long, long-standing. This is going to line his family pockets for generations to come and he knows it. This is about money, it’s about power, it’s about control. All three things are not always the same motivator in a person. And I’m not picking on one leader. We have a fake leader because this was installed, this was an installation. And then for the first time ever in our country’s history, we had electrified barbed wire around our three branches of government. It is down to the people. What do I mean by that? I’m not saying, take to the streets. You don’t have guns, you do have guns. What you do have is you have the power, but it’s collective, and you got to stop pearl clutching. Oh my God, is the government really lying to me? Oh my God, how could they put stainless steel particles and parasites into these injections? Well, they are, and your government is lying to you. And there’s like a fire ant phenomenon.  I keep looking for upstream. Where’s the upstream evil cabal? Like I was saying earlier referencing Dr. Shiva something he said recently, it’s a swarm model, it’s not a hierarchical model. Fauci’s in on it. It’s a Gates thing. The pharmaceutical companies have been literally tanking, if you really look at their history. This is their lifeblood now. This is the way they’re going to make their trillions. It is down to the people, but what the people can do is start locally. So I’ve said to people, for example, here in the United States I’ve said, you know what, you can’t do anything about the federal government right now so start where you are. Start in your neighborhood committees, your town councils, your school boards. If you don’t have children or grandchildren, it doesn’t matter. Go stand with your fellow citizens. They’re trying to get the boot off the neck because the people locally have the power over you. They’re affecting your life, whether they’re forcing you into a mask or this or that or some other crazy nonsense, and you got to wrangle the power back. Find a legal way, hold a quorum, kick them out, whatever you need to do but take that power peacefully, legally but take it back and take it back soon. Then from there, once you get that power hold, you can go to the next level. Maybe it’s a regional thing or something like that. That’s one suggestion. The other thing is to form mini-communities because we have to get ourselves, Ashley, off of the corporate teat, okay? I’m going to lose my job, we got the letter. Yeah, they’re going to fire you. They’re coming after two things, Ashley, two things because these are the hills to die on, remember. Mark my words, okay. The first one is your livelihood. Of course, it’s going to be the hardest thing. And the second thing is your babies, right? They’re already putting in their data for 5 to 11 because you know that the FDA is going to approve it, then the CDC is going to recommend it, and then the rest of the world goes in lockstep. So the point is they are coming after those two things. You know it’s going to happen so stop whining and bitching and step forward and start thinking.  Put your energy into, okay, I’m an electrician, and my wife is a bookkeeper or an accountant. Okay, how can we, with our families, with our neighbors, get ourselves off of the corporate dependence and start to provide services for each other because there’s going to be a little bit of a darker time before we get to the other side of this, in my opinion. And if I’m wrong, you’ve prepared and didn’t need it. I’ve always been of the philosophy I’d rather prepare for something and not need it than to not prepare and need it. If you have a medical background, you’re a nurse or a physical therapist, start thinking with other people how can I repurpose my skills to barter and keep my family and myself going. Maybe work in a different job or for a small business to keep them alive and they don’t demand that you have the jab before working there. I mean find those, find each other. Find each other. That’s the way you’re going to survive, and we are going to get to the other side.   [01:30:02] Ashley James: I totally recommend that. Create a network so that you can find better work somewhere where they’re going to respect your medical freedom, but also the emotional relief that comes from being surrounded by like-minded people. I did that.  Back in June of last year, I reached out to a homeschooling community and I said, hey, can we come out of hiding? Can we have a playdate? Three women in the Facebook group called me grandma killer, and then one person said, hey, we’re at the park already. We basically quarantined for three months because no one was going to do playdates. That was so bad for our son who was five. And so we went to that park and there’s three moms. They were so like-minded, and then we just started building. Now we’ve got like 100 moms all in the area and all very like-minded.  I found another Facebook group of women in my area, very similar to what you’re saying, they’re all talking about the jobs they’re leaving, the companies they will not work for, and the companies in the area that will not force anything medical on someone, and so they’re all going to work for those companies. You can find each other. But when you’re surrounded by friends and family that are pressuring you, that are listening to the media, and that are criticizing you or even isolating you or threatening you, it feels very lonely, it feels very isolating. You begin to question your decisions. Surround yourself with like-minded people. Now, you have a book and I think it’s very important that people know about it based on what we’re talking about now. Your book is A Sea of New Media. I think it’s important to read now because it’s going to teach us what we can do and what we definitely should be doing. I don’t think everyone has the talents or the desire to step out and be a reporter. But for those that have the drive that wants to speak out to want to support each other, to want to continue to get this information out there and share, definitely get the book A Sea of New Media. You can get it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Maybe tell us a bit about your book.   [01:32:36] Dr. Jane Ruby: Yeah, let me clarify something. This is not for people who want to become a reporter. So I’m sorry if I miss characterized it, but this book is the opposite. You carry around that device every day with you called a cell phone. It’s got a camera on it. It’s a computer, okay. It’s an audio device. If you think you can’t make a difference because we can’t trust the mainstream media. But if you have people out there photographing something and uploading it. If you think you can’t make a difference as a single person, a simple single person. Think about the guy who was at the 9/11 Memorial in 2016 who captured Hillary Clinton being dragged into that van, right? He was just walking by. Nobody knows his name now. I know his name because that’s my business, but nobody knows his name now or could recall it. But he was just walking by and he said, oh, that’s weird. Look at them dragging Hillary. He turned his phone on, he videotaped it. That changed the course of history. It changed the course of the election because they were lying. He proved that she was sick. So I was at an airport once, an alarm broke out, and people were going in every different direction. It was the Raleigh-Durham Airport, and they had no emergency plan. I was not into any of this. This was years ago. I took pictures of everybody running, tripping, getting injured, running out of exit signs that were like two storeys high because they were for airplanes. It was terrible. I uploaded it, local TV station called me, I gave them the film, and it resulted in them revising their emergency plan for that airport. You don’t have to be, oh, I want to be a reporter, I want to be a journalist, no. I don’t want to do that. But automatically, you’re a truth-teller. Before I close because I have to run soon, but I just want to say, the title of the book, A Sea of New Media, came from a comment made by the late Andrew Breitbart, who was an amazing patriot and a great light in our lives here who mysteriously died two weeks after he was giving a speech at CPAC in Washington DC. I watched it in person and he said that we were going to vet Obama. He had films and documents, and I think they took them out, but that’s just my opinion. But earlier to that, he had been very active with the Tea Party and there was this event in the steps of the US Capitol around 2010 and three African American legislators were coming down the steps. The Tea Party was going, kill the bill, kill the bill. And later that night, the thing came out in the media that these three leaders claimed that somebody yelled the N word or that a bunch of people were. And Breitbart said fine, if you got an audio or a video that you got, you had 20,000 people standing there. Somebody’s got to have a cell phone or something, right? He offered up to $100,000, nobody could come up with any proof.  And so weeks later, he was on the national mall that, grassy knoll between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, and he was giving a speech to just tens of thousands of people. And he said, we vindicated because it was a lie because you guys, nobody could show the proof. It was like the inverse of what I’m saying. If they had said that or called the man name, somebody would have had some video on it out of all those thousands of people.  And he said, hold up your cell phones, it was nighttime so all these beautiful lights were twinkling. And he said, now you have a sea of new media to capture the lies. And I thought, you know what, I’m going to write a book. This was around 2015, 2016. I was in DC for 10 years and everything was turning over. I was engaged with all these people, many of whom you probably know on social media now. They’re much more famous, but we were all shoulder to shoulder just hanging out. We didn’t even realize we were at the beginning of a major movement. And I thought, I’m going to write a book about these people, myself, and all of our experiences how important it is just to take a picture. If you’re going to call an entity like call your politician’s office and give them hell because they got the boot on your neck, tape it. Tape everything. When the police walk up to you, tape it, okay? You never know when that’s going to become something important and it’s going to make you a truth-teller because you’ve got evidence.   [01:37:13] Ashley James: I love it.   [01:37:14] Dr. Jane Ruby: Thanks for the time on that, but I think it’s important for people to understand how it came about. It’s for everybody. I think it’s inspiring in that way. It’s kind of fun too.   [01:37:24] Ashley James: Well, thank you. Do you identify as a whistleblower? I definitely can see you as a truth-teller.   [01:37:32] Dr. Jane Ruby: No.   [01:37:33] Ashley James: Thank you. Thank you for illuminating this darkness and for us to see. I really, really appreciate it, and I appreciate your time coming here. Of course, the links to everything that Dr. Ruby does are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com, especially the link to Telegram, to her Patreon, and to her book, A Sea of New Media. I’d love to have you back on the show. You’re welcome back anytime.   [01:38:00] Dr. Jane Ruby: Thank you.   [01:38:01] Ashley James: You said talking about the judicial arm of the UN is a whole nother topic for a whole nother day, so you’re definitely welcome back. We’d love to have you. It has been such a pleasure. And I really hope, no matter where any of my listeners are on the political spectrum, I respect and love all of you. We’re all on this journey together. I respect medical freedom, the freedom to choose. I want you to have the freedom to choose or to say no.   [01:38:29] Dr. Jane Ruby: Exactly right.   [01:38:32] Ashley James: I hate this term, anti, right? I am pro-medical freedom. I believe in your freedom and your right to choose something or to say no to something. That freedom needs to be protected, and so all of us need to be truth-tellers to continue to enforce and protect our freedoms, or else we will lose them forever. Thank you for coming on the show. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?   [01:39:02] Dr. Jane Ruby: I want to second what you just said. This is not political at all. Freedom is in everybody’s good interest, right? We’re all brothers and sisters. I would echo what you said, Ashley, it’s about making your own choices, and doing so in the most informed way you can. Just stay open, take your time, and do your own double-checking. Anybody who says, oh, you don’t have to look that up. Do what I say, that should be your red flag, not somebody who says, hey, go double-check me. I say that all the time, all the time. So God bless everyone. Just stay well and take your time, be discerning. It’s been a pleasure, Ashley. Thanks for having me, and hopefully we’ll get together soon.   [01:39:53] Ashley James: I’d love that. Thank you so much, Dr. Jane Ruby. This has been wonderful. Thank you.   [01:39:58] Dr. Jane Ruby: You’re welcome. Take care.   Get Connected with Dr. Jane Ruby! Website Telegram Patreon Facebook Instagram Medium Book by Dr. Jane Ruby A Sea Of New Media      

Become a Certified Health Coach Through IIN just like Ashley James! Get their Valentines Day Special! Experience a free sample of their program: learntruehealth.com/coach The website forum is here: https://forum.jackkruse.com/index.php?forums/the-kruse-longevity-center.50 Health and wealth are linked QuantumHealth.TV TV show on quantum biology Patreon blog : Covers decentralized networks of biology and Bitcoin www.patreon.com/DrJackKruse   Neurosurgeon Discovers Key To Mitochondrial Health  https://www.learntruehealth.com/neurosurgeon-discovers-key-to-mitochondrial-health   Highlights: What are mitochondria Mitochondrial DNA vs. RNA and DNA Mitochondria are only inherited from mothers What is leptin Three pillars of supreme mitochondrial biology   In this episode, neurosurgeon Dr. Jack Kruse talks about a different perspective on achieving optimal health. He also shares the importance of mitochondria, the three pillars of supreme mitochondrial biology, and the things we can do to live a longer life. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today is a doozy and I’m so excited that you are here to learn from Dr. Jack Kruse, really interesting information he has to share with us today. I ask you to keep an open mind, and I just think the best interviews are the kind that challenges our belief systems and allows us to learn something totally new that’s outside of our reality. Remember the movie The Matrix so many years ago, like 20 years ago when Neo takes the pill and all of a sudden wakes up in The Matrix and you’re like, whoa, I did not know that that is where that movie was going? It’s kind of like that. It’s the what you don’t know you don’t know. That’s wherein lies the biggest help for you because you know you should go to bed on time, drink water, move your body like exercise, and you know you should eat healthy. Those are all good things right, but if you’re here to learn true health, then you’re really here to learn things you don’t know you don’t know. And I just love Dr. Jack Kruse for that. He is here to teach a lot of what we don’t know we don’t know. And in fact, I’m sure that after this interview, you’ll want to follow him and continue to learn from him. Now I don’t believe in any one diet dogma because I believe that healing is a journey and that we should learn from all the people and all the experts, and then figure out how to apply what works for us to us. So just listen with a really open mind. Today he shares some great information about how we can improve significantly the health and function of our cells. Specifically, a part of our cells is called the mitochondria, which is the powerhouse of the cell.  The difference between you and a cadaver is a cadaver’s mitochondria has stopped, right? There’s no more energy production, the cells aren’t producing any more cellular fuel, right? You are alive, your mitochondria is alive, and there’s a lot going on in the world that is dampening, that is hampering, that is harming your mitochondria. So he is here to teach us things that we can do really easy as in very accessible things that we can do to immediately and drastically improve our mitochondrial health and thus improving all hormones in the body and bringing into balance blood sugar, leptin, and also strengthening the innate arm of the immune system. So, great information. Just strap on and just remember, he’s going to challenge your belief systems and I think that’s a good thing. Please share this podcast with those you care about who also would appreciate a wonderful challenge to their belief systems, and give them great information to improve their mitochondrial health as well.  I’d love for you to join the Learn True Health Facebook group if you are like me and you’re interested in joining a community of like-minded true health seekers that are looking to support each other along their health journey. So just search Facebook for Learn True Health, or you can go to learntruehealth.com/group to join. You can also go to learntruehealth.com to search for all the other podcasts we have. There are lots of show notes and you can use the search function to find those episodes. I’d love to have you join the email list if you ever want to just stay updated as things progress. Just keep sharing, keep listening, and please join the podcast Facebook group, love to see you there as well. And also, we are on LBRY, so if you are a listener or a new listener and you want to know where to find us, you can find us at any podcast directory including LBRY. Awesome. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and enjoy today’s interview. [00:04:23] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 467. I’m really excited for today’s guest. We have with us Dr. Jack Kruse. Dr. Kruse, I’ve had several of my past guests reference your work, and I’ve actually had several listeners request to interview you, and I just keep hearing your name over and over. So I’m so glad to finally have you on the show. Welcome.   [00:04:55] Dr. Jack Kruse: No problem. Appreciate it.   [00:04:57] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. I’m really intrigued by your work. Now listeners can go to jackkruse.com, and of course, the links to everything that Dr. Kruse does are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Before we dive into you teaching us and sharing with us exactly what you do, can you tell us the story of what happened that led you to the work that you do now?   [00:05:24] Dr. Jack Kruse: Well, I mean, life happened to me, to be quite frank with you. It’s a story where being an allopathic neurosurgeon, I was doing things that I was taught to do both in residency and medical school, and I began to find that some of the things that I was doing really weren’t benefiting patients long term. I began to question, was I doing the right things for my patients? And then ultimately, it then happened to me. I wound up gaining quite a bit of weight after residency and I tore a knee meniscus at a spine meeting that I was giving a talk at. And one of the orthopedic surgeon’s wives who happened to work for a biotechnology company that actually knew the reason why this happened to me, and she said, look, I want you to read these six papers. I’m going to give you a book to read. Long story short, what she was trying to tell me was the company she was working for was cooking the books on a hormone called leptin. They had synthetic leptin and they began to realize certain things about leptin, and all these papers that she sent me, she was actually trying to out her company but I actually went a different way. I actually realized that what fundamentally she had done for me was answer the key question that my medical training was basically given to me by a centralized controller, specifically big pharma, which came from a lot of the political history of the United States in terms of medicine. What I realized is that leptin fundamentally works within a decentralized network, which is what nature and decentralized networks, one of the fundamental tenets of them is they don’t have any central controller, meaning there’s no CEO, there’s no boss, but they work on something called negative or positive feedback loops. It turns out the negative and positive feedback loop that leptin works on is actually the light and dark cycle. That hormone controls all energy balance in your body. So after about 18 months of doing all my homework on this when I realized most of the things that I learned in medical school were wrong because they came from the centralized controller, which was big pharma, I began to ask better questions. And when I asked better questions, I started to realize that the focus that medicine is on right now is RNA and DNA, and the real focus that we need to be on is actually mitochondrial DNA because that’s where energy is transformed from the environment in. And when you begin to focus on that, people magically do better. That’s kind of how it started almost 16, 17 years ago now.   [00:08:10] Ashley James: It’s very apropos what you said about how your realization that your medical training was largely influenced by politics and the pharmaceutical industry, and that’s what we see when we look at the creation of allopathic medicine over the last 115 years. That the pharmaceutical companies were investing in the universities that would teach drug-based medicine only and guide them.   [00:08:43] Dr. Jack Kruse: You need to understand the reason why that happened. It’s actually not a medical reason, it’s actually an economic reason, and it goes back to the breakup of Standard Oil. When Teddy Roosevelt came in after McKinley was assassinated and he took apart Standard Oil, if you ever go back and read what Rockefeller said in his testimony in front of Congress and Teddy Roosevelt said, come hell or high water, I will make sure that you pay for this.  And to this very day, I always point this out to people that all the components that were Standard Oil eventually became big pharma, why? Because now all the chemicals that they created in their petroleum products were reconstituted and then what Rockefeller decided to do by hiring Abraham Flexner, this went on to the Flexner Report. Everybody loves to think that this was an entirely new industry, no it wasn’t a new industry. What it was was repurposing waste chemicals in a new way, and Rockefeller had gotten these ideas over the last 30, 40 years of his life that he actually could do that. To this very day, if you look at where big pharma is incorporated, they’re all incorporated in New Jersey, and that’s exactly where Standard Oil was incorporated. That fact has not changed today. The problem is most modern humans don’t understand truly how this happened. They believe that it’s a biologic story and it’s not. It was an economic story, and it was a robber baron seeking to bankrupt the US Federal government. And I have to tell you that I think Rockefeller has done a pretty masterful job over the last 115 years on this planet.   [00:10:25] Ashley James: Not only do they put the byproducts in the medicine, but they’ve also put it in our cosmetics. It is in our detergents and the cosmetics that then get on our skin and get absorbed that way as well. It’s pretty ridiculous when we look to see the byproducts of these different industries and how they end up in our body when they clearly shouldn’t be. How does that affect the mitochondria? So you’re saying the key to health is making sure the mitochondria is functioning, the DNA of the mitochondria is functioning. How do these man-made chemicals affect the mitochondria?   [00:11:14] Dr. Jack Kruse: Well, the effect varies depending on the class of drugs you’re talking about, but here’s the general gist that people need to know. Allopathic medicine has kept the focus on RNA and DNA. We learned about RNA and DNA in ‘53 from Watson and Crick. Big pharma has always kept the gun barrels for drug development there, why? Because they knew if we could never get an answer, you’re just going to be able to create products for customers that they need constantly and it’s a good business model. They’ve been very successful with it. For those in your audience that really don’t understand cell biology well, you just need to know that mitochondria is an organelle within a cell that provides all the energy that life creates from the environment around it in terms of making things work. So when I make the comment to people that not all the atoms in the cell are nonliving, taken apart, the organization, however, are those atoms with the energy that’s contained in the cell is what takes them abiotic atom and actually allows it to act in the orchestra so that it appears to be alive. And really, what the life force is all about is about the organization of energy so that it can transform both information and energy into useful physiologic work. So when you understand that, basically mitochondria transforms energy from the sun and turns it into something useful that we can use to do physiologic work at some level. So, when a person is dead, we have a name for it. It’s called a cadaver. What is a cadaver? A cadaver is a person that is a bunch of atoms that have no energy that’s organizing their physiologic action. People who are alive actually do have the ability to use their mitochondria to transform the things that can absorb, reconstitute, and transform energy into something useful, that cell is me. And it turns out that mitochondrial efficiency determines your health span and it determines your longevity. It turns out as energy transformation is reduced, that’s where illness comes, and when it gets to a critical mass that’s when you die. So in this paradigm, that was really laid out probably close to 50 years ago by a guy named Doug Wallace who’s now at the Children’s Hospital Philadelphia, he’s the Ph.D. that found out that all mitochondria only inherited from our mom, it’s not inherited from our dad. So it turns out that our mom gives us the power plant that allows us to live.  So that means that mom or the maternal side is far more important in understanding the trajectory of patients’ lives especially early on, and then how to maximize mitochondrial function going forward. It turns out, many of the things that are operational for mitochondrial DNA are not operational and incongruent with the things that we know about regular RNA or DNA that’s found in the nucleus. It turns out that energy production from mitochondria is actually what turns on RNA and DNA inside the nucleus, and why is that important? Because it basically means that the way life manifests—meaning the phenotype of different diseases or different healthy states—is totally reliant on how well or poorly you transform energy into mitochondria.   [00:14:50] Ashley James: Now you had mentioned earlier that you began this diving into leptin. Can you explain what leptin is?   [00:14:59] Dr. Jack Kruse: Leptin is a hormone that’s found in humans in their subcutaneous fat that actually goes to tell the brain at the hypothalamic level—that’s in a part of your brain that’s right behind your pituitary gland—what the energy balances of the body. Since you’ve heard me talk about mitochondria earlier, you begin to realize that medicine really is a thermodynamic gain and not the gain that everybody else talks about. It’s about thinking like an engineer, and leptin happens to be information from the distal part of the body, meaning the subcu fat, to the brain what energy status is in different parts of the body.  The way leptin works in humans, it only enters the hypothalamus when it’s dark, usually right around midnight to about 3:00 AM. And that’s where the information transfer occurs between leptin and the hypothalamus. If that information transfer is not uploaded properly, similar to how you would think about the USB drive through your computer, the brain never gets that information, you become leptin resistant, then you’re subject to many different diseases—obesity being one, but many other diseases are also on there as Doug Wallace has laid out in his 50 years of research. That’s basically how it works.   [00:16:20] Ashley James: So if someone is a night owl and doesn’t go to bed till 1:00 in the morning, or if someone has poor sleep and basically…   [00:16:28] Dr. Jack Kruse: They should buy term life insurance.   [00:16:33] Ashley James: Oh geez.   [00:16:35] Dr. Jack Kruse: That’s the truth.   [00:16:36] Ashley James: So you said that this is all about the light-dark cycle, I’m just thinking about those for people that live near the North Pole where they get months and months of only summer or months and months of only dark. Are you saying we really should be very careful about balancing the circadian rhythm and avoiding blue light?   [00:16:57] Dr. Jack Kruse: If you don’t do that, you’re guaranteeing that you’re going to be a customer of big pharma, that’s really the key. And the key is, once you begin to realize that nature is the only decentralized network that’s natural on earth, you need to understand how it works. This is the reason why, if you look at planet Earth—just to make this very clear to you—we have boreal forests, which are the last living structure in the Northern Hemisphere. We don’t have that in the southern hemisphere because we only have Antarctica.  But above the boreal forest, which is right around the 59th latitude, Earth is not hospitable to life. That should actually clue you in to, hey, maybe strong magnetic fluxes from the Aurora Borealis and maybe the really poor light and dark cycle that you have with the seasons up there is somehow not optimized to mitochondrial biology. That’s the reason why evolution or God—whoever you believe in most—has not put living things above the boreal forest. And the reason why this should make sense to you is remember what the boreal forest does, it’s the largest secretor of oxygen on planet Earth. And remember, oxygen is the terminal electron acceptor for mitochondria. So for those of you who think this is hyperbole, you need to know how all the pieces fit to really understand disease and wellness. It turns out that oxygen is extremely important in the dance that life does, and it turns out the amount of oxygen we really need is completely linked to the amount of light that the system gets both through the skin and through the eyes. That’s actually how leptin works. And when you begin to see these pieces fit, then you begin to understand why it is when a young kid looks at their cell phone 150 times a day and the blue light screen is 5750 Kelvin light, which mimics mean when you’re telling the brain 150 times a day even when it’s dark out that it’s solar noon, you can see how that creates a problem with chaos in the hypothalamus that leptin can’t work. You have nasal chaos in medicine that’s called inflammation and inflammation leads to leptin resistance and leptin resistance leads to the diseases that are associated with poor leptin biology for energy and information transfer and things like obesity.   [00:19:15] Ashley James: So I know you’ve been touching on this, but could you lay it out for us to understand what is the connection between having healthy levels of leptin and having healthy mitochondria?   [00:19:29] Dr. Jack Kruse: Actually, I don’t think you should think about healthy leptin levels and I think that’s one of the fallacies of functional medicine. They want you in the paradigm where you start to think about healthy levels of everything. It doesn’t matter what lab you’re talking about, why? Because they functionally make the same mistake that allopathic doctors do. They think somehow that looking at your cholesterol level somehow has any thermodynamic relevancy or face validity to understanding truly what’s going on at the cellular level and they don’t. And the reason why they’re the same is because the allopathic doctors who they love on social media give you prescriptions for statins, vaccines, and all kinds of things like that. What do they do? They turn around and sell you supplements. They’re basically doing the same thing. It just has a different idea. It’s basically propaganda, and with propaganda, I will tell you marketing is legalized lying. They get away with it, and the reason they get away with it is because allopathic doctors are functionally taught to look at RNA and DNA and not think thermodynamically about people. When you begin to think about the thermodynamics that people through mitochondrial biology and leptin biology, you begin to realize that everything is about information and energy. And it turns out that leptin biology optimizes that. If you learn how to use the light and dark cycle, how to use water, and how to use magnetic effects because those are the three pillars that form supreme mitochondrial biology. Once you optimize those, magically the diseases that have afflicted you over a period of time start to go away without you needing some supplements or a prescription for a statin.   [00:21:10] Ashley James: So you said water, light, and magnetic effects are the three keys to having a mitochondrial function.   [00:21:18] Dr. Jack Kruse: Correct. We call it light, water, and magnetism. It’s the three-legged stool of life. Where did that start? It started with NASA. NASA and SETI look for life on other planets by utilizing those three things.  