Learn True Health with Ashley James

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

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

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

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 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 www.drbrownstein.com www.centerforholisticmedicine.com The Many Benefits of Iodine with Dr. David Brownstein https://www.learntruehealth.com/the-many-benefits-of-iodine-with-dr-david-brownstein   Highlights: Importance of iodine in the body Halide elements Why fluoride causes more harm than good Why do we need salt in the body Refined salt vs. unrefined salt In this episode, Dr. Brownstein is back on the show to talk about the importance of iodine in the body. He shares some stories of how two of his patients with breast problems got better after taking iodine. Salt goes hand in hand with iodine, so he recommends taking in unrefined salt with iodine. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I’m excited for you to learn from today’s guest. He was recently on the show sharing some mind-blowing information, and now he’s back because I wanted to dive deeper and explore thyroid and iodine and how we can use iodine to detox certain chemicals in the body that are wreaking havoc. I’m really looking forward to you listening to this and deepening your knowledge of how you can support your body’s ability to heal itself. Another way that I support my body’s ability to heal myself, and I would love for you to also do the same, is by using Sunlighten Sauna Technology. I had a heavy metal issue for many years and I didn’t know it. I finally figured out that the cause of a lot of my health issues came from my body not being able to get rid of all the heavy metals that I had accumulated. I was having liver problems. I was having an array of hormonal issues. And as I did the heavy metal detox and this is actually doing the show. Since I started the show five years ago, I got a Sunlighten Sauna and I used it regularly almost every day, I would say about five times a week. I would sit in that sauna for about half an hour, sometimes 45 minutes. I feel amazing after I get out of a sauna. The Sunlighten Sauna especially because it uses a different kind of technology than the other saunas out there. It uses full-spectrum, and I had a whole episode with a cardiologist on this. Light is a nutrient that our cells have receptors for, which just blows my mind. And when you are in artificial light, you’re not receiving it so we become deplete. We end up missing out on, the cells are lacking this key component. When we are in a Sunlighten Sauna, we’re getting full-spectrum, it’s actually nutrition, the sunlight nutrition. We’re getting the mid, near, and far-infrared spectrum. So, there are receptors on our cells that receive this information. What’s great about the Sunlighten is it decreases inflammation, decreases pain, helps the body to lose weight. You burn about 500 calories every time you do sauna therapy. The sweat that comes out of you contains toxins that now your liver doesn’t have to process, your kidneys don’t have to process. There are heavy metals in that sweat, so now you’re removing, you’re eliminating things, not only chemicals but also heavy metals. And it opens up the blood flow in the body, it helps to balance and stabilize blood pressure. People have deeper sleep because they’ve decreased the stress levels in the body, the stress hormones go down. There’s this cascade of events that happen when we use sauna therapy. I also did an interview with the man who regularly, once a year—and he has a degree in traditional Chinese medicine. Every year he does a 30-day fast and he spent thousands of his own dollars doing lab tests to show that long-term fasting helps the body to eliminate forever chemicals and the chemicals that’s in our food supply now that disrupt hormones. What he noticed is when he did a fast and incorporated sauna therapy as well, he had way greater results than if he just did a fast alone. That’s because sauna therapy allows the body to bypass the liver, bypass the kidneys when it comes to detoxing certain heavy metals and certain toxins, and just everything I explained earlier about all the other things that it can do. I’ve had several interviews about saunas. If you want to dive into it and learn more about sauna therapy, just go to learntruehealth.com and search sauna. Or you can go to learntruehealth.com and search Sunlighten. I remember five guests off the top of my head that all told me they own a Sunlighten as well and absolutely love it. Now Sunlighten has these big wooden saunas that you can fit into a corner of your room, or if you’re like me and now live in a smaller space, you can get what’s called the Solo System. The Solo System is something that you lie on, you put on top of you, and then you have a nice good sweat like a cocoon. Then you are able to pack it up and put it away when you are done. The Solo System is so compact because it telescopes into itself that it fits in a closet or under the bed, which is so fantastic. What I also love about it is it’s ultra-low EMF, meaning you won’t have negative reactions like a lot of cheap saunas out there. Unfortunately, if you go to just buy a cheap one, you’re ultimately going to be exposed to high levels of electromagnetic radiation, which is damaging to the body—not good at all. And then another thing that I love about the Solo System, and all of the Sunlighten products but especially the Solo System, is it is non-toxic. The padding they use for you to lie down on is made of non-toxic bamboo memory foam, which I did not know you could make memory from bamboo, but isn’t that neat? So it’s non-toxic, it’s low EMF. This is what I love about Sunlighten is they truly are thinking about how you can support your body’s ability to heal itself and detoxify. I know several cancer patients as well who use Sunlighten’s Sauna Technology to support their body’s ability to fight their own cancer and live to tell the tale. So many reasons why I recommend Sunlighten, and I know right now they’re doing a special. They often do specials at least once a quarter for our listeners. So you can give them a call just to ask questions like what size fits in my house, what’s the pricing like, and what’s the payment plan like if you want to do a payment plan? Then be sure to mention my name, Ashley James, and the Learn True Health podcast when you do call Sunlighten so that you get the special listener discount. They’re always putting specials on especially for our listeners.  I sat down and had a talk with the founder of Sunlighten and interviewed her, and she gave us a great deal like free shipping, which saves you about $500, as well as $100 off of accessories. My favorite accessory is the bamboo cushion and it has a bamboo cover. The reason you want to use things like bamboo or organic cotton when you’re in a sauna—if you’re not going to be naked, you want to use all-natural fibers because synthetic fibers will block the rays of the frequency of the light. So the mid, near, and far-infrared will be interrupted and you don’t want that.  Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing my podcasts with those that you love and care about. If you’re interested in learning more about detoxifying and using sauna therapy for healthy hormones, for healthy hormone function, for weight loss, for lowering blood pressure, for supporting the body’s ability to fight cancer, and also supporting the body’s immune system, decreasing inflammation, decreasing pain—all these topics are explored in the podcast at learntruehealth.com. Search sauna or search Sunlighten.  I have at least six episodes where we talk about how great it is, and multiple doctors that help their patients detoxify and absolutely love Sunlighten, and I have loved it. It has really, really helped me tremendously and measurably to remove heavy metals from my body. Thank you so much for you, listeners. Continue to share this podcast with those you care about. If you want to come and discuss what you learn today or if you have more questions, join the Facebook group. Go to learntruehealth.com/group, or you can search Learn True Health on Facebook.   [00:08:33] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 464. I am so excited to have back on the show Dr. David Brownstein. Man, when we had you on the show that was just a recent episode, 462. You shared with us how you’ve been successfully treating all of your patients who are infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You treat it much like all the other upper respiratory infections you’ve treated for decades with amazing success, just outstanding success. Is it the FTC that came after you because you were sharing for free all this information on your website, and they don’t want anything that could possibly be considered a treatment, a cure, or therapy that is effective to be publicly posted, which just blew my mind? So listeners got to go back to episode 462 for that information. What’s cool though is that you’re able to publish a book and it’s still protected under your freedom of speech rights. We have had several listeners who’ve read your book since having you on the show in episode 462, and they’ve reported in the Learn True Health Facebook group that your book on basically supporting the structure and function of the body’s ability to fight off viruses and respiratory infections with holistic medicine. How your book’s amazing and they loved it. So I definitely recommend listeners check out all of Dr. Brownstein’s books. You can go to drbrownstein.com. He has so many books that’s why I’m really excited to have him back on the show today. Today we’re going to talk about something I think is really interesting because there’s a lot of doctors that say we have too much iodine. There are doctors who say we have too little iodine. Some doctors say, don’t worry about it, you’re just got to get enough in your food or just eat fortified salt or whatever. Is it the right kind of iodine? Are we getting too much or too little? What parts of the body use it other than for just creating thyroid hormone? So this is very interesting, we’re going to dive into this because you have some information about preventing cancer as well, which I’m really excited about. Welcome back to the show.   [00:11:06] Dr. David Brownstein: Thank you for having me on, Ashley.   [00:11:08] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. I hope to have you on again and again because you have so many amazing topics and you’re such a fantastic doctor. You know what really blew my mind—not only blew my mind but many of my listeners also shared with me how you helped your dad reverse his heart issues by looking at his nutritional levels and balancing his hormones, and that was so cool. That was kind of like your wake-up moment, introduction to seeing how much we’re missing in the allopathic world. The world would be a different place if every doctor had the education that you’ve earned through your clinical experience through the years. I really wish that more doctors would read your books, learn from you, and continue the curiosity of what we can do with nutrition to support the body’s ability to fight off disease and maintain optimal health. Having said that, let’s dive right in. Tell me, what happened along your journey as a doctor that made you interested in wanting to explore the topic of iodine? Do we need more of it, do we need less of it? What’s going on with iodine?   [00:12:27] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, my journey with iodine began when I started holistic medicine. I talked about that story of my father in that previous episode, right?   [00:12:40] Ashley James: Yes, that was mind-blowing.   [00:12:43] Dr. David Brownstein: Let me give the Cliff Notes version of that because that’ll sort of segue into iodine. My dad had his first heart attack at age 40 and his second heart attack at 42, and he suffered from severe coronary artery disease after that. He had continuous angina for 20 years. I was a conventional doctor at that time, I thought he was dying, and I think he was dying. He was on 12 medications to treat hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease. He looked awful and was doing awful.  I was given a book by a chiropractor who told me I should look at this, and it was really my first anything holistic given to me or anything shown to me. It’s called Healing with Nutrition by Jonathan Wright who’s an allopathic physician. I read that chapter on heart disease first and drew a few blood tests on my father and treated him with two natural therapies: natural testosterone and natural thyroid hormone. Within seven days of that, he made a dramatic improvement. His pale and pasty color went pink and healthy-looking. His 20-year history of using nitroglycerin daily for angina for anything he did go away, never to return. His cholesterol in the 300s fell below 200 without changing any of his bad dietary habits, and he looked and acted much better. When I saw the changes in my father, I knew that’s what I want to do, doing holistic medicine. Because I used two natural hormones in my father—natural thyroid hormone and natural testosterone—every single new patient I’ve seen since then gets a whole hormonal workup. Because part of that hormonal workup is checking thyroid hormones, ovarian hormones, testicular hormones, adrenal hormones, pituitary hormones, and trying to balance the hormonal system and see why the hormonal system is imbalanced if it is. After I started doing this and using bioidentical natural hormones, I was seeing great results, practice was growing, I was happy. I thought I was doing good in medicine and helping people, which is what I was tasked to do in life. But it was bothering me, why was I having to use so much thyroid hormone? I had the first ten years or so of my holistic practice, I would say I had about 75% of my patients on thyroid hormone, little amounts. They were feeling better, their physiology was better, and their biochemistry looked better on blood testing, and most importantly they felt better, they reported. But it was bothering me, why are there so many people who need to take thyroid hormone? Why is the thyroid gland so screwed up? I would look at the ins and outs of the thyroid, what makes the thyroid work, what doesn’t make it work well? When you read about the thyroid, you read about iodine. Iodine is an essential element that the thyroid utilizes to make thyroid hormones. Without iodine, the thyroid can’t make thyroid hormone. But it’s not just the thyroid, all the glands in the body need iodine. In fact, every cell in the body needs iodine. But if we’re going to focus on the glands right now, that includes the thyroid, ovaries, uterus, breast, prostate, and pancreas. These glands all make hormones, prostaglandins, and other things. There’s not a hormone in the body that can be produced without iodine. The highest concentration of iodine in the bodies of the thyroid gland, and the active and inactive thyroid hormones T3 and T4, the four and three refer to how many iodine atoms are attached to the thyroglobulin molecule. The thyroid gland, it’s made of iodine so important that it can concentrate iodine against the gradient, meaning the highest concentration of iodine in the human body is in the thyroid gland. There are very low concentrations in the bloodstream, and the body has developed an intricate mechanism to take iodine from a low concentrated area like the blood and put it into a higher concentrated area of the thyroid.  It’s an ATP-dependent process, so it’s an energy-dependent process. We use up energy to do that. The body doesn’t like the use of energy, it likes to conserve energy, and the reason it utilizes energy is because it’s so important. We can’t live without thyroid hormone. I would look at what makes the thyroid hormone go and think about why this patient needs thyroid hormone, why all these patients need thyroid hormone.   [00:17:30] Ashley James: So many people are on thyroid medication and it’s just amazing. It blows my mind that they’ll be on it for years and years and there’s no question. Okay, well, what’s the root cause, what’s behind it, or why is the body not especially women, and a lot of men don’t go for the tests, or the doctors don’t test men, but men too. Why are they deplete? Why are they having thyroid disruption? And why are there so much Hashimoto’s right now? It’s way more than we had 30, 40 years ago.   [00:18:09] Dr. David Brownstein: Oh, it’s at epidemic rates right now. Hashimoto’s is in epidemic rates. All those conditions I write in my book, and in my newsletters and stuff. I say it’s all related to iodine deficiency. The iodine deficiency causes problems with the thyroid, causes problems with the breast, prostate, pancreas, ovaries, uterus. What do we see in problems of all those tissues? As you mentioned, there’s epidemic rates of thyroid problems from thyroid cancer to autoimmune thyroid disease like Hashimoto’s and Graves’ disease, as well as hypothyroidism. The fastest-growing cancer in America right now is thyroid cancer, meaning the most diagnosed cancer. And then we have one in seven women with breast cancer. We have one in three men with prostate. cancer. We have epidemic increases of pancreatic, ovarian, uterine, and it’s cancers and it’s all related to I think the same thing. Iodine deficiency is a big part of that. You mentioned that so many people are on thyroid hormone. People are on hormones and the other problem with people being on thyroid hormone and so many people on thyroid hormone and they still feel lousy, they still feel tired, they still feel achy. What many of these people need is iodine. If you put someone on thyroid hormone who’s lacking iodine, you make the iodine deficiency worse. When you put someone on thyroid hormone which increases the metabolic needs of the thyroid gland, it increases the body’s needs for iodine. You make iodine deficiency worse if you put them on thyroid hormone and they’re deficient in iodine. There are studies, there have been three of them over the last 20 years, that show the longer women take thyroid hormone, the increase in risk of breast cancer goes up over time. After ten years, women who take thyroid hormone for ten years have a 50% increased risk of breast cancer compared to women who don’t take thyroid hormone. How can that be? I struggled with that when these articles came out. I didn’t have a great answer, and I think the answer is they’re iodine deficient.  As I wrote in my book, if you put a woman on thyroid hormone who is iodine deficient, you’re going to make the iodine deficiency worse. And you’re going to make it worse in other tissues besides the thyroid like the breast, the ovaries, uterus, and that’s why you’re seeing these cancers go up with that.   [00:20:49] Ashley James: So, are there receptors for iodine in other places in the body other than the thyroid hormone?   [00:20:57] Dr. David Brownstein: Every single cell in the body needs and requires iodine. The white blood cells need iodine to fight infections. Iodine is needed in fat cells, muscle cells, and immune system cells. Everything needs iodine. The problem is iodine levels have fallen over 50% across the United States over the last 40 years. Iodine is part of the halide family in the periodic table of elements. The halides consist of fluoride, bromide, iodine, and chloride.   [00:21:32] Ashley James: This was my next question. I’m so glad you’re segueing into this, please continue.   [00:21:37] Dr. David Brownstein: So, of those halides, two are toxic and two are essential. Iodine and chloride are essential, we can’t live without them. We need lots of it in our bodies. Bromide and fluoride are both toxic items that are non-essential. We can live and we can thrive without them, we don’t need them because they’re both poison enzymes and they’re not good for our body. The problem is, over the last 40 to 50 years we’ve gotten way more fluoride and bromide from fluoridated water to brominated drink in bromine and flour. It’s a fire retardant used in so many consumer items such as phones, computers, mattresses, carpets, curtains, and things that we become over-fluoridated, over-brominated, and at the same time more iodine deficient. The halides are very interesting to study because they can competitively inhibit one another, which means that if you get too much of the toxic halides—fluoride and bromide—it’ll kick the body out of the essential halides—chloride and particularly iodine. Conversely, if you get enough iodine in and you’re toxic on the other ones, you’ll be able to release those. We’ve had a double whammy going on for the last 40 or 50 years. Iodine levels have fallen over 40% to 50%. At the same time, our exposure to toxic halides has increased. That is the main reason I think we’re seeing this rapid rise in thyroid disorders such as autoimmune thyroid disease, Hashimoto’s and Graves’ disease, hypothyroidism, and thyroid cancer, as well as all the other iodine deficiency disorders—breast cancer, prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, and so on and so on.   [00:23:30] Ashley James: So, to put it in a way that we can visualize, the thyroid, like you had mentioned, takes and concentrates iodine tremendously. When we consume fluoride in tap water or bromide in baked goods, for example, that competes with iodine. Is the thyroid, then concentrating the fluoride, does it also then uptake and concentrate that as well?   [00:24:03] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, we know the thyroid can concentrate bromide, and we know if there’s not enough iodine and excess of bromide that the thyroid hormones can be brominated instead of iodinated. We were designed by our maker to have iodinated thyroid hormones, not brominated thyroid hormones. We don’t quite know what the significance of that is because it hasn’t been studied, but I can tell you, I think the significance of that is increased risk of thyroid cancer, Hashimoto’s, Graves’ disease, and hypothyroidism, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing. As far as fluoride goes, the conventional mantra is that fluoride helps prevent cavities. If it does, it’s a minimal improvement, but almost every Western country except two, us being one of them, have removed fluoride from the water supply because we realized that if it does decrease cavities, it’s minuscule. The only way that fluoride has been shown to decrease cavities is topically applying it like in toothpaste, not by drinking water.   [00:25:11] Ashley James: I do have a question about that. Sodium fluoride, which isn’t that a byproduct of aluminum production and that’s what we’ve been drinking basically in tap water? I’ve read this so I don’t know if this is true or if this is just something that was published online. But didn’t they put sodium fluoride in certain prisons and certain concentration camps in the water in order to sedate the prison population? Fluoride, in certain amounts, kind of makes a more lazy or less aggressive society. Is that true?   [00:25:53] Dr. David Brownstein: The Germans used it in their concentration camps to do exactly that. Fluoride also has been shown to lower the IQ of newborns, mothers who have high fluoride levels. There have been studies that show the IQ declines in newborns in women who drink fluoridated water at levels like what’s fluoridated in the US.   [00:26:17] Ashley James: So we’re creating a population that is less likely to rise up, rebel, and is also stupid. That’s quite fascinating, and this is why I really believe that we should question everything. Don’t ever trust what’s in your food, what’s in your water, what’s in your medicine. Always, always, always do your own research and never trust anyone with your own health. Always filter your water. Don’t just trust that your water is safe, the air is safe to breathe, or the water is safe to eat, to drink, or the food is safe. We have to be more diligent because there are over 80,000 new man made chemicals in the last 40 years that are in the food supply that we’re now seeing are forever chemicals. And that they enter our body and block our receptors from absorbing certain nutrients and from interacting with hormones. It’s quite scary. Fluoride is an essential nutrient in small amounts in the soil. It’s in the soil along with all other trace elements and minerals. We’re probably getting enough if we eat enough fruits and vegetables and like you said, you could brush your teeth. But then, there are populations that don’t have any fluoride whatsoever added to their water, and that their teeth are wonderful. So when the body concentrates fluoride, do you think that also is a contributor to other hormone dysregulation and cancer creation?   [00:28:12] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, studies have shown increased fluoride content results in certain bone cancers in young boys. We know fluoride poisons hundreds of different enzymes in the body. It’s a known carcinogenic agent. I think it’s ludicrous to put fluoride in the water. If you can’t afford an expensive filtration system, then you don’t have a choice. You’re just getting fluoridated water. Personal choice comes into play here. Remember, the World Health Organization has done studies with cavity rates and fluoridated non-fluoridated countries, there’s no difference at all. It has been shown for over 40 to 50 years. The decline in cavity rates that have occurred over the last 50, 60 years has occurred in countries that don’t fluoridate their water as well. There’s really no business in fluoridating water. There’s really no business in our health of doing that.   [00:29:16] Ashley James: I can’t remember the exact information, but I read an article years ago. They did this in rural parts of Canada. I’m originally from Canada but I live in the states now. They gave tablets of fluoride to children because everyone was on well water. One of my friends was part of this experiment—governments like to do that thinking that it’s healthy. It actually had the reverse effect and all the children end up with rotten teeth. There was something about too much fluoride or high concentrations of fluoride actually led to the opposite effect, that led to teeth that decayed rapidly. Maybe because it just threw the body so out of balance, I don’t know. When I was pregnant, I really looked into everything I could do to ensure my baby was healthy and that his or her IQ would be optimal. I did see that iodine was one of the needed essential nutrients along with essential fatty acids. There were studies that showed that mothers that consumed iodine had smarter children. So, that makes sense that fluoride, since it competes with iodine, would dumb down the IQ, so it’s like that’s the opposite. What you’re saying is we need more iodine. Now, you did mention that iodine helps to almost detox fluoride. So can you discuss that, how to use iodine as a detox agent?   [00:30:58] Dr. David Brownstein: Like I said with competitive inhibition, if you get one of the toxic halides that’s a little too much, you’re going to kick out iodine from the body. Conversely, if you get enough iodine, you can kick out those toxic halides and detoxify the body. Now, one of the problems is if you’re full of bromide and fluoride when you take iodine, you can create what’s called a Herxheimer reaction where you get an overload of detoxification and people don’t feel good. Now, if you’re working with a holistic doctor who is knowledgeable about this can help you avoid that. I don’t find that happens very much in my office, but it can happen. It just needs to be done appropriately. One of the ways to avoid that happen is when you take iodine, take salt with it. Salt is the second major constituent in the body next to water, and we need adequate amounts of salt. We need over 100 grams of sodium and chlorine at any one time in our body, we’re supposed to have that. Most people are deficient in salt. I’ve been checking people for 28 years on salt levels and recommending salt intake go up for many of my patients because you need a lot of cells in the body. And salt can help usher out the bromide that’s in there.  In years past where medicines with bromide such as Bromo-Seltzer were used and people would get bromide toxic. So one of the ways conventional medicine dealt with it when they got bromide toxic, when they get delirious, very tired, and the brain wouldn’t work very well is they would salt the bromide out with a salt solution IV. But you can do that naturally, which is taking more salt in your diet. I wrote a book about this called Salt Your Way to Health, which is one companion book to the iodine book.   [00:32:48] Ashley James: I love that you’re bringing up salt. So many doctors say that salt is the contributor to high blood pressure and that we should reduce salt or eliminate it completely. We do actually consume more calories when something has salt in it, that’s true. So we still have to manage our food intake, but know that when we add salt—think about a bowl of rice. If it’s just a plain bowl of rice and no salt on it you’re going to eat to satiety. But with a bowl that is salted, we can overeat it because it tastes good. So we still need to be more conscious when we salt things that it does taste good and we might eat past satiety. But what’s interesting about salt is the body uses chloride and sodium chloride to make hydrochloric acid. There’s an epidemic of heartburn out there and indigestion. Of course, if you’re not digesting your food you’re not absorbing your nutrition, and then everything cascades from there. I’m sure you have a book on that.    [00:33:50] Dr. David Brownstein: I talk about that in my salt book.   [00:33:52] Ashley James: There you go. I knew it. I knew you’d have a book on that, but it’s fascinating. You recommend that people use salt along with iodine. Where should they get their salt? I know you’re not going to say basic table salt or are you?   [00:34:09] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, there are two types of salt that are available—refined salt and unrefined salt. Refined salt is made by food companies because they refine food products to take out things that degrade. The reason they do that is the refined food products can stay on the shelf forever. It has a longer shelf life and then they make more money because they don’t have to throw products out. So, just as they refined flour to take out some natural things because the natural things will go bad, they refined salt. Refined salt is that thin white stuff that’s pretty much in every restaurant across the United States. It’s the girl with the umbrella on the side of the salt container, I can’t think of the name of it as an example of refined salt.   [00:35:02] Ashley James: Morton’s?   [00:35:03] Dr. David Brownstein: Yeah. It’s just got sodium and chloride plus some other toxic ingredients that shouldn’t be in salts such as ferrocyanide and aluminum silicate in it. That’s compared to unrefined salt, which has a full complement of minerals in it that come with wherever the salt is mined from. Celtic brand sea salt, Redmond Real Salt, and Himalayan salt all have over 80 minerals in them. Now, the minerals are in small amounts, but the minerals are essential and utilized. I did a little study with my daughter Jessie when she was in middle school. She did it, and we did a study for her science class where we looked at what’s the difference in pH of refined salt and unrefined salts. Refined salt creates an acidic pH environment, unrefined salt helps alkalize tissues, and the minerals help alkalize it. If you eat a bunch of refined foods, you’re going to be too acidic, and that can lead to degenerative problems in the body. You want to have a neutral pH, which is generally 7.2 or so. Unrefined salt can be part of maintaining that neutral pH because we all tend to be acidic if we eat lousy food, we’re stressed, and we become nutrient deficient. So, salt’s really an important substance that’s why I wrote a whole book on that.   [00:36:35] Ashley James: That is fascinating that refined salt versus unrefined salt acts completely different in the body. One is acidic, one is more supportive and alkalizing. One has toxic ingredients, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve even seen certain refined salts where one of the ingredients was sugar. I kid you not, I just laughed. Because so many people don’t read labels.  When I go to a grocery store, my husband gets so frustrated. He calls me the label reader. I will read all the labels, but when we go to a restaurant, you just trust that they’re going to use good ingredients and they don’t. They use the cheapest ingredients. So we really have to be diligent to eat as much as we can at home and to use the healthy salt at home that has those trace minerals that don’t have all those weird agents in it that are very toxic for the body if eaten over time. I always think about what our health was like 100 years ago versus now. Heart disease, cancer—these things are so much higher than 100 years ago, and we have to look at what we put in our mouth. What we put in our mouth every day is either hurting us or healing us.  So we’ve got our salt, that’s something that we can easily switch to because you’ve given us some good advice on how to find it. What about iodine, how should we take iodine? And we want to avoid that thyroid storm that might occur by consuming too high of a level of iodine because from my understanding if you consume too much, the thyroid shuts down in a protective manner if you consume too much at once. So, how to know how much iodine our body needs every day? I’ve heard some Naturopaths like to use the skin test where you put some iodine on the skin and watch if acid absorbs, whereas others say that’s really not an accurate way to measure if you need iodine or not. How do we figure out how much we need to take and in what form?   [00:38:54] Dr. David Brownstein: So, the skin test is not an accurate way. There was a study that showed that 80% or so of the iodine placed on the skin sublimates into a gaseous phase and leaves the skin. So there’s no reason to do that. That’s not an accurate measure. A large percentage of the body’s iodine is in the skin so I don’t know if it’s just you’re measuring that.  The best measure of iodine status is a urinary excretion test. A holistic doctor can help you with that one, but the iodine loading test is by far the best test. I was involved in developing that test and working with my mentor, an iodine doctor, Guy Abraham, who developed a test. But we worked together on it, refining it. I got to help refine it. Urinary testing of iodine is the best way to go by far. The skin test doesn’t show you much. What was the other part of your question, Ashley?   [00:39:56] Ashley James: So, what form of iodine should we take and how do we know how much we should be taking?   [00:40:03] Dr. David Brownstein: We should get your levels checked to work with a doctor who’s literate in iodine, so that’s number one. I wouldn’t suggest doing it alone, but I have 30 years of working with iodine. In my first ten years, I couldn’t get it to work clinically in my practice because I was using the wrong form of iodine. I know now what I did wrong and I don’t make that mistake anymore. But with iodine, I think the best form is using a combination of iodide and iodine. What that means is that it’s a reduced and oxidized form of iodine.  For the chemistry people out there, if all the electrons in the outer shower are paired, that’s a reduced element. And if there’s one electron missing, that’s an oxidized element. It’s looking for an electron. The reduced and oxidized forms of iodine are used in different tissues of the body. The thyroid uses iodide, a reduced form. The breast uses iodine, the oxidized form. So, for a whole-body effect for iodine, it’s best to use a combination of the two. So, I use Lugol’s solution, which was first made in the 1800s. It’s a solution of potassium iodide and iodine in water. There are pills of this Lugol’s solution available too. I find it very effective, and by far it’s the best form of iodine out there.   [00:41:44] Ashley James: Oh, fascinating. Now, of course, listeners can buy your book on iodine to get way more information. This was just the tip of the iceberg. How can we find a holistic doctor that is proficient in iodine? Can listeners work with you? Do you do telemedicine, or is there an organization they can look up where they can find a roster of doctors that are proficient with this?   [00:42:20] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, I don’t have a roster of doctors. My book describes where you can do the testing and all that stuff. The labs know who’s sending in tests, so the best advice I can give people is to call a lab that’s doing an iodine loading test, and there’s a few of them out there, and they’ll tell you who’s sending in tests in your area. That’s one way to look for who’s doing the iodine testing out there.  Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of misinformation about iodine even in the holistic world. I call it medical iota phobia. They’re afraid to use iodine—it’s been successfully used for over four generations of clinicians—for their own unnatural fears and not looking at the science, and not looking at what’s really true with iodine out there.   [00:43:12] Ashley James: Could you share a few stories of success you’ve had with your patients? How has iodine changed their lives?   [00:43:25] Dr. David Brownstein: I’ve had so many patients whose first ten years I have 3/4 of them on iodine, and then now, I have less than 1/4 of my patients on thyroid hormone because they’re all on iodine. When people are diagnosed with a thyroid problem, I also do hormonal nutritional workups at the same time. So if they’re iodine deficient, what I always teach doctors when I want to teach them about iodine is to correct iodine deficiency first or concurrently with thyroid hormone. Don’t put them on thyroid hormone first because you’ll make the iodine deficiency problem worse as I said earlier. I have a patient who had a bad fibrocystic breast disease who came to me with a bilateral mastectomy scheduled for three weeks after that visit. I was the last resort for her. She’s a nurse at the University of Michigan and she was miserable. She couldn’t wear a bra. She couldn’t not even wear tight clothes but just form-fitting clothes or something like that. She couldn’t stand anything tight. She was wearing this baggy stuff, which was still hurting her. And if anyone rubbed up against her breast, she’d bumped into anything, she’d start crying. She’d been to the University of Michigan Cystic Breast Clinic and they told her to come off caffeine and chocolate and clean up her diet. She was eating a bad diet and she tried all that. It helped a little bit, but then symptoms got worse over time. Really, they told her, the only thing you can do is have a mastectomy. She sees a lady in her late 30s scheduling a bilateral mastectomy. She had had enough.  So she came to me as a last resort, read my book on iodine, and read about fibrocystic breast disease. I do an iodine loading test on her. The iodine loading test is where you take 50 milligrams of iodine at time zero, collect 24 hours of urine after that, and measure how much iodine comes out in the urine over the 24 hours. When you take iodine orally, 98% or so is excreted in the urine. You can measure the amount in and the amount out, subtract the numbers, and know how much the body has hung on to. Generally, when the body hangs on to more iodine, it’s more deficient. So once people get iodine sufficient, they have enough iodine in their body and they take 50 milligrams, they’ll pee out about 45 milligrams or 90%. They’ll hang on to 5% of it or so. That’s iodine sufficiency. So, in her case, this patient peed out 50% of the iodine and held on to 50% because she was very deficient. So I told her to move her surgery back three months. I said, let’s give this a try. I said it won’t be gone in three months, but it should be markedly better. If it’s not better, it’s too late. I didn’t know if it was too late. Tissue sometimes gets so disorganized and such a mess that you can’t get them to come back sometimes in the body. So, she called me up after two weeks into it and said she’s starting to feel better. And I saw her a month later, she had moved the surgery back two more months. And she said she’s 50% better. When I did an exam on the first visit, her breast felt like the best description I can give you is when I used to take Taekwondo in my younger days, like that punching bag feel. Like a hard-punching bag with bumps on it. It felt like alien tissue on her chest. I could barely even touch it because she was wincing and in pain. I didn’t do an exam during the one-month visit, but I asked her to come back in another month. She came back another month and said she’s 80% better. I examined her breasts at that point. It felt like she had a breast transplant. The punching bag feeling was gone. She still had lumps but they were much smaller. Now I could do almost a full exam with very minimal discomfort. She canceled her mastectomy surgery. I saw her back three-month visit, almost normal breast tissue, no bumps. She went back to her fibrocystic breast clinic and had an exam. The doctor said, wow, what are you doing? It’s way better. So she started to tell him and she said he’s just glazed over his eyes. When she stopped talking, he said, all right, I’ll see you in six months. That’s a good story.  Another good story with iodine is a lady, I diagnosed her with inflammatory breast cancer—the worst kind of breast cancer. Usually, you’re dead in three to six months from diagnosis. I was doing a study on iodine at that time with Dr. Abraham, and I put her in the study group of breast cancer diagnoses. She had very low iodine testing. I put her on iodine at 50 milligrams.  She called me up about two weeks into it and said, I’m having a problem with the iodine. I said, what’s the problem? She goes, my nightshirt is yellow over where my breasts are when I wake up in the morning. I’m on the phone with her and I said oh, well, how do you feel? She goes, I never felt better. I’m able to babysit my grandkids now, my energy is coming back. She goes, I don’t know what to do. I said, well, why don’t you come in, bring your nightshirt with you. So she brings in the nightshirt and you can clearly see this yellow stain on the inside of her nightshirt. I asked her if I could keep the nightshirt and analyze what the yellow stain was. She had yellow nails. There are not many things that cause yellow nails except for maybe if you got jaundice, but it wasn’t a jaundiced yellow, it was a little different yellow.     [00:49:46] Ashley James: And her eyes weren’t yellow?   [00:49:48] Dr. David Brownstein: Her eyes were not yellow. She’s not jaundiced there, but her nails were this particular yellow color to it. It was not a jaundice yellow but a different shade. It’s hard to describe it. So, I said to her, bromide has a yellow color to it, you’re probably detoxing from bromide. She said, what do I do? And I said, well, I’m going to put my head together with a friend of mine and we’re going to analyze this t-shirt. And I said, since you’re feeling good, up your salt intake to another teaspoon a day. I put her in a teaspoon of salt with it, increase your water intake, and start bathing in Epsom salts and we’ll get this bromide out of you. She kept on the 50 milligrams of iodine. She was part of a study, so when I tested her, we did a bromide check on day one. When she took out 50 milligrams of iodine, her bromide levels were the highest I’ve ever seen. Thirty days later, I checked her iodine and bromide levels again. Her iodine now was coming up and her bromide was starting to come down. Sixty days later, she didn’t have a lot of bromide and her iodine levels were stabilizing at high levels, and she felt much better. She lived six more years. She died of inflammatory breast cancer and had a good six years. The only thing I would do differently with her now is I would have put her on more iodine from what I know now. I did have the shirt analyzed, it’s a funny story with that. I lost her shirt. We were moving house.  I was consulting with Charles Hakala from Hakala Labs. We were developing a chemistry experiment to take a gram of the shirt from where over her breast where it’s yellow, and a gram of the shirt from the back (not yellow), and analyze the halides—fluoride, chloride, iodine, and bromide. We know how to do that. We were planning it out and then I lose the shirt. I look all over the place, can’t find it. I look at work, I look at home, and I had moved my home. We were packing stuff up and moving. So we moved to our next home and I can’t find the iodine, it’s done. So I had some shelves in my office that maybe ten years later from this incident. It was just a couple of years ago. I was cleaning out and lo and behold in the back of the shelf is that shirt in a bag. I had sealed the bag. It was sealed. I couldn’t believe it when I found it because I looked for it for years. I opened the bag and it’s still got the yellow color to it. I called Charles, we pulled up our data, we did the experiments on it, her bromide levels were, I don’t remember the numbers, but they were really high. On the back of the shirt, there was no bromide, and so she was excreting bromide. This was the first case that was ever reported of someone detoxifying from bromide in that way.   [00:53:04] Ashley James: From her breasts.   [00:53:06] Dr. David Brownstein: From her breasts.   [00:53:07] Ashley James: Where the cancer was.   [00:53:09] Dr. David Brownstein: And her nails.   [00:53:10] Ashley James: Yeah. Wow. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Brownstein. I know you have to go. Thank you so much for coming here today and sharing this information. I think it’s so vital that we continue to seek out information to add to our nutritional protocol and also the idea that using certain things like iodine for detoxification as well is really critical. It’s always a pleasure speaking with you. Listeners can go to drbrownstein.com. They can also go to centerforholisticmedicine.com. And please, get Dr. Brownstein’s books, go to his website, lots of great information. Of course, listen to episode 462 where he shares his very fascinating story with very successful treatment of his patients over the last year plus that have had coronavirus infections. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?   [00:54:16] Dr. David Brownstein: No, thanks for having me, Ashley. I would say that if you’re not feeling good out there and you’re sick and you’re not getting answers, really try and find a good holistic doctor who can help work with you and work together with you to find out what’s wrong and what’s imbalanced. The human body is pretty well-designed when we give it what it needs, and we keep away from what it shouldn’t be exposed to. It takes a little bit of work, but the work can be worth it because you should go through life feeling good with enough energy and be happy.   [00:54:50] Ashley James: Absolutely. That is my philosophy as well. Thank you so much and I look forward to having you back on the show.   [00:54:57] Dr. David Brownstein: Thanks, Ashley.   [00:54:57] Ashley James: Have a great day, thank you. I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Brownstein. I just wanted to remind you, if you’re interested in using the Sunlighten Technology to help your body detoxify and achieve your health goals, I highly recommend going to sunlighten.com, checking it out, listening to my interviews about sauna therapy, and specifically using the Sunlighten Technology, which you can find those by going to learntruehealth.com and using the search function there, or just give them a call. Just Google Sunlighten, Sunlighten Sauna, and give them a call.  Make sure you mention my name, Ashley James, and the Learn True Health podcast so that you get this special that they are giving our listeners this month. I want to make sure that you get the best discount and also get the best experience with them. If you have any questions about my experience with Sunlighten, feel free to reach out to me. You can email me, support@learntruehealth.com, and you can also reach out to me in the Facebook group by going to learntruehealth.com/group to be redirected to the group, or just search Learn True Health on Facebook. So again, that’s Sunlighten Sauna. Google them, give them a call. They’re all wonderful to talk to, and then make sure you mention Learn True Health the podcast and Ashley James to get your special. I am just so thrilled with the outpouring of information, the sharing from all the listeners these last five years. So many listeners have gotten a Sunlighten Sauna or done other practices that other guests have recommended and then they come back and they share with me, they email me, or they share in the Facebook group. And so many people have been thrilled with their experience using the Sunlighten Sauna, as have I. This is one thing for me to say that I’ve had a great experience, I’ve had an amazing experience, and my guests to share that they and their patients have amazing experiences. But then when we see it in the Facebook group and listeners are sharing that they love their Solo System, they love their Sunlighten, and that it’s made such a difference in their life, it’s really cool.  As a community, we can come together in the Learn True Health Facebook group and we can share what’s worked for us so that we can learn from each other. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, and I look forward to you coming and joining the group and sharing with us what you’ve learned and loved learning from the Learn True Health podcast. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.   Get Connected with Dr. David Brownstein! Dr. Brown’s Holistic Medicine Center For Holistic Medicine Books by Dr. David Brownstein A Holistic Approach To Viruses Drugs That Don’t Work and Natural Therapies That Do! 2nd Edition Iodine: Why You Need It. Why You Can’t Live Without It. 5th Edition Ozone: The Miracle Therapy The Guide to a Dairy-Free Diet The Guide to a Gluten-Free Diet   Check out more wonderful books by Dr. Brownstein!

