Learn True Health with Ashley James

Join the Learn True Health Facebook Group: LearnTrueHealth.com/group BOOKS: Proof of Heaven: https://amzn.to/3JHSELt The Map of Heaven: https://amzn.to/3vjNQ9V Living in a Mindful Universe: https://amzn.to/3JK2Kvt   FREE online course in mindfulness is available to all at this link: http://ebenalexander.com/33days    FREE meditation is available on the Sacred Acoustics website: https://www.sacredacoustics.com/pages/free-download-sign-up   Proof of Heaven: Neurosurgeon Shares His Journey into the After Life, Dr. Eben Alexander https://www.learntruehealth.com/proof-of-heaven-neurosurgeon-shares-his-journey-into-the-after-life-dr-eben-alexander   Highlights Understanding Gateway Valley on Dr. Eben’s life What is Earthworm’s eye view Interpretation of Near-Death Experience (NDE) and Shared Death Experience What is the Coherence Technique of HeartMath Institute What is Binaural Beat   NDE or near-death experience, for some people, is an uncomfortable topic to listen to or understand. Some testify to it being able to experience it first hand themselves, and our guests for today, Dr. Eben Alexander and Karen Newell, will be sharing some more insights about NDE, as well as with The Mysteries of Consciousness, Death, Eternal Nature of the Soul, Afterlife, Heaven itself on their personal perspective. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. If you listen to the last episode with Dr. William Davis, Episode 476, we talked about a very specific strain of really healthy bacteria for the gut, Lactobacillus reuteri, and its many benefits. He shares how to culture it that you can get all the benefits, including a natural antidepressant, and helps even people with lifelong insomnia. He had shared that his sleep problems are lifelong sleep problems recovered after starting to eat the Lactobacillus reuteri. A yogurt that takes 36 hours at 100 degrees to culture and he uses cow dairy. Because my whole family is allergic to cow dairy, and we’re dairy-free. I’ve been experimenting with the different methods of using it. I made the most delicious batch and best batch yet. I was so excited that I wrote out the recipe and put it in the Facebook group. The Learn True Health Facebook group has the non-dairy recipe for making the Lactobacillus reuteri, which an antidepressant. It helps with sleep, increases joy, and stabilizes mood. It helped me tremendously, and I suffered from post-traumatic stress attacks in the last few months. Since eating the lactobacillus reuteri, I learned from Dr. William Davis and it all has in his book. You can listen to the last episode to get that information. I want to tell you if you’re dairy-free and you’ve wanted to try his lactobacillus reuteri recipe, I’ve found a way to make it so delicious. I’ve tried with soy and it tastes really bad but it worked. I got all the benefits from it, but it didn’t taste great. Then I made it with coconut, which also did not taste great. I didn’t even want to eat it, but it still worked. Then I tried to make water kefir which was unsuccessful, and I’m going to look into what I can do to see and I still want to try to make a drink out of it. Then I made it with organic raw cashews, and it was successful. So I laid out everything I did and put it in the Facebook group. Come and join the Learn True Health Facebook group. If you can’t find the post, just use the search function in the Facebook group and search for yogurt or the word cashew or Lactobacillus reuteri and you’ll find it there. I hope you enjoyed today’s interview. It’s a bit different. Sometimes we do episodes that aren’t about physical health. We’ve done episodes about addiction, mental health, and emotional health and occasionally, we also cover spiritual health. I think it’s really important to have this attitude of no stone left unturned. Keep our minds so open that our brains would fall out. That was one of my favorite sayings. I learned about 14 years ago from a man I was listening to his podcast. He would cover topics so far out there, even for me. It helped me realize when we expand our minds and get into the learning state. Being open to what we don’t know that doesn’t invalidate our belief system, like I’m learning different spiritual beliefs, wouldn’t make me less Christian. I still have very strong rooted beliefs in my spiritual practices, but understanding other people and other systems help me better understand the world. If we can gain a deeper foothold into our health by taking in new information and seeing the world through other eyes, that is a positive thing. In today’s interview, we have a neurosurgeon who has documented a near-death experience. His brain was so sick that it could not have been performing the hallucinations or the visions that he was having. He had a one in a billion chance of surviving. He was so incredibly sick. All the doctors were amazed when he came back to life when his 10-year-old son was standing there begging him to come back to life and then he did. After seven days of being in a coma, his brain was absolutely beyond damaged. So the doctors were saying– well, okay, pull the plug, let’s let him go, that would be a humane thing to do. He shares his story and his adventures since where he has been studying near-death experiences and sees that there are millions, in fact, documented near-death experiences that all have very similar qualities. So we can take that and look at our own lives and how we’re living our own life now. I think this is a positive message for humanity. In today’s interview, if you don’t have any spiritual beliefs, it’s going to be beautiful. It won’t challenge anything, but for those who are strongly rooted in certain religions, it might not align with your religion, and that’s okay, too. This episode isn’t meant to change anyone’s beliefs about their religion. It complements because what it shows us, God is love. The infinite source of creation is there with a love that has been the documented experience of millions of people who’ve had near-death experiences, which is fascinating. We explore this topic. We also explore tools that can help people who are in anxiety and depression, feeling disconnected, and feel they’ve lost their purpose. Please share this episode with those who would benefit from being uplifted. At the beginning of the interview, I shared that yesterday was the anniversary of my daughter’s birth and death. Last year, I faced that question– where’s my daughter? What happens to us when we pass and a close family member of mine is in their final moments of life right now? We’ve been facing hospice care for the last few months, helping with that. My husband’s been doing hospice care. Looking at our family and our life from that lens, this time on Earth is short. I hope that everyone listening comes away after listening to this interview feeling uplifted and feeling inspired to live the best life. No matter how long or short it is, leave a positive impact on the world, know that you’re loved, and focus on gratitude.   [00:07:45] Ashley James:  Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 477. I am so excited for today’s guests. We have on the show two amazing people, Dr. Eben Alexander and Karen Newell. This is perfect in divine timing. As far as I’m concerned, this is the feedback I got after doing this podcast for six years now. The feedback I get from my listeners is that I’ve been searching for this information. I just looked in the last week and then boom– your podcast came up or I was having this problem with my child and the next episode that came out was the answer to my problem. Many times there’s this divine timing, although I typically have about ten or so interviews in the hopper to edit and publish. I feel guided when and what to publish. It’s like I’m told– okay, now’s the time for this topic that needs to be learned. Everyone needs to hear about this next topic. Its divine timing can be for the listeners, but sometimes the divine timing is for me too, because interviews will happen in my life right as I need them. I can’t tell you how many times this happened to me and where it was the problem I was going through. It just so happened that the interview was scheduled for the right time. A very close family member of mine is in the final hours of their life right now. He’s been in hospice care for months and to have this interview be today even though we had to reschedule it, who was rescheduled to be at this moment. Where we’re all questioning what happens after we die? When we’re stuck with this realization, we’re not going to be here forever, which is motivating to live your life to the fullest now and do the best work we can while we’re here in this earthly realm. So what happens after we die? Do we just decompose? Is that it, or is there more? What I love, our guests today have so much to share in this realm. The other piece of the divine timing for me in this particular interview was yesterday. I celebrated with my family the birth and death of my daughter. It was our first anniversary. This whole last year, I’ve been faced with grief and death and thinking about where we go when we die. Where’s my daughter? She’s not here. Where is she? Is there an afterlife? I’ve always had the knowledge of believing I was raised and I was Christian. I’ve had a very strong feeling that I’ve felt the presence of God with me. But not everyone hasn’t had that experience in their life. To come from a scientific standpoint and in scientific observation, it’s very helpful to get a different perspective. I think today it’s going to be really exciting for everyone and this is something that we all have two things in common. We’re all born and we’re all going to die. That’s like if we can just sit around and go. It doesn’t matter where we were born, who we were born to. We all have these two things in common. There are a few more things in common like we all need to breathe and drink water. We start to see that we have a lot of common ground, but the fact is, we’re all faced with this sense of our own mortality and questions about what happens to the afterlife. Welcome to the show, guys. I’m really excited to have you here today.   [00:11:45] Dr. Eben Alexander: Ashley, thank you so much for having us on. It’s great to be here.   [00:11:49] Karen Newell: Yes. I’m looking forward to this conversation.   [00:11:51] Ashley James: Absolutely. Dr. Alexander, your first book, I believe, was Proof of Heaven, then you wrote the Map of Heaven and Living in a Mindful Universe, of course with Karen. Could you both share what happened and what led you to this point you were authoring these books? I know there are some pretty big stories you have to share.   [00:12:23] Dr. Eben Alexander: Well, of course, it all started with the experience I had back in November of 2008. At that time, I was a 54-year-old neurosurgeon. I’d spent 15 years teaching neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School thought I had some idea of how the brain, mind, and consciousness work. Then I had this extraordinary experience. It was one that absolutely should have killed me, severe gram-negative bacteria, meningoencephalitis. So I go into all the medical details in the book, Proof of Heaven. Luckily, there’s also a medical case report published ten years after my coma by three doctors not involved in my care. Who went a lot further than I did in assessing my medical records, analyzing them, and making two major conclusions. One is that my brain was documented to be way too ill to have supported any dream or hallucination that was not possible given the extent of my illness. The other thing was that I spent a week in a coma due to this severe and very rare and adults of bacterium, Indigo encephalitis. My doctors had estimated early in the week, and I had a 10% chance of survival. By the end of the week, only a 2% chance with no chance of recovery. That’s why on that Sunday morning, day seven of coma, they recommended just stopping the antibiotics and letting nature take its course. But, of course, that’s when I came back to this world. But the point that the case report doctors were making is that my recovery was miraculous. The medical peer reviewers at the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases published it. The case report in September 2018 challenged the doctors who wrote it and said, how do you explain this? This case is absurd. This kind of patient doesn’t end up making a full recovery. That’s when they said, well, because he had a near-death experience, he was gifted with this miraculous recovery. And the peer-reviewing medical scientists said, okay, that’s good enough for us, and they published it. The reason why the doctors who wrote the case report knew of other cases, for example, Anita Moorjani, who had advanced stage four lymphoma, a profound near-death experience, and then she came back from all that and cured cancer. Likewise, Mary C. Neal, an orthopedic surgeon, had an over 30-minute warm water drowning and then recovered from that completely. So anyway, that’s the main point for all of us because in Learning True Health, truly, the power of this kind of mind over matter healing here even goes far beyond the placebo effect is something available to all of us. And that’s one of the main reasons I’ve shared my story.   [00:15:07] Ashley James: That’s so beautiful. We now understand your background. Karen, where do you come into play with all this?   [00:15:16] Karen Newell: Well, I met Eben about three years after his coma and this is before any of his books had come out. We were at a workshop learning how to use sound to get into expanded states of consciousness and I heard that he had a near-death experience. I’ve met others who’d had near-death experiences. Just to start a conversation, since I didn’t know his story, I went right to the heart of the matter. I said, what was the big lesson you learned? What was the big thing you came back with? Because near-death experiencers always come back with some usually deep personal lesson. He looked at me and said that the brain doesn’t create consciousness, and I was confused. I said, well, why would anyone think that it does. When we met, Eben came from this very materialist background where he thought it was birth to death and nothing more. So the physical world is all that exists, and everything else is just an illusion. I was coming from the opposite like you described when I was young. I just had this knowing many of us do, and we have this knowing that we’ve been here before. This isn’t just the beginning, and we may come back again. Certainly, this idea of a soul to me was very certain in my mind, and it wasn’t through any specific religious teachings. Although, like you, I was raised Christian, it just came from my own kind of inner understanding. When Eben said the brain doesn’t create consciousness, I never thought the brain created consciousness. I thought that consciousness was what we are, or a soul consciousness, energy, spirit. That’s where we realized we were coming from opposite ends of the spectrum and Eben had just learned this profound lesson through his direct personal experience. That’s what intrigued him and I was taken aback when he said the most profound lesson he learned had to do with science. To him, this evidence could end the entire worldview belief system of reductive materialism. So I asked him, and I said, didn’t you experience love? What about the love? Wouldn’t that maybe be a more profound personal lesson? And he said, well, yes, I definitely experienced that love, but you can’t bring that back here. It’s so intense and overwhelming on Earth. It’s not possible to experience that kind of love. So I looked at him again, a little confused. And I said, well, I’ve experienced that love without a near-death experience through spiritual, meditative experiences that I cultivated intentionally. I had experienced the love that many of these near-death experiencers talk about. That’s what intrigued Eben and he said–Oh, my gosh, and so you can tell just from that information, how many areas we had to discuss in order to find that common ground that we felt when we met?   [00:18:24] Ashley James: Can you share any details you remember from your near-death experience?   [00:18:30] Dr. Eben Alexander: Yes, there’s a tremendous amount to the story, but just too abbreviated for this discussion. It’s important to point out that one of the atypical features of my near-death experience was that I was amnesic and had no memory of Eben Alexander’s life. I had no words, no language, no knowledge of Earth as the universe, and it really was an empty slate. So I realized in the months after my coma that was absolutely necessary for me to learn some of the deeper lessons of the journey. It had to have some of those atypical features for me to avoid rejecting it out of hand is impossible to make sense of. Then the journey itself and this amnesic state started in what I call the earthworm’s eye view, a very primitive course, a kind of unresponsive realm. It was like being in dirty jello. So there came this spinning malady of light that opened like a portal and led up into this rich, ultra-real Gateway Valley, where I found myself next. The Gateway Valley would be the kind of realm where all of us would reunite with our higher souls, with souls of departed loved ones, go through life reviews, and then make plans for the next incarnations. All that kind of thing. But in my world in this Gateway Valley, I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing. There were millions of other butterflies looping and spiraling and vast formations. There was an incredibly beautiful landscape down below us. That was a meadow surrounded by forests with waterfalls and the crystal blue pools, thousands of beings dancing. They were all dressed in very simple but very colorful garb. All of the festivities I witnessed there, including all the rich plant life with no signs of death or decay, were being fueled. Because up above are these floating orbs of angelic choirs emanating chants and anthems and hymns that were just thundering through my awareness and completely enlivened that entire scene. That’s when I recognized that I wasn’t alone on the butterfly wing. A beautiful spiritual guide was a young woman with sparkling blue eyes, high cheekbones, a broad forehead, and a broad smile. She never said a word. She didn’t have to. Her deep emotional truth came straight into my awareness, telepathically and emotionally. That message, I think, was the central message I was to bring back to this world through all fellow beings. You are deeply loved and cherished forever. You have nothing to fear. You’re deeply cared for. I can’t tell you how refreshing and reassuring that was at that time. At that point, I was aware of all of the lower four-dimensional space-time, this material world collapsing down all of that spiritual realm of the Gateway Valley, including a different ordering of causality, then I call deep time. That’s what allows for things like life reviews, which are not just remembering events of your life but reliving them in a detailed fashion. I witnessed all that stuff collapsing as the angelic choirs provided yet another musical portal to higher and higher levels. That portal led me up into what I call the core. The core was a complete resolution of all dualities and kinds of paradoxes of this existence, into that oneness with the Divine. An infinitely loving healing force that God forces that so many have encountered. Over thousands of years, I would say that those encounters are the basis of all of our great religions, from prophets and mystics. I’ve realized that even though when I came back to this world, people who’ve read Proof of Heaven will realize, I called that deity alm. Because that was the sound, I heard the resonance in this infinity and eternity. That’s what I brought back and I realized that it’s a waste of time to say whether this is God or Allah, Brahman, Vishnu, Jehovah, Yahweh, Great Spirit, whatever you want to call it. So there’s some profound agreement about the love, compassion, mercy, and acceptance of that infinitely loving source of our very conscious awareness. That’s what I realized in this core realm. I was told there would teach you many things, but you’re not here to stay. You’ll be going back. But, of course, all of those mini-lessons about reincarnation, the eternity of the soul about the fact that we’re sharing one mind. All of that was presented to me in this powerful passion. But then I would tumble back down to that earthworm eye view. That’s what I came to realize by remembering the musical notes. This melody would conjure up that light portal back into the Gateway Valley, and I always experienced that same beautiful guardian angel on the butterfly wing and different lessons that would happen in that Gateway Valley. But always, I would ascend back up through the angelic light portal into the core realms, that oneness with the Divine. There finally came a time when they weren’t kidding, and I could no longer conjure up the musical notes of the melody to bring me that passageway up out of the earth worm’s eye view. To say I was sad at that point would be an understatement. I also realized a trust in the universe at that point. That’s also when I witnessed six faces that turned out to be what are called vertical time anchors. Five of them were physically present in the ICU room for the last 24 hours, and I was in a coma. One of them was Susan Ranches, a family friend I’d first met back in the early 1970s in freshman college English class. So many decades later, my family knew that she had done channeling work with coma patients, which helped some of them return to life. My family asked her to intervene. She channeled to me from 120 miles away. Her presence was clear to me as the physically present people in the ICU room. I had first-hand experience of the absolute reality of channeling, which I would have denied to even existed before my coma. But, of course, I’ve grown a lot from this coma, and at any rate, it was at that point that the six-face that I saw were the ones that brought me back to this world. That was the face of a 10-year-old boy, who was my son Bond. Even though I said, my amnesia was still very active. I had no idea who this being was. But it was on day seven of coma. Sunday morning, the doctors had just till the family conference, saying it was time to withdraw medical care and let me go. When Bond overheard that, even though they protected him from the worst news during the week, he ran down the hallway. I was lying there on my ventilator as I had been for the last seven days. He pulled up my eyelids, and I promise you, I did not see him with the eyes. I didn’t hear him with my ears. But he was pleading with me– Daddy, you’re going to be okay as if somehow that would make it. And now, all of a sudden, deep in the spiritual realms, I had assumed that this whole adventure could continue or cease. It didn’t matter. All of a sudden, I realized there was another soul involved. I had a tremendous responsibility to him. I did not understand his words, but I could sense that I knew I had to come back to this world from his pleading. When I did, within the next few hours, opening my eyes, struggled, and fought the ventilator. That’s when the doctor pulled the breathing tube out. To their shock, I was coming back and saying words and showing some neurologic signs of progress. Although I still didn’t recognize loved ones at the bedside, my mother, sisters, and sons, those memories came back very rapidly. As did language over hours and the next few days, all my semantic knowledge of cosmology, physics, and neuroscience came back over about two months. During that time, of course, I was wrestling back and forth with how to interpret my experience. When I first tried to tell my doctors about it, they said we couldn’t even understand how you’re coming back to us. But you can forget about it because a dying brain plays all kinds of tricks. My first statement to my son, Eben the fourth, who was majoring in neuroscience at the time and came home two days after I got out of the hospital, I told him it was way too real to be real. That’s how I interpreted the experience in the context my doctors tell me the dying brain plays all kinds of tricks. But over the next weeks and months, going back to the hospital, talking about doctors, going through medical records, neurologic exams, scans, all of that. I realized that my brain was in no shape to harbor any dream or hallucination, much less the most extraordinary, detailed, memorable, and meaningful experience of my entire life. How did that happen when my brain was so demonstrably offline? That’s why the medical community takes my case so seriously. You find it probably mentioned, for example, in the recent bigelowinstitute.org contest concerning the best scientific evidence for survival of consciousness beyond permanent bodily death.   [00:27:32] Ashley James: This experience that you’ve had and other people have had, it’s not common. A lot of people who are in comas, not everyone has the experience you had. But some have the medication, and it was the coma, and it was brain damage, and just things are firing off weird. Someone could explain it like that, but this isn’t common. If that were the case, then everyone in a coma or with brain damage or an infection in their brain would have the same experience?   [00:28:16] Dr. Eben Alexander:  Well, this is the beauty of my case. The facts when you line them up from a medical perspective, as that case report does. They make it crystal clear that this brain could not have had any experience. There was no way for it to support a dream or hallucination because of the extensive damage to the neocortex. Then, of course, you’ve got the healing to explain. The healing completely defies medical expectations. There are no other cases of this kind of severe meningitis resulting in somebody who makes a full recovery. So that’s why this kind of exceptional case makes the point. But to get back to your original statement, it turns out that NDE is quite common. Probably 15 to 20% of people with cardiac arrest have some elements of a true near-death experience. They’re insanely common when you start to look at all of it. So when you follow Gallup polls, that kind of information suggests 3 to 5% of people on Earth have had NDE. Four hundred million people or more have had NDE. Their commonality is far more striking than that they don’t happen to everyone.   [00:29:29] Ashley James: You call it a near-death experience. A friend of mine was pronounced legally dead and then came back to life and shared his experience with me of what we don’t know what to call heaven paradise. The Bible says we go to paradise first and heaven later. Wherever he was, he was clearly in the presence of God. He describes that tremendous love that is so intense, beautiful, and divine. He says it was like God is a son, that we’re all orbiting around his experience. His friend, whom he had met, had committed suicide and was distraught about that. He met up with his friend, and his friend said that his guilt kept him from getting close to his love. It kept him like Pluto is like way out there orbiting but just not close enough, and that he was wrestling with the guilt of what he had done. And the hurt that he had caused his friends and family. So my friend ended up having a near-death experience again, saying that his friend had resolved it in the spiritual realm, had resolved and healed from it. Just these interesting experiences that people are having, and there are commonalities like everyone describes that love. Intense love is the sensation of being close to God and being close to our Creator. So that it is, it’s intense love. Karen, you say that through your spiritual practices you have tapped into that and have experienced it. Do you teach this in the book Living in a Mindful Universe?   [00:31:26] Karen Newell: Somewhat, you can teach with your words but the experience of love must be generated as an experience. When we just talk about it, it doesn’t have the same sort of impact. Yes, I teach practices where people can start cultivating these kinds of experiences. I know for me, at first, it wasn’t easy. I grew up in a family where we were not demonstrative when it comes to our love. We weren’t saying I love you and all of that. We were a perfectly normal family. There wasn’t abuse going on or anything like that, but I wasn’t used to expressing love. As I got older, my parents had been divorced. I had a whole idea about how love is not necessarily always successful. I just was so curious, and eventually, when I started reading about it, I could only understand it intellectually, which is just not the same as the experience. It was the work of HeartMath Institute that brought me to where I am now. That’s because they’ve been studying the heart for decades. They find that the heart emits an electromagnetic field. It expands and contracts around our body, and the brain also has one. The heart’s electromagnetic field is much, much bigger than the brain. The electric part is 60 times greater, and the magnetic part is 3000 times greater than the brain. So it expands and contracts around your body based on your emotional state. Emotions like love, happiness, and joy will create a very large electromagnetic field, whereas emotions like grief, sadness, or anger might create a small electromagnetic field. What’s interesting is that this electromagnetic field seems to influence people around you. Whatever emotions are inside of you are the ones that are being radiated by your heart naturally. So I took this very seriously. I don’t want to have anything in my heart that might offend someone else. I was thinking mostly about my family and friends. I don’t want to affect them in a bad way. I started to learn some of the HeartMath techniques, and they have one called Coherence Technique. It’s as simple as generating a feeling of gratitude in your heart, and it sounds simple. Let me generate a feeling of gratitude, and all I could do was generate thoughts of gratitude. I could think of things I was grateful for, but it didn’t change how I felt. I took the advice given and had to go over several different kinds of sessions where I had memories from my past. What made me feel joyful? What can I be grateful for? It’s going to be different for each of us. It was a memory of a stray dog my mom had taken in and turned out to be my childhood dog through college. She ended up having puppies underneath my bed just a short time after we adopted her, and for me, it was a magical moment. My mom probably thought it was a big mess, and I thought it was just beautiful, living, cute, little, lively creatures right there under my bed. And my dog trusted me to have them under my bed, not my brothers. It was to memory, and from there, I remembered all the dogs I had ever known and loved. That connection with dogs and animals started to allow me to feel this flicker, this warm, glowing flicker in my heart. I thought— Oh my gosh, that’s it, and then it went away. So I had to go to a little practice. Eventually, when you’re able to generate these feelings of gratitude, you can have the intention to attract that love that exists from the source, from God, from the universe, whatever you want to say. Once you’re able to generate it from within, it expands, and you attract this greater love. It is a framework of how it works, but that’s exactly how it worked for me. Everyone can learn how to do this, and we feel that love is just as overwhelming as your friend was driving. I can’t know if it’s the same as when in your near-death experience or feeling it may not be as intense. But wow, it’s certainly wonderful to feel. If I’m just feeling a fraction, five or 10% of what they’re feeling is worth it. So you feel this warm connection to something greater. You feel like you are always well in the universe that nothing can be wrong even if you’re in the middle of hardships, and all seems to make sense. The love that I feel is our birthright when you think about the term making love. Ideally, we’re making love when a baby is created. I love how Eben puts it, and he calls them homes for souls. When you create a baby from the love between two individuals, you’re creating and making love. You’re creating a home for a soul to live in. I always think it wouldn’t be just an ideal world if that’s how every baby was created. But if not, we can still rediscover that love even if we’re not gifted with it throughout our lives.   [00:37:18] Ashley James: My husband had a similar experience growing up. Similar to that, there wasn’t a lot of demonstrative affection and love in his household. His dad just said to my husband in his 50s, just two months ago, said I love you for the first time. There’s a lot of emotional healing going on. In my life and my family’s life, just imagine being 50. So what is my husband,53? For the first time hearing, I love you, and his dad never said it to anyone. He didn’t see his dad give you a handshake, not a hug. These last few months, there’s been a lot of love and a lot of discovery of gratitude. So when our daughter was born and died, we turned to gratitude to focus on what we’re grateful for, or you’re focusing on what we don’t have. A lot of people get wrapped up, especially in the material world. If only I had that Tesla. If only I had a house and only I had a million dollars. If only I had a better job. If only I had a better body or this or that. If only I had this carrot on a stick that we get wrapped up in. It’s the chasing of what we don’t have. I find it interesting to look at other religions or spiritual practices like Buddhism style or Zen. They say attachment creates suffering, and I would say attachment to what you don’t have to create suffering because the things I do have them attached to if I can stay focused on the gratitude around what I have. So what I have now, be grateful for what I have that makes me feel so much joy and thankfulness. That’s a prayer that I love to do. I take God if you don’t know what to pray for. It’s like we’re not asking Santa. It’s not like a Christmas list. I don’t want a pony. So when we’re praying, we could just be grateful. It could just be listing off everything you’re grateful for every day. Just thank You, God, for what you’ve given me. Thank You for what I have. Thank You for the help I do have.   [00:40:00] Karen Newell: You bring up an interesting point that we often look for objects outside of us to meet our needs. One way that we like to teach intention. If you want to create something in your life, it’s not to think– oh, that Cadillac or Tesla, whatever it is. But it’s what is the feeling you would have when you have that thing. Instead, focus on the feeling you’d like to feel. Generate that feeling. Just imagine you already have that thing that you want. What does it feel like? When you generate that feeling instead of a thought of a particular thing you want, somehow the universe seems to know how to provide you with whatever will continue for that feeling to go on. Sometimes we don’t know if that Tesla may not be the thing that makes us feel that way. Maybe it’s a vacation to South Africa. Who knows? Sometimes, when we get an attachment to things can be so damaging because they may, even once we finally get them, not satisfy us in the way we had hoped. So it’s just a different way.   [00:41:05] Dr. Eben Alexander: I just pointed out one of the deepest lessons from a near-death experience. I think most near-death experiencers would agree that the true currency of a soul in terms of successfully navigating and growing through this life is all about relationships. You’ve been able to share love and kindness and compassion and mercy with others. The more successfully you can harvest the love of the universe for all that is. This focus on material things definitely falls away after a near-death experience because we learn truly. It’s all about our relationships. The more we can foster that sense of love and kindness and help others, our lives will be better.   [00:41:52] Ashley James:  I did an interview a few years ago with a man traveling the world and studying depression and addiction. He talked about a study where they looked at cultures with the most material possessions and cultures with the least—looking at the level of satisfaction, fulfillment, and joy in one’s life. What I found fascinating is that you think the child with the most toys would be the happiest, and it’s the opposite of the children in South America who have one possession, and that’s a soccer ball, are the happiest. They’re far happier. These families with far less are far happier, more satisfied, feel more grateful, and have less depression than those in North America who have all the possessions we could ever want because they have the one soccer ball. These kids have one soccer ball, and they get like 15, 20, and 30 friends together to play. It’s the relationships they have. In Latin America, the focus is strongly on the family. Everyone has cousins and aunts and uncles in the family structure, and relationships are important. More important than possessions. In America, culturally, it looks like we value possessions more than relationships. So it’s interesting to shift what we value.   [00:43:35] Dr. Eben Alexander: I would say the whole world of addiction and alcoholism is all about this notion of trying to fill this hole with material goods, material stuff, and substances that give you certain feelings. And what you realize in that addiction and alcoholism were you’re trying to fill a spiritual hole with material stuff. The only way to fill a spiritual hole is a spiritual matter. So growth of [inaudible 00:44:03] soul and a deeper understanding of one’s relationship. Sometimes you have to sacrifice the ego because the ego-mind, that little voice in our head, is not our ally in this journey. The ego would rather see a toe’s dead and see itself dead that’s why many therapists do a ritual sacrifice. The ego allows it to be reborn in a much healthier kind of higher soul form, and not one so self-centered because that ego can lead us into tremendous toxicity, trying to satisfy its needs. The more we come to recognize this kind of bigger picture of who we are, it’s all about relationships, and it’s all about love and sharing kindness and compassion and mercy with others. The more satisfied we are with our lot in life. That’s done with gratitude, and forgiveness gives us tremendous tools to overcome most of the apparent hardships that human beings face.   [00:45:48] Ashley James: In the early days after your coma, did you begin to look at other examples? Can you share some other stories that struck you that made you realize others have had the same experience? You did mention two or three people shared the stories of what surprised you as you were in the early days you were doing your research and understanding that what you had was a visit to heaven.   [00:45:32] Dr. Eben Alexander: One of the people common things to encounter in near-death experience or just the dying experience in hospice care, in terminal patient care. What are you encountering in the soul of the departed loved one? In fact, for me, that means you’ve got an authentic experience right there. But, of course, the [inaudible 00:45:52]coma has said that the hallucinations you’re encountering as a whole of a departed loved one. I now know those are very real encounters; in fact, that’s imprimatur proving it to be real. Many other features of NDEs are quite common. The notion of going from darkness into light is sometimes described through a tunnel. Certainly, encountering that infinitely loving and healing God force is something that many NDEs involve. They also can involve encountering religious figures, although that’s much less common. For example, encountering Jesus Christ or Muhammad or something like that is not very common. Certainly, the encounters with the souls of departed loved ones can be very evidential to help someone realize that it’s all about relationships and that our souls do not die. The biggest gift to me in this whole experience of sharing my story publicly is that thousands of people share their experiences with me. That kind of thing has proven the reality of this. We shared the resonance and overlap of these stories in the second book, The Map of Heaven. In our third book, Living in Mindful Universe, we go the distance to make this argument that science and spirituality are coming together. So the only way for them to move forward is by this kind of shared acknowledgment of rehab of spiritual reality. So that is one where our minds are all connected. That’s one of the deepest pieces of evidence for the reality of this afterlife, and all that is this notion of one mind. I would say that the game has just changed dramatically in the last year about this question of an afterlife. Robert Bigelow, an aerospace engineer in Las Vegas, put up $1.8 million in prize money and challenged scientists who study this question– what is the best evidence for survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death? He received over 200 essays written by groups studying the question of the afterlife for more than five years from a scientific perspective. The 29 winning essays are available to the public for free right now, at bigelowinstitute.org. If you go and read the first place essay by Jeffrey Mishlove, who spent more than half a century studying this evidence, you’ll realize, of course, there’s an afterlife. We don’t understand how it works yet. Certainly not going to fit into you all kinds of religious or scientific wishes of the day. The more we investigate and the more we find out its reality, not only in the afterlife realm. Many of those essays also discuss the scientific evidence for reincarnation. Reincarnation was never anything I considered as part of reality before my coma. My coma journey showed me very clearly that our souls come back again and again. In this process of continued refinement, but given the importance of relationships, you never have to worry that a loved one who is reincarnated before they would be available to you at your own passage. Some people worry a lot about that. That’s where that whole notion of deep time and a different causal ordering from this spiritual perspective is so important to get. So if you go to bigelowinstitute.org and start reading those essays, you’ll find a tremendous amount of evidence. Reading those essays, no rational person will ever doubt the reality of the afterlife and reincarnation again. It just means we need a much bigger theater of operations to understand and explain the brain-mind relationships and the nature of reality that we seem to witness as human beings.   [00:49:49] Ashley James:  In science, because of your latest book, you talk about how science is now catching up to the spiritual in understanding it. Is there anything from your book scientifically that helps us better understand the spiritual realm or the afterlife?   [00:50:12] Dr. Eben Alexander: Yes, we go into great detail in the book Living in a Mindful Universe to do two major things. One is to make the scientific case for the primacy of consciousness of philosophical opposition, known as objective idealism. I think the whole world of quantum physics has been poised to acknowledge that reality for a long time. And the founding fathers of the field sifted the primacy of consciousness and the oneness of mind. In fact, in the second place winning essay Dr. Pim Van Lommel wrote a beautiful scientific explanation based on NDEs that he studied for over decades as a cardiologist. Towards the end of this essay, he makes the argument for the one mind. We’re all sharing this one consciousness of [inaudible 00:51:02] to top-down calls of principles of the universe. He lists four scientific resources for this one-mind idea. One is the book, One Mind, by our friend and colleague, Dr. Larry Dossey, which came out in 2013. A wonderful expert vision of this oneness of mind between human beings that we share with other life forms, too—a very important concept. He also mentioned the book Spiritual Science by Steve Taylor. He mentioned a Beautiful Paper by Bernardo Kastrup. I think it’s in the Journal of Consciousness studies entitled The Universe in Consciousness. Then he lists our book Living in a Mindful Universe as the fourth major scientific resource of the one mind. I would add Pim Van Lommel’s book, Consciousness Beyond Life. I think those five resources together will give people a full-blown scientific view of this concept of the one mind and how top-down causality from the mental air of the universe explains a tremendous amount of quantum physics about the hard problem of consciousness. So this is an impossible problem for materialism to try and conjure up a way for phenomenal experience to emerge from any arrangement of physical matter like the substance in the brain. We also go into the apparent unity of consciousness, known as the binding problem in the philosophy of mind. Especially in this discussion of the consilience of supporting the one mind hypothesis for the primordial mind hypothesis, as we call it in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe. All the evidence for nonlocal consciousness comes out of the world of parapsychology. So this is the kind of evidence that I would have dismissed and debunked before my coma out of pure willful ignorance. I know now that’s a pretty foolish position to take the evidence for things like telepathy, remote viewing, precognition, presentiment, psychokinesis, distance healing, power of prayer, near-death experiences, shared death experiences. These are identical in quality to near-death that happened in very healthy people and past life memories and children suggestive of reincarnation. You go to uvadops.org— University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies. For more than six decades, they’ve accumulated over 2500 cases of past life memories in children, 1700 plus of those cases have been quoted solved. That is the research. They identify the person described as living the previous life of that described by that child. All this evidence is what we cover in Living in a Mindful Universe. It takes a store to a very profound consilience and consolidation of scientific evidence supporting the notion of the one mind. Our souls come back and again in this refinement process towards oneness with the Divine.   [00:54:04] Ashley James: Karen, as you wrote this book with Eben, the Living in a Mindful Universe, I always like to talk to authors because although they are the experts of their book, they’re also the students. To get into that position of learning while you’re researching for your book, I love what unfolds for authors. What unfolded that surprised you the most as you guys wrote this book together?   [00:54:36] Karen Newell:  What unfolded surprised me? Eben is very scientific, as you can hear from how he explains everything. Our goal was to make it accessible to the non-scientific mind while also ensuring that these science-minded people would not be thinking– Oh, you took shortcuts and all of that. I thought science was not something that was my forte and one of the exercises we went through in the book is when Eben did write with a very scientific passion. So I had to understand that goal, and that’s how it would stay in the book. I learned a lot about quantum physics and the experiments in quantum physics, the double-slit experiment. Everyone always talks about the difference etween a photon and a wave. None of that had been of any interest to me, and I had to learn that. So in the process of doing it, I learned how to describe it in ways that laypeople would understand. That was interesting, a topic that I had avoided for my whole life. Then, suddenly, I was helping to try to explain it so that other people could understand it. That was a really interesting few months, and we still go through that now. Not as much because I’ve learned so much, but when he’s trying to explain a concept, if I don’t get it, the burden is on him to make sure that I do. That’s been an interesting exercise to bring together the hardcore heavy science into a more accessible format. So that people who are more spirit-minded can access it and understand why it matters in our daily lives. Because of all of these things we can talk about, the philosophers pontificate about the reality of our universe, but when it comes down to it, it’s the experience. Individual people are walking around in this world. So that’s what matters. So that’s what we brought together. For me, that challenge was bringing science in.   [00:57:02] Dr. Eben Alexander: I would simply add that was a huge part of our effort. The book was not just to explain these things from a scientific perspective. But to offer people tools to explore their own life and consciousness because I had come to realize within two years in a coma if I had any hope of understanding the deeper nature of my journey. I had a much more active cultivating, navigating, and exploring my consciousness, which I ended up doing through meditation. In Living in a Mindful Universe, we also talk about Karen’s work. She’s the co-founder of Sacred Acoustics, and that’s a form of binaural beat brainwave entrainment that I use an hour to a day and have been doing for the last ten plus years. In my own personal exploration, we wanted to share a personal experience with people. The book also has some indicators and information to help people in their own exploration of consciousness.   [00:58:00] Ashley James: I love hearing that a neurosurgeon likes the binaural beats music and uses it. So this is exciting because I’ve loved listening to these different melodies with different wavelengths, and I’ve always found it really helpful. I found this one on YouTube that’s like—come, focus and study for ADHD people, and I put that on. I could focus for like an hour while I was listening to it. It’s just beautiful melodies going back and forth. It helps me focus that I always laugh because it’s like for ADHD people to focus and study. I juggle so many things, I have a kid at homeschool, taking care of everyone and everything in my life, and then I’ve got the podcast. I’m constantly being interrupted by all these other things. So I think it’s my environment that makes me ADHD.   [00:59:04] Karen Newell:  You’re not alone. It’s not just you don’t have to label it as ADHD. We all can use the tools to help us get into a better state of focus you mentioned in these YouTube videos. We create at sacredacoustics.com. We create the same type of recordings. Just to caution on YouTube, the audio quality can only be so high when you merry it with a video. You’re not getting the best quality, the best potential to deliver binaural beats. You might want to check out sacredacoustics.com. We have a free download that you can get by entering your email address. We also have something called the whole mind bundle, and it includes recordings that deliver Delta, Theta, and Alpha signals. Those Alpha signals that you’re probably listening to help you get into that more focused state. Theta signals will help you go a little deeper into a more meditative state, and Delta signals will help you sleep. So many, many people listen to these recordings to help them sleep. So this whole mind bundle it’s available at sacredacoustics.com. We use that in a pilot study. A psychiatrist in New York City applied them in her psychiatric practice. She prescribed this set of recordings that people can sometimes listen to flexibly while doing other activities, just like you said. Also, there are shorter recordings that people can use for like 20 minutes a day to help them establish a regular meditative practice. What she found with Dr. Anna Yusim and then published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in February 2020 was that a 26% reduction in anxiety occurred. People were able to sleep better, focus better, and reduce their anxiety. The control group, the patients in the same practice, did not listen to the recordings but only had regular therapy. Over the same period of about two weeks, they saw a 7% reduction in anxiety. So 26 versus 7% just by adding listening to these recordings. Even if you’re listening to them to help you focus, they could potentially help to reduce your anxiety. One obvious way is if you’re able to focus and get your work done, you’re not as anxious about getting everything finished. Do they seem to play another role in really helping to relax the brain? Beta is the state we’re in when we’re walking around, talking, and anxious, and that’s a higher state. Binaural Beats are designed to deliver these lower states of awareness by delivering one signal to one year. A slightly different signal to the other ear. The difference between those two frequencies gives you the brainwave state we’re trying to deliver. So Delta, the border between delta and theta, is right at four hertz. So many of our audio recordings deliver a four-hertz signal that borders between awakening asleep. So this allows you to support the body and profound relaxation, but the mind doesn’t fall asleep. It’s still aware. That’s the meditative space, the hypnagogic state where we can start to release all the emotional traumas, focus on feelings that we want to manifest in our lives, ask questions about problems that we might be having, and get some answers. We can also use that space to do lucid dreaming kind of activities. It’s also possible to connect with your departed loved ones. Those who have passed from this world are often trying to contact and stay connected to people who are still here living on Earth in their human bodies. So when we are more open to that, when we can get into a relaxed state, we might more readily notice this attention they’re trying to give us. There are many applications that people use these recordings for, not just focus. Certainly, the focus is one of those primary tasks that we all need help with during the day. Certainly, these days, anxiety, addiction, all of that is just running rampant. So any kind of tool that people can use at the beginning of COVID, that’s right when this study came out. Actually, right when it was published. I wanted to make these recordings available to others right when we entered into these lockdowns when people were panicking and so nervous and upset about what was going on. I drastically reduced the price of these recordings to $19 for a whole set of nine recordings and a PDF guide that teaches you how to use that. I also made a free option because many people are in financial uncertainty. I didn’t want there to be any barrier at all. So many people have taken us up on that offer, and I feel gratitude towards them because I understand we are all part of one mind or one consciousness and one heart. So I feel that each of us takes the time to quiet the mind, release emotional traumas, focus on that essence of who we truly are, and find that meaning and purpose in our lives. As each person does that, I am so grateful because that contributes to the whole. So this is what I feel every one of us can do to contribute to the whole. We’re not only helping ourselves, but we’re helping everyone else by bringing our health into balance.   [01:05:08] Ashley James: I love it, and thank you so much for making that free for those in financial hardships. I am so grateful for people who are helping people. That experience of being we are all connected, I said that at the beginning. We’re all born, we all die, we have a lot in common, and if we could take on this idea that we’re all part of these raw pieces of the puzzle. I read something once God loves you so much. You’re one of his children. He also loves you so much that he is like your worst enemy. The person that you hate so much. He loves them just as much, and it’s like being a parent with two fighting kids. If you can look at that person who you despise, maybe because of where they come from, or their background or what they believe in, their different political beliefs or different religious beliefs, or they’re just on the opposite spectrum of one of your values or one of your beliefs. You look at them, and you can’t understand them. You don’t like them as an entire group of people because they’re on the opposite part of the belief system than you. If you can look at those people and get that even though on this plane of existence at this very moment in the mindset and you guys can’t see eye to eye. You might not like each other because of your beliefs and values and whatever it is. If you can both get that you were born into a family, you all have many things in common. That God loves you. That you are loved, showered with love and gratitude, and can transmute even your worst enemy in your mind. When you realize that this person, as much as you don’t like them or because of their beliefs, you guys have so much more in common than you think. If we could all live that way, we could all look at every one. Imagine if all politicians could look across the other side and go; we have so much in common. Why don’t we focus on what we have in common and the common good we want to do? Of course, it doesn’t sell headlines. The mainstream media wants to keep us in fear, keeps us like it’s clickbait. Life right now could be social media’s clickbait and everything that is causing turmoil. There have been studies done that prove that things on Facebook and Instagram are increasing suicide among youth. I think suicide is now the second leading cause of death in youth under the age of 24. Mental and emotional health that’s the true pandemic right now. If we look at how many people are on antidepressants and anxiety meds. I love that you talked about what we’re missing in cultivating spiritual health when we cultivate spiritual health that helps us heal our mental and emotional health. I found a new church. I just love it and have been going several times a week. And that’s where I’ve been doing so much of my emotional healing and working through the post-traumatic stress that I’ve had over the last year. We’re worshiping and praising, and we have so much gratitude. Everyone is in a state of gratitude, and then the whole, there are hundreds of us, and we all feel what’s described as the Holy Spirit. We all feel a connection to God, and it is so intense and so beautiful. It just feels so real. I understand what you said about how you can practice spiritual experiences, especially with gratitude that gets you in that state of love. I’d love for you guys to talk about– either one of you. What kind of tools could be helpful that you already have mentioned a few? Do you have any more tools that could be helpful for those who are suffering from grief, loss, depression, and anxiety which is something I feel that so many are suffering from right now?   [01:10:05] Karen Newell:  What is one of the very simple tools I often recommend to people is just to imagine that your breath is moving in and out of your heart. You can imagine your breath. A lot of meditative teachers will have you practice imagining what is coming in and out of your left toe. Something anywhere on your body it’s an exercise in moving your awareness. But when you imagine that it’s moving in and out of your heart, it’s filling up a bubble around your body, a little sphere. If you can imagine that your breath moves in and out of you in all directions, this really moves you out of your thinking mind. That’s where your distress is coming from. The heart does not have a linguistic center. Interesting Heart Math will tell you that the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. I feel like it’s collecting information out in the world and sending it up to the brain. Then the brain has to assign meaning to it and come up with words to describe it. We can escape those words, that little voice that maybe is telling us we’re not good enough or keeping us in a state of procrastination instead of productivity. Whatever it is, move your awareness to your heart. Imagine your breath is moving in and out of there. That’s a beautiful exercise that can help get people wrapped around it. I will tell you that some addiction doctors have used our free recordings, the alm recordings, right on patients when they’re in distress. They’ll come in, and they’ll be all strung out, and they can’t get them to come to have a conversation. So this doctor will pop the headphones. You have to use headphones to get the full power of these recordings. Put the headphones on the patients, and they just get calm right away. So lots and lots of tools related to the sound and just how you hold your awareness.   [01:12:14] Dr. Eben Alexander: The only other point I was making is a key starting point for people. Kind of new to this is in this kind of meditation, going within what you’re doing is acknowledging that this kind of mental air of the universe is something shared throughout the universe with great influence. The important step to take at the beginning of any such meditation is that one has to realize they are not to identify without running a stream of thoughts in their head. So many people think the running stream of thoughts in their heads is who they are. It’s their identity. I’ll point out that it is your ego-mind, and that certainly serves some purpose in the general survival of biological systems on Earth. And yet we are far beyond the predator, prey, and dance that involves so much of biology. So that’s no longer humankind of preoccupation. My point is that we can discover that we’re much more than just our physical bodies. So we’re much more than just running a stream of thoughts. In his book, The Untethered Soul, I love how Michael Singer calls running a stream of thoughts in your head the annoying roommate, and that’s a very important way to look at it because that’s not truly who we are. We can come to much greater discovery by cultivating the sense of connection across the veil with a unified mind with God-consciousness that has the highest and best good for all involved as its primary interest. There’s something I would paraphrase from Einstein, and he said the true value of this whole depends on how much they’ve liberated themselves from the concept itself. That’s where this ego-mind, this voice in our head, can be so misleading. And Rene Descartes, a renowned French philosopher of hundreds of years ago, said, I think therefore I am. I wish he clarified it a little bit and said, I am aware of my thoughts, and therefore I exist. That awareness of them, that’s the part that outlasts the death of the body and brain. That’s the part that actually expands when we die. That’s what near-death experiencers tell you: your awareness doesn’t shrink down to nothing as a materialist would postulate. Still, it expands when you’re liberated from the shackles of the physical brain and body. This is something we can all practice through meditation. Flipping these surly bonds of Earth in the material realm and the apparent here now and this kind of sense of self. We all have the freedom within meditation and centering prayer to escape from that kind of false imprisonment of the illusion of being isolated as an individual physical being. We’re much more than that, and that’s really one of the deepest lessons to start within this adventure is exploring that shared consciousness.   [01:15:20] Ashley James: Now, you lost your sense of self. You had mentioned that it’s like your ego wasn’t there, you didn’t know who you were, but that needed to happen so you would learn and accept what was going on? I’ve heard of near-death experiences where people didn’t know who they were, and they did see fellow members who had passed or met Jesus and knew who they were.   [01:10:50] Dr. Eben Alexander: Right.   [01:15:52] Ashley James: Is your experience uncommon that people don’t know who they are? Or are there some experiences people do and some don’t know? How can we better understand near-death experiences if this really happens when we die?   [01:16:15] Dr. Eben Alexander: I think the important thing to point out is that near-death experiences, as we said earlier, probably 400 million people around the world patterns are very common. And when you study them, you find a lot of commonalities, and you’re exactly right. Most people go into this with full memory of their lives. All this tells me is if my experience was incomplete, if I’m going to die, I would have gone on to that next level of going through the life review. Now it’s important to point out, though, that I did witness life reviews with a very powerful passion, even though I cannot have an Eben Alexander life review because of my amnesia. The way I saw them, and these both occur in separate passages through the core realm, first was what I call the Flying Fish analogy, and that was basically where I experienced becoming flying fish. And when we’re down in the water, we are dumbed down. We didn’t have all the knowledge of our higher soul. We were buying into this material incarnation and that’s it. It gives a skin in the game. But then when I popped up out of the water into the air, as flying fish, I was in that space between lives and reunited with a higher soul and all that kind of thing. Now, this next vision was even grander and happened on a separate passage through the core; it’s what I call the Indras Net Vision. That was this extraordinary higher dimensional network of interconnected threads, and the threads represented soul lines of an individual soul from multiple incarnations approaching this incredible enlightenment and oneness with the Divine. In that particular vision, that ultimate goal was reflected as this kind of golden center to this web network to which we were all kind of attached and working our way through these incarnations. The life review and reincarnation were very clearly presented to me in these visions.  Now the important thing to stress is months after my coma, and this is something we explained in Living in a Mindful Universe. If I had scripted my NDE first and foremost, my father would be there. My doctor father was a world-renowned neurosurgeon. He was very important in my life. It passed over four years before my coma. And surprising to me, especially because I’ve never had NDE in the literature before after my NDE, at the advice of my older son majoring in neuroscience, who knew every time you revisit a memory, you change it. So he told me to write everything that I could remember from my NDE before I read anybody else’s NDE. That was important information. I wrote 20,000 words over six weeks or so.  And then, I started reading the NDE literature and that’s when I was totally blown away by a lot of similarities. I was surprised by the absence of my father and we explained that especially in the third book, Living in Mind for Universe, how he appeared to me in meditation two and a half years after my coma. It made it very clear that if he had been apparent to me as he could, he could not be apparent to me in my NDE. Despite a one in ten million diagnosis from an E.coli bacteria of meningitis in an adult, despite a one in a billion recovery, if my father had been the one on there, I would have been more tempted to dismiss it. So you only see what you want to see all the way out. So it’s a psychological factor, that’s why my guardian angel had to be who she was. Someone deeply important to me in my life. Anyway, that’s kind of the longer version of NDEs, of life reviews, of my father’s presence and discovering the importance of why he couldn’t be there in my original NDE.   [01:20:07] Karen Newell: You touched on how we can know that Eben’s experience or people who have near-death experiencers have the same kind of experience we would have when we actually go on to die. Fortunately, we have data on that. Christopher Kerr is a director and doctor at Hospice Buffalo, and he started doing studies on hospice patients some years ago. He wanted to hear from them directly. So what is it that you’re experiencing as you get closer to death because up until then, it was only clinicians who had reported their observations of what people were going through? No, actually asked for dying patients themselves and that was brought up at the institutional review board where this is going to be proper. Dr. Kerr explained that these patients are actually benefited by having the opportunity to talk about their experiences. What’s so remarkable is that around 90% of the subjects stated did have what he called End of Life Dreams and Visions. The dreams happen when the subject is asleep. When they’re awake and have these experiences, they’re called visions. It’s the same type of experience that the subject is usually the same whether you’re awake or asleep, which is so weird for us. People who just have dreams think they’re a little different at any rate. These were very realistic types of dreams. These people reported them to be hyper-real, more real than real, and they would say as if they were actually lit. Which is remarkably exactly how near-death experiencers describe near-death experiencers. Their experiences say that they’re more real than real. The other thing that happens is that people will say that there are scenes of travel where they know they’re going somewhere, that they’re packing or they’re in a car or bus, and they’re going somewhere. But they don’t necessarily know where they’re going. So the idea that it’s the end is not really brought out in these experiments. The other thing that’s very common in these experiences is that people will start to relive their life. So when Eben talks about this life review, people in the– let’s say a couple of weeks before they die, say they’re in the hospice center. The first dreams that they started to have are up to their childhood. They’ll stretch or relive childhood events and connect with people they knew back then. They could still be alive, or they could still be dead at this point. But as they get closer to death, the prevalence of dreams and visions involving deceased relatives increases dramatically. Often they’re just seen as being present, quietly observing, always emanating this loving energy, and other times they actually interact. We can be quite certain that actual death is very similar to what near-death experiencers tell us. It seems that life review starts to begin before you actually die. Once you actually die, it just continues in another form. And near-death experiencers, of course, are dying, necessarily in a natural way. So many people are oftentimes natural because it couldn’t have to do with a heart attack or something, but it’s a sudden way. If they’re not being led into death over many weeks and then days and then hours. It happens suddenly and they just pop right into their life reviews without a chance to start gradually. So this gives us a lot of information that can make us very confident that our awareness continues that we encounter the souls that departed loved ones. That love is a thief that’s another thing they say is that– everything is related to love and those loving bonds. We often call it the binding force of love because it keeps us connected even into the afterlife.   [01:24:23] Ashley James: We’ve talked about beautiful positive things. I’m going to turn to something negative now, but I hope there’s hope here. I feel like we’re in dark times. Hopefully, not everyone feels the same way. Hopefully, there are people who don’t feel like we’re in dark times, but there’s a strong sense that there’s a spiritual war. A lot of people that I know believe that there are demons. There are negative entities that there are forces out there that are not wanting what’s in our best interest. In your research in studying near-death experiences, studying the afterlife, and spirituality. Have you come across the concept where people are struggling with demonic possessions or a feeling like there are negative forces that are hindering them from being able to live that life full of gratitude and love and connect with God and move into a positive spiritual realm?   [01:25:37] Dr. Eben Alexander: I would say, especially, when you look at the broad literature on near-death experiences and combine it certainly with Christopher Kerr’s work as Karen was discussing the end-of-life experience so commonly encountered. You find that 90 to 95% of it is just this beautiful, blissful kind of finding of a spiritual realm. You don’t find that there’s some battle between good and evil going on in the spiritual realm. In fact, even that kind of predefined set of near-death experiences that are turned into hellish NDEs or negative NDEs is often involved– for example, someone who has been so busy handing out pain and suffering to others that their life review might seem kind of hellish because you have to be on the receiving end of that in life. Your life review is not from your perspective. But from the perspective of those around you who were influenced by your actions and thoughts. But the overall ambiance of that kind of community and those reports. This even includes, for example, if you go to the really negative kind of expectations, you might have to say, for example, inadequate prison where with rapists and murderers, you find that when prisoners work as hospice workers for fellow prisoners, they still uncover these same stories of kind of redemption of forgiveness of people facing the bad that they’ve done in this life, but seeing it in this light of love that guides them more towards a loving presence. That’s why I think overall, the evolution of humanity, given this huge kind of factor NDEs and the loving ambiance in the background, that over a period of time, we do become more loving and move away from this kind of false sense of separation in comes of materialistic thought. I would agree with you that our current world is very apparently conflicted, polarized, lots of conflicts, violence, warfare, economic polarization, corporate greed, climate change, and all that. I would say that the answer to that is a spiritual awakening. It simply involves more and more people becoming aware of this deep truth about our existence that in many ways is very optimistic. When you look at the big literature on NDE reports, for example, the ions website hosts thousands and thousands of reports with these kinds of experiences. The overall background is one of a very positive transformation of humanity. Kenneth Ring is one of the founders of the International Association of near-death studies. He wrote it three decades ago. It’s about how just people knowing NDEs could change their own reality. You don’t have to have an NDE just knowing about these experiences and their commonality helps all of us to come into a deeper sense of the higher good that we can practice in meditation, centering prayer, and through the way that we live our lives and all the choices, we make every day. But despite the apparent hardships, and I would say that the hardships are there, just as in the world of alcoholism and addiction study where people have these hardships that they’re dealing with. It’s like getting a bottom, a gift of desperation that they’re able to bounce back up and gain the energy to improve themselves. Likewise, society is facing a collective gift of desperation with all these apparent hardships, conflicts, political polarization, etcetera. There is a way out, and that is for humanity to truly become wise. Homo sapiens, the word sapiens, means wise. Yes, you could attribute much of the scientific advances in medicine, communication, transportation, etcetera. Over the last two centuries to been a wise move. When you look at the ugly underbelly of all our addiction to fossil fuels, the floating gyre of plastic twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean, these are obviously very negative sides of our technological growth. So it’s time for humanity to really grow up and quit living this kind of myth of false separation from each other. We’re all in this together. We need to take care of each other. And we need to have a much longer timescale. Politicians and corporate leaders look at the next quarterly report for next year’s elections. We need to look at 50 years in the future and our children and the quality of their lives and start doing what’s right for them. So that’s where I think this world can start to take stewardship as we should truly. If we’re going to call ourselves Homo sapiens and start leading this world in a much more positive direction, that’s beneficial to all.   [01:30:39] Ashley James: Your book Living in a Mindful Universe, there’s a lot of tools, a lot of actionable steps, can you guys certainly want to leave with us or teach the listeners today?   [01:30:51] Dr. Eben Alexander: I think the main thing is just to take time each day to go with that. Realize that little ego voice with a lot of its demands on you is not who you truly are. To try and cultivate a richer relationship across the veil with that primordial mind, that God force that has love, kindness, compassion, and mercy right at the core of all of this activity.   [01:31:15] Karen Newell: When we say go within, that may look different for each of us. It really is incumbent on each of us to try different practices. Find that combination of practices that work best for you because it’s going to be different for each of us. We are both very big fans of using sacred acoustics recordings to get into expanded states that not everyone will respond the same way, and so if that doesn’t work, you try something else. Some people like to do movement sorts of things, and others do centering prayer. I like how you said when you go to your church, and there’s a community of people, you’re all focused on generating that connection to the Holy Spirit together. Doing this with other people can strengthen the experience exponentially. I like to imagine that it is all about our heart energies interacting, and we are supporting each other in this effort. When you’re not nearby other people, you can always imagine that your highest energy expands all the way out to the entire Earth. It’s interesting at Heart Math when they measure that electromagnetic field. Whatever device they use, we seem to go to the maximum distance that it can measure. Who knows, it might be unlimited. Eben will always remind me that we can’t get confused and think that the electromagnetic field, which is a material thing, is all that it is. It’s a very useful mechanism that we can focus on that we know is happening, whether we realize it or not.   [01:32:53] Dr. Eben Alexander: There’s a much deeper form of information overlay between minds that presents in quantum physics as entanglement, and that would be my point. This kind of communication goes beyond just electromagnetic things that will be limited by the speed of light. Also, in adding to the comments you were making, I would point out that we’ve started developing a community of like-minded people, and you can access that at unitedinhopeandhealing.com. Very specifically, Karen had the idea that since all of our jobs were canceled back in March 2020 for the summer, she decided we would interview the scientists and fellow experiencers that we would have been meeting up with at those conferences. We would just interview them for the benefit of the public at large, and those interviews we did once every two weeks for most of the pandemic. They’re available at unitedinhopeandhealing.com for free to the public. We hope that those will help people realize there’s a community of like-minded people growing up around all of this kind of teaching and effort.   [01:34:00] Karen Newell:  On that same website is a membership platform. The webinar access is all free. People can also connect, and we do on our platform, our teaching platform, where we have some core classes, but then also we do monthly Q&As, where people can submit any questions they want. So we take about 90 minutes to answer them. That’s also going on that same website if people are interested.   [01:34:25] Dr. Eben Alexander: There’s also a course available for mental health practitioners co-taught by Karen, myself, and Dr. Anna Yusim. I would say that course can be very valuable in helping people deal with mental health issues in the modern era.   [01:34:43] Karen Newell: One last resource is an online companion workbook that we created to go with Living in a Mindful Universe, and it’s called your 33-day journey into the heart of consciousness. If you go to ebenalexander.com, you’ll find a link to that 33-day journey. It’s an email. Just get an email once today with a note and a personal practice, and it’s all related to the book Living in a Mindful Universe.   [01:35:15] Ashley James: Excellent because I was actually just to ask about the free online course that you guys have, that’s ebenalexander.com/33days. Of course, the links to everything you talked about are going to be in the show notes for today’s podcast, learntruehealth.com. So listeners go to learntruehealth.com to catch that or in the description whatever podcast platform you’re listening from. Go in the description, and I’ll make sure that all those links are there, of course, the links also to the books as well. This is such a beautiful thing to focus on. You’ve given us so many tools. I love the idea of making sure that we take time every day to stand in gratitude. To imagine when it comes to wanting something we don’t have, imagine what it would feel like to have it. Then imagine yourself having that feeling, that same feeling, and what other things you can experience or other relationships you can cultivate that will also give you that feeling. Stepping away from– I will be happy until I have this physical object and stepping towards your whole complete imperfect now as you are in and your possessions aren’t really don’t bring joy. But focusing on building relationships and staying grounded in love. Remember that even those people you don’t necessarily like or understand or get along with they’re just like you. They’re all part of the same soup. We’re all in it together. We’re all God’s children. And even these little mind shifts can help us live a more fulfilled life and a life where we’re focusing on being just beautiful human beings. I saw someone yesterday who was wearing a pin that said—humankind, be both. It’s exactly, be both, be kind and be human.   [01:37:31] Dr. Eben Alexander: I would like to think they go hand in hand.   [01:37:34] Ashley James: Thank you so much for coming on the show guys. This has been a pleasure and if you have more resources or discover more information and you want to come back and share more science. I would love you back.   [01:37:50] Dr. Eben Alexander:  Ashley, great talking with you. Thanks for having us on.   [01:37:53] Karen Newell: Yes, and thanks for all you do to help others as well and get all of this information and 20 more other people that you interview out into the world. Thank you so much.   [01:38:03] Ashley James: It is my pleasure.   Get Connected with Dr. Eben Alexander Website Facebook Twitter YouTube   Books by Dr. Eben Alexander Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness The Map of Heaven: How Science, Religion, and Ordinary People Are Proving the Afterlife Seeking Heaven: Sound Journeys into the Beyond

BioGaia LACTOBACILLUS REUTERI for fermenting: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AH3RT9Y/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_66EPKQ3B46MSWZEQMB85&subject Best Yogurt Maker for this type of fermentation: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08PQ2KWHS/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_ZN6Y7CKZ757KHCDGGS0J&subject BOOK: Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B096RTDMXV&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_2Q1YVTR4GATHAW0G5MMS&tag=mighty91com-20   Antidepressant Probiotic Homemade Yougurt Lactobacillus Reuteri, Dr. William Davis https://www.learntruehealth.com/antidepressant-probiotic-homemade-yougurt-lactobacillus-reuteri-dr-william-davis   Highlights Benefits of TRPV1 in our gut Benefits of lactobacillus reuteri Losing weight by focusing on gut health support Importance of fermented food for the gut   After the success of Wheat Belly, Dr. William Davis is back with a new book, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight. Super Gut explains how we can eliminate bad bacteria and breed good bacteria in the gut. In this episode, Dr. Davis shares specific bacteria that we can ferment that can target specific areas such as deeper sleep, increased libido, and muscle injury reduction. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Okay, I’ve got a few really exciting things to share with you before we dive into today’s interview, so you don’t want to skip this part. I interviewed Dr. William Davis, this is today’s interview, back in February. My life’s been crazy. I have been wanting to sit down and publish this since I did the interview. It was late February. We were in the middle of moving, packing, moving, and it was total chaos. I’m so happy, I finally have a moment to sit down today and publish this. I’ve got 10 more interviews. I’m just backlogged with interviews that I want to get out there and publish. Just watch out. They’re going to start coming out more frequently now. I’m so excited to finally get back onto a regular schedule now that we’ve landed in our new location. This interview was so life-changing for me because in January and February, I was having breakdowns, emotional breakdowns. My mind was okay, I was like, hey, I can taskmaster. Give me five things and I’m going to just bang them out. My mind was totally clear, but all of a sudden, I just noticed that my physical body was incredibly stressed out. I am definitely handling a lot of things in the last year and then I had a lot on my plate. Mentally I felt fine, This is the whole thing, I don’t feel stressed. Stress is not an emotion. I started noticing that the littlest thing would have me in tears. It wasn’t just one part of the month, it was two months straight. I was in tears at the littlest thing. I felt so bad for my husband and my son who is so good-hearted. I’m sure it was scary all of a sudden like seeing my mom smiling one second then mom’s crying another, what’s going on. I tried to explain as best I could. I did notice that my body was definitely emotionally in overwhelm. This was just such perfect timing to get this interview. At the beginning of the interview, I had no idea that this was going to be the answer to what I needed. With what Dr. William Davis shared, I took his information and I made one of the things he shares about today is a specific kind of—it’s hard to call it yogurt but it’s a fermented thing that you can make to eat. I made it out of soy milk and then I made it out of coconut milk just to try different plant-based options because I’m allergic to dairy but if you’re not allergic to dairy you can follow his recipe. What was just so cool and I’m so excited to share with you is that I had a result the same day I took it. The last time I had such a profound effect was when I got on the supplements that takeyoursupplements.com sells back 11 years ago. I think it was about 11 years ago. I was so sick. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility, type 2 diabetes, and chronic adrenal fatigue so bad that I couldn’t process human language in the morning. I was in really rough shape. Getting on those supplements and going gluten-free, so cutting out barley, wheat, rye, and oats, and then getting on the supplements, the trace minerals they sell, especially the liquid vitamin which is really bioavailable and absorbable, and the trace minerals, within 24 hours of being on those, I noticed my blood sugar began to balance. That constant gnawing hunger went away within five days of being on the supplements. My energy levels were the highest they had been in 20 years. For somebody who has chronic adrenal fatigue, it’s amazing. It wasn’t like energy that was jittery, it was just like real energy like my body started coming back online because it was so deficient in those minerals. Often, when we have a mineral deficiency, we have symptoms across the board that doesn’t make sense to doctors because the doctors are not taught what trace mineral deficiency looks like, that’s just not in their wheelhouse. By getting on the supplements that takeyoursupplements.com sells, I was able to—they’re very specific to each person and their needs—turn around within five days. I thought this was amazing. In terms of getting better from feeling horrible to feeling great, it was one to five days, boom, that was amazing. Since then, I have had great experiences with many products. Using what Dr. William Davis shares today had me go from crying and just—I’m pretty sure I was still struggling with depression and all the changes that have happened with our family. Then I took the stuff that he told me to ferment, a very, very specific strain of probiotic, and 4I noticed a shift. That day was the last day I broke down crying for (I don’t want to say) no reason, but it’s kind of like crying over spilled milk like a way to overreact. Something small would happen, and my body would just completely meltdown. Since I started introducing this specific probiotic, it’s a specific strain that affects the brain chemistry. How cool is that? It helps balance the brain chemistry so you feel happier. It also helps with insomnia so you get better sleep. I don’t have bad sleep, but I started getting better sleep. I started waking up wow, that was a really deep sleep. It helps with sleep. It helps with joy and a feeling of contentment, a feeling of connection, connectivity to the people you care about. It has a few other really cool positive results that Dr. William Davis is going to go in today. I wanted to let you know that since this interview, I tried it and I’ve been eating it, and I’ve been getting fantastic results. There’s my testimonial. Please share this interview with everyone you know who has insomnia and also who wants to have more joy and feel even keel in terms of their emotional state, definitely share it with them. Another cool benefit to this specific strain of probiotic that you need to ferment yourself to get enough of it so you can eat it to get it in you is it increases the body’s ability to produce collagen so that wrinkles go away. Even for vanity’s sake, it’s worth thinking about because it’ll make you have better hair, skin, and nails. People are noticing all kinds of positive results. I love this concept. The whole interview today is about this concept that there’s a pharmacy that we could tap into in our gut that we could prescribe ourselves specific strains of probiotics. These are healthy bacteria that live in our gut. Prescribe ourselves specific ones that have specific outcomes. It’s already well established. I’ve had dozens of interviews about this. You can go to learntruehealth.com and use the search function to find all my interviews about gut health. The doctors I’ve had on who talk about gut-brain access, that there’s a direct correlation with what goes on in your gut. There are about four to six pounds. Think about you have a little chihuahua-sized animal that lives in your gut and it’s made up of thousands of different strains of probiotics. You want to have the good kind and you want to make sure you mitigate the bad kind. They actually digest our food for us. They make nutrients for us by digesting the food that we absorb. They make chemicals for us that affect our brain, affect our chemistry, and affect our hormones. It’s amazing. This is just scratching the surface. It’s so cool. We’re on the cutting edge. Dr. William Davis shares that information today. That was the one thing that I wanted to share with you. The next thing I wanted to share with you is I’ve done some recent interviews which I’ll be publishing soon about some pretty amazing stuff like how to increase nitric oxide in the body which has just a host of amazing health benefits. I’ve been pouring through all these studies and what I’m seeing is thermal therapy, using the Sunlighten Sauna, the reason why I say Sunlighten Sauna specifically is the Sunlighten Sauna has near, mid, and far-infrared. It goes into the different depths of your tissue and it binds to receptors. Now I had a cardiologist on, Dr. Joel Kahn, and he talks about this that in our cells, we have receptors for hormones, we have receptors for nutrients like let’s say calcium, and glucose, right? Insulin being like hormones, we have receptors for those things. We also have receptors for light. That these infrared lights, the spectrum affects our cells. There’s one specific protein that is triggered by heat and this protein is called TRPV1. This protein when triggered by heat—I believe it’s over 41 degrees Celsius is what I read—then helps the body to turn pre-muscular cells into muscle cells. They’re seeing that for the elderly, it helps to lower the chances of wasting away. It increases muscle, continuing to have more muscles so the muscles don’t waste away. It plays a huge role in helping with cardiovascular health to the point where this one study I read showed that they’re now doing therapy with people who are in cardiac failure. They’re really far gone in terms of their cardiac disease and heart disease, and that using heat therapy actually helps to increase nitric oxide in the body which supports the endothelial function of the cardiovascular system. It reduces the oxidative stress of the cardiovascular system that supports the autonomic nervous system. They’re seeing that there are so many things. It also helps balance blood pressure. They’re seeing so many benefits to using heat therapy for cardiovascular health. Well, I was looking into this specific protein, the TRPV1, because there’s also a role that plays in breaking down and helping the body break down fat and in burning fat as fuel. Everyone who wants to be healthy wants to make sure we have healthy levels of fat. Brown fat is linked to better health and better health outcomes and burns off excess fat. What we’re seeing is, when you’re in a sauna, yes it increases the body’s heat, your core temperature, and thus you’re burning off calories. They say about an average of 500 calories. Obviously, it depends on the person and how long they stay there and how hot it is. They also see now the reason why being in a sauna helps people lose fat is that it is creating these specific proteins, it is binding to these receptors. When it was explained to me, it was like, imagine a fat cell has these triglycerides that are built inside the cell and then they’re too big to get out. You have to tell the triglyceride inside the cell to break down. Kind of like a sectional couch, you can’t take your sectional sofa out the front door until you break it down into its parts. Using the Sunlighten Sauna therapy is one of those ways to trigger to create that cascade effect to the body that triggers the fat cell to break it down so that it can leave the fat cell so that the triglyceride can break down to leave the fat cell, which I found fascinating. There are all these health benefits that I keep reading as I’m pouring through this information, but just the fact that sauna therapy increases nitric oxide in the body, in my next episode you will be learning more about nitric oxide and how the amazing benefits of it. Everyone says inflammation is the root of all. At the very core of all diseases, there’s inflammation. Then people say, actually lactic acid is the root. No, lactic acid and inflammation are the result of the root cause and the root. We go deeper than that when the body cannot make enough of the nitric oxide that causes inflammation, that causes lactic acid, that causes all these cascades of negative outcomes that we see. When we’re looking at the common factor between everyone with disease and we’re going well, everyone with disease has more lactic acid and has more inflammation. Therefore, those are bad things we need to manage. Those are results of not enough nitric oxide in the body. My next interview is going to be about that. How cool was it that the Sunlighten Sauna increases nitric oxide production which is linked to longevity by the way and not having enough of it is linked to early death. Also, so many health benefits of looking better and feeling better. What I want to say about Sunlighten is I’ve had mine for a few years. I absolutely love it. I’ve gotten so many health benefits from it. I am always in touch with the owner of the company there. They offer a great discount for listeners. Please give them a call. If you have any questions, they’re fantastic. They can help you out, give you the literature, give you the science. Also make sure you mention the Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James because they will give you a fantastic discount, including free shipping. If you ever have any questions about it or anything at all, you can also contact me at ashley@learntruehealth.com and I would love to help. I’m so excited for you to hear today’s interview because what Dr. William Davis shares today has changed my life. It’s now April and when I did that experiment with the probiotic that he recommended, that was near the end of February. All of March, even in the midst of the chaos of my move, we moved in March, I did not have any of those emotional overwhelm that I had before. I was able to navigate just by introducing this probiotic. You know what I said to my friend, I said that I’m on an antidepressant. She of course looked at me with big eyes. I said no, you don’t understand, not a pharmaceutical. This stuff that Dr. William Davis shares today, I said to her, this feels like I’m on an antidepressant. I feel amazing. I’m going through a very chaotic move and yet it’s not affecting me, it’s like the stress is gone. That’s why I’m so excited for you today because imagine if the whole world was able to get their body to the point where they’re just feeling so calm and happy, and how much we could accomplish instead of feeling overwhelming stress. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Continue to please share, this episode is going to change lives I just know it. Come into the Learn True Health Facebook group because I’d love to hear your experience as you also experiment and play around with the things that Dr. William Davis shares today.   [00:17:12] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 476. I am so excited for today’s guest, we have back on the show with Dr. William Davis. Dr. Davis, you were on the Learn True Health podcast back in episode 167 which was eons ago but I have to tell you that you had a profound impact on my life and my husband’s life back in, this was like back in 2011, 2012, somewhere around there.   [00:17:48] Dr. William Davis: It was like the 19th century, wasn’t it?   [00:17:55] Ashley James: Yes, the dinosaurs roaming the earth. We went gluten-free. Actually, we cut out barley, wheat, rye, and oats. Oats contain gliadin, which is a protein similar to gluten. Some people react to it, some people don’t. We were just like, let’s just throw them all out anyway and we noticed a profound difference. I love sharing the information that you shared in your book, Wheat Belly, was so eye-opening for us. It really helped us solidify our decision to eliminate barley, wheat, rye, and oats. Then what happened was amazing, my husband and I lost so much water weight. In one month actually, I lost 25 pounds of water weight and both of us had our wedding rings flying off our hands. I’d like to go to point, oh, the remote is over there, I’d point my hand in that direction and my rings would go flying across the living room. We had our rings custom fitted. We waited about six months because I thought this might be temporary because women are more in tune with the water weight of their body than men possibly. I was like, well, this might be the time of the month and by the next time of the month, it won’t be like this. Six months go by and we’re still not eating barley, wheat, rye, and oats. The 25 pounds of water weight is still off of me and I can’t believe it. I couldn’t push a finger into my skin and then have an indent, it wasn’t like that. It was just overall inflammation. Then six months later we went and got our rings resized. That’s what we found out, I went down one and a half ring sizes. My husband went down two whole ring sizes. Then I was able to overcome a lot of other health issues. I mean, the diet was a major factor and also nutrition. I brought in specific very high-quality supplements and I tweaked my diet, but I was able to reverse type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue. I no longer have polycystic ovarian syndrome. Every doctor I talked to was like, you can’t reverse that. Watch me and look at my labs, they’re like, oh my gosh, I love showing to doctors my labs. They don’t believe it. It’s like, these are two different people. I reversed infertility, all these great big things, but really the big thing was eliminating barley, wheat, rye, and oats. I have had so many friends say, oh, I tried that. I was gluten-free for two weeks, and I didn’t notice a difference. I’m not allergic to gluten. I definitely want to get into that. You have a new book out, which I’m really excited about, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight. I love that you have a deep dive into supporting this microbiome. It’s like six pounds of bacteria in our gut that we can actually use to heal our whole body. We talked about this that your book has very actionable steps that people can take to restore their health. I’m really looking forward to you teaching us that today. Welcome back to the show.   [00:21:10] Dr. William Davis: Thanks, Ashley. Thanks for the invitation. Glad to be back.   [00:21:13] Ashley James: Absolutely. Fill us in. What happened in the last four or five years since you were on the show with us?   [00:21:20] Dr. William Davis: Well, as you experienced, the Whole Wheat Belly lifestyle really can change people’s lives if they get it right. As you see, a lot of people say things like, I went gluten-free. Meaning they may have cut back on wheat and unrelated grains, but then turn to gluten-free garbage, which is awful. They make that mistake. Those gluten-free processed foods are just horrible for your health. It shocks me that that industry continues to grow and they fill store shelves with something that’s far worse than sugar. If people get it right, they do experience as you have. By the way, reversing polycystic ovary syndrome is a huge advantage in health. As you see, the 15% of ladies who have it shouldn’t have it. Doctors say there’s really nothing we can do except give you diabetes medications, give you insulin, give you anti-hypertensive drugs, and then go through procedures for fertility, which is ridiculous. As you experience, it is readily reversed back to normal, including the hormonal distortions just by shifting your diet and maybe addressing a handful of nutrients that are lacking in modern life. People are doing this and experience as you have dramatic life-changing improvements in health, weight, et cetera. But I also saw this, people say things like, I lost 73 pounds, but I have another 40 to go and I’m stuck. Or my joint pain from my rheumatoid arthritis is better, but I’m not off all the drugs yet. In other words, people were having successes but not 100% all the way back to perfect health, so I asked what is missing. Now in the basic program, even back then, I was advocating adding a high potency multispecies, probiotic, fermented foods, and prebiotic fibers. But even those efforts to address the microbiome were insufficient for many people. I continued to dig and look for answers in the microbiome. I was shocked at the kind of things you can uncover in the microbiome. It led to an explosion and actionable solutions. Things you can do to take back control over their health.   [00:23:34] Ashley James: As you’re looking at the microbiome, what was the biggest, the first aha moment that really shocked you that made you go, oh my gosh, I have to dive into this deeper?   [00:23:44] Dr. William Davis: It was a series of things that I stumbled on was a series of very elegant research studies from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, conducted between 2013 and 2017. This cancer group was looking at a microbe lactobacillus reuteri named after the German microbiologist who discovered this microbe in breast milk in 1962. They were looking at this microbe because they were looking into how it prevented colon cancer. It has very potent anti-cancer effects. They gave it to mice and they noticed something unusual. They noticed that within a few days of getting lactobacillus reuteri, these mice developed what they described as rich luxuriant fur. They decided to explore it and they found all sorts of unexpected phenomena. They found, for instance, that healing was remarkably accelerated. If you inflicted a wound, it healed in half the time. Hair grew faster and thicker. They found that skin thickness increased dramatically because there’s an explosion of collagen in the dermis, the dermal layer of skin. There was one study, they did a very elegant series of studies. They compared two groups of mice both fed a really crappy diet, a fast food diet, essentially. White flour, sugar, hydrogenated oils, fried foods, et cetera. One group just got the diet, they got fat, old, lost their hair, stopped playing with each other, stopped mating. They got old, fat, and died. The other group was fed the crappy diet also but given reuteri. These mice stayed slender, had thick and luxurious fur, played with each other, mated, and stayed young until they died. When that would get really interesting. They even made some other interesting observations. There’s a restoration of youthful immune response in old mice. There’s a dramatic restoration of youthful testosterone in male mice. There’s an increase in growth hormone. But the pivotal finding, the real central finding in all these studies, was that all those effects came because reuteri that colonizes the entire length of the GI tract, by the way, not just the colon, sends a signal to the brain to release oxytocin. This group worked out all the details. If you cut the vagus nerve, the whole effect is turned off. It’s so-called gut-brain access via the vagus nerve. The reuteri sends a signal to the brain, the hypothalamus, to release oxytocin and there’s a 300% increase in oxytocin. I found that really interesting even though the group said, isn’t that interesting? Do with it what you may. I got a hold of the same microbe that they used in these studies. It was available as a commercial product from Sweden. The company is called BioGaia and the product is called Gastrous. The problem is, these tablets are made for infants, and they were targeted for reducing infantile colic, regurgitation and diarrhea after antibiotics. The tablets had very low counts of microbes, I would challenge that they’re even enough for a baby. They had such low numbers, I made yogurt out of that, but not yogurt in the conventional sense. I made yogurt in a very different way. I fermented for a long, long time, 36 hours, not the usual four hours or 12 hours that some people use at home. I want as many microbes as possible. We performed flow cytometry on the yogurt and we’re getting around 250-260 billion bacteria per half cup serving. We increased the number of reuteri by a thousandfold over what was contained in the tablets. Then I want to see if we could mimic these effects in humans. Me and thousands of other people, including my entire neighborhood, are eating this yogurt. We all start to see all the same stuff. People got that boost in oxytocin and said things like, I like my family better. They don’t annoy me as much. I like my spouse better. I like my coworkers better. I understand other people’s points of view more readily. My skin is smoother, I’m losing my wrinkles. I heal faster. My sleep is deeper with vivid dreams. I’m no longer hungry, my appetite has been turned off completely. I’ve regained youthful muscle and strength. I have an increase in libido. I’m having erotic dreams like I used to have as a teenager or in my 20s. Increased muscle, increased libido, thicker hair, smoother skin. Ashley, this one microbe turns the clock back 10 or 20 years. That’s just one microbe but it became clear. It was an illustration, Ashley, just how potent it could be to restore this one microbe, which by the way, almost all of us have lost. When Gerhard Reuter was exploring reuteri in mother’s breast milk and stool, he found it in almost everybody. In the indigenous populations on this planet who have been studied for this, they all have reuteri. If you look at chipmunks, squirrels, dogs, and raccoons, they all have reuteri. Modern people have lost it. Very few of us have it anymore because it’s very susceptible to many things like the antibiotic ampicillin. If you took ampicillin for your urinary tract infection or upper respiratory infection, you’ve likely lost your reuteri. We restore this ubiquitous microbe and spectacular things happen.   [00:29:40] Ashley James: I’m just imagining how many women are breastfeeding diligently thinking that they’re supplying their baby with this and they’re not, because at some point they had a UTI infection and they lost it forever. It’s not something that’s in our food supply that we can get back once it’s gone.   [00:30:10] Dr. William Davis: No, it’s not in the food. Not to say there aren’t wonderful microbes in fermented foods. You eat, say some kimchi, which is my favorite fermented food of all. By the way, people in South Korea have among the lowest incidences of cardiovascular disease in the world, far less than we do. There are probably a lot of factors but I think a major factor is their enthusiastic consumption of fermented foods like kimchi. Kimchi’s got wonderful microbes. It’s got something called leuconostoc mesenteroides and pediococcus pentosaceus. These are really beneficial microbes, but we can get species like lactobacillus reuteri, we actually have to get it specifically. Now, one of the things that I think we’re in the process of figuring out is we have to pay attention. When you play with microbes, you have to pay attention to strain. Not just species but strain. To illustrate, you have E. coli, I have got E. coli, your listeners had E. coli in their colons. What if you ate romaine lettuce tainted by cow manure from the Central Valley of California? Well, you could die of that E. coli. Same species, E. coli, different strain. The strains that we use from the gastric tablets are two strains. It’s 17938 and 6475. I have seven other strains now of reuteri, they are in my refrigerator. I’ve made yogurt with all of them. I’ve experienced the same effect or greater with these other strains. Now, we have a mouse study lined up. We’re going to compare five strains and see if any of them are better at provoking oxytocin than the others. That’s going to get underway in just a few weeks. We’ll be smarter. What I want to do at some point is say, Ashley, this is the strain you want to use. It’s the best at generating this effect. But right now, we can’t say that, so just to be sure, we stick to the Gastrous stains. Let me tell you an embarrassing story. We get a boost in oxytocin from reuteri. Ashley, I think it’s safe to say, the restoration of reuteri makes us better human beings. Now, I did something crazy. I got another strain of reuteri from a microbiologist friend. He’s a master at generating super-duper high counts of unique strains. He was actually about half an hour from my house at a place called BioSource, his name is Suresh. He gave me some of his reuteri strains. It was super-duper high potency. I made yogurt out of it. Tastes the same, nothing different. I had it that night and then I went to sleep. During sleep, I had this incredibly vivid dream. Really embarrassing, Ashley, but I will tell you anyway. I dreamt this imaginary woman came to me and I could see her in vivid detail. I could see her hair color, her eye color, and her facial features. She introduced me first and last names, which I have never had happened in a dream before. I felt overwhelming love and affection for this imaginary woman. When I woke up, the odd thing was that overwhelming love and affection continued for this imaginary person for many hours into the day. It was intoxicating. I hadn’t had that feeling for a real person in years. I’ve not been able to recreate that feeling, but I think if we can recreate it, we can almost turn this on and off. It also makes me wonder, Ashley, if modern humans have lost reuteri and thereby the capacity to enjoy very high levels of oxytocin. Is the intensity of love and affection today less than it was 60, 100, or 10,000 years ago? Tough but I believe it might have been.   [00:34:11] Ashley James: Just think of maybe are there other groups of people that had higher levels of it naturally because their lifestyle didn’t degrade it? For example, in the history of the First Nations people in North America, what they taught in schools is so manipulated from the truth. When you actually dive into it, you find that most of the tribes were at peace with each other. They traded with each other. There were tribes up in the northern regions of the United States that had conch shells because they traded all the way down from the Mexico area. They trade routes. There was a lot of peace. There’s a lot of prosperity. There is vibrance, right? Then when they teach us that they were all savages, they’re all killing each other. That’s what they taught me in school. Then I go and actually find out that it’s highly manipulated, the history that they teach. They had so much beauty in their cultures, of course, some war with each other but there’s more peace than war. There’s more togetherness, trading, and helping each other. I just wonder if cultures were more in touch with herbal medicine and nature if they had higher levels of these strains versus cultures that maybe were drinking alcohol and messing around with substances that would disrupt the microbiome.   [00:36:12] Dr. William Davis: I think we can only speculate. It will be tough to prove. I got the oxytocin levels, the blood levels of three primitive indigenous populations. I got unpublished data from a researcher in California who went to New Guinea and very bravely got the blood of some very—these are people who just two generations ago were cannibals who were eating other humans. He got the blood from these people and measured oxytocin. I have also the data from the Somali, another indigenous population, and from the Bodango people in the Republic of the Congo. These are all people who have not been exposed to antibiotics and are not exposed to glyphosate, the herbicide. Do not get herbicide and pesticide residues in their food. Don’t take statin drugs or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. They have essentially a stone age microbiome and thereby presumptively higher oxytocin dose. Unfortunately, the methods to measure oxytocin are so wildly different that it’s almost impossible to compare their levels to modern levels. Different methods, different tests, and platforms. I have the data, but I can’t say that they had higher oxytocin. I wanted to prove that primitive people with reuteri have higher levels of oxytocin. Unfortunately, this kind of a mess of data surrounding oxytocin prevents us from doing that. We’ll likely never know unless we have a time machine and go back in time, draw blood, and run those tests using modern methods.   [00:37:50] Ashley James: There are thousands and thousands of different bacterial strains, healthy helpful bacterial strains that we can have in our gut. You’ve isolated one and played around with one and found that your healing room time, your collagen, and people are getting younger. People are getting more feeling wonderful in their bodies and connecting with other people. That alone, yes, I think that you’ve sold everyone. Everyone’s like, okay, sign me up. That’s just one. Now, you talk about making yogurt. Can I take the same stuff and go make some fermented food with it? Just add it to the brine, add it to the saltwater and ferment some cabbage and get the same result, or do you find that we have to make yogurt and can it be a plant-based yogurt?   [00:38:40] Dr. William Davis: It doesn’t have to be dairy and it doesn’t have to be yogurt. It could be coconut milk. It could be veggies. What I don’t know Ashley is the number of microbes you obtain from that. If you were to ferment let’s say some eggplant and cabbage, the reuteri will compete with the microbes that are on the surface of the vegetable like say Leoconostoc. I can’t say that you get the same kind of numbers. That’s a work in progress. We’ll probably quantify that. That requires DNA analysis. Flow cytometry is a quick and dirty way to count microbes. When you have different microbes, several of them to tell them apart, you have to do DNA analysis to tell them apart and count them. We have not done that, but you can indeed do that. You know what, you can gauge this by the effect. Personally, for instance, I go from terrible insomnia, terrible for years, decades taking horse doses of melatonin just to get a good night’s sleep. Now whereas I used to watch TV or read books at two or three o’clock in the morning. Now I sleep straight through nine hours of sleep. By the way, those of us who wear actigraphy graphic devices like an Apple Watch, a Fitbit, or an aura ring, see that REM sleep, the deep restorative phase of sleep that helps you maintain good mental health is extended by about 20%. That’s another thing that needs to be formally documented with AEG, not just an active graphic device. I know I get a very deep sleep with vivid, colorful dreams. I know if I take a microbe that’s not working or I’m not getting enough microbes, I’ll revert back to being an insomniac. I have my own little built-in gauge. If your listeners do this, you try to ferment something else, and you lose the effect, then you know that the microbe count might not be enough. One thing you’ll find in the world of the microbiome that’s not well explored is what’s called dose-response. The drug people, as much as I despise that industry, those people are very good at dose-response dies. They have a new drug, they’re going to test all variations in dose 0.25 milligrams, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.5, 5.0, 10, 15, 25, 50. They have deep pockets. In the microbiome world, we don’t have deep pockets like that. We do have a human study where we are going to take a stab at dose-response, 10 billion and 50 billion with a strain of reuteri. My gut’s sense, forgive the pun, it takes probably 50 billion more microbes to generate an effect. What I don’t know is, let’s say you fermented sauerkraut with reuteri, will you get sufficient numbers of reuteri when it competes with other species? That I don’t know. But you know what, this is fun, it’s benign, it’s very low cost. In fact, you save money. One of the things I advocate is you can spend a ton of money on these fancy commercial probiotics, which by the way have some real problems. Nonetheless, you can buy a probiotic. Pay a lot of money for it. You can ferment foods with it. It cuts back on your need to buy it again. If you make the yogurt, for instance, you don’t make future batches from tablets of reuteri, you make it from a little bit as a prior batch. That’s how I have my entire neighborhood making reuteri yogurt. I give them a little bit of the yogurt and they make their yogurt from that prior batch.   [00:42:18] Ashley James: Yes, right. Maybe you could clarify, I think a lot of people thought if you take a probiotic, it’s like planting a seed in a garden. Then you don’t have to keep planting seeds every day. Right? Whatever you planted is going to grow and then reproduce its own seeds and then keep growing. The idea is, if you take a probiotic, wouldn’t that one course of probiotics populate the gut and now the reuteri is living in your gut and that’s it. It’s over with. You do not have to eat anymore. Or do you have to constantly eat it because it doesn’t reproduce in the gut?   [00:42:57] Dr. William Davis: You raise a fundamental question, Ashley. That is how come if mom gave you a microbe, you’d likely have it for decades, if not an entire lifetime. If you take it as a probiotic or yogurt, you’ll have it for a few days, maybe weeks, and then it dies. Why? Well, it points toward all the inadequacies of the current understanding of commercial probiotics. The commercial probiotic is when nothing more than a slapdash, half-hazard collection of microbes just put together with no rhyme or reason. That’s the current crop. The probiotic of the future will have other factors built-in. For one, they must specify strain for the reasons we talked about. If you don’t specify strain, you have no idea what you have. For instance, there’s a strain of lactobacillus rhamnosus, that GG strain that has very good evidence for abbreviating post-antibiotic diarrhea. If you take lactobacillus rhamnosus non-GG strain, it doesn’t have that effect. You need to know the strain. That’s one issue. Another issue is microbes are just like people. We don’t live in isolation all by ourselves. We have partners, families, neighborhoods, and communities. Bacteria are the same way. They have guilds or consortia and they work together. Almost no probiotic preparation factors in that phenomenon. The only product I know of that does that is one out of Colorado called BiotiQuest’s Sugar Shift. I have no relation to the people who developed it. My friends Martha Carlin and Dr. Raul Cano, a microbiologist with 40 years of academic experience. They formulated this because this group of microbes work together and generate bigger effects. They call it Sugar Shift because it reduces blood sugar quite substantially, by the way. Most other probiotics do not incorporate that phenomenon. Another deficiency of modern probiotics is they fail to include keystone species. These are foundational species that support other species like plankton in the ocean. Without plankton, you don’t have whales or jellyfish. It’s foundational or keystone. We need to have restored keystone species. Reuteri is a keystone species. There are others like lactobacillus gasseri, faecalibacterium prausnitzii is another, don’t memorize these of course. When you buy a commercial probiotic, many of them lack. In their defense, a lot of this is a work in evolution. But the bottom line here is a probiotic is probably one of the least important things you can do to restore the microbiome. Among the most important is to include fermented foods. Bring back fermented foods, just like your great-grandmother did. Kimchi, kombucha, kefirs, yogurts, fermented veggies, fermented meats, all those things, you get these wonderful microbes. The curious thing is the microbes you get from fermented foods like leuconostoc mesenteroides do not actually take up residence for very long. By some odd twist, just having those guys restored allows healthy microbes to re-emerge. It’s not quite clear how that works but this is very interesting data out of Stanford. The Sonnenburgs, Eric and Justin, husband and wife microbiology team published a very important study that showed that fermented foods hands down are the most important thing that you can reincorporate into the modern diet. That is something that most people forgot about. In fact, most modern people think that fermented foods are rotten. They’ll often throw away something that ferments. We need to add those things back and that’s a really big advantage for the restoration of rebuilding a microbiome.   [00:47:06] Ashley James: I love it. What about prebiotic foods? Fibers that are non-wheat, there are some indigestible fibers that we don’t necessarily eat because we’re going to digest it but it feeds the microbiome. It just enriches it. How important is making sure that we eat prebiotic food?   [00:47:33] Dr. William Davis: Very important, Ashley. As you suggested, including sources of prebiotic fibers. If you and I were primitive, indigenous populations, you wouldn’t go to a grocery store, of course. You would dig in the dirt and look for roots and tubers. That’s where you get the majority of your prebiotic fibers. You would also kill animals, and as disgusting as modern people find it, in addition to eating the brain, heart, tongue, and pancreas, we would also eat the intestines and stomach, and sometimes do that raw. That is the real version of prebiotic fibers and probiotics. Modern people cannot stomach those kinds of things so we have to compensate for it. I say all of that because sometimes things we turn to get our prebiotic fibers seem a little odd. Like a raw white potato is filled with prebiotic fibers. It seems a little odd because we’re not used to that. We’re trying to recreate what indigenous populations did by digging in the dirt. Raw white potatoes, inulin powder is an easy convenient way to get it. Legumes, white beans, black beans, kidney beans, peas, chickpeas, hummus, root vegetables, dandelion greens. There’s a long list of these things and they’re very, very important. The problem that people encounter though is modern people have so massively disrupted their microbiome in the form of either dysbiosis that is unhealthy microbes in the colon or worse, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO, where all 30 feet of the GI tract are filled with unhealthy mostly stool microbes that they say things like, I can’t eat beans because when I do, I have explosive diarrhea, panic attacks, bloating, and other effects. There’s nothing wrong with the beans or other foods you’re intolerant to and that could be, by the way nightshades, FODMAPs containing foods, histamine foods. There’s nothing wrong with the food. There’s something wrong with your microbiome. These are modern phenomena. People say things like, I had the testing, I can’t eat these 42 foods. There’s nothing wrong with the food, it’s your microbiome. People have to get beyond this idea that there’s something wrong with the food. It is something wrong with you, the microbiome.   [00:49:55] Ashley James: Right. It’s fascinating that our microbiome actually helps us digest our food and turns it into chemicals that we absorb. Without the microbiome, we would not survive. It’s so important, but like you pointed out, it also plays a major role in our mood. Often we sort of live life letting our mood guide us. They woke up on the wrong side of the bed. People make decisions most of the time, not logically, but most of the time from their emotions. They’re letting their gut run them, right?   [00:50:29] Dr. William Davis: Exactly, I’m always impressed just how much our internal dialogues—the things we tell ourselves, conversations we have in our heads—are colored by our microbes. A really good illustration of this is when you try to undo all these bad things. Let’s say you have all these stool microbes like E. coli, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas, and Proteus, and all these are filling your 30 feet of GI tract. Well, you do something to kill them. It could be an antibiotic, it could be an herbal antibiotic. It could be something I called SIBO yogurt. We make yogurt that I think is proven to be effective in eradicating SIBO. You kill these microbes and when they die, they shed their breakdown products, some of which get into your bloodstream and people call it die off but the real name is called endotoxemia. People will say things like this as they are in the process of killing microbes. They say, I’m having terrible panic attacks. I’m having dark thoughts and nightmares. People are chasing me, I’m falling off a cliff. My heart is racing. I’m having a low-grade fever. I ache all over. That’s a vivid illustration of the kinds of things that happen when unhealthy microbes die off. Outside of that situation of die off, just having microbes living in your GI tract—these microbes don’t live for hours, they do not live for decades. If you had trillions of microbes occupying 30 feet of your GI tract, and they live and die in rapid succession, they shed their breakdown products, some of it gets in your bloodstream, that’s endotoxemia. Even when you’re not trying to kill them, some of it gets into your bloodstream. That’s the thing that colors your internal dialogue and your mood. There’s a very interesting but disturbing set of studies from Germany where they took people who are non-depressed, normal people, they took that endotoxin to break down prompts and bacteria and injected it into these normal people. Which is really scary because if you miscalculate the dose, you can kill somebody quite easily. They somehow got into the review board. An injected bacterial endotoxin into these people, within three hours were profoundly depressed and had all the hallmarks of depression by MRI. It’s just one illustration of the potent effect that microbes have on your internal dialogue and mood.   [00:53:10] Ashley James: That is scary. What about someone who puts on an antibiotic? Does that have a similar effect? Does endotoxemia occur when we go on antibiotics?   [00:53:23] Dr. William Davis: It can. It depends on the antibiotic, where it was targeted towards. But yes, people do get quite sick taking antibiotics. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish the die off effect from the disease you’re treating. If you’re treating pneumonia, you’re already sick, feeling awful, and having a fever. The die off effect just makes you feel a little worse. This is a well-established phenomenon. That’s known for about a century. It’s not just unique to these efforts in the microbiome. It is known to occur with virtually any infection where you’re killing off microbes. It is an illustration of the power of microbes and their breakdown products that color human mood and our internal dialogues. It makes you wonder, hate has always been part of the world. Humans are a violent species. As you pointed out, has it gotten worse? Did indigenous populations actually enjoy a lot more peace than we give them credit for? Part of that at least do the microbiome, such as loss of reuteri and thereby oxytocin, the hormone of love, affection, and understanding of other people’s points of view. We can only speculate, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is somehow we prove it to be true.   [00:54:41] Ashley James: You are a cardiologist. I wonder from that filter, from that viewpoint, have you seen that restoring the microbiome positively affects heart health?   [00:55:01] Dr. William Davis: I think so. That’s an area where the microbiome science has simply not been explored sufficiently. It’s my prediction that the microbiome plays a very important role in coronary disease. That is heart attacks and those diseases of the heart’s arteries. I think it plays a big role in cardiomyopathies, heart muscle diseases, congestive heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and other heart rhythm disorders. I predict that managing the microbiome will become a major—the problem with this of course, Ashley, is that practicing physicians, including my immediate colleagues and cardiologists, are typically 20 years behind in the science. I still have colleagues say to me, there’s no such thing as SIBO, which is ridiculous, of course. There are thousands of published research studies on SIBO. They say things like, we know that probiotics don’t do anything. Well, we’ve got some criticisms of probiotics, but to say that they don’t do anything is completely nonsense. That’s the nature of things that the science has marched way ahead and the practicing physician is way behind. That’s why I think it’s so important for what you’re doing, what I’m trying to do, and that is broadcast these messages so that your listeners can take the reins. Yes, and their doctor will say, Ashley, did you consult doctor Google again? Right?   [00:56:23] Ashley James: I would fire that doctor and hire a more informed one. That’s what I will do.   [00:56:28] Dr. William Davis: That’s what you have to do. Take the reins yourself. That’s one of the great things about the microbiome. If you can tolerate a little bit of digging and understanding, it’s not that difficult. People have astounding control over their health if given a little bit of direction. The reuteri yogurt and other yogurts. I should tell you about the SIBO yogurt. This problem of SIBO, that is 30 feet of microbes, largely stool microbes that have ascended up into the small bowel. I used to think this was uncommon or rare until something came out called the AIRE device made by a company in Dublin, Ireland. Invented by a Ph.D. engineer named Dr. Angus Short. He made this device because he saw his girlfriend, now wife, struggle with her irritable bowel syndrome when she was told to go on a low FODMAPs diet. He saw a low fiber low sugar diet. He saw how difficult that was for her and when she did get exposed, how she’d have bloating, diarrhea, and other effects. He invents this device for her that measures hydrogen gas in the breath because bacteria produce hydrogen gas but humans do not. You can use it to map out where microbes are. He commercialized this device a few years ago thinking it was just a device for people with IBS and FODMAPs intolerance. I got a hold of it and I called him up and I said, Angus, this is far bigger than you think. This is a device that maps out where microbes are in the GI tract and helps people navigate all food intolerances. FODMAPs, nightshade, histamine-containing foods, sorbitol, fructose, fruit, legumes, nuts, all that stuff. He now knows that this is a far more important device than ever thought. I had thousands of people testing their breath now for hydrogen gas. Ashley, what shocked me was it’s everywhere. People are testing positive left and right. It’s the uncommon person who tests negative. My crude estimation is that at least a very conservatively estimated, at least 100 million Americans have SIBO. I think that’s a dramatic underestimation. It’s gotten a whole bunch worse just the last few years. People say things like, this is too complicated. It’s too much to worry about. It is scaring me. It’s very unwise to ignore this because if you have SIBO, which is true for a lot of people—at least one in three—over time it leads to autoimmune diseases, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, colon cancer, and neurodegenerative disorders. In other words, it leads to a whole host of diseases. Of course the doctor is more than happy to dispense all kinds of fancy drugs including biologics for many thousands of dollars per month.   [00:59:40] Ashley James: Just thinking about what led us here? I mean, antibiotic use is on the rise, right? Glyphosates in our foods, just one of the thousands of chemicals in our food. Glyphosate, although was first designed as a chelator, is now known back, I think, 2010 or 2012, they published that it’s also an antibiotic. Glyphosates, which is in the Roundup. Which is in so much of our food. Even if you buy organic at home, if you go out to a restaurant to eat something, you’re eating glyphosate. That is basically antibiotics in your food. There are chemicals in our food that are harming our microbiome, then there’s the diet itself. I heard somewhere that eating high fat and when I say high fat, I mean a highly processed oil, standard American diet like eating french fries, like eating canola oils, right? This very high unhealthy fat diet, just go out and eat at restaurants basically. That oil itself suffocates the good microbiome. It makes it like an anaerobic environment. I’m just exploring, just in my mind, I’m exploring all the factors that we have in this modern era that are killing the good bacteria.   [01:01:26] Dr. William Davis: You know, Ashley, I could devote an entire episode of your podcast just talking about that because you’re making an essential point. We’re drowning in the factors that disrupt the microbiome. You’re right, antibiotics. Most of us by age 40 have already taken 30 courses of antibiotics. For every thousand children, over 1,300 prescriptions for antibiotics are written every year. That’s just antibiotics. You making an essential point with the glyphosate. Yes, an herbicide but also a potent antibiotic. Other herbicides, pesticides, a linoleic acid-rich diet that is a diet that includes lots of vegetable oils, corn oil, sunflower oil, and safflower oil does disrupt the microbiome. We have to be careful here. I love talking to a microbiologist. I’m not of course a microbiologist but I talk to a lot of microbiologists. I love talking to them because they have such great insights into microbes. The problem with microbiologists is they are microbiologists. They don’t understand nutrition. I mentioned that because you’ll see in a lot of the studies, they say, we gave our mice a high-fat diet just like unhealthy Americans. They’ve subscribed to this ridiculous and outdated notion that we should all be low fat, which of course is absurd. The low-fat mantra has damaged so many billions of people’s health and lives and it’s a big driver of obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemics we now have, so we have got to be careful. You’re right that the linoleic acid omega 6-rich oils do contribute to the disruption of the microbiome. On the other hand, it’s omega 3, the EPA DHA, not so much the linoleic acid that has microbiome protective effects. One of the things that the omega 3 fatty acids do is activate an enzyme that lines the intestinal wall called intestinal outland phosphatase. One of the effects of that enzyme is to deactivate that endotoxin that microbes release and tries to get into your bloodstream. Even good old fish oil has beneficial effects on the microbiome.   [01:03:44] Ashley James: I love it. I love all these tidbits. Let’s talk more about your book because I’m sure I want to go make the SIBO yogurt. We’re going to make it out of coconut milk or something. I really want to make that. My husband has had mild SIBO. We did that test, eating a certain diet, then you blow into the little tubes and you send it off to the lab. I also wonder about small intestinal fungal overgrowth, which the doctor who coined that and the first person who ever published studies on it, I had him on the show. He says it’s a man-made illness because without antibiotics and all the things we’ve done to disrupt—basically take healthy food and turn it into junk food, turn it into processed food, and all the chemicals we now eat. Mostly it’s the overuse of antibiotics. He sees that fungal overgrowth is now taking effect in the small intestines. He had a wealth of data to support this and he was criticized heavily by his peers. It’s just funny that we can have a mountain of evidence. It’s like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. We can have a mountain of evidence, but when we challenge people’s belief systems, especially someone who has had more education around their profession, challenging that education sometimes leads to a lot of resistance. We have to remember to keep our minds open enough that our brains could fall out. Just think critically. Don’t take everything at face value. Question everything, but keep your mind so open. What if you could cure your insomnia and depression because you changed what you ate? So many doctors out there will say that’s impossible, take this prescription. Yet here we have this book, Super Gut by Dr. William Davis. He’s showing us that we can do simple, small, actionable steps each day, and we could cure lifelong insomnia. We can look younger. We can have more love in our life. We can start to reverse major health issues and get off medications like diabetes. For SIBO, it causes so much discomfort. Like you said, it can lead to colon cancer, it can lead to all these other issues, that it causes distension. I have a friend who has such a bad SIBO that she only eats meat. She’s so careful. She can’t even use spices. She can’t put onion on something. Any form of fiber and she is so sick. She gets a migraine. She gets bloated and she’s so sick that the only thing she can do is use a small amount of meat each day. She is becoming skinnier and skinnier in a very unhealthy way. She’s always in pain. I can’t wait to give her your book. I am going to cry. I’m so excited for her because I know her case is extreme. It was years and years leading up to it. For those who notice that they have gut issues, they have digestion issues, and eliminating one food after another and after another. It is going to get to the point where it’s like, what can you eat? Whereas when we heal the gut and that we have a strong healthy microbiome, the microbiome is working with us, the healthy microbes are working with us to help digest our food, and assimilate our food, then we won’t have those issues anymore. The SIBO yogurt is that in your book?   [01:07:41] Dr. William Davis: It is. I came to it by just sheer logic, just reasoning this out. Because when you think about it, if you have SIBO that is 30 feet of trillions of microbes, if you take a commercial probiotic off the shelf, can it get rid of your SIBO? No, it might reduce bloating and diarrhea a little bit, but it really wants to get rid of these misplaced bacteria in the upper GI tract. That’s why people use things like Rifaximin, the prescription antibiotics, and some of the herbal antibiotic regimens that have some proven efficacy like the good the bad, and the FC biocides regimen that I discussed in the book. That we use for a couple of years successfully. But I asked some different questions. I asked, what if we chose bacterial species that colonize the upper GI tract? Because that’s where SIBO occurs. What if we chose species that produced what are called bacteriocins? These are natural antibiotics effective against this species of SIBO. I chose a strain of Lactobacillus gasseri. Gasseri colonizes the upper GI tract and produces up to seven bacteriocins. It was a bacteriocin powerhouse. I chose those strains of reuteri that also colonize the upper GI tract and produce up to four bacteriocins and a strain of bacillus coagulans. We co-ferment them as yogurt. It doesn’t have yogurt, but in this case, I use yogurt. Extended fermentation to achieve very high bacterial counts and we consume half a cup per day. Ashley, so far, this is only about 30 people but 90% have converted to hydrogen gas negative by the AIRE device. So far, it’s holding up. We have several clinical trials in the works. We’ll probably do that one down the road, not as yogurt but we’ll have to encapsulate microbes to control the dose. We’ll probably look at that formally and see if this holds true, but so far I think it’s working. The downside is you have to eat it for about four weeks. It’s a little slower than antibiotics. There is a die off phenomenon upfront. You do get the little bloating, anxiety, and those light effects, but Ashley, it’s just yogurt. It’s such a nice way to approach it.   [01:10:11] Ashley James: Instead of having to go through the FODMAPs diet, that is infinitely easier than getting rid of SIBO traditionally.   [01:10:20] Dr. William Davis: Right. Now, one thing we’ve not done is test how well this works in non-dairy fermentation that I just don’t know. I believe you can do quite well though. We’ve had a number of people do this well with coconut milk, canned coconut milk. The only difference is when you ferment canned coconut milk, there are a few additional steps you have to add because coconut milk likes to separate into fat. You don’t want to get this big layer of fat. You have to add some guar gum. We preheat. We don’t preheat dairy, that’s an unnecessary step. They do that in conventional yogurt making because they start with skim milk or low-fat milk. I start with organic half and half, 18% fat. For all the problems that dairy may have, the least problem or no problem is the dairy fat or fat is fine. This notion of low-fat nonfat dairy is ridiculous. I start with organic half and half 18% fat. You can also start with organic coconut milk. You’ll just have to add a few additional steps like adding a little bit of guar gum and then we also blend it with a blender until it thickens up. All of these additional steps discourage separation in the final product.   [01:11:37] Ashley James: This is so interesting. I’ve made plant-based yogurt before and I used whatever I thought was a healthy probiotic. It turned out well. I’m excited to play with your system and what’s in your book. Your book is Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan, so let’s talk about this. It is a four-week plan just to reprogram your microbiome to restore health and lose weight. Give us a glimpse into what it looks like for the next four weeks. We’re all going to get your book and then we’re going to do it for four weeks. How much time does this take? What kind of fun experiments are we going to be cooking up in the kitchen? Give us a layout of what it looks like for the next four weeks.   [01:12:26] Dr. William Davis: If we spend the first week, I liken this, Ashley, to a backyard vegetable garden. Let’s pretend it’s May or June and you’re going to layout a 10×10 plot. How do you do that? Well, you lay out your plot, then you pick out the stones and the twigs, and then you plant seeds. Then you want to fertilize it for the growing season. After a couple of months, you’ve got a whole bunch of eggplant, pumpkins, squash, cucumbers, and zucchini. The same kind of thing happens in your microbiome. We have to prepare the soil. It’s done the first week of preparing the soil means undoing all the things that screw up your microbiome such as getting filtered water, and choosing organic foods over conventional foods wherever possible to minimize your exposure to herbicides and pesticides. Working to get off medications like statin drugs and anti-inflammatory drugs. This might take longer than a week but at least you have a whole week to try to reorganize your life and clean up your microbiome. We also approach diet. I’m guilty of reintroducing some of the Wheat Belly-type concepts just because as you saw, even though the concepts in Wheat Belly did not take the microbiome 100% of the way back, it was a great start because one of the things that happen with brain consumption is huge intestinal inflammation. You experienced it, you lost all that water weight.   [01:13:56] Ashley James: Yeah, the inflammation weight.   [01:13:59] Dr. William Davis: When you lose water weight, that is very important because it means you were retaining water because you were inflamed. Getting rid of all that inflammation, water is a huge step. We reintroduce the diet like we’re already doing the diet simpler for them. I also introduce nutrients that are largely lacking in modern life. Not because of the diet but because of the way we conduct our lives. We can’t drink from the river because it’s got sewage, pesticides, and herbicides. We have to filter our water. All water filtration removes all magnesium. We all begin with profound magnesium depletion. We’ve replaced that and that helps the microbiome as well as other aspects of your physiology. We’ve replaced vitamin D because we don’t eat liver and most of us live indoors and wear clothes when we’re out in public, we replace the vitamin D. Iodine and omega 3 fatty acids, similar reasons, which we’re because we’re just not getting enough from our diets. One departure we have to talk about is people get all excited when they hear about the reuteri yogurt and how you turn the clock back 10 or 20 years, the infantis yogurt that we use in babies that has dramatic effects on their future development and IQ, or bacillus coagulants, how it helps athletes recover faster. But the problem with that is those are really powerful strategies but they work much better if you don’t have SIBO or SIFO. Many people have to stop the program and then deal with their SIBO or SIFO. It’s not that difficult, but it means there’s a delay. You might not do it in four weeks because if you’re going to do the SIBO yogurt, that alone is about four weeks. If you do the candibactin regimen of herbal antibiotics, that takes a couple of weeks. If you don’t have SIBO or SIFO, that’s a lot simpler. Then you start talking about these fermented foods, including yogurt to get these outsized effects.   [01:16:07] Ashley James: That’s really exciting. It’s exciting that people will be in touch with their bodies. They’ll notice these changes. They’ll go, okay, I’ve got to stop and go and do the SIBO regimen and then come back. It empowers people. It gives them confidence. I’ve experienced this as well. So many of us, because we’re raised to believe that we wait to get sick and then go to the doctor and the doctor is on their pedestal that will heal us. Then they write a prescription and which most drugs don’t heal, they suppress. They manipulate the body, suppress, and they don’t actually help the body overcome and get healthy again. Because the body was out of balance because it was missing nutrients, mostly it’s our diet. We got to bring and we got to correct the diet. We’ve got to make sure our diet includes the prebiotics and the probiotics, the fermented foods. Like you said, first correct the overgrowth if there’s an overgrowth in the small intestines. We’ve been raised to believe that we wait to get sick and then see the doctor. It’s so backward. This is sort of the mainstream idea of health is that we are helpless and the all-seeing, all-knowing doctor is going to help us. That’s the perfect business model. It’s perfect PR perfect marketing for big pharma. It’s perfect, a lifelong customer, for doctors and big pharma. Then there are doctors like you who are like let’s get so healthy we don’t need to get sick all the time, go to the doctor, and get a prescription. Let’s get so healthy that we prevent getting sick.   [01:18:06] Dr. William Davis: You make such a crucial point that I agree completely. That is, we need to get away from this idea of treating diseases like type 2 diabetes. What are they doing for type 2 diabetes? One, the American Diabetes Association diet is absurd. It raises blood sugar and sustains diabetes, so they’re no help. The doctor introduces drugs whether it’s insulin, Metformin, Byetta injections, or other drugs to reduce blood sugar. They don’t address the cause. What you’re advocating is we identify the root causes of these conditions. In the case of type 2 diabetes, let’s remove the foods that raise blood sugar and cause insulin resistance. Let’s address the nutrients that are largely lacking that also contribute to insulin resistance. Let’s address the microbiome that via endotoxemia contributes largely to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes goes away in the vast majority of people. I was a diabetic 30 years ago. I’m no longer a diabetic on nothing except my nutrients and food. I have perfect blood sugar and perfect hemoglobin A1C. I’ve done this with many, many people, and there’s actually published evidence to this effect, but unfortunately, it doesn’t drive revenues. While you and I know this, your listeners know this, my colleagues don’t give a crap because there’s no pot of gold involved.   [01:19:40] Ashley James: This is a really scary part of the medical system. You as the patient need to be incredibly informed and we have to pull our heads out of the sand. We cannot blindly take our bodies to a doctor that is just going to put us on the conveyor belt of allopathic medicine. We need to take charge. That can seem daunting and overwhelming, especially if we have a large family. I know as a mom, I’m responsible for feeding everyone every day, every meal, and it gets a little overwhelming and gets a little old. If we can sort of step back and just take these baby steps, and I love that your program, let’s just make this yogurt and eat it for the next two weeks, that’s doable. What else are some doable steps that we can take? Nothing overwhelming, but something that really gives us some bang for our buck.   [01:20:45] Dr. William Davis: I have a really cool one. It’s not in the book, but it’s consistent with the program. It is on my website. I had my Wheat Belly blog for years. It had 30 million visits and I converted it over to drdavisinfinitehealth.com. I had so many websites and social media. I combined a lot of it into one website, this drdavisinfinitehealth.com. One of the things I’ve been advocating is that there’s a fungus, not a bacteria but a fungus called saccharomyces boulardii. It’s a cousin of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae that’s used to ferment wine and beer. Saccharomyces boulardii is better adapted to the human body. It doesn’t take up long-term residence. It acts as a kind of a traffic cop in your microbiome that when you get exposed to this microbe, it does all kinds of cool stuff. It encourages growth, a proliferation of healthy bacterial species. It discourages unhealthy species including fungi like candida albicans, candida glabrata and malassezia. If you take it during a course of antibiotics, it minimizes the disruption of your microbiome because it’s not susceptible to antibiotics. It’s a fungus. We take this microbe and you could buy it in the US at Walgreens, Walmart, or Target as a product called florastor. Florastor has different names in other countries but in the US it is called florastor. As often happens, they sell it in low numbers. What we do is take a capsule of the Florastor and empty it into some juice. Apple cider is a really good one. I recently made mango passion fruit juice. You have just had to make sure there are no preservatives in it. Look for potassium sorbate or those kinds of things. Don’t buy those, you want one with no preservatives because preservatives inhibit the microbe. Get a natural juice, it’s going to have a lot of sugar, but fermentation by saccharomyces boulardii reduces the sugar because it eats the sugar. Take a capsule, empty it into any volume—a quarter, a gallon, whatever you want. Cap it lightly, not tightly, because you’re going to see within 24 hours as it sits on your kitchen counter it will be bubbling with carbon dioxide. Let it go for 48, not more than 72 hours refrigerated. You’re going to have sparkling juice. It’s effervescent, it’s delicious. You’re getting a wallop of saccharomyces boulardii that helps bring your bacterial and fungal microbiome back in order. This is a great adjunct to the other things you’re doing like SIBO yogurt, the candibactin regimen, or whatever else you’re doing to reorder your microbiome. It’s a big advantage. Just be sure not to cap it tight because you’ll have an explosion because of so much carbon dioxide. It tastes like apple soda or whatever kind of juice you ferment. It’s effervescent like soda.   [01:23:59] Ashley James: It sounds like making water kefir where the bacteria eats the sugar and poops out the bubbles.   [01:24:02] Dr. William Davis: Exactly, yes.   [01:24:05] Ashley James: I love it. I have a dear friend who has lifelong constipation. Her parents had her on courses of antibiotics as a baby. I just think this is such a common problem. She has tried everything. Everything that I’ve given her because I have lots of health information. I’m like, all right, try this healing gut soup. Now, try this herb and try just everything and she says it’ll work for a bit. Then the second she gets off it, it’s a high-fiber vegetable soup. It’s really nice when she takes it but the moment she stops taking it, she’ll go back to incredible constipation. Nothing seems to last. Nothing seems to stick. Every supplement she’s tried, every diet change she’s tried, and it doesn’t have any lasting effect. She’s tried on over-the-counter probiotics. She has to be on high doses of oral magnesium just to keep her moving. What would you say to someone who has lifelong constipation that has never been able to get it under control? I really feel like it’s a microbiome issue because she knows she was on antibiotics her entire childhood and it totally destroyed her gut. All the conventional ways of restoring the microbiome haven’t worked for her. What would you say for those who have very chronic constipation?   [01:25:32] Dr. William Davis: First, Ashley, I’m very impressed she knows you and she knows about magnesium because magnesium is a really big advantage. It abbreviates the so-called transit time. The amount of time it takes for food to pass through your GI tract. She’s already done that. That’s a great thing to do. Another thing is called obstipation. It’s the most severe form of constipation that seems to respond to nothing. Getting rid of wheat and grains is important because of the gliadin-derived opioids. Of course, opioids are very constipating. Anybody who’s taking oxycontin or other opioids knows he gets terrible constipation from opioids. The gliadin protein in wheat and the related proteins and other grains become opioids and they are likewise extremely constipating for many people. I had a woman way back when Wheat Belly first came out and she said, you’re not going to believe what happened to me. I moved my bowels once every three weeks. My abdomen is so distended. I’ve had numerous endoscopies and colonoscopies and all they tell me is to take laxatives, enemas, and stool softeners and nothing works. I went wheat and grain-free and I lost 30 pounds in a week. For the first time in her lifetime, she’s moving her bowels every day. Then her family left the house for a day and she’s hungry for lunch. She says, what the heck, I’m going to make a sandwich. She had a sandwich with bread and it all came back. It took her about another week to get off of it and have her bowel movements returned. I’ve seen things like that. That’s called obstipation. The gliadin-derived opioids can be very potent. The other thing here is likely she has, of course, methanogen overgrowth. That is an overgrowth of not bacteria and not fungi but these peculiar creatures called archaea. These are really fascinating creatures because they’re also called extremophiles. They live in the boiling water geysers in Yellowstone National Park. They live at the bottom of the ocean with extreme weight upon them. They survive in all kinds of extreme environments, the Dead Sea with extreme salinity and the human GI tract. No one knows how they got there or why they’re there, we are filled with methanogens. When they overgrow and possibly ascend into the upper GI tract, the telltale sign is unremitting constipation. The newest AIRE device that came out literally two weeks ago, the old AIRE device only measured hydrogen gas. The newest device measures hydrogen gas and methane. She can do that and prove to herself whether she has methanogen overgrowth or she can do a stool analysis and see if she has an excess of so-called methanogens. These are microbes like methanobrevibacters smithii and some others. One of the problems we have with methanogen overgrowth, it’s not quite clear how we best manage it. There’s some evidence that the Rifaximin antibiotic has an effect. There is some data and we’ve seen some successes with the Candibactin Herbal antibiotic regimen. There may be some other things, but they’re very poorly documented. We’re not quite clear on exactly what to do with methanogen overgrowth, though I personally would consider the newest aire device and consider the Candibactin regimen. If you have methanogen growth, you’d likely have other disruptions in the microbiome. All the other things we do like saccharomyces boulardii sparkling cider, maybe the SIBO yogurt, all those kinds of things probably have value as well.   [01:29:26] Ashley James: The candibactin regimen is that in your book?   [01:29:30] Dr. William Davis: It is. It’s from metagenics. It’s Candibactin-AR and Candibactin-BR. I was very skeptical about these herbal antibiotics because when you combine things, when you say things like this, let’s throw in a little oil of oregano because it’s effective against E. Coli. Let’s throw a little this herb because it’s effective against this other microbe. You really can’t concoct antibiotics that way. There has to be formal evidence and these were concocted very sloppily. I was very skeptical. Then there was a study from Johns Hopkins that compared incredibly Rifaximin to conventional antibiotics with two herbal antibiotic regimens. The ones I’ve mentioned, the Candibactin regimen and the dysbiocide regimen from Biotics Research. Lo and behold, the herbal antibiotic regimens outperformed the Rifaximin and the Rifaximin failures, of which there are many, responded to the herbal antibiotics. Lo and behold, some evidence that there are herbal antibiotics. Now, there are lots of other herbal antibiotics but they have no evidence for efficacy. I have no reason to take them on faith. Those two regimens have worked for us. But lately, I’ve been inching towards this idea that you know what, if you have SIBO, not methanogen overgrowth, try the SIBO yogurt. There is one small study, I believe it was done in Italy looking at reuteri that suppress methanogens. But I’m skeptical, I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that’s really going to play out in the real world. I wouldn’t advocate the reuteri alone for methanogen overgrowth and constipation.   [01:31:13] Ashley James: It sounds like a pretty stubborn microbe to get rid of like it lives in the Dead Sea and lives in geysers. It sounds like it’s going to take a bit more to move it out of the body.   [01:31:30] Dr. William Davis: Here’s an oddity. If we look at the microbiomes of indigenous populations like the ones that have been studied in Africa, South America, and elsewhere. They have methanogens more than we do. In other words, if we use them as a comparator to see what a healthy microbiome should look like, this is kind of puzzling, they have more methanogens than we do. I think what’s happening here—by the way, beyond constipation, methanogen overgrowth has not yet been blamed for any human disease. It’s not quite clear what these things are doing. I think what that means when you look at the Hodza, for instance like Maasai, Yanomami, or the people in the jungles of New Guinea, they have all these methanogens. What the real story here is with the presence of methanogens per se may not be harmful. It’s the company it keeps in the rest of the microbiome. In other words, maybe those indigenous populations define with methanogens because they have more spirochaetes that we don’t have any of. They have more Prevotella and they don’t have any by sort of bacteria. They have a very different microbiome. Maybe it’s the setting that occurs. In other words, it’s not quite clear what we do about methanogen overgrowth but for the sake of your poor friend’s constipation, it’s still worth considering, like the candibactin regimen. I think in the future, we’re going to have to rethink this whole situation within the methanogens.   [01:33:09] Ashley James: Fascinating. I love it. I’m really excited to apply these to my life and get my friends and the whole neighborhood. I’m very excited to play with it. I’m very excited for my listeners to get your book, Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight. Lastly, let’s talk about this idea of losing weight simply by focusing on supporting gut health. We touched on how by removing grains, you can lose the water weight. How even just with the Lactobacillus reuteri improves the oxytocin and you feel so good and you’re not hungry so it curbs the appetite. Beyond those things, how does your book help us lose weight by creating a healthy microbiome?   [01:34:09] Dr. William Davis: Back to your reuteri and oxytocin, you may recall one of the effects of the boost in oxytocin is the so-called anorexigenic effect. It really turns off your appetite. If you go wheat and grain-free, you’ve eliminated gliadin-derived opioid peptides. They’re not only constipating, but they’re also very potent appetite stimulants. That’s why you see people, for instance, have a big bowl of pasta, they’re filled to bursting, yet they’re still hungry. That’s the gliadin-derived opioid peptide appetite-stimulating effect. Wheat and grain-free, you’re given tremendous control over your appetite. Cultivate reuteri, get a boost in oxytocin and you become profoundly in control. Food is great of course, but you are no longer tempted. Hunger feels completely different. It’s no longer that gnawing desperate feeling. I personally feel hunger as slight restlessness after I haven’t eaten for maybe six to eight hours. It’s a very different experience. The oxytocin effect is a big, big advantage. Then there are microbes like Lactobacillus gasseri that have been shown in two studies to reduce waist circumference quite significantly. If you did an MRI or CAT scan of your abdomen and measure the cross-sectional area of visceral inflammatory fat, you would see dramatic reductions in visceral fat. It’s not quite clear why that is, but I think it’s because gasseri is so good at reducing endotoxemia. We call that endotoxemia. The breakdown products of microbes that enter the bloodstream is a big contributor to insulin resistance. If we took somebody who is slender and active and measured their fasting insulin, it’s likely something two micro units per liter. If we took somebody who was pre-diabetic, had a big waist, a lot of visceral fat, and we measured their fasting insulin, it’s probably 30, 70, 100 microunits per liter. In other words, it’s not 20% worse, it’s manyfold worse. When you have high insulin, it causes weight gain and prevents weight loss. One of the big drivers of that high insulin is endotoxemia. If we get microbe gasseri that reduces endotoxemia, your body is allowed to reduce insulin and thereby release weight. Those are the two biggest strategies that I’m aware of.   [01:36:41] Ashley James: I love it. I just had another thought for cardiovascular health. Is there a microbiome fix for high blood pressure?   [01:36:53] Dr. William Davis: What we do with high blood pressure is we start with the diet, which alone has huge effects because we lose visceral fat. Insulin drops, we don’t have insulin resistance, and that releases fluid as you experience. That alone is huge. We add the nutrients largely lacking in modern light, vitamin D, magnesium, omega 3, fatty acids, and iodine. Those four things all together have a huge impact on further reducing insulin resistance and reducing blood pressure. Just the magnesium alone reduces blood pressure. Then taking the steps to restore a healthy microbiome, thereby reducing inflammation and endotoxemia also reduces blood pressure. Getting fermented foods reduces blood pressure. Those microbes, let’s say kimchi or fermented sauerkraut, like Leuconostoc Mesenteroides and Pediococcus they reduce blood pressure. We’re not actually treating blood pressure, we’re addressing the factors that allow blood pressure to emerge in the first place, and almost people walk away with a blood pressure of like 106.   [01:38:07] Ashley James: That’s awesome. When we go to make our yogurts, like you’ve mentioned, the Lactobacillus gasseri, the reuteri, and all these other really great ones, can we take all of them and throw them in and make a concoction, or do they compete and we really should make individual batches with each one?   [01:38:26] Dr. William Davis: That’s a good question, Ashley. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. You can do that, you can combine them, but it’s like your backyard garden. If all you have growing your gardener tomatoes, you’re going to have a ton of tomatoes. What if you grow tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, and squash, you have fewer tomatoes. The same kind of things and it depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If you’re a competitive athlete, you want to reduce the amount of muscle injury you have with extreme exertion. You should take Bacillus Coagulans, probably fermented by itself from natural effects. You want to get smoother skin, deeper sleep, and restore youthful muscle strength, that’s a reuteri effect, you probably want to ferment reuteri by itself. What if maybe you have somebody in their 20s who doesn’t really need to reverse age yet and would also like some better recovery, and maybe wants to have lower blood pressure and a smaller waist? Maybe we could co-ferment reuteri, gasseri, and bacillus coagulans. You can do that. We make future batches of yogurt from a little bit of the prior batch. As you get further and further in subsequent batches, there can be shifts in relative numbers of different microbes. One of the things that happen with the SIBO yogurt is you’ll lose the reuteri probably by your 10th batch. That’s an instance where you want to re-inoculate or start from scratch again. A lot of this is a work in progress, we have not done DNA analyses and all the different combinations. You can do this, you can combine microbes. This is very useful for younger people. All humans are supposed to have reuteri. What if you have a 10-year-old or an 18-year-old? They probably don’t want to superduper the high numbers were getting. They can co-ferment several microbes and still get reuteri replenished and get those other benefits as well.   [01:40:29] Ashley James: I love it. Does your book have a list of all these different ones that talk about each one of them like an encyclopedia, all the different microbes that we could be fermenting to repopulate to get specific outcomes?   [01:40:49] Dr. William Davis: Approach it like a menu at a restaurant. If you and I walk into a restaurant and the waitress hands us a menu, you don’t freak out and say, oh my God, I can’t order all these appetizers, main dishes, and desserts. We pick and choose the dishes we want. We do the same thing with the microbiome. Pick the microbes for the effect you want. If you want deeper sleep, greater libido, and smoother skin, let’s ferment the reuteri. If you want a reduction in knee pain from arthritis, let’s ferment the bacillus coagulans. If you have a baby and you want that baby to sleep through the night, take longer naps, and have half as many bowels movements, thereby half as many diaper changes, have less asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, type 1 diabetes, autoimmune disease, have a higher IQ for a lifetime, and are less likely to become obese as adults. Let’s ferment Bifidobacterium infantis. You can pick and choose the microbe you want for the effect you want just like a restaurant.   [01:41:51] Ashley James: This is amazing, everything you listed. I’m really just imagining the listeners are just getting so excited to get your book, try it out, and start making this yogurt. You don’t have to eat bowls and bowls of it. You’re just having a few spoonfuls of this yogurt. Then the question that arises is, because there’s an acid on my stomach, doesn’t it kill all the bacteria anyway?   [01:42:16] Dr. William Davis: There’s a drop in numbers, but the microbes that were using largely survived stomach acid and bile. These microbes are fairly tolerant to the stomach. There are microbes that do indeed die, but the ones that we’re using are the ones that have been shown to be tolerant to those kinds of things. If you eat, for instance, 250 billion, maybe only 100 billion survived, but it’s sufficient to give you a big wallop of an effect. By the way, the saccharomyces boulardii that we make those sparkling juices with, by the way, you don’t want to overdo those juices. They do still have some sugar. It cuts the fermentation process and cuts sugar by 50% or more. If anybody’s ever interested, you can get a hydrometer from your brewing. If you have a beer-making store they have these things called hydrometers. With just a few dollars, you can measure the sugar content of your juice so you can calculate how much sugar you’re getting. I suggest people drink no more than a quarter cup a couple of times three times a day so you’re not getting a bunch of sugar all at once.   [01:43:27] Ashley James: As we’re drinking it, is it making it into the intestines, is it making it to the colon?   [01:43:35] Dr. William Davis: The saccharomyces, in particular, are very tolerant. That’s a really big advantage. By the way, it’s also tolerant to alcohol. You can make an appletini and other martinis with it.   [01:43:50] Ashley James: Some of these are supposed to populate in the colon not in the small intestine, is that correct?   [01:43:55] Dr. William Davis: That is true. Unfortunately, some of the probiotic manufacturers have ignored this whole issue of SIBO which is a big miscalculation. They do things like double encapsulate their capsule so that it does not dissolve in the small bowel. I think that’s a real mistake because even if you don’t have SIBO, there are so many factors that are trying to make you have SIBO that it’s worth always having microbes in the small bowel to discourage E. Colis and Klebsiellas of the colon from ascending. You’re just taking Ranitidine or Prozac for a few weeks is not to give you SIBO. Just having an all-you-can-eat vacation in Mexico where you drink too many margaritas over three days, that’s enough to give you SIBO. There are so many things conspiring to make those microbes rise in your small bowel that I think is worth having those release in the small bowel and not trying to keep them in the colon alone.   [01:44:55] Ashley James: Which makes the yogurt make so much sense.   [01:45:00] Dr. William Davis: Yes.   [01:45:01] Ashley James: I can talk to you all day. This is so fascinating. I’m really excited about your book. Of course the link to the book, Super Gut, is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast down the description, learntruehealth.com, and in whatever podcast directory you’re listening from right now. Dr. Davis, is there anything you’d like to share to wrap up today’s interview? Any homework? Any suggestions? Of course, we’re going to have the link to your website and everything you do. Also in the show notes that people can follow you and read your blog and continue to learn from you. Please, impart us with final words of wisdom.   [01:45:40] Dr. William Davis: As you know, Ashley, the lesson to pass on is that if you desire, if you want to, you have astounding power over your health. The last person you want to consult and how to become healthy is the doctor. The doctor has no idea. If you said, hey, doc, I’m interested in boosting my oxytocin by getting reuteri. I’m trying to make the sparkling apple cider so I get a big wallop of saccharomyces boulardii, what do you think about that? You’re going to get glazed eyes, they’ll make fun of you, or say something like, hey, did you consult Dr. Google again? Sadly, people in healthcare have abdicated their responsibility because of making more money for their healthcare system. So important to emphasize that people have huge power. Also, it’s important to know that what you’re doing is so crucial. People like you and me are no longer welcome on major media. We can’t get on TV. We don’t get interviewed by major magazines or newspapers because there’s too much money at stake from big pharma. Big pharma now funds so much of the media via direct consumer drug advertising and other means that people like you and me have missed on his health, nutrition can’t get in anymore. It means that podcasts, blogs, and social media are the ways we have to get these types of messages. It’s not coming from the doctors, it’s not coming from the media, we’ve got to get these messages out because they’re so powerful and they empower people.   [01:47:20] Ashley James: I am so thankful that you came on the show. Again, thank you so much for sharing this information. We really do need to empower ourselves. We really do need to educate ourselves and keep our minds so open that our brains would fall out. We just have to be willing to challenge the belief system we grew up in. We have to be willing to be the salmon. I like to say this often on the show, if you want to be a statistic, do what everyone else is doing. One in three people has a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. I think it’s one in three women and one in two men. It’s ridiculous. There’s a 50% chance that you’re going to get cancer if you just do what everyone else is doing. My listeners on the show don’t. They love to be the salmon, swim upstream, be the black sheep, and choose to take charge of their health. Sometimes that’s overwhelming. Just taking one step at a time, just one little thing that you can do today to improve your health and continue doing that. If you want to have diabetes, one to two people are diabetic or pre-diabetic, obesity, it’s so common now. Heart disease and cancer are the top killers, and of course, diabetes is a trifecta because diabetes causes heart disease. Then there’s dementia. There’s just a deterioration, a quick-aging, quick deterioration, dying younger and younger. If you want that in your life maybe not now but in the future, then do what everyone else is doing. Go eat what everyone else is eating. Just go to your doctor and get put on older drugs he wants to put you on. Going with the flow leads to being a statistic. We have to look at the statistics of health in our country and realize that doing what everyone else is doing is going to give you that life. You have to go against the grain. You have to throw the grains out and listen to Dr. William Davis. What I love is Dr. Davis brings science-based, holistic, you in charge of your health healing medicine that is backed by studies, that is backed by science. We don’t need to wait to get sick. We can take actionable steps today. Definitely get Dr. Davis’s book, I’m so excited about this, and start to take these actionable steps and then do it with your friends and family. It’s so easy to hand a spoonful of yogurt to your husband, wife, sister, or whatever. Just hey, try eating every day. Just a few spoonfuls a few times a day, and here, drink this little sparkling beverage in here. Eat some fun fermented food I made. It doesn’t take cups and cups or bowls and bowls of it. Just a spoonful at a time, little tweaks at a time we can completely take back our health. I know everyone is really excited about introducing the reuteri and having a better sex life, feeling amazing on oxytocin, and having better collagen and twice as fast healing. That alone I think has sold all of us on buying your book, Super Gut. Of course, following you on your blog and continue to learn from you. Thank you for everything you do. I’d love to have you back on the show when you have more information. I know you’re just constantly digging into the bleeding cutting edge of all the science coming out. Please, come back to the show when you have more to share.   [01:51:10] Dr. William Davis: I will Ashley, happily, anytime.   [01:51:11] Ashley James: Love it. Awesome. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful.   [01:51:15] Dr. William Davis: Thank you, Ashley. Keep up your great work.   [01:51:17] Ashley James: I hope you enjoy today’s interview with Dr. William Davis. Wasn’t that amazing? I bet you’re so excited to jump on probiotics, go experiment, and make some yourself. I am going to put the links to what he recommends in the show notes of today’s podcast. Wherever you’re listening from, just go to the notes below of this recording, the description. You can go to learntruehealth.com or from wherever you’re listening, just click on the podcast and you’ll see the notes in the description. I’ll make sure I put the links there for the probiotics that he recommends to culture. Also yogurt maker and other stuff like that. Make sure that’s there so you could immediately go and give it a try. Come join the learn true Facebook group and let us know how it goes. Of course, I’ve already shared my testimonial at the beginning of the interview. I look forward to hearing yours as well, I’m very, very excited. Please, join Learn True Facebook group, come share your experience, give it a shot. I’m all about experimenting and the kitchen is such a fun place to do some great fermenting, culture some great probiotics, do some health experiments, and just try it for yourself. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and I’m just really excited for the journey that you’re on. If you’re new to this podcast, welcome. Please join the Learn True Health Facebook groups so that you can ask questions and jump into the community. I also recommend going to takeyoursupplements.com as they are amazing health coaches that help you through a naturopathic doctor-created program. Get on exactly what your body is craving, what your needs, and what your body’s missing, as well as helping you understand the nutrients that certain foods are hurting you, certain foods are helping you. They help you in that way to guide you. So if you’re looking for a bit more hand-holding, definitely want to check out takeyoursupplements.com as well. Dive into the group, into the community because we’d love to see you there. You can even use the search function in the Facebook group to dive in and learn from so many amazing people from past conversations and start your own new conversation. Just throw some questions out there and it’s a very supportive group. I’m there every day helping people and I look forward to meeting you and seeing you there as well. Get Connected with Dr. William Davis! Website Facebook  Twitter Instagram YouTube Spotify Books by Dr. William Davis Super Gut Wheat Belly Undoctored    

Medicinal Aloe Gel Drink LearnTrueHealth.com/aloe  - coupon code LTH2022   Dr. Vickers website: http://www.gersonclinic.com   Reversing Cancer with Advanced Gerson Therapy, Dr. Patrick Vickers  https://www.learntruehealth.com/reversing-cancer-with-advanced-gerson-therapy-dr-patrick-vickers   Highlights: History of Gerson Therapy Importance of alkaline diet Importance of coffee enema in detoxing the body What a Gerson meal looks like   Dr. Patrick Vickers is the Director and Founder of the Advanced Gerson Therapy Clinic. He studied under Charlotte Gerson and applied everything he learned about the Gerson Therapy and tweaked it to enhance Gerson Therapy based on scientific studies. In this episode, Dr. Vickers shares the Gerson Therapy and Gerson meals look like. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am so excited for you to hear today’s interview with Dr. Patrick Vickers who shares the Dr. Max Gerson protocol and then the add-ons that he has added on that he has found in his clinical practice to even enhance the effects. So Dr. Max Gerson and the stories shared in today’s interview, but to give you a little bit of a teaser trailer, Max Gerson was able to cure very stubborn migraines. Then he found out his migraine diet cured tuberculosis, and this is right before World War II when there was no cure for it. It was something that was very stubborn, can stick around for years, and was entirely fatal for many people. And then he found out it cured cancer. And then he found out it reversed even very stubborn diabetes, and so he treated tens of thousands of people with all kinds of conditions using this very specific protocol that he dialed in, and it is a specific diet, but it also involves other things and we’re going to learn about that today. I’m so excited for you to learn from this episode. And if you don’t have any of those conditions, what’s really great is you can still apply what you learn today and add a bit of it to your life to prevent disease as well. Please share this interview with those you love who have migraines, who have digestive issues, who have cancer or have cancer in the family and they’re concerned about getting cancer. For those who have immune problems because this protocol helps the body have such a robust immune system, and for those who have blood sugar problems, even type 1 and type 2 diabetes really, really respond well to this protocol. So basically, everyone can benefit from listening to today’s interview. Now, Dr. Patrick Vickers also mentions that he’s added on certain things to Dr. Gerson’s protocol that he found in his clinical practice to supercharge the program. One of those things he says is absolutely essential to supercharge the program is the Organic Medicinal Aloe Gel Drink that we talked about in the last episode, in episode 474 that Dr. Michael Haley talks about where they take the aloe straight from the field. Dr. Michael Haley owns this farm and they take the aloe, they cut it open, they cut open the filet, they take just the gel, and then they immediately freeze it and ship it to you, and then you drink it. It’s so different from what you get in the store. It’s completely different. What you get in the store has been filtered, pasteurized, and all the medicines have been taken out. But when you drink only a few ounces of the stuff a day, Dr. Michael Haley spoke about it in the last episode that it will block the cancer cells. The cancer cells try to absorb it, it binds to the cancer cells kind of like stuffing their mouths full, and then they cannot digest it because the polysaccharides in the aloe gel cannot be digested by cancer, but cancer thinks it’s a sugar so it tries to absorb it but then it can’t digest it. But it basically blocks the cancer from absorbing any more nutrients, thus starving it out. And so Dr. Patrick Vickers today talks about how he adds the aloe gel to every freshly pressed juice drink that he gives daily to his cancer clients and patients at his clinic and he tells people to do it. I love this aloe gel. I noticed it really helps our family. I have friends who take it and notice that even their hair, skin, and nails get healthier, their digestion gets healthier. So it’s just something wonderful to add to your smoothies or to your freshly pressed juice, or you can just do a few shots of it today. And in the last episode, I share how to make it taste good so kids even like it because my son thinks it’s delicious when I do these little tweaks and he thinks it’s really great as well, and we noticed that improvement for him as well. You can get a fantastic discount that Dr. Michael Haley’s giving all of our listeners by going to learntruehealth.com/aloe. That’s learntruehealth.com/aloe and there you can get a few frozen jugs. It’s great to keep it in the freezer for times if you ever have any digestive issues, it’s great to just have on hand because for me, for our family, when we had either food poisoning or some kind of stomach bug, we drank it and it immediately stopped all the symptoms—the diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, all of that stopped it in its tracks for all three of us. I thought that was pretty awesome. It’s like medicine. It’s good to have on hand as well as a good to take for prevention. You can also use the coupon code LTH2022 and he’s going to give you his cream as well, which is an aloe cream. I really like it because it’s not greasy and I like to have it at my desk. I love anything natural to put on my body or to put in my body that helps. So that’s learntruehealth.com/aloe coupon code LTH2022. It’s a wonderful adjunct to the Dr. Gerson protocol, as well as anyone who wants better hair, skin, and nails, better digestion, less inflammation, less pain. People even with arthritis are noticing an improvement, which of course Dr. Michael Haley talked about in our last episode and of course in the first episode where I had him on about a year ago and he shared some amazing stories. You can find lots of fantastic interviews on the podcast by using the search function at learntruehealth.com. You can go to learntruehealth.com and use the search function to find all kinds of wonderful episodes. I have a ton of episodes on reversing cancer. Cancer and heart disease are the two largest killers. My dad died of heart disease, my mom died of cancer. My mom was the healthiest person I knew until she passed away of cancer suddenly, and that has helped fuel me to want to learn how I can help others. I can’t save my parents, but I maybe can help you save yours, or I can help you save yourself or save someone that you love. So let’s turn this ripple into a tidal wave and let’s help as many people as possible to learn true health and to reverse and prevent disease. The body has an amazing ability to heal itself. We just need to give it what it needs and stop giving it what it doesn’t need. Dr. Patrick Vickers today shares exactly what we can do to support the structure and function of the body to cure disease. The body can cure its own disease when we help it, and I’m so excited for you to learn from today’s episode. Thank you for sharing this podcast. Come join us in the Learn True Health Facebook group. We’d love to see you there. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day and check out the aloe, let me know what you think about it. learntruehealth.com/aloe, use the coupon code LTH2022. Do a challenge. Do a whole bottle. Do about four to eight ounces a day depending on your medical conditions, what you like to reverse, and at the end of the bottle, notice any changes in your hair, skin, and nails, your digestion, your inflammation. Just notice it and then I’d love for you to come to the Learn True Health Facebook group and let us know different positive changes that you’re experiencing.   [00:08:09] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 475. I am so excited for today’s guest we have with us Dr. Patrick Vickers here to share about Gerson Therapy. His website is gersonclinic.com. Of course, links to everything that Dr. Patrick Vickers talks about today are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Welcome to the show.   [00:08:45] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Thank you very much for having me, Ashley.   [00:08:47] Ashley James: Yeah, I’m really, really excited, but as we were joking around before we hit record, we were bound to meet because you kind of know all my friends or we have mutual friends. You’ve been on the Tim James show, of no relation. You’ve been with Dr. Michael Haley, who is also awesome. I’m sure if we sat around we could talk more and probably figure out we have a lot more friends in common. I have been fascinated with Dr. Max Gerson’s therapy. I watched some documentaries on it. I highly recommend checking them out. There are a lot of documentaries out there so just pick one and go for it. There’s some on Amazon, the Gaia TV, and all that stuff, or just YouTube Dr. Gerson. I’ve actually watched some documentaries on YouTube also. What fascinates me is his entire story, and then of course the controversy, right? Because you can’t steal the money, the profits from the people trying to sell the drugs. If you create a system that eliminates a disease, you will be kicked out of this country, time and time again we’ve seen it. This therapy is so effective, but you have to follow it to a tee. It’s so effective that he was able to help people completely reverse and no longer have cancer. That’s near and dear to my heart. I held my mom’s hand as she died of cancer at 55 years old, and she was the healthiest person I knew. Watching her pass away from cancer, I’ve always wanted to know what I could have done differently. I was 22 years old. I was just learning about all this, but if I could go back in time, absolutely, I would have taken her to your clinic to do Gerson Therapy. I’ve had friends ask me, what would you do if you had a cancer diagnosis? I would 100% do Gerson Therapy. That makes me sit and think, well, why am I not doing it now? Maybe that’s something we could talk about. Just the other day my friend said, I know all the things I need to do to get healthy, but I’ll probably do them when I get sick enough to need it. She was being honest. She was being very blunt that, you know, my life is busy. I’m taking care of two kids. I’m running a business, and really, I’m not going to actually take care of my health like seriously spend six hours a day between nutrition and exercise preparing food and all the things it takes. She’s sacrificing the time it takes to take care of herself until her back is up against the wall. I’m like, okay, if my backs up against the wall with a cancer diagnosis, I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m 110% in on Gerson Therapy, ozone IV, and all the other kinds of modalities, but why am I not doing that amount of intensity into building health? Why do we wait for a diagnosis? I definitely want you to introduce Gerson Therapy and talk about Max Gerson, but maybe we can talk a little bit about is this podcast just for people who have cancer, or can we utilize Gerson Therapy or should it be utilized for people who don’t have cancer?   [00:12:27] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, I mean, that is the proverbial issue, isn’t it? I mean, how often have you heard an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? And so, we’re [inaudible 00:12:36] virtually every single degenerative disease including terminal cancer, so why wouldn’t it make sense that that would be also used as a lifestyle of prevention, which it is. I mean, you look at Charlotte Gerson who died three years ago this month, actually, at the age of 98. She used the therapy her entire life as a means of prevention after her father cured her of advanced tuberculosis when she was 12 years old. This is a dietary therapy not just for reversing disease, but its principles are utilizable for prevention as well and should be. To wait until you get sick, let me tell you, I’ve had this clinic now for over 10 years. You don’t want to wait until you get sick because quite often, it can be too late by the time you’re diagnosed. So to live under those premises that I’ll just wait until I get sick, it’s not a very smart strategy. [00:13:37] Ashley James: I know Gerson Therapy takes several hours a day between food prep and also certain bathroom routines you would be performing, to say it politely. It’s a part-time job to Gerson Therapy well, to do it to the tee, right? I mean, once you get into the routine, maybe you can shave some time off. But is there Gerson therapy for doing cancer reversal and is there Gerson Therapy light for just creating—like maybe just one coffee enema a day instead of six and maybe once a day instead of 12 times a day? Is there like a Gerson Therapy light for just preventing disease?   [00:14:28] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yes, of course, there would be. Our intensive protocol for the cancer patient is completely different from a standard detox protocol at home just to change your life and maintain health. But the principles, which hopefully people will learn on the show today, that protect your cellular health, particularly your metabolism, are going to remain the same for every patient, whether it’s a detox or a cancer patient. But certainly, the intensity is going to be different for varying cases. The detox would simply be much less than the intensive cancer protocol, no doubt about it.   [00:15:08] Ashley James: Got it. Well, I’d love for you to, later on in the interview, explain what we can do on a regular basis. Give us some actual homework on what we can do on a day-to-day basis to prevent disease using the Gerson Therapy for maintaining health. But let’s talk about Max Gerson. Give us a rundown, who was Max Gerson and how did he discover the Gerson Therapy protocol?   [00:15:37] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, that’s a great question. And as you said, Dr. Gerson’s story is truly one of the greatest stories and tragedies in American history for certain, if not world history. Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Albert Schweitzer called Dr. Gerson the greatest genius in medical history. Eight years before Schweitzer won the Nobel Prize, Dr. Gerson cured Schweitzer of severely advanced diabetes within six weeks. In six weeks, he was able to completely reverse Dr. Schweitzer’s advanced diabetes and he cured Schweitzer’s wife, Helena, of terminal tuberculosis when they had a little girl who was only three or four years old at the time. Gerson, his life, his story, his therapy, I mean, it is just a classic tragedy, so to speak, and we’re going to go into that, but who was he? So he was born in 1881 in Wagrowiec, Germany, which is now Wagrowiec, Poland. It was under German annex at that time. At the age of 18, when he wanted to go to university, back at that time, if you wanted to go to university in Germany, you had to pass an exit exam out of school. You just didn’t go to university based on grades or based on your SAT scores. You literally had to pass an exam out of high school. Well, his calculus professor put a question on there that he’d never seen before. He managed to come up with such an elaborate solution that his teacher couldn’t even tell him whether it was right or wrong. So she sent it to all the top university math professors in Germany at that time and every single one wrote her back and said, we have a mathematical genius within our country and they all tried to recruit him for math. Recognizing that they had something very special in their midst, the Gerson family got together shortly thereafter one night at the Gerson home—aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins all got together to discuss what Dr. Gerson would study at university. They all agreed that he should study medicine because they felt that’s where he would have the greatest impact on humanity. Here we are now, that was 120 years ago, literally 1900 and here we are 120 years later, talking about the man who truly had the greatest impact in medical history on his ability to reverse advanced terminal disease. He goes off to university at the University of Freiburg, and while he’s there, he’s suffering from severe migraine headaches. Now, this is at a time when Germany was leading the way in medical research. If you wanted a superior medical education, you went to Germany to get it. He had the top professors in the world at his disposal. None of them could help him. They had nothing to offer him. He set out to completely cure himself of his disease by radically altering his diet. He cut out all the fat, all the salt, all the processed foods, the alcohol, all of it of a standard German diet of that time and completely cured himself of his migraine headaches. Well, he graduates from the University of Freiburg, opens up practice in Bielefeld, Germany. And in Bielefeld, Germany starts using this migraine diet on his patients when one of his patients comes back completely cured of their tuberculosis. Now, this is at a time when tuberculosis was “pandemic”, for lack of a better word. It was literally killing over a million people in Europe at that time, and so that was a big thing. All of a sudden, he now recognizes that he can cure TB. So he starts treating all these TB patients and curing them of their TB. When a guy by the name of Ferdinand Sauerbruch gets word that there’s this doctor curing advanced TB, now Ferdinand Sauerbruch was Europe’s leading thoracic surgeon. He was the guy operating on all these tuberculosis lung patients. And so when he heard this guy Gerson was carrying TB, he approached Dr. Gerson and he asked him to embark on a study of 460 tuberculosis patients. He said to Dr. Gerson privately, if you can cure but one of these patients, I will believe every single word you have to say, and Dr. Gerson cured, and this is no joke, 450 out of the 460 tuberculosis patients with his migraine diet.   [00:20:29] Ashley James: Let’s just pause there. I want to pause there because this one point, I think a lot of us just take for granted, oh yeah, cure TB, no worries. TB back then was like having the plague. If you were in a hospital with TB, you probably were going to die. What was the percentage? I don’t remember exactly what they said, but didn’t he expect something like only 4% to survive? How many people should have died under the normal care for TB out of those 460 patients?   [00:21:11] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, when he approached Gerson and said, if you cure but one of these patients, I’ll believe every single word that you have to say. So clearly, he wasn’t expecting much, was he?   [00:21:20] Ashley James: He wasn’t expecting any of them to live.   [00:21:22] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, exactly. I mean, I would imagine he was expecting some of them to live, but to cure 450 out of 460, and this is what we tell people—cancer is the monster, that’s the difficult thing to cure. We can still cure it. Viruses, bacteria, do you know how simple those things are to cure? You take tuberculosis and it’s easily curable with something as intensive and radical as the Gerson Therapy. So he became renowned at that point, Ashley, for reversing advanced tuberculosis. And then Hitler came to power, Gerson and his family were German Jews. He lost his entire family in the Holocaust. He himself nearly died in the Holocaust and he was the only one left. He was on his way to Vienna to give a lecture on his curing of tuberculosis when the SS Army stopped the train and entered his cabin when they started looking for IDs. They were asking for their IDs looking for Jews. There were two or three other men in Dr. Gerson’s cabin with him, and when the SS officer came in, Dr. Gerson actually panicked, but the SS officer turned to the other gentleman first and asked for their IDs. And then when the SS officer turned to Dr. Gerson, he didn’t immediately ask him for his ID. He asked him where he was going. And so Dr. Gerson told him he was on his way to Vienna, Austria to give a lecture because he was curing advanced tuberculosis. Now, if you’re the SS officer, you’re like, yeah, whatever. Come on, you’re carrying tuberculosis. And so Dr. Gerson threw up two x-rays in the window and he showed the SS officer a before and an after x-ray of a TB patient that he cured. The SS officer was so shocked he forgot to ask her son for his ID and he led him off to Vienna, Austria. And as soon as he finished in Vienna, Austria, he immediately made his way back home, immediately packed up his family, Charlotte Gerson included who was probably only eight or nine years old at that point, and he fled to France. When Hitler invaded France, Gerson fled to Manhattan and he set up practice on Park Avenue. Literally, I kid you not, a hundred feet around the corner from Memorial Sloan Kettering, the largest cancer research hospital, arguably, in the United States if not the world and he began to practice in Manhattan literally right around the corner from Memorial Sloan Kettering on Park Avenue. This is when it became known that he could cure advanced cancer and the story goes like this. So a woman in New Jersey, I believe, was suffering from advanced gallbladder, stomach, and liver cancer, all three. Yeah, all three, and she had heard that Dr. Gerson was practicing in Manhattan. She approached him and begged him for his tuberculosis treatment for her cancer and he refused her. Now this is back in the early to mid-30s maybe and he refused to treat her. Now, why would Dr. Gerson refuse to treat her even back then? Because even back then as a medical doctor, under your licensure to treat cancer with anything other than the standard accepted forms of conventional treatment at that time risked losing your license, risking ridicule, ostracization from your colleagues, and so he refused to treat her. She kept coming back and she would not take no for an answer. Finally, he said to her, all right, I’m going to treat you in secret, and he ended up treating her. Lo and behold, he completely reversed every single one of her cancers. It was at that point that he said, I can no longer turn my [inaudible 00:25:39] away from this deadly scourge of cancer. He dedicated the rest of his entire life to treating cancer patients at the risk of everything that he would suffer from that point on, and let me tell you, did he suffer? He was completely ostracized and ridiculed by his medical colleagues. They took away his licensure at some point. They took away his membership from the New York State Medical Society. Up until that point, Gerson was one of the most published doctors in the world. He had a litany of publications in major medical journals around the world on his treatment protocols. And from that point on, he became a marked man and became prohibited from publishing in all major medical journals around the world. They destroyed him.   [00:26:37] Ashley James: How many cases of cancer did he cure in the United States before they did that before they took his medical license away?   [00:26:47] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, that’s a good question. I don’t really know, but he was able to get his license back. They briefly took it away. What they ended up permanently taking away was his membership from the New York State Medical Society. But between 1910 and 1959 when he died, he probably literally cured thousands of patients in that timeframe. From 1930 when he arrived in the United States to 1959, you’re probably looking at 5,000 to 10,000 during that time frame, I would imagine. He was a marked man from day one. Let’s say he cured that woman somewhere around the mid-30s, 10 years later in 1946, word’s out that Dr. Gerson, this guy in Manhattan, is reversing advanced cancer. Well, in 1946, the Pepper Neely Anti-cancer Bill came to the floor of the United States Senate. It’s designed to appropriate $100 million in funding to anyone who can show promise in the realm of cancer research. Well, they invited Dr. Gerson to testify July 1st through the 3rd, 1946 and he brought five of his most terminal cancer patients that he ever had and all five walked through the Senate chambers door and testified on his behalf. So shocked were everybody in those chambers that Senator Claude Pepper himself, who to this day remains the longest-serving senator and congressman in American history. He said Dr. Gerson dedicated his life to the mastery of this scourge of cancer and all should honor his great work. So why haven’t you heard of him? Why isn’t his protocol standard among medical care? Well that day, Gerson was to give an interview to the international press after he gave his testimony. So they whisked him away to the international press room where he sat alone in a room for over an hour and a half. They never showed up. They were whisked away to another room and an impromptu party was thrown on their behalf. They were not allowed to interview Dr. Gerson. Why? Gerson wasn’t only talking about being able to reverse the dance cancer during his testimony. He was asked why is cancer growing at such a rapid rate? What are the causes of cancer? And he exposed every single industry that are the huge lobbying organizations paying the politicians’ campaigns. As soon as he started talking in those Senate chambers, red flags went up through all of Washington, and that man, Dr. Gerson, was prohibited from being interviewed any further by the international press. However, present at his testimony was a man by the name of Raymond Gram Swing. Now, who’s Raymond Gram Swing? Well, back then, if you wanted to listen to your news every night, you didn’t have a TV, you had a radio. You had the option every night at 7:00 PM Eastern to listen to ABC, NBC, or CBS radio. Each one had their own nightly anchor like we had Tom Brokaw growing up, right? Well, they had Edwin Murrow, the famous Edwin Murrow was the anchor for CBS. I’m not sure who the anchor was for NBC, but the anchor for ABC News Radio was Raymond Gram Swing, and he’d been working for ABC News Radio at that point for 33 years. Well, he was present at all of Gerson’s testimonies and he went on his program one night and he said to the entire country, and probably the world parts of the world were probably listening as well. He said to the entire country that night, folks, forgive me if I don’t have my morals correct in talking about these top stories. The Truman Anti-Racketeering Bill had been signed. Something regarding Trieste and Italy and World War II has been agreed upon. Those would have been major stories for the entire night. He spent an entire 30 to 45 minutes talking about how the cure for cancer had been found. He spent the entire time talking about Dr. Gerson and his therapy. Well, right after that, for nine hours straight at the ABC News switchboard in Manhattan, it lit up for nine hours straight from people all over the world calling, begging to find out where do we find this cure for cancer. Two weeks later, Raymond Gram Swing was fired from his job at ABC News Radio. This is what we dealt with then. This is what we deal with today. If you are an editor of any major media outlet, your sole fiscal responsibility is to promote the financial interests of your organization. It has nothing to do with giving your eye the truth, and that is why any editor would be out on their butt on the street if they were to ever reveal something of this nature, then and now. That is essentially the history of the Gerson Therapy and what Dr. Gerson suffered up until his death in 1959.   [00:32:44] Ashley James: Did he always practice in the United States? I know that there’s the Gerson Clinic in Mexico. Did he open that or was it his children that opened that?   [00:32:55] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s right. So up until then, there were no laws prohibiting him from opening a clinic in the United States and treating people with that. The only thing would have been his license at risk, and all the other ridicule and the ostracization, which he went through wholeheartedly. It wasn’t until later when Nixon declared the war on cancer in 1971 and the pharmaceutical industry started to gain a tremendous amount of power in the realm of treating cancer that then they made it illegal. So like right now in the United States, it is literally illegal to treat cancer with anything other than chemo, radiation, and surgery, that is the law. If you want to treat people with Gerson Therapy, you cannot do it in the United States. You have to be outside the states. In 1977, 18 years after Dr. Gerson died, the therapy actually died with him. Nobody did it for 18 years until someone offered Charlotte Gerson in 1977 all the money necessary to open up the first Gerson Clinic, which was opened up in Tijuana Mexico, and she became the face of the Gerson Therapy, essentially up until the day she retired and obviously until the day she died. It was in 1977 it was opened in Mexico, and that’s what remains to this day.   [00:34:28] Ashley James: Now, is that your clinic or you have a different clinic?   [00:34:33] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yes, I have a different clinic and there are reasons for that, right? So the Gerson Institute which Charlotte originally opened and she retired from over 10 years ago, if you go to a clinic like that, you only get the Gerson Therapy as Dr. Gerson left it in 1959. That was probably the biggest tragedy that Charlotte Gerson left in her legacy. She never tried to improve on her father’s therapy. Her father was the consummate scientist. He was constantly changing and perfecting his therapy based on what was coming out in the scientific literature. So if he were alive today, his therapy, while the dietary portions may look quite similar, a lot of the things that have been revealed to us since 1959 in the scientific literature is proving beneficial to the cancer patients, there’s a myriad of things that have come out. Charlotte stopped the therapy dead in its tracks from 1959. Why she did that I have my own ideas. I think having been the longest living Gerson survivor up until her death, she was the longest living Gerson survivor because her father cured her of tuberculosis at the age of 12. I mean, it almost brings tears to my eyes to even say that. You can imagine how endeared she was to her father. I think that emotional psychological attachment made it really hard for her to change what her father left behind when he himself would have completely gone to work with the scientific literature, and that is where we are different from what remains of the Gerson Institutes Clinic. We have taken Dr. Gerson Therapy, kept the basic foundational protocol he left for us, and we’ve added proven scientific therapies beneficial to the cancer patient and other degenerative disease patients. Nothing we do at our clinic is not in the scientific literature plain and simple, and so that is the difference between us and them.   [00:36:50] Ashley James: So you’re just taking Gerson Therapy and then turbocharging it? [00:36:58] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That is exactly right. [00:37:02] Ashley James: What comes to mind is Dr. Michael Haley, one of our mutual friends. He was on my show talking about how there’s a new study around aloe and consuming aloe blocks cancer. So the cancer thinks it’s food because cancer loves glucose, love sugar. The aloe looks like sugar to it, but it can’t digest it and eat it. So it binds to it kind of like it stuffs its mouth. It stuffs the cancer’s mouth but then the cancer can’t swallow it. And so then, it starves it because now the actual food can’t get in. When he explained that I was mind blown. [00:37:54] Dr. Patrick Vickers: And so that’s how I know Michael, right? Well, of course, we use Michael’s Aloe. Our patients get one ounce of that aloe in every single juice they get throughout the day in 13 juices. That’s not the most powerful healing component of Michael’s aloe. When you realize that cancer and any disease is related to gut health, you have to restore the gut. There’s not a more potent healer of connective tissue and gut tissue than the aloe, Dr. Haley’s raw aloe. You can’t buy aloe off the store shelf, it’s toxic. It’s been deodorized, it’s been depolarized, it’s had preservatives added to it. It’s toxic and dead. Dr. Mike Haley’s aloe is living, live, fresh aloe, and so that healing power, and there’s a myriad of things that aloe does apart from what you and I have just discussed, but those are the two major healing properties. So this is what I mean. We’ve taken Dr. Gerson’s therapy and we’ve added these things to enhance exactly what Dr. Gerson would have probably done had he had access to this information. [00:39:15] Ashley James: Right. Yes. I love it. Okay. Now we know about Dr. Gerson. He discovered the system of how to reverse many diseases because first of all, he went to reverse his migraines and he did. Then one of his migraine patients was like, hey, by the way, my TB’s gone. He’s like, wait a second, I wasn’t treating you for that. He’s like, I thought this just got rid of migraines. So it gets rid of TB, that’s crazy because that’s like the Black Plague of the day, right? And then he’s like, well, this must affect the immune system, what else can we treat with this? Then he goes on to cancer, like you said. He helped Albert Schweitzer reverse his diabetes. He was trying to figure out why this diet can reverse diabetes, cancer, and migraines? So let’s talk about that. If you go to an allopathic doctor, and we didn’t talk about you. We haven’t even talked about you yet and your background, but you don’t come from the standard allopathic medical school. But if you go to a standard—and again, I could get on my soapbox and start ranting about the allopathic medical system.   [00:40:45] Dr. Patrick Vickers: I won’t stop you. Go ahead.   [00:40:48] Ashley James: Individuals who go to medical school aren’t inherently evil. I’m sure some of them might be statistically, but inherently, they want to do good, right? The problem is they’ve been indoctrinated—through their medical schools—into a system that for 150 years has been designed to brainwash the doctors into thinking their form of medicine is the only form of medicine, and everything else is “alternative”. This is a quote from one of my old Naturopathic mentors. That’s like saying, a golden retriever is the only kind of dog and every other dog is an alternative dog, all right. I mean, it’s ludicrous to think that drug, chemical-based, pharmaceutical medicine is the only kind of medicine that’s standard, and everything else is some back of the bus quackery, when in fact, we’ve been using holistic medicine, was the traditional form of medicine was the standard, and it was allopathic drug-based medicine that came in and tried to do through wonderful marketing the last 100 years, PR, and lobbying has brainwashed the public. Hollywood also played a role in brainwashing everyone to believe within three generations that you wait to get sick, then you go to your doctor, and you get put on drugs. You wait to get sick, you go to your doctor, you get put on drugs like we’re cattle. Except they treat cattle better because they’ve tried to prevent illness in cattle because it would cost the farmer too much money. If you waited for a cow to get sick and then they’d have a $2,000 medical bill, that would make your hamburger be $50 instead of $5, right? So they try to keep costs down by preventing disease in the farms. This comes from one of my other Naturopathic mentors, Dr. Joel Wallach, who talks about how—oh, you know Dr. Wallach. When I was 12 years old—I have a distinct memory—I’m sitting in the back of my mom’s car and she’s driving around. I’m super bored, it’s a Saturday, and she has to run errands. I’m just sitting in the back of the car bored. My mom pops in because we’re like, okay, well, you’re bored. Let me pop in this tape. Bootlegged health lecture from Dr. Joel Wallach called Dead Doctors Don’t Lie and I was on the edge of my seat. My mom was really crunchy and really into holistic medicine, so she’d read me the journals and stuff that our Naturopath would give us for bedtime reading. She never read me like nighttime stories, but she opened up the newsletter or the articles that her Naturopath would write and she’d read them to me. I learned about antioxidants when I was like nine. I’m like, this is fascinating. Anyway, my entire life has changed. I listened to Dr. Wallach and I realized the system is broken. I’m 12 years old. I’m getting it like it’s hitting me. Why is this so important? We have to shift our perspective because we’ve been taught that there’s a specialist for your eyes. There’s a specialist for your liver. There’s a specialist for your skin, right? Even if you go to the Mayo Clinic, which I’ve heard several people say, they felt very disenfranchised because they thought it would be this—now I’m sure people have good experiences there too. I’m not saying that no one’s going to have a good experience with these kinds of clinics, but what I am saying is that they still felt like there wasn’t enough communication between the liver specialist, the colon specialist, and the nose, throat, and ear specialist. Whatever they were doing, it still felt like they were being taken apart and only looked at their parts. I have a listener whose mom has kidney problems and heart problems. The kidney doctor gave her a diet that will cause her to die from heart disease. The heart doctor gave her a diet that will cause her to die from kidney failure. She was so baffled. She was like, why aren’t my doctors talking to each other? They’ve both given me diets that will kill me. She finally got them to talk, they argued a lot, and they both could not figure out what kind of diet to put her on because they don’t know about Gerson Therapy. But the point is, we’re not being looked at as a whole, right? So from the standpoint of our own training, because we have all been trained through the media to have a certain perspective, that’s why we need to examine our own belief system, and really learn the history of modern medicine so we really get that we’ve been constantly being bombarded by a narrative that is swaying our belief system towards what they want us to think. We need to come back to the truth. The body has an innate ability to heal itself. We have to give it what the body needs. From an MD medical standpoint, it does not make sense that a protocol, you can’t give a drug to someone that’s going to cure migraines, tuberculosis, cancer, and diabetes in one drug, one protocol.   [00:46:37] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s right, but you can sure make a lot of money coming up with a protocol for each, can’t you? [00:46:43] Ashley James: Right. By the way, you wouldn’t be curing any of them. You would be managing the disease. Oh, Metformin. I’m so livid that doctors still prescribe this. Go read the side effects of Metformin. One of the side effects can be that it causes blood sugar imbalance. This drives me nuts. It also put my friend at a hospital for a year, and the doctors never took her off Metformin. I was the one that pointed out to her, one of the causes can be acute pancreatitis. She was in the hospital for a year with acute pancreatitis, and the doctors never took her off of it. She was just on it because she’s at the age where you just want to prevent— Excuse me, that’s not how you prevent diabetes by giving people drugs before they’re even remotely diabetic, but doctors are still doing it. They’re off-label prescribing all the time. Seventy percent of the adult population of the United States is on at least one prescription medication, which means 70% of the adult population, not only is it completely indoctrinated in the system, but also is so sick and so unhealthy that they’re using drugs to manage the symptoms. Most drugs don’t cure, we have to remember that. There are only a few handful of drugs that really helped to reverse the disease. Most drugs out there do not cure, they do more harm than good, and they just manage symptoms. My thing is we have to start questioning everything so that we can undo the brainwashing. Could you please tell me, Dr. Vickers, why is it that Gerson Therapy, what did he discover about his protocol, and why is it that it can reverse all those different diseases that seemingly are not related?   [00:48:39] Dr. Patrick Vickers: And they all are related. That’s a great question. The question is, what’s the secret to the Gerson Therapy? Eight movies have chronicled this man’s work, no other therapy can boast even more than one or two max, but eight have chronicled5 Dr. Gerson’s work, which is why Schweitzer calling the greatest genius in medical history. And if you ever read Dr. Gerson’s book that he published a year before he died, that’s called A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Case, if you ever read that, you can see the absolute work of a genius. But in that genius, it is so ridiculously simple because the secret to reversing advanced disease, which is the secret to preventing cancer and degenerative disease I literally learned in biochemistry 101. Everything that you read in that book is biochemistry 101 ultimately, and when you read it, when you read that book, there’s one word that he talks about over and over and over again, which is the secret of health and disease and what is that one word? Metabolism. We learned metabolism the first three weeks of biochemistry 101 in chiropractic school. Let’s start there because that is the crux of the matter. What is metabolism? Metabolism, by definition, is the breakdown of food into energy. Okay, that’s it. If there’s anything that we’re going to grasp, its metabolism, the breakdown of food into energy. When you see someone who’s sick and dying, what do you notice? They’re lethargic. Why are they lethargic? Because they’ve lost the capacity to produce energy on a cellular level, and the immune system requires massive amounts of energy on a daily basis just to maintain health, let alone cure a sick and dying body. Metabolism again is the breakdown of food into energy. Every sick patient has lost that capacity. So is it any wonder, where are we taught? What are we taught? That 70% of our immune system is where?   [00:51:20] Ashley James: Our gut? [00:51:20] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Exactly. Seventy percent of our immune system is in our gut. Well, part of the breakdown of food into energy begins in the gut. By definition, metabolism, the breakdown of food into energy starts in the gut. Every single sick human being has a deranged gut, so you must heal that. Now, where’s the other 30% of the immune system? Well, once the gut breaks down the food, you must now be able to convert it into energy. So the gut absorbs everything you need for that into the bloodstream, and now cells must convert that into energy. That’s where we also have destroyed everything from the day we were born. Once the body breaks the food down, it now must convert it into energy. How does it do that? Well, inside your cells, you have this little thing called mitochondria. Mitochondria take sugar and in the presence of oxygen—and this is so absolutely vitally important, this is the other crux of the matter other than the gut. The mitochondria—only in the presence of oxygen—will convert sugar into energy. Only in the presence of oxygen. If oxygen is not present, then sugar will get converted by the mitochondria into lactic acid. We also know that as what? Fermentation, right? That’s how you make wine, that’s how you make beer, that’s how you make kombucha. You cut off oxygen so that the sugars get converted into alcohol and/or lactic acid ultimately. Once you heal the gut, now the gut can properly absorb the nutrients, you now have to be able to convert those nutrients into energy, which requires oxygen. In 1931, Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize in medicine for proving that cancer viruses and bacteria can not survive in a body where the cells are properly oxygenated. He went on to completely write this thesis and win the Nobel Prize on the fact that the primary factor in the body’s ability to oxygenate the cell is an alkaline diet. [00:54:19] Ashley James: Why? Do you understand why? Can you explain why? [00:54:24] Dr. Patrick Vickers: I can’t exactly explain why and it is so simple. Now, we’ve already discussed the gut, now we have to address the cell. I told you, inside the cell, you have little things called mitochondria that convert sugar into energy in the presence of oxygen. Now, what’s around that cell? Around our cells, we have a cell membrane. That cell membrane is the gatekeeper. It determines what can go in, what has to go in, what can’t go in, and it determines what must come out and what can’t leave the cell. That’s all determined at the level of the cell membrane. What is that cell membrane made up of? It’s made up of fats. It is a phospholipid. Lipid means fat, right? Okay, so that cell membrane’s made up of phospholipids, but what fats are that cell membrane made up of? [00:55:30] Ashley James: Cholesterol?   [00:55:31] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Whatever fats you’re feeding it. Whatever fats you’re feeding your body, your body’s going to naturally use that to maintain the cell membranes. Well, what kind of fats is everyone eating today? Cookies, cake, ice cream. [00:55:54] Ashley James: Polyunsaturated, fatty acids.   [00:55:56] Dr. Patrick Vickers: No, on the contrary. Well, I mean, in some of the cooking oils and stuff, right? But most people are being bombarded with saturated fats. Cookies, cake, ice cream, dairy, milk, ice cream, pizza, pasta, meat. All of these things are loaded with saturated fats, and this is what’s going to make up these cell membranes. Now, why is this significant? We’re going to get to the issue of alkalinity here and acidity. How many times have you heard alkalinity promotes health, acidity promotes disease, right? Yeah, how many times have we heard that, but it’s never really explained on a cellular level what are the health implications of that very statement. Alkalinity and alkaline diet promotes health and acidic diet promotes disease, what does that mean? So today, our cell membranes are made up of saturated fats. When we are talking about saturated fats, what does that mean? What are saturated fats? Saturated with? Saturated fats are saturated with hydrogen. This is very important to understand, they’re saturated with hydrogen. Your fats are carbon chains and the definition of that fat will be dependent on how much those carbon chains are saturated with hydrogen. When we’re talking about alkalinity and acidity, what are we talking about? We’re talking about pH, right? Alkalinity and acidity, when we’re talking about those two terms, we’re talking about pH. What does pH stand for? Its potential hydrogen. That’s it. PH is potential hydrogen. Do you know what the definition of acidity is? The true scientific definition of acidity.   [00:58:26] Ashley James: How much hydrogen is present? [00:58:29] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That is exactly right. The buildup of hydrogen in the body, particularly at the level of the cell membrane. Why is this significant? That cell membrane, the way it determines what gets in, what gets out is based on the electrical charge at the level of the membrane, and that electrical charge is dependent on the type of fats at the level of the cell membrane. So if your body is bombarded with saturated fats like when you read a label as well, partially hydrogenated oil, right? Have you ever read a label and it says partially hydrogenated oils? Companies have learned that you can bubble hydrogen into their products, and when you do so, you stabilize it. When you can stabilize it, you can store it on the shelves until Christ returns. That’s what they do with these products, but then there’s naturally saturated fats, all the things that I mentioned previously. What’s happened is when you saturate something, you completely stabilize it and change its electrical. potential. and charge. When oxygen goes and approaches that cell, that charge literally cannot accept it and it repels it away. When you are acidic, you cannot get oxygen into the cells. So again, acidity, by definition, is the buildup of hydrogen in the body, particularly at the level of the cell membrane. By definition, acidity is the improper utilization of oxygen. This is exactly what Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize in 1931 on by demonstrating these very principles, which I’m not going to go into it or maybe later I can, but by the way, Gerson was already demonstrating this very principle for 20 years with his dietary therapy. He already knew and understood this. Where did he graduate from? The University of Freiburg. Where did Warburg win his Nobel Prize? At the University of Freiburg. My personal opinion is he won the Nobel Prize riding on Dr. Gerson’s back. He was a researcher, Gerson was a clinician. He knew Dr. Gerson no ifs, ands, or buts about it. He won the Nobel Prize based on that very principle. When we’re talking about alkalinity and acidity, we’re talking about pH. When those cell membranes are loaded with hydrogen in the form of saturated fats, you cannot oxygenate tissues and you will cause disease in the body because cells then go into a state of fermentation. What are we talking about cancer? It’s a fungal fermentative organism. When it’s exposed to oxygen, it cannot survive. The way you restore oxygen to the body, to the cell is through massive amounts of nutrients in the form of glucose. Glucose sugar does not cause cancer and feed cancer. It actually heals cancer. How often have you heard sugar feeds cancer? It doesn’t. Sugar heals cancer. If sugar fed cancer, Ashley, we would be sending patients to their graves exponentially quicker than they’re trying to get not to there because our patients are getting 3500 to 4000 calories a day in sugar in the form of fresh-pressed juices daily. It’s sugar in the presence of oxygen that gets converted into energy that rallies the immune system so that the immune system can destroy the disease. Sugar, hypothetically and theoretically, would feed cancer in an acidic body because you can’t convert that sugar into energy, it would get broken down into lactic acid fermentation, and that would continue to feed the disease. However, sugar in an alkaline body, an alkaline diet as is the Gerson Therapy, is what cures the human body of all diseases because you now reestablish the body’s ability to oxygenate tissues. How do you do that? First, you have to change the fats at the level of the cell membrane. Gerson tried every oil available to him and the only oil that did not cause cancer to worsen was flax oil. Why? What is flax oil? Flax oil is a complete polyunsaturated fatty acid. Let me give you an example. If I put flax oil, coconut oil, and olive oil in the freezer, and I put them overnight, I take them out, It’s going to take me about five, six hours for me to get two to three tablespoons of coconut oil out of that jar because coconut oil is so highly saturated, it’s so stable that when it freezes, it takes so long to unfreeze to thaw. If I put olive oil in there, within two to three hours, I can probably get a few tablespoons. Why? Because olive oil is a monosaturated fat, meaning some of its carbon bonds are saturated with hydrogen, some aren’t, so it’s rather neutral. Flax oil, when I put that flax oil on the freezer and I take it out, it is frozen solid. In five minutes it is completely liquid. Why? Because it has no hydrogen saturating its bonds. When you take flax oil internally and it goes to start restoring the cell membranes, the charge of flax oil literally acts as a magnet to draw oxygen into the cell. It literally sucks it into the cell. This is powerful medicine. This is how you restore metabolism. You have to restore metabolism to restore health. Is it any wonder when we’re watching the news, reading newspapers, reading magazines, and we’re reading about cancer, what is one of the precipitating factors of you getting cancer? Obesity. How many times have you heard the obesity cancer link? It’s because of metabolism. When you’re obese, obviously your metabolism has become faulty. You restore metabolism, you restore health. It starts at the gut, then you must repair the cell. You must repair the cell membrane with the fats. Then the other thing you’ve got to do, you have to get all the other hydrogen running around the body out of the body and neutralize it. How do you do that? There’s only one way—an alkaline diet. Let me explain. When you juice, and the Gerson patients are getting 17 pounds of fruits and vegetables every single day in the form of juices. Do you know if you test that juice with litmus paper before you drink it, it tests acidic? But when you drink it, it gets broken down into potassium hydroxide. Now potassium hydroxide is so highly alkaline now how do you write potassium hydroxide chemically? The way you write a hydroxyl molecule chemically is OH-. How do you write the acidic hydrogen molecule? H+. So you have all these H+ molecules running around the body. You need OH- molecules to neutralize those H+ molecules. There’s only one way to do that. There is no other way, it’s juicing.   [01:08:17] Ashley James: Does that become water?   [01:08:18] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Exactly.   [01:08:21] Ashley James: You get OH- plus a hydrogen is H20.   [01:08:26] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Is H2O. So all of a sudden, you start bombarding the body with these massive amounts of juices, which you’re creating OH- ions. They immediately start acting and interacting with the positive ions, go through the reaction, and the reaction creates H2O. H2O water is a neutral charge and all of a sudden, oxygen can begin to flow again in the body. And all of a sudden, all these sugars that you’re taking in can now get converted into energy. So you’ve now repaired the gut, which you can only do with food and juices. You’ve now neutralized the acidity, which there’s only one way to do it, which is food. And now, there’s one more thing you’ve got to do. We have to destroy the mitochondria’s ability to function inside the cell. How have we done that? Salt. Rule number one on the Gerson Therapy, absolutely no sodium other than what occurs in fruits and vegetables naturally. Why? There are two reasons why. When you eat salt and it doesn’t matter if it’s table salt, Celtic Salt, Himalayan Salt, salt is salt is salt. When you eat salt, you cause cellular edema. Salt and water enter the cell and they swell the cell up. My patients and the companions, they will all lose 7 to 15 pounds on a two to three-week stay when they come to our clinic just from the salt and water that they’re storing and stuck inside their cells because the only way you can get that salt out once it’s in there, that salt and water, is through potassium. The only way you get potassium is through raw fruits and vegetables or fruits and vegetables. There is no other way, other than possibly supplementation, right? But dietarily, the only way you can get salt and water out of the cell is through potassium. And who’s eating enough fruits and vegetables to get salt and water on their cells today? Hardly anyone, that’s the reality. Rule number one on the Gerson Therapy is no salt, bombard the body with potassium not in the diet only but Dr. Gerson created a special potassium powder that the patient gets in all their juices. That just forces the excess salt and water out of the cells. The other reason why salt is so destructive to the human body is your thyroid gland. Your thyroid gland is specifically responsible—this is really important to understand—reproducing the mitochondria. The thyroid gland makes the mitochondria, the very things you need to convert sugar into energy. So is it any wonder when someone’s overweight, they’re cold all the time. They have no energy. Their hair’s falling out. What do we say? They’re hypothyroid. The body’s not producing the amount of mitochondria necessary to convert food into energy. Well, what’s the thyroid completely dependent on? It’s completely dependent on iodine? What is salt? Salt is sodium chloride. Chloride displaces iodine from the thyroid gland. That’s why when they came out with table salt, which is 99.999% sodium chloride, what happened? Everybody started getting goiter walking around looking like turkeys because they were getting goiter. So what did they do? They iodized it right? Just to the point so you don’t get goiter. Take Celtic Salt, Himalayan salt, it’s 86 to 87% sodium chloride. You need very, very little salt on a daily basis to maintain optimal health, less than a quarter of a teaspoon. We are consuming exponentially more than that, and we’re just growing the mitochondrial ability to convert food into energy. So it is all these principles from the gut, to the cell membrane, to the neutralization of hydrogen, and the restoration of the mitochondrial function inside the cell that makes up our metabolism, the breakdown of food into energy, which is the secret to the Gerson Therapy. Dr. Gerson talks about this extensively. All of these things I’ve just spoken about, he talks about them extensively in his book. It’s why Warburg won the Nobel Prize. This is how you must address all diseases. It makes sense, doesn’t it?   [01:14:21] Ashley James: My mind is spinning. I mean, I have so many questions. [01:14:26] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Go ahead. [01:14:28] Ashley James: So when you said the thyroid gland makes mitochondria, can you please clarify? Does that make the mitochondria for the whole body, or is it the thyroid’s making mitochondria for the thyroid gland?   [01:14:43] Dr. Patrick Vickers: No, that’s its job. Its job is mitochondrial production. It is responsible for replicating, reproducing mitochondria for the cells. [01:14:51] Ashley James: All the cells, the whole body?   [01:14:53] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, that’s its job. It is responsible for mitochondrial production.   [01:14:59] Ashley James: I did not expect to learn that today. That is kind of mind-blowing and I really want to go down that rabbit hole. Your thyroid gland needs to be optimally functioning so that your mitochondria can replicate in a healthy manner. The thyroid, does it talk to the mitochondria throughout the lifecycle of the cell, or is it simply responsible for making sure the mitochondria get produced?   [01:15:26] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s a great question. I can’t answer that, to be perfectly honest with you.   [01:15:35] Ashley James: Regardless, we understand that the thyroid hormone is important in the metabolism, which we’re talking about, right? So we got to like a little bit of a big picture, thyroid is really important. The potassium powder in the juices that you make helps the body. Now, we have to be careful. I’m sure this is why people who are on medications, right? Like people who know they’re really, really off-kilter, they should be under a Gerson-trained physician like yourself, they should come to your clinic because you can’t just take potassium nilly willy. If you’re already sick, you could cause heart issues, muscle issues, or whatever. We can’t just take potassium powder nilly willy, right? We have to make sure we’re doing it correctly.   [01:16:27] Dr. Patrick Vickers: This is definitely correct. That is correct. So someone who has heart problems, kidney problems, you obviously have to be careful with the amount of potassium levels that they get, right? But I’m going to tell you something. What we’re taught in chiropractic school is the same thing they’re taught in medical school—too much potassium could throw the heart into AFib, A fibrillation. Ironically and clinically, that always isn’t necessarily the case. So this potassium powder has to get diluted in 32 ounces of water and then dissolved into solution. Then it’s that solution that goes into the patient’s juices. We have had patients go home, not dilute the potassium, and put three tablespoons or three teaspoons of that powder into each juice. If you told the medical doctor that they would absolutely freak out because that patient would immediately go into AFib. Well, we’ve had countless patients do that for decades because they didn’t listen and they just call us up complaining that their stomach hurts, that it burns, and that they’re peeing like a racehorse. That’s it because they’re just dumping so much sodium and water, right? It’s amazing some of the things we learn hypothetically and theoretically and what ends up happening in clinical practice, right? However, with that said, people on meds, people with heart problems, people with kidney problems, you don’t screw around with potassium regardless. You do have to clarify that, but anyway, yeah.   [01:18:06] Ashley James: So salt, which is in everything, right?   [01:18:12] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Everything.   [01:18:13] Ashley James: Any packaged food, it’s hard to find a packaged food that doesn’t contain fats that are harmful that have hydrogen in it and salt. I try to buy healthy snacks for my son because I mean, there’s only so much fruit he will eat. I swear, I will feed him three bananas a day and four oranges and five apples, it just gets to the point where like in between meals—because I don’t know if you know about kids, but kids have two stomachs. They have a stomach the size of a pea and that’s for meals like mealtime, and then they have a stomach that is the size of the moon and that’s for snacks. My son, when it comes to eating meals, it’s like I’m not hungry. He takes one bite. I’m full now. But then it’s like five minutes later hunger, hunger, hunger. I just have to always have snacks with me. So sometimes I need packaged or like shelf-stable food because we’re busy and I have a really hard time finding things that don’t have any hydrogenated fat and it just drives me up the wall. And then, of course, tons of salt. So we really need to become food detectives if we’re going to eat something from a package. I really like a whole food plant-based diet simply because it’s really easy. There’s broccoli, I eat it, like one ingredient foods. There’s spinach, I eat it. There’s brown rice, I eat it. There’s potato, I eat it. It’s very simple. One ingredient, no reading, my husband loves that. It drives him up the wall, anytime I touch a package in a grocery store you bet I’m flipping it over to read the ingredients.   [01:19:56] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Me too. Me too, Ashley.   [01:19:58] Ashley James: And then he goes, ugh. My husband’s just like, no. But he just stands there but then he’s just like, come on. Every grocery trip is 90 minutes. And now when I buy groceries online, then I could sit there for hours and read ingredients, right? But yeah. You and I could go grocery shopping, make a day of it, and read labels. It would probably be like, oh, look at this one, this is crazy. We should do that, it’d be fun.   [01:20:30] Dr. Patrick Vickers: It’s true, Ashley. Our stores today, even our health food stores, they’re so deceptive. It’s so deceptive.   [01:20:40] Ashley James: Yeah, you can’t really call them health food stores anymore since the ’80s. Not that I get off-topic in my interviews, but some listeners are like, why don’t you just ask questions? And I’m like, it’s conversational, we’re going back and forth. I love having conversations. We have to understand the history, the last hundred years, study, really understand the history of our food system and really understand the history of our modern medical system. If you understand big pharma, big agra, and big food, if you could just take those three and really study the history of it, you will make such better choices for yourself because you will understand what is going into your body and it’s so sad that we have to do this. But back in the ’80s, and I had a great interview with Joan Ifland, who is a Ph.D. in basically food and addiction. She’s the one that made it into the DSM-IV, which I think it’s DSM-5 now. She made it into the DSM-IV processed food addiction understanding. She talked about that back in the ’80s when the cigarette companies realized that tobacco companies were like, hey, we’re probably going out of style starting in the ’80s and they needed to do something about it because the word was out, tobacco causes cancer. They could only keep the lid on that for so long. And then they’re like, well, you know what, we’re in the business of addiction. We’re not in the business of tobacco. We need to continue being an addiction business. So they started to buy up every single processed food company like Kraft and all these major food companies. Basically, if you go to this grocery store and you randomly put your hand out and touch a package, it’s probably owned by a tobacco company. The food made in that package was actually formulated by food scientists who are designed to figure out the exact amount of fat, sugar, and salt to cause a dopamine response similar to getting your fix of meth, heroin, or whatever, right? They really dialed in the exact chemicals and even in the healthy foods because Kashi was bought by one of those companies. So all these “healthy food companies”, once they get big enough they get bought out, and then they just get slightly changed so that there’s just enough salt in it to make you crave it and make you need that dopamine high from your food. We have to get that this is an addiction. It’s like if you take a child and they were born from a mother who was on heroin, that baby was born but it’s not their fault they’re addicted to heroin, right? Everyone listening, unless you’re like no packaged food whatsoever, everyone who eats packaged food or any kind of processed food, you are like a baby born from addiction. This was given to you as a child, the cereal, and you didn’t know it. Unknowingly, they triggered the four chemicals in your brain that cause addiction. So when you go to make these health changes that Dr. Vickers is explaining today, know that there’s going to be a transition where your brain starts screaming, give me the salt, give me the salt. That’s because salt, sugar, and fat, which is outlined in my episode 230 with Dr. Goldhamer. He wrote the book called The Pleasure Trap, a great book. It explains that salt, sugar, and fat are used in the food system to override your brain. So it’s kind of like quitting cigarettes, right? You can do it. People can do it. People do it all the time. You have to be intentional. When you’re going to cut salt out of your diet, you have to know that it’s like quitting cigarettes. You can do it, but you have to be ready for the cravings, and it’s temporary. The cravings are temporary. You’re saying the number one rule is cutting out salt, which obviously, there’s a transition period. It takes about a month, I’ve heard from Dr. Goldhamer. He says it takes about a month for people to become neuro-adapted so that they start tasting food.   [01:25:24] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s amazing. That is exactly right. That’s the experience of our patients at the clinic. You have receptors on your tongue, right? You have receptors on your tongue for salt, sweet, sour, and bitter. Your receptors have become so dull that they can no longer taste the natural sodium in fruits and vegetables. When patients come to our clinic, the first week or two, they absolutely hate the food. Even though the food is absolutely delicious, they hate it. But right around the end of their second week, third week, they start raving about the food because they have neuro-adapted those receptors. They’ve cleansed those receptors to now where they can actually start to taste what real food is supposed to taste like. That man, that’s brilliant because that’s exactly our experience.   [01:26:23] Ashley James: The Gerson diet—just to recap what you said in the big picture—is making your cells so healthy again, because the salt is swelling them and not letting oxygen in. If you don’t let oxygen into the cell, then the mitochondria is going to ferment your food in because there’s not enough oxygen and it needs the oxygen and the sugar, but if there’s a lack of oxygen, it’s anaerobic, so it causes fermentation, it increases lactic acid, and then you feel sluggish and slow, you get stiff, and you get achy. People go like, I have arthritis or I kind of feel achy. It feels very gross. It feels like your muscle’s flu-like symptoms. Sometimes you have too much lactic acid. You’re kind of achy, you’re really slow, you’re tired, you’re sluggish, you’ve got brain fog, and you just feel like poop, right? Unfortunately, when people feel like that, they go towards the foods that will mask it.   [01:27:23] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Quick fix.   [01:27:24] Ashley James: The quick fixes, right? Like sugar, coffee, and fast food, something that’ll just kind of get them through the day, unfortunately. Coffee doesn’t give us energy. It suppresses the nervous system experiencing tiredness. It’s just like if you had a headache, you took Advil, it doesn’t make the headache go away. It just makes the experience get numbed. So coffee doesn’t give us energy. It just tricks you into thinking you’re not as tired as you actually are.   [01:27:53] Dr. Patrick Vickers: It’s ultimately stimulating metabolism, right? Which is energy, right? It’s stimulating energy production. The caffeine is, and it’s deriving some of that probably from fat or stored up glucose somewhere, stored glycogen, but that’s why you’re getting a quick hit of energy obviously, which is like any drug like cocaine or whatever.   [01:28:15] Ashley James: Right. The problem is it’s not from your mitochondria, that energy is not from your mitochondria.   [01:28:19] Dr. Patrick Vickers: It is the mitochondria.   [01:28:22] Ashley James: Sorry, yes, performing in a healthy way. You’re forcing it to do something, but it’s not performing in the optimal, in a healthy way.   [01:28:30] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, that’s right.   [01:28:32] Ashley James: Okay. So salt is not helping because it’s swelling the cell. We need oxygen into the cell. The oxygen’s not getting into the cell because the fats we’re consuming are full of hydrogen. Can you explain why is it that—I’m imagining. If we can all just imagine a cross-section of a cell and you’ve got this fat layer that’s the cell wall, if there’s hydrogen all through that, why is oxygen having a hard time passing through the cell?   [01:29:02] Dr. Patrick Vickers: It’s the charge.   [01:29:03] Ashley James: Okay.   [01:29:04] Dr. Patrick Vickers: See, so that cell membrane’s charged based on the fat. That cell’s either going to accept the charge or repel a charge. A saturated fat membrane is literally going to repel oxygen away from the cell. It will literally drive it away. Whereas flax oil, which has no saturated bonds, literally acts as a magnet. It draws it into the cell. Yeah, that’s it.   [01:29:38] Ashley James: So fascinating.   [01:29:39] Dr. Patrick Vickers: It is, it’s incredible. It’s an issue of biophysics, not an issue of biochemistry, ultimately. It’s actually biophysics.   [01:29:48] Ashley James: I love it. Okay. So no salt, take some flax oil daily, and drink fresh juice daily.   [01:29:57] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s right.   [01:29:58] Ashley James: First thing in the morning, best time to drink it, throughout the day. When’s the best time to drink it?   [01:30:04] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Our patients are getting every hour on the hour for 12 hours straight. They’re getting 13 juices a day.   [01:30:10] Ashley James: Okay. And how many ounces is that?   [01:30:13] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Eight ounces.   [01:30:14] Ashley James: Okay. And they’re also eating food in addition to that. This isn’t the juice fast.   [01:30:20] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s exactly right, and this needs to be very understood. So when a patient comes to you, comes to our clinic, what did I say in the beginning when we started talking science? What is completely destroyed and deranged? Their gut, right? Their gut is completely destroyed and deranged. If you put a cancer patient on an all-raw diet, they won’t do well. So if you give them the juices and you give them meals that are all raw, they will not do well. Gerson was absolutely adamant that their three meals every day were thoroughly cooked. Well people say, well, oh, it destroys the nutrients, it destroys the enzyme. He didn’t care. You were getting all the nutrients in the enzymes in the 13 fresh-pressed juices, 17 pounds every single day. Those are absorbed into the bloodstream almost as quickly as alcohol with very little energy and enzymes required to utilize them. Meals on the other hand, cancer patients cannot handle raw cauliflower, raw broccoli, raw carrots, raw whatever. It needs to be thoroughly cooked because cooking is actually a form of pre-digestion so that they can easily convert that food into energy. That was a huge, huge, huge issue for Dr. Gerson. He was so adamantly against a raw food diet for a cancer patient apart from the juices on a daily basis.   [01:31:59] Ashley James: Now, you mentioned that cancer is a fungal infection.   [01:32:11] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, it’s fungal and fermentative in nature. That’s how it survives. We know what survives on anaerobic metabolism. That’s how it survives.   [01:32:26] Ashley James: Except that there’s a form of lung cancer that doesn’t, but all other cancer does. There’s one form of lung cancer they found that didn’t do that, which is kind of weird. I can’t remember the doctor that told me about it, sorry. You said it’s fungal fermentation. Do you believe that tumors are an encapsulated fungal infection?   [01:32:54] Dr. Patrick Vickers: No, I don’t necessarily believe that. Look, you and I have cancer, right? We all have cancer. Every single day, our body’s destroying that cancer. There comes a point, and it’s usually right around the fifth decade of life because that is the standard mean age of the people who come to my clinic that the body just loses the capacity to destroy cancer cells and these cancer cells start to accumulate and accumulate then they form a tumor ultimately. I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily a fungal infection, so to speak. No.   [01:33:36] Ashley James: Okay. But it’s acting like fungus in that it is anaerobic?   [01:33:42] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, that’s right.   [01:33:44] Ashley James: Okay. Does Gerson Therapy help the immune system see the cancer? Because the problem with cancer is that the immune system doesn’t see it. It’s like it has a cloaking device.   [01:34:00] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, it’s able to put a biofilm around itself, right? So cancer cells, and that’s a great question because melanoma and lymphoma, which are our two greatest successes, do not have the ability to put a biofilm around themselves to make themselves undetectable to the immune system. Whereas all your other cancers have that ability. Clearly, the Gerson Therapy is able to break down that biofilm. Well, how would you break down that biofilm? Simple, I mean, we know ellagic acid like in cranberries. We know that that can break down the biofilm. So no doubt these fruits and vegetables are breaking down those, and then the massive amounts of enzymes that we also give, you can rest assured those enzymes are going to dissolve that biofilm that the cancer cell puts around itself, and then the immune system can readily attack it. But again, that’s why lymphoma in melanoma, they’re so easy to treat and they’re easy to treat because they can’t hide from the immune system. So you put someone on the Gerson Therapy and the immune system readily attacks the cancer because it has no defense. Pretty cool stuff, huh?   [01:35:14] Ashley James: It is really cool. So for those who don’t have those two kinds of cancers and they do have a kind of cancer that has a biofilm, you give them supplements.   [01:35:27] Dr. Patrick Vickers: I don’t give ellagic. I’ve been banging around the idea of giving patients ellagic acid as a supplement because you can get it as a supplement, but I’m just not sure how the digestive tract in the body can handle that in a cancer patient. I just haven’t been quick to jump on giving that as a supplement. If somebody said to me, hey, I’m interested in doing ellagic acid when I go home, I mean, I probably say, well, okay, I mean, I guess give it a shot. But I mean, historically, look, if it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it, right? Historically, clearly, we’ve been able to break down biofilm and cure cancer because that’s 120 years of the history of the Gerson Therapy. Whatever we’re doing is breaking down that biofilm, and so I’m just not ready to take that leap where we’re just bombarding the body with things to break down the biofilm because clearly, we’re already doing that.   [01:36:29] Ashley James: If someone ate cooked cranberries like they made a cranberry sauce, would they get enough of it in their food?   [01:36:37] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s a great question. I’m not sure how much. When you cook things high in oxalic acid, you actually eliminate the risk of a buildup of oxalic acid. I don’t know if you cook something, what happens to the acid when you’re doing that. So if they cooked the cranberries, I really don’t know. But I will say something. Chris Wark from Chris Beat Cancer who’s been in my clinic many times, he endorses my clinic. He once sent me a study somewhere where they tested all the fruits that we have available to us today. I don’t know if it’s in the states, around the world, or whatever. But in that study, they tested all fruits, its effect, and its ability to stop cancer dead in its tracks. Of all the fruits they studied, two stood out clearly amongst the rest as being able to stop cancer dead in its tracks. That was lemon and cranberry. They stood out like way beyond the rest—lemon and cranberry. We’ve actually added lemon to the Gerson protocol, which Gerson had lemon before he changed his juicing protocol in 1952. He had lemon, so we’ve reintroduced it so to speak. Yeah, we put in our carrot juice now.   [01:38:01] Ashley James: Yum. And I love fresh lemon squeezed into water just first thing in the morning, also. Count that one back. What do we need to understand about preventing disease? Pretty much everyone who’s listening wants to be healthier than they are now, right? Not everyone listening has a cancer diagnosis or a major disease diagnosis.   [01:38:32] Dr. Patrick Vickers: We’re going on one out of every two if we’re not there already, right?   [01:38:40] Ashley James: Yeah. My listeners are enlightened. They’re with you. They’re like, yeah, we’re going to go drink the juice and screw that salt. We’re with you. I say this all the time on my show, so if you’re a longtime listener you’ve heard me say, if you want to be a statistic, eat like everyone else. Go  with the herd. Go with the flow, drive-thru McDonald’s, drive-thru Starbucks. Just go through the drive-thrus, order takeout. Just eat like everyone else, get some frozen pizza, drink some beer, just be like everyone else. Be like how everyone else is doing it and you will be part of the statistics, right? So the statistics is one in three people have diabetes or are pre-diabetic. One in three people are obese and soon to be morbidly obese, and the thing is there’s so much shame and guilt around that. The fact is again, it’s like the baby being born of a mother who is addicted to heroin. It’s not the baby’s fault. This is not your fault. You were put in a system since birth that is designed to make you sick, not healthy. As we can see from Dr. Gerson’s life, he is the man who figured out how to cure cancer almost a hundred years ago, right?   [01:40:09] Dr. Patrick Vickers: And virtually every other disease as well.   [01:40:11] Ashley James: And was completely squashed on purpose. The system that we live in does not want you to know the truth about anything that would eliminate their power and their profits. The diseases you have now, they’re not your fault in that you didn’t know these forces have been controlling your life. This is like the matrix, right? But once you are outside the matrix, it is your fault if you continue to choose the behaviors, and still I don’t fault you because again, it’s an addiction, we’re constantly being bombarded by our friends, our family, the media. We have to become the salmon. We have to become the black sheep. We have to become the salmon. We have to go upstream. But imagine you’re the only salmon in the stream and every other fish is going to the ocean and we’re like, no, I got to go this way going against the grain. Sometimes it’s lonely. Join our Facebook group, Learn True Health Facebook group then you’re not going to be alone. Thousands of listeners are just like you in the same boat. They’re the black sheep of their family. They want to get healthy. The rest of their friends are wanting to go out partying, drink beer, eat wings, or whatever. The thing is it takes a complete mental shift, and it also takes being kind to yourself because you are that baby born of an addicted mother. You’re born into this and now you’re being birthed out of it. Now you get to decide, are you going to go down the steps and eliminate salt, increase your potassium drinking juice? Are you going to incorporate flax oil and cut out all other unhealthy oils? Are you going to go through the list, and I’m sure that Dr. Vickers has a lot more homework he can give us. But now that we understand the science, the science is to heal the cell wall, heal the cell, heal the metabolism of the cell, and don’t do anything to impede it. Support the thyroid and the mitochondria to work healthfully to receive oxygen. That alone decreases inflammation in the body, removes the oxidative stress from the body, and helps restore the gut. I mean, those things, I don’t know an illness that that wouldn’t help. It’s very exciting. What we have to understand is that it just doesn’t end today, just listening to this. This is now the stepping point where we need to start taking action. We need to take actionable steps. So, like I said, not everyone listening is in a disease state right now. There are some people listening who need to do it 110% go to your clinic and do that. Absolutely go to gersonclinic.com, check it out, go to your clinic, and get doctor-supervised transitioning into this therapy. And then there are those of us who have some minor things they’re dealing with and want to prevent it from getting worse and want to start heading in the right direction.   [01:43:34] Dr. Patrick Vickers: We have programs for them as well, right?   [01:43:36] Ashley James: Do you have virtual programs?   [01:43:38] Dr. Patrick Vickers: No, we don’t do online remote consulting at this point just because I’m so busy. I mean, I’m just ridiculously busy and I don’t have people trained up to provide that sole service, and that’s why we have a clinic where people come and they spend a week and do a detox or two weeks and do a detox. I mean, on my website, we just created a store within the last six months. There is like a month supply or a three-month supply of the Gerson Therapy supplements and included in that is a one-hour consultation with me. My time is so limited that if everybody started buying that, I don’t think I’d be able to keep up. But I do offer that included in that package, but that’s really the only thing that we have that’s of that nature.   [01:44:31] Ashley James: Got it. I would love to see in the future something where one of your cohorts of people coming into your clinic, you recorded all the seminars or educational pieces and then put that together online. So either those who need a refresher could take it or those who want to learn more, if they can’t travel for whatever reason, it would be really cool to get that, maybe have a digital course.   [01:45:01] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, for your listeners, for example, if your listeners go to our website, there’s a section you can click on that says gift. If you go to gift, your listener goes to gift, click on gift and put in the password podcast. They can actually listen to our private video series that’s only for our clientele that comes to the clinic. You can tell your listeners to do that. Hit the gift section on our website, put in the password podcast, and they can watch all of my interviews, my lectures on the very things we’re talking about on the therapy, all of those private videos they can have access to.   [01:45:52] Ashley James: Sweet, awesome, thank you. I mean, of course I want everyone to go to your clinic, but for those of us who can’t at this very moment, I love them. I’d love for people to just today do that because we got to start learning more and making it part of our routine. When I learned something completely revolutionary, I’m like, oh, yeah, I’ve got to do this. And then life happens and all of a sudden I’m back in that old routine. We need to make sure that we make this a habit that lasts. We’ve talked about some things that people do for major illnesses. What homework do we do to prevent disease that’s really important?   [01:46:40] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, we’ve addressed the nutritional portions and how to reverse the underlying causes of a disease. We’re at the ultimate restoration of metabolism, which you do through diet, right? But there are some things we haven’t talked about. For example, you have to address the issue of toxicity. Patients coming to us, they’re so incredibly toxic from years of a toxic lifestyle, toxic environmental exposure. Then when you put them on a therapy like this, you’re generating even more toxicity, right? You’re breaking down diseased tissue, you’re breaking down tumor tissue, you’re rebuilding new tissue. The juicing is pulling toxicity stored up for years, decades out of the cells back into the bloodstream. If you don’t detoxify those patients, they’ll all die. You cannot put them on the dietary regimen without the proper detoxification. You kind of alluded to this at the beginning of the interview with bathroom procedures. Dr. Gerson made the coffee enema famous. Our patients are getting five coffee enemas per day—five per day. There’s not a more powerful way to detoxify the human body than a coffee enema, and that includes prevention as well.   [01:48:06] Ashley James: That’s one thing they mentioned in one of the documentaries I saw is that Gerson was having great success in Germany reversing cancer. And then when he came to New York City, when did he come to York City? What year?   [01:48:22] Dr. Patrick Vickers: I want to say probably the mid-30s.   [01:48:25] Ashley James: So mid-30s. Gasoline was leaded, I believe, so we can imagine in a busy city, people are breathing in lead all the time. There are no regulations for factories not dumping into anything—mercury, any kind of sludge—into the creeks, and then people might eat the fish like the Minamata disaster in Japan where people were born with major mercury deformations because of the mercury being dumped into the streams that led out into Minamata, which was a fishing village. This is the same thing happening, and all of a sudden, he does the same protocol that was working in Germany, but he noticed that the people would immediately die. You didn’t mention that because it probably isn’t a great part of the story like, and then everyone died of the therapy. But what I found fascinating was that he figured out, he had to troubleshoot, why are people in Germany living and beating cancer, and then I come here with the same protocol and people in New York City will drop dead very quickly of toxicity?   [01:49:43] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Oh, no. I think he discovered early on in Europe that if he didn’t detoxify his patients he would lose them. I’m not sure that was discovered necessarily in the United States.   [01:49:56] Ashley James: Well then the movie got it wrong, but I thought that was really interesting and I thought maybe it had to do with America being more toxic, and I mean, still toxic today, but in terms of lead in the gasoline so the environment.   [01:50:11] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Maybe it was the cancer patient then because he didn’t start treating cancer until he got to the United States, right? That might have happened with the cancer patients, some of the cancer patients at first. The first one he did he completely cured her, right? How he did that without coffee enemas, I’m not sure if he maybe didn’t do enough coffee enemas going forward, I don’t know. At one point during his practice, he lost his first few patients because he didn’t detoxify them heavily enough and they went into more toxic shock, ultimately, and that’s where the five coffee enema protocol was ultimately derived.   [01:50:53] Ashley James: That’s why I think it’s so important to point this out because some people say, well, I’m going to do Gerson therapy, but I’m not going to do the coffee enemas because that’s weird.   [01:51:01] Dr. Patrick Vickers: You can’t.   [01:51:02] Ashley James: Some people are like, well, I’m going to do it, but I’m not going to eat breakfast because I don’t like eating breakfast or whatever. If you’re reversing your cancer with Gerson therapy, you don’t cherry-pick what you like and what you don’t like.   [01:51:13] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s exactly right.   [01:51:14] Ashley James: He trialed and errored this and got to the point he’s having the greatest success, and you could add things on like aloe. It’s not going to hurt, it’s only going to help more, but you don’t take things away. So you say one coffee enema a day for those who are just looking to prevent disease.   [01:51:32] Dr. Patrick Vickers: I’ve been doing one a day for 25 years.   [01:51:36] Ashley James: So could you explain why coffee enemas help to detox the body?   [01:51:44] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Absolutely. And it’s pure science, it’s not voodoo science. Your liver produces an enzyme called glutathione transferase. Glutathione transferase is the most potent detoxifying enzyme or one of the most potent detoxifying enzymes in the human body. Well, your liver needs palmitic acid in order to create glutathione transferase. Well, properly roasted organic coffee from a specific bean, not a drinking bean, is loaded with palmitic acid. It’s been demonstrated scientifically by Peter Lechner, you can Google it, Peter Lechner. It has been demonstrated that when you do one coffee enema, the production of glutathione transferase by the body goes up 600 to 700% greater than normal. I mean, there is nothing that can produce that kind of detoxification. Now, what people don’t understand is when you do the coffee enema and you stimulate that production, that requires massive amounts of nutrients. So if you’re not replenishing the body with nutrients in the form of juices and massive amounts of organic produce on a daily basis, you’ll actually cause yourself more harm than good over time because you’re going to deplete the body over time. That’s why drinking coffee, you deplete your body of nutrients so much because you’re losing so many vitamins and minerals because it’s a diuretic. It’s artificially stimulating metabolism, which requires nutrients. When you do a coffee enema, the rule is three to four juices for every coffee enema. So if I do one coffee enema day, I’m literally eating three to five pounds of fresh organic produce every single day, raw. That’s to balance my system. But that’s the main thing that the Gerson coffee enema does. The other thing it does, is as you and I are sitting here, if we’re talking for 15 minutes, our blood is circulating through our liver and our kidneys. It’s being cleansed two and a half times in a 15-minute period going through our liver and our kidney for cleansing, dialysis, so to speak. When you do a coffee enema, it must be because of the hypovolemic state because you’re now adding a quart of liquid to you. You must increase the flow of fluid through the body. You’re actually running your blood through the liver and the kidneys five times rather than two and a half times. So it’s a natural form of dialysis, so to speak. That’s another side benefit, so to speak, of the Gerson therapy. Finally, the other thing it does is it releases bile and it causes bile to flow, and that’s what your toxins are ultimately bound to. The way the liver detoxifies is cholesterol gets converted into bile acids, and then bile binds toxins and eliminates it through the intestines and the kidneys. So that’s the other thing that the Gerson coffee enema does. It produces bottom bile flow, which is also enhancing detoxification.   [01:55:01] Ashley James: And then we have to make sure that we have something that’s going to carry that all the way out, so don’t be constipated because the body tries to reuptake cholesterol from bile and it’ll reuptake some of those forever chemicals. All those chemicals the body’s trying to get rid of because the gut doesn’t know the difference, right? It’s costly to make bile, and so the body tries to reabsorb it. We want to make sure we’re getting enough fiber, that 15 grams a day, that average American diet, that’s not going to cut it. Aim for 50 grams of fiber a day, 100 grams of fiber. But the juices, there’s still some fiber in juice, right? I know that we do remove pulp, but can you also take some pulp and throw them back in or can make dehydrated crackers out of it.   [01:55:53] Dr. Patrick Vickers: There’s no reason. If you’re eating three Gerson meals a day, there’s no reason.   [01:56:00] Ashley James: What is a Gerson meal? Maybe we should give it a picture. What does it look like to eat three Gerson meals a day?   [01:56:08] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Every morning is oatmeal with dried fruit stewed into it, so prunes, raisins, and mango. What else do we eat? Sometimes we throw currants in there. That’s it. It’s oatmeal and dried fruit, and then they get an orange juice every morning. Flax oil is mandatory. Two tablespoons of flax oil every single day is mandatory. And they can have a natural sweetener. They can have up to two to three teaspoons a day maximum of a natural sweetener, so honey, a sucanat, maple syrup they can put in their oatmeal, so that’s breakfast. Lunch and dinner, mandatory are potatoes. Potatoes are a staple. They’re so easily converted into energy by the body, and so Gerson made potatoes staple. There’s also something called Hippocrates Soup. Mandatory is Hippocrates Soup at lunch and dinner. It was actually a soup created by Hippocrates 2500 years ago. Now, Hippocrates is considered the greatest physician that ever lived. Ironically, Gerson used his work and Paracelsus’ his work to come to his conclusions and ultimately formed the Gerson therapy. So Hippocrates Soup and potatoes are a staple, then any other vegetable. It might be asparagus, it might be squash, it might be onions or tomatoes, all of those things can make up another vegetable dish. That pretty much derives the Gerson Therapy meals, they’re simple. We have very artistic chefs. We have vegetarian artistic chefs. I mean, they’re brilliant. They take fruits and vegetables and they literally turn it into appetizing art, and so it’s amazing what you can do with what God gave us. I mean, fruits and vegetables and the combinations you can make are just fascinating and just scrumptious.   [01:58:16] Ashley James: I love it. I didn’t hear any—some people are going to freak out—protein in that. Can you please explain? How am I going to get my 500 grams of protein a day that everyone tells me I need?   [01:58:35] Dr. Patrick Vickers: One of the biggest fallacies out there is how much protein the human body needs and what kind of protein the human body needs. I can’t tell you how many times people ask me that question, where am I going to get my protein on this diet? Well, where does a horse or a cow get their protein from? Are they cannibals? Are they pumping iron all day long and building that muscle mass that way? No, they’re not. How are they getting their protein to support their massive structures? They’re eating grass all day.   [01:59:16] Ashley James: Elephants.   [01:59:18] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, they’re eating greens.   [01:59:19] Ashley James: Right? Largest land mammals.   [01:59:22] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Exactly. They’re eating greens. Greens are loaded with proteins. Carrots are loaded with protein. Potatoes are loaded with protein. They are, I thought they were a carb? No. They’re a carb, they’re a protein, they’re virtually a perfect food. Oatmeal, protein; lentils, protein; quinoa, protein. I mean, you combine these things and you get them all in your diet on a daily basis and your body will be able to take those amino acids and completely make a protein for your optimal survival. You do not need meat, you do not need eggs, you do not need milk, you do not need cheese in order to get protein into your diet. It is one of the biggest fallacies and tragedies out there because meat and all those other things I mentioned, are such inferior proteins. They’re inferior proteins to keep the body optimally fit and healthy.   [02:00:25] Ashley James: And the fat, the diet is pretty much naturally low in fat minus the flax oil that you’re adding. How much flax oil should someone eat a day? Is it something they’re eating just by the spoonful, pouring it kind of like cod liver oil into the spoon, or are they putting it on their salad? Obviously, they’re not cooking with it? How much flax oil should someone be consuming a day and how do they eat it?   [02:00:58] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Just to clarify something, all our foods, whether it’s a fruit, a vegetable, or whatever, pretty much comes with everything we need from protein, to sugar, to even essential fatty acids. You wouldn’t even necessarily have to supplement with flax oil if you’re eating a proper diet. Even spinach and greens have essential fatty acids in them. A healthy person, if they got one tablespoon of flax oil a day, that would probably be optimal. It’s a highly, highly concentrated fat right? I mean, how many freaking flax seeds do you have to press to get a tablespoon of flax oil, right? Our patients have to do two per day when they’re cancer patients, but then at six weeks, they have to go down to one because you can’t bombard the body that long with such a highly concentrated fat and it’s not necessary. In the beginning, they needed to do that because they need to restore the proper fats at the level of the cell membrane, but after six weeks, Gerson felt like he could wean them off or wean them down. They would continue one tablespoon for the rest of their protocol. To put one tablespoon a day into your diet, whether it’s on a salad or in the oatmeal. I put it on the oatmeal, I put it in the potato, I put it on the salad until I have essentially a tablespoon a day. I don’t take more than that.   [02:02:41] Ashley James: What kind of flax oil because I know there are doctors out there like Dr. Wallach who say we shouldn’t eat any oil out of a bottle because it’s rancid and it’s going to increase—   [02:02:54] Dr. Patrick Vickers: This is true.   [02:02:57] Ashley James: It can potentially increase the hydrogen in the body. It can give it more free radicals. Of course, this entire diet would really help to mitigate that. What kind of flax oil is best to take?   [02:03:10] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Okay. So obviously, it has to be cold-pressed right, and there are a few companies that produce a really high quality flax oil. We get ours from Omega Nutrition. Barlean’s, perfect. Barlean’s not a problem. They’re just as good of a producer as Omega. Those are the two that I would highly recommend. Now, in terms of getting rancid, you’re exactly right. Flax oil is highly volatile. What makes it volatile is what? It doesn’t have any hydrogen bonds, that’s what gives it its volatility and it’s quick to go rancid. Now, what does quick to go rancid mean?. Well, that cold-pressed oil is in an opaque bottle and it’s also refrigerated, so it’s not exposed to light, heat, or air until you open it then it’s exposed to air. But it’s not exposed to light and it’s not exposed to heat.  If you continue to refrigerate it, a 12-ounce bottle will last you for three weeks. It should last you for three weeks. At the end of three weeks, that’s when it’ll start to break down. But for two to three weeks, you can use that oil perfectly, keep it refrigerated, and it will stay completely fresh. And then from there, they say pretty much after three to four weeks, you might want to consider throwing it away because it’ll start to break down even if you just open it up, pour it, close it, put it in the fridge. But it should last you anywhere for around three weeks. But fish oil. Do you know fish oil they say is like 5 to 10 times more volatile than flax oil? And so, these supplements, they put them into these capsules, they put them into bottles and stuff. When you take those fish oils, you know how you burp and it has that fishy taste? That’s already gone rancid. These companies that are producing fish oil, they’ll tell you publicly because they’re trying to sell you their product how pure, unrefined, and how un-rancid their oils are. But reality is, behind closed doors, it is impossible to keep their oils pure. That’s why when you take them, you burp, and you taste that fishy taste, that means it’s gone rancid because true fish oil right from the fish when you eat it, it doesn’t have that taste. It has a pure almost like flax oil taste. Fish oil, I would never touch it. Not to mention, where’s that fish oil coming from? It’s coming from the fat of the fish. Where do the mercury and the toxicity in the oceans get stored? In the fat of the fish. However much you try to distill it and distill the heavy metals and stuff out there, you’re not going to succeed in getting most of that out. I don’t buy it. I never touch it. Flax oil is my go-to guy.   [02:06:19] Ashley James: I love it. This is something we can all do. We can incorporate these things. It does take about a month to neuro-adapt fully, but we can look to see significantly less inflammation. This is incredible for those who are in pain. I mean, just the whole food plant-based diet alone. No oil, let’s say. A whole food plant-based diet, no oil, so no processed food, no oil. My friend Naomi who actually had her on the show because she reversed a major heart condition with the whole food plant-based diet with no oil. Her parents got on it. I think they’re in their 70s, really nice people. Her mom reversed her arthritis-like major arthritis pain, kind of like preventing needing surgeries in the future kind of arthritis. She no longer has arthritis, and I think it was like three weeks in which she said to her daughter, hey, my arthritis pain is gone. That just blew my mind because we’re taught that arthritis is wearing away of the cartilage. I’ve seen people reverse arthritis. I’ve seen Dr. Wallach reverse arthritis. I know it’s reversible. MDs will tell you it’s not. I remember back in college, [inaudible 02:07:47] was a neurosurgeon in Croatia and he escaped the war and came over to Canada. He was my professor. Later I think he was like the Dean of the Naturopathic College in Toronto. I remember in anatomy class, he said, you cannot regrow cartilage. This is like 1999. He goes, you cannot regrow cartilage. Once you have arthritis, you will always have arthritis. He was really adamant. Do not even think that arthritis is reversible. Once you’ve lost cartilage you could never get it back. I thought, this is ridiculous. You’re expecting me to think that like you were the cartilage you’re born with is the cartilage you’re always going to have or something. It’s so silly. Of course, the body can regenerate cartilage. Are you wearing your body down faster than you can regrow it? If you’re not giving yourself the raw building blocks, if you’re not giving yourself the material it needs to grow—the bones, the joints, the cell walls—and then you’re dosing gasoline on yourself and then lighting it on fire every day with your habits, of course you’re going to go downhill. Of course, the cartilage is going to wear away because you’re dousing yourself with flames and then not giving yourself anything to rebuild, not enough. It’s like everyone else. You can be like everyone else; you’re going to become a statistic. But we can reverse these diseases. That’s exciting. MDs will tell you you cannot reverse these because that’s their training. We have to start thinking for ourselves and question everything. Question absolutely everything and don’t take our word for it, question us too. Go look into this stuff. Go try it for yourself. See how you are. Give it three months, I’d say. What happens to people in three months? If we all jumped in and did this for the next three months, what would we expect to feel, what would we expect to happen in our bodies?   [02:10:05] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Oh, wow. I mean, look like Albert Schweitzer, severely advanced diabetes six weeks, Dr. Gerson cured him. Someone scheduled for triple quadruple bypass surgery, in one month we’re canceling their surgeries. You want to lose weight? Our patients are losing anywhere from a quarter to a pound a day until they’re normal weight. Now people say, well, how on earth can you lose a pound a day if you’re consuming 3500 to 4000 calories? Because the experts say that you have to consume anywhere from a maximum of 1200 to maybe 1500 if you’re going to lose weight. Well, how is it that on the Gerson Therapy consuming 3500 to 4000 calories per day that you can lose anywhere from a quarter to a pound per day?   [02:10:55] Ashley James: You’re healing the metabolism.   [02:10:56] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Because the issue of weight loss has nothing to do with caloric intake. It has everything to do with being able to convert those calories into energy, and that is everything that we have spoken about today. We have restored metabolism from the gut, to the cell membrane, to the internal part of the cell so the mitochondria can convert those calories into energy, and that is proper and healthy weight loss. Massive amounts of caloric intake. Imagine that, and the experts tell you you’ve got to starve yourself on 1200 to 1500 calories per day if you want to lose weight. That’s bogus. It’s nonsense. They don’t understand the cellular science behind it, and that’s what made Gerson such an elemental genius. He has taken modern nutritional ideas and theories, whether it’s weight loss, the ketogenic diet, and turned it up on its head. This is what you can expect on the Gerson Therapy. Skin conditions. Do you have a severe skin condition? A lot of our patients come in with severe skin conditions because typically, your skin conditions are underlying metabolic errors and preconditions to cancer. They come in with skin conditions, within three months, their skin conditions are completely resolved—three months. This is what you can expect.   [02:12:35] Ashley James: I love it. This is so exciting. I realized I’ve had you on the show for two hours now. I could talk to you for another five. I’d love to have you back on the show. Dr. Patrick Vickers, it has been such a pleasure having you. This way of eating goes completely against the grain, in terms of weight loss, great read. I listen to the book. Who figured, right? I love podcasts, I like listening to books. Proteinaholic by Dr. Garth Davis, just listen to the first chapter. He tells his story. He’s a second-generation weight loss surgery doctor. He made a name for himself cutting people’s stomachs out. He was in Texas and he was working with 600-pound plus patients, and his dad did too. He was on Bravo, he had a reality show, he had a book out. He was all about the lower fat, processed food, 1200-calorie day diet. In his 30s, he started feeling sluggish, he started getting a little tubby. He started feeling more and more tired. He was eating the same thing that he told his patients to eat like high protein, low carb, low fat cheese, low fat yogurt, and he just started to just feel sicker and sicker. He used to think his patients were just lazy because they said, I’m too tired to go to the gym. He’s like, you’re just lazy, and then he noticed he was too tired. He’s like, oh man, this diet that I put everyone on I’m on, it’s failing me. So then the kicker, he’s 35 years old, he’s a surgeon, and he starts to lose his eyesight. He goes to the eye doctor and they say, you have cholesterol deposits in your eyes so bad that your eyes are like a 60-year-old man and you’re going to have to be on, and he gives him like a long list full of drugs for the rest of your life. Cholesterol meds, high blood pressure, all blood thinners, whatever. He was put on so many meds. He goes home and he sits there and goes, my lifespan is now just cut short because these meds will cause my lifespan to be cut short. He’s 35 years old and he has to eat humble pie. He realizes everything he’s been telling all his patients is wrong. He goes back to the drawing board and that’s when he discovers the stuff that you’re teaching. That this way of eating is the way to heal the body, and then he heals himself and he has to completely eat humble pie, and that’s when he produced the Proteinaholic, which is his journey of discovering the true science of health. He debunks like 30 different diets. He debunks keto. He debunks everyone that’s all mainstream, and he does it in a very fun manner. It’s a really interesting book. I apologize, this isn’t meant to offend you. I don’t think there’s one doctor on the planet that has the entire truth.   [02:16:01] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Well, exactly, right?   [02:16:03] Ashley James: But it is up to us as the individual consumer to go and learn from each one and then figure out what works for me, right? We listened to Dr. Patrick Vickers and we listened to this doctor here and this doctor here, and we started to get this full picture. Dr. Wallach says no oil all the time ever. So I’m like, okay, great. No oil time ever. But then Dr. Patrick Vickers comes along and says, well, actually, flax oil has all these benefits. You take it in this way, and also, yes, I agree the other oils are good. And then we look at that and go okay, I’m going to try this on. We just have to continue to get the information from these amazing doctors, especially the clinicians because they’re boots on the ground seeing the results.   [02:16:54] Dr. Patrick Vickers: That’s exactly right.   [02:16:54] Ashley James: Implement it into our lives. Question everything. I like to say, I’m the biggest open-minded skeptic. Question everything, but also have an open mind enough to take in information that goes against your belief system. I was a meat eater through and through and I was scared of having one meal without meat. You bet this challenged me and I didn’t want to hear it. I did not want to hear it. My husband went overnight, after I did these interviews like I did some plant-based interviews, my husband started looking into this information. Overnight, he went from never eating vegetables, only eating meat, to never eating meat again four years ago. He woke up and said, I’m never eating meat. He would make a joke,I eat vegans daily because all he ate was beef. He’d eat pork for breakfast and then before lunch and dinner, and that was it, or eggs maybe, but that was it. That was his diet. He was on a carnivore diet. And then a switch flipped in his brain. He’s not a health nut, but a switch flipped in his brain, and I watched him do it. He said four days into eating this—you got to get he was like 100% meat to 0% meat. I had to all of a sudden learn how to cook whole food plant-based, like delicious meals that weren’t gross, that weren’t plain but also weren’t full of junk. He said, four days into this, this food tastes so good. If you told me this food too would taste so good I would have done this years ago. He says this food tastes way better, way better. It’s just a matter of giving it a try. The Proteinaholic book is great because he shares his own personal journey. He says at the beginning, you don’t have to be a vegan. You don’t have to go there and do that. But just look at the science, look at the results, look at it for yourself. Try this on, try this way of eating on. He just shows. Okay, you want to eat chicken breast once a week? Well, here’s the damage. Here’s the potential damage to the body. He just shows it. It’s interesting, right? We have people out there who want to go and reverse disease and you’ve got fantastic answers, we want them to your website, gersonclinic.com. It has been such a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much. I definitely want to have you back. Anytime you want to come to teach new things, share new things. This has been fantastic.   [02:19:25] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. I just want to share one anecdote with you. I lived with Charlotte Gerson, right? She invited me to come live with her for two months at her home in San Diego, where she had all her father’s handwritten files of all his patients between 1910 and 1959, which I’m one of maybe a handful of people who’ve ever had the opportunity to actually go through those files, but guess who lived on the same street as Charlotte Gerson. Joel Wallach.   [02:19:56] Ashley James: No way. Shut the front door.   [02:20:02] Dr. Patrick Vickers: He lives on the same street when I was living with her, yeah. And Joel and I actually have lectured at the same venue a couple of times. We’ve lectured in the same venue. A guy by the name of Vincent [inaudible 02:20:15] holds a thing in Missouri from time to time and we lectured on the same stage. But I met JoeI. I saw Joel walking up and down the street back in 1998.   [02:20:27] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that is so cool.   [02:20:30] Dr. Patrick Vickers: When that video or that tape that you’re referring to, that’s when it was huge. He was iconic at that point. But he lived on the same street as Charlotte, go figure.   [02:20:42] Ashley James: Him and I have traveled together. I’ve helped him with his lectures, and he’s this little short dude, right? I mean, he’s stout, right? He’s not a pushover, but he’s really short. My husband’s 6’7″, and I’m also pretty tall. I’m 5’10”. For a woman I’m tall. We both got muscle, my husband and I, and when we were traveling, we were running through the airport and he had two 80 pound bags. They’re hockey bags or huge duffel bags. Two 80 pound bags and we tried to help him because we had our suitcase. We tried to help him and we were struggling. He picks both of them up like their feathers and starts running through the airport. We were winded. This dude is fit and that was about eight years ago.   [02:21:51] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Because he is tiny.   [02:21:53] Ashley James: He’s tiny, but he’s fit. I love his work. And again, I don’t think every doctor on the planet has the answers, but Dr. Wallach has a lot of answers that other doctors don’t. We just have to keep going down the rabbit hole, and I’ve had him on the show twice and it was great. I can’t wait to have him back. I can’t wait to have you back. This has been amazing. And of course, listeners need to go to gersonclinic.com and then go to the gift section, put in the password podcast to start getting your videos. I’d love to come to your clinic one day, that would be so great. I hope that my listeners who need the help will seek your help. I just pray that this episode and all that you do, all your endeavors will fall on ears that are ready to hear and will make a ripple turn into a tidal wave and help so many people to beat cancer and other diseases. Thank you for helping end the needless suffering. That’s really important.   [02:22:55] Dr. Patrick Vickers: Thank you, and don’t forget, your listeners can go to that gift section and put in podcast, and they can listen to all the science that we’ve talked about today and even then some because there’s a lot we didn’t talk about. That’s only for our paid clientele, they have access to that. Those are our private videos. Have them go there, gersonclinic.com   [02:23:20] Ashley James: Awesome. All right, thank you so much. And please, come back to the show. Don’t be a stranger.   [02:23:24] Dr. Patrick Vickers: You just let me know when and I’ll oblige.   [02:23:27] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s episode with Dr. Patrick Vickers. Wasn’t it amazing? I just love this protocol. I have a family member who is in hospice care at the end of their life. They chose to go through traditional cancer treatments and now they are in the final stages of their life deteriorating, which they deteriorate quite quickly after doing the traditional methods, the cut, burn, and poison methods. I convinced them to just try some freshly pressed juice. They’re not willing to use any form of natural medicine, but they’re feeling so awful. I said, would you just be willing if I bought organic vegetables and fruit and I made some juice for you, would you be willing to do it? And so they said, yes. And I said, would you be willing to try this diet, the Gerson protocol? I’m not expecting them to do the whole thing. Just would you be willing to do it, and they said, okay, well, I’m willing to do most of it. So they’re not willing to do all of it, but again, I just wanted to make them more comfortable. They’re not willing to fight for themselves and use natural medicine to reverse their disease so I can’t force them, but I did provide them with freshly squeezed juice every day and some healthy meals. What happened would really blow your mind. They’ve been bedridden, unable to walk. If they try to stand, they faint because their blood pressure is so bad. There’s weakness in their body. They can’t stand, they have to be carried. Within 12 hours of them drinking juice, they were perky, peppy, sitting up without having sudden blood pressure drops. Within 24 hours, with a walker, they were able to take a little walk around the house first time in two months. That was so cool. We’ve just been giving them some juice and basically, Gerson-style meals and they are feeling so much better. Now, the person is still in hospice care, they’re still at the end of their life. They’re still going downhill much slower now and having much more quality of life. We actually noticed their confusion went away. Their dementia where they didn’t know how to work a remote anymore went away. They’re able to use the remote control without asking how to use it. Another thing, they had stopped reading, which they love to do, and they stopped using their cell phone. They were just, for the last two months, sitting in bed confused, staring at the TV. After about two days of being on most of the Gerson protocol, like I said, they’re not doing the coffee enemas, but they’re drinking some juice. Not drinking as much juice as you would if you were trying to save your life, but they’re drinking a bunch of juice, vegetables, and some fruits, and then eat some of the meals. They started reading again. They started looking on another phone again. They started sitting up and talking. The color came back in their face. Pain became less. Bowel movements became much easier, going to the bathroom became much easier. Their mobility became much easier. It improved quality of life more than any drug that that hospice care could give them in less than a week. If that doesn’t speak to the profound effect that food is medicine, that what you put in your mouth every day, that if you go through the drive-thru, what you’re putting in your mouth is hurting you is poison. If you spend the time to eat organic, fresh, raw and cooked vegetables, and the juice, you are blasting your cells with high oxygen nutrients that help the body to be healthier and healthier and healthier. Another thing to remember, this has just given me such a perspective. How you manage your stress, how you take time to take care of yourself, the self-care that you put in in the kitchen, not just in the bathroom. I’ve heard people say, oh, I’m going to take an extra-long bath and that’s my self-care. Your self-care starts with the kitchen. What you do, what you put in your mouth, what you drink, what you eat, that is the biggest self-care. Go for a walk, pray, meditate, read, try to ground yourself. Go lie down in some grass. Literally, go hug a tree. Get out in nature. Give yourself moments of joy and nourish every cell in your body. What you do now will affect the quality of your life in the last 20 years of your life. The last 20 years can be miserable or they can be filled with joy. I’m a friend of a woman who’s a doctor and we’ve been friends for many years. She’s in her early 80s and you wouldn’t know it. You’d think she was in her 40s. She runs marathons. She’s been in the Olympics. She’s so wonderful and she took care of her body her whole life, and now, there’s the return on her investment. Because I know 80-year-olds that are going blind, that are losing their comprehension, that is losing their mobility. Whereas my friend has the same functionality as a 40-year-old and she’s loving life in her 80s. That’s the blessing you get by really taking what you learned today and applying it. Just remember that, apply it. The investment in yourself can make such a difference and just try it for a week. I cannot believe what’s happening to my family member who clearly has seen benefits from this just a week into doing it. So I’d love for you to just give it a try and just commit to seven days of juicing and eating this diet and see what happens. See the miracle that unfolds in your body. I’d love to hear from you. I’d love to hear how you respond after a week. What are the changes? Even just the subtle changes, what are the benefits that happen? Please come to the Learn True Health Facebook group and share, I’d love to hear. And also, remember to go to learntruehealth.com/aloe and get some of that Medicinal Aloe Gel and drink it every day. Let me know how that helps you. The coupon code is LTH2022, and that’s learntruehealth.com/aloe. I look forward to hearing from you after you do all this. I want to know how this helped you. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Thank you so much for sharing this with others. Let’s help as many people as possible to learn true health. Get Connected with Dr. Patrick Vickers! Website Facebook YouTube Instagram        

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

Go to TakeYourSupplements.com to speak with a holistic health coach so you can get on the right nutrient protocol for your needs and health goals! 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. Because of the farming practices over the last 100 years, most of our food has 60% fewer vitamins and minerals compared to just 50 years ago. So if you aren’t eating eight cups of a variety of fruits and vegetables each day, you may be missing some of your essential nutrients. These are the raw building blocks the body needs to create new healthy tissue, healthy hormones, a balanced digestive system, strong muscles, bones and joints, and maintain an optimal functioning nervous system.  Especially, if you’re experiencing more stress or if you’ve gone through an illness like an infection, that takes more resources. So if you’re not consuming more vitamin C, more of all the 16 vitamins, and all the 60 minerals when you’re going through more stress either physical stress, emotional stress, mental stress, those stressors take more nutrients to survive those bumps in the road in life. Over time, that whittles away. That depletes our nutrient tanks, our stores in our body. 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! 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