To give you a good frame of reference, let’s take the next planet. The next planet is Mars. It’s dead and it’s red. It’s a giant desert. It has the sun driving most of its processes. As a planet, the spectrum, however, is different because it has no atmosphere. The reason it has no atmosphere is because it has no magnetic field. And it turns out there is water on Mars, but it’s frozen at the polar ice caps. So just the presence of light, water, and magnetism doesn’t mean that you can be optimized, which is part of the reason why it’s a joke that our friend Elon Musk wants to go to a dead red desert in the sky. It absolutely makes no sense, but it only makes sense if you think about it probably from a different viewpoint. My viewpoint is that life on Earth is optimized because light, water, and magnetism operate in a certain way. Light is important for leptin, and it turns out, mitochondria—if you know anything about mitochondria, most people who are not science bases, I know that you’ve all heard about photosynthesis. Photosynthesis forms the entire food web on planet Earth. There’s not a food that you can think of in your mind right now that’s not directly linked to photosynthesis. The only foods that don’t fit there are processed foods that are made in the lab, why? Because they’re not made in sunlight. That’s the reason you shouldn’t eat them. It’s not for any other reason. The key is when you understand that photosynthesis basically takes CO2 from plants, takes water from the hydrologic cycle on Earth, and uses sunlight to create glucose [inaudible 00:23:17]. What does mitochondria do? It fundamentally reverses the process of photosynthesis. So what do we do? We take sugar and we break it back down to CO2, which we expel or exhale, and we make water. We make water at a very specific place in our body. The water we make is made at cytochrome c oxidase, which is a cytokine four in the mitochondria. Most allopathic doctors, most functional medicine doctors don’t even know that basic. They don’t even know that mitochondrial respiration reverses the photosynthetic product. Most people in allopathic medicine and functional medicine look at food from the viewpoint of carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids, Jack Kruse does not. Jack Kruse knows that all foods are an electromagnetic barcode of electrons and protons tied to the photosynthetic qualitative programs that are found in nature. You need to think about food that way. And what do mitochondria do, or anybody who’s ever studied mitochondria knows that the input to mitochondria is called electron chain transport. It’s not called protein, lipid, or carbohydrate transport. It’s called electron chain transport. Then there’s this fifth cytochrome that everybody in allopathic medicine and functional medicine seems to know about but has no earthly idea how it fits into the fabric of nature. It’s called the ATPase. The ATPase is what makes some of the energy. A better way to think about it is it transforms the energy that’s present in food to something we can use electromechanically in cells to derive life and life principles in terms of physiology. It turns out, the ATPase functionally works both with electrons and protons. In fact, it needs 3.4 protons from inside the mitochondrial matrix to spin it one time in its [inaudible 00:25:15] head to make one ATP. When you begin to see the processes inside mitochondria and how they transform energy from the sun into energy that we can use for physiologic work, then and only then do you have a concept of truly how we build health and how we build illness.   [00:25:37] Ashley James: So, besides eating foods that require photosynthesis, like you said, does our body—and I’ve heard this, a past guest mentioned this…   [00:25:47] Dr. Jack Kruse: Let me stop you for a moment because you just skipped over a really big problem.   [00:25:51] Ashley James: What’s that?   [00:25:52] Dr. Jack Kruse: Where do you live?   [00:25:54] Ashley James: Washington state.   [00:25:56] Dr. Jack Kruse: Perfect. So, let me ask you a question based on what I just told you because if you skip over this part you’re bound to make this mistake. If you’re in Washington State on December 31 and you go to Whole Foods and eat a pineapple, do you think that nature has a problem with that?   [00:26:12] Ashley James: Actually I do.   [00:26:15] Dr. Jack Kruse: Good, because then you understood what I just said. Because see, photosynthesis doesn’t provide pineapples to grow at your latitude. You know what that means? That means you’re creating molecular chaos on your cell if you do that. So here’s the key point. You’re designed to eat a diet that your eyes and skin see every single day.  So guess what, it has to be congruent, otherwise you create that chaos signal which is inflammation. That means that leptin can’t get into the hypothalamus to optimize the mitochondrial engines that are present in every part of your body. And it does that by two program changes that you probably have heard of, some of your listeners may have heard of them as well. It’s autophagy and apoptosis. That’s fundamentally how we optimize or change energy flux to a cell. If those processes are broken, then you cannot transform energy properly.   [00:27:15] Ashley James: Do you believe in fasting to stimulate autophagy and apoptosis?   [00:27:21] Dr. Jack Kruse: Yeah, not apoptosis but autophagy is definitely stimulated by it. And the key with that is, that’s why we have the main breakfast. We’re designed to eat while it’s still light out. You should never eat late at night because it ruins the leptin melatonin growth hormone pathway that I mentioned early in the hypothalamus. Once that’s optimized, then what happens next is you go all the way usually for about 12, 13, 14 hours until you eat your breakfast, and you’re designed to eat breakfast. Within the first 30 minutes to an hour of AM light. That’s the way you’re designed to work in nature. Unfortunately, that’s not the way most modern humans live their life.   [00:28:06] Ashley James: Definitely not. So for those who can’t go to bed with the sun and wake up with the sun because of their family schedule or their work schedule.   [00:28:18] Dr. Jack Kruse: Term life insurance.   [00:28:19] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [00:28:21] Dr. Jack Kruse: This is the message that you need to get to your viewers, Ashley, and it may be the inconvenient truth in them. You don’t get a free pass from nature. You need to realize that you’re tied to her quilt, and if the circumstances that you find yourself in are not optimized for the way the game is played, you will wind up with a disease at some level. That’s what evolution is telling you, and this is the reason why you get the ideas about survival of the fittest and survival of the wisest because those that are necessarily fit doesn’t mean they’re wise. You can be fit, live in a blue light world, eating pineapples at the 44th latitude in Washington like some of your listeners probably do, but you will not live long. That’s why there’s a lot of really good-looking cadavers in cemeteries.   [00:29:15] Ashley James: You mentioned that program cell death, which is the apoptosis, you don’t recommend fasting for that. What do you recommend doing to help stimulate that?   [00:29:31] Dr. Jack Kruse: Apoptosis is stimulated by appropriate solar exposure on your skin and your eyes. It’s specifically controlled mostly by UV light exposure. That’s specifically UVA and UVB. So one of the things that we can tell when someone has good apoptosis present is we can use the vitamin D levels as a proxy. And most people in North America right now have vitamin D’s that are horrible, why? Because they don’t spend a lot of time outside in the sun. So for example, I don’t know where you are now because we’re not doing a video on this. You remember when we started the podcast, you asked me, hey, this background is bad, you know why? Jack doesn’t use headphones. Jack does all his podcasts sitting out in the sun. I’m in Destin, Florida right now outside in the sun doing this podcast. I bet you that you’re in Washington inside with headphones on.   [00:30:23] Ashley James: In a very dark room.   [00:30:25] Dr. Jack Kruse: There you go. Not only that, I know that you’re an hour behind me, so it’s 12:25 PM where you are. It’s 1:25 PM where I am. So guess what, this is the time of the day where Jack gets to make vitamin D through his skin and his eyes. So Jack is not going to miss this even though he’s excited to talk to Ashley James, why? Because the benefit of technology, doing this so that I can share these ideas with your audience, that’s the amazing part of technology. But if I continue to do this inside over and over because I’ve done 1000 podcasts, that would have a significant problem for my biology. In other words, I become thermally inefficient and I would wind up having to go see my profession or some of these functional doctors who would sell me the marketing tab line, buy my shit so you can get healthy. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. I always tell people, it’s amazing to me that wild animals know how to do this. They don’t have any doctors out there and they seem to do just fine in nature. Believe it or not, we’re proof, meaning humans are proof that what happened from an evolutionary standpoint, our last few million years, must have been pretty good because we’re here today talking about this as proof because back then, there were no fancy foods. There were no restaurants. There were no supermarkets. There was no Gold’s Gym. There were no trainers. There were no diet books. But guess what, we’re here to show you that nature actually works if you get out of your way.  The reason I don’t have to teach lions and hippos quantum mechanics and mitochondrial biology is because they don’t have this quantum computer in their head called the human brain that allows them to break nature’s laws, kind of like the laws that we just talked about a little while ago about how you and I are doing this podcast. We can see choices are the hinges of destiny. And the thing is the more choices that you make that follow nature’s fundamental laws, the more you can avoid guys like me or the functional medicine doctors.   [00:32:37] Ashley James: I love what you just said, and I’m going to go back and write that down because I absolutely love it and use it as a quote in this interview. Your choices being the hinge to basically every little day, like you said, 1000 podcasts is 1000 opportunities lost to produce vitamin D. So we have light receptors, our cells have light receptors and basically, sunlight is nutrients and everyone is deficient in it. We need to get out in the sun.   [00:33:10] Dr. Jack Kruse: I would tell you that sunlight is not only energy but it’s information and we know that, not that I want to take you down this rabbit hole.   [00:33:19] Ashley James: Oh, take me.   [00:33:21] Dr. Jack Kruse: I can tell you that the guy that determines the energy side of the equation, you’ve probably heard of this, Ludwig Boltzmann, came up with the mathematical proof behind the second law of thermodynamics. And in it, basically the equation, when you look it up on Google or in a book, you’ll see that that is an equation that defines entropy. Here’s the interesting part of the story. In 1948, a guy named Claude Shannon who worked for Bell Labs. He was trying to fix information and energy. He’s trying to explain it. He’s trying to explain how you can figure out the minimum amount of information in a message, and he used mathematics to figure it out. Ironically, the last thing that he came up with the last equation is an equation that looks exactly like the one that Boltzmann came up for entropy. So now we know from physics that has been developed over the 20th century from a guy named John Wheeler and another guy named Vopson that actually energy and information are one and the same thing. This is a huge development for people like me who teach about mitochondrial energy production because that means that sunlight is actually not just energy, it’s also information. It turns out the chromophores that are in your body that are what you call the light sensors have different physiologic tasks because they provide different physiological information. So for example, I’m going to teach you something right here about mitochondrial biology because we talked about autophagy and apoptosis. Autophagy is predominantly controlled by light in the 600 to 1000 nanometre range. It turns out that apoptosis is controlled by the light that goes anywhere from about 250 to 400 nanometers, and we have chromophore proteins throughout our body that react to it.  For example, the number one red light chromophore in the body happens to be water, but the number one red light chromophore in mitochondria is cytochrome c oxidase. It has four different chromophore proteins in the cytochrome c oxidase at 620, 680, 760, and 860. So basically, nature’s telling us that she takes four bites of the apple to get her information and this fits because our sun is a G class star and it turns out 43% of sunlight happens to be infrared, a light, which carries 600 to 1000 nanometer light. So this gets back to the whole story about how leptin biology ties to solar cycles because it turns out the type of light that our star makes optimizes our health. On the apoptosis side, it turns out that the chemical receptors that are important for UV light are something called leptin, which we talked about already, and the other part of it is another chemical called melanopsin and neurons. We have these opsins on our skin and our eye that actually absorb UV light, and neuropsin is present on our cornea and our skin, and it’s basically a UVA light detector. It tells us about the intensity.  Melanopsin is a blue light detector. It tells us about the amount of blue light that’s present in our body. And if you understand the physics of organisms, meaning how all cells are optimized, it turns out that there has to be a perfect balance between blue and red light, and red light is almost always the same from the time the sun rises to the sunsets, but blue light is not. It actually increases from sunrise to sunset, and it crescendos right at sunset. In other words, the color temperature of light is greatest about the hour before sunset happens and melanopsin is looking for that signal as the sun falls and drops. As soon as that happens, that’s the signal that leptin and melatonin cycles and cortisol cycles pay attention to you in your body. And if those cycles are off because you happen to look at your iPhone 150 times a day after the sun sets, well guess what, you just ruined the way you’re designed to work in nature.   [00:38:06] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. And for those that don’t know, autophagy is so important because it’s cleaning up the dead, damaged tissue. Could you explain a little bit about why autophagy is so important that we make sure that we’re stimulating it correctly?   [00:38:23] Dr. Jack Kruse: Yeah. Well, I mean, this one is pretty simple because I like to take this analogy like a Ferrari engine on a Ferrari car. If you buy a Ferrari right off the line in Italy, the car goes 230 miles an hour. The engine is primed and does well. A Ferrari that’s four or five years old will only go 230 miles an hour if you have a mechanic that keeps it running in tip-top shape like it was when it came out of the line in Italy.  It turns out, autophagy is the mechanic in a cell that actually makes sure that everything is optimized. In other words, when the engine in the body somehow has damage in it, autophagy is designed to either recycle the engine to make it better, or if it’s really bad, there is signaling in mitochondrial biology that marks the mitochondria for replacement. That’s what apoptosis is and it gets rid of the engine completely, and then you are able to use some mitochondrial processes to amplify some of the other mitochondria in the cells so that energy transformation is not hindered long term. Obviously, the more mistakes you make, the more you affect energy over time, and that’s where disease manifests. If you really understand mitochondrial biology as Doug Wallace has laid it out, if you want to understand what aging is it’s very simple, it’s the loss of energy efficiency in mitochondria that happens each decade, we lose—and this is an average answer—on average, as humans, about 10% of our efficiency every decade we’re alive.  So if you’re 60 years old, technically in your seventh decade, that means you have 70% energy loss from what you did as a baby. That means that you have to optimize autophagy in that 30% and apoptosis in that 30% in order to maintain wellness going forward. So it means that as you get older. This information I’m sharing with you is more important, and if you want to hear that directly, does it mean, when you’re an old guy like I am, that that’s the reason Jack is sitting out in the hot Florida sun on the autumnal equinox talking to Ashley James? You got it.   [00:40:45] Ashley James: And apoptosis is so important because it’s programmed cell death. Cancer cells don’t do it, and that’s why they grow out of control.   [00:40:54] Dr. Jack Kruse: Just think about what you just said there, you’re right, cancer cells do not perform apoptosis, but what’s the key? I told you that UV light controls that.   [00:41:03] Ashley James: We’re told not to go into UV light. We’re told, don’t go out, cover yourselves up. You’re going to get cancer if you go out in the sun. What you’re saying is we have to go out in the sun to prevent cancer to support the body’s ability to get rid of it.   [00:41:15] Dr. Jack Kruse: Let’s go back to the beginning of the podcast. What did I say Rockefeller told Teddy Roosevelt? Guess what, if you create the narrative that people buy, which is propaganda, don’t you think that that made good business sense for the people? And when you consider that the medical school curriculum was the algorithm that Rockefeller used to create a new industry to get it back, and then think about it, his grandsons who are both in the Senate and the House of Representatives. They saw it fit that Medicare bills were passed. Why did they do that? They were trying to bankrupt the American government to pay them back to what Teddy Roosevelt did to their family.  See when you see how all the pieces fit, then you begin to understand truly why big pharma corrupts medicine, and the problem is, it’s not medicine doctors are bad, the problem is most medical doctors are ignorant of the history behind their own profession, and they’re completely ignorant of the fact that the medical school curriculum is really the first algorithm that has been built to really suit the profiteers and not patients. Until you find a doctor who understands decentralized medicine, which is what mitochondrial medicine functionally is, you the patient have a target on your back, and that target is from big pharma. If you don’t think that that’s not ongoing right now in this COVID debate with vaccinations, you’re sadly mistaken.   [00:42:50] Ashley James: You know, a lot of my listeners lately have been asking what they can do to prevent, to treat, and also after they’ve had COVID, how can they recover for some who are still experiencing it?   [00:43:08] Dr. Jack Kruse: So let’s talk about that. Does anybody out there know anything about coronaviruses? Do you know that coronaviruses are seasonal viruses? Do you know when they tend to manifest? When the sun is not strong. So guess what, that’s autumn and winter, okay? And here’s the other interesting thing. It turns out that the innate and cell-mediated immune system do not work well when there are high levels of blood glucose.  So everybody seems to know that people with COVID tend to be fat and have low vitamin D levels. Now, do you understand why? Here’s the flip side of the story. What are the two fastest ways to raise your blood glucose? Most of your listeners will probably say cheesecake or carbohydrates. It turns out, they’d be wrong. The number one way to raise blood glucose faster and the insulin process is unopposed blue light by red light. Those studies have been out in the literature for 34 years, and guess what, none of your endocrinologists, none of your primary care doctors seem to know that. If you go on my Twitter feed, you’ll find it posted. I post that slide at least 1000 times a year. And when I point out to people that if you want to get COVID, all you need to do is sit in front of the TV or computer screen, stay inside.   [00:44:22] Ashley James: Oh my gosh that just hit me.   [00:44:25] Dr. Jack Kruse: And here’s the big-ticket, remember, vitamin D is a proxy for apoptosis. What is apoptosis? It takes out cells that have been virally infected. Well, guess what, if you don’t have a high vitamin D level, do you think your cell-mediated immune system can actually operate? The answer is no. So the longer the virus sits around even though it’s not a deadly virus, if the immune functioning in you doesn’t work, you fall into what Dr. Fauci wants you to believe, a big pharma solution. So, who is John Rockefeller today? Dr. Fauci, Birx, Redfield, Pfizer, Moderna, that’s who they are, and you need to understand how the game is being played. You’re being shown a narrative that on the surface makes sense, but it only makes sense when you understand it from their perspective. What I like to explain to people is COVID is a compliance test for an economic war that’s being waged against patients. So if you have the mindset that COVID is really a deadly virus, you are going to have a victimhood mindset. You are going to be subject to the beliefs of the people that are out there that are going to convince you to roll up your sleeves and get a jab. If on the other hand you understand the linkages back to Rockefeller and how this has been polluted, you’ll begin to realize you have a warrior mentality. And the answer for you is to understand how to use or build mitochondrial power or what we call redox power to increase your cell-mediated immune response and your [inaudible 00:45:58] response so that coronavirus is nothing but the flu because that’s really what it is.   [00:46:03] Ashley James: And they told us to stay inside. What did everyone do? They didn’t get sunlight and they stood in front of their screens for months and months and months.   [00:46:13] Dr. Jack Kruse: And they watched Netflix, and they ate food from Amazon that was not created by photosynthesis. Is it any wonder why we have the outcome we have when you understand the quantum biologic or the mitochondria perspective? Do you understand why I’m pretty popular right now? Because guess what, 15 years ago I was a crazy SOB on the internet. Now, people are beginning to realize, I’m pretty smart. I’ve dissected this out pretty well. And the thing is right now, what you are being subject to Ashley is something that Plato discovered almost 2500 years ago. It’s called the Allegory of the Cave. For the listeners who don’t know about it, I’m going to explain it to you. Viral tyranny is found in that story. Plato tells us a story about a bunch of slaves that are handcuffed to a wall inside a cave where their masters put a fire in there and the fire shows a shadow cast on the wall. They stay in there so long that they come to believe that the environment that they’re in is reality. One of the slaves one day breaks his chains, goes outside, and realizes that there’s a world outside. It’s amazing. What does that slave do? He’s faced with a moral dilemma. Do I go and leave the cave and try to find other people like me who got away, or do I go and try to help the people that are still locked in the cave? The story goes, he goes in and tries to help those people, and what does he find? Those people are perfectly fine to believe what’s in the cave. They do not want to go out and help them. What’s the moral of the story? Most people whose perception is altered by something, who are not willing to change suffer from something called Stockholm syndrome, and they continue to believe the people who oppress them. What’s the story of the person that left? The person that left has an ethical dilemma. When you understand the ethical dilemma and it has affected you many more times in your life than just this COVID thing, which is exactly how I told you how I figured out the leptin story because that’s effectively what happened to me as an allopathic doctor. I began to realize that I needed to question every narrative. And I realized as a lion, I was interested in other lions. I realized that I can’t help obedient idiots in the cave who don’t want to help themselves. So if you want to roll up your sleeves and think that the big pharma solution to this coronavirus is found at the tip of the needle, good luck. For everybody else who wants to do it nature’s way, come follow me.   [00:48:50] Ashley James: Exactly. I mean, the propaganda is so thick. I’ve studied Trivium and neuro-linguistic programming and understand the linguistic fallacies. So when I read through the media, I can see the propaganda is right there.   [00:49:09] Dr. Jack Kruse: That story too. Most people who are going to hear this podcast don’t know where that story began. It began with a guy named Edward Bernays in 1928. And guess what, Mr. Bernays wrote a book in ‘28 called Propaganda. He was a German Jew who wrote this book and immediately, who was the first person that picked it up? It was actually Rockefeller and all his friends that are associated with Hitler in Germany. Joseph Goebbels used everything in Bernay’s book to basically get German people to comply.  This may be a really controversial thing to say on your podcast, you may want to cut it out, I would strongly recommend you don’t, but I would tell you the tip of the jab is just like the tip of a tattoo needle that the Jews faced in World War II, why? Ultimately people would say this may be insensitive because we know the outcome for the Jews, we don’t know what the outcome for people with the jab is going to be, but the one thing that we do know is that the people that do get the jab are getting way higher rates of problems related to the Messenger RNA vaccines.  I’m just going to tell you, I don’t think it’s hyperbole to extrapolate this out further that you have to understand, any level where you’re being affected by propaganda and viral tyranny, you must fight against. And I’m going to tell you, this whole story when you asked me about leptin, I looked at the leptin biology story that I woke up with the same as I look at this COVID score. I was fortunate to be woken up before COVID. Physicians right now still are like those slaves in the cage, and you guys are the public, you have a choice to make. Are you going to continue to be an obedient idiot listening to the people with those shadow casts on the wall, or will you maybe go out and look and see another world that’s out there?  That’s the world I’m showing you in this podcast today. It’s the world of data. It’s a decentralized network that works on light and dark zones. There are so many different ways you break these rules, you just don’t realize it. Until you become aware of what you don’t know, so that’s the Dunning-Kruger Effect, you’re much more likely to be programmed, and that’s what was the key in Bernay’s book. Bernays became a huge sensation because he’s the reason why we got Madison Avenue and that advertising, but very few people know that’s also how we got fascism in Nazi Germany.  Most people think it is hyperbole when I say that what’s going on in the United States right now mimics exactly to a tee what happened in Germany. And do I believe it will end very much the same way for the American republic if we continue to allow the politicians in Washington D.C. to do what they’re doing? See, the best way for people to fight this is with civil disobedience. And the reason that you’re doing that is because science is on your side, meaning nature science, the fundamental laws, the things that we talked about—autophagy, apoptosis—what’s the law that belies all of them? A guy named Einstein came up with that and won a Nobel Prize in 1922 called the photoelectric effect. That’s the basis of actually what happens photosynthetically. The laws of thermodynamics are axiomatic truths that we found everywhere in the universe. It just doesn’t work in Florida, Washington, on Earth, and Jupiter. It works everywhere, contrary to what Dr. Fauci will tell you.   [00:52:46] Ashley James: I’m so glad you’re bringing these things up today. This is so, so key for the listeners. Thank you. Thank you so much, and I will not cut out anything you said. I believe in freedom of speech as much as I believe in medical freedom.   [00:53:03] Dr. Jack Kruse: Good.   [00:53:06] Ashley James: So you talked a lot about light, and you also mentioned that water and magnetism essentially are very important. What about 5G? What about the new cell network that’s coming around?   [00:53:27] Dr. Jack Kruse: Well, that’s light. Remember, 5G is engineered light. So guess what, is engineered light the same as solar light? The answer is no. So, does it have negative correlations? That’s right. So that means, the more technology you use and abuse, the worse that your mitochondrial function is going to be.   [00:53:44] Ashley James: Got it. And in terms of water, are you talking about hydrotherapy like using hot and cold water? Are you talking about drinking water?   [00:53:53] Dr. Jack Kruse: Water is a big, big topic. It’s the water your mitochondria make that’s the most important. Then the water you drink is much secondary important, why? Because it turns out, the hydrology cycle on the Earth also works on a latitude basis. So, most people know that water is H2O. Most people don’t know that there are three isotopes of hydrogen. One is radioactive. That’s called tritium. The other one is not radioactive, it’s deuterium. And then we have light hydrogen, which is just a hydrogen proton.  It turns out that deuterium is a proton plus a neutron and I already told you the story that the ATPase uses 3.4 of those light hydrogens to make an ATP. It turns out, when you have deuterium inside the matrix it breaks the ATPase. So you can probably figure out, that’s not good for energy or information if you’re a mitochondria. And it turns out the way deuterium works when light is poor like it is above the boreal forest, water tends to be deuterium depleted the most. It turns out the worst water in the world is around the equator, and the reason why is because we are able to use more of the light than the water. So, this is even codified in photosynthesis in our foods. So that’s why water and where deuterium is in foods is really important. In fact, I tell doctors—I don’t tell patients this—when you look at the enzymatic steps in glycolysis and you’re a physician you go, why in the hell does nature or God put all these nine enzymatic steps in there? The reason is simple. It’s trying to avoid deuterium inside the mitochondrial matrix, that’s the real reason it does it.   [00:55:31] Ashley James: I got lost. Some water has some form of radioactive hydrogen in it?   [00:55:45] Dr. Jack Kruse: No, no, no. Not radioactive. We don’t use radioactive stuff. The story is a story between light, hydrogen, and heavy hydrogen, which is deuterium. It turns out the water on Earth, seawater is 155 parts per million, your mitochondria makes water that is less than 10 parts per million, and the water that’s in your blood mimics what’s present in the sea. So that means blood and mitochondria have two separate types of water, and it turns out that all of oxidative metabolism—both glycolysis gluconeogenesis—the whole game is to avoid deuterium placement inside the matrix. When you do that, you wind up getting sick. Why? Because you can no longer transfer energy properly or information through the ATP inside the mitochondria.   [00:56:32] Ashley James: So how do you prevent deuterium placement inside the mitochondria?   [00:56:37] Dr. Jack Kruse: It’s pretty simple, I already answered that question for you. Live a proper circadian life.   [00:56:41] Ashley James: Got it.   [00:56:43] Dr. Jack Kruse: It turns out that sunlight naturally deuterium depletes water through photosynthesis. That’s the reason why circadian biology is the single number one thing for a Black Swan mitochondriac. That’s the name of the tribe that I teach.   [00:56:56] Ashley James: Okay. How do listeners join your Black Swan tribe and learn from you?   [00:57:06] Dr. Jack Kruse: Well, to try it out, you can come to my forums. I have a website called jackkruse.com. I have forums there that will overwhelm you. I mean, there’s 10 years’ worth of data there where I talk about a variety of different things. But if you want a lot more information in terms of hand-holding and what I do monthly Q&As for my members, that’s kruseatdestin.com. I have different groups in there that I use. You can go to that website and see it from there.   [00:57:35] Ashley James: What kind of water do you drink?   [00:57:36] Dr. Jack Kruse: It depends on the season. So right now I’m in the process of the autumnal equinox of changing to more deuterium depleted water. So that means I drink water from higher latitudes when the sun begins to weaken here in Florida.   [00:57:50] Ashley James: So you get your water from different locations?   [00:57:56] Dr. Jack Kruse: Iceland. Icelandic water.   [00:57:59] Ashley James: Got it. You don’t put it through any kind of special filter?   [00:58:02] Dr. Jack Kruse: You don’t need to. Do the animals do that, so why should you? But I guarantee you, you’ll have an allopathic or functional medicine doctor, after listening to this, try to sell you an answer.   [00:58:14] Ashley James: I use a Berkey just because it removes crap, I don’t know.   [00:58:22] Dr. Jack Kruse: Yeah. I don’t know if I’m such a believer in Berkey. I’ve done biohacks on them, and to be quite honest with you, I think a lot of the stuff that they tell people is manufactured as a story. If you told me you’re doing it, I’m not going to pound you too hard because at least you’re trying to do something to help you. And do I think that trying to optimize your water is [inaudible 00:58:49] or as smart as optimizing your diet? Yeah, I do. I believe they’re that important. But if you don’t get out in the sun, all of those things are a giant waste of money.   [00:59:00] Ashley James: Got it. I love it. Dr. Kruse, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing this information. I definitely urge listeners to go to your website, jackkruse.com, and also your Patreon, patreon.com/ DrJackKruse.   [00:59:18] Dr. Jack Kruse: That’s where we get the high-level stuff. If you want to learn about the quantum thermodynamics of truly how life works, I have a 28-part series that teaches you all that. That may be a rough drink out of the firehose for people who don’t get the basics down. But if you want the basics down, I think you could go read my book. It’s 10 years old now. You can buy it on Amazon. It’s called the Epi‑Paleo Rx.  