Watch the 4 Hour Event: https://www.flemingmethod.com/recorded-event-2021-presentation-series Find LTH on LBRY: https://lbry.tv/@Learn-True-Health Find LTH on Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/kGf34VnWr7H9 Join the LTH community: learntruehealth.com/group Ashley James and Dr. Richard Fleming Highlights: Where did SARS-CoV-2 come from What is InflammoThrombotic Response What is FMTVDM or Fleming Method Effective treatment or COVID-19 What kind of diet help to prevent disease Dr. Richard Fleming on the Most Effective Drug-based Treatment for Covid-19 https://www.learntruehealth.com/dr-richard-fleming-on-the-most-effective-drug-based-treatment-for-covid-19   Dr. Richard M. Fleming, PhD, MD, JD is a scientist/physicist and also a cardiologist who discovered that inflammation and heart disease go hand in hand and have patented the Fleming Method (FMTVDM). He led a clinical trial on COVID-19 treatment protocols. In this episode, Dr. Fleming shares where SARS-CoV-2 came from, which medicines are effective for the treatment of COVID-19, and what type of diet helps prevent diseases. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This is a long-awaited episode that I did with Dr. Richard Fleming. I have been so excited to publish this and I apologize for the break that I took. Man, this year has been crazy.  Basically, we moved, we had to move very quickly. We had to use the Marie Kondo method and get rid of most of our belongings that we filled a 2700 square foot house. And now we are living in a beautiful and very small space. We have decluttered our life, and that’s what we have been doing the last two months. We got rid of all of our belongings, only kept the absolute essentials, and we moved. So now we are living in a beautiful area, in a very, very small space, in a more efficient life. It’s a huge emotional process going through decluttering and just emotionally and energetically removing from my life what no longer served me. I watched the Marie Kondo show on Netflix, many of my friends have read her book, and I read some of her books. What I wasn’t aware of is how much of an energetic release would happen. When we decluttered, we donated, we sold, we gave away, and in some cases had to throw away so much of our belongings. And now, everything we own can fit in basically one room, which feels liberating. Also now, I realize that there’s a whole ‘nother level of organization that we’re going to achieve. But we’ve taken the last two months, we were very, very busy doing all of that, and finally we’re now set up and I have my computer set up, and I’m able to interview and publish episodes again. This particular interview is, in my mind, one of the best or one of the most informative pieces that I have ever done. What I really enjoy about Dr. Fleming’s research is—you know, there are some doctors that sell a book, this is how they make a living, and so there’s always a question in the back of your mind like, what’s your motivation? Is it money motivated? I believe everyone has the right to earn a living, you just have to wonder, how much are they selling, right? Whereas Dr. Fleming, he has everything to lose and nothing to gain from putting this information out there. He loves doing research. He’s a research scientist and cardiologist. He is a patent holder of a method called the Fleming Method that is used today for early detection of heart disease and in some cases cancer. And he really doesn’t like self-promotion, that’s not his thing. Him and I talked about that off the air. Now, when I interviewed him, he had an event coming up in which he was even upset they were charging $10 to come attend the event. And it was a four-hour lecture that he was giving with over 100 slides that you could download for free. This information is so incredibly valuable and I’m so excited to bring it to you today. Because of my move and everything that’s going on, unfortunately, I’m publishing this after his event. However, the good news is you can go to his website, flemingmethod.com, and of course, the links to everything that Dr. Richard Fleming does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. You can go to his website and from there you will be able to see, I believe he’s cut it into something like the four-hour lecture into something like 15 parts. You can stream, watch, and I think you might even be able to download his lecture. And definitely download the PDF with all of the slides. What he gives you with all of the evidence is he gives you the paper trail of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Who created it, how it was created, the effects it has on the body from a medical standpoint. The paper trail is very evident. He shows who funded it, the labs have funded it. He shows basically what it does to the body, and if we understand what it does to the body, then we can also understand how to best combat it as well. He shows his study—which he talks about in our interview today and you’re going to be blown away— where they’ve used medications to see which ones are best at surviving, decreasing the mortality rate of coronavirus infection. He also shows the latest vaccine trials, their efficacy and their safety. He basically pulls all this data and digests it and explains it. So it’s fascinating. I watched the four-hour lecture. I listened to most of it because I was listening to it while I was packing up our house. I’d look over occasionally at the slides that he was presenting, and just my mind was blown. So I’m excited for you to hear this episode. Thank you for your patience. I know you guys have been eagerly waiting to hear it. Definitely go to his website to listen to his four-hour lecture where he goes into great detail. What’s great about our interview is he goes into stories and explains the backstory as well, so this interview will complement his four-hour lecture very well for you. If you have any questions, if you want to chat about this interview or anything that Dr. Fleming does, please join the Learn True Health Facebook group. It’s a great community of holistic-minded people who are all looking to achieve true health and looking to continue learning from each other. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook, or you can go to learntruehealth.com/group. That’ll redirect you straight to the Facebook group.  Thank you so much for being a listener and thank you so much for sharing these episodes with those you love. This is one of those shareable episodes for sure. I know that there’ll be new listeners and I’m very excited. Welcome guys. I’ve been doing this podcast for five years now, and I continue to just love everything I learned from all the holistic doctors. Now I’ve got some more episodes in the hopper for you after this one, and I just know that you guys will love the next few episodes that are coming up so stay tuned. Make sure you’re subscribed on your favorite podcast directory. And please, if you love the show, give it a five-star rating and written review. It really does help. The more positive five-star written reviews we get, the more platforms like iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher, the more they, in turn, will promote the show’s search ability to other people. So we can spread this information through giving it great reviews.  So if you like it, give it a great review, and if you don’t like it just write me an email and start a conversation with me, support@learntruehealth.com. I’d love to hear from you. Either way, thank you so much for being a listener and sharing the show. Enjoy today’s episode, I know you will—some amazing information. I’m so excited to get it out for you today.   [00:07:57] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 463. I am so excited for today’s guest. You just have no idea. We have probably the smartest guy in the world on the show today. I watched a two-hour YouTube video with Dr. Richard Fleming, explaining the link between inflammation, SARS, and COVID. He’s the one that discovered the inflammation and heart disease go hand in hand. Dr. Fleming, your research, what you’re sharing with us on your website, which I recommend all listeners go to flemingmethod.com. He puts out lots of great information. He doesn’t like charging for things. He just wants to keep helping us and get this information out there. He’s got over 30 videos explaining the science behind COVID and inflammation, and it’s really going to wake people up for real, blow their minds, and get us back in charge of our health. That’s the whole point of this podcast is getting us back in charge of our health. When you understand how these things work in the body and you understand an inflamed body, how it responds to disease and infection versus a body that’s not inflamed, the care that you can do to take care of yourself to prevent things from happening in the future, you’re going to be so much better off. Dr. Fleming, it’s such a pleasure to have you here today. Now, you have an event coming up in Texas, in Dallas. So if any listeners are in Dallas, they got to go to flemingmethod.com and right there at the top, it says Event 2021. It’s only $10, it’s a whole day event where you can learn from Dr. Fleming and you’re going to learn about COVID. I’m sure you’re going to tell us a little bit today about what this event is, and it’s going to be filmed. So for those who aren’t in Dallas, Texas, we’ll be able to go to your website, flemingmethod.com, and watch the event as well. You’re going to be giving us the download of all your slides. There are over 100 slides referencing all the studies. We were just talking before we hit record that you’re surprised you haven’t been assassinated. I mean honestly, you’re putting out so much information that would make some government officials very angry, some CDC officials very angry. People that want to keep telling us we all need to follow their guidelines, which I’m not sure how studied their guidelines are. I don’t see the science. I just see them constantly changing directions. In my state, in Washington, what I’ve seen is almost half of all restaurants have gone out of business. We’re heading for a major disaster if the economy goes this way. Small businesses are being crushed, and so many people are losing their jobs. I am in fear of what is going to happen in the next few years as a result of the government not taking true science into account and making mandates that aren’t necessarily helping any of us. And then, of course, we’re not being told what we can do to actually prevent or support our body in mounting a healthy response. So there’s all this in the air and Dr. Fleming, I’m so excited to have you here today to share with us what we can do to support our body to prevent heart disease, which you are the expert in, and also, talk a little bit about COVID since you have so much information around that.   [00:12:11] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, first off, thank you for inviting me, Ashley. It’s my pleasure to be here and given an opportunity to try to provide some information for your listeners and let them know about the upcoming event.  It’s interesting that you mentioned the CDC just a few moments ago because back in 2005, the CDC invited me to attend a conference and present on not only the patent FMTVDM, which some people have shortened to the Fleming Method because the name of the patent is rather long. But also, the role that diet and other risk factors for heart disease played for it. So we were talking about heart disease and cancer at that point in time in conjunction with the patent.  Just for the heck of it, the title of the patent is the Fleming Method for Tissue and Vascular Differentiation using same state single or sequential quantification comparisons. I thought I was doing people a favor by the acronym FMTVDM, and now it’s been shortened to Fleming Method, which is fine. This is year number 53 for me doing research—and one of the things that I learned way back and particularly back in medical school when I entered medical school in 1980—was we were told by the dean that 90% of what we’re going to be taught was incorrect. He encouraged those of us who are research-oriented, and I was clearly research-oriented, to investigate different fields of medicine and try to advance it as best we could.  So I’ve spent several of those decades looking at the tests that we do, understanding what causes different disease states, and trying to get a better handle on finding problems earlier, but not from the point of view that there are so many people that get tests done that they don’t quite know what the results of those tests are. It’s not a matter of having an insensitive test finding things, or an overly sensitive test finding things. It’s a matter of actually measuring things. Much of the work that I’ve done diagnostically has been to look at how we measure things and to define not only disease but our health on a spectrum from one end to the other so that we can find things sooner. Not just so we can attack it using the same old methods, but hopefully so we can do things to improve our health earlier on using, hopefully, less aggressive and less toxic means, and perhaps more fundamental approaches than we’re so used to doing. One of the things that people need to appreciate or I would hope that they would appreciate about medicine is that much of what medicine has had to focus on is just simply keeping people alive in emergency situations, and that’s where a lot of our focus has been. Only after you tackle that type of problem do you get the luxury of going back and looking at how we can then prevent things. There is not a lot or actually any emphasis by the Federal government on preventing disease. In the 1960s, that was discussed briefly, and some of the people that raised those questions were advised to stop asking those questions, and they did. The government does not like it when you raise questions and does not like it when you think outside of the box.   [00:15:53] Ashley James: It was pressure by the pharmaceutical industry, you think because there’s no profit in not being sick?   [00:16:04] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, I’ve got two responses to many questions people answer. First off, there’s a heck of a lot of profit for people in not being sick because vitamins, minerals, and lots of different things like that are made by the same pharmaceutical companies that sell you the prescription drugs. But you are correct in that there is an awful lot of money to be made by disease. It’s like casinos. If you look at a casino and you and you look at what they consider the risk of winning there, you just have to step back for a moment and think, how do they keep the doors open to all these bright shiny places? And it’s not because they’re losing money, they’re making money. Big Pharma is making money. There’s no doubt about it. The SARS-CoV-2 has demonstrated a tremendous capacity to make money.  In fact, billions and trillions have gone into SARS-CoV-2. And the irony is when you look at the evidence about this virus, where it came from, who paid for it, and who’s funding the research not only for this virus but for vaccines, for CRISPR technology, for SAM technology, for transmissible vaccine technology, for all the other components, you’ll find that it’s basically the same groups of people. It’s our Federal government, it’s the Gates Foundation, it’s the Helmsley Foundation. It’s people that were connected with Jeffrey Epstein when he was alive.  You’re right. I mean, those types of things are controversial and I don’t think the powers that be really want that information out there, but unfortunately, they really haven’t, in my opinion, been manipulating something as long as they have been with this pandemic. The amount of time that they’ve been manipulating it had its effect of getting people to not talk to each other and to go along with the flow, but it’s also had a secondary effect, which is a significant amount of the population that I’ve guesstimating is about 30%, have really kind of had it with this process. And that’s caused them to start doing what they’re not supposed to, which is to get together and to talk about things. The more people talk and share information, the less likely they are to be manipulated and controlled by the powers that be.   [00:18:46] Ashley James: Yes, that’s why we’re here today. You guys that are listening to this, that is exactly what you need to know is the more you know, the more you’re not going to be manipulated. We talked about this in past interviews about how we’ve been raised to believe milk is good, milk does a body good. That was marketing.   [00:19:10] Dr. Richard Fleming: Oh yeah.   [00:19:10] Ashley James: We’ve been manipulated through marketing, that’s federally subsidized, right? It doesn’t do a body good. There’s so much science now, so many studies show that it’s actually not great for you, and it’s not a great source of calcium. Calcium is much better getting it from vegetables, for example, versus getting it from a cow because that’s so pro-inflammatory for the body and there are higher risks of cancer. We can get into that, but I just want to bring it up, just touching on this a little bit because you did go there. The word conspiracy is a plot or a scheme to do harm, to do things that are illegal. So when we talk about conspiracy because, in the mainstream media, it’s been twisted. The word conspiracy is, oh, those are the nutjobs who believe the Earth is flat or whatever. They try to paint the word conspiracy, and it’s actually not the definition. The definition is when we are identifying a group of people who are doing harm, who are doing something possibly nefarious. And you mentioned those organizations like the Gates Foundation, those same organizations and people that you mentioned are also connected to or were connected to the Wuhan lab that was studying the SARS-CoV-2 virus. So just putting it out there, when we go down that rabbit hole, we see that there’s so much to look at. These organizations that are now telling us what we need to do or to our body have been involved for a long time in studying this virus, and creating vaccines. Scary though that every vaccine they’ve ever tried to test on animals for COVID because COVID has been around for a long time just like influenza, different variants have been around for a long time. Every time they go to create a vaccine, all the animals die during the trials. And now, the animals that it’s being given to are humans because it’s a trial now. This is the scary part. What is the connection? Now considering that you are the discoverer, you are the person who discovered that heart disease and inflammation go together, that inflammation causes heart disease and you can see the two together. I love that then you created this method of measuring it so that we could catch it way early on. Most people know they have heart disease when they have their first heart attack or when they have angina, when they have major they’ve had it for years. They’ve been developing it for years or they develop a stroke. They’ve had it for years, but what if they could have gone through a test and then caught the inflammation early on and then changed their lifestyle so that they didn’t have that inflammation, they didn’t go that route? Now, this is near and dear to my heart because my dad died of heart disease and my mom died of cancer. These two things, if they had known years before that their body is going to create this disease that will end their life early, they would have made different choices, hopefully. But what is the link between inflammation and maybe how people, when they have COVID, how their outcomes are? Can you see that there are significantly worse outcomes for those who already have inflammation? If their body’s not inflamed, do they have better outcomes? Is there a way of treating the inflammation while they’re in COVID, while they’re infected so that they have a better outcome?   [00:23:31] Dr. Richard Fleming: Right. Let me walk everybody back to a little bit of history on me so that you can get a perspective of me laying these answers out. So in 1976, I joined American Heart as a faculty member, which made me the youngest faculty member at that point in time in history. I hope nobody has taken me out of those positions at a younger age than I did. But, more power to them if they have. As a result of doing it, I get put on three basic committees. One was basic, one was advanced cardiac life support. And then the other one was a new committee, physician cluster education faculty. I began on all three of those for the latter one talking to physicians primarily and then expanding beyond that about what caused heart disease and what can be done about it. The primary theory at that point in time was it was cholesterol. I spent a couple of decades teaching that and training that to people. And then in the late ‘80s, I started questioning some of that. From ’89 to ’92, I was actually the cardiology fellow who did the Dean Ornish program studies for them at UT where I did my fellowship in cardiology. I then questioned further on that because some of that data even is questionable about what the real outcomes were, and proceeded to look at a variety of other factors that people were reporting as significant but not uniformly. And so over the course of time and eventually I took six months sabbatical to just sort this out. I developed what was called the Fleming inflammation and vascular disease theory, the Fleming inflammation and heart disease theory. The inflammation and heart disease theory has been called a variety of things. Presented it at American Heart in 1994 then again in 1995, reduced it to a textbook. So, written up as a chapter in a cardiology textbook in ’99. And then, from 2000 to 2003, published a couple of studies on bacteria and their specific roles. And then we were on 20/20 in 2004 talking about it. And essentially began with the process that heart disease is an inflammatory process, it’s not a narrowing of an artery, although that occurs later on. About half of the people find out they have heart disease by dropping dead of it, which is not your best approach to find out that you have a problem. It’s the inability of an artery to relax and increase its blood flow upon demand that’s called Flow Reserve and I wrote the quadratic equation for that back in ‘90 or ‘91. So that is the blood flow equation for humans. Then came up with these 12 factors of which one of those are infectious diseases like bacteria and viruses that produce an inflammatory process. Now, I then also went on to explain that this is what causes diabetes, high blood pressure, cerebrovascular diseases, strokes, cancers, and a variety of health problems. And that obesity is one of the primary reasons why these chemicals exist in the body called cytokines are interleukins, which means they are chemicals that are released from one type of blood cell to another type of blood cell to signal that there’s a problem. So the entire theory boils down to two things going on: an inflammatory process or a swelling, and a thrombosis or blood clotting process, which at first blush might seem not good for the human body until you realize that really what that does is it tries to kill off something that’s not supposed to have been in the area by releasing chemicals that just perforate or destroy cells that are damaged. And then, depriving them of blood by forming a blood clot so it decreases their nutrients getting in there or their oxygen getting in there so things die. The focus is to attack things that shouldn’t be there. These chronic inflammatory diseases, however, are the result of us, humans, doing things for our bodies that we shouldn’t. I chuckled at the milk comment because that’s one of the conversations that I’ve had with people in the past. I’ve had lots of criticism from people that they don’t like what I have to say. I like to be liked, but it’s not my goal as a scientist/physician to make you like me, my goal is to tell you the truth. I always tell people that if they’re given the choice between the doctor they don’t like that saves their lives and the one that will hold their hand while they’re dying, go for the first one. The latter one doesn’t have a very good outcome, even if you feel good while you’re doing it. So, the inflammatory process is designed to protect you. But if you’re doing things to insult your body consistently, it will produce disease and you will stay in a hyperinflammatory, hyper thrombotic or what I call InflammoThrombotic Response, ITR for short because scientists and doctors like to abbreviate things. And then my students get to listen to me say don’t abbreviate, tell me the whole thing. They get to abbreviate when they’re later, older, doing things like I do, and getting tired of using the full phrases. What we saw with SARS-CoV-2, and it’s important to distinguish between the viral infection and the disease. So SARS-CoV-2 is the virus and COVID-19 is the disease. It’s like cholesterol is a problem, and coronary artery disease is the disease. They are two different things. COVID means that you have developed an InflammoThrombotic Response. Well, why would you develop a potentially lethal, life-threatening InflammoThrombotic Response? Well, it’s because you have comorbidity. You have one of these other health problems that your body is already in hyper or increased inflammation or inflammatory and thrombotic process. So now, you just simply toss a little bit more gasoline on the fuel by having the virus, and what we see were people’s systems that simply couldn’t hang on anymore, that was “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. So that’s what we really saw and see with this disease. During 2020, I began the process very early in the year of sorting out what was going on with this virus as best I could and looked at treatments. Where everybody else was focused on what type of treatment, was it an anti-malarial or an antibiotic, I was asking a different type of question. Which was, what’s the mechanisms of action or how do these drugs work? Because that’s really the key. It’s not the label that you put on it, it’s how do the drugs work? They do the things that are necessary to treat a) a virus, and b) this InflammoThrombotic Response that can occur to it. Because I patented FMTVDM or Fleming Method and had already done about two decades’ worth of research, we already have the data that shows where this inflammatory and thrombotic process of infection lies in the measurements of FMTVDM.  The other thing is that I’m not a big fan of doing sloppy research, even though I get a lot of criticism from people who like to do sloppy research because they like to do one drug or two drugs and then compare that, and that’s not very useful. I mean, it’s nice if you have lots of time and people aren’t dying, but when people are dying, you have to take a different approach, in my opinion. And that’s to look at a lot of drugs altogether. You can only do them one at a time, but if you do it intelligently, you can layer them one after another. We took 1,800 people. I’m going to answer this now because I see criticisms on social media. The study was not changed from 500 people to 1,800 people. The study was designed to end up with 500 people who were hospitalized with the InflammoThrombotic Response of COVID-19. To do that meant that we had 1800 people that we originally saw to get to the 500. In fact, we got to 501 because I didn’t stop at 500. I stopped at 501, big deal.   [00:33:03] Ashley James: When you saw these 1,800 people, were they all positively infected?   [00:33:09] Dr. Richard Fleming: Right, so that’s the thing. They were done in 7 countries, 23 facilities outside of the United States. Because the United States had already established that it wasn’t going to do this type of research, it was going to muddle along at the pace that it was doing and it was going to focus on vaccines. So I have—I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime, but I certainly have now—seen an environment where the Federal government said there are no treatments for these things and you’d better not be treating people for it. So clearly this was not something we could do in the United States, and I make no apologies about that.   [00:33:49] Ashley James: That seems completely unethical.   [00:33:52] Dr. Richard Fleming: I think it’s unethical and considering where this virus came from, everything shows that this is a bioweapon that we’ll get into if we have enough time. And that the same people that said there are no treatments, we’re going to go vaccines, are the same people that paid for this gain of function by a weapon. And I don’t think it’s just unethical, I think it’s criminal. I think they have violated international law. And if I have anything to say about it, they will be held before a second Nuremberg trial and be held accountable. So we did it outside the country and what we did is we brought them, so they came to see their doctors. I simply coordinated the study and made the patent available without cost and designed a study. So they came to see their doctors. They had to have a positive PCR test, for lack of a better thing. That’s all we had at the time. And then their doctors decided whether they would say, okay, I don’t think you’re symptomatic enough to be treated. Go home, come back in three days. I want to re-evaluate you, or their doctors who would say, well, we have four options to treat from here in an outpatient setting. I think you’re symptomatic, I’m going to start you on that, and then come back in three days. They were almost evenly distributed, there were slightly more who ended up getting treatment by their physicians. And then in three days, a decision was made. You came back, you looked better, and you get kept on that medication; or if you weren’t getting medication and you got better, everybody said hooray.  In either group, if you didn’t get better, you got hospitalized because you were symptomatic and you were then diagnosed with COVID-19 coronavirus disease 2019. Because it was not the 19th coronavirus, it was discovered in 2019, or at least that’s when all of us were told about it. Although, we have documents that show that SARS-CoV-2 was actually part of a research project out of China in 2007 where they combined hepatitis C virus, HIV virus, SARS-CoV-1, and SARS-CoV-2 in a gain-of-function research project.   [00:36:17] Ashley James: That’s where the bioweapon thing comes in?   [00:36:19] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, we’ll get into that in more detail, but it’s out of the United States and out of China, primarily.   [00:36:28] Ashley James: Is this a patent that people can see?   [00:36:30] Dr. Richard Fleming: I don’t know if they patented that, but the papers are certainly out there. In fact, I’m writing a book on gain-of-function because I was asked to write a book. Not only was I asked to write a book, but I’ve been asked to provide documents for court. [00:36:47] Ashley James: I’d love to have you back on the show when you have released your book so that we can promote it because I know my listeners would be very interested in reading it.    [00:36:57] Dr. Richard Fleming: I would be delighted and you know how I feel about promoting things.   [00:37:01] Ashley James: Don’t worry, I’ll do the promotion for you.   [00:37:04] Dr. Richard Fleming: Thank you. So they did that and when they came into the hospital, they had an FMTVDM done. They also had a number of other tests, a couple that looked for information, and other things that we were concerned about. They had electrocardiograms, looked at their heart rhythm and the QT interval that everybody stresses out about, and then they were randomly assigned a treatment—1 of 10 treatments. Sorry, that’s just how you do research.   [00:37:36] Ashley James: But this was suspected to help them?   [00:37:42] Dr. Richard Fleming: Right. Every one of these treatments I had selected based upon the mechanism of action and data that was available that I’m surprised more people aren’t aware of, but that’s the function of a good researcher is to be able to do that type of thing. And then in three days, they had the studies repeated, and one of three things was going to happen. Either they got better, they got worse, or no change. I won’t go through the details of how we did the measurements and what accounted for better or worse, but just using that if they got better, then they were maintained on that drug. If they got worse, the drug was stopped and they were randomly given another one. If there was no significant change, they were randomly assigned to a new drug on top of what they had already received. So with 10 treatment combinations, we ended up with, in the end, 52 different combinations of drugs that were studied. And because FMTVDM quantifies and measures, we had the ability to statistically analyze that and sort out what worked and what didn’t work, and in what combinations things worked and didn’t work. That boiled it down to three combinations that were 99.83% successful for COVID patients. Outpatients with SARS-CoV-2 had a variety, about an 83% success rate. Although one drug combination worked 100% of the time, and as I tell people, it worked 100% of the time, my response is yeah. But if we get enough people, somebody is not going to work on it. You just have to be intelligent enough to realize what the information is telling us is what works, and it shows us why the drugs work because these drug combinations, when you tend to look at them, by doing them in combination, decreased hospital stays from 40 to 60 days down to 1 to 2 weeks. And then the other thing was that we’re very careful about the ventilator settings because using ventilators, the way that they are standardly typically set and used on patients has already been shown in three major publications published in the New England Journal of Medicine—when it was still a journal versus a political tool—had shown previously that if you set ventilators the way we set them routinely for patients, you’ll kill patients with this type of lung disease. And I think we’ve done a great job now of validating those papers as well with all the people that have died, and SARS-CoV-2, for the only positive note I can say on that, is it validated my original theory from 1994. Not where I was going or wanting to go with that, but there you go.   [00:40:36] Ashley James: It originally validated that inflammation is the root cause of disease?   [00:40:42] Dr. Richard Fleming: It validated the fact that bacteria and viruses are one of those pro-inflammatory things that will kill you with heart disease and the other diseases because that’s why people died.   [00:40:53] Ashley James: It exacerbates what’s already there, right?   [00:40:57] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, they weren’t being treated, that’s the problem. 99.83% of our people survived. So what that tells you is that had everybody else been treated for this InflammoThrombotic Response that I described in the theory, we wouldn’t have had hundreds and thousands and millions of people die. But it’s the attitude of, well, everybody talks about inflammation and heart disease, but it’s lip service to me because nobody then turned around and treated the people. If the attitude is we don’t have treatments for this, or if we treat you that way that they’re going to come after our medical licenses or throw us in jail, well, understanding that that is the scenario that happened in the United States and around the world, it’s not too challenging to understand why the German Medical Association behaved the way it did under Adolf Hitler. And Göring at the 1947 Nuremberg trials when he knew he was going to be hanged for crimes against humanity, the Germans and Nazis were no different than the Americans, the British, or anybody else. He said, any government can do this to its people, and the American attorney that was arguing with him said, no, no, no, we’re a free society in the United States. This does not happen. And Göringlooked and he said, you know, it doesn’t matter whether you get a republic, a parliament, communist, socialistic, or fascist society. All you have to do to manipulate the people is tell them there’s a problem. Tell them if they don’t step in line that bad things will happen. Tell them that people that don’t step in line are unpatriotic and you will manipulate the people. And I think we’ve seen a good demonstration of that over the last year and a half. I mean, at least that’s my perspective on it. Psychologists have known this for a long time since the 1940s if not before, how to modify this. The US Army and government are very good at learning how and controlling people’s behaviors, and yet they continue to repeatedly conduct experiments on US citizens. I mean, you don’t even have to be good at this. You can go to Wikipedia and type in something about US government experiments on its people, something like that, and you’ll pull up a Wikipedia page that will just blow you out of the water.   [00:43:39] Ashley James: Yeah, there’s video footage.   [00:43:41] Dr. Richard Fleming: From [inaudible 00:43:40] experiment to syphilis to radiation exposure on US military personnel—you name it. We’re not living with a bunch of nice folks. If you look at the last 20 to 30 years, you’ll see that the US government has conducted gain-of-function research, and it has paid Peter Daszak of EcoHealth over $61 million, $39 million of which came from the Department of Defense and they provided an advisor, David Franz, who was a former Deputy Commander of Fort Detrick, our bioweapons Center for the US military in the United States. Provided that to Peter Daszak who then provided funds to Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And you don’t have to be really good at this, I don’t think. I mean, I’ve got a ton of grant data, I’ve got a ton of published papers that showed who paid for the results. There are patents out there that show that Daszak patented for gene manipulation, including humans and viruses and bacteria. The US government gets patent kickbacks on not only that one, but specifically the patent for investigating chimeric, which is the scientific term for gain-of-function, spike proteins on coronaviruses. So what Anthony Fauci did earlier in the week or during this last week when Senator Dr. Rand Paul asked him about gain-of-function research coming out of NIH and NIAID to Daszak and the others on coronavirus. When Fauci danced around that as he did and said the US government has not funded gain-of-function research, they’ve got a bloody patent that they’re getting the rights and monies for that very type of research. The paper trail of publications and money trail shows that Fauci committed perjury.   [00:45:52] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [00:45:55] Dr. Richard Fleming: I mean, Fauci, remember, was pushing the vaccines and he is connected with Pfizer and Moderna.   [00:46:02] Ashley James: Yes. And connected with the Wuhan lab that created the virus, the study.   [00:46:10] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah. Not only that, but if you go and you look, you will see that Fauci, Gates, Helmsley, and Epstein are all tied together behind the scenes. Epstein not so much anymore because he’s dead, which is what happens to you—speculative on my part, it is my opinion, not a known fact—if you displease powers that be, bad things happen to people, even if they’re powerful people.   [00:46:40] Ashley James: And it definitely sends a message to everyone else step in line.   [00:46:43] Dr. Richard Fleming: It definitely does. I mean, one of the things that I’ve commented to people is—and some people don’t like me to get this off track—I’m Viking ancestry. I frequently tell people that my ancestors had a good way of cutting down recidivism. They just simply cut the heads off their enemies and it sends a very powerful message. I’m pretty sure that my ancestors aren’t the only ones that learned that message. People end up dead, people end up missing. I know more than enough examples of it.   [00:47:20] Ashley James: There’s a lot of holistic doctors, a lot of doctors that have been speaking out, such as yourself, who suddenly passed away even though they were super healthy. It does leave us suspicious. I pray that you are safe. You’ve moved to Texas. We joked about how you moved to Texas, everyone has a gun—you don’t—but everyone has a gun, they’re going to protect you. You mentioned that 99.8% of people survived. Is that out of the 1,800 people in your initial study, or was that the hospitalized 501?   [00:47:54] Dr. Richard Fleming: It was the whole 1,800. All three people were on a ventilator, one died at three days, one died at four days, and one died at five days.   [00:48:04] Ashley James: Still, to work with people around the world, 1,800 of them who all tested positive, 501 ended up in the hospital, which you have to be pretty sick to end up in the hospital. I know because a few days after I gave birth, many listeners (some don’t), some might be first time listeners.  On April 13th of this year, I gave birth to our daughter who passed away. So I was struck with intense grief, which put my blood pressure through the roof. Normally my blood pressure is actually slightly low, in the healthy low range. And then I think I might have gotten it from one of the paramedics because there were 13 paramedics in our bedroom because we did a home birth.  Just so you know, it’s something that wouldn’t have been prevented if I had gone into the hospital. She died right as she was born. It’s not anything we could have prevented if I was in a hospital either way and there was no detection that we would have known in advance. That’s the thing I struggle with. I couldn’t have prevented it, and it’s really God’s will. That’s what I have to be with. There are these times when we can take charge of our health, which is what we’re learning today and all our interviews, and then there are times when we have no control. And that’s when we have to just step back and realize that, yes, our life is in God’s hands. We do everything we can to be healthy, and the outcome sometimes is just not in our control at all. But a few days later I developed COVID, and everyone who was part of the birth, actually most of them who were part of the birth also developed COVID. My son, zero symptoms. I mean, he’s six, he’s healthy. My husband had a stuffy nose. He mowed the lawn for four hours while in the height of having COVID. He’s like, yeah, I kind of have a runny nose. That was his sickest, but I was bedridden.  I was on all the homeopathy and I was on all the supplements, everything I could possibly get my hands on. And it all kind of helped, and then on day eight, which I heard is the day that a lot of people kind of tank, my blood pressure went down. It was like 96/46 or something. I was practically fainting. My blood pressure just all of a sudden tanked. My O2 was down to 93 and I was having problems breathing all of a sudden. The concern was that I developed a clot from pregnancy, which is possible. It’s like okay, we should definitely get checked out. I went to the hospital to get checked out to make sure that I didn’t have a blood clot from pregnancy because I had just given birth. I got a CT scan for the first time in my life and that was an adventure. You know what was funny, the entire time I was telling the tech about you and your research. I was like, oh, the isotopes. A layperson trying to explain your Ph.D. research to him and he’s like, okay. I’m like, no, it’s so cool, you got to check it out. So I told him to look at your videos. But anyway, luckily I didn’t have a blood clot. The doctor comes in and he has a very concerned look on his face. Now my oxygen came back up to 95, so I was doing okay. My lungs were kind of sore, it was a little bit hard to breathe, but I had stabilized basically. He said, well, I really want to put you on this experimental drug. It’s not approved by the FDA and he doesn’t know if it’s going to be paid for by my insurance. I’m not going to get a $20,000 bill. I can’t even pronounce it casirivimab and imdevimab.   [00:51:57] Dr. Richard Fleming: Right, so two antibodies.   [00:51:58] Ashley James: Okay. They wanted to give me that. And so I said, can I please have the paperwork? He prints me out this nice little sales form and I’m looking at it like, well, there’s no statistics on here. So I went to the website, I looked, and I read the studies. They studied two groups of people that were hospitalized, one was 200 and something then the other was 200 something. The ones that were hospitalized and didn’t receive the treatment, 10% of them died. The ones that did receive the treatment, 11% of them died. I’m like, 1% more. I could die. I could have a 1% more chance of dying if I do this. I look through it and I’m like, you know what, just send me home with an inhaler. I’m going to take my chances. I’m not a guinea pig. I don’t believe in enrolling myself at any—   [00:52:50] Dr. Richard Fleming: Experimental research.   [00:52:51] Ashley James: Experiments, thank you. I’m not a guinea pig. He was really concerned. He’s like, you really need this. We’ve seen this work really well. I felt like he was selling me on it, and I’m like, okay, you know what, I’m going to come back if I get worse, but I really feel like I’m stabilized now. And I didn’t have a fever the whole time, I didn’t have a headache. It was all just breathing stuff. And now that I know I didn’t have a blood clot, I could go home and continue taking all my supplements, just resting, and the inhaler, the albuterol helped tremendously. I also got on glutathione and almost immediately got better, which is really interesting considering, you see that inflammation absolutely plays a role in the outcomes that people have. So I get home and then the next day, I get a phone call from the hospital. The pharmacist is trying to sell me on coming back to get the medicine. I’m sitting up on the couch sorting clothes and doing laundry. I’m like, I’m fine. I feel great. I just needed that little help with the inhaler to get me through the tough breathing. I was already on my way back mending, and they’re trying to get me back to get in the study to be part of the experiment. I mean, that they’re trying to sell me on it is pretty interesting. We, of course, quarantined the whole time, we were at home. But just to see how the medical system and how they were really excited to get me in this experimental thing, right? It’s like, no, thank you. And I got better. It’s interesting. Our son got completely exposed, no symptoms. There are a few people that were in our inner circle during that time that also had no symptoms, so their body must have mounted a response without having to have COVID-19. They were exposed to it but didn’t have to have it.  My husband had minor, minor symptoms. I had more major ones, and the doctor said to me in the ER, you’re not sick enough for me to admit you, but you’re not healthy enough for me to not be worried about you. You should really get on this drug I’m trying to sell you. It’s interesting. Now, I’m very curious, and I’m sure all the listeners are curious. What was the most effective treatment that you guys figured out?   [00:55:18] Dr. Richard Fleming: For outpatient or inpatient?   [00:55:21] Ashley James: Oh, let’s talk about both.   [00:55:24] Dr. Richard Fleming: The combination that we saw for outpatients that were most successful was a combination of primaquine, clindamycin, and hydroxychloroquine. And the reason for that is that you have to look at what the drugs actually do. So, SARS-CoV-2 everybody I think has heard the term ACE2 receptor. If you’ve heard of a site on the cell that the spike protein attaches to, it’s typically the ACE2, the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptor that we talk about. Although, there are actually four receptors on the cell. So the first one is ACE2. The second one involved is something called TMPRSS2 or transmembrane serine protease 2. The third one is called a furin cleavage site. And the fourth one is called neuropilin-1. So, the second one TMPRSS2 explains why black people tend to get more infected with SARS than white people because their nose and upper respiratory system have more TMPRSS2 receptors, than do Asians, Latinos, or Caucasians. So they’re more prone to the virus.  And it turns out that when I did my research to look at that upfront, that clindamycin which is an antibiotic works because it interferes with the TMPRSS2 receptor, and it interferes with the ability of the virus to replicate itself called the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, which is the enzymes involved in ribosomes that take the RNA and translate it to protein. For example, the spike protein. And that turned out to be correct. Obviously, I didn’t know it before we started it, but it turned out to be correct. Then primaquine is an aminoquinoline like hydroxychloroquine but it’s a one-time dose. And, it has a longer-term effect and so it interferes with the binding of the virus to the ACE2 receptor and also interferes with the virus being able to replicate itself. And then hydroxychloroquine does a number of things that interfere with the attachment of the spike protein to the ACE receptor. It decreases an inflammatory process through inhibition of what’s called a toll 7 receptor. It interferes with clotting by interfering with what’s called glycoprotein IIb/IIIa, all of this was back in the original theory in 1994. It slightly increases the pH of something called cytosol, which is where the virus finds itself once it gets inside your cells.  The first thing the virus has to do is get the envelope off to release its genetic material onto our cells. And it turns out that hydroxychloroquine, by slightly increasing that pH—and we’re not talking about anything that you would significantly know, I mean, this is minuscule—it interferes with the ability of the envelope to come off. It opens up a passageway, which is called an ionophore because it’s an ion that passes through. So the ion is zinc, so it opens up the passageway for zinc to come from outside the cell to inside this cell, which interferes with the ability of the virus to replicate itself again to RdRp, RNA-dependent RNA polymerase. It also decreases some of the other cytokines or chemicals released by cells to cause tissue damage. So, that’s how it works. It’s not because it’s an anti-malarial because it’s a drug that works by these mechanisms independent of what we call it. So those three together had that effect. It turned out that for individuals that actually develop full-blown COVID, the best combinations turned out to be three. Two of them included patients who had received an aminoquinoline like primaquine or hydroxychloroquine as outpatients and then got admitted. And if they have that, then two drugs, one called interferon alfa-2b, which interferes with the ability of the virus to replicate itself again. And another one is called tocilizumab. It’s an interleukin-6 inhibitor, which is a prothrombotic scenario. So again decreasing the ability of the virus to attach to replicate itself and to cut down on the inflammation and subsequently blood clotting. So there was that. Another combination if they’d gotten an outpatient aminoquinoline like primaquine, hydroxychloroquine, or the combination was to put them on methylprednisolone, which has that same effect on decreasing inflammation and blood clotting. And then the third group were those people who hadn’t received an aminoquinoline as outpatients, and what proved to be successful was the combination of primaquine and clindamycin. And then the same two drugs tocilizumab and interferon alfa-2b. Those were extremely successful. It doesn’t mean that other treatments don’t work, but I did not include them in the protocol to be randomized too. There was one drug that we were going to use that we elected, the IRB that initially set this up, we decided to avoid it because there were questions about it way back when. I don’t know if that was the right thing to do or not, but we elected not to keep it in the study, so it was deleted between the time that we set it up and the time we actually implemented it. And then we’re going to look at taking the same approach with mechanisms of action and looking at how vaccines actually work. I’ve assembled based upon the best science that we have more than likely drugs that we think will be beneficial, and we’ll release that. Obviously not prescribing to anybody or telling you to do it. That’s up to you. It’s a semi-free society, emphasis on the semi. So that people can download the material, take it to the doctor, and talk to their doctor. They and their doctor can decide, presuming they’re allowed to anymore. But somewhere somehow, people will be able to take a look at this, investigate it, and see if it doesn’t help.   [01:02:35] Ashley James: If your doctor is not willing to look at the studies that you bring to them, you have to fire them and get a better doctor. You want one that is willing to keep their mind open enough to look at new research.   [01:02:51] Dr. Richard Fleming: Right. Well, the problem is that there’s so much interference to the practice of medicine that shouldn’t be there. That some of these poor doctors are just simply scared. The question is, what are you scared of? Are you scared of losing your job? Because I know a lot of them are. Are you scared of losing your medical license? I know a lot of them are. Are you scared of losing the life of your patient? You have to balance that in there, and I’m not telling anybody I have the answer for you because I’ve certainly run my role with the Federal government and got taken to task for it, but I would do it again because it was the right thing.  You just have to decide whether you want to practice medicine under heir Hitler and the regime of Nazi Germany and fascism, or whether you want to allow physicians to practice medicine the way that they think. Because if you look at the Constitution of the United States, I have a law degree also and I thoroughly read the Constitution of the United States. I will assure you that I’ve seen nothing in the US Constitution that authorizes the Federal government to determine what healthcare is. It doesn’t mean that they don’t think that they have the right to do it, I’m just telling you that I don’t see anything in the US Constitution either in Article One, Article Two, and clearly not in Article Three because the courts don’t run medicine, although they might think they do. Nothing that gives the Federal government authority to run medicine. So I’m not sure why we go to medical school and actually get an MD, DO, or whatever people get to practice medicine if they’re not going to be allowed to practice medicine.   [01:04:41] Ashley James: Yeah, this is scary.   [01:04:45] Dr. Richard Fleming: You don’t call up a three-letter Federal agency when you’re sick, do you? I mean, when was the last time you felt sick and you called up NIH, CDC, or any of the others?   [01:05:00] Ashley James: I love that you talk about hydroxychloroquine, and this is something that a lot of people don’t know. What they know is what they’ve been told. What they’ve been told by the media is hydroxychloroquine, and this was right around when Trump was saying—if you remember the last year, I know some people have PTSD and don’t like to remember 2020. But when you think back, I mean really, it’s a big fuzzy blur to me, right?  But when you think back to early 2020, it was right after my birthday, March, 8, the restaurants here closed and the bars closed. They said we need two weeks. We’re going to shut down for two weeks. Governor Inslee, we’ll reopen at the end of March, beginning of April. And then April 1 came.   [01:05:51] Dr. Richard Fleming: They didn’t say what year though, did they?   [01:05:53] Ashley James: Oh, shoot. You got me there. Oh my gosh. And then it was, okay, it’s going to be May, and then, okay, it’s going to be August. I just got angrier and angrier as I saw what was going on. The manipulation and taking away our freedoms. Was it North Dakota or South Dakota, I’m sort of having a brain fart right now, but it was one of those states sort of in the middle there, to the north, where the governor said, I’m not shutting down anything. I’m not going to affect any business. If you want to wear a mask, you wear a mask. If you don’t, you don’t. If you want to stay open, stay open. Let the people decide, but the government is not going to interfere with your businesses. Fauci said, your hospitals will be overflowing and you’re going to kill people because of this. And she had one of the lowest rates and did not have her hospitals overflowing. People decided to wash their hands and take their own precautions, but they still went out, did stuff, went to restaurants, and lived their lives. Maybe they took a little bit more precautions, but that’s just showing that the shutdowns have not been working because there are states where they didn’t shut down and the numbers are either similar or lower.  I mean, it just boggles my mind. And the numbers, don’t get me started because it’s so easy to manipulate these things. Positive cases don’t mean hospitalization, although there’s a percentage that we can look at. But to say the cases are up doesn’t mean that the hospital stay is up. So you talk about hydroxychloroquine, and it was Trump early on.   [01:07:57] Dr. Richard Fleming: Let me stop you for just a moment. I know you’re in a good role, but I want to point out something. Kary Mullis invented the PCR test, Polymerase Chain Reaction test, for the express purpose of finding genetic material. Now, Dr. Mullis, I think he got a Nobel Prize for this. The PCR test is an outstanding test, and for those of you who don’t think so, go read the patent. What you’ll see is that its expressed purpose was to simply find genetic codes.  Kary Mullis also said that if you look at his data on the patent—having a patent I’m particularly sensitive to this that you put down what needs to be known. You may not put down everything but you put down what needs to be known. Didn’t use more than 15 to 20 cycles to do it. And it was not a test for diagnosing disease. Now, around 2006 I think it was, his patent expired. Right around that same time, the Federal government of the United States got a patent for PCR specifically related to viruses. So it’s interesting to note that with the Emergency Use Authorization, PCR tests were given an umbrella under the EUA by the Federal government who just happens to have a patent on PCR tests. I just think that’s fascinating. Mullis, fortunately for him, died in 2019 before this fiasco really took off. Unfortunately, I see a lot of similarities in Mullis and myself in our perspectives on many of the people on the powers that be, which is I don’t think they’re smart enough to really understand it but they certainly know how to make money and manipulate the scenario. So, with that said, I just want to put that out there because I think it’s interesting for people to realize that the US Federal Government has a patent on PCR testing. Wow, you can use this for this virus. Okay, go ahead.   [01:10:19] Ashley James: When you hold the patent, you can profit from it.   [01:10:22] Dr. Richard Fleming: There you go, no conflict of interest there at all.   [01:10:28] Ashley James: I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, the cycles that were being used were really kind of oversensitive.   [01:10:38] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, they didn’t stop at 15 to 20 like Mullis said, did they?   [01:10:42] Ashley James: Yeah, and so we were getting false positives?   [01:10:48] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, here’s the thing. I wouldn’t call them false positives because they detected the genetic sequence, okay. But when the test is designed and the man says, look, at 20 cycles, you get everything you’re going to get that’s of value, then why do you go beyond that?   [01:11:10] Ashley James: Could they be picking up on a different coronavirus or something that’s not necessarily infecting them but just hanging out in their body because they already have an immune response to it?   [01:11:21] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, I mean, anything’s possible if it has the same genetic sequence that you’re looking for, okay. An additional point is that it doesn’t define whether you’re going to get sick and need treatment, okay. It doesn’t define whether it’s a virus that’s from living tissue that was in the process of replicating or it’s been laying outside of a cell where it’s dead. It doesn’t give you any of that, which is what Mullis told people. It was to look for specific genetic sequences. It’s an outstanding test. It was used for something it was not designed for, and when his patent expired, the Federal government got up with a very specific twist on it to make money on it.   [01:12:13] Ashley James: It’s interesting. I also find the timing interesting that when the next administration after Trump came in, very soon after, they announced that they were lowering the testing into those ranges that were more accurate.   [01:12:35] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, a very interesting thing that you should notice when the current administration came into power, and I haven’t looked at this for a while, but the vaccine studies stopped recruiting on the National Clinical Trial website. They were actively recruiting patients before that, but on or around the 20th of January, Pfizer, Moderna, and Janssen all stopped recruiting, Well, they didn’t need to because you’re either in the experimental group or the control group right now.   [01:13:04] Ashley James: Yeah, we’re all in the experiment. It’s kind of sick. A year ago when this was very new, we’re all just going what is going on? I did an interview with a Naturopath who’d come up with his supplement recommendations to support the body during this time, help the immune system—zinc, vitamin D, the things that we know work. And then also the things that he’d seen were helpful if someone had it.  Interesting that the FDA is really going after NAC right now when NAC is such a powerful, it helps our body with the antioxidant effect, especially in the lungs. It’s a decongestant. There are so many ways the body uses NAC in a very supportive manner and people have been using it preventatively and also when they have COVID. And then now, it’s being threatened to be taken off the market. Not because it hurts people, but because they’re saying, well, we studied this originally as a drug. It’s an amino acid, leave it alone. You can’t patent this, stop it. Back when we’re all looking around I had that interview and I said to the doctor, I said, years from now, if we ever get to look at the true numbers, if they ever actually have real numbers, years from now, we’re going to study 2020 (now 2021) as the world’s biggest experiment on its people. This is how I felt then and I definitely feel that way now a year later. We have to know more and more information. We have to be tapped in. We can’t just blindly listen to the mainstream media. Example being, early on when Trump said—coming back to the story—he said, oh, promising information is coming out about using hydroxychloroquine, and all of a sudden the media starts attacking him and attacking what he said. Oh, he’s telling us that we’re going to inject bleach into our bodies or whatever. Oh my gosh, it’s just ridiculous. He was sort of using the layman’s terms of trying to describe some things that he was told work.  He’s just trying to encourage people. Hey, there’s some interesting stuff out there that has some good information. Stay positive, stay safe. And the media went nuts and said he’s trying to kill us all. He’s telling us hydroxychloroquine is going to help us, and then also the study comes out.  Maybe you can fill in the gaps because you know more about this than I do, but when a study came out there’s like 90,000 participants and they said that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work. The media latched on to that and said, Trump’s a loser. He’s telling us a bunch of stuff that’s going to kill us. Don’t listen to him, or whatever they were saying. I just thought this was really interesting. Why is the mainstream media so angry about this drug and this treatment? They’re not doctors. Who are they, right? And then it turns out that a prominent study was completely made up. Maybe you could fill in the gaps of that.   [01:16:47] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah. Unfortunately, that’s gone on both sides of that so you can’t take much. You have to take it all with a grain of salt because there’s been so much manipulation of the scientific literature, particularly in the last decade or so. I actually resigned from The Lancet and from the British Medical Journal Open Quality journal due to my concerns about the ethics of what’s being published. So, with all the politics going on and some of it is related to the fact that the Chinese have gotten so many grants from the United States, and some of that money has been invested into actually buying control of the journals, it’s very hard to know what’s—   [01:17:33] Ashley James: What?   [01:17:34] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, you got it. You heard it right. What’s really valid and what’s not. As a researcher, I get a chuckle out of people who criticize individuals publishing in journals that aren’t at the top journals. I mean, I just resigned from two of them because of my concerns about it. When Watson and Crick first published their paper on DNA, they published it in a then relatively unknown journal called the Journal of the American Medical Association. But when Watson and Crick published their little one-column piece, JAMA was not well known. So this is not how you figure out what’s valid and what’s not. The scientific method is what determines that by reproducibility. So, taking that in mind, let’s address a very specific issue about hydroxychloroquine. Hydroxychloroquine is supposedly a big no, no. Let me back it up. For SARS-CoV-1, Anthony Fauci thought that hydroxychloroquine was a great drug, so I’m not certain what happened between his go-go for that versus it doesn’t work. Oh, wait a minute, there’s that conflict of interest about him being connected with Pfizer and Moderna. Never mind that comment then. The scenario of hydroxychloroquine is that it will stretch out part of your heart rhythm, the cell’s activity that is called the corrected QT complex. Q and T are areas that we measure on the electrocardiograms. When it gets too long, you get a bad rhythm. If it gets too short, you get a bad rhythm. We have this kind of nice, in-between zone. So, the argument is that hydroxychloroquine will prolong your QT and develop a heart rhythm that could kill. That’s possible, but so do a lot of other drugs that people take every day that nobody seems to stress out about. Here’s the killer in the argument. The rhythms that they’re worried about from prolonged QT are polymorphic ventricular tachy dysrhythmia and torsades de pointes. That’s me as the cardiologist now speaking. There’s not a single published case since SARS-CoV-2 hit in 2019 that anybody has published in any medical journal anywhere that I’m aware of, since I keep saying it this way in interviews and nobody is correcting me, I’m presuming nobody else has found one either. Not a single published case report of a single person having either one of these two rhythm problems as a result of taking hydroxychloroquine. So, for millions of people around the world, and I don’t know how many people actually have taken hydroxychloroquine, not a single case example of what causes seizure activity in Anthony Fauci’s brain or somebody else’s brain.   [01:20:37] Ashley James: Some people take it prophylactically because they’re in areas with malaria. This is a very well-studied drug, very well-studied.   [01:20:48] Dr. Richard Fleming: Look, every drug has side effects. The question is, if you have a drug that has a side effect and it’s the drug that’s going to treat something that could kill you, you might want to look at that in that light.   [01:21:08] Ashley James: Right, absolutely.   [01:21:10] Dr. Richard Fleming: Disease that might kill the patient, no, we won’t treat them because this drug might produce your heart rhythm that we’d have to actually do something about. FYI, we included that in the trial protocol too where calcium is one of the things that you use. We made available a drug called esmolol whose side effect is it shortens the QT interval. It’s not like they were going to get hydroxychloroquine for the rest of their life. They were in a hospital with COVID-19 and their QT interval was being monitored because the cardiologist was a member of the team in each one of these places.  That if a decision needed to be made that whoops, look at that QT interval—and by the way, we did collect all that data and it didn’t result in anybody having to stop the drug—you could start IV esmolol, intravenous esmolol, IV in the vein and give them a drug for the period of time they’re getting hydroxychloroquine. They weren’t going to be discharged on it, they weren’t going to be discharged with an IV. If the worst amount of time you have to do is treat for 7 to 10 days, that’s not the end of the world, particularly if it’s saved somebody’s life. The irony here is that I’ve seen patients that come in with 20 or 30 drugs and half the drugs are to treat side effects from the first set of drugs. It’s like, okay, this is too much chaos going in for my little brain to handle. Maybe we should simplify the regimen. Anyway, I think that the hydroxychloroquine and the nonsense related it to death, even if it could cause the death of anybody.   [01:22:54] Ashley James: Well, thank you for the clarification. So what we have to understand is if you think hydroxychloroquine isn’t effective to help people with COVID-19, it’s because of what you’ve been told. If it’s because of what you’ve been told in the media in the last year, understand that they’re going off of a fake study, of a study that was completely—   [01:23:21] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, it was made up. You’d have to check the motives of those people. But here’s the other thing. Hydroxychloroquine is an FDA-approved drug. Physicians use drugs for what’s called off-label purpose. In other words, a drug approved for one thing and then used for something else. All right. There’s a drug called Procardia or nifedipine. Nifedipine is the drug name, Procardia is the trade name. It came in an orange capsule and it was useful for blood pressure, for chest pain, for angina from the heart, but it frequently dropped the blood pressure too fast, and so it wasn’t the favorite drug for a lot of people.  But here’s the thing, if somebody came in with really high blood pressure, you could either run down the hall and start an IV and run nitroprusside, nitroglycerin, or a variety of medications into them, which you usually required putting them in the intensive care unit. Or you could go and get a Procardia capsule that was an orange capsule and stick a needle into it, squeeze it, and the fluid that Procardia would come out of the hole. Have the patient tilt their head back, lift their tongue up, and squeeze that under their tongue, and you could watch their blood pressure just nicely come down so they didn’t have a stroke, a hemorrhagic bleeding stroke. Now, since I’m sure the FDA is listening to this, let me assure them and the rest of your listeners that we use that, I use that frequently. It was an off-label use. Completely legal because the drug was FDA-approved and physicians get to practice medicine how they want. So, when a drug is approved for one thing, if a physician believes and their patient is willing—I think that’s called informed consent, not that we’re doing that for vaccines—then you can actually use that medication for the patient for some other purpose. Classic example minoxidil. Minoxidil is a fairly aggressive drug for lowering blood pressure, which you really should have a cardiologist watching you and monitoring your heart to make sure you don’t have what’s called pericarditis as a result—irritation of the lining around the heart because it’s been known to happen. But a side effect was women grew mustaches. Now, what do they use minoxidil for? Put it on the scalp of men’s heads so they grow hair. Not what it was really FDA-designed for or approved for. Just because big pharma doesn’t want to go back for every indication doesn’t mean that a drug can’t be used for something else. Patients used to come into me with their medicines and I would say, well, what are you taking this for? They would say, well, you’re the doctor, don’t you know? I would look at them go, well, I do, but there’s more than one thing you can use this medicine for. I thought maybe you, since you’re taking the medicine, might have a clue why the doctor told you. No, no clue. That’s right because too many people get prescribed medicines without a thorough understanding of why they’re taking them, and too many people take medicines without a thorough understanding of why they’re taking them.   [01:26:42] Ashley James: Right. The state of our healthcare is very sad. Off-label use is common, it’s done all the time.   [01:26:54] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, so what the heck is the FDA and all the other agencies getting involved with this for? And threatening doctors to take away their licenses if they use it and threatening pharmacies and then pharmacists won’t fill prescriptions. I’m sorry, pharmacists, you’re not practicing medicine, you’re practicing pharmacy. Your job is to dispense these medications. It’s not for you to be second-guessing physicians for how they’re treating them. And when pharmacists got to the place where they would say, well, I can fill this prescription for hydroxychloroquine but I need to know why you’re prescribing it. No you don’t, it’s a violation of HIPAA. You’re not the patient’s doctor.   [01:27:37] Ashley James: So when we look at it from this perspective, the conclusion we kind of tend to jump to is the government and the media and other bodies are trying to prevent people from acquiring a treatment that is effective, and then telling them what they should do is, stay in your home, wear a mask, don’t go to restaurants. We’re taking your freedoms away. You have to get a vaccine that, by the way, I don’t even want to call it that because it is not yet. It’s an experiment, it is a trial that you are entering into. This blows my mind. This has not been studied enough to know that it’s safe. The FDA hasn’t approved it, right?  State governments are all saying their own different things, but they’re kind of threatening that your freedoms will not be given back to you unless you enter into this experiment. And then you had mentioned, we’re not really practicing true informed consent when it comes to vaccines.   [01:29:04] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, so people don’t really know what the side effects are and the consequences are. Let’s run through Pfizer, Moderna, and Janssen vaccines as approved under EUA authorization, not FDA approval. Let’s look at what these Emergency Use Authorization documents actually tell us because I think we’ve got enough data. If we read through the emergency use authorization documents, what you hear from everybody is vaccine efficacy, vaccine efficacy. Most people don’t know how vaccine efficacy is determined, so here’s how it’s determined. It’s 1 minus what’s called the risk ratio. Well, what’s the risk ratio? Well, the risk ratio is, how many people got diagnosed with COVID who got vaccinated, divided by the number of people who got COVID who didn’t get vaccinated. One minus that times 100 for percent tells you the vaccine efficacy. You don’t take a drug based upon how often it fails. You take a drug based upon how often it works. If I were to come up to you and say, Ashley, I want you to take this pill to prevent diabetes. Now, it doesn’t work any better than not taking anything, but I want you to take it, would you take it?   [01:30:41] Ashley James: No.   [01:30:44] Dr. Richard Fleming: Okay, good. I actually had one guy once say yes because it’s you, Dr. Fleming. Okay, I missed my point on that one. The point was that he trusted me so he presumed that it wouldn’t do what’s been done.   [01:31:02] Ashley James: That’s a good point though. Just like we trust our mechanic. The mechanic says I have to replace the thingamabob. We’re like, do it.   [01:31:09] Dr. Richard Fleming: Which you should be able to trust your doctor. And I’m going to stand my ground on that one. I’m an MD, I believe you should be able to trust your doctor. I’m not accountable for everybody. But I do believe you should be able to trust your doctor.   [01:31:26] Ashley James: But it’s up to us to pick the right doctor that we trust.   [01:31:29] Dr. Richard Fleming: So let’s look at the emergency use authorization documents and ask the intelligent question. How often will we not get diagnosed with COVID, right? That’s the point. Because the reason why people think they’re getting vaccinated is so they don’t come down with COVID or don’t die. And it’s not that they think they won’t come down with COVID, it’s that they think they won’t get infected. Well, here’s a point, vaccines do not prevent you from getting infected or transmitting the infection. Vaccines expose you to something that you’re likely to see with the infection so that it takes you less time to mount a response. Nothing in that says prevents infection or prevents transmission. All right. Now, if we ask the question of Pfizer and we look at the numbers, and I don’t have them in front of me. You can go read the EUAs, go look at one of the lectures I’ve done or any of the number of things where I pull these out, or come to the June 5th presentation where we’re going to get them in even greater detail.  You look at the numbers, what you will discover is that seven days after Pfizer’s second injection—which is the day that they chose not me, their documents—and you ask that question, how many people did not get diagnosed with COVID who got vaccinated versus how many people who did? You do the statistical analysis—that’s the scientific method of looking at the numbers, not just going, wow, one more than the other. You actually have to look at how much more compared to how many people in the group, and is that statistically significant. When you do that, you will find out that there’s no difference, statistically, in the number of people who were diagnosed with COVID, who got vaccinated or didn’t. If you do the same thing for Moderna, same results. If you do the same thing for Janssen at 14 days, a slight difference that is statistically significant at 14 days, but at 28 days, 2 weeks later, that difference is gone. No difference in the number of deaths. So the EUA documents show that there is no statistical difference in you getting COVID or dying whether you get vaccinated or not. I think that’s the end of the conversation.   [01:34:00] Ashley James: It doesn’t stop you from getting it, it doesn’t stop you from transmitting it. It is maybe making it so that your body can mount a response against it faster.   [01:34:13] Dr. Richard Fleming: Although I would love to see the actual data for that because scientists like myself measure T cells, antibody responses, and titers and none of that data is in the EUA documents, and I have seen minimal, I mean miniscule information in the published scientific literature medical papers. In fact, nothing that actually gives the raw data numbers to look at to go, is this real, is this valid? Just percentages.   [01:34:41] Ashley James: Yeah. And then if we look at VAERS, we can see the injuries from it.   [01:34:48] Dr. Richard Fleming: VAERS is an interesting thing. Interesting information about VAERS is that if you look at this Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a lot of people are not turning in material because they have been told that, oh, that’s not the vaccine. A lot of doctors I’ve heard trying to enter data into it and it’s bouncing back, so they’re not actually getting it in there. Back in the mid-1970s, there was something called swine flu. I was an orderly working in the hospital, taking care of several of these patients who had been vaccinated for swine flu and had something called Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is a neurologic abnormality that affected their ability to walk, talk, eat, drink, and even breathe.  We lost in the United States right around 25 people from the swine flu vaccine, and they pulled it off the market. We’ve lost how many thousands of people now following these SARS vaccines? It’s over 3,000, I’m not sure if it’s over 4,000. I’d have to look at any given day. I’ve kind of given up watching because the death rates, just if you track bars over the decades, you’ll see it’s relatively flat and then just taste this spike in 2021. Are you with me? Why in the 1970s did 25 deaths get the attention of people? And today in 2021 with more deaths than were killed in the Twin Tower attacks, we’re still oblivious to saying, wait a minute, we’re using something that is associated with deaths, it’s associated with inflammation and blood clots. And FYI, that stuff’s in the EUA documents. Janssen, Pfizer, Moderna put this stuff in the EUA documents, these side effects, which raises a point I want to make on safety and efficacy. I want to encourage people to quit saying safety and efficacy. I would like to encourage people to start saying efficacy and safety. Because if it’s not effective, it doesn’t matter whether it’s safe or not, you wouldn’t take it. And the first thing you do in clinical trials, which by the way weren’t done, is to determine if it’s effective. What dose is effective, and then you spread it out beyond phase one. We took the development of a vaccine from a 3- to a 10-year process—it’s typically 10, but we’ve done it in 3—to a less than 10 months process for all 3 of these. In fact, Janssen started the later phase, phase three, before it started 2A, And it goes phase 1, phase 2, phase 3. And so they started the last phase before they started the second phase. My little scientific brain has challenges with that because that’s not how it’s done. But that’s how it was done. It doesn’t matter how the scientific method is supposed to work. What we did is we took an infection that was man-made, we quarantine the healthy, we pan cultured everybody using a test that its inventor said not to use for that purpose, and then we shoveled money into vaccines that we now know don’t statistically change whether you’re going to get COVID or die.   [01:38:53] Ashley James: But they’re still pushing them and they’re opening up younger and younger ages for part of the trial. This is a trial, this is an experiment. The entire population is being pushed to enter a drug experiment.   [01:39:10] Dr. Richard Fleming: Mom and dad, if you’re doing this with your kids, I would never experiment on my kids.   [01:39:20] Ashley James: Thank you. It’s scary.   [01:39:24] Dr. Richard Fleming: Somebody asked me sometime within the last week or so what I thought about it, and anybody who’s listened to me knows that my answers are never really short. I might give you an answer but then I will explain it because I think you’re due that. It’s not because I want to hear myself talk. If you ask me a question, I believe it’s my responsibility not only to give you that answer so that you’re getting an answer as opposed to listening to the explanation, and you’re going, is there an answer in here? So I give you the answer and then I explain it to you so that you know it. Somebody asked me the other day about what I thought about vaccinating children 12 to 18, and I said I’m going to deviate just a little bit. It’s stupid, and then I explained it. If you don’t care about other people, at least care about your children. I understand everybody’s scared. One of the things I emphasize is that people recognize, everybody recognizes that most people are scared. And if you see people that are sheltering in place and are masked up—I mean, I approached a woman at the store yesterday and I thought she was going to jump through the flowers. I mean, she worked behind the flower ornaments at the store, and I simply wanted to ask if they had something in the store. She almost jumped over the counter to get away from me. It’s like, ma’am, okay, got it. You’re scared, I got it.   [01:41:09] Ashley James: This is right back to what you said—I can’t remember the Nazi General, I can’t remember his name.   [01:41:16] Dr. Richard Fleming: Göring.   [01:41:17] Ashley James: During the trials he said, if you put a population in fear, they will lap up whatever it is that is the solution. Whatever that solution you bring they’re just going to eat it right up because you put them in a place of fear. They’re fearing for their life. Same with 9/11. 9/11 was a great example of taking away freedoms because we’re like here, take them, take them. Take all our freedoms. Wiretap us, we don’t care. Surveil us. Take all of our freedoms away, we don’t care. We want to be safe. We want to feel safe.   [01:41:54] Dr. Richard Fleming: The Founding Fathers frequently said, people who will sacrifice freedoms for security will have neither. US Military Army Reed Hospital was very much involved in some of the early research and control of human beings in the 1940s. And for your listeners, I have most of my master’s studies in psychology, experimental not clinical. Which means I’m a researcher and don’t want to sit down and listen to you tell me your problems. The data was very clear, if you take somebody, people, and you tell them there’s a problem that is threatening them. And then you say, but if you do this, you will be safe, and we can measure this so we can tell you if you’re doing it right, and gives you positive reinforcement. That is an extremely effective way of getting people to do whatever you want them to do. If you think that the military does this stuff and then doesn’t apply it, again, the DOD does not work with the Girl Scouts. They’re not selling your cookies.   [01:43:10] Ashley James: Is it true that when you get the vaccine you sign something that says that the DOD is tracking you for the next two years?   [01:43:19] Dr. Richard Fleming: I don’t know because I’m not getting the vaccine so I haven’t seen what they’ve had people sign.   [01:43:25] Ashley James: I listened to a lecture a doctor gave who explained that you are entering into an experiment, but you’re also entering into an experiment that the DOD is watching you.   [01:43:34] Dr. Richard Fleming: Hey, I would love to have that paper. I’d love to see that document. Whoever you did that wants to get that to you and then to me, I would love to have it.   [01:43:42] Ashley James: I will see what I can do, absolutely. I mean, I understand people are entering into experiments, but the DOD is involved in monitoring the results of it?   [01:43:52] Dr. Richard Fleming: The DOD paid $39 million of the $61 million that went to Peter Daszak. And they provided him with a policy advisor.   [01:44:02] Ashley James: You know, always follow the money. Follow the money. That if you ever want to be a researcher and you want to think for yourself and not just believe what you’ve been told, follow the money. Money doesn’t lie. The money trails don’t lie. So there’s a lot of confusion out there. I’m in a bunch of Facebook groups because I’m interested, and you know what, there’s so much misinformation. When we start talking about conspiracies, again, I’m not talking about conspiracy theory, I’m talking about conspiracy factor. It’s a felony or it’s a group of people who are conspiring to do harm, to do something nefarious and not good. We look to see them. We see there’s a conspiracy over here. An example is governments experimenting on their people, this is documented, many governments including our own.  I love the United States. I love this country. I’m incredibly patriotic. I’m originally Canadian. I love living here. I want to live here forever. I look at that American flag and I actually get emotional because of what it represents, because I love the Constitution. I love the Founding Fathers and how they broke away. If you really study the history, I’m from a country that still worships the queen. So to come here, it’s like this is the country that broke away from or tried to break away from that and create something that gave more freedoms to its people. And I believe that we all deserve, that is our right to have freedom as long as we’re not hurting someone else, right? Just like New Hampshire, New Hampshire Live Free or Die, that is what I believe in.   [01:45:48] Dr. Richard Fleming: Iowa is where I’m from originally, and the banner there is Our Liberties We Prize and Our Rights We Will Maintain.   [01:45:55] Ashley James: Right. And each state you find this theme especially in pockets of areas. Certain states are more forward like having an actual motto, but this is what I love about this country. But we have to always protect our rights. We cannot just assume that they’re just given to us. We have to constantly protect them. So anyway, lots of misinformation out there. I’m the most open-minded skeptic. I’m going to listen to information, but then I’m going to use my critical thinking, which we were not taught to critical think. That’s actually something as adults we really should learn how to critically think. It was systematically taken out of the education system when they introduced the Prussian education system. You can study or read John Taylor Gatto’s books, he talks about that and he has lectures on YouTube. He has since passed away, but he has some amazing eight-hour lectures on YouTube and interviews about how they have designed the education system to make good little factory workers or make good little students that think the way they want them to think and not teaching us critical thinking. We have to learn it ourselves. And I know I’m going off on a bit of a tangent here. But what I see in Facebook and these communities is they’re talking about that there’s a fear that if you don’t have the vaccine and you’re in close contact with people that do, that you could also be affected. For example, some polio vaccines shed, and I understand that this isn’t a live virus vaccine, but that there’s concern that people can get even sick or harmed that are not vaccinated from being in close contact with those who have. Is there anything in your research, is that completely phooey or is there some basis to that?   [01:48:04] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, to begin with, my first statement is we don’t have any scientific evidence one way or the other, which is something that raises enough questions that we should be trying to figure out if there’s something going on. I will tell you that back in March of this year when I was giving some lectures here, I was trying to emphasize that I didn’t think that these vaccines—Pfizer, Moderna, or Janssen—merely contain the genetic information for the spike protein. It was my opinion then and it’s my opinion now that there’s insufficient information in just that segment for that structural protein, the spike protein, to get that much of a response. So my proposal was that there is probably something more in these vaccines that enhances that. Now, there is something called transmissible vaccines and something called SAM or self-amplifying mRNA vaccines, hence, SAM. What SAM is, is it has not only the mRNA for what you want built like the spike protein called the structural antigen. But it also contains the earlier part of the genetic sequence that makes an enzyme called replicase to replicate.  