But I will tell you, the first chapter is an eye-opener. It gets into the reason why I became very pissed off in my profession and really the story behind it is tied to this story of JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John Rockefeller. So I realized that I’ve been lied to by my profession for a long time. It doesn’t mean it was done with intent. Most of the doctors out there are ignorant of the things that we talked about today. So I don’t want any of you to get pissed off at the doctors.   [01:00:11] Ashley James: They don’t know.   [01:00:13] Dr. Jack Kruse: They didn’t know and now that I’ve been talking about this for 16 years, if your doctor hears this and doesn’t know, then you should fire him.   [01:00:21] Ashley James: Lastly, my one last question is, if a good friend of yours were to become sick and they think, okay, I’ve got a coronavirus and they’re pretty sick, what advice would you give them?   [01:00:37] Dr. Jack Kruse: Just what I told you today—optimize circadian biology, drink a lot of deuterium depleted water, and avoid a ton of food. You use a lot of fasting because we know that fasting with viruses actually optimizes both autophagy and apoptosis. But again, to do all those things, you really need good sun. Where you are right now in Washington, you don’t have that, so the smart answer there is come take a trip down to Mexico or El Salvador. I just got from spending three weeks in El Salvador, and I live at the 28th latitude here in Destin. But I went down to the 13.4 latitude to get a boost towards the end of the summer, and I’m actually planning on potentially opening a clinic down there.   [01:01:25] Ashley James: That sounds wonderful. Well, I look forward to hearing about that clinic that you open up down there. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I love what you share. I learned about what you talked about in terms of the history of the allopathic medical system about 11 years ago and it blew my mind. I’ve been feeling like I’ve been living in the Allegory of the Cave just trying to help people wake up to this information. And you’re right, those who would rather stay in their servitude will vilify you for trying to bring them the truth.   [01:02:05] Dr. Jack Kruse: Yes, absolutely. And that’s one of the things that I faced when I brought this to the Paleo community 15 years ago. I mean, most people don’t even know this, but I was one of the keynote speakers, the original Paleo f(x) Conference, and boy they didn’t like the message that I brought. And I did the same thing for the first Bulletproof Conference in 2014. Dave Asprey didn’t like this message either because if you understand what I’m saying to you, you don’t need anything special to be optimal. What you need to do is optimize light, water, and magnetism. And here’s the best part of the story, none of that really cost you a lot of money.  The only thing I really sell people is the information that I shared with you on this podcast. If you want to learn more and you want to get up to speed faster, yeah, it probably would be wiser for you to learn from a guy like me, that’s what I’m charging for. I’m charging you for my time, but I’m not going to sell you a pill, a prescription, or something. I’m going to sell you ideas that I learned from nature. And the thing is, if I’m wrong, that means Einstein’s wrong, Darwin’s wrong, I’m cool with that. But the one thing I can tell you for sure, allopathic medicine, functional medicine, and anybody who sells supplements exclusively, they’re about as useful as the letter G in the word was lasagna.   [01:03:27] Ashley James: Again, I’m so excited for this information to get to my listeners. My listeners are just hungry and thirsty for this knowledge, and I know they’ll be excited to continue to learn from you on your forum and on your Patreon. Is there anything that you’d like to say, anything you’d like to share to wrap up today’s interview?   [01:03:50] Dr. Jack Kruse: I would tell people one of the things that I’ve done, if you’re a wordsmith and you’d like to read, I would just tell you to probably get my book. Be the Patreon stuff, read the stuff on the forum. But if you’re a visual learner and you’re not deep in the science, I started a project this year that you might be interested in, it’s called Quantum Health TV. In that, I do small little episodes where I talk about aspects of quantum biology and lay it out. I just finished doing a four-hour documentary about mitochondria and deuterium. Since we talked a little bit about it here, if anybody wants to learn more about it, I think if you watched those videos, you’d probably do okay, and I think you can find them at quantumhealth.tv.   [01:04:42] Ashley James: Yeah, quantumhealth.tv is what’s in my notes. I’ll make sure that all the links are in our show notes.   [01:04:49] Dr. Jack Kruse: I think that one’s good for the visual learners because you know, not everybody likes to read. I tend to be a reader. I’m not really a big fan of video, and you probably know why now because video is not really great for me if I’m looking at a screen. I’d rather read the book out in the sun. But you know, different strokes for different folks. The bottom line is we’re trying to get people off of zero. And if you don’t know anything about mitochondria and you heard anything in this podcast that intrigued you or interests you, the wise among you will take something you fundamentally don’t believe, examine it for yourself, and then decide. Maybe I can do something else. Maybe this isn’t going to be as hard as I thought. Maybe the answer for my autoimmune condition, my cancer, my obesity, or my hyperthyroidism might be found in the message that’s buried in light, water, and magnetism. Then I feel like we’ve done a good job here.   [01:05:47] Ashley James: Excellent. Well, I am really excited to check out your quantumhealth.tv videos because I’m definitely a visual learner, and I am definitely going to go get out in the sunlight after this interview, and I hope everyone else does as well and checks out everything that you do. Thank you, Dr. Kruse. You’re welcome back on the show any time you want to share more information. We’d love to have you back.   [01:06:12] Dr. Jack Kruse: No problem. It was fun. Take care.     Get Connected With Dr. Jack Kruse! Website Quntum Health TV Patreon Forum Facebook Instagram Book by Dr. Jack Kruse Epi-paleo Rx: The Prescription for Disease Reversal and Optimal Health

Go here for the book and Dr. Z's gifts for you: https://www.learntruehealth.com/eo   Essential Oils Apothecary by Dr. Eric Zielinski https://www.learntruehealth.com/essential-oils-apothecary-dr-eric-zielinski   Highlights: Essential oils for headache Know the root cause of an issue, then find out what essential oil to use Phototoxic oils Sensual master blend   Dr. Eric Zielinski is back on the show to talk about his new book, The Essential Oils Apothecary. He shares some essential oil for headaches, which oils are photosensitive, and a recipe for an immunity-boosting and sensual master blend. Intro: Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. We have back on the show today Dr. Eric Zielinski here to share with us some amazing information about essential oils, the powerful concentrated herbal medicine that you might not be aware of. He co-authored his latest book with his wife, Sabrina Zielinski, otherwise known as Mama Z, The Essential Oils Apothecary. I’m a really big fan of this book and I know you will be too. You can go to learntruehealth.com/eo. That’s learntruehealth.com/eo to preorder his book, or if you’re listening to this later on and it’s already out, then you’ll be ordering that book. But if you go to that link, he gives you hundreds of dollars’ worth of his information for free, videos, all kinds of stuff, and recipes. He really just gives you so, so much. Now, you can always go and buy his books from other booksellers like Amazon. However, if you buy it straight from his website, he gives you a ton of fantastic freebies that aid you in your journey of increasing your health. And if you’re new to essential oils, welcome. You’re going to learn a ton today. And if you are a seasoned user of essential oils, you are going to be learning some great tricks to increasing your life in every area of your life by adding essential oils to it. I love the recipes that he shares today. I also just recently interviewed his wife so I’ll be publishing that as well very soon. Now, Dr. Eric Z was on the show in episode 302 and 363, so you can go back and listen to episode 302 and 363. He talks about The Essential Oils Diet, and we get really deep into the safety of essential oils. How to safely use them because there’s a lot of controversy out there and if you use them wrong it could hurt you. Just like any herb, if used incorrectly can hurt you. So just like too much water could hurt you if you drink too much water, too much of a good thing is not a good thing anymore. So he does talk about how to use essential oils safely. But I love that in The Essential Oils Apothecary, it will be such a powerful resource to have in your home to open up during times of needing more like first aid or triage, or sometimes with chronic things like sleep problems or hormone issues. You’ll be able to come to it in times of need and improve the quality of your life and your family’s life. Now, you can get his book by going to learntruehealth.com/eo. That’s learntruehealth.com/eo.  When I did interview him, this was back in early March. Since I did this interview—and he asked for me to wait until his book was on pre-order so it was a few months ago that I did this interview—a lot has changed in my life since. If you’re a regular listener, you’ll know I lost a child during labor. And then a few days later I got COVID. And then I immediately had to pack up, Marie Kondo our entire life, and move from a 2700 square foot house that we lived in for seven years into what is probably somewhere between 300 and 400 square feet. We’re loving where we live now, I’m not complaining. I’m just laying out the foundation of how much has happened in the last few months of my life. That there’s been chaos and turmoil, and a lot of emotions to process. And I’ve taken what I learned in today’s interview and utilized it to help me. Because I know that this has helped me, I hope it’ll help you as well. So enjoy today’s interview. And please join us in the Facebook group, Learn True Health Facebook group. I would love to see you there. Also, please share this episode with those who care about especially your friends who use essential oils as they will love the information that they learn from Dr. Z. Enjoy today’s show and go to learntruehealth.com/eo.    [00:04:35] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 466. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show, Dr. Eric Zielinski. Dr. Eric, you were here in episode 302 and 363. You have a library of wonderful books that you’ve published. And you and your wife do this together, coming up with these amazing recipes. You’ve taught how to use essential oils in different ways—safely always—in ingesting them sometimes, in our cooking because it’s a form of herbal medicine. But it’s a very concentrated form of herbal medicine so we need to be careful. And you teach the safety of that, you teach how to make sure that we’re getting the quality essential oils, and what to look for in different brands. I love that you don’t align yourself with one specific brand because that way we know that we can go out there and look for what you say to look for. So there’s so much we can learn from Dr. Eric. And today you’re here to talk about your latest book coming up, The Essential Oils Apothecary, which I’m particularly excited about because you take it into chronic illness and disease and many other ailments. Going really deep into how we can heal the body and using this specific type of herbal medicine. For those who haven’t really experienced essential oils, I think that the atmosphere or the idea that they’re just smelly oils, that they’re like spa day smelling oils. And I don’t think that a lot of people truly understand their intense healing properties. Very, very, very concentrated healing essences of plants. Maybe you could just start off the interview, and you have shared your bio in the past interviews so listeners can go back and listen to 302 and 363 to get to learn more about you. But I’d like to start off, for those who don’t know deeply, have a deep understanding of how healing and powerful central oils are, well essential oils aren’t just a fun smelly spa day thing. It’s a concentrated form of herbal medicine. But can you explain why essential oils have such strong healing properties?   [00:07:10] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Of course. And first of all, thank you for having me. It’s my privilege and sincere pleasure, because a) I love you, you’re the best. And I am so proud of you. I mean, you’re doing such a great job. And the segue into your question is, I love how you continue to deliver to your community, and that really is the essence of what we do and what the importance of the literature continues to show about essential oils.  I mean, traditionally speaking. I mean, plant-based medicine since the beginning of time. Okay, I get that. And aroma therapists have been using them for ever, in certain ways. But like you, we, in my space as non-branded evidence-based essential oil researcher, this is cutting edge where researchers are today looking at how plant-based volatile organic compounds—volatile meaning they readily evaporate, organic meaning your carbon-based, compound meaning that there are a ton of chemicals like 200 to 300 different chemicals in the essential oil, right? Like D-limonene, pinene. I’m not talking about bad stuff. I’m talking about actual chemicals that are good for nature. So it’s cutting edge research, and so we have this tradition where before the advent of the antibiotic, what did people use? I mean, I don’t know. I wasn’t living back then. I mean, think about that. People don’t even know. Most people alive today don’t even know what life’s like without antibiotics. The antibiotic came around in the mid-40s, and it was the solution to basically every infection. You can basically take what we see in nature that we know that by the way, this is pretty cool for you history buffs out there, front line medics combat medicine World War I, World War II, you open up their medicine kit you’d find essential oils.   [00:09:17] Ashley James: Which ones?   [00:09:18] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Lavender, you’d find oregano, you’d find thyme, you’d find tea tree. And you know what you’d find? You’d find the ones that were indigenous to their culture, like Australia, eucalyptus and Tea Tree, America, you’d have peppermints and some of the other herbal oils. You’d go to France, obviously lavender, right? You go to Italy you’ll get the citrus oils. That is the key to a lot of this is throughout the history of time, people always used what was available to them because they didn’t have Walmart. They didn’t have airplanes shipping plants that were not indigenous to their areas. So when you’re looking at true healing, when you’re looking at true abundance of health, it really starts in your backyard because your biochemistry matches the biochemistry of the soil and the plants, and there used to be this wonderful harmony. We kind of mess that up a little bit. But I enjoy traveling and I enjoy mangoes and things that don’t naturally grow in Georgia. But what we have here is this concept that we have what we need in nature. So at the end of the day, they work because that’s essentially what we interact with at a biological level.  And so, I’ll leave you one with one little quick analogy, as I’m thinking through this, I’m sorry. I’m thinking like well, I don’t get it. Well, what do we think our ancestors used for pain before Advil or Bayer? I mean, when you go through different plants and when you go through different solutions, you would have chemicals that people realize, oh this is kind of anti-inflammatory. They just knew, oh, it just made me feel better. And when you’re looking at, for example, the willow tree, our ancestors used willow bark and they used to make a paste out of it and a salve out of it. Well, when you extract the chemicals in willow bark, there’s a salicylate type of chemical in it in the salicylate family.  Well, if you manufacture it and you put a shiny white pill on it you can call it aspirin. And that’s essentially how every drug is today, up until now, the different technology that they have. Up until recently, every drug on the market had some basis of the chemistry that they find in plants. It’s not like a chemist would just invent the chemical structure in her head. I mean, you had to base it off of something that you knew worked because that’s how the body works.  The body has receptors around cells, and the body has neurological impulses that could be triggered based on the chemicals that it interacts with. The food and the things that are in the air like those volatile organic compounds that are being emitted from the trees. And all of it just makes sense at the biological level. Well, that’s the basis for medicine. And so, bam, that hit me like a ton of bricks several years ago, that’s when I literally transformed my medicine cabinet, and that’s when the symptoms went away. That’s when I started feeling better in every area of life because I wasn’t using toxic substances to manage things anymore.   [00:12:41] Ashley James: So if someone’s in pain, let’s choose a headache. Maybe it’s a tension headache, for example, what essential oil or blend of oils would you go to?   [00:12:55] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Wonderful, wonderful. I’ll give a quick list because they all work depending on how you respond to it, and I think that’s key. I want to preface this whole talk because I know we’re going to drop a lot of cool little truth bombs and recipes and things. We are individuals. So I’m a 41-year-old Caucasian whose ancestry is from Poland. My biological makeup is uniquely distinct, and the melanin on my skin, the way that my skin interacts with the sun, and the way that my skin interacts—which is key because this is topical we’re talking—is uniquely different than a 75-year-old, let’s say, African woman from Kenya. Knowing that we need to find what works for us. So like a doctor practicing medicine to figure out okay, which concoction of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery is going to help this person, we practice essential oils or aromatherapy. So that to say, here’s my wonderful list off the top of my head because they’ve worked for us and countless people.  First, something menthol-based like eucalyptus or peppermint. One oil specifically that comes to mind is rich and D-limonene, and no one talks about it in relation to pain, but that’s orange. Orange has a profound anti pain effect, but it also helps with depression, helps with anxiety, and helps boost different moods. It’s wonderful. Copaiba. Copaiba is rich in beta-caryophyllene. Beta-caryophyllene is a chemical—again, plant-based chemical—that triggers the endocannabinoid system. It works just like CBD, so it has a CBD-type of pain relieving property. A lot of folks swear that Frankincense is the solution to everything but death, but I’ve heard that frankincense because it’s inherently anti-inflammatory can also help. What is the cause of your pain? If the cause of your pain is typically speaking an inflammatory cause, then you can find a number of oils that will work.   [00:15:03] Ashley James: I love that. I love that idea. When someone has more melanin in their skin, they have darker skin, how does that affect their absorption of essential oils?   [00:15:17] Dr. Eric Zielinski: You know what, I wish I had a direct answer because I have not seen any research on that. I do know that the photosensitivity of essential oils greatly depends on how the essential oils interact with the UV rays and how that gets absorbed in the skin. So inherently, someone with a lot of melanin in their skin, you don’t have to worry about sunburn per se. You don’t have to worry about exposure because through ancestry you’re in sub-Saharan Africa and you have that natural resistance.  What I posit to people when I’m proposing is that for people that have sensitive skin, especially Scandinavian people, you have to be careful that you need to dilute essential oils potentially more than someone who has like, I don’t say thicker skin, but skin that isn’t as sensitive. Again, it’s a generalization and I know we can’t generalize when it comes to healthcare, but the theory would be that someone might need to have a stronger dose when they apply topically, and they don’t necessarily have to worry about photosensitivity like other people. And that brings up a whole nother topic. Who’s talking about putting on bergamot oil and not going outside? That is a known risk. People are burning themselves. There was a documentary on Netflix that we were recently featured in, and part of the story was this poor woman who got like—I forget what it was, forgive me—third degree burns because she applied essential oils and ended up interacting with, I believe she was in a tanning bed. And the thing is that there’s a chemical in bergamot, bergaptene. Well, it kind of makes sense, bergaptene, bergamot. That exemplifies the UV rays and that could cause extreme burns on people. So, again, depending on the melanin content, that is not a concern. But when it comes to the therapeutic benefits of it, I can’t show one way or another, but I do know it does affect safety risks.   [00:17:28] Ashley James: So, if people of different skin tone we’re using essential oils at night—before they go to bed, for example—the dosage wouldn’t matter? It’s during the day when their skin is going to be exposed to sunlight certain essential oils can react with UV rays, is that what you’re getting at?   [00:17:48] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yes. This is quite frankly hotly debated in the aromatherapy community, and I have my own take on basically let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. There’s balance in everything. Maybe we’ll talk about ingestion because I have a dozen plus capsule remedies straight from the research trying to help people balance blood pressure and blood sugar for crying out loud, but aroma therapists will say I’m committing blasphemy because I’m improperly teaching how to ingest oils. As controversial as ingestion is, the same thing is, okay, what do we recommend to people? So here’s the bottom line, and this is coming straight from Robert Tisserand’s Essential Oil Safety Manual. The key here is primarily undiluted, aka neat essential oil use. Now, that right there is full concentration of oil. For 99.9% of all your topical preparations, you need to dilute your essential oils. It just makes sense. Here’s the thing, I’m as natural, and we talked about this right before we just went on. I’m as natural and granola. My wife delivered our babies at home in a hot tub. We’re those people. We are the natural granola family.   [00:19:05] Ashley James: I think that’s normal, by the way. That to me just seems normal, not extreme or crunchy. And going to the hospital when you are healthy, your baby’s healthy, and there’s absolutely no risks, going to a hospital seems just not normal to me.  So in my mind there’s a scale of what’s normal and healthy and what’s abnormal and not healthy. Going through a drug every time you have a symptom is not normal and not healthy, to me. To other people, to mainstream society, that is normal. And I’ve said this before on the show, if you want to live like a statistic—remember, one out of every three people will develop cancer in their lifetime, one of every three people are obese, have type 2 diabetes, or are about to have type 2 diabetes, have high blood pressure, or cardiovascular disease. I mean, the top killers are chronic disease, cardiovascular, and cancer.  Look at what people are suffering from and dying from. If you want that, if you want to be a statistic, do what everyone else is doing. If you don’t want to be a statistic we need to be the salmon. We need to examine everything and examine our belief system and go, why is it “normal” to take a drug like aspirin instead of ingesting a little essential oil or rub a little essential oil on me? Why is rubbing an essential oil on me considered crazy, but taking a synthetic drug that can have side effects and deplete the body of nutrients “normal”? Why is it “normal” and accepted to go to a hospital for a healthy birth rather than do it at home for a healthy birth? In which, less interventions will occur, and there are many studies worldwide that show greater successful outcomes for both mother and baby if you can avoid a hospital.  Now again, that is not to say if you have complications, yes, we want emergency medicine available to us. The problem is the moment you step into a hospital for a healthy birth, you are going to get interventions that cascade into more interventions into more interventions. That’s a whole other interview right there. But this is it. If you want to have different health, it all starts with your mindset. It all starts with you questioning the reality you have been brought up in. Questioning the reality that we’re taught is normal by the mainstream. We have to question everything. And we have to go wait a second, why is it that I blindly have accepted this my whole life? Why have I blindly accepted that the pediatrician gets to do this and not that? Why am I accepting that this is the way it is?  And instead, question everything, do the research, learn from doctors like Dr. Eric Z because man, you look like an extremist to some people, and yet your entire family—now five beautiful children and your wife and yourself—are of peak health. We all want to be as healthy as you guys, and we’ve got to start by questioning the decisions that we make and the belief system we have around health. And I know my listeners are really awake to this that’s why they’re here listening to you. I myself had a very bad burn, not from essential oils but from putting citrus on my skin. My parents and I were in Mexico many years ago and we squeezed some limes in our hair because we were like, oh, we’re going to bleach our hair in the sun. Blood rushed to the surface of our skin and we got really bad burns. We actually had to be put on bleach cream, believe it or not. I was like a teenager and didn’t question that, but the skin doctor said we’re going to end up with these big birthmarks that would just basically turn brown and be there for a really long time if we didn’t.  And he said, yeah, the skin and UV react to citrus, so you can’t do that. You can’t just put citrus because it was like going down our face and we didn’t realize it. And that wasn’t concentrated like essential oils are concentrated. So I can only imagine that we have to be really careful because this is medicine. Just because it’s from a plant doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its own set of side effects, right? However, the side effects from aspirin can be far greater. I have a friend who had a really bad abscess in his tooth. It was like a Friday and the dentist couldn’t see him until Monday. So he started chewing on aspirin like it was candy and by Sunday he went blind. I remember him calling me being like, I can hardly hear anything. He lost his vision and he started to lose his hearing. And I’m like yelling at him, stop taking the aspirin. He had given himself aspirin poisoning. A Naturopathic friend of mine explained, this is Dr. Megan Saunders, she’s been on the show a few times. She said, willow bark, if you take willow, let’s say you make a tea out of it or some kind of thing that you’re ingesting, there are components like there are thousands of chemicals like you’ve mentioned in a plant. So willow, if you were to ingest willow bark, you get to a point if you take too much of it, there’s something in willow bark that makes you vomit it back up.  There’s safety mechanisms in nature, not with every plant because some plants are poisonous and toxic to the body. But in certain medicinal plants, if you don’t extract and make a drug out of it right, if you just have it as in its whole form, it won’t let you over consume it. Whereas when they take aspirin, they remove those nature’s safety mechanisms from it so that you can take a concentrated form, which is potentially life threatening. So, with essential oils, we’re left with something far safer, and yet I love that you start off this conversation with the things we really need to be careful of because someone who’s never used essential oils can douse themselves in it go out in the sun, get a third degree burn, and then say essential oils are BS and never use them again. And I’d rather everyone be safe. So thank you. Thank you for saying, yes, we have to be careful. These are extremely concentrated forms of plants, so you’re not just taking bergamot like you’re eating a bergamot. You’re actually eating pounds of it if you were to start taking the drops. Maybe you could explain concentration a bit.   [00:25:59] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Well, exactly. Your analogy was perfect with willow. I mean, that was the danger of consuming a natural compound in its whole form poses itself if you overdo it, and then when you concentrate it, that’s why wintergreen can be toxic when you consume it in its whole form because of the same chemical compound.  Circling back to the photosensitizers, for those people who want to take notes and who are really diving deep here at this point, I want to give you the list from the book of those oils that are phototoxic. And just a quick, quick summary of it, the bottom line is I’m not concerned about using oils and interacting with the sun. I have found that, as a rule of thumb, if you’re going to put potentially photosensitizing oils on your skin, always dilute them to about a 2% dilution.  What’s that? Fancy way of saying you got 600 drops in an ounce. So start with an ounce of a carrier oil, like olive oil or coconut oil and 2% of 600 is 12, so you need 12 drops of essential oil added to one ounce of a carrier. That’s a highly diluted 2%. If you use your 2%, that’s our body care by the way. That’s what we use every day for just our day-to-day, our moisturizer. And once we anoint our kids before we kick them out to school, we douse them up with some vanilla and orange and they smell like a Creamsicle and they’re happy. The teachers love them because they’re like a walking diffuser. So you start with your 2% and—this is key—avoid direct contact, it’s a good idea, for about an hour. And here’s why I say that because some aroma therapists say like you mentioned, at night is it fine for the next day? Here’s what we see. Your skin will start to absorb because essential oils are transdermal. They’re lipophilic hydrophobic, fat-loving, water-hating, volatile organic compounds. Your skin will absorb them immediately. There’s going to be very, very little residue after an hour at that point. They’re either going to evaporate out because they’re volatile or they’re going to seep into your bloodstream, which is cool.  But here’s the list of oils you need to be concerned about and I’ll start with yours. I was going to read alphabetical, but lime. Lime is a photosensitizer. So is angelica root, bergamot like I mentioned, bitter orange, cumin, grapefruit, lemon, and rue. It’s something to keep in mind. I think dill. I don’t know why I don’t have dill. I have to go back to that. I think dill as well. I’m going to put dill with an asterisk, but not many people want to smell like dill. So anyway, you don’t have to worry about that. That’s the list. That’s the list right there that we know and this is traditional aromatherapy.   [00:28:51] Ashley James: You bring up dill and I just have memories of my son. He had colic really, really, really bad when he was a baby and we would dilute dill and massage his tummy with it to help because it was one of those safe for babies. You have to be careful with babies. Can’t do any kind of peppermint or menthol, which I was surprised about. Because it liquefies the mucus and then they don’t have the ability to cough it back up. But dill was one of those safe ones, and it gave him relief. I just remember. Anytime I smell dill, I’m brought back to that time of massaging a tiny baby tummy and trying to soothe his colic. Why do you put orange and vanilla on your children?   [00:29:38] Dr. Eric Zielinski: I don’t know anyone, I’m not kidding, I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t like that smell. I mean, this is the Dreamsicle Creamsicle smell.   [00:29:45] Ashley James: Okay, it smells good. Is it because it’s antiviral? Is it because it calms them and makes them so they’re better at learning? Besides the fact that they smell good, what is your parental reason behind it?   [00:30:00] Dr. Eric Zielinski: I mean, believe it or not, there is the element where the happy smell produces a happy response, and that is proven. I mean orange is a proven antidepressant. So yeah, it’s rich in D-limonene, it’s anti-inflammatory, it stimulates the immune system, it helps balance your mood.  Vanilla is wonderful, it’s calming. It’s not a sedative per se, but it really helps balance people and it also balances the aroma. It blends well. And that’s the other thing is, when we talk about aroma therapy, there’s a known concept of creating a synergy blend. And this is something that we need to keep in mind. Again, I found that. I found that orange and vanilla, and again I think there’s a reason though. There’s a reason why dream creams, the Dreamsicles, or the Orange Julius is when you look at traditional food recipes too, this is a known synergy. It just tastes good. It just smells good. But also, instinctively, it does well for the body like compound things. So yeah, orange is good by itself and vanilla is good by itself, but combined together it’s like wow, it’s like superheroes. When you combine the power of superheroes together, for us we’re a Marvel family, that’s when all the superheroes can prevent global domination. But by him or herself, a superhero is limited. So when you look at aromatherapy blends, there are known synergistic effects that happen. And I want to point out one thing. I know we can talk because we got a little extra time than other interviews that like, you got to stop at 30 minutes. It’s so hard to get everything in 30 minutes. But here’s the problem with drugs, all right.   [00:31:47] Ashley James: Can I make that the title of the show? Here’s the problem with drugs. All right, we’re going off on this tangent. It’s going to be a four-hour interview. Here’s the problem with drugs. I’m sorry, I just love that.   [00:32:00] Dr. Eric Zielinski: You can’t fraction out a chemical and expect it to perform in a desired effect when it’s out of context. Chew on this for a minute. Here’s what we found. Again, let’s go to D-limonene, we talked about it a lot. But, limonene antidepressant, limonene anti-inflammatory, shown to kill cancer cells.  Research has shown that when you extract limonene, even if it’s “natural form”, it will not have as potent and therapeutic of an effect as if you were to use orange oil in its whole form. And that’s what drugs are based off of. They take a chemical that they know like menthol, like the salicylates like you mentioned from willow, and like, okay, this chemical is the main chemical that does this main desired result. Let’s build a preservative effect around it and let’s create a whole system based off of this one compound, but it’s out of context.   [00:32:58] Ashley James: And then patent it. Make a chemical and patent it so we can make money. I mean, it has to be synthetic enough to be patented because you can’t patent nature.   [00:33:09] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Exactly. So that’s why oils work the way they do because you’re looking at a cornucopia of 200 to 300 chemicals in one drop.   [00:33:19] Ashley James: That all synergistically works together. This is like Mother Nature, God intended. I always want to go super spiritual when we talk about healing with plants. I always have this urge to go somewhere spiritual. I know that there are listeners out there who don’t relate to that, maybe atheists, and I in no way mean to put them off. Because I think some people go, well, if you’re not talking about science, then I don’t want to hear about it. There’s so much science in this that Dr. Z can talk about the science all day long. And let’s just for one minute go somewhere, just an appreciation for nature. It is so beautiful and miraculous when you look at, when we examine these herbs, the healing properties, and the hundreds of chemicals that work together that have the synergistic effect that help the body kill cancer, decrease inflammation. All essential oils have antimicrobial properties, some are more than others. I’m just guessing, you know more than I do, but lavender would be less than oregano, right? But oregano is kind of like a nuclear bomb for certain microbes, right? Whereas lavender is something gentle you can use on a baby. But they all have antimicrobial properties. When I was a teenager, my summer job I worked at a holistic spa. I was the front desk lady every summer. I just love this job and I got really involved in studying all the things we sold because it wasn’t like a bunch of face creams, it was a bunch of essential oils. It was a bunch of herbs and stuff like that. My boss was super and still is. She’s no longer my boss, but she’s still super into crunchy granola hippie stuff like the healing stuff. So when you came into her spa, it was about how we can heal by not putting chemicals in our body, and this is back in the ‘90s. Nowadays it’s a little bit more accepted, but back then, it was kind of revolutionary. As you walk into a spa and you’re having more of a health experience. And so she gave me a bunch of books and CDs to study, and I was about 14 or 15, essential oils and it was all new to me. I’m like, oh, these all smell good and some of them don’t smell good. I’m studying it. I think I might have told this before on the show, but one day I wake up and I have a stomach flu, just bad. It was fever, vomiting, and other symptoms that are in line with the stomach flu, and I couldn’t go to work that day.  So my mom called my boss, they were friends. My boss says okay, Cheryl, come on over. I’ve got something for Ashley. And so my mom comes home with a bottle of lavender and a bottle of peppermint from the spa. She makes a pot of hot water and puts one drop of peppermint in it. She gets about an answer two of olive oil because that’s the only oil we had in the house at the time and she puts a few drops of lavender.  This is what my boss told her to do, she rubs the lavender on my stomach and my chest. She tells me to smell, to sniff, and to sip the tea, which was ingesting the peppermint essential oil. I did both. I immediately fell asleep. I stopped vomiting, I immediately fell asleep, and when I woke up my fever had broken, and my gastrointestinal issues were gone. My stomach upset was gone. I felt like I had been through something, but I no longer had the stomach flu—gone.  From that day forward I was in love with essential oils. I began to study feverishly. Anyone that came in the spa was going to buy an essential from me because I was like telling them all about how amazing they are. The fact that they absorb through the skin and go in between the cells in the lymphatic system. That’s why when you get an essential oil massage it’s a lymphatic massage, typically. They help the cells communicate better between each cell. They help kill microbes, but they don’t kill good microbes like good gut bacteria. Oh just on and on and on and on learning about how amazing essential oils are and how we can incorporate them. But then I had an experience where we got so passionate about them we diffused them eight hours a day and the diffuser was right beside the aesthetician. And the aesthetician came in a few days after we were just constantly adding essential oils to the diffuser because we thought, if a little is good, a lot is better.  She came in and her entire right side of her body, which was the part of her body that was closest facing to the diffuser, was one giant pimple, was one giant breakout. She told me she felt stoned. She goes, I feel really weird. I feel stoned. And this is before we opened up the spa that morning. She goes, I have to tell you that I had a really shady past. I used to be involved in street drugs, and I kind of feel like I’ve done heroin, meth, or something. I feel like that.  And she and I talked it out. And again, I’m a teenager. I don’t know as much as I know now, but her and I figured out that we were diffusing way too much essential oils, it caused her to have too much of a detox reaction too quickly and the street drugs that were still sort of stuck in her system were kind of like releasing and her liver couldn’t handle it and her skin couldn’t handle it. We looked more into it and realized we only should be diffusing once a week. Not every day 10 times a day. So, that had me go wait a second, there’s more to this. There’s more to essential oils than just their fun smelling oils you can do as much as you want. We have to really be careful. So again, I love that you’re bringing up cautions, but I don’t want people to get so afraid they don’t use them.   [00:39:28] Dr. Eric Zielinski: No, no. That’s what we do with our kids. I mean, instinctively, my wife came up with this orange and I guess the anchor of this part of the talk is this orange vanilla blend because her mom struggled through postpartum depression, and she didn’t want that to happen.  So my wife always loved that smell and that was like her anchor. And that’s why it kind of just became like this family blend. But you know, oftentimes the things that we do, and I think this is kind of bringing back like you mentioned earlier about spiritual piece. What about the intuitive piece like, there’s something known as the organoleptic evaluation with how we interact with the essential oil, and it really focuses on the five senses, but the sixth sense is part of this. How do you perceive, what are you intuitively yearning for? Our family intuitively has been drawn to this. This is how things work. I mean, I’ve seen this over and over again with nature and plant-based medicine. A few years ago. A study was done on roughly 80 people in a hopeless situation. Now, how relevant is that today? I don’t know of anyone who has not had a little bit of hopelessness in the last year and a half or so depending on what persuasion you are. Whether it’s political, whether it’s healthcare, whether it is social. There is so many social, right? There are so many hopeless situations that we’ve had to deal with as a society. So they put people into a hopeless situation and this is fascinating. This is why this is so relevant to today. The people were asked to solve an unsolvable social discrimination task. It’s basically like saying you have to solve racism right now and they gave them a hard task, and that created hopelessness because well, I can’t do it. They couldn’t solve it within a time period or something.  During this task, they were diffusing D-limonene and vanillin, which is the main component of vanilla. Basically, orange and vanilla, and they were asking the volunteers to rate the aroma’s quality. Whether it was intense, pleasant, or familiar before, after, and during their hopelessness exercise. Who would sign up for hopelessness exercise? Thank God for subjects and volunteer people. So, fascinatingly (this is the key), the more pleasant the participants judged the aroma—basically they felt it was good in the room, they liked it, it was nice to them—the less effective the hopelessness induction was in reducing happiness and increasing their mood. So basically, what did we do? I don’t know about you but I dealt with a lot of hopelessness when I was a kid. And oh this study, I got to get in front of people, or oh whatever. We didn’t realize but intuitively and now we know because we’ve been educated on it, we send our kids off to school with this orange vanilla blend already putting them at an advantage so that if they will get into a hopeless situation at school, they’re going to feel better, and they’re going to be more empowered to get through it. And regardless of what happens around them, our teachers always say, well, your kids are always so happy, and that’s by design.  We understand, if all hell can be breaking loose around you, you could be in the midst of the worst situation possible, but if it is well with your soul. If you’re happy and joyful, some people might call you gullible or ignorant like Forrest Gump, I will tell you one thing, we could tease Forrest Gump through stupid is as stupid does, but that is a great example of how someone who is at peace, joy, happiness, and content in whatever situation that he’s in. It’s great to see how someone can overcome all odds. And so, ultimately, why do we do what we do is because we know it works and it has a desired effect.   [00:43:44] Ashley James: So psychologically, any essential oil, as long as you really enjoy the smell, would help you have more happiness and less hopelessness?   [00:43:53] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yes.   [00:43:55] Ashley James: So, in your book, The Essential Oils Apothecary, I’m sure you have a section on depression, mental health, possibly even postpartum. Beyond your orange and vanilla, what suggestions do really work effectively for these situations?   [00:44:16] Dr. Eric Zielinski: So here’s one thing, the problem—not problem, but let’s call out the elephant in the room—with that study was it was a D-limonene and vanillin study. Again, they extracted out the chemical. It was natural-based, and this is what chemists do because chemists are trying to hack into the chemicals so that they can create drugs. If they would have used orange and vanilla, I guarantee you, it would have had a more desired effect and would have been better. So what does that tell us? Like for example, D-limonene which is a chemical that is rich in all citrus oils, top to bottom: orange, grapefruit, neroli, lime, bergamot, lemon, petitgrain. These oils should be in everyone’s toolkit if they want to boost their immune like proven. This is why, by the way, I like those studies because here’s the problem though, again, I guess let’s be honest, if they would have done an orange and vanilla study, well, what exactly in the orange helped? That’s where it’s like out of the 300 chemicals in orange or whatever it is, I know they’re all different. 150 to 200 chemicals in orange, which one was a deciding factor? Well, they guessed ahead of time, well, probably it’s D-limonene. And so that’s how they proved it. That is the wonderful thing about it, and we find that limonene can help with substance abuse and addiction too. Limonene, in a recent study, uncovered that it greatly reduces drug addiction-related behaviors and dependence in lab rats. So they had cocaine-addicted lab rats or whatever it was—I forget, I’m sorry—heroin or something. But it was drug addiction and they incorporated limonene and it greatly reduced the addictive behaviors and the dependence. That’s why in my book, I have a chapter called depression and substance abuse. Well, that seems weird. Why would you combine them two? Because they’re so intimately connected. And we find again the same chemicals in the oils that work in the same oils that work for one will work for the other. And so, that’s where hopelessness comes into play. I was an addict. I get it. I was an alcoholic. I was abusing street drugs. I was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and hopelessness was the common denominator in my life for those several years. And it was a dark hole that I self-medicated with street drugs and alcohol just to get the high, just to get through the next day, just because I hated my life. And sad to say, how many people can relate to that right now? At one point last year, Ashley, at one point during the pandemic, there were more people dying of suicide in Japan than there were people dying of COVID. Same thing with children in America. More kids were killing themselves than kids dying of the virus. There’s a reason for that, and I’ll tell you. Having faced the demon of suicide, suicide ideation, thinking about, meditating on, wondering, and contemplating how and where, I get that. And it’s hopelessness, that’s really the key.  And so if there’s something we could do to boost that to essentially hack into the system, you know what that would be realistically? Go out in nature. Go out in nature, go on a hike. Why? Because pinene, limonene, and other anti-inflammatory rich compounds are being emitted from the plants and trees. That’s why things like forest bathing, which I know you’ve had people on your show talk about before, have been shown to help people. So the problem is, when someone’s already stressed out like they have been for the last year and a half, the whole world’s crumbling, everything. It’s just like, how much more can we handle as people and then you stick them inside their cardboard box all day. It’s like the perfect storm for absolute hopelessness. And no wonder we’re dealing with this huge, huge true pandemic of mental health conditions.  And what have I found myself doing? Craving to be outside. And when I can’t be outside because I’m grateful to be able to do what I do, but I’m stuck in my home. I can’t do this interview outside. People will get distracted. There’ll be horning, birds chirping, or whatever. I got to have a microphone. I’m in front of my computer. But guess what I have diffusing? Oils that are from trees. I love the cedarwoods, the sandalwoods, the Douglas firs, and the pine. If I can’t be out into a forest, I’m going to bring the forest inside.   [00:49:13] Ashley James: I love that. Bringing the medicinal properties of the forest inside if you can’t get out into it. And some people can’t. Some people aren’t mobile. Some people don’t live near forests. So you’re bringing what you know is a healing property. There’s other healing properties of being in a forest, but the fact that we don’t even realize that we’re inhaling medicinal properties being released by plants over outside, isn’t that amazing?   [00:49:47] Dr. Eric Zielinski: When you cut your grass and you smell—and I love that, I actually love the smell of fresh cut grass—what do you think that is? That’s the essential oil from the grass. And quite frankly I’m surprised. Well actually, we do have it. It’s called lemongrass, right? That’s a known essential oil. That’s been shown to help with everything from killing MRSA, to pain, to helping balance blood cholesterol levels, right. We talked about that in our cardiovascular disease chapter. People aren’t distilling the grass that we see in our lawns and creating a diffuser blend out of it. I think that’s kind of coming next. I think we’re going to see more people getting back to those things that they love. Again, you’re right. To your point, there’s negative ions being emitted. There’s the beautiful sounds. You know what, research has proven that listening to sounds of nature have a more desired effect. Put you in the parasympathetic rest, digest, calm, meditative—that empowering state—versus sounds of industry, sounds of modernization, industrial society like cars, motors, engines, whatever it might be. Just the hum, hum, hum of your HVAC unit. Those non-nature sounds trigger a sympathetic fight or flight response. So you’re out in nature, you’re hearing those natural sounds from the birds and the whistling of the trees or the rustling of the leaves, and you’re seeing—there’s actually a word because I’ve been studying a lot, especially for my book about forest bathing. There’s actually a word in Japan—that I couldn’t pronounce to save my life—that describes the type of sun that shines through the leaves. It’s like this golden beautiful heavenly ray.  We have no words in English to describe that, but it’s like a word to describe that particular light that shines through the trees. You’re getting that now. So you’re stimulating the ocular senses, the sight, and then now you’re stimulating the olfactory system because you’re breathing those chemical compounds that are being emitted from the plants. And then hopefully, you can maybe barefoot yourself or get to a point where you can earth, ground, and just be rooted again. And now you’re in a position where you can truly be one with nature and heal. Here’s the cool thing about forest bathing too is it’s been proven to stimulate and boost considerably—we’re talking considerable production of natural killer cells and also anti-inflammatory compounds. You’re out forest bathing, it will soothe inflammation at the cellular level. It will cause your immune system to pump out natural killer cells that we have seen to be shown effective against fighting cancer. And just one two-hour forest bathing session will have a lasting effect of up to four weeks. So what does that mean? Okay, I live in America. I’m a dad, I have five kids, I have an online business. Well, I try once a month or so to go out with my family and we just have a time like a day trip. Go up north, see some waterfalls, or go to the local park. And it doesn’t have to be a forest per se, it could be a dense tree, a wooded park, or anywhere you got some trees. We try to do that once a month or so, but you know what, it’s my way of life.  So right before this interview, I had a little bit of time and I went outside. I actually took my daughter, we have a park like 100 yards away from us in a little homeowner’s association subdivision. I took my daughter to the park and we ended up throwing rocks in the stream. And she ended up swinging for like five minutes. It was like a 15-minute daddy-daughter break for my four year old, but that’s my way of life. It’s like, let’s get some fresh air. Let’s get some sunlight. The thing is it’s not prescriptive. It’s not like, oh, let’s check the calendar. I don’t have to have an alert on my phone to say go outside and breathe. I crave it. It’s like my body yearns for it intuitively. It’s like get out of this cardboard box and be one. That’s life. I think that’s an abundant life. And that’s how we thrive during this season. So yeah, if someone’s in a position where they can’t move very well or if they’re stuck, they’re sheltering in place, they’re quarantining, or whatever it is, open up the window at least. I mean, move yourself towards the windows so you get sunlight like the plants. I mean, just do whatever you have to do to interact with nature. Get those Douglas firs and citrus oils and defuse them in your diffuser. You have more control than you think over your environment to create a healthy atmosphere to thrive.   [00:54:25] Ashley James: I love it.   [00:54:28] Dr. Eric Zielinski: That’s a mic drop. I drop my mic and people would be like, bam, that’s a mic drop. Hey, we’re an hour into this where if people are listening, these are the diehards. We love you. Salute. I mean, seriously, I got my three fingers up there. This is Hunger Games, right. I love it. And these are the conversations we have to have, and this is how we have to challenge one another and encourage one another. I’m telling you, going back to hopelessness and helplessness, if you have a friend or a loved one who is in a position where they’re just not there, help them. I mean, this is where life happens now. I’ve been doing this for 18 years. I’m very blessed, I’m fortunate to be able to make a living doing what I love doing. But this stuff, this talking, this writing, this researching, this helping people, look, I just found out. I’ll never forget going to work and I was working in finance. I was juicing green stuff. If it could be green, I’d juice it. The guys and gals at work would tease me. Hey, what’s in your juice today, Eric? Who do you think they went to when they got sick, no joke. He was like, hey, Eric, I got this. What do you think? I wasn’t a doctor then. I wasn’t anything then other than a guy who’s trying to be healthy and I was studying a lot. And you know what, that gave me so much purpose. That’s the other thing, having a life outside your own, and that’s what forest bathing does too. It’s been shown to make you realize that you are truly just a speck in the microcosm. It gives you a sense of awe that there is something greater. Again, as a Christian, I have a creation perspective here. I don’t ever feel closer to God than when I’m in nature, but also it gives me a greater appreciation. It gives me a purpose. It makes me feel like I belong. And so, here I was, using oils to help with maybe an athlete’s foot, an ache, or a pain, and then I realized there’s so much more to this. Why would I write another book? My first book is done well. It’s in 10 different languages around the world. It’s huge in my little space. Why write another one? Because I’m evolving, I’m shaping. I’m learning more. I realize more than ever the intricate connection we truly have with plants, and the hook is the essential oil. It’s not the fiber. It’s not the non-nutritive substance that just biodegrades. That’s all good, too, that has a purpose. But where the true healing happens, where the lives are truly changed is the essential oil.  It’s like, wow, it can help with addiction, it can help with depression, it can help with libido. It can actually help with sexual dysfunction. The number one most searched term on my website related essential oils—and we get millions of people visiting our website every year—is essential oils for sex. That blew my mind because I don’t have people asking me about it. Why? Obviously, it’s personal. People are searching through their fingers. So I’m like, you know what, I’m going to talk about this. So I did all the research on erectile dysfunction. Let’s cover this. Let’s go. Let’s do it.   [00:57:47] Ashley James: Now, how do you know it was men searching versus women? And what and what sexual dysfunctions were they searching for? Was it to enhance sex or was it because they couldn’t climax? Is it because the women of a certain age are drier down there and they want to maybe keep youth down there? Is it erectile dysfunction for men? I’m guessing you have a section in The Essential Oils Apothecary book that’s coming out on how you can use essential oils to have a healthy sex life.   [00:58:22] Dr. Eric Zielinski: We have a whole chapter on it, no joke. It’s erectile dysfunction and libido.   [00:58:26] Ashley James: Teach us.   [00:58:27] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Hey, can I give everyone a recipe?   [00:58:29] Ashley James: I’d love that.   [00:58:30] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Okay. I love sex. It’s okay to admit that.   [00:58:35] Ashley James: I mean, you’re married and you have five kids.   [00:58:39] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Let’s call it the elephant in the room here. And again, as Christians, I don’t know why certain things are taboo. Here’s the thing, I love food. I love playing with my kids. I love forest bathing. I love things that make me feel good. If sex was not desirable you wouldn’t do it. If you didn’t do it, the human race would have become extinct. Think about that. At the core, it’s the most primal evolutionary act that anyone, anything could do. Here’s a blend. This is your blend. This is our blend. This is a blend that could change your life for a million reasons, if this is an area that you want to enhance.   [00:59:23] Ashley James: My mind is racing right now, I know I’m pausing for effect, but you’re going to tell us a blend of essential oils in my mind is like, where am I applying it topically? Am I eating it? Is it only on the man? Is it only on the woman? I’m already going at how does this get applied? Is it before sex? Is it every day? Is it during sex? I want you to just explain it so that we all get it how to do this correctly.   [00:59:49] Dr. Eric Zielinski: You know what, I took this book to another level meaning this, it dawned on me. Like you just said, people have those questions, all these little details. So what I’ve done for every health condition that the research could substantiate, and then I could prove from my own experience, I created a blend like a master blend. So there’s this master blend I call the sensual blend. And then I show people how to use it in their diffuser, their inhaler, a spray, a massage oil, roll on, or a bath. It’s like wow, you get one blend and you can use it for like 10 different things. Yeah. Same thing with cardiovascular disease. Same thing with Alzheimer’s. So, this is the blend. You start off with a little baby 5 ml bottle. So you get an empty bottle and you can get them on Amazon. Start off with the top, 15 drops of orange essential oil, 10 drops of bergamot, 10 drops of neroli, 10 drops of lavender, 10 drops ylang-ylang, 5 drops of sandalwood, 5 drops of geranium, 5 drops of jasmine, 5 drops of patchouli, 6 drops of rose, and let’s round it off with 7 drops of vanilla. Okay, the big question we always get is, I don’t have XYZ. Okay, don’t worry about it. I mean, this is the cool thing, don’t worry about it. I can’t afford rose. Well, some people can’t, I get it. And so what we found—here’s a cool little hack for people—is that you could get a pre-diluted bottle of rose oil and now most of the companies sell this kind of stuff. You get a pre-diluted bottle of rose in a roller bottle that’s now affordable.   [01:01:45] Ashley James: That can be your carrier, right? Carrier oil?   [01:01:47] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah, exactly. So now they dilute it so it’s a carrier oil, but yeah you’re only getting maybe 10 drops but it’s affordable. Because if you get a bottle of rose that can be $200. So, anyway, that’s the master blend, and this is one of those things where I’m telling you it might be worth it. It might be worth having a make and take party at your house and maybe your one girlfriend has jasmine, your other girlfriend has vanilla, your other girlfriend has rose. Have fun with it.   [01:02:09] Ashley James: Good idea. You all go in on it. So, ylang-ylang is something that can trigger migraines in some people. I’m one of those people where I really can’t. I’ll open a bottle, I’ll smell a blend of ylang-ylang, I’ll close the bottle, and I’ll be like, that was fun. I hope I don’t get a headache. Some people cannot handle ylang-ylang. I’m just starting to feel dizzy just thinking about it. I don’t know what it is about it. Will it be fine to not use it at all, or is there a ylang-ylang replacement in this blend?   [01:02:38] Dr. Eric Zielinski: The thing is that this is not like baking a cake where you need to replace an ingredient or it ends up becoming like a hockey puck.   [01:02:53] Ashley James: So it’s like making a salad. It’s like making a really delicious salad. Here’s all the ingredients, but if you don’t like croutons, you don’t have to have the croutons.   [01:03:00] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Exactly. And I’ll tell you though, for me, it will always maybe lack that essence of all of it. This is the synergy blend. And yes, if you don’t have any of them, if you don’t want any of them, or if you only got three of them, just start there. Now, this is your master blend and this is practically speaking. We give people step-by-step how to do all this stuff. You get this empty bottle and put a label on it. Call it your love blend, sensual blend, call it whatever blend you want to call it. Label it so you remember because if you’re like me you have like 30 blends in your medicine cabinet, you forget what’s what. So I’ve learned my lesson. So now you got this master blend. So what you could do is how do you use it? Well, you can get an aromatherapy inhaler for a couple of bucks on Amazon. It looks like a lipstick tube. It’s basically a glass tube with organic cotton swab in the center of it essentially is what it is, and you could put like 20 to 25 drops of that sensual blend in that aromatherapy inhaler, and what do you do? Keep it handy, and when you want to “rev up your engines on your libido”, open the inhaler, take 10 deep breaths—and here’s what I suggest, seriously I suggest this. My wife and I are part of a Bible class for married couples. They explained how women are like crockpots and slow cookers where men are like microwaves. It’s just the nature of how we are. And so, what you do is you get started, especially if you’re a woman or man who needs a little time to stew things going. Get this and take some deep breaths and think about love, think about romance, think happy thoughts about sex. It’s a shame you experience that with ylang-ylang, actually, because ylang-ylang is not a known aphrodisiac. What ylang-ylang does uniquely, specifically is it’s an anti-anxiety It’s anxiolytic property.  And so what it does, it’s been shown clinically to help reduce the stress and anxiety related to sex. That’s the key. Rose is a known aphrodisiac. Jasmine is a known aphrodisiac, but there’s also that stressful, like again, vaginal dryness, erectile dysfunction, abuse trauma, relationship concerns, whatever. There are a million reasons why someone would be hesitant or stressful about potentially having sex. Ylang-ylang has been shown to help reduce that. So you have this inhaler that’s personal. See, you can do this without anyone knowing you’re doing it too because it’s personal. It’s not like a diffuser that is dispersing the essential oil in the room. But with that said, get the diffuser kicking. Imagine you’re trying to set the mood and maybe you put the diffuser on, and you just enjoy a nice meal together or you’re doing a foot rub on the couch watching a movie, whatever. But see, the diffuser can literally shape the environment of the room, and that’s where you would use it to potentially impact your partner.  This is where a lot of wives I noticed do this with husbands or women with men because men aren’t typically as open to certain things, and that’s a stigma that I’m willing to stand by because I’ve seen it. There’s research behind it. Women by and large are the drivers of a lot of this stuff.   [01:06:31] Ashley James: When you say this stuff you mean essential oils?   [01:06:33] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Of anything health-related, no joke.   [01:06:37] Ashley James: I was like, are we talking about sex? Are we talking about the bedroom stuff? Because I was like, men are usually the ones that are more like wanting to experiment, but you’re talking about health stuff. That makes sense.   [01:06:48] Dr. Eric Zielinski: And oils. Again, statistically speaking, men are not looking at oh let’s experiment with essential oils to get us into the mood.   [01:06:57] Ashley James: I think if you told the average husband, this is going to spice up the bedroom I think that they would be the ones going, why haven’t you put it in the diffuser yet?   [01:07:09] Dr. Eric Zielinski: That’s what I’m talking about. Guys, if you’re listening, that’s the thing. If you want to do something, say hey, I just listened to this crazy lady podcast with this crazy guy and they said something to do. Can you mind if I put something or whatever. You could be real subtle. This could be something where you don’t even let her know. But yeah, I’m speaking to guys and gals. But again, it’s fun.   [01:07:34] Ashley James: So you put this in the diffuser, you could also put it in a bath.   [01:07:38] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Massage oil.   [01:07:39] Ashley James: You could put it in a massage oil. We’re not applying it directly on the vulva, in the penis though?   [01:07:46] Dr. Eric Zielinski: This one particularly is something that I am not concerned too much about. You want to be careful. You want to be careful, which one specifically? This is one of those things where I have no problem with it and so my wife doesn’t either. You need to dilute it to like less than 1% though, which means six drops of this blend per one ounce of a carrier. So basically, you get a few tablespoons of coconut oil, three or four drops of this. We actually do have a lubricant recipe, and it is similar essential oils. I mean, when you have the essential oils lavender, Roman chamomile, ylang-ylang, rose—all these are safe. So yes, you can. You really can. But the key is though, highly diluted. You can’t mess around with this neat.   [01:08:46] Ashley James: Okay. I’m going to ask another question because in the bedroom stuff ends up in people’s mouths. Is it okay if you accidentally ingest some of this blend?   [01:08:55] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah.   [01:08:57] Ashley James: Okay. So safety. The safety around it.   [01:09:01] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yes, exactly. And all these, I mean super highly concentrated. Out of this list, people typically don’t ingest Jasmine. But again, you’re getting like 1/10 of maybe 1/2 of 1% of 1 drop.   [01:09:19] Ashley James: Yeah, you’re not supposed to drink this.   [01:09:21] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah, but the blend though, in and of itself, I said five drops of jasmine in just the blend as a whole. And then once you put only two drops of the blend, you know what I mean? Once you get down, this is parts per million. By the way, good point. Wintergreen you don’t drink, but what do you think flavors your root beer, right? So that’s my argument always with the aromatherapist, it always goes down to dosage. Yes, you don’t put five drops of wintergreen and take it as a capsule pill because that could cause liver and kidney toxicity. But parts per billion, yes, that’s what flavors our soft drinks.  So yes, good question. All this is safe. At the end of the day, you got to experiment and you got to enjoy. But yes, all this is completely if you use it the right way and follow the instructions—when’s the last time you were struggling with sleep? You went to the pharmacy, you got a sleep aid, and you just randomly took how many pills you wanted to without reading the instructions first. Unless you use the product, typically, you would look first. Okay. How many pills should I take? That’s what I want to encourage people. You look at the instructions.   [01:10:38] Ashley James: Yeah, and then there’s men out there, and I know one that drank two bottles of cough syrup because it made him feel better and ended up in the hospital with acetaminophen poisoning. Because there’s cartoons on it and it tastes good. They make it all child flavor and it makes you feel good, so you think you can just sip on it. You can just sip on it all weekend long while you have a head cold. And meanwhile, on the back, it’s like one tablespoon every eight hours. Do not exceed four tablespoons in a 48-hour period or whatever.  What’s scary is that Costco sells lethal-sized amounts. When you buy cough syrup, for example, if you were to drink that on a weekend, that will kill you. You can buy Tylenol or aspirin in a bottle so big that that bottle will kill you. That is too much, right? People that don’t read the instructions, right? But it’s weird that we sell over the counter dosages of something that are lethal expecting people to read the tiny words on the back. But yes, to your point, we need to follow the instructions. Just like you would take seriously instructions on pharmaceuticals, either over the counter, at least I hope you would. How is it that I have so many friends that I know of that have misused over the counter meds because society just treats drugs like candy? And they end up with these health problems, right? And even some people take them within the normal parameters but they didn’t realize that they had MTHFR.  I’ve just recently learned this. You can’t take CBD with certain pain meds because the pathways in the liver are the same and it will cause a backup in the body. So you’ve got over the counter pain meds, over the counter CBD, and neither bottle says don’t take with the other, and you take them both. If you happen to have MTHFR as well or if you have any other health conditions, where your liver’s already weak to begin with, you can go into some kind of shock. So, these are all over the counter things that we just think that pharmaceuticals are safe like candy. I mean, honestly, right?   [01:13:16] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Can I brag on my book for a second?   [01:13:17] Ashley James: I do. I want you to because I want people to know that we can use these safely, but we have to follow the instructions and the instructions are in your books.   [01:13:25] Dr. Eric Zielinski: I got a chart, and I didn’t do it in the first book and I realized that was one of the reasons I needed a follow up. I hired somebody, and this is where I’m good at what I do but there’s limits and I recognize that. I hired a trained aromatic practitioner or aromatherapist who’s a researcher. I paid her a good amount of money because she earned every bit of it, and she spent a ton of time compiling the most exhaustive, up-to-date drug interaction list with essential oils possible. That’s in the book. That right there is worth the book is just to know.  And by the way, teaser, there’s not a lot of concern. There’s a handful or two handfuls of essential oils that if you consume, then you need to be careful. But by and large, topical application and inhalation like through aromatherapy inhalers and diffusers, you don’t have to worry. But there are certain oils that are better not just if you’re on a drug, and one of them—I’ll let the cat out of the bag—is so important that everyone needs to know because so many people are on blood thinners right now. Do not be consuming clove. That’s a problem because the big network marketing companies have their “immunity blend”, and all of them include clove because clove oil contains some of the highest quantity of antioxidants of any substance that’s available.  The ORAC score, the measure of antioxidants, of clove has been reported up to a million. Compare that with wild organic blueberries, which is great, but that only has like a 7000 ORAC score. We’re talking a million. So clove, that’s a big thing. So, if you’re on warfarin or any kind of blood thinner, be very careful about consuming anything with clove. And not that I’m saying it’s a guaranteed reaction, but you overdo it, you could hurt yourself. That’s what we give people. And again, people look at this stuff and everything that we’re trying to do to help people is to take away that pain point of fear because there’s paralysis by analysis.  I’ll never forget when I was marketing, when I was in the corporate world, there’s ignorance on fire or paralysis by analysis, and there’s a balance between the two. I want people to be educated, but the word is empowered. I want to empower people where they feel, yeah, I’m confident. I know what to do. And you know what, when you, your children, or a loved one has something happen, and I guarantee you, someone’s going to get sick, someone’s going to get a booboo, someone’s going to cut themselves, that’s life, you’ll know what to do. And that right there puts you in the driver’s seat. Like you mentioned before, you’re not running to the doctor for every little thing. I am self-sustaining. That is worth gold. That’s priceless.   [01:16:43] Ashley James: Absolutely. Just thinking of how I use essential oils in my medicine cabinet, tea tree oil, I don’t understand people that don’t have tea tree oil in their medicine cabinet because it’s such a staple. It has always been a staple since I started using essential oils back when I was a teenager.  I’ve had maybe three in my lifetime nail bed infections. I mean, they’re freaking painful. Probably right up there with birth giving. So painful. Oh man. There’s a throbbing pain. One of them was on my big toe and that was because I was running around the jungle with no shoes on in Florida and I don’t know what I caught. But tea tree oil, just dosing my toe everyday with tea tree oil. I had a finger one and then I had another toe one for some reason. It hasn’t happened in a long time but tea tree oil, for me, has always been something. But you got to be careful. Dilute it correctly, that kind of stuff. I don’t ingest it. Once in a while I’ll get ear infections. I figured out why, and I’m dairy-free and really, really don’t eat sugar very often. Very, very low sugar. All the things that you would think when you think of ear infections, but I’m allergic to latex and I wear these studio headphones all day long. And then I was sleeping on a latex pillow. And so I was getting zero infections. My ear was very upset, particularly I sleep on my left side more than my right. It’s just unconscious when I’m sleeping, it’s what happens.  And so I was developing these ear infections and I couldn’t figure out why. And so I got garlic mullein oil and put drops of tea tree oil in it. So I supercharged my garlic mullein oil that also has calendula in it. Oh my gosh, that stuff is amazing because I’ve used antibiotic drops. I will not let a doctor give me antibiotics orally for an ear infection when you can just do a local. I found that putting a few drops of tea tree oil in the garlic mullein oil with calendula was more effective than when in the past I have used antibiotic drops. And so, I probably had about three or four ear infections in the last five years. It’s not been a lot, but each time I feel it coming on, I go immediately to the garlic mullein oil with the tea tree. I add a few extra drops just to freshen it up. Not that much. It’s like a four ounce bottle and I add two drops because I don’t want to overdo it. And then our son only once, and he’s of course dairy-free as well. And I keep saying that, for those who don’t know, the number one cause of ear, nose, and throat infections in children is cow dairy consumption.  This again should be criminal, I’m getting up on my soapbox, but MD pediatricians, it should be criminal that they go to a surgery in which by the way they have to put a child under anesthesia, and that has killed children before. I have read the articles of the children that have died because of anesthesia to have their adenoids removed, their tonsils removed, and put tubes in their ears all that could have been prevented from a dietary change. I mean, that should be malpractice, right? But the MD, the kindhearted MD pediatrician has not been taught this. This is not their education. This is up to us as the patients to educate ourselves. So if you go to an ND, a Naturopathic pediatrician, they are way more likely to start you off with dietary changes, herbs, essential oils, and much more gentler, less invasive procedures than something that is a potentially life-threatening surgery for a child. And that doesn’t solve the problem either. The immune system is still having major issues. They’ll just express deeper in the body. So, when you’re using these drops in your ears, you have to make sure that your eardrum hasn’t ruptured yet. You don’t want to put stuff in your ears if your eardrum is ruptured. But I use it with our son—I don’t know why he got an ear infection. It came and went, but the drops with garlic mullein oil with calendula and tea tree oil made it come and go so fast and never had a problem since. And so that’s my one thing. If I could say everyone has one essential oil, of course, it doesn’t smell great. It’s probably not going to be like your aphrodisiac scent.   [01:21:46] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah, it’s not in the love chapter.   [01:21:48] Ashley James: I love it because when I smell it, I feel like I’m getting out—what’s that cleaner that they use in hospitals? My friend had a love affair with the scent of this, I don’t know why. But in Canada, they use this one cleaner in every single hospital. And when you smell it, you’re like, oh, this place is disinfected. It smells like it would strip cancer off the walls. It is such a powerful scent that you just know you’re walking into a clean hospital. There’s no MRSA here. They’ve already doused the place with something that literally made every microbe die within a 100 mile radius. But when I smell tea tree oil, I’m like, yeah, we’re going to kill those germs. That’s what it smells like to me. But it doesn’t smell in any way like it’s going to uplift my mood. I think it’s good to have those two, clary sage and rose bergamot for me are my go-to make me happy scents. I smell them and I’m immediately in a good mood. I don’t know what it is. But clary sage is really good for female hormones, I know that. So those two are my feel good, happy. I like blending them together, that’s my thing. Just like you do the orange and the vanilla. So I think it’s good that we experiment and figure out what makes us happy, what smells are really good to us. And then go deeper and learn. Wouldn’t it be cool, you smell a bunch of them at the store, figure out which one you really love, and then study that one and go wow, it helps with eyesight or it helps with liver function. Get The Essential Oil Apothecary book and start smelling ones you’d ever smell before and then go, wow, this one really resonates with me. I’m going to learn more about it because it resonates with you. We could look at it from the standpoint of, I have liver disease, I want to heal my liver disease. Let’s go through the apothecary book and learn how to do that. Or we could go and just smell a bunch of essential oils, find ones that make us really happy, and then start studying those just to start, right? We can do either way with your book.   [01:23:56] Dr. Eric Zielinski: You know, you mentioned something that quite frankly warrants an entire conversation. I’m sure we’re wrapping up here in a minute so I don’t know how long we have to talk about this. But your experience with tea tree is very similar to my experience with lavender. Tea tree imprinted you. You have a neurological response. It’s like gravity. It’s like your reflex response. It’s almost automatic. That could have the opposite effect. That’s why I talk about abuse and trauma as well is that the olfactory system directly impacts and will create the neurological impulse to your limbic system, your memory, your mood, your emotions. And so, what’s really fascinating about this is it’s worth the effort and life-long benefits of finding something that really works for you. I guess as a warning, as a rule of thumb—I’ll just throw this out there for you, Ashley—maybe there is a biochemical something or another that we don’t really understand surely, but maybe biologically, your chemistry just interacts with ylang-ylang in such a way where it just, eh, I don’t know. Maybe your body rejects it or maybe something happened subconsciously, when there was a ylang-ylang scent or aroma in the air around you. I found that whether it’s trauma, whether it’s abuse, whether it is a negative stressful experience, some people, when they smell an essential oil, they automatically like whoa, they find themselves agitated. That’s not necessarily the fact that the oil could be synthetic, it could be adulterated, but we find that a lot of these people something happened.  That’s why folks like my friend Dr. Tony Jimenez, who runs the Hope4Cancer clinics around the world, has all of his patients go through emotional recall therapy because according to him, cancer is really, at its root, an emotional disorder. And so, all of his patients go through emotional recall therapy. And Dr. Leslie and the other doctors that do this, they’re using aromatherapy as an anchor. So whatever aroma it is that makes you feel good at that moment is the anchor during the sessions so that when something happens, and invariably it does, in the future you smell that aroma, it brings you back to the point of healing that you were going through during your sessions.  And for me, I had such a wonderful spiritual epiphany in a season of my life and I was introduced to lavender. In fact, I was introduced to essential oils through a lavender hand soap. And believe it or not, it was lavender that every single time I smell lavender, it reminds me of 18 years ago when I became a Christian. It reminds me of that dramatic I was blind, now I see moment when I was being mentored and loved, and unconditionally accepted by people. That wasn’t my life experience before that. Today, lavender is an anchor for me and will be, God willing, for the rest of my life. And so, for you, for whatever reason, tea tree. And there may be something, who knows, with ylang-ylang. Maybe at the deep subconscious level just something. It could have been anything like hearing bad news. And that’s the thing about today in 2021, who has not been traumatized? At some microscopic level of even literally being forced to stay in your home outside of your will without leaving, or whatever it might be, who has not had some sort of micro or macro traumatic experience in the last year? You’d be hard pressed to find anybody, myself included. So, with that said, what triggers that experience in you? A food, smell, hearing sensation, or music. Now is the time more than ever to be truly cognizant and in tune with who we are. I’m not here to be a false prophet or the bearer of bad news, but I’m telling you something, mark my words on this, we’re going to see such a ramping case of PTSD across the globe. And people don’t even realize they’re living through it now.  It’s like they don’t realize that they need to process the micro trauma and the macro trauma, whether it is just whatever. Someone dies, whether it’s you lose a job, whether it’s you lose some freedoms or health freedoms, or whatever it might be. This has been such a traumatic experience in a season that has lasted now nearing a year and a half plus two years depending on when you’re listening to this. And the long-lasting effects are going to be forever unless we truly come to terms and grip and bring healing. So why am I mentioning this? Well, aromatherapy can help you through this whole process. And just truly trust me, do yourself a favor, be in tune with yourself. Listen. Even if it’s at an intuitive level, if you feel drawn away from something, listen to that warning. If you feel drawn to something, follow it with reckless abandon. Do what you need to do to feel good and have yourself be in a place where you allow yourself to be well.   [01:29:48] Ashley James: I love it. Well, I hope listeners want to follow this with reckless abandon. Well, I mean, with caution also on our side. To do it responsibly and using moderation. Because we can replace chemicals, artificial things with essential oils, and you’re showing us how. I interviewed Dr. Klinghardt who has been an MD, a medical doctor, for over 40 years. It’s a very interesting interview because people come from around the world to see him. One of his clinics is in my backyard, but he is famously known around the world as being a doctor you go to when you don’t know what the heck is wrong. When you’ve been to the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic or every clinic and they all say we don’t know what’s wrong with you, then people find Dr. Klinghardt. So he regularly reverses really, really bad Lyme disease, really weird parasitic infections, and also has an amazing track record for getting children to no longer be on the spectrum. Now, in our interview we talk about this, are they truly autistic or did they just have autistic-like symptoms? Because when you and I were kids, it was very rare to ever meet a child with true autism. It was very, very rare. And now, almost every classroom—because statistically it’s like 1 in 30 or something—can technically have a child with autism in it. So is it real autism when it goes from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 30 in less than one generation? Something is amiss.  So I think it’s autism-like symptoms. I don’t think it’s true autism. I think a lot of children are being misdiagnosed because it’s all the same symptoms, and that’s because of several things, but one is the inability to detox heavy metals, which end up in the brain tissue. One of the causes of that is Glyphosate. Glyphosate will bind to heavy metals and release them into kidney tissue and into brain tissue because glyphosate is a chelator that will release heavy metals when pH changes, and blood changes pH when it changes to another liquid. For example, blood to urine, blood to cerebral spinal fluid. And this is something we covered. I have two interviews with Dr. Stephanie Seneff, who’s a Ph.D. MIT top research scientist, and she goes through this. That’s why I had Dr. Klinghardt on the show to talk about heavy metal detox. And through that he spoke about his experience being trained as an MD in Germany. In his medical school, while he was being taught surgery, he was being taught acupuncture and homeopathy. As well as all the other things that MDs are taught like pharmaceutical drugs. There’s one part of Germany that’s very holistic. He walks out of medical school, comes to America over 45 years thinking every doctor knows how to use homeopathy and boy was he surprised. Remember, his training is MD. He still knows every drug known to man and when to use them. He says, my favorite thing is to not use drugs. My favorite thing is to find something in nature that works better than drugs and use that instead. And if he has to use a drug like a chelator, let’s just say it’s more beneficial. He weighs the risks and it’s more beneficial to use a drug-based chelator for that one patient, then that’s what he’ll do. But his thing is to look at what we can do with essential oils, herbs, and homeopathy. Look what we can do with plants first. So his whole mantra for over 40 years of practicing medicine has been, I will find a plant that does the job better. And if I don’t, then I’ll go to the drug. But most of the time he ends up using a plant. And could you imagine if you go to your cardiologist and they go well, I see that your LDL lipids are high. I’m seeing your cholesterol levels aren’t really trending in the right direction. Your A1C is getting up there. I’m not happy with your high blood pressure. We could put you on blood pressure meds, Metformin. We could put you on a cholesterol lowering medication. Of course, all of this will lead to a lower life expectancy and more complications in the future.  But instead, I’d really like to get you on some lavender oil. I want to cut out the peanut oil in your diet, the omega 6s, and I really would like to get you eating more plants and antioxidants. Let’s get you on some of those essential oils that have antioxidants in them. Let’s get you walking every day out in nature, and then come back in three months and let’s retest you. Could you imagine? I just did an interview with a doctor that talked about how they did several studies and they found that dark chocolate was something like 66 times more effective than cholesterol lowering medication when it came to the outcomes of preventing heart disease? And yet, they’re not prescribing that but are prescribing something that causes side effects and harms us. So, I’m a big advocate for your book. I’m really excited that it’s coming out. I think it’s going to be a game-changer for a lot of people because they can look to these less invasive things first to make the changes.   [01:35:50] Dr. Eric Zielinski: And that’s the lifestyle because you know what, what you’re proposing and what you’re sharing is reality for a growing number of people. Out of all the things that have happened to us lately, one of the greatest things is this mass awareness and discussion that we’re having. Okay, well, let’s revisit immune health, let’s revisit what we’re doing. People are questioning, people are looking, and they’re starting to investigate. A lot of medical doctors are starting to see, and it’s wonderful. It really is. Things come full circle, Ashley, and that’s really the cycle of life. We’re not too far away. This drug phenomenon that we’ve been in has taken the world by storm all because of greed and political influence, yet we’re not even 100 years away. In the scheme of things, what’s 100 years in the timeline of humanity? I mean, we’re not even 100 years into this new revolution. And when you look at chronic disease, which is the purpose and the sole motive behind why I did what I did with The Essential Oils Apothecary, when you look at the number of diseases that are rising up as the primary causes of death, that’s an issue. I mean, people were dying. I get this a lot and this is one of the arguments that people say, well, their life expectancy. Well, yeah, because we don’t have the bubonic plague and dark plagues, and we’re not like drinking, urinating, and bathing in the same water. That’s why.  I mean, yes, basic sanitation really was the solution to most diseases before the chronic disease epidemic started 100 years ago or so. That’s really eye-opening when you look at it. I have a biblical worldview and Moses died at 120, I believe it. I believe that when I read the Bhagavad Gita or when you look at your ancient scriptures, you’re seeing people live to a ripe old age and they’re healthy and strong. That to me is the promise that we have available to us, and this body is wonderfully adapt and adapting to adapt, essentially, to regenerate and to heal. And if using essential oils as part of your holistic lifestyle can help, hallelujah, go for it. So that’s it. I love it.   [01:38:24] Ashley James: And there are so many religions, ancient cultures that have documented the use of essential oils. The Thieves blend is something that certain essential oil brands will sell, but the Thieves blend is rumored to be the blend that was used during the bubonic plague. Grave robbers would wear all these herbs. If they could get essential oils out of them, they would have, but they wore all these herbs and these herbs helped them to stay healthy while they were thieves basically being exposed to the plague. I love the Thieves blend, and every company does their own version of it. But it’s like that highly disinfectant, really great for these times when people are a little bit more on edge when it comes to having a cold or flu. Because even if you’re not worried about getting COVID and maybe you’ve already had it or you’re not letting fear into life. The problem is if anyone these days develops a basic cold, a little sniffle, everyone around you is paranoid.  My friend had to pull her kid out of school this week because he had a runny nose. No other symptoms, a runny nose, and he has to now go get a COVID test, quarantine, and wait for the COVID test before he’s allowed back to school. And I get it. This is the stressor that we’re all living under, which is why we should forest bathe in essential oils, bring nature into us to help de-stress. But if you had just a basic little cold, little sniffle, little sinus thing, everyone around you looks at you like, oh my gosh, are you going to kill me? I’m leaning towards using more and more the Thieves blend. Maybe you could tell us what your version of the thieves blend is. Is there a clove and there’s thyme in it? What other herbs?   [01:40:37] Dr. Eric Zielinski: The immune-boosting blend of a variety of it, one version of it was shown clinically in research trials to kill the flu virus in vitro. So here’s the list. I mean, our version of it, actually, I’m glad you mentioned it because I’ll give you guys and gals, listening, let me pull it up. I want to make sure. I make it all the time for me and my kids, but let me quote, pull it up in my book because it’s really kind of cool. We share immune-boosting strategies in the book obviously because if your immune system is dampened, you’re not going to be able to really beat chronic disease. So our immune-boosting blend that we recommend is going back to your 5 ml bottle that we shared earlier with the love blend, get 10 drops of cinnamon bark essential oil, 10 drops of clove bud, 10 drops of eucalyptus. And personally, I have not found a difference between eucalyptus globulus or eucalyptus radiata. I mean, it’s one of those things, whatever frankincense you got, whatever orange wood you got, whatever eucalyptus, they have such similar properties and chemical structures that there’s no major difference in this case. Ten drops of lemon, 10 drops of orange, and 10 drops of rosemary. That’s our immune-boosting blood completely safe to consume, safe properly, of course, safe to apply topically. Again, remember, clove and Warfarin, remember your blood thinners and your drug interactions. But what we do is here’s a little recipe. My kids call it healthy butter. I love this immune-boosting snack as part of our prophylactic immune-boosting strategy when it was in flu season. But now it’s like, okay, well let’s take this, especially when COVID hit, this was something we took on a regular basis, just because we weren’t sure what was happening with that thing. Now we’ve kind of settled down where we’re not taking it every day, but here’s our recipe.  Start with a tablespoon of unsweetened nut butter. We love creamy almond butter or if you can get NuttZo butter. I love NuttZo. We get that at Costco. It’s a mixture of a bunch of different nuts. Or you can get sunflower butter or nut butter. Get one serving of a non-flavored liposomal vitamin C. It’s a form of vitamin C that is highly absorbable. I’m sure you’ve had people in the past talk about it on your show. One teaspoon of raw honey. I like manuka honey, extremely beneficial for health and immune-boosting. One teaspoon of organic virgin coconut oil, two drops of this immune-boosting blend I mentioned before, and I like a quarter-ish teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice.  For those people in Australia who ask me what is that because you don’t know what that is because that’s American, I’ve had this question a lot. It’s basically a mixture of the spices you would put in pumpkin pie. That would be cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, allspice, and a tiny pink Himalayan pink salt. You mix that together, yum. Spoon it up, eat it solo, or add some freshly cut veggie sticks or apple slices. That’s what my kids call healthy butter.  I kid you not, that version of that to the nth degree because I like 10X that. That was how my wife and I managed pneumonia when we had black mold in our home. I stretched this to the point because we took antibiotics. I’ll confess, the first time I’d taken, the only time I’ve taken antibiotics in the last 20 years, and I took it because I was about to launch a health summit, and I was on the other side of the microphone. I was interviewing 15 people. I had pneumonia, and I had 15. I don’t know what would you do. I had a choice.   [01:44:33] Ashley James: Well you get to a point. We believe that emergency allopathic medicine is there for us when we need it and we try to avoid it, not putting our head in the sand like the creator of the Muppets. I mean, God rest his soul. I love Jim Henson.  He was so afraid of doctors that he didn’t do anything to take care of himself and he died of the common cold basically. It just developed into pneumonia and he died. He lived in New York City and had access to the world’s top traditional Chinese medicine, as an example. He could have gone and done herbal medicine, anything. Reading the end of his life, reading the description of what happened, he was so afraid of doctors he chose to do nothing. We’re not saying don’t take antibiotics and don’t do anything, we’re saying, if you have a cold, try everything else first and if it gets to the point where it’s pneumonia, you know what, antibiotics might be what you need. I’m not going to fault you there.   [01:45:47] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Let me tell you my story though because here’s the thing. This is my confession. I’m real. I’m a person, right. So I tried everything I could to knock this thing out naturally. I had a huge deadline. My livelihood was depending on this project. I went to the doctor. I got an antibiotic, which helped reduce the coughing and things for the two, three weeks that I needed to during this interview. But you know what happened? As you would think, it came back again. I got sicker than I was before. No joke. So for me, it backfired, but it got me through this little hump, and I didn’t have a solution. By the way, here’s the thing about drugs. Drugs are designed to have an immediate impact quickly where natural solutions virtually every time, it will take a little longer. It’s just the nature of it. It takes the body time to respond. That’s why our antifungal yeast infection tampon recipe, well, it’s been shown clinically to knock it out within three days. But you take an antifungal drug and that’s a lot quicker. Most women, who wants to wait three days? So I get that. I was beside myself because yeah, I went through the 20 interviews I had to do. I did my summit, I did all this stuff, but I was sicker than I was. That’s when a friend of mine introduced me to liposomal vitamin C and I was like wow. This was a long time ago and this is when I was introduced to this immune-boosting blend manuka honey combination. I took like 10 doses of this a day. And between that and getting a proper air purifier to help with the black mold that we found, that healed my wife and I of pneumonia. And so for us. I have recognized the impact of medicine and natural medicine when used appropriately. But yeah, that recipe I shared with you is the modern tasty version of what we put together years and years ago when quite frankly, medicine failed us because that’s what happens to people. You go from prescription to prescription to prescription and then you never get well. That’s where I recognize that unless I’ve exhausted my resources, I’m not going to try it. So to your point, don’t judge yourself, don’t let yourself get beat up. If you’re at a point where whatever it is, you got to do what you got to do. You got to be you. And even if that’s taking chemotherapy or radiation, you have to be true to who you are and you got to live to the light that you have. And me too. We all are destined, I believe, to walk different paths. But trust me on this, regardless—and this is so important, this is the importance of integrative medicine—of what you choose, if you choose don’t think of it as an all allopathic, all-natural. You should always incorporate natural solutions regardless.  So it doesn’t mean like, oh I’m going to take chemo, I can’t use essential oils. No, that is a lie that medicine uneducated practitioners promote that we’re trying to correct. But the ones that get it, the ones that are truly integrative, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve known. Of the millions of people that follow us, this is a common thing that we get through emails, chat, and text messages that we get through our support team. Their oncologist tells them not to use essential oils and supplements while they’re on chemo. Says who? There’s absolutely zero research. This is the stuff I cover in the book on my cancer chapter, says who? If you talk to an educated oncologist, truly educated who knows the literature, they’ll say, well, there’s virtually no risk. Let’s watch it together. Let’s do this together. Not this no-yes hard line in the sand. That’s malpractice in my opinion. By the way, we filmed the documentary. I don’t know if you watched this actually. I’ll send you a DVD of it. If you want a free screening of a documentary that we produced about a woman’s story, an integrative cancer story, go to hopeforbreastcancer.com. We were so inspired by this that my wife and I donated $50,000 to the Independent Cancer Research Foundation to send a woman to the Hope4Cancer Clinic in Cancun to get integrative treatments, and we documented her journey, and she goes through it.  She did things in secret afraid of what her oncologist would say because her US-based oncologist was not supportive of XYZ. And that’s the environment. That’s the wrong doctor to have. It’s not judgmental against anyone. It’s like look, find someone who respects you and will support you for what you want to do. And if there is a firm contraindication based on the science, then yes. But by and large, telling someone on chemotherapy that they shouldn’t take vitamin C because it can counteract the immune, it’s nonsense. That’s nonsense. What we’re doing is we’re challenging all of us, myself included, to really think and work together because we do not want a line in the sand where we’re not willing to cross over. We want unity. We don’t want division here. So, yes, you can and should never ever cast aside your natural solutions. You should always have that be part of your way of life. And when needed, yeah, thank God medicine is there. I mean really, thank God, for a lot of people whose lives have been saved by medicine. But don’t think it’s an all or nothing thing. And so for us, yeah of course, I mean granola as you get. We’re the home birth. We don’t do all these other things, but we know what to do when it’s time. And when it’s time to go to the hospital because we did our stuff. It’s knowing that you have most things. And in my first book I quoted an urgent care doctor. Essentially my paraphrase said, 75% to 80% of the people that come to urgent care have no business being there. Simple things that they should be able to manage themselves. This is from an urgent care doc. It’s about let’s flip that on its head. It’s a wonderful, wonderful journey of you use supplements, proper nutrition, mind-body practices, and using plant-based medicine like essential oils. Wow, what a wonderful chat. I love it. I love it.   [01:52:41] Ashley James: The trick is to know when to use what. And on the flip side, there are people this year. I’m friends of friends of some of them who have died this year because they didn’t seek medical help because they didn’t want to go to the emergency room and they weren’t sure if they should. On the flip side, we need to be better at listening to our body day-to-day, to be incorporating preventive medicine day-to-day, and don’t be ashamed or scared to seek help, seek advice. Hey, is this normal? Hey, should I get this checked out. If you have health insurance, I’m pretty sure all health insurance does this nowadays, telemedicine with a nurse, telemedicine with a doctor. Within minutes you could be on the phone with someone saying, hey, these are my symptoms. What do you think? Should I just book an appointment? Should I do a telemedicine appointment with my doctor in a few days? Is this urgent?  Having stuff at home like a thermometer, a pulse oximeter, and a blood pressure cuff allows you to just check your vitals yourself. Make sure that they’re calibrated, that they work. And just don’t put your head in the sand. But there’s no harm in incorporating something that will boost you, that will support you like incorporating essential oils when done healthfully, rather than wait till you’re so sick that you need a larger intervention like you need the hammer. I’d rather handle it when it’s a whisper in the body than wait until my body is screaming and being hit by a 2×4. When we see people recover from, let’s say infection, health isn’t never being sick. Health is how quickly we recover, and that also goes from mental and emotional health too. When I lost my mom to cancer we were best friends. And to lose her so suddenly, she was diagnosed in Easter and died in July. She was the epitome of health to me. She actually ignored little signs in her body because she just thought, oh, whatever. She had moved from Canada to Florida. She was doing new routines. She ignored that there were little aches and pains or little warning signs for about a year. She ignored them and just plowed through because she had a strong constitution. We don’t want to ignore. We don’t want to overreact, but you don’t want to ignore either. And by the time she found the cancer, because she was already such a strong and healthy person, it was riddled everywhere in her body. And someone who eats a standard American diet would have been bedridden, but she was up and running because she was healthy in other ways.  But she died very quickly and I was left with wanting to heal emotionally as healthfully as possible. And so, I did a lot of personal growth work and I found one man who mentored me. He was one of the original Landmark Forum leaders. And he had suddenly lost his brother halfway through leading a course in front of 200 people. He taught me some really interesting things about being with grief and not resisting but being with it.  And he said, being healthy and emotionally healthy too is not about never being sad or never being depressed. It’s how quickly you’re going to bounce back. It’s that muscle that you build, how quickly can you get out of victim mode, get out of reaction mode? How quickly can you come back into peace, come back into learning, come back into understanding? How quickly can you recover from that, learn from it, grow from it, heal, and be with the emotions too. Don’t resist them, don’t push them down.  And same goes for physical ailments. We’re all going to be exposed to microbes. This is a dirty world we live in, and that’s good. We have more cells that are not us than our us in us and on us. We have more bacteria than cells. We are all part of this microcosm of good and bad bacteria for us and viruses and all that stuff. It’s the environment to the body that determines how quickly we can recover from that. My friend just less than two weeks ago broke her leg skiing. She is already walking, not a walking cast. It’s like a cast she can take on and off. She’s already walking on it. The doctor said six months to repair. She’s like, are you kidding me? She’s doing salves on it. She’s doing everything known to man. All the essential oils and all the homeopathy and eating. Eating everything that’s super, super bone-building healthy for her. Her doctor is also cool. He said, listen to your body because she’s like, can I walk on it, can I put weight on it? He goes, listen to your body. And she’s able to put weight on it and walk a little bit on it and with no pain. She’s listening to her body. But could you imagine if your version of your mindset of health is, I’m going to practice preventive medicine every day so that when I do get sick I recover quicker. So when I do injure myself, I heal faster than I would if I just ate McDonald’s and waited until I need to be put on antibiotics. That’s the philosophy, right? We’ve talked about the mindset of healing, and that’s why I think we want to have The Essential Oils Apothecary as one of the books in our library so that we can go to essential oils and use them on a regular basis as the herbal medicine that supports us in building our bodies up—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually building ourselves up. Thank you so much Dr. Eric Z for being on the show. This has been a lot of fun. Continue coming back, continue teaching, bringing us more recipes, and I’m really looking forward to having my hands on your book. I know it’s coming out soon and listeners can preorder it, but it’s going to be out soon. I’m already thinking of Christmas, it’s going to be great as a Christmas gift.   [01:59:30] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yes. I hope. Yes, it’s perfect timing. Thank you. It’s always wonderful. You bring so much insight, and quite frankly, you’re an expert in your own right and in so many things. It’s just so impressive and so wonderful, refreshing to hear and. And I know you have a wonderfully, loyal, and educated listener base. So everyone listening, especially at this point, how long are we into this? Two hours or so, this is the top 1% of the 1% here at this point, unless people just fast forward to the end. Good for you.   [02:00:06] Ashley James: Go back. Go back and listen.   [02:00:08] Dr. Eric Zielinski: Yeah, go back. It’s like, join our ranks. This is health evangelism. The more people we could reach, this is how we change the world. This is how we encourage people. This is how we take away essentially just that power that’s been robbed, that they’ve taken, in a sense stolen. And there’s not a nefarious organization we can pinpoint, but I’ll never forget when a girlfriend of my wife’s told me she wanted her power back. Meaning she bought land in Costa Rica. She got seeds like lots of seeds to start growing her own farm. She started doing things herself.  She felt disempowered by just life, by the system. She lived in Boston and it was just a very disempowering experience for her, and I will never forget though, she said, I want my power back. Wow, that was one of those indelible things. You know when you live your life and people say something? That was what, 15 years ago that she said that to me I think. And it was one of those things that I’ll never forget. So, if you feel disempowered, then yeah, continue learning from Ashley. Be empowered, pick up my book, Essential Oils Apothecary. And I will leave you with this, folks, because unfortunately, we’ve actually talked about some things that are not in the book because I have a limit. I couldn’t write a 1000-page book. My publisher is like, oh no, the spine will break. You can only have so many. Literally, I have so many references in my book we had to shrink the font and all that. I don’t even know, I got to double check at this point. We might even need to put the references on my website. So we created a series of demo videos that walk people through. You mentioned bone, joint disorders, like broken bones. We helped heal our son of a broken clavicle, fractured clavicle within like two and a half, three weeks. Got him out of his cast like a month ahead of time, and we have our bone strengthening remedy that we actually walk you through how to make, and then we start talking to you about some other cool stuff in our video series. So go to eoapothecary.com to order the book but redeem our little sweet special gift bonus package. We want to help you. If you’re like me, you’re a visual learner, and a lot of people love reading, but it’s really cool to see something in action, so that’s why we created that video series, and it’s free. It’s just our gift to you. We’d appreciate it if you buy the book and then we can teach you how to get the most out of it. This has been wonderful. It really has been. Thank you so much for having me.   [02:02:54] Ashley James: Wasn’t that wonderful? I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Eric Zielinski. You can go to learntruehealth.com/eo. That’s learntruehealth.com/eo to not only pre-order or order his book, but to also get a ton of fantastic downloads from him that he’s giving away for those who order his book through his website. So you definitely want to make sure that you get those. You don’t want to miss out by ordering from somewhere else like Amazon because you will miss out on all those awesome downloads that he’s gifting to all the listeners who go to learntruehealth.com/eo. Please share this episode with those who care about that love essential oils or could definitely use turning hopelessness into happiness. There have been times in the last few months that I felt quite stuck, depressed, overwhelmed, and hopeless. Prayer, connection with my family, my husband, and our son, and also utilizing essential oils. Something as easy as uncapping it and taking a really deep breath of sweet orange, clary sage, or rose geranium. Taking a nice few deep breaths, applying some topically to my wrists, or putting it in the diffuser, or putting some on my clothing, my bath, or my foot bath, and just taking some deep breaths and using the essential oils to center myself, come back to now, breathe. It has helped me to get unstuck. So, from an emotional standpoint, from a spiritual standpoint, it is helping me heal. And then essential oils are fantastic for really, day-to-day, real-world applications, improving your immune system, cuts, bruises, sleeping better, improving mood, and cranky kids. My son has some essential oils that he loves. He’s been using roll ons for a very long time and he loves them too, and he picks out his own. He particularly loves lavender.  So, it’s fun. It’s fun to use, it’s herbal medicine. It’s fun to use with the whole family, and it’s such a great remedy when we are up against it. And a lot of people are up against it this year. So it’s a fantastic gift to give to someone. Giving them a little roll on of lavender, eucalyptus, or peppermint. For muscle tension, sometimes it’s great just to center yourself, breathe, relax and bring us back into the parasympathetic nervous system of rest and digest instead of being in the fight or flight mode. Please, share this with those you care about. We’ve got to get this information out there. Could you imagine if everyone just turned to essential oils, prayer, and connection with loved ones first before getting before going for drugs. Drugs have their place, but sometimes people go straight to drugs without trying natural medicine, and herbs in the form of essential oils are so easy to use. That’s why I love The Essential Oils Apothecary book because it’s something that we can just start little bit by little bit using, and it’s fun, and it will uplift you, and in some cases really make a huge difference. So, whether it makes a little difference or big difference, it’s so worth it. It’s so worth just trying it, and exploring it and that’s why I love the book The Essential Oils Apothecary. So check it out, learntruehealth.com/eo, and please share this with those you care about because we can help. We can uplift each other and help each other. Thank you so much and have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.   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 Apothecary The Essential Oils Diet Healing Power Essentials Book Using God’s Medicine For The Abundant Life Heal Your Gut With Essential Oils

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Experience a free sample of their program: learntruehealth.com/coach Dr. Christianson's Book: https://amzn.to/2VNVjjC Listen to Past Episodes with Dr. Christianson: https://www.learntruehealth.com/metabolism-reset-diet https://www.learntruehealth.com/heal-your-thyroid-holistically www.drchristianson.com   The Thyroid Reset Diet  https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-thyroid-reset-diet   Highlights: Wolff-Chaikoff effect Iodine vs. iodide Myth-busting halogens Three broad categories of thyroid disease   In this episode, Dr. Alan Christianson is back to talk about his new book, The Thyroid Reset Diet. He busts some medical myths about halogens and thyroid diseases. He also shares that it’s not about consuming more or less iodine, but it’s more about how much we need and how much we can tolerate. Intro: Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today we have back on the show Dr. Alan Christianson who was in episode 307 and in episode 324. I highly recommend you go back and check out those episodes. You can learn more about him, his story, and the work that he does as a Naturopathic endocrinologist. I had him on the show previously talking about thyroid, and that was before he had published his book, which we’re discussing today, The Thyroid Reset Diet. He goes into so much more detail in this episode so I’m really excited. And we also had him on the show in episode 307 talking about The Metabolism Reset Diet.  Since his expertise lies in both holistic medicine and in endocrinology, I think it’s fascinating to learn from him. He really does love to bring in the science, bring in the studies, and the proof, the evidence, and the research to dispel the myths. There are so many myths when it comes to medicine, right? There’s so much dogma and so many beliefs that are not associated with actual science, are not grounded in science. So he likes to dispel that, and instead of following assumptions, beliefs, or hypotheses, he sticks with what is true, what’s proven, and then uses holistic medicine as much as possible to support your body’s ability to heal itself so that you can get so healthy you don’t need to be on medication anymore.  I just want that for you so badly. I want everyone to be able to get so healthy that they can reduce their meds and even get to the point where they can safely and healthily get off of medication because they no longer need it. Of course, there’s always the exception to the rule like a type 1 diabetic, but I have even seen type 1 and type 1 diabetics significantly reduce their amount of insulin needed, which is so exciting because they were able to optimize their body’s ability to use insulin in a healthy way instead of having developed insulin resistance. So, with that, there’s so much you’re going to learn from Dr. Alan Christianson today. And there’s one thing I wanted to touch on. Since this week, I’m really focusing on how supportive using specific infrared therapy is for your health. I used it to detoxify heavy metals, it had such a powerful impact on my life. But there’s actually a lot of evidence to show that if you have thyroid problems, using regular sauna therapy, what that looks like is spending about 20 to 30 minutes every day or every other day in a sauna and specifically the Sunlighten Sauna because they are extremely low toxic.  Most saunas out there, a lot of toxicity, unfortunately. They’re extremely low EMF, which means that even though there are electronics in them, they’re not emitting an electromagnetic field that is dangerous to you. And the Sunlighten Sauna uses the full spectrum, it’s like sunlight. It uses the full spectrum of mid, near, and far.  And the reason why that is better than any other sauna, and I’ve had entire interviews on this. You can search Sunlighten or search sauna when you go to learntruehealth.com. What’s really interesting about the near and the mid-infrared is that it speeds up wound healing, it decreases chronic pain very quickly, and it decreases inflammation. So someone can come into a sauna with pain and walk out with significantly less pain, sometimes it helps pain go away completely depending on the cause of the pain, and decreases inflammation. Not only does it help with detoxification, which I’ve talked about before, weight loss, and improvement in metabolism, but it also improves collagen production. So there’s that vein inside of us. We’re like, I’d like to avoid wrinkles or I’d like to have firmer skin, have more tone, have healthier-looking skin, and just healthier skin in general, and healthier tissue. That is something that is achieved with sauna therapy because the near and mid-infrared spectrum helps to improve skin health. And so, some women and some men use their sauna, the Sunlighten System specifically, for vanity sake, and why not? But really, my focus has always been on the health aspect. And so what we’re getting is we’re seeing that through improving the metabolism, decreasing inflammation, improving cardiovascular function, and improving body temperature, you are also supporting the thyroid function. There are studies out there that show it, which is really exciting.  The general benefits of infrared sauna—relaxation, stress relief, which is great, in and of itself, especially if you’re combating a health issue like thyroid problems. Oftentimes, those with stress and especially medical stress, will go to food like sugar, alcohol, or cigarettes as a form of stress relief. The unfortunate part of that is that’s obviously hurting the body. Where we could use sauna therapy every day to improve stress levels because you can actually decrease stress levels in the body by using sauna therapy.  Detoxification, cellular health, and wound healing is improved. Cardiovascular function is improved. Blood pressure is regulated, so if you have high blood pressure or low-pressure blood pressure it actually helps to balance it. Anti-aging and the cleansing of the skin, weight loss, which we already talked about. You burn about 500 calories per sauna session. Circulation improves greatly, and then the pain relief, which we talked about. But there’s even more, there’s so much, and it’s great.  If you want to just internet search thyroid health and sauna therapy or infrared sauna and thyroid health, you’ll see lots of articles, lots of studies. It’s fun to look at. There’s even a study where it increased the thyroid-stimulating hormone. So if you know you have low thyroid-stimulating hormone, it was for a specific cohort of people that had low thyroid-stimulating hormone. So just very interesting how we can utilize nutrition—which we’re going to talk about today—and we can utilize lifestyle changes such as using the Sunlighten Sauna System in order to support overall health. So the whole body, holistic health, emotional health, as well as physical health, and also thyroid health.  Now, Sunlighten does offer my listeners a great discount, so if you do decide to call them, check them out, and ask them questions because they have systems that are big enough for two or three people, and then they have the personal size ones—much, much smaller, especially if you live in a very small space like I do now, then you would be interested in their Solo System. They even have a small sauna that is a wooden sauna, but it’s kind of like a TARDIS if you know about Doctor Who. It actually fits just into the corner of a room, so it doesn’t take up that much space. Two people can fit in it, or one very comfortably can fit in it. But that used to be in the second bedroom of our house. It would just fit into the corner, kind of the size of two small closets or one large closet basically. They have many different sizes to fit your needs. And what I do love about their company is they’re so health-focused. Their entire purpose is to support your body’s ability to heal itself, be as healthy, and feel as good as possible. I can’t tell you how amazing I feel when I come out of a Sunlighten Sauna. I absolutely love it. I kind of became addicted to it. I’d rather be addicted to my sauna than addicted to drugs or alcohol for stress relief. So, as addictions go, it’s pretty great when you become addicted to kale and sauna therapy. Fantastic. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for supporting the show by sharing it with those you care about. If you do decide to get a Sunlighten, you know you will get a great discount. I did interview the founder, Connie Zack. You can listen to that episode, and she promised that she would always give a fantastic discount to all the listeners, so make sure you mention Learn True Health with Ashley James when you call Sunlighten. You can just Google them and give them a call, they’re really great there. They’ll answer all your questions.  Right now I know they’re having a special going on in the first part of August or maybe all of August, I’m not sure. But just give them a call and ask the specialist. It’s something like free shipping and a percentage off or a discount off of their models. Just give them a call and let them know Ashley James sent you and that you get that special discount. And then if you have any more questions, a lot of our listeners are in the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group, and they also have gotten a Sunlighten Sauna. They’ve shared their experiences so you can start a conversation there. We can all talk about our experiences with the Sunlighten Sauna. Excellent. Enjoy today’s interview. Please come join the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. And please talk about this episode if you have questions or comments, want to talk about what you learned, or maybe something that came up for you that you want to discuss with other listeners and myself, I would absolutely love that. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook or go to learntruehealth.com/group. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and enjoy the show.   [00:09:52] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 465. I am so excited for today’s guests. We have back on the show Dr. Alan Christianson. You can go to drchristianson.com to check out his amazing website. Back when we had you on the show in episode 324, you were sharing with us The Metabolism Reset Diet, which was pretty mind-blowing and you dropped these little nuggets which kind of blew my mind. One of them was about how most people actually are consuming too much iodine instead of too little, which I just did an interview with a doctor who swears we all need to be taking copious amounts of iodine. So this is going to be one of those things wherein the journey to our health, in our own personal health, we will come across contradictions.  Atkins versus plant-based, right? That’s just one of those big ones. Should I eat more meat or no meat? Should I go all meat or no meat? Should I eat more fat or no fat? There are some people who swear by keto and they’re like, oh, I feel amazing, and some people eat zero fat and they eat a whole food plant-based diet with no added fat and they feel amazing. How is it that complete opposites both can lead to health for certain people? Well, some doctors swear by iodine and say that no one’s getting enough and we need more, and here you are with an amazing book, The Thyroid Reset Diet. One of the things that just blew my mind was that you share and you back it up with a lot of evidence that we are actually getting too much, which I find really interesting. Now, you’ve also written a book The Adrenal Reset Diet. I’m fascinated about that topic. I’d love to have you on the show again at some point to go over that because so many people suffer from adrenal fatigue, whether they know it or not, and reach for more and more caffeine, sugar, and stimulants to cope with adrenal fatigue. So I’d really love to have you back on the show to teach us about that. But let’s dive into thyroid. Now, for those who’d like to learn more about Dr. Christianson’s background, you can go to episode 324 because we did cover his bio. You’re a holistic doctor, you’re a Naturopathic physician, and you’re very well researched. I really love your book The Thyroid Reset Diet. In fact, I could hardly hold on to it because every time I was reading it—so I would always read when I went on playdates or took my son to the park, and all the moms would see the cover and be like, I have thyroid problems. Then I’d be like, okay, you can borrow this for three days, but then you have to give it back to me on Thursday when I meet you at gymnastics because I haven’t finished reading this book. I kept lending it.  At one point I just would open it up to the graphs and be like okay, it boils down to this look at this graph, look at this graph, see this, and then they’re like, well, how do I eat? And then I’m like, okay, well, you can eat this way. Go to the back of the book and here’s the diet and here’s the questionnaire. So it was a lot of fun sharing your book in the passion, enthusiasm, of all the women. Actually, one man came to me and he does not look like he has any health problems and he’s like, actually I have a really low thyroid. I lent him the book for a week too.  So, everyone thought it was really interesting and several of my friends ended up just buying a copy for themselves. So, this whole concept first of all of too much iodine is radical because we’re all told in the holistic space that we need more iodine. So I definitely want to jump into that and allow you to teach more about how we can reset our thyroid and support our thyroid in going back to healthy levels. So many people out there have thyroid issues it’s becoming just an increasing problem. First of all, you’ve written all these other books. Did you have an aha moment? What had you want to write an entire book on supporting thyroid health?   [00:14:08] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, the research drove me to it. I saw this story clearly represented in the medical literature and no one was talking about it. I’ve known forever that the thyroid needs iodine. I’m an endocrinologist and that stuff that we learned pretty early on. Starting in about 2002, there became a big fad in the natural health space of giving massive amounts of it. Treating thyroid disease, I saw the complications from people who were taking too much and how it was worsening or causing thyroid disease for those that didn’t have it. So I was well aware of the dangers of excess, but in the last four or five years, there’s been this mounting body about how excess might not be all that much, and how there may be an opportunity to reverse disease by controlling it. So it was really just driven by data that needed to be given a voice.   [00:14:58] Ashley James: And you show pretty clearly that different countries around the world, when they added iodine in the form of adding it to their salt for example and they added iodine into the food supply and how thyroid problems mounted pretty heavily. Well, one thing that’s been explained, and I’m sure you know way more about it than I do, is this idea of halogen poisoning. That fluoride, bromine, chloride has been added to our water and our food for the last 15 years or so.  What is going on? We’re being poisoned with these halogens, to which iodine is one of them. And my understanding is that things like fluoride block iodine. And so, when you looked at this information and saw that people were consuming more iodine and thus having increasing thyroid problems, did you also take into account that other halogens were increasing like countries started to add fluoride to the water, bromine to the flour, chlorine in the water as well. Did that come into account?   [00:16:13] Dr. Alan Christianson: For sure. Let’s back up a few steps too. People do talk about needing more or needing less. More and less in my vocabulary are four-letter words. So if you think it through, more to take into its ultimate extreme is basically infinite because more is more. Whatever you’re consuming today you need more, so you consume an infinite amount, you consume nothing but iodine, it’s silly. And then less is none, taken to its extreme. No matter how much you’re consuming, if you need to consume less, you’ll eventually get to none. Those are words I don’t like to use in terms of nutrients or foods or really much of anything. There are amounts and we know that the thyroid needs iodine, it’s not the enemy. It’s necessary, but it’s necessary in certain amounts. There are two big considerations. Here’s how much we require, and how much we can tolerate. And now, of course, people are different. What we see is that the requirement differences are quite small. There are not big differences overpopulations in iodine requirements. Past predictable standards like body size, age, gender pregnancy status. So once you know some of those things, you can pretty well peg iodine requirements. Even absorption doesn’t vary too much. But tolerance varies tremendously. A lot of people can tolerate occasional high doses or persistent moderately high doses with no big consequences. But they’re not the ones who are apt to get thyroid disease. So those who are apt to get it are those who cannot tolerate much extra. And it really comes down to just how iodine works as a nutrient and how it works in the thyroid.  So, big picture, it’s the richest source of free radicals of all known elements in the nutritional profile. There’s no other nutritional element that generates free radicals like iodine. That’s why it’s been used forever as an antiseptic in medicine. It’s highly reactive. Like bleach or hydrogen peroxide, it’s a good antiseptic. Now, in the thyroid, it’s oxidized to its active state called iodine, normally it’s in the state of iodide, and iodine binds up with a protein and makes the thyroid hormone. This actually goes way back to the earliest forms of single cellular life, iodine was used as a transport mechanism for high-energy molecules.  But the drawback is that if there’s too much of that in the thyroid, it harms things. It’s just from the free radicals. They can’t be managed and it damages the cells. So we’ve got a lot of built-in mechanisms to protect us. The main one is called the Wolff–Chaikoff effect. And basically, the thyroid quits working when it’s given too much iodine. But that can’t go on forever, and it doesn’t work flawlessly. So sometimes, too much still gets in, and that can then add on autoimmunity for those who are prone to it. Should I talk about the halogens, or were there some comments you had on those comments?   [00:19:14] Ashley James: I definitely want to talk about halogens. You brought up the Wolff-Chaikoff effect, which I think for layman’s terms, some people call it a thyroid storm, right? Or is that different?   [00:19:27] Dr. Alan Christianson: No, it’s different. I can expand on that.   [00:19:32] Ashley James: Yeah, I would love that. Just to have a clear understanding. Let’s say I took a bunch of iodine because I thought it was really good for me. It’s too much and then my thyroid can’t absorb that much in order to protect itself from absorbing too much. It would then shut down for a time?   [00:19:56] Dr. Alan Christianson: Yeah, so the protein that forms thyroid hormones is called thyroglobulin. Think about it like a passenger van. This capacity for 13 passengers, right? So there are 13 spots that are available for iodine. But if saturation levels of iodine are too high, it can get in the wrong spot. It can be like passengers can pile on top of each other and that can make just chaos. So rather than allow chaos, the gland just locks the doors. It just stops more from coming in.  This has been well understood since about the ‘50s, and you talk about thyroid storm. So that’s that phenomenon of Graves’ disease or hyperthyroidism. That’s where there’s this vicious cycle of extra thyroid hormone worsening the autoimmunity that releases extra thyroid hormone. And the amounts in circulation can be life-threatening. So in situations like that, there’s a lot of medicines that are used to slow the thyroid and we can talk about fluoride too. Before we had current medications, fluoride was used for that purpose and very high doses of it. Yes, they can slow the thyroid, but now there are medications that are used more specifically, but they all take six to eight weeks. So if someone’s in a life or death situation where their heart is about to stop from too much thyroid hormone, the only thing that can stop it at the moment is a massive dose of iodine, and that’s via the Wolff-Chaikoff effect. You can also think of it like just blowing a fuse. If there’s too much current in your wires, you blow a fuse in the fuse box so the house won’t burn down.   [00:21:32] Ashley James: Wow. Yes. So the thyroid, does it take about 24 to 48 hours before it starts to back up again because it has to wait for the kidneys to excrete enough iodine for it to be safe to turn back on?   [00:21:48] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, the Wolff-Chaikoff effect, once it’s engaged, there is variation in how it plays out. So, the most typical scenario is about two to three weeks later the thyroid comes back online again. But there are variations. For some people, it doesn’t come back on correctly, and for others, it can lapse into hyperthyroidism. That’s just called iodine-induced hyperthyroidism.   [00:22:10] Ashley James: Could someone out there in one of the countries in which, like for example the United States where iodine is regularly put in salt. Could someone, through their diet alone, accidentally consume enough iodine to have the Wolff-Chaikoff effect occur?   [00:22:32] Dr. Alan Christianson: Yeah. And one more thing that I failed to mention that your question brings up is that I described it as like an on or off. We now understand there’s a little more nuance. It can actually be kind of like a parking brake towards not just totally on or off, but there’s a certain number of clicks. So it can be partially engaged, and yeah, it’s very easy to be above one’s personal tolerance and have that be subtly slowing the thyroid on an ongoing basis.   [00:22:58] Ashley James: This is where it gets interesting because in your book you show that too much iodine can cause almost all the symptoms of too little iodine in the diet.   [00:23:10] Dr. Alan Christianson: Yeah. And also, just a very high level, a lot of concept—iodine, it’s the most researched nutrient on the planet, bar none. We’ve been studying it for well over 150 years. We understood its role before we knew about the role of vitamin C, and we’ve got more data on it. There are about 30,000 studies relating its function to thyroid disease, and there’s a pretty solid body of knowledge. We’ve also tracked iodine fortification efforts all around the globe. And we’ve seen what levels of iodine intake correlate with the best health thyroid disease, higher or lower. So we’ve got all these data points. Now, in the late ‘90s Just, just a little time after the internet came on like you were talking about earlier, a gentleman made several hypotheses that he bundled together into a series of articles called the Iodine Project. He hypothesized that we really needed more iodine, not less. He argued that halogen compounds were blocking iodine, and he argued that humans needed 400 to 4000 times what’s been considered as the safe upper limit. These ideas have been passed around verbatim ever since then by many other doctors.  They’re things that if you don’t really understand the ways in which iodine can be counterintuitive like you know more is not more. If you don’t get the nuances of how it works in the body. Those ideas are plausible, and a lot of them are internally consistent. They have a lot of explanations, but there’s a whole pile of ideas that are floating around that are just not in alignment with our body of knowledge from iodine from these last 150 years.   [00:24:56] Ashley James: So it’s a medical myth?   [00:25:00] Dr. Alan Christianson: At best, and it’s also harmful though. There are several papers in PubMed about people who have followed these exact guidelines during pregnancy and giving birth to babies with congenital hypothyroidism. And they’ve named these high-dose iodine products by name. They’ve talked about the exact doses used, and these are things that are still written about in guidelines in functional medicine. So it’s harmful, and I’ve seen scores of people that likely otherwise would not have developed thyroid disease, but it came on days after embarking on some of these protocols.   [00:25:30] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. That’s so scary because too little iodine during conception leads to lower IQ. They show that it’s healthy to have healthy levels of iodine during pregnancy to have a healthy IQ for the baby.   [00:25:53] Dr. Alan Christianson: Yeah, and let’s talk about that. That has happened, and the last time was in rural China in 1991. The time before that was in Papua New Guinea in 1962. Currently, there have been many studies on how much iodine is best for pregnant women, and they do need some, and the requirements are a little higher than they are in the nonpregnant state. But the Cochrane Review did a recent analysis of the effects of iodine supplementation during pregnancy, and they showed that women that do supplement with iodine during pregnancy, even the amount found in prenatals, they’re not less apt to have thyroid disease, they’re not apt to have better health overall. They’re actually more apt to have elevated thyroid antibodies, they’re more apt to have morning sickness, and there’s also no improvement to the baby’s health. So yeah, in modern populations, we need some, but by and large, people are getting enough. There’s not a benefit to going out of your to add more even during pregnancy.   [00:26:49] Ashley James: And what you’re saying in your book is that many people are getting too much iodine.   [00:26:54] Dr. Alan Christianson: Yeah, not all but many are. And again, the tolerance varies. So, if we went back to, again, not that far back, the early ‘90s, we had 112 nations on the earth that were considered severely iodine deficient. But as of 2014, Thankfully that problem was eradicated. But now, we’ve got 52 nations that are considered at risk for thyroid disease due to iodine excess. So many things that we know about other nutrients just don’t apply to iodine. Like vitamin C, we need it, we can get too little. Optimal amounts are probably higher than the bare-bones amount that offset the deficiency. We’re rarely in danger of getting too much from common sources. Yeah, none of that’s true for iodine. It’s so different. Our tolerance, those who are prone to thyroid disease, their tolerance is just ridiculously narrow.   [00:27:45] Ashley James: So, we talked briefly about the iodine storm, you said that’s Graves’ disease.   [00:27:50] Dr. Alan Christianson: Thyroid storm.   [00:27:51] Ashley James: Right. I want to talk a bit more about iodide versus iodine, but you said iodine is very inflammatory for the body and that it causes free radicals. Is that what you said?   [00:28:06] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, one of the strongest examples of that is if you see old medicine bottles, they had a skull and crossbones on those. One of the more popular means of suicide in the early part of the 1900s was iodine ingestion. So, high enough amounts, it’s fatal. And almost all of what we’re exposed to, to be precise, is in the form of iodide. It’s bound, it’s not in a free radical state. But when the concentrations are high enough, then it does dissociate into iodine. Now, normally that doesn’t happen in the body with the exception of inside the thyroid follicles. So right there, that’s the job of thyroid peroxidase. It takes iodide and makes it into iodine, but it does it very cautiously, and only in just exacting amounts.   [00:28:52] Ashley James: So iodine is controlled in the body in exacting amounts, but what if someone consumes it in their diet, in the food because it’s added. It’s added to salt and so much salt is in processed food in excess amounts. So we’re getting iodine in processed foods. Is it iodine or iodide?   [00:29:21] Dr. Alan Christianson: It’s iodide.   [00:29:22] Ashley James: Okay. So iodide, which is bound and it’s not considered inflammatory?   [00:29:29] Dr. Alan Christianson: It comes down to quantities. So if iodide is at an excessive level, then it does still end up becoming too much inside the thyroid. So to be really precise, we talk about excessive amounts and then toxicologic amounts. And so the excessive amounts are where there’s too much for the thyroid to function at optimal capacity, and then toxicologic amounts when there’s so much that even outside the thyroid it’s dissociating into iodine, and that’s where you start seeing kidney damage and systemic organ damage from it. That’s not common. That doesn’t really happen from most sources of iodine, with the exception of a few medications or iodine in some contrast media.   [00:30:09] Ashley James: I’m wondering, is it excessive iodide that causes Graves’ disease because iodine is so inflammatory and we know that inflammation of tissue can lead to autoimmune disease?   [00:30:28] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, so there are links between iodine intake and all types of thyroid disease. The links, it’s not as clear of a smoking gun with Graves’ as it is for a causative factor for Hashimoto’s. There is associated data for excess iodine being also a factor for many types of thyroid cancer, but the strongest clear smoking gun link is for Hashimoto’s. In fact, one group of researchers, they concluded that of all the controllable factors that give rise to autoimmune thyroid disease—and they’re referring to Hashimoto’s in this context—they said that iodine is not the only factor, but it’s more relevant than all the other factors combined.   [00:31:06] Ashley James: And so if we’re helping someone to heal from Hashimoto’s and reset their thyroid so that they no longer have Hashimoto’s and they have a healthy thyroid, you have a diet in your book, and it allows people to control the amount of iodine because you said it’s not about the four-letter words more or less. It’s about the balance that that person needs. And so, if someone has Hashimoto’s, how would they know how much they should control in their diet?   [00:31:38] Dr. Alan Christianson: In a perfect world, we would have a simple blood test or some sense of the way of measuring that. And there are scores of iodine tests that exist, and many of them are useful for evaluating a population’s iodine status. But the problem with individuals, there are two problems. One of which is that none of the existing tests that are used for the nutritional status of iodine, none of them have enough intra-subject consistency. What I mean by that is if you did the test more than once you’d get a different answer. So for urine random iodine, if you tested yourself 10 times in a row, you can be within 80% accuracy. If you want to be within 95% accuracy, it takes over 300 tests. Now, if you do a 24-hour urine test, then you have to do 200 tests to be within 90% accuracy. But the other question is what is the clinical relevance? So, in some of the studies that showed that regulating iodine could reverse thyroid disease, some of them would test people before embarking upon the reduction of iodine. And the question was, were those whose measured iodine levels high or higher, were they the ones most apt to benefit? And what we’ve learned is that the compartment of iodine within the thyroid doesn’t perfectly correlate with measured iodine in the urine or in the blood. And so, in the studies, many people who were not high in iodine still have benefits to thyroid function through iodine regulation.   [00:33:10] Ashley James: That’s fascinating. So what’s in the urine is not really an accurate representation of what’s going on in the thyroid?   [00:33:19] Dr. Alan Christianson: It’s not an accurate representation of what your averages are, and it’s not an accurate representation of what’s going on inside your thyroid.   [00:33:26] Ashley James: Fascinating. Can you explain how the thyroid uses iodine to make T3, T4? These are the things we’ve heard of. We’ve heard of T3, we’ve heard of T4. You mentioned that there’s a protein. But how does our thyroid—if someone doesn’t know, it’s the gland behind the Adam’s apple in the throat, like a butterfly-shaped gland. Now you say in your book that the thyroid is the only place in the body that has receptors for uptaking iodine, which kind of blew my mind because I thought iodine was used by other tissues in the body too.    [00:34:14] Dr. Alan Christianson: If I did word it that way that wouldn’t have been correct wording. So there’s a compound called NIS or the sodium iodide symporter, and that is found in other tissues. We know that it’s relevant to lactating breast tissue. So, iodine needs to be concentrated to be at physiological useful amounts within the thyroid. And so, the Wolff-Chaikoff effect just stops that concentrator. Now, that’s also true for breast milk. So, the amount of ambient iodine in the blood is not enough for the appropriate iodine concentration in human breast milk, and that’s not true for other nutrients. The amount of magnesium in mom’s blood, that’s about the same concentration that it would be in breast milk. But there needs to be a mechanism to concentrate. So there is this concentrator in breast tissue. Now, when you really get deep into cellular histology, you will find NIS in many other parts of the body, but the thought is, it’s not biologically active, it’s just linked via embryology. We start off as one cell, two cells, a little blastocyst, right? And many cell types have common ancestors. So a lot of cells that go on to become thyroid cells have ancestors they share with other cell types like those that line the gut, those in salivary tissues, those in the prostate, and some of them might actually concentrate iodine for antimicrobial effects. There are theories about that but they’re not definitive. But as far as we know, the biologically active role for iodine is solely for the formation of thyroid hormone or for the presence of that for the baby’s eventual production of thyroid hormone.   [00:35:54] Ashley James: Oh, that’s fascinating. So then there is a link. I keep saying I’m going to ask you a question then I have another question.   [00:36:04] Dr. Alan Christianson: I’m still waiting on the halogens.   [00:36:06] Ashley James: I know. We’re going to get back to that one too. It’s like, I got a notepad here. I’m going to make sure we get all of it done. See, I’m so glad we have 90 minutes with you today because you’re a wealth of knowledge and your books are actually very easy to read. So I definitely recommend listeners get your books because there’s so much science in your books, but the way in which you present it, I found it to be easy to digest. It wasn’t cumbersome to read your book. You are really a great author as well, but I do appreciate the science and you’re not whitewashing the subject. I really like getting down into the nitty-gritty. I do definitely want to touch on breasts and breast cancer. But let’s go back to my question that I just asked you, which is how does the thyroid use iodine to make thyroid hormone?   [00:37:02] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, here’s the two-minute version of that answer. So basically, we get iodide from our diet, from other sources, it gets in the bloodstream. It’s circulating the bloodstream. So we’ve got this pump that’s looking for iodine and waiting to pull it inside the thyroid. That’s the NIS. So the pump pulls it in. There are little clusters of thyroid cells called follicles, kind of like a circle the wagons thing, and inside the follicles that is where all the magic happens. So, a few other steps bring iodide into that follicle and then thyroid peroxidase, you may have heard about that. That’s an enzyme that people think about having antibodies for. That’s an enzyme that helps to oxidize iodide into iodine. And when it’s oxidized, it becomes single and ready to mingle. It’s ready to bind up with something. So then you’ve got a protein called thyroglobulin. And this is a long, long complex amino acid chain comprised of tyrosine and other compounds, and it has those 13 spots to hold various iodine atoms. So, the iodine atoms get on there, they make monoiodotyrosine. So one iodine with a tyrosine. And they make diiodotyrosine. And then this molecule bends so the monos and the dis connect, and the dis and the dis connect. And one and a two connecting makes a three, and that’s T3. And then a two and a two connecting and it makes four, that’s T4. The molecule itself is then pushed out of those follicles and the thyroid pulls off the active hormone and releases those into the bloodstream, per the body’s overall regulation.   [00:38:42] Ashley James: Could someone have an underproduction of thyroid hormone because they’re missing other cofactors like tyrosine?   [00:38:50] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, not really. The reason there is tyrosine is abundant in all dietary sources, and it’s also a non-essential amino acid. So the body can pretty freely convert it out of phenylalanine, which is also readily available. So tyrosine deficiencies have not been documented in humans. There are some very rare genetic tyrosine hydroxylase enzyme genetic defects, but even those don’t impact thyroid function.   [00:39:19] Ashley James: Oh fascinating. So really, at the end of the day, you’re either getting too much or too little iodine for the thyroid?   [00:39:27] Dr. Alan Christianson: You know, other factors can certainly have some relevance, but again, all of the factors we know about combined are less relevant than the ambient iodine exposure.   [00:39:36] Ashley James: And you share this in your book that what we’re seeing is that culturally, we’re not really experiencing iodine deficiency. It’s very uncommon nowadays.   [00:39:53] Dr. Alan Christianson: That’s correct. No nations are considered they are. And I’m not saying it’s not possible. I actually have seen people develop that there if they’re on all raw foods diets and not really using any salt that has appreciable iodine content. That’s rare, but certainly, it can happen. But those who are on a variety of food categories, all foods have some. No foods have none.   [00:40:15] Ashley James: A friend of mine had a baby and he must be in his late 20s or early 30s, so this is close to 30 years ago. And as a small baby, he had a goiter. This is an Alberta in Calgary, and the doctors called in the Canadian version of CPS because they thought the parents had beat the child because the neck looks so odd. They thought that they were abusing the child, oh the poor parents, and they’re so sweet people. And then one of the doctors who is originally from India identified it as goiter and gave the baby appropriate levels of iodine and that went away. That’s the only case of goiter I have ever heard of in my life to someone that I know, and yet well most of my friends have thyroid problems. So it’s interesting.   [00:41:07] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, the weird thing about all types of thyroid disease is too little or too much iodine can drive them including goiter. In Denmark, the rates of goiter increased after iodine fortification. They found that some other factors can be relevant to goiter that have nothing to do with iodine, but too much can be a driver for it as well.   [00:41:23] Ashley James: Let’s get on the halogen conversation. What’s been proposed—and I’d love for you to do the medical myth-busting here—is that there are these halogens. Fluoride, which is now added to our water so everyone’s getting fluoride, and I really am of the opinion that sodium fluoride is unhealthy for us. There are many reasons why but it’s being added to the water. Finally, some counties are taking it out. Bromine, which is added into flour so people who are eating the standard American diet are getting plenty of that. Chlorine is in the water, chlorine is in your swimming pool. This concept is that fluoride, bromine, and chloride can block iodine receptors and build up toxic levels in breast tissue and other tissues of the body possibly leading to causing breast cancer. I’d love for you to myth bust that concept.   [00:42:23] Dr. Alan Christianson: Sure. Well, so more depth with that story too is also the idea that these things that any sign, if someone ingests a lot of iodine and anything bad happens, this story has a free pass. And the free pass is that that thing that happened wasn’t from too much iodine, it was from iodine pushing out all these nasty halogens and the halogens caused the harm. Within this belief system, that’s one of the exit strategies they have whenever someone seems to be harmed from too much iodine. As a lot of things, these are not unanswered questions. These are not data points in which we lack knowledge. They’ve been very well studied. Now, the closest kernel of truth to this is that fluoride, like I mentioned, certainly can have hyperthyroid effects. The threshold seems to be somewhere around 5 to 10 milligrams per day, and the further you get above that the more clear it becomes. So, we do have fluoride in the water, and there are times where it’s fortified. There are some pockets of the world where geologically, there’s just a lot of ambient fluoride in the groundwater. There are a few pockets of China and also rural Tibet in which that’s been the case, and it has been shown that they’d had more hypothyroidism, not lasting. Once they’re really taken away from the high ambient fluoride in the water, they do better. But municipal fluoride has been thoroughly studied as far as its links to thyroid disease. I don’t have data top of mind for all of their concerns about it, but I’m very aware of the studies about its links to thyroid disease. And in terms of municipal fluoridation added to water supply, it’s not been shown to affect thyroid function in the amounts that are normally used like one part per million or below those thresholds. And that’s fitting what we know about it having a no observable effect limit of somewhere around 5 to 10 milligrams relative to thyroid function. All bad things have that. They have some point at which we cannot detect their effects. In terms of chlorine, we do have data on how chlorine acts relative to the sodium iodide symporter. It simply has no effects on that. It doesn’t block it, it doesn’t get taken up by it. The symporter is quite specific to iodine, and there’s also been data on chloride exposure and chlorine exposure relative to thyroid function, and there’s just no known link. If someone is exposed to pools that are densely chlorinated and indoors, especially like indoor pools, that can worsen asthmatic states, but that’s the closest thing I found. Now, bromide is really fascinating. So, there are brominated dough conditioners that are used for commercial baking. Bromide is not added to flour, however, and that’s a little bit different. In the ‘60s, there were questions asked about just that, whether bromide could have some effect upon thyroid function because it’s sharing a column with iodine. It’s a halogen like iodine is. In studies that were done as recently as the last, last decade, humans were given doses of bromide in excess of—it’s actually found in pretty much all foods and varying amounts, and we have some unavoidable exposure to it from natural sources. And so people were supplemented with doses that represented roughly 50 times a range of doses, but the higher ones represented about 50 times the normal ambient exposure. And they were closely tracked for two months for all facets of the thyroid function. Now, those on the highest doses of bromide had a slight improvement in their T4 output, but there were no other changes anywhere else. And it wasn’t a dose-related response, so it probably wouldn’t be meaningful to say that bromide was helpful. But there was clearly no harm whatsoever to thyroid function, even in all those doses. And a funny thing too that I learned in researching this paper many years ago, bromide is now categorized as an essential element. We know that the body needs it for basement membrane formation in cellular junctions.   [00:46:28] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. I love holistic medicine and I think the biggest frustration for me is how much disinformation there is, but there’s disinformation in every facet of life. Go study theology and you will be absolutely bombarded with contradictions. Go study politics.   [00:46:56] Dr. Alan Christianson: I’ve gone down that same road. I thought I’m just going to throw in the towel. I’m done here. But you’re right, everywhere you look, you just got to do a good look wherever you are.   [00:47:03] Ashley James: Yeah. This is why I also try to focus on mindset when it comes to the idea of holistic health. The reason why I started this podcast five years ago, I was incredibly sick. I share my story in other past episodes. I was incredibly sick for many years. I mean, I never wanted to kill myself because I still find joy in life, but I was miserable. I was suffering. I often just burst into tears from the amount of pain I was in. I really feel like a prisoner of my own body. I really was suffering for so many years, and I’m so grateful that I have my husband who has been my absolute rock and my greatest supporter. We just celebrated our 13th anniversary and he’s phenomenal, such an amazing human being. So I suffered for so long, and it was actually because of my husband. We found this Naturopath. We found a lecture that he did online and then we started following his work, then we started following one of his mentors’ work, and then he and his mentor became my mentor for 10 years. And I followed this information, cleaned up my diet, took certain supplements, changed parts of my lifestyle, and I no longer have polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, and chronic monthly infections for which I used to be on antibiotics for constantly. And I also had digestive issues. And all this little stuff I was able to resolve with natural medicine and I became so passionate about it that then I was like I have to share this. I’ve learned so much from interviewing amazing doctors like yourself, and of course, I feel like I’m on a journey with my listeners. So they’re here having their own issues that they’re suffering with, and I want them to know that they can also heal, even if everyone in their life has told them that they’ll always have it, it’s genetic. I can’t tell you how many doctors told me I’d never have children—I’ve conceived naturally, and told me that I’d always have diabetes—my A1C is 4.7. This idea that doctors tell you you’ll always be sick, I mean, please throw that out the window. Don’t ever limit yourself because there is always a contradiction out there. The frustrating part about the misinformation, which misinformation is everywhere, not just in the holistic space. The idea of medical myths, they tend to live, we tend to let them have a life of their own. And then if we don’t keep our minds open enough, our mindset needs to be that we don’t grab on to dogma. That we don’t say, well, this diet is the one diet and everyone should be on it. This is not religion, right? Science is never settled, it’s always changing. We’re always learning new things.  So if we can keep our minds open enough and be humble enough to challenge our own belief systems, then we can finally allow to be okay with and hold the paradox of the idea of like the last episode was all about that we need more and more and more iodine, and this episode is like whoa, wait a sec. Let’s look at all the research and see that most people are getting too much. And really, we need to find out what our limit is and what our healthy levels are. And through your book, The Thyroid Reset Diet, we can learn how to adjust our diet to actually create the healthiest levels of iodine for us. With every interview, we’re learning more, but often interviews will contradict each other because myths are everywhere and we have to be open enough to take in the research and then make our own judgments, and also try it out for yourself. You have used your thyroid reset diet with your patients. I’d love for you to share what you see happen? So when you helped patients eat a healthy diet that limited or controlled the amount of iodine coming into their body, what kind of results did you see?   [00:51:27] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, at the time I was doing a lot of work managing those who were on long-term thyroid medication, and I was seeing more and more people to where they were outgrowing their medicine. It was too much for them and they were getting side effects. So it was a short-term problem, but it was a long-term win. We would keep weaning and adjusting and seeing them need less and less. So that was the main change, and it was a really exciting thing to see happen.   [00:51:53] Ashley James: So through this diet, people have been able to get off of thyroid meds?   [00:51:58] Dr. Alan Christianson: So there’s a pretty big study that was just finished after I completed the manuscript for this book. They took a large group of people, it was about 400, and they gave them very cursory information about avoiding extra iodine like just really, here are some supplements that have it. Here are some foods that are very rich in it, and they then checked the concept of deprescribing. Could they take away their thyroid medications? They were all on third medication.  What they saw is that over 80% of people, it’s actually 84%, who did these most basic things needed less medication. And within that group, 40% needed no medication, and they could retain perfect thyroid function and a symptom-free state without medication. And again, that was really basic one or two steps out of six or seven possible steps.   [00:52:46] Ashley James: I would be so happy if all my listeners, 80% of them could lower their meds and 40% could get off their meds in the next—what did it take? How many months?   [00:52:58] Dr. Alan Christianson: This particular time frame was six months for the study.   [00:53:01] Ashley James: I would love that. I’d love to see all my listeners so healthy that 100% of them didn’t need medication. But realistically, what a win. What a win for all the listeners because I know several women on thyroid meds that are just suffering from the side effects of it. They feel as though it’s a moving target. Oh, my doctor put me on this dose and now I feel miserable. I go back, my doctor does tests, then he puts me on this dose, and then I feel more miserable. It’s like they’re just experimenting on them.   [00:53:36] Dr. Alan Christianson: There’s an untenable belief that thyroid medication levels will stay stable for all people and that they should function as they would if their thyroid was providing those same hormones. And those things we know are just not true.   [00:53:49] Ashley James: That reminds me of a family member who got a pacemaker down in a country in South America. They happened to be traveling there at the time, they didn’t go there for this procedure. They were really miserable for about a year. Their hands and feet were turning blue. They were not looking healthy. We urged them to seek help, but you know with family members, they don’t listen to you, right? They’ll listen to a complete stranger but they won’t listen to you. One of their caretakers took their blood pressure and took their pulse and said, go to the ER right now, I’m very concerned. What they found out was that in South America, they set pacemakers to 40 beats a minute. Forty beats a minute. Like you mentioned, the way they set a drug, they expect your need for that drug to be constant. Just like they set a pacemaker, your need for heart rate isn’t constant. You walk up a flight of stairs, you want your heart rate to go up to 100 or 120. If your heart rate is always 40, you go up a flight of stairs you’re going to pass out. Your need has increased. Could you explain when someone’s need for thyroid increases? Is it when they’re doing physical activity or when they’re in stress in their life? What happens when we need more thyroid?   [00:55:19] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, our needs for thyroid don’t vary that much and that quickly, but there are other reasons why medications just don’t replace what we have as consistently. Our needs do fluctuate to some extent as the seasons change—hotter or colder ambient temperatures. Also with age, we probably need a bit less. And as our body size changes, we need to balance proportion to our body size.   [00:55:43] Ashley James: So it’s not as severe as the heart rate, but it is fluctuating.   [00:55:52] Dr. Alan Christianson: So there was a big survey done by the American Thyroid Association in 2018. They surveyed over 12,000 people who are active with conventional technologists, and they asked them, how well have your symptoms been managed? And less than 5% consider themselves very satisfied with their symptom management. And in fact, 30% had seen more than six doctors trying to improve their well-being. So yeah, the medications don’t work as well as your own thyroid hormones do. So the more you can make by yourself the better.   [00:56:23] Ashley James: This reminds me of an interview I did at least a year ago, if not more. It was with a man who had a very severe ADHD and when he got on Ritalin—now most people, when they get on Ritalin, are not comfortable with it. When he got on it he said he was the happiest person in the world. For the first time in his life, he could focus. He had extreme ADHD. He didn’t try changing his diet, supplements, or anything. He just went on medication and he said it was a miracle for him.  But then one day, he couldn’t remember his name, he felt as if he had had a stroke. He was very sluggish, he could hardly talk, he had complete amnesia. His wife took him into the ER and what they finally figured out was one of the possible side effects of that medication that he had been on is extreme hypothyroidism, which one of the symptoms is amnesia like the brain is just not functioning. And so he had to get off of the Ritalin, which he was so depressed about because he was actually finally getting a hold of his life. But then, luckily, he was motivated to look holistically, and now he uses supplements and diet to support his brain health and his thyroid health. But that’s so interesting, this idea that someone could be on a medication that ends up messing with their thyroid. You had mentioned that certain medications have halogens in them. Beyond the fact that we should control our diet to know how much iodine is coming in, are there medications that we should be aware of that can really mess with our thyroid?   [00:58:10] Dr. Alan Christianson: There is a fair number. I do delineate those in the book. Some examples, not the most commonly used, but one of the most severe in its effects is one called amiodarone. And it’s pretty shocking the harm from amiodarone can occur even six or nine months after someone has stopped taking it. It can last in the body for that long. It’s a high concentration of iodine used to regulate the heart rhythm. It can cause blindness, kidney damage, death, thyroid disease, almost everything you can think of. And they’ve even tried to see how much of it is the drug by itself and how much of it is the iodine that’s a problem.  There’s a different version called dronedarone, which is quite similar to the absence of iodine, and it has a completely different, much milder side effect profile. That’s one of the more dramatic culprits, but there are many things. If one’s on prescription medications, it’s good to be aware of possible iodine exposure if they have thyroid disease.   [00:59:08] Ashley James: So there’s been talk of breast cancer being caused by bromine excess, for example, and the use of iodine to detox that from the breast tissue or using iodine as a supplement to support the body in fighting cancer. What are your thoughts or what is the research that you’ve seen in terms of iodine and breast cancer?   [00:59:39] Dr. Alan Christianson: So one thing I’d like to do a quick high-level answer first is that I’d really encourage listeners when they face medical controversies, to evaluate the type of data they’re comparing. A lot of data is hypothesis. Women in Japan have less breast cancer, they consume more iodine, therefore iodine must be helpful. So that’s a hypothesis, and that’s based upon a mechanism. Now the other kind of data is like a real-world outcome. Well, what do we see of women in Japan, how does their iodine intake compare to their breast cancer risk? Or what do we see for breast cancer risk for women when we look at their iodine content? So when we see outcome data, what actually happens to people in the real world, that always is given more weight than a hypothesis. A hypothesis is plausible and it’s worth looking at more closely, but whenever a hypothesis and an outcome contradict, we ignore the hypothesis because we can make hypotheses about anything we want. That’s like looking at clouds in the sky. We can see patterns. Our minds are very good at that. So now, to answer your question, that’s how that hypothesis came about was Japanese women. And what we now know is that there’s a spectrum of NIS expression in breast tissue. I mentioned earlier that it’s done for lactation to get some iodine in the breast milk. So lactating breast tissue has a bit of NIS expression. Non-lactating breast tissue, the receptor is present but it’s not active, it’s dormant. So the continuum goes from normal to lactating. Then the next step is fibroadenomatosis. It used to be called fibrocystic breast disease. We now know that’s an overexpression of the sodium iodide symporter. The sodium pulls in more fluid, and there’s fluid retention, there’s pain, there’s engorgement. The highest expression of NIS shows up in breast cancer. And we know that there’s some correlation between the free radical damage of extra iodine in the tissues and the gene damage that gives rise to cancerous growth. Now, we’ve even seen this in Japanese women.  So when you take Japanese women, and you compare those without breast cancer and those with breast cancer, and you look at their iodine status, it turns out that those with breast cancer are the ones that are exposed to the most iodine. And this has been shown in other cultures as well. Some have even argued that you could use some of the iodine urine tests, they’re not good gauges for the nutritional status of iodine and they’re not good markers of thyroid function, but they may be predictors of breast cancer because it’s been shown in other areas that the more iodine women are excreting in their urine, the more they are at risk for breast cancer.   [01:02:18] Ashley James: Can you explain why? Is it because it’s then showing that they’ve been consuming it? I’m not understanding because if they’re excreting it in their urine then it’s not collecting in the breast.   [01:02:32] Dr. Alan Christianson: There’s some relationship between urinary excretion and what’s present in the breast tissue when that NIS protein is pathologically overexpressed. So it seems that part of the mechanism of some types of breast cancer is that that iodine transporter is overexpressed. It’s pulling in too much iodine, it’s causing free radical damage, and that’s part of the gene changes that can be early along in breast cancer formation.  There’s even been some research as to whether or not iodine can be used to tag radiotherapy. So radioactive iodine is used for thyroid disease, but there’s talk about using that for breast cancer as well because the cancerous breast tissue selectively takes up iodine more so than healthy breast tissue does.   [01:03:15] Ashley James: Oh my. But that wouldn’t help though. I mean, okay, now we know where the cancer is. Would that be feeding or stimulating the cancer to grow?   [01:03:28] Dr. Alan Christianson: That’s the hypothesis. If it were just iodine, but if it were radioactive iodine, then as the cancer takes that up it’s like a trojan—worse.   [01:03:36] Ashley James: Got it. Okay, I’m sorry. I thought you meant radioactive in that we’re using it for an MRI or something. Now I get it. Using it to uptake like they do with insulin and glucose. They’ll inject insulin so that people’s blood sugar drops and then they’ll attach the—   [01:03:58] Dr. Alan Christianson: In this case, radioactive iodine is given for ablating or for destroying unwanted thyroid tissue. So if someone has Graves’ disease and you want to get rid of their thyroid, one method is to give iodine that’s radioactive. And so, a lot of that iodine ends up in the thyroid and that radiation stays localized. I’m not endorsing that as the answer to Graves’ disease, please hear me. So the same process is talked about as being a possible treatment for breast cancer because breast cancer cells also selectively take up iodine.   [01:04:28] Ashley James: You mentioned Graves’ disease and not following the conventional allopathic let’s just burn it out with radiation as a recommended approach. What is your recommended holistic approach to resolving thyroid issues? So we have Graves’ disease, we have Hashimoto’s, but you also talk about in your book hyperthyroid and hypothyroid, both being benefited by the same diet.   [01:05:04] Dr. Alan Christianson: We got good data on that. In one of the more dramatic studies, they took a group of people that were pretty severely hypothyroid. I know you know this, a lot of listeners probably haven’t heard this, but one of the ways we gauge thyroid output is by looking at how much the body is asking the thyroid to work, and that’s the TSH. The higher the TSH is the more the body is asking the thyroid to work. It’s not the only thyroid test that matters. I won’t go into that right now, but proportionately, the further the TSH gets above 2 or 2 1/2, the more the thyroid is slowing. If it’s above 4 1/2, it’s blatantly abnormal. So in this study, these people had TSH scores that averaged 14.1, they were severely hypothyroid. And they had been pretty steady for about four years in that state, so it wasn’t a recent thing. Many in the group had TSH scores between 100 and 200, so it was a big deal. And there was one sole intervention done. They were not given medication. They were not told to eat a healthy diet or anything else that probably might have been useful as well. They were only counseled to regulate their iodine intake now. Afterward, they followed up with people to see how well they performed, and a certain number didn’t quite understand the instructions, didn’t comply. We’re people, it happens, we’ll come back to that. But some of them did follow things quite well. And what they saw is that the whole group, for starters, ignoring who did what they’re supposed to and who didn’t. The group as a whole, 78.3% of people were at perfectly normal thyroid function. So TSH average score is under 3 in this context. Within two months, they did nothing else but lower iodine, 70.3%. You know those silly infomercials, but wait, it gets better?   [01:06:58] Ashley James: Yeah.   [01:07:00] Dr. Alan Christianson: But wait, it gets better. The remaining people, the 21.7% if I’m right. The 20-ish% that didn’t get better, so one big chunk of them were the ones that didn’t follow the instructions for whatever reason, no judgment. You got to play to win the lottery, and it’s true for a lot of things. They didn’t play, so we’ll put them aside. Of the other people who did lower their iodine, there were now two remaining groups, and one group were those whose scores were so insanely high going into it that they were actually improving a lot, but they weren’t yet better. So their scores might have gone from 200 down to 20 or something. So they weren’t normal. They didn’t get in that 78% of those who are totally better, but they were sure heading that way. And now the final group is those who did do everything just right, but their scores failed to improve at all. That was about 3% of the participants. So, 97% of people, again, some of them didn’t follow along so we don’t know, but of those who did, people got better, they got darn close to it 97% of the time.   [01:08:09] Ashley James: I want to take that 3%, have them work with you and figure out what’s going on. What’s going on? That’d be really interesting.   [01:08:18] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, I’m pretty happy about the 97%   [01:08:20] Ashley James: I’m really happy about the 97%. I mean, ideally that those who get your book have a 97% chance of having a healthy thyroid.   [01:08:31] Dr. Alan Christianson: So those numbers apply to those who are not yet on medication, and the numbers we have for those on medication that were the earlier 84% and 40%. However, those numbers were with very cursory recommendations. I think people could do better with more thorough regulation.   [01:08:47] Ashley James: I’m a health coach. I’m not a Naturopathic physician. I always refer my clients to become patients of good Naturopaths like yourself who are really well researched and in a very caring way help people to balance their diet and supplement intake. But when I work with clients to support them in achieving their health goals, oftentimes they’re on medication because I believe it’s over 70% of the adult population in the United States is on at least one medication, which blows my mind. When you see the world through my eyes and you see what I’ve seen, true health is not having any symptoms. True health is your body being in a beautiful state that you don’t need meds. There’s always a caveat like someone with type 1 diabetes. My grandmother was one of the first in the world to receive insulin. She was in Toronto, she was dying, she was in the hospital 11 years old or something. She was young and she was one of the first children to receive it, and she lived to be 77 years old, only having amputated a thumb from gangrene. Back then, it was very hard to regulate the body. They had very rudimentary testing for blood sugar, and she showed me how she ate, which is really cool because, to this day, people are finally rediscovering how to eat healthy.  She ate pounds of vegetables and steamed them, and then she would eat the vegetables. She would let the water cool and she’d drink the water because she didn’t want to lose one drop of minerals or nutrients. Anyway, I just watched her and saw how healthy she was in the face of type 1 diabetes. So, there is always an exception to the rule where we would want someone with type 1 diabetes to be on medication. But for those who are so sick that they get on medication, medication isn’t healing the body. We want to get to the point we’re so healthy we don’t need it for chronic illness. That’s why something like The Thyroid Reset Diet Book is such a good resource because we want to support someone to get off meds. So when I’m working with a client, let’s say for blood sugar, and I say to them, you’re going to want to go back to your doctor. Go to a doctor, go to a Naturopath, and get tested because if they’re on a bunch of meds like metformin, insulin, and everything, they start eating the way that helps create insulin sensitivity and balances blood sugar. Now all these drugs are going to drive them down too low.  Same with blood pressure. I’ve had clients who stand up and they’re passing out because two weeks into eating a super healthy diet, and now their blood pressure meds are actually pushing them too low. I say you’re going to have to go back to either your prescribing doctor. Go to a doctor that actually believes that you can get so healthy you don’t need meds, let’s start with that. You’re really going to want to make sure that you and them are on top of watching yourself through this diet. You get so healthy that they lower or take you off of meds.  If your doctor is skeptical about taking you off of meds or lowering meds, I really suggest you find one that has the mindset that you can get so healthy, you don’t need medication. Because it’s that kind of doctor that actually looks at research, instead of the medical dogma that they’ve been taught through medical school. So your book, The Thyroid Reset Diet, and through all of your research, when people who are on medication either for hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, Hashimoto’s, or Graves’. Let’s say the first three months of them being on your diet, what steps should they take? Should they go to their doctor right away and say, hey, by the way, I’m doing this diet? What should they do? What tests should they take? What should they be looking for? When should they go to a doctor and say, I need to lower my meds. I’m correcting myself and I’m afraid these medications are going to now push me too far in the wrong direction.   [01:13:11] Dr. Alan Christianson: They’ll need a good relationship with a doctor who supports them in that journey. I see many blogs that talk about all the thyroid tests to ask for and other things to do. But ultimately, someone’s going to have to help interpret those tests and modify the medications. You need a doctor not just as a rubber stamp to provide those things, but to give some guidance and input. So yeah, you need a trusted partner. And in a perfect world, yeah you could let them know before you even start. But at a minimum, at least the first month into it, you should retest. The doctors will always have their own tests. They’ll run at least a TSH and their free hormones, but you should retest and see if your needs change. Sometimes, you’ll see that obviously by symptoms even sooner, but you won’t always see it by symptoms of too much. In many cases, the blood levels can show up before the symptoms do, and that’s great. Then you can make adjustments that are early and give your thyroid the best chance to recover. The drawback is that if you do need less and you’re not aware of it, the extra is harmful, but also, it makes your thyroid less able to heal and recover.   [01:14:21 ] Ashley James: Can you elaborate on that?   [01:14:23] Dr. Alan Christianson: For sure. The feedback that tells the thyroid to work is that thyroid-stimulating hormone. And if your medications are more than you need, your body doesn’t know where the extra is coming from and it assumes that it’s its own fault, so your body stops stimulating your thyroid and you lower the TSH. Now below some threshold, there may not be enough TSH just to sustain your thyroid. So you need some TSH to keep your thyroid working and give it a chance to grow and recover. So if your thyroid starts to get stronger but your medications are not adjusted, it bumps up against the ceiling to where the TSH goes down. And even though your thyroid could work better, it won’t because your body won’t allow it to.   [01:15:08] Ashley James: It’s so important to work with a doctor that would lower the medication. Now, what is worse, being on slightly too much, or being on slightly too little? Is it safer to be on a lower dose?   [01:15:24] Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, this is one of those things whether it’s worse to get slapped or punched. So, neither one is good. The too much has more short-term medical complications. But it doesn’t always cause symptoms. Some people are more prone to symptoms than others, and some get them at an earlier stage, but the complications are still there. Too little can be rife with symptoms for sure, but there are fewer medical complications in the short term. There are many longer-term medical complications of too little. So yeah, so both are not too good, both may or may not make you feel well. Too much have a greater short-term risk for harm than too little can.   [01:16:09] Ashley James: Are there other minerals that are supportive of the thyroid like selenium that we should make sure that we incorporate in our diet?   [01:16:16] Dr. Alan Christianson: Yeah, and big picture concept, it’s not so much that—back to more again—more is better. It’s more so that none is bound. So your body has a certain amount of buffering that it can do for iodine. We never get the perfect amount of anything. We’ve got all these ways that we buffer our body chemistry from moment to moment. And so too with iodine. Again, our upper limit can vary, so how much we tolerate can be different. Now, if someone’s low in selenium, whatever their iodine ranges will be just incrementally narrower and will have that much harder of a time buffering the fluctuations of iodine.   [01:16:57] Ashley James: Yeah, and that’s something that really fascinated me when we talked about in our last interview that the selenium, making sure that there’s an adequate amount. Selenium is that protector. If you have too much or too little iodine, the thyroid doesn’t overreact. So it does create that buffer, especially while you’re doing something like The Thyroid Reset Diet and really becoming more conscious of how much iodine is in your diet so that you can get to those healthy levels. Again, not saying we’re eating less iodine, but we’re eating the right range, right? So looking at the diet to get ourselves into the right range to support thyroid health. That something like selenium would then support the thyroid in not fluctuating, jumping too high or too low. That’s something we don’t want. We don’t want the thyroid to get overstimulated or understimulated. We want it to be in a nice healthy range. Are there any other foods or nutrients that are really good specifically for the thyroid? I mean I can think of antioxidants that are super awesome because they decrease inflammation. But is there anything specific to the thyroid that we should definitely make sure we’re consuming?   [01:18:16] Dr. Alan Christianson: You know, really, all nutrients have some play in things, and I think about it more as a matter of not so much that adding above some threshold is helpful, but a lack is bad. So you don’t want to be lacking any key nutrients. Some of the big ones that come up are going to zinc, iron, or vitamin A. But any nutrient you talk about, our body’s chemistry is so connected that it can all come back and have some relevance. So I do encourage iodine-free multivitamins for people at reasonable quantities. I do encourage a broad range of healthy foods from as many food categories as possible.   [01:18:52] Ashley James: You had mentioned TSH, for example, the thyroid-stimulating hormone and just these examples of when it’s too high or too low. What about going back to looking at the hypothalamus or pituitary? Is that ever a concern supporting the hypothalamus and pituitary in terms of thyroid health, or really, the biggest thing we can do is control iodine intake?   [01:19:23] Dr. Alan Christianson: The biggest thing we can do is control iodine. So we talk about three broad categories of thyroid disease: primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary means the thyroid is not working because it’s not working. Secondary means the thyroid is not working because the pituitary is not telling it to work. And then tertiary means the thyroid is not working because the hypothalamus is not telling the pituitary to tell the thyroid to work. So, secondary disease happens a few times per 100,000. That’s pituitary disease, but it’s not limited to thyroid function, and it’s rarely subtle. I see many examples where people are told they have pituitary problems, but they really don’t. I’m sorry. They can occur, but it’s a common thing to be told in natural medicine that it’s a problem when it probably isn’t. And then tertiary disease or the hypothalamus is failing, that happens a few times per year across the globe so it’s extremely rare. So by and large, the main thing is primary disease, and the main controllable factor is Iodine intake.   [01:20:23] Ashley James: Very interesting. Now you haven’t mentioned free T3 and free T4, and that’s something that a lot of Naturopathic physicians like to test as well. Could you touch on that?   [01:20:37] Dr. Alan Christianson: I sure can. So, we look at the amount of hormone the thyroid secretes, and that’s the two that are measurable, and they’re essential, the body needs them. They’re a little different and they’re often misinterpreted because they’re regulated after they’re released. So what we see in the bloodstream is not so much with the thyroid made, it’s more so what the body adjusted. So many look at that and think, oh, the person has too much, too little, and they won’t look at the TSH. So the TSH does reflect what the body is asking the thyroid to do. The T3 and the T4, they only reflect that when you’re at the most extreme highs or deficiencies. In most cases, when you’re reading them, you’re really reading how the body adjusted those after they were already released. So some talk about how they should be on the high side of normal, that’s not what we see in healthy people. There’s actually a lot of data for T3 saying that those who are consistently high normal are more apt to be obese and diabetic. So yeah, they’re relevant, but they take a bit more depth of understanding as well.   [01:21:42] Ashley James: So when someone is going to an endocrinologist or a holistic physician, they want them to test TSH, but also test T3 and T4, especially if they have an understanding of what the body needs versus what it’s using?   [01:22:00] Dr. Alan Christianson: Correct.   [01:22:02] Ashley James: And in terms of the drugs, there’s this idea that there are healthier thyroid drugs and other thyroid drugs that are less healthy or less effective, or that there are these natural versions where you can get basically a thyroid from a pig. What’s your take on that? Is there a thyroid drug that you would say no one should be on because this has the most side effects, that there’s a better version? What’s the best drug to be on if someone had to be on a drug?   [01:22:38] Dr. Alan Christianson: Yeah, real quick. So we’ve got synthetic versions of T3 and T4, we’ve got natural desiccated thyroid, which is the pig thyroid you alluded to, and then there’s nonprescription cow thyroid. Now the last one I don’t recommend for a lot of safety reasons and stability reasons, so just not good across the board. The synthetics T4 only therapy, the synthetic type, it’s actually the same as what the body makes, and a lot of folks do well on that. It does work for many. For many, they don’t respond as well. They don’t get full control of their symptoms. So, that can work, but it often does not. T3 only is not recommended because the body also needs T4. And then natural thyroid, that big survey that I mentioned, it did show that of those who are taking natural thyroid, a higher percent did experience better management of symptoms than those on just the synthetics. So yeah, natural thyroid can be a viable option. And there really is a groundswell of support that’s burgeoning in the conventional community to give people more options. It’s starting to happen and there are more doctors being aware of that. But yeah, people should have multiple options, and sometimes, it is just a matter of adjusting the medication to help. But again, I think at the higher level of if the body can work by itself again, that’s the best outcome.   [01:23:58] Ashley James: That’s what we want. We want everyone listening to get so healthy they don’t need medication anymore, and always find a doctor who also wants to support you in that. I really recommend your book, Thyroid Reset Diet for anyone who has thyroid issues, especially those on thyroid medications. Now, obviously, if someone has had their thyroid removed that’s a different conversation. They would need to be on medication, right? And hopefully, they work with a really good endocrinologist or more holistic-minded doctor to balance that. But those who are having thyroid problems, what I like about your book is you have quizzes in it, you give a diet that’s really very comprehensive, and an easy way for people to figure out exactly what ranges they need to adjust for their diet. Listeners can go to drchristianson.com, and of course, everything that Dr. Christianson does is going to be the show notes for today’s podcast including the link to his book at learntruehealth.com. It has been such a pleasure having you on the show today. Thank you so much for coming in and diving into this topic, which is riddled with controversy. So many medical myths.   [01:25:10] Dr. Alan Christianson: It’s been a blast, Ashley. I always enjoy talking with you. You’re crazy smart. We get to go into greater detail about things, and you’re doing a huge service for your listeners. So yeah, I’m really honored to spend time with you again.   [01:25:19] Ashley James: Thank you and thank you so much for coming on the show, and please, come back and let’s talk about your Adrenal Reset Diet because that’s another really fascinating book that I’m sure anyone who has had adrenal issues or has energy—if you’re getting up in the morning and you need coffee throughout the day or you need sugar throughout the day, then you probably need The Adrenal Reset Diet. So I’d love to have you back and we could talk about that. Thank you so much for coming on the show.   [01:25:44] Dr. Alan Christianson: That’d be a blast. Thanks again, Ashley.   [01:25:47] Ashley James: Wasn’t that an amazing interview with Dr. Alan Christianson? You know, I could have had him on the show for another hour and we could have dived into even more information about the diet, but unfortunately, he was crammed just back to back with interviews and he had to go. But he was so generous with his time and I really enjoyed having him on the show. I definitely recommend getting the book. Of course, you can go to the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com or the show notes within whatever podcast app you’re listening from and click the links there to be able to get to past episodes with Dr. Alan Christianson that I’ve done with him, and also to the book to get The Thyroid Reset Diet. Just like I shared with my experience with his book, you’ll get one copy and then you’ll start reading it and everyone that sees it—just go read it in public. People will be like, hey, I have thyroid problems, what’s that all about? Tell me about it. Can I borrow your book? It’s really funny. And it’s also a great gift to give to a loved one who you know has been struggling with thyroid issues because the book is so easy to read, so down to earth, and provides just fantastic science in a way that’s easy to comprehend. So I hope you enjoy the book. And please, join the Facebook group, Learn True Health Facebook group and share your experiences with his diet, with his recommendations. I’d love to start a conversation around that for us to all learn from each other. Now, if you have been thinking about getting a Sunlighten Sauna, now’s a really great time because they have a fantastic discount going on right now. Make sure you mention the Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James so that you get the discount that they give us. And if you do have a Sunlighten and you have been enjoying it, come to the Facebook group and share your experience. I just absolutely love it and I know that I know that so many of our listeners, and actually several of my clients, share that they absolutely love their sauna. One of my dear, dear friends has used infrared sauna therapy to heal her. She had Epstein Barr Virus for many, many years. She incorporated so much holistic medicine, but she noticed that was one of the things that really moved the needle for her in terms of boosting her immune system and making it so that she felt amazing throughout the day. Anytime she feels like she’s dragging, she’ll jump in the sauna, and then a half an hour later, she’ll just feel like a million bucks. That’s been my experience with the sauna is that whenever I feel down or depressed or I feel sluggish, getting in that sauna, half an hour later, I feel absolutely amazing, the endorphins are going. It’s a good addiction. It’s a really good feeling, so trade in the drugs and alcohol for a sauna, that’s all I have to say. And check out Sunlighten because they are, in my opinion, the best sauna company on the market. They offer the full spectrum, the near and far infrared, very, very, very non-toxic and low EMF, which is ideal for what we want. Plus the company is in the United States, and they have fantastic customer service. I had an issue with one part. I stepped on the sauna, I broke a piece, and they immediately, without question, they’re like hey what piece broke? Because I stepped on a corner really hard. And they’re like, okay, and then they sent it off right away and they replaced it immediately. I thought that was really cool. And then another time I had a problem updating that tablet, I called them, and they helped me right away. I’ve been really, really happy with the customer service there. And that’s why I feel comfortable sharing Sunlighten Sauna with you because you are looking to gain the best health possible. You’re learning about how you can achieve true health, and I know that sauna therapy is a proven way that you can add something to your life every day or every other day to see better results. So there are lifestyle things that we can change. There’s diet, there’s supplements, and there’s lifestyle, and this would fall under the lifestyle category. Why not use the latest technology to support your body’s ability to heal itself? It makes so much sense. You can also listen to my past in interviews with experts. I have cardiologists on the show swearing that Sunlighten is amazing as well as other doctors. So yeah, you can search sauna or you can search Sunlighten by going to learntruehealth.com and listening to those doctors talk about their love of not only sauna therapy but specifically the Sunlighten Company. And make sure you mention Learn True Health with Ashley James so that you get the greatest discount. I want to make sure that you get that special treatment and the discount when they know that I’m the one telling you guys to go check them out because Connie Zack was on the show. She’s the founder, and I really think she’s awesome. And if any of my listeners have any problems with Sunlighten, please make sure that you give me a message. You can just message me, email me at ashley@learntruehealth.com, or you can go to the Learn True Health Group and just let me know if you’ve any problems at all. I will personally contact the owner and the managers there and make sure that it’s all smoothed out.  But I’ve had hundreds of listeners buy saunas from them after our interview, and I’ve only had one out of hundreds that had a miscommunication with one of their staff. I jumped in and then it was immediately resolved right away. It was just a misunderstanding, miscommunication. It was totally resolved. So I’m really happy that they have maintained such high standards. That’s how I want it for all of you guys. Awesome. Well, I’m so glad you enjoyed today’s interview. Please share this with those who care about, especially those you know who have thyroid problems, and have a fantastic rest of your day.   Get Connected With Dr. Alan Christianson! Official Website Facebook Instagram Pinterest YouTube Thyroid Self-Exam Books by Dr. Alan Christianson The Thyroid Reset ; Adrenal Reset Diet Metabolism Reset Diet Check out other episodes with Dr. Alan Christianson! Episode 307 – Metabolism Reset Diet Episode 324 – Heal Your Thyroid Holistically