Combined together, they produce a substantially larger amount of the spike protein to get an immunologic response. One of the interesting things about getting SARS-CoV-2 person-to-person is that you’ll get,I don’t know how many viruses for a viral load, but it’s not billions. So every one of those viruses gets into your sinuses and potentially the rest of your body and attaches to an ACE2 receptor and starts that sequence I talked about, and it has to have that sequence and it downloads its genetic mRNA. The lipid nanoparticle vaccines Pfizer and Moderna carry 13.1 billion mRNAs, and the Janssen double-stranded DNA carries 50 billion for every one of those inside an adenovirus that attaches. So we’re talking about billions versus thousands. And so what we’re seeing where people were dying with COVID-19 with comorbidities is we’re seeing a different group of people pop up with responses to the vaccines in a younger age group that are healthy, and that should be what we see with that type of phenomenon because if they’re healthy and they haven’t had a hyperinflammatory disease process going on, then you would expect them to mount a response to those billions of genetic sequences that they just injected into themselves.  Bearing in mind that this is a gain-of-function of spike protein so it’s manmade, so it’s a bioweapon. What they’re doing is injecting themselves with billions of genetic code sequences for a man-made bioweapon. Now, whether that is so amplifying the numbers that there’s spike protein that is shedding or something else is shedding, whether it’s that or if they’re doing transmissible vaccines where it’s already been done and studied were certain viruses you can vaccinate the animal and another animal will come up and touch it and be vaccinated by virtue of touching where the vaccine was injected. Their favorite animal they’ve done this and so far the most are bats. They’ve also done some studies in rabies viruses and SARS-CoV-2, and a lot of other viruses where they’re looking at transmissible vaccines. And when you read the papers, they’ll tell you the virus and they’ll tell you the vector. Is it a virus, a lipid nanoparticle, or is it something else getting into this cell? And then they’ll tell you the animal—dog, mouse, human, cat. Did you notice what I mentioned there?   [01:52:35] Ashley James: Human.   [01:52:36] Dr. Richard Fleming: Because for rabies and SARS-CoV-2, the animal that’s listed is human. All the other viruses, they’ve got one of the other animals, but for rabies and SARS-CoV-2, the animal listed is human. Not rhesus monkeys, not humanized mice, not anything else—human. You’re the animal. And this research has been going on for two to three decades funded by our government and the groups of people—Helmsley, Gates, and the Epstein’s of the world for two to three decades. This did not just happen. This has been going on. So, do we need data to really find out what’s going on, absolutely, we do? Can I tell you exactly what’s going on? No, I can’t. Can I tell you this two to three decades worth of work that’s been going on with this type of stuff? Yes, I can.   [01:53:46] Ashley James: Do you know what’s interesting is that the people who are not going to get the vaccine on Facebook and all these groups are afraid of the people who are getting the vaccine and are avoiding them. And the people who are getting the vaccine, there’s a lot of them who are like, I’m going to still wear my mask even though they told me I don’t have to, and I’m going to stay away from those non-vaxxers because they’re going to be contagious. It’s interesting what has been created is this environment of fear—fear your neighbor. We’re the 99%.   [01:54:18] Dr. Richard Fleming: Fear your neighbor, turn on your neighbor, tell on your neighbor.   [01:54:23] Ashley James: It’s very Orwellian. I love Orwell and his work. If you look at it, it’s very sci-fi. I’m a big sci-fi fan and this feels like we’re living in a sci-fi future, it’s very weird. That they’re creating this to fear each other instead of coming together. I mean, when we are divided fighting about political things of the past like abortion rights or race. It’s always been this black and white, let’s fight about two different opposing thoughts. The dichotomy, right? It’s a dilemma. When you have two choices it’s a dilemma, and as long as they keep us fighting—and that’s why I never understood the two-party system.  Being from Canada, there’s like 20 parties or something to choose from. There are three of them that are always sort of somewhat in power, but you have a choice. But here, you’re fighting over one thing or the other—less taxes, more taxes; bigger government, smaller government. And as long as they keep us fighting among ourselves, we won’t rise up together to make a change. We won’t look at what we all stand for. Let’s say you’re one way, pro-vaccine, and I’m the other way, anti-vaccine, or whatever. Let’s say you’re pro-abortion, I’m anti-abortion, whatever it is. We’re on two opposing sides. But if we actually come up to the bigger picture, we both have the same goal. We both want health, right? We both want to protect people. We want freedom. When we look at the bigger picture, we all actually want the same thing. We have to come up and see, don’t let fear control us.  But it’s very interesting and I feel this has been created, this fear has been orchestrated to keep us from questioning, from thinking for ourselves because that’s what it looks like when you look at the environment the last year and all this craziness that goes on. And now that people are saying that they’re going to stay away from each other and they’re afraid of each other, even though those that are not getting the vaccine are afraid of all the other people. There’s so much fear keeping us silent and keeping us from learning or questioning. So we got to come out of fear. So it’s interesting that there is a potential for someone who’s unvaccinated to be exposed to in close quarters to someone who’s been vaccinated. That there can be something that transmits. I saw some things printed out from one of the vaccines as part of their trials that talked about it, but I don’t know enough of the science to completely understand it.   [01:57:23] Dr. Richard Fleming: I’ve seen some of that too and I have responded to people by saying, well, it doesn’t really say this is happening, but it does raise a question in my mind scientifically as to why those statements were made.   [01:57:43] Ashley James: You and I could talk for hours, I realized we’ve been talking for quite a while. Seriously, this could be a 16-hour interview. I want to respect your time. I love learning from you, I hope the listeners do too. Actually, I know they will because our listeners are just like me wanting to know as much as possible to support their health, and they’re used to long interviews. I lost my sense of smell—it was kind of freaky—having COVID, and I tripled my zinc. I was taking 30mg a day, and I tripled it. I took one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening— spread it out. And two days later I got my sense of smell back. I thought that was interesting. My husband lost his sense of smell too. I told him to triple his zinc, he did, and it came back right away. I thought that was really interesting. What are your thoughts on homemade quinine? The simmering of the grapefruit peel and then drinking that a few ounces a day. Is there any basis that if someone couldn’t get their hands on hydroxychloroquine, is that chemically similar enough to hydroxychloroquine—homemade quinine?   [01:58:55] Dr. Richard Fleming: The bottom line answer is I don’t know. One of the things hopefully your listeners are picking up and you as well is that I’m science-oriented. And in the absence of scientific information that gives me an answer on something I won’t pretend to know it because I don’t know it.   [01:59:15] Ashley James: Absolutely.   [01:59:17] Dr. Richard Fleming: Even many of the medications, I don’t know whether they work or not. I know people who claim that certain drugs work, but they didn’t measure actual tissue effects, so I don’t know whether it worked. Half the people who received nothing as outpatients got better, so did they get better because they got nothing? I mean, an outcome doesn’t mean that it’s the result of what you did, unless you can measure something there because there are all sorts of other variables that go on that you don’t know. I mean, was it something else that happened or a combination of things that happened? And that’s why science is supposed to be more rigorous and not guessing. One of the comments I make about Remdesivir is, well, I know it got cleared EUA for SARS-CoV-2. But in our study, if somebody did not have an aminoquinoline or anything else before they get randomly assigned to receive Remdesivir, 28% of them got better on it. You can take that for whatever it’s meaningful to you, but to myself as a research scientist physician, if you can get better, get worse, or stay the same, you have a 33% and 3% chance of each, and 28% is performing at less than chance. But, again, thanks to the powers that be, it got cleared for SARS-CoV-2. And I would argue that there’s no scientific data that shows that it’s beneficial. I don’t know if the home approach for trying to get an equivalent aminoquinoline compound out of that would work, number one; two would be adequate dosage-wise to have an effect, I don’t know. I just don’t know.   [02:01:24] Ashley James: Well, I appreciate that. I’ve been getting the feeling since I’ve been following your YouTube videos that you have strong ethics, you’re honest, and you’re here to show us the truth whether we like you or not. I like you, you keep showing me the truth. I like you. Listeners should go to flemingmethod.com, absolutely continue to follow Dr. Richard Fleming. To conclude our interview. You’ve done so much research around cancer, cardiovascular health, the cause of pretty much all the major illnesses, which is inflammation—it all starts with inflammation. This is what you’ve been saying for years because this is what you see in your research. What can we do to decrease inflammation in the body? What’s really effective, or maybe point us to some resources?   [02:02:19] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, other than being self-serving and saying go look on Amazon. As far as diet and lifestyles are concerned, again, my parents would probably have a pretty good handle on this, and they didn’t have to go to school like I did. To do the basic things that make sense, which is to not overeat. You actually need about 10 calories per pound per day for your caloric intake. It does not change much from that. Maybe 10%, 20%, 30% if you are a heavy construction worker, which I doubt many people are these days. For total caloric intake, I’ve always advised people to cut down on saturated fat. Saturated fat really doesn’t do much for the human body except provide calories. I have told people not to eat a lot of refined processed foods, primarily because it’s very easy to consume a large number of calories. If I asked a second grader or a fifth grader what happens if you eat too many calories, they’re usually pretty smart. They’ll say, yeah, you get fat. I asked most adults that and I get the most interesting answers, many of which are not related to getting fat. Clearly, smoking does not help your body. I’ve not seen a single study that says that smoking is good for people. I mean, I know that it’s a habit that people learn. It’s a drug, it’s addicting, but you can quit. You just have to decide what it is that motivates you for doing that. I think people should exercise. I like to run, I like to fence, I like to downhill ski, I like to scuba dive. I don’t suggest everybody do that. A lot of people would kill themselves with some of those sports, but you need to be doing something. I’ve always encouraged people to find something at least three times a week for half an hour like running, bicycling, or just walking, and then do something else to be active on the other days. I mean, they used to be that people were so much more active. Clearly, this sheltering in place—a term that I just love because it has very little to do with what you’re doing—did nothing but inactivate people, cause them to eat more, get stressed, and not take care of themselves.   [02:04:50] Ashley James: Increasing comorbidities, which if then they got COVID-19 would increase their chances of dying or having a much harder time with it.   [02:05:00] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, a very well thought out plan. So those types of things. Again, you don’t need nearly as much protein as people think you need. Most people need about 40 grams of protein a day, and plant protein. Your body doesn’t know where those amino acids come from, whether they’re animal products or plant products. I kid you not. When you eat arginine, it doesn’t come with a label that says plant-based versus animal-based. I chuckled at the milk comment earlier because I’ve gotten way too much abuse from people for saying, not sure why you’re drinking this. We consume more calcium in the United States than the vast majority of people, but what we’ve discovered is that the more protein you have, the more it leeches the calcium out of your bone. The studies that have actually looked at that show that about 800mg a day of calcium with exercise including aerobic and anaerobic—so in other words, exercising your heart and heart rate and then exercising your muscles—are the types of things that keep bone formed and bone forms along what’s called lines of stress. If you use a muscle and a bone, it causes stress along that to be activated and that will lay down the calcium. If you don’t do that, you end up with weak bones, brittle bones, and they break over the course of time. If you get a hip fracture when you’re older, about half the people will die from the hip fracture because not only is there a broken bone with immobility and blood clots from that, but you can also get fat released from the bones and it can go through your blood vessels. It’s called a fat embolism, and it can kill you. That type of thing. And I encourage people to be interactive with other individuals because socially, there’s quite a positive feedback for people who get out, and they’re mentally, physically, and (dare I say) spiritually, but that gets into another realm of activity that is positive for people. All of that has been shown to reduce stress levels and improve immune functions. This is the type of stuff that you don’t need somebody like me telling you about. I never thought in my early life I would have done as much research into these areas as I’d done. It demonstrated some interesting research over the years and I think it was helpful. I mean, it’s certainly provided some of the insight needed to better understand inflammation and disease. A variety of diseases proved to be fortuitous between that and the patent to investigate SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.   [02:07:55] Ashley James: What kind of diet do you eat to prevent disease? Can I just eat like you? I want to like you. First of all, you look so young. You look great in your videos, so I know you’re doing something right.   [02:08:13] Dr. Richard Fleming: I got my hair cut the other day so I think I look better.   [02:08:18] Ashley James: Well, how do you eat? I want to know how you eat for preventing disease and staying healthy.   [02:08:23] Dr. Richard Fleming: Very boring for what most people do. A disappointment, I’m not a red meat eater. I don’t even have a taste for red meat, and that’s not to harm people who say that just cut the fat off so you’re not ingesting the fat. You don’t need the fat, I know you like the flavor of it, but your body doesn’t need it. As far as meats or proteins are concerned, I do like more lentils and lean meats. I would argue that I’m actually more interested in fish than anything else. I like sushi. A lot of fruits and vegetables, and I always remind people that apples, oranges, and bananas are not the only vegetables out there. There’s this whole list of things that if you walk up and down the stores—although not as much today as there had been, but those days will return—you’ll find a whole bunch of things that actually grew in the ground that you can eat. It’s just amazing. They’re called fruits and vegetables. I avoid canned foods like the bubonic plague, which I thought was a particularly appropriate pun there for SARS-CoV-2 and the plague because I don’t need the added salt. I don’t add salt to my food. People are used to that because it’s flavored. The reason why people are used to the flavor is that when people settled this country in the United States, they started down the east coast and as they moved westward, well, if you pull up vegetables and fruit they only last so long. So people took animals with them. And then to keep those meats from spoiling, they originally used a lot of pepper in Europe to pepper the foods so the meats would not spoil and become infected with bacteria and kill people. And then, they discovered this really cheap thing in China called salt, sodium chloride, and they found that it did the same thing. So what our ancestors did is they settled this country in North America was they would then salt the food to preserve it so bacteria didn’t grow, and over the course of time, people got used to that flavor. Many people are of the confused notion that that’s what they need to actually make the meats or whatever foods they’re eating taste normal. You don’t need to add salt to it. If you’re adding salt to it for flavor, you’ve lost your taste and not due to SARS-CoV-2. Find something else to season it with, there are tons of seasonings, and you’ll appreciate what foods really taste like. Fruits and vegetables are definitely high. Do I eat bread? Yes, I do eat bread. I’m not gluten-free. I’m not certain that many people are really gluten intolerant. My ancestry is Scandinavian, so I would argue I’m probably very lactose intolerant. I’m not a big milk drinker. I like yogurt, but I can’t stand the taste of milk. That’s just a personal preference.  My children grew up with skim milk when they had it. I would prefer that they drink orange juice, but that’s up to them. I had an ex father-in-law who was a dentist who insisted that everybody needed milk for calcium for their teeth. I just had to look at him and say, where did they teach you this in dental school? Well, I was in dental school. You need calcium, but nowhere other than perhaps if the tooth falls out is there a benefit of milk for a tooth. Because if you immerse it in milk it does protect it pretty well. Why get it to a dentist if there’s a chance of it being implanted? But that’s the misperception that they were taught, and so go for it. Sokolof I did know, he was the guy who bought a million-dollar—the first of the year football game. I forget what it’s called. The once-a-year football game.   [02:13:12] Ashley James: The big one, the Super Bowl.   [02:13:14] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, Super Bowl. Thank you.   [02:13:16] Ashley James: It’s okay.   [02:13:19] Dr. Richard Fleming: I remember that Phil Sokolof, who passed away many years ago now, bought a $1 million 30-second ad so he could take a container of milk, look at the camera, and throw it over his shoulder. Well, you have a million dollars to throw away on that cute commercial. I don’t know if that answered the question for you.   [02:13:43] Ashley James: I liked that you brought up that there’s only a certain amount of calories we really need. That we can get a lot of our protein, we can get all of our protein, all of our amino acids from plants if we wanted to. We can choose to completely eat plants. If you’re going to choose to eat animals, then focus on the leaner ones and avoid things like milk because there’s actually no nutritional benefit to milk. There’s plenty of studies showing that it’s actually a harmful effect to the immune system. It creates phlegm.  I mean, you can get all that calcium and all those minerals that you’re supposedly getting from the cow, which actually, how the cows are getting it is they’re being supplemented. Because these cows are all grazing in minerally rich soil. They’re not eating grass that’s grown in minerally rich soil. You’re buying factory farm milk where the cows never see the light of day for five years while they’re being impregnated constantly, and they’re being forced to give up the milk. And then they’re being supplemented, they’re being given calcium supplements. So why don’t you just avoid the milk, take a calcium supplement, skip the middleman?   [02:14:53] Dr. Richard Fleming: Bypass the middleman?   [02:14:56] Ashley James: Right. Bypass the torturing of an animal. Seriously, it is. It’s animal torture, you don’t need it. Go drink some almond milk, you’re going to get lots of great nutrients, or water. Water is wonderful for you. Yeah, you had mentioned Amazon. You have books on Amazon. Stop Inflammation Now! is on paperback on Amazon, and the links to all your books and stuff are definitely going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. We need to know this information. I love talking to researchers because that’s where we get the real stuff from. Don’t listen to mainstream media. There’s an agenda behind it, they’re being paid.  You don’t like money being involved because money corrupts truth oftentimes because there’s an agenda. You just want to show us the truth without an agenda being behind it. So I really appreciate how candid you are, and I’m looking forward to your talk that’s coming up on June 5th. Listeners got to go to flemingmethod.com. Click on the event 2021 and get that information, especially if you’re going to be in Dallas, Texas or gain access to the video footage. Are you going to live stream it or are you going to record it and provide it later?   [02:16:11] Dr. Richard Fleming: We’re going to record it and we’re hoping to live stream it. We’re talking with a number of people right now who’ve expressed an interest in live streaming it, and we have people all around the world that have asked for that. Our hopes are that we’ll not only be able to live stream it, but receive questions from people around the world at the time that’s happening and then filter that through other people, not myself. Other people that are sitting to the side looking at the questions and going, okay, let’s make this one of the questions that we answer. There’s no way in the world for me to respond to all the questions that come in.   [02:16:55] Ashley James: Right. I see you have a 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM time slot for Q&A, I have a feeling you’re going to be there longer than 1:30 PM.   [02:17:03] Dr. Richard Fleming: Well, I think that’s a hard cutoff.   [02:17:09] Ashley James: Well, then it’ll be a challenge. Everyone around the world, I challenge you to come up with the coolest question to get submitted. It’s like winning a prize. So that’s going to be a lot of fun. You’re going to talk about the real science behind viruses, vaccines, and treatments. We didn’t really even get into your research around how bacteria and viruses affect inflammation and thus affect cardiovascular disease. You did touch on it. There’s a lot more information on videos that you’ve released. There’s this two-hour one you did, that’s how I found you and I just absolutely fell in love with your work. I’ll try to find it and link that in this episode as well. But that’s going to be a great talk, so I’m really looking forward to you doing that on June 5th. Is there anything that you’d like to wrap up today’s interview? Anything you’d like to leave the listener with?   [02:18:06] Dr. Richard Fleming: I think it’s important that people realize that they’re able to make sense out of this, even though viruses are not something that most people are familiar with. But I think there’s a common sense approach to understanding something. Despite all the advantages I’ve had academically, research experience, medical experience, and even a little legal experience that I’ve had in my life, I just always return (believe it or not) to my parents and my grandparents. I ask just very fundamental questions, which is what would my parents or grandparents think about this? They had a really good sense of looking at something and saying that something just was not quite right. And that has actually been very useful in my life, both from a research and medical perspective. But as far as sorting a lot of this out with SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, which is the agendas of people, what they’re saying, and why are things inconsistent this go around compared to other things that we’ve all experienced. Which is, why were treatments shut down? I mean, treatments were just simply shut down. Why were vaccines pushed from day one? Why did we quarantine the healthy versus the sick? Why did we pan culture everybody when we’ve never done that before? I mean, I guess what we’ve demonstrated is that, yup, it’s a respiratory virus and it passes from person to person. Okay, that was just outstanding. We could have used those resources much more efficiently to treat people, get them in and out of the hospital, and save lives. But instead, this was the approach. I think taking my parent’s approach, the common sense approach is the way to do it. The goal of the website and these presentations isn’t for you to just listen to me and go, well, he says to do that, that’s what we should do. If there’s any credibility into what somebody is telling you, you should be able to listen to what they’re doing and look at the information yourself and say, yup, that makes sense.   [02:20:29] Ashley James: Okay, I have one more question. I’m sorry. If we could fire Fauci and put you in his place, if you had Fauci’s job tomorrow, what would be your advice to the American people, to the government? Right now, his advice is to get a vaccine, wear a mask, and stay inside your house. What is your advice if you had his job?   [02:20:59] Dr. Richard Fleming: I’ve answered that question as to what I would have done when SARS first hit. Much to the chagrin, many people don’t like the answer that I gave to that one. What I would do immediately at this point in time is I would, the first thing I would do is I would immediately stop the vaccines, and I would demand that they be run through animal model trials because the animal model trials are more alarming than we’ve talked about in this program, number one. Number two, I would reinvest in emergency funding of research treatments to get a better handle on this, and I would allow physicians to treat them based upon the best knowledge base that they had available with agreement and informed consent from their patients. Quite possibly, I guess the first thing I would do is I would immediately shut down gain-of-function research where there’s an argument for benefit of gain-of-function research, it has gone way astray. The implementation of that has not been what it was meant for. I would immediately pull off funding and shut down all projects, demand that the vaccines be placed under animal studies to demonstrate efficacy and then safety long before we gave it to people. Make certain that physicians and patients were allowed to use the treatments that we know are available, and then invest massively in clinical trials to validate the treatments that there’s already scientific evidence for, and to expand that, to include medical treatments that have not been considered. So those would be my first three things.   [02:22:58] Ashley James: I love it. Oh gosh, can I vote you in, please?   [02:23:02] Dr. Richard Fleming: I would probably be assassinated.   [02:23:09] Ashley James: So, we need to wake up. We really need to think for ourselves. Please, please, please, please think for yourself and just become an open-minded skeptic. Gather information, question everything. Question what Dr. Fleming says, question everything.   [02:23:24] Dr. Richard Fleming: Yeah, it doesn’t hurt my feelings.   [02:23:26] Ashley James: Yeah, seriously, question everything, but keep taking in the information. And also, always follow the money, follow the money trail. The doctors have never before been treated this way, and all of a sudden, their hands are tied when it comes to treating their patients. It’s very weird. Well, it’s also that way with cancer treatments in the United States, that’s a whole other topic. But doctors, their hands are tied when it comes to treating cancer patients, and follow the money trail there as well. But for the majority of illnesses, we’ve never seen this happen before. This is unprecedented. And then now, it’s like a global experiment. We’re going to stay safe, we’re going to stay healthy, we’re going to keep preventing disease as much as possible by eating healthy and lowering inflammation in the body. Getting your book and going to your website, flemingmethod.com, and continuing to gain learning from you. Especially also YouTube, I love your YouTube lectures where you have slides.   [02:24:38] Dr. Richard Fleming: They have pulled those down.   [02:24:40] Ashley James: That’s why I couldn’t find it. I was looking for that two-hour one, I couldn’t find it.   [02:24:47] Dr. Richard Fleming: We have several on Rumble, and then there are several people like Steve Bannon and David Clements and Del Bigtree that have been interviewing lately, and [inaudible 02:24:56]—just a wide variety. We’ve done some interviews out of Italy and Australia. I have a French interview later on this week. There’s a variety of ways that people are getting different messages out there, they’re just having to use alternative channels.   [02:25:13] Ashley James: Yeah. Well, hopefully you’ll be able to host those videos that you’ve created on your website, or like you said, you got it on Rumble. Get it on LBRY. It’s done through the blockchain, they can’t shut it down. But there are ways to host videos that are unmessable, they can’t mess with it.   [02:25:39] Dr. Richard Fleming: I’m hoping we get a very good turnout on June 5th to help get some information out to people.   [02:25:45] Ashley James: Yes, let’s do it. Let’s all make sure we’re there, either in person or virtually on June 5th. And again, all the information is on flemingmethod.com/event-2021. Dr. Richard Fleming Ph.D., MD, JD, I love your work. I pray that you are safe and that no one comes after you, me, or anyone that you talk to for bringing this information out to the public. They certainly don’t want it to be out to the public, and that is deeply, deeply concerning. Stay safe. Thank you so much for this interview, and I really appreciate the work you’re doing.   [02:26:28] Dr. Richard Fleming: My pleasure, Ashley. Thank you for the invitation.   [02:26:30] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Richard Fleming. Please visit his website flemingmethod.com to watch the event. When I interviewed him, it was before the event. I thought I would have enough time to publish this before his event, but unfortunately, with our very quick move, we had to move very quickly out of the house we were in. I didn’t have enough time, and so now I’m publishing it after his event. But like I said in the introduction to today’s interview, in case you missed me saying that, the good news is you can go and watch the entire four-hour lecture, which I highly recommend checking out and just absorb the information. Listen, my stance is don’t blindly trust anyone. Question everything, even question the guests I have. What I like about Dr. Fleming is he has all of the research behind what he says, and he invites you to check it out. You can download a 100+ page PDF with all of the research that he shows, all the studies he shows, all the information out there so that you can come to your own conclusions. I really like it when guests point us in the direction of resources so that we can do our own digging and affirm what direction we want to go with our health. I believe that we need to be proactive when it comes to everything we put in our body—be it food or medicine—and that we need to look into research instead of blindly following or trusting anyone. Please don’t blindly trust or follow anyone, me, your doctor—anyone. We should look into information, and that’s why I say I’m an open minded skeptic. I’m going to be skeptical, but I’m going to be open-minded enough to look into the information and be open-minded enough to really check in.  I have to do an ego check. Do I put my ego aside enough to humble myself to be wrong? Is it okay that my belief system can be challenged? Is that okay? Some people it’s not okay. Some people want to blindly, no matter what, trust their belief system even when new evidence comes out that challenges it, and that’s where we can get ourselves in trouble when it comes to health because that then becomes dogma and not actual science. So are you following science, which science is always changing as new information comes out, or are you following dogma, which is a belief system that would negate new information? We all have to do kind of an ego check and just ask ourselves, am I okay with my belief system being challenged in the light of new information? I know that you are to a certain extent because you’re here listening to this podcast, so you’re seeking information, you’re excited to seek information. So just remember, being humble, being open minded, and being skeptical are really good strengths to have or to work on for your health. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this information with those you care about. Please join us in the Learn True Health Facebook group, what a great community we’ve been building over the last five years. I feel so privileged and so humbled to be in your presence, to work with all of you there at the Learn True Health Facebook group. Right now we have our community and in a Facebook group, and maybe in the future, we’ll have it somewhere else. Maybe I’ll host it somewhere else, but for now, several thousand listeners are there. Please come join us, it’s a wonderful place to be. Ask questions and also use the search function there to see past conversations as well. Be sure to look up Dr. Richard Fleming and his website flemingmethod.com and check out his amazing four-hour lecture. I’d love for you to come join the Facebook group or if you already joined, come into the Facebook group afterward and let’s have a discussion about this episode today and also his four-hour lecture. What do you guys think? Let’s talk about it. All right, thanks so much for being a listener and sharing these episodes. Let’s keep an open mind. One of my past mentors would say, keep your mind so open your brain could fall out. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Get Connected with Dr. Richard Fleming! Website Linkedin YouTube Twitter Books by Dr. Richard Fleming Is COVID-19 a Bioweapon?: A Scientific and Forensic Investigation CoVid-19 Made Extremely Simple (Unmasking CoViD Book 6) The Truth About the Diet Grifters in the Era of CoVid-19 CoVid-19 Is Not a Hoax. Exposing The Real Grifters Unmasking CoViD – Part 1  ;

Dr. Brownstein's study that he published about his findings with treating patients with Covid-19 can be found here: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Novel-Approach-to-Treating-COVID-19-Using-and-Brownstein-Ng/c1805feeee6e9e68a68a0a0071e98e67e7062399 And the PDF can be downloaded here: https://cf5e727d-d02d-4d71-89ff-9fe2d3ad957f.filesusr.com/ugd/adf864_cc5004cfa84a46d3b1a0338d4308c42c.pdf Find LTH on LBRY: https://lbry.tv/@Learn-True-Health Find LTH on Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/kGf34VnWr7H9 Join the LTH community: learntruehealth.com/group   Dr. David Brownstein on Proven Effective and Natural Protocols for Respiratory and Covid Viruses https://www.learntruehealth.com/dr-david-brownstein-proven-effective-natural-protocols-respiratory-covid-viruses   Highlights: Importance of hormones to overall health Importance of maintaining adequate iodine levels Natural therapy for COVID How to maintain a properly functioning immune system   In this episode, we have Dr. David Brownstein. Dr. David Brownstein is a family physician that specializes in using vitamins, minerals, herbs, and natural hormones, and utilizes nutritional therapies. He shares how he went from being a doctor practicing conventional medicine to becoming a holistic doctor. He talks about how he has helped his patients recover from COVID and gives some tips on strengthening our immune system so we can have a good immune response to stressors or illnesses. Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love Dr. David Brownstein who has a very interesting story that he shares right off the bat at the beginning of the show. I don’t want to spoil it, so you’re going to have to listen to it because it really blew my mind. But his story is what got him into holistic medicine, and holistic medicine is where he ended up with a bunch of patients in his clinic who had COVID. He used the same tools he’s been using for several decades, and here we are with this amazing study that he published and the FTC coming after him. Just so much crazy information, I’m so excited for you to hear today’s interview. I hope you listen to the last interview I did with Dr. Paul Thomas, and I hope you also listen to the next interview I’m going to be publishing. It’s a three-part series. It just so happens I did these interviews and I thought they really go well together. Even though it’s similar information, it’s also very different.  This doctor used a more holistic natural approach to helping his patients boost their immune systems and fight viral infections with great success. And then the next interview I’m going to be publishing one of the things we do talk about is his 1800 person study using pharmaceutical drugs very successfully at supporting the body’s ability to fight this specific viral infection that we are facing at the moment.  Please find the Learn True Health Podcast on BitChute as well as LBRY. And you can just search for BitChute, search for LBRY and find the Learn True Health podcast. You can follow me there, you can follow me on iTunes, or most other podcast directories. But if I become censored because of the information that my guests are sharing, I just want you to know that you can find me in these other places. You can find the podcast in these other places where they still believe in freedom of speech. You can also find us, our whole community, in fact. Join the Learn True Health Facebook group. It is a fantastic community of very supportive, holistic-minded people, and I just love the community we’ve built there. So you can come and join us there. I don’t have any plans to switch the group to another platform, but with censorship and with holistic practitioners being de-platformed these days and holistic reporters and podcasters being de-platformed, we might have to at some point. So hopefully, all this content is protected by freedom of speech. I’m just here to help holistic doctors and really successful doctors, successful in that their procedures are successfully helping people to gain health. I’m creating a platform for them to give you the information you need so you can make great health choices for yourself. I’m so excited to continue to do that, and I hope and pray that everything we do here, we get to continue doing. It does concern me that the people I’ve been following have been taken off of platforms like Facebook and YouTube. It does concern me, and these are people who are also sharing similar information. So, I hope that we can all stay sound, healthy, and safe, and also be able to continue to learn and grow from all these wonderful experts and guests. But do follow us at places like BitChute, LBRY, and our Facebook group. And you could also join the email list by going to learntruehealth.com and the pop-up pops up, just put your email in there. I do not spam. I send very few emails, but you will get notifications from us should there be any news that’s worthy for you to know about. Thank you so much for being a listener and sharing this podcast with those you care about. Today’s episode not only touches on COVID and supporting the immune system, it also talks about heart health, hormone health, and how hormones directly affect heart health. So share this episode with those who care about that may have those concerns as well and want to learn more about that. Come to Learn True Health Facebook group after listening to this and share what you think. This episode really blew my mind, so I’m really excited to start a conversation with you guys about today’s interview. Have a fantastic rest of your day.   [00:04:59] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 462. I am so excited for today’s guest. We are in for such a treat. We have Dr. David Brownstein with us who’s an MD, board-certified family physician, and you got into natural and alternative therapies. I’m always fascinated because medical school does not necessarily like the holistic approach and doesn’t necessarily teach it or focus on it. I’ve met a lot of MDs that their training kind of led them to [inaudible 00:05:43] it or almost look down upon holistic or alternative methods. I would love to know just jumping into this conversation, and I’m very excited because you have some books that I know my listeners would absolutely love. Your latest one, A Holistic Approach to Viruses, which of course, isn’t that just the big buzz for the last year? But you also have Iodine: Why You Need It, Why You Can’t Live Without It. I mean, we can have you on again for an entire episode about that. You have a book specializing in vitamin B12 for your health, which, again, I would love to have you on multiple times because every book you have, I’m like, oh my gosh, that’s an entire interview. The list goes on and on. The Guide to a Gluten-free Diet, The Guide to a Dairy-free Diet, The Soy Deception, I mean, I have a feeling we’re going to be learning a lot from you. And then Ozone: The Miracle Therapy. I have listed all of your books, they’re all very interesting. But what I really want to know just jumping into our interview today is what happened as a medical doctor that had you go into that holistic realm, that had you go, I really want to help people, maybe natural therapies instead of just jumping to a drug right away? What happened as a doctor that had you go this route?   [00:07:09] Dr. David Brownstein: Oh, Ashley, thanks for having me on. And I didn’t start off as a holistic physician, I’ve turned into one. You know why? My career in medicine started as a little boy when I used to go to the doctor for severe asthma and just decided I want to be a doctor and help people. So I geared my undergraduate training at the University of Michigan for going to med school. I went to Wayne State University School of Medicine, and I wanted to model myself after my family doctor. I didn’t come from a holistic household. We didn’t take vitamins in our household. We didn’t do anything holistic. We went to the doctor when we were sick, we took whatever they gave us. We didn’t question anything in my household. That’s what I thought I wanted to do in medicine. So I finished a family practice residency and started practicing conventional medicine as I was taught in my training. My turning point came around six months into that when, for a couple of nights, I just lost sleep for an unknown reason and became anxious after losing sleep for an unknown reason this anxiety percolated up in me. I remember getting ready to go for work the next day after the sleepless nights and my wife, Allison, was getting ready to go to work. I blurted out to her, “I don’t want to be a doctor anymore.” It’s the first thing I ever said to her about it.  Now, she has known me since I was 18. I had $100,000 in student loans. I always talked about being a physician, this was all I wanted to be. I want to be a family doctor. So she says to me, what’s wrong? And I said I’m not really helping people. I’m just prescribing all these drugs that don’t really work. I’m prescribing more drugs to treat the side effects from the first drugs, and they’re not getting better. I just said to her, I can’t do this for the next 30 or 40 years. She said, Well, why don’t you do another residency? And I said, I’m not doing that again, one was enough. What was happening in my life at that time was my father was really sick. He had his first heart attack at age 40, he had a second heart attack at 42. Over the next 20 years. He had two bypass surgeries, he had numerous angioplasties, he was on 12 medications for heart disease, cholesterol, hypertension, and diabetes. My dad had suffered from continuous angina over a 20+ year time period. Every day he was having chest pain, it was getting worse. If he did any mild activity, he would start popping nitroglycerin pills like they were candy.  We were all just waiting for the phone call that he had died because he looked so bad. He was pale and pasty. My dad wasn’t the best patient either. He could eat like the best of them, he was overweight, he smoked, and never exercised much. Those sleepless nights came, I didn’t really know what was going on. I go to work that day and I happen to see a patient. The patient is friends with Allison and I. We’ve gone out and his wife works with Allison. He was bothering me to meet his chiropractor. At that time of my medical career, I never met a chiropractor, I never went to one, never knew what they did. In my medical training, I was taught to not send patients to chiropractors, they were dangerous, and that was it. So I never sent a patient to a chiropractor, and I used to actively tell them don’t go because they were dangerous, even though I never knew what the philosophy was, never knew what they did. But the patient, Michael, was bothering me to meet his chiropractor, and the chiropractor really helped him out in much more so than back pain through taking some supplements and things like that. So in my anxiety and my lack of sleep state, I took the phone number from him. I remember I called the chiropractor at lunchtime, we set up a dinner meeting for a couple of days the following week. Tuesday comes around for dinner with the chiropractor, and I tell Allison when I get home from work, I’m going to cancel. I don’t want to waste my time with a chiropractor. She said that would be rude, you need to go because you made this date. She said, be nice. I met the chiropractor, his name was Dr. Robert Radtke. He was using nutritional therapies and he was talking functional biochemistry to me much more so than I knew, way more than I knew at that time. He brought a book Healing with Nutrition by Jonathan Wright who was an allopathic physician. I read that book. I took the book home. First off, Dr. Radtke and I hit it off. He was much more functional biochemistry than I did. He was very smart. He was telling me stories of using nutrition to heal his patients and to help them along. Either Dr. Radtke was lying to me, or there were other therapies out there that I wasn’t exposed to. So I took that book home. I read that book until late at night. The next morning, I called my dad up before I went to work and said, I want you to come in the office, I want to do a few blood tests on you. I checked two blood tests on him based on talking to Dr. Radtke and what I read in that book—his thyroid hormone levels and his testosterone levels. A few days later, I got his blood work back. His testosterone levels were below detectable limits, they weren’t even reading on the lab test. No one had bothered to check that. His thyroid levels were in the reference range but in the very low part of the reference range. No one had bothered to check anything but a TSH before. So I checked his other thyroid levels of T3, T4, and thyroid antibodies. So based on that lab work, I started reading and I put my dad on two things. I put him on natural testosterone, and natural thyroid hormone, desiccated thyroid hormone. Within seven days, his 20+ year history of angina melted away and never returned. Stopped using nitros. He actually called me that day. He said, I want you to know, I haven’t used the nitro today. I’m like, why? And he said, because I don’t have chest pain, it seems like maybe it’s going away. I followed up with him the next couple of days, that was gone, never to return. Instead of looking pale and pasty, he started to look pink on his face and looked healthier. Thirty days later, I checked his cholesterol levels, which were stuck in the 300s on cholesterol-lowering medication. Without changing any of his bad habits, his cholesterol fell below 200. All these inflammatory markers improved his blood work.  Once I saw the changes in my dad, I decided that’s what I wanted to do in medicine. I decided I was going to be a holistic doctor. I didn’t really know what it was, but I knew I couldn’t do this in a conventional office. I went to the partner of the practice and said, I need to leave. He said, why, you’re going to be a partner in a few months? I said, I want to do holistic medicine. He goes, what’s that? I’m like, I’m not really sure yet, but I’m going to figure it out. He said, well, why don’t you do it here? I said, No, I can’t do it here. I need my own office. So I left and that’s how it started. Since I treated my dad with natural testosterone, natural thyroid hormone and he made such a dramatic improvement, every patient that I’ve seen for the last 27, 28 years has been given a full thyroid, full hormonal workup, and full nutritional evaluation. That’s how it all began. The first book I wrote was The Miracle of Natural Hormones in 1998. I’ve featured my father in that book because of the response he had. Overcoming thyroid disorders came shortly after that because of the response I had with him and seeing all the thyroid effects. One thing led to another and it was the best thing I did in medicine. Now I know biochemistry much better. You learn it in medical school, you learn it in undergraduate school, but you don’t learn to utilize it in your practice. You learn it to pass the test and then you forget it. Now, I’m studying biochemistry every night. I’ve got biochemistry charts up in my office at home. My goal is to support a patient’s biochemistry, which leads to support for the immune system and leads to better health. It was the best thing I did in medicine. Medicine went from being I can’t do this for the next 30 to 40 years to I’m almost 30 years into it and hope I got another 30 ahead of me to do it. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.   [00:16:20] Ashley James: Now, the Center for Holistic Medicine in West Bloomfield, Michigan, that’s your clinic?   [00:16:28] Dr. David Brownstein: That’s mine. I left his office and that’s what I formed when I left that partner’s office. And then lo and behold, about eight years later, I liked him. He and I kept playing tennis and I kept bugging him about, hey, Rick, this is a better way to practice medicine, this is way better. I finally convinced him eight years later, he just walked away from this practice and joined me. There are three doctors in the practice now. We have a nurse practitioner and a physician assistant. We have a busy holistic practice.   [00:17:00] Ashley James: I love it. I’ve been in this space studying intensely holistic medicine for 10 years. Applying it to my own life first and then I became a health coach and I’ve been working with being mentored by Naturopathic physicians for the last 10 years, I have never heard of heart disease being caused by and also then cured by balancing testosterone and thyroid. I mean, it makes sense, but I have no idea what the process is. Why is it that his thyroid was out of balance, his testosterone was out of balance, and he had heart disease because of it? Why is that?   [00:17:48] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, it’s a good question. It took me some research after I saw the improvement he did, so I started researching all these hormones. What I found was that having a balanced hormonal system is just essential to health. If you look at the hormonal pathways of the body, the adrenal and sex hormones like testosterone, estrogen, DHA, and progesterone, they’re all produced in the ovaries in women, testes in men, and adrenal glands in men and women. We all have the same pathways. The precursor substance to all this is cholesterol. You can’t make hormones in those glands without adequate amounts of cholesterol. So here, my dad, he’s got this high cholesterol in the 300s, and he’s got testosterone levels of zero, basically. Now, I checked his other hormone levels like DHA and pregnenolone, they’re all in the same pathways. It’s kind of like driving from town A to town B to town C in order. Your hormones are made in a certain order, one follows the other, and that’s the way it is. If you go from the beginning, cholesterol is really the substrate that fuels this pathway. So here’s my dad with a cholesterol of 350 or so and he can’t make hormones. They’re all near zero when I checked them all as I started learning about one after another and I put him on small amounts of all of them. Why wasn’t he making hormones? Well, you need adequate thyroid hormone to stimulate that pathway. You need vitamin A as a cofactor to make that pathway go. You need magnesium and some B vitamins to make that pathway go. So my dad was lacking a lot of basic nutrition like most of the patients that I see are, he was lacking thyroid hormone, and he couldn’t make his hormones. If you look at the literature for heart disease and what causes atherosclerosis, hypothyroidism is known to cause it. That’s been known since the late 1800s. Low testosterone has been known to cause heart disease. Much of the research with that has been out of Europe, but that’s been known for over 50 years. Maybe I got a little lucky with my dad, but when I put them on those first two things and I went and researched some more, how does that make his angina better? And there was tons of research showing this is why his arteries were blocking up. Either the underlying cause or a major part of the underlying cause of what was causing his problems. After I treated him with those two things and then I started adding DHA, pregnenolone, and other things in there as I found what he was lacking, but he never had another day of angina in his life. He was able to lose weight without changing his bad habits. Once I saw the changes in him, I knew that’s what I wanted to do in medicine. That’s been my passion, that’s been my drive. It served my purpose and it served my patients’ purpose.   [00:21:06] Ashley James: This is what I want for every listener, to have a doctor on their team that acts like Sherlock Holmes. I want a doctor that questions and goes, what’s going on? Let’s look deeper and understand this. The fact that they never ran these panels on your dad, that they were only looking. It’s like the iceberg story. They’re only looking at the tip of the iceberg. They’re like, oh, heart disease. This is my frustration with allopathic medicine is it’s reductionistic. He has angina, let’s look at the heart, and they’re not looking at the body as a whole. Hello, we’re not looking at his thyroid, testosterone, or any of his nutrient levels, right?   [00:21:49] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, you’re right. He has angina so he’s got chest pain when he does any activity, right? He walks up a flight of stairs, whatever. Walking up a flight of stairs or walking sometimes a few steps, so you give him nitroglycerin which dilates the arteries and the chest pain goes away.  Well, does he have a deficiency of nitroglycerin? I mean, it’s kind of the reductionist model of conventional medicine. But really, what my father had was no testosterone, his hormonal biosynthetic pathways were not working because he was lacking thyroid hormone, he was lacking vitamin A, he was lacking some B vitamins. Once we corrected those things and supported him with small amounts of hormones, he made a dramatic change in his health. It was really something.  I still think about that today, that got me going in the right pathway for medicine. He was my first patient. All patients are important. He was certainly probably the most important patient in my career.   [00:22:55] Ashley James: Of course, one of our parents would be, wouldn’t they? Now, you mentioned that you use desiccated thyroid hormone, and that surprised me because you were just newly introduced into holistic medicine. The training of an MD is to do more synthetic. Can you explain for the listener what desiccated thyroid hormone is versus the synthetic that we’re so used to?   [00:23:21] Dr. David Brownstein: So I ended up writing a book on this, Overcoming Thyroid Disorders. In med school, I was trained to assess a patient’s thyroid status by drawing a TSH level, a thyroid-stimulating hormone level. That’s a hormone secreted from the pituitary gland in the brain, and that is released from the pituitary gland, hits your bloodstream, goes to the thyroid, and causes the thyroid gland to release thyroid hormone. Now thyroid hormone released into the bloodstream from the thyroid gland feeds back into the pituitary gland. It was supposed to be this check and balance thing to see if you got enough thyroid hormone. If you don’t have enough thyroid hormone, you should produce more TSH. If you got too much thyroid hormone, you should produce less TSH. There are multiple places where this pathway gets disrupted. Going back to basic biochemistry and physiology, and just basic biochemical pathways can help. Sherlock Holmes is a good example. As a physician, I’m always thinking, what’s the underlying cause of this? I don’t think this is sent from another planet if the patient’s sick for something. I mean, sometimes you can never figure out why they’re sick or why something happened and many times you can. Again, I said that from the beginning that supporting the patient’s physiology and biochemistry is really what we should be doing in medicine. And the problem with relying on drug therapies, I mean, look, most of the first two years of medical school are spent on memorizing drugs, their mechanism of action, their half-life, and things like that. When you look at those mechanisms of action, nearly every drug prescribed out there is either poisoning an enzyme or blocking a receptor in the body. For the long term in our lives, I don’t think it’s a good idea to poison enzymes or black receptors. The enzymes and receptors are there for a reason. Now, there are times to do that. If you’re having an acute heart attack, there are enzymes that might need to be poisoned and receptors might need to be blocked temporarily. But for long-term care, using those drugs doesn’t support physiology, doesn’t support biochemistry, it does the opposite—it disrupts it.  I think that you also have to look at our health statistics in the US. We take more drugs than any Western people on the face of the planet. We spend more money on health care than any people on the face of the planet, and we have worse outcomes than every western country. We are bottom last in almost every outcome, and the only one we’re not bottom last, we’re second to last. That includes infant mortality, neonatal mortality, maternal mortality at birth, longevity in adult males and females, chronic health conditions—the list goes on and on. We have lousy health outcomes. What’s happened with coronavirus epitomizes how we are as a country. It’s a sad state we’re in right now. I think the sad state is being driven from this lack of education of doctors that have no idea how to holistically approach anybody, no idea just basic holistic things like vitamin C, iodine, or I call these as basic things that people need and they can’t live without. I mean, 99.9% of physicians out there have no clue what these things do with the body, why they’re essential, how to assess them, and how to rectify deficiencies with us. Unfortunately, we have 600,000 deaths from COVID because, in part, we’re an unhealthy country, and we’re unhealthy because we take too many of these drugs, and we’re unfollowing holistic lifestyle.   [00:27:24] Ashley James: It’s those with comorbidities that have the highest chances of passing away from a viral infection, let alone COVID. But also, in the United States, doctors are being told not to prescribe drugs to try to treat it or try to try to support it. There’s no treatment, you just have to manage the symptoms. It’s just very frustrating.   [00:27:52] Dr. David Brownstein: No, no, no, you can’t manage the symptoms either because there’s no prevention, treatment, or cure for COVID. Therefore, any mention or any action thereof falls in violation of the federal code. That was part of a letter that I received from the FTC for treating COVID patients, and we can get into that.   [00:28:12] Ashley James: We’re definitely going to get into that. I want to go there. The little voice in my head is going, we’re going to be delisted from Google from going there, but we have to, everyone has to understand you. We live in a country where the government—this is unheard of. I feel like I’m in an Orwell novel.  The government is telling doctors how to practice medicine. It’s unconstitutional what’s going on right now, and it’s unethical. It’s unethical that your hands as a physician are being tied and unable to practice medicine. You’re allowed to practice medicine with other illnesses, why are you not allowed to treat the patient the best way you know-how with this one? It is so political and we are killing people, are harming people for politics. So anyway, I’m just upset, scared, and angry for all the people who are suffering from this when good doctors like yourself could absolutely be saving lives but they’re being told not to. Isn’t that crazy? That sounds crazy. That sounds absolutely crazy, doesn’t it?   [00:29:25] Dr. David Brownstein: I’m 58 years old and I’ve never seen anything like this, never thought anything like this would occur. Orwellian is the right—what is that, an adjective? I’m not quite sure when I use it that way. But it is an Orwellian-like thing where big brother is just controlling everything. The message from the beginning of COVID was to hide in your basement and don’t leave your house except to get food until we have this vaccine.  The message to physicians was you can’t treat it so don’t even try. What physicians were telling their patients from the beginning of COVID, well, nothing I can do. Stay home until you can’t breathe then go to the hospital. We all know what happened at the beginning of COVID. We were, as physicians, we didn’t know how to treat that disease, and we were treating it incorrectly. That’s not blaming anybody, it was a new illness. We really didn’t know what we were doing and we tried our best. If you went to the hospital and you got ventilated a year ago—March, April, and May—you had an 88% chance of dying. It’s the first illness that I’ve seen that physicians were instructed not to do anything and wait for this vaccine. Waiting for the vaccine caused about 400,000 people to die for doing no therapy. Doctors who were doing therapy like me were silenced. You were warned, either you stop talking about it or you’re not going to be able to practice medicine. You have to make your Sophie’s Choice. I was seeing COVID patients from the beginning. Do you want to get into COVID right now?   [00:31:17] Ashley James: Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s go there. We’re already there, let’s go there.   [00:31:20] Dr. David Brownstein: So when COVID came, when those first reports out of China in December 2019, an atypical pneumonia. I think it was three or four patients who had this novel coronavirus with atypical pneumonia. I read those reports and I followed it from the beginning. I watched what happened in January and February, Spain and Italy, and Europe experienced it before we did. I knew it was coming. I mean, we all knew it was coming. And then the first cases in the US were in Seattle and California. That was the middle to the end of February of 2020. COVID was clearly coming, and it was going to come across the country. We didn’t have any immunity to this. I remember I had a meeting with my staff at the end of February 2020 that the media headlines were awful. Everyone’s dying or gets COVID. Italy’s got bodies piled up on the streets. Spain was a mess. It’s only a matter of time until it comes here. I have this meeting in my office at the end of the workday, the end of Thursday. The tension in the air was palpable. You could cut it with a knife, everybody’s scared. Everybody’s scared. In this meeting with the staff, I said, we got to clear the air here. We’re going to stay open through COVID, and my staff started to question me, why don’t we close? I said, why would we close? This is our time.  I said, I’ve been practicing medicine for I think it was 27 years. I said, 26 years and a few months were for this. This is what I’ve been practicing for. I used to talk we, my partners and I. This is what we were practicing for, to get ready for something like this. This is a novel illness that conventional medicine has no clue what to do yet we do. I said, we’ve been treating flu-like illnesses with 30% of them being coronavirus infections, because it’s known that 30% of all influenza-like illnesses are coronavirus every year, with an approach to support the immune system.  We’ve done the same therapy for over 25 years. The only thing we changed was if we learned something new, we added something new with little tweaks like that. But otherwise, it’s been the exact same therapy for over two decades. The therapy consisted of using high dose vitamins A, C, and D, iodine for four days, and nebulizing a dilute solution of hydrogen peroxide and iodine.  What we found over the 25+ years was that our patients didn’t get hospitalized, didn’t get pneumonia, and didn’t die at anywhere near the rates of what’s reported every year from influenza-like illnesses during the flu season. Remember, in a light flu season, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 Americans die. In a medium season, it’s up to 80,000 or so. And in a bad season, 100,000 to maybe 120,000 dies. A lot of people die from flu and flu-like illnesses every year in the wintertime in America. Our patients didn’t seem to do that, so this therapy was working. The other part of the therapy was that if people got worse or they needed a little support, we would do intravenous vitamin C and hydrogen peroxide and then shots of ozone. That was the whole therapy in a nutshell. In the meeting with the staff, I reminded them, we’ve got therapy for this. The question came back to me, how do you know it’s going to work for this new strain of coronavirus? I said, I don’t know if it’s going to work, but why wouldn’t it work? It’s worked for every other strain over the last 25 years.  I said, we have an immune system for a reason. I said, we’re going to support the immune system. The immune system is going to do fine with coronavirus if it’s got the right raw materials. That was my prediction. I said to them, look, I can’t guarantee anything because I haven’t seen this one before, but I don’t see any reason why we’re going to have trouble with this. So I told the staff, hey, anyone who doesn’t want to work, you don’t have to work. I’m not going to force anybody to work through this. I said, I will work alone if I have to work alone. I said, I’m working until either I get sick or they won’t let me work, but our patients are going to need us more than ever. I said to them, this is our time. This is 27+ years of practicing medicine for this moment. This is our time to shine. That was the meeting. We had about 40%, 50% of our staff. As soon as it hit Michigan, it hit the Detroit area where I was. We were one of the four hotspots, in the beginning, was Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts. It already started in Seattle where you are. We were one of the four hotspots when it moved to the western part of the US. We were getting phone calls, people couldn’t breathe, the hospitals were filling up, the media headlines were fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. I’m not lying to you, I was scared at the beginning too. Here we were treating patients, we didn’t let them come into the office. We were treating them outside in March in Michigan. Let me tell you, March in Michigan isn’t pretty. It’s snow, sleet, ice, wind—it’s terrible. We were in snowstorms in full hazmat gear trudging out there with ice and stuff and having people put their arms out the windows of the car in freezing weather and giving them IVs. Then when you have them put their buttocks out the door as we were putting shots in the rear end.   [00:37:20] Ashley James: Of what, B vitamins?   [00:37:22] Dr. David Brownstein: Shots of ozone in the rear end. So look, truth be told I was scared for myself. I have a 65-degree scoliotic curve with lung involvement. I have severe asthma, which I used to be in multiple inhalers and wheezing all the time, and adopting a holistic lifestyle, that doesn’t bother me much at all. I play tennis without inhalers. The only time it bothers me is when I get a cold now. But I have severe asthma, I have lung involvement from scoliosis with half a lung missing on one side, and my normal pulse ox is low just because I don’t have a full two lungs like everybody else. And I have an immune system disorder that 1% of the population has. My immune system disorder is lack of immunoglobulin A, which makes me more susceptible to viral illnesses.   [00:38:17] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that’s three. That’s like the trifecta.   [00:38:20] Dr. David Brownstein: I went in the wrong profession for my body. Let me tell you, I was scared for myself as well. You know what, I eat well, I take my supplements, and I know what to do for viral flu-like illnesses. So we were treating people. I was reporting it online on my website. I was putting videos of patients as they recovered. Patients who couldn’t breathe, who called their doctor, the doctor told them there’s nothing to do. Take Tylenol or something or stay home until you can’t breathe in and go to the ER. Patients would come in with pulse ox in the 80s and low 80s, even upper 70s sometimes. They were trying to stay out of the ER. Everyone was scared because you were going to die it felt like if you went to the emergency room back then. About a weekend into this, the fear starts to go away for me and for my partners because people are calling us back, I feel better. They particularly reported they felt better after nebulizing peroxide, and they felt better after getting an IV if they really were sick. Two weeks into it we feel no different than any other flu season except we’re swamped with too many patients. We’re going outside and we’re working after hours, we got cars lined up in the parking lot. We’re all taking turns going outside. We have an assembly line going to meet them outside. We’re lining up 10 cars on the weekends. Three docs, nurse practitioner, my PA, we’d all show up and do our job. So a couple of weeks into it, we’ve got a pretty good plan, these patients are doing okay. I was doing interviews online, I was talking about it. I was saying what I thought was wrong with conventional medicine. But I titled each of these blog posts, there’s still hope out there because there was no hope from conventional media, there was just no hope. You got COVID, you were going to die. That was the feeling out there. We all remember this. I mean, it’s going to be seared into our psyche. About two months, March-April, I’m posting my blog post number 30 or something. Out of the blue, I got a letter from Federal Trade Communication. I remember I walked in the door, it was Tuesday night, which is my late night, not only was it my late night at work, but we’re treating patients in the parking lot and it’s tiring.  I’m walking in at 8:00 or 9:00 at night after getting there at 7:00 in the morning. I’m working as hard as I worked as a resident it felt like. I’m way older than I was back then, and so I’m exhausted. I walked in and my wife and daughter were at home. They’re looking at the computer, which I see as soon as I walk in. I’m like, what’s wrong? I thought someone died, from their face. She said, well, come in. I’m like, no, tell me what’s wrong and I’m standing there holding my bag and I got my coat on. She said, you got a letter from the Federal Trade Communication. I said, The FTC? She goes, yeah. I said, what they want? She goes, well, they’re ordering you 48 hours to remove all your blog posts about COVID or else. I said, what? I probably said a few words after that.   [00:41:53] Ashley James: I know, me too.   [00:41:55] Dr. David Brownstein: She said, you have 48 hours to remove it or you’re going to hear from the US Justice Department.   [00:42:03] Ashley James: What happened to freedom of speech?   [00:42:04] Dr. David Brownstein: I was speechless. I come in, my wife’s a lawyer.   [00:42:14] Ashley James: Oh, that’s handy.   [00:42:16] Dr. David Brownstein: So I said to her, maybe it’s time to retire. She said, you’re not retiring over this letter. This is stupid. It’s ridiculous. You’re doing a good thing. You should get an award. You don’t deserve this and you didn’t do anything wrong. If you want to retire because you want to retire, let’s talk about that. But you’re not retiring over this letter. This is stupid. She talked me off the cliff because I told my mother, I did tell my elderly mother this story. If the FTC released a press release about me and I thought the local papers were going to pick it up, and I didn’t want my mom to read in the papers. I told my mother, I was proud to be the first in the family to have a federal agency after them. I didn’t cheat anybody, I didn’t steal any money. I didn’t hurt anybody. I was doing my job. When we got the letter, we read it a bunch of times. We pulled everything down off the internet the next day. So in there, I got 20 years of stuff and we just took it all down. It was the last blog post I did, which was in April of last year. I’ve been blogging for 25+ years. So I was keeping track of the patients I was treating with COVID and we’re doing the same therapy. Out of the first 107 patients, we had a couple of hospitalizations and no deaths, when we should have had—I can’t remember the numbers, they’re in my peer-reviewed paper I published on this. We should have had 8 or 10 hospitalizations and 5, 6 deaths, something like that, from the numbers that were occurring at that time. My wife, being a lawyer, started communicating with the FTC, the gentleman who wrote the letter. He said, in this original letter, they went through all my blogs and they spent a lot of time bullet pointing what they said was inaccurate information about COVID because they kept repeating the line, “There’s no prevention, treatment, or cure for COVID, therefore, any mention thereof falls in violation of federal code…” and it’s a long number. I’ve been cataloging these patients that we were treating, I knew we had 107 patients at that time when that letter came in. In that letter, they said, “because there are no clinical studies indicating what you say is true, there’s no prevention, treatment, or cure for COVID, therefore, any mention thereof falls in violation.” I called a few friends and one of them said to me, if they want a study, why don’t you give them a study. You’ve been treating patients for two months. I retrospectively reviewed the data of my patients that were treated. Since I wasn’t blogging, I had some time on my hands that I’m not used to. I put together a study of 107 patients, case series study, and I got it accepted for peer review. It was peer-reviewed three times. I got it published in a peer-reviewed journal.  When it was published, my wife sent a letter to the FTC saying, well, you said there are no clinical studies, here’s one. She attached it and said, we want to publish this on our website without commentary, just publish the study. And they said, no, this is not a randomized control trial.   [00:46:00] Ashley James: Now they change the story.   [00:46:03] Dr. David Brownstein: Now they changed it. So here we are at the beginning of an illness that’s killing hundreds of thousands of people. There’s no randomized control trial at that point of anything related to COVID because who could do it? You can’t randomize a trial. And I wasn’t going to randomize anybody to receiving therapy and not receiving therapy. Now when I thought it was going to help them. That’s unethical. I should go to jail for that if I did that, and there’s no way I could sleep another night, another minute in my life if I did something like that. But anyway, there were no randomized control trials at that point, there were only clinical observations. I wasn’t hiding in my basement. I wasn’t closing my office. I was on the frontlines treating people. We get the letter back from the FTC saying, no, not a randomized control trial. That was the last contact we had with them. We kept doing our thing. Now, we’re over 400 patients. Again, we have a couple of hospitalizations, no deaths from any of our patients related to it. The therapy still works. The consequence of the powers that be telling physicians there’s no therapy and you can’t do anything for your patients and just wait for the vaccine was we had over 400,000 people dead before the vaccine was even started. I believe those were the numbers. When this post mortem is written on coronavirus, it’s going to be ugly. One other side to that story was, so here I published the study, FTC won’t let me put it on my website. So we hired a first amendment lawyer in DC who really is a specialist with the FTC recommended to me by two prominent people out there. This gentleman’s in his 70s. He’s been doing this for 40+ years.  In the final analysis he said to me, you do not have first amendment protection right now to talk about COVID online. You should, but you don’t. He goes, that’s the political world we live in right now. He said, you have to make a decision whether you want to continue treating patients or you want to fight the FTC. He said, if you want to fight the FTC, I’ll do it for you, but his retainer was multi-millions of dollars that I don’t have. He said, it will go to the US Supreme Court and then we’ll see. But if you don’t have that money and you want to treat patients, then I advise you to stop writing about it. He said, I’ve never done this before in my career, and it’s not right, but this is the world we live in right now. But I said to him, hey, I’ve been writing this book on my experience with treating viruses. Can I publish it? He said, oh, your book has first amendment protection. He goes, yeah, you can publish anything you want.   [00:49:12] Ashley James: Okay, so explain that to me. You’re not protected by the First Amendment if you’re posting a blog on your website, but you are if you publish a book, why is that?   [00:49:23] Dr. David Brownstein: He said it’s not right, it should go to the Supreme Court, and it should be rectified, but that’s the way it is. He said, me personally, you do not have First Amendment protection. He goes, the book does. Books are treated differently than the web and anything you write. So I published my book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses, the therapy we’ve been doing. It’s been amazing. We just got through another round of COVID in Michigan, in the Detroit area where I live. We were, again, working long hours in the parking lot. I think we’re at the end of that. That seems pretty settled down now, but the therapy still works. There’s nothing better we have than our immune system. It’s what we should be focusing on more than anything as physicians. If the immune system has the basic raw materials it needs, it can do pretty, pretty wonderful things when it’s confronted with stress from a virus or something else.   [00:50:34] Ashley James: Absolutely. So you mentioned that part of your therapy was high doses of A, C, D, and iodine. Did you mention zinc?   [00:50:44] Dr. David Brownstein: No, I did not mention zinc because we did not use zinc as part of our therapy. It’s never been part of our therapy.   [00:50:50] Ashley James: Why is that?   [00:50:51] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, that’s a good question. Why is that is because I’ve been doing holistic medicine for 20 years checking people for nutritional and hormonal imbalances, and zinc is one of the things that I’ve been checking. It never was part of our therapy. So our therapy is what I told you, what you just repeated. I can’t explain why it was never part of our therapy, and part of it was because we’ve been checking zinc levels for years and rectifying zinc levels. Most of our patients weren’t low with zinc going into this thing, but we never found a need for zinc for treating viral illness. It just wasn’t.   [00:51:29] Ashley James: Your patients aren’t deficient, everything was good, and if you saw zinc deficiency, you would handle it.   [00:51:33] Dr. David Brownstein: Of course I would. Do I think zinc should be used for this thing? I can’t speak to you, I didn’t use it.   [00:51:41] Ashley James: Yes. Sure, sure, sure. That makes sense.   [00:51:44] Dr. David Brownstein: I didn’t need to use it. My patients did fine with what we gave them.   [00:51:47] Ashley James: I had COVID. Right after I gave birth and we lost our child, very traumatic. My body’s in shock. My immune system is tanking because I’m in grief and I just gave her, so postpartum. And then I had postpartum high blood pressure, which we weren’t sure if it was—I had no signs of preeclampsia during pregnancy, but it was very high the moment I gave birth, which also having paramedics work on your newborn for an hour while you’re begging for your daughter to be alive, I’m sure that raised my blood pressure. But my blood pressure was through the roof for the first time in my life. That’s a comorbidity in and of itself for COVID. We think maybe one of the paramedics gave me COVID because a few days later, I developed symptoms, and my husband had it but he had a sniffly nose and he mowed the lawn for four hours in the height of his COVID. He’s like, yeah, I’m kind of tired and I was sniffling. That was it. We did quarantine just to protect everyone else. I’m not going to be a schmuck and just make anyone sick. So we stayed at home, obviously, and I was postpartum.  But I was hit really bad. Normally I’m a very healthy person, but knowing what my body had just been through with giving birth, grief, and high blood pressure from whatever it was from—whether it was grief or whether I did have all of a sudden, out of nowhere, have some preeclampsia. But I had no other symptoms of preeclampsia. It was just like, okay, well, the body acts weird after giving birth, who knows. So I was hit really hard, I was in bed, and I was exhausted. And then I’d get really lightheaded and dizzy, and my blood pressure all of a sudden tanked into the double digits. I was like 94 over 46 or something crazy, like I was fainting, which I also read is something that can happen. When you have COVID, you can experience all of a sudden these dips or drop in blood pressure. And those on blood pressure meds, there’s this whole article that talked about blood pressure medication and how doctors need to know that patients should be taken off of them because it can cause massive kidney damage to be on blood pressure meds while someone has the active infection that they’re fighting. I didn’t have a lot of the symptoms like I didn’t have the headaches. There’s a bunch of things I didn’t have, but it was really hard to breathe. My lungs felt like I had asthma. I’ve never had asthma in my life but describing it, it’s like I took a breath and everything hurt, everything was tight, and it was very hard to even get air into my lungs. It felt like it was all tight like asthma. And I lost my sense of smell, it was crazy because I have essential oils. I was just like, all of a sudden I can’t smell peppermint. This is crazy. What I did was double my zinc. I went from 30 milligrams to 90, and two days later, my sense of smell came back. I was like, okay, maybe my body was using up more zinc to fight the virus and I dipped into a deficiency and so my smells went away, and then it came back when I took more. But basically, my smell came back the moment I took more zinc, which I thought was really cool.  Then my husband noticed his sense of smell went away. So I said, okay, take more of your zinc. He did and his sense of smell came right back. I was like, this is cool because some people lose their sense of smell for a while. I’ve heard weeks and some people, even months later, say they don’t really feel like their taste or smell is back to normal whereas mine is totally back to normal. I definitely incorporated zinc into it. I was taking everything I could, everything I could get my hands on. And now NAC, which Amazon has taken out of their store even though NAC is not illegal. But this is really frustrating. Also, Amazon also took down I think Colloidal Silver a while ago because they’re like, how dare you use natural medicine to support your body in fighting an infection. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen. This is pretty crazy that major stores like Amazon are limiting our access to natural therapeutics that support the body’s ability to fight infection. Why is that? It boggles my mind. I’m very excited about your book and I think listeners are. Considering the fact that your book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses is protected, giving you free speech, you’re allowed to share everything that you’re not allowed to share online. Are there things in your book that you aren’t even comfortable with saying in an interview? Are there things that are so shocking that you couldn’t say it here? Are you allowed to talk freely about what’s in your book?   [00:56:54] Dr. David Brownstein: First off, I’m sorry, for your loss. I didn’t know any of that.   [00:56:59] Ashley James: Yes, the last month or so has been a little crazy for me.   [00:57:07] Dr. David Brownstein: But no, there’s nothing shocking in the book. It’s a 25-year history of what we’ve been doing. There’s still good news out there, there’s good news in that book. Your immune system was designed by somebody for a purpose, and the purpose was so you can survive, have kids, and perpetuate the species, otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. This is what should be done, in my opinion. I think that when you look back at this, and basically CDC, NAAT, Dr. Fauci, and everybody is basically saying there’s nothing to do. Just stay home, social distance, and wear your mask. That’s it. That was incorrect. We should be supporting the immune system. It’s not rocket science. It’s pretty basic stuff in my mind. I wrote a peer-reviewed paper, I published a book on it, and we’re still doing it. I don’t know. I feel like I’m in Alice in Wonderland where down is up and up is down right now. It’s sad, it’s really sad. When the truth finally comes out about this, people could see through the fog of fear that’s been thrown at them, I imagine there’s going to be a lot of angry Americans out there. I mean, right now, they’re just placid Americans, I don’t quite understand that.   [00:58:40] Ashley James: I don’t understand it either.   [00:58:42] Dr. David Brownstein: We should be in the streets. Europe they’re in the streets. They’re not happy with the situation they’re in. We just do nothing here. We’re just complacent sheep. I’m not quite certain why that’s the case.   [00:58:56] Ashley James: Maybe they’re drinking the fluoride in the water.   [00:58:59] Dr. David Brownstein: Maybe.   [00:59:02] Ashley James: Well, it’s probably because so many people are listening to their friends and family and listening to the mainstream media, and the narrative is very convincing. But we have to start thinking for ourselves. We really do. We have to put on the critical thinking cap and go, okay, I’m going to question everything. I want people to question what I say. I want people to question what you say. I want people to question everything, become the Doubting Thomas. Don’t just blindly listen to anyone. I don’t care how much of an expert they are. I don’t care what level in the government they are, what level in science they are, how big up in leadership they are, question everything. We really, really, really need to put on our thinking caps, what’s going on here?   [00:59:53] Dr. David Brownstein: Let me tell you, I bring back the analogy of Vioxx. Vioxx was a COX-2 inhibitor. It was in the 2000s I think when it came out. The headlines were, we have a new anti-inflammatory medication and it’s not going to cause GI bleeding because tens of thousands of Americans die a year from GI bleeding due to NSAIDs, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug use like Motrin, Advil, and prescription NSAIDs.  Here’s Vioxx, it’s not going to cause GI bleeding and it’s going to treat them because it works in the COX-2 pathway instead of a COX-1 pathway, which most anti-inflammatories work on both COX-1 and COX-2. So, here I go look up the mechanism of the drug when it was announced it’s coming out. I look at the pathways, I look at my biochem charts, I’m like, hey, this is going to prostacyclin, which is an important prostaglandin that needs to be produced to keep blood vessels dilated. So if you don’t have prostaglandin, the blood vessels are going to constrict. If you don’t have prostacyclin, the blood vessels can constrict and you can get strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots. I saw that and I remember writing about it and said, this may be causing strokes and heart attacks. I’m not going to use this drug, and I never prescribed Vioxx once. Well, the consequence of Vioxx coming to the market, FDA-approved, touted in all the headlines as the greatest advancement in NSAID therapy. Fifty thousand Americans died that didn’t have to, over 150,000 had strokes and heart attacks that didn’t have to, and the drug was pulled from the market. Merck paid billions of dollars in fines. There was no reason it should have been approved in the first place. There are many incidents of conventional medicine, missing the boat, and being late to the boat. People do need to think for themselves. They need to not rely on TV personalities and fear to make their decisions. Because really, through this whole COVID crisis, this was being driven by fear decisions from Dr. Fauci on down. It was a fear-based approach of locking yourself in your basement, social distance, and wearing 10 masks when you go outside. Look what we got for it, almost 600,000 dead while we waited for the vaccine. That was just a mess.   [01:02:36] Ashley James: I want to talk about the vaccine, we’re going to get into that in a bit. In your book, do you talk about what we can do to support the body in preventing getting infected? This is my thing, my son was exposed and had zero symptoms. He was exposed to both of us.  We all sleep in the same room. He has his own bed, but we’re all in the same big room. I do that because actually, he has asthma. We have it under control now, but I want to listen to him. I’m like a paranoid mom and I want to listen to his breathing because oftentimes, he would go into respiratory distress at night. He’s been hospitalized twice. It’s allergy-induced, and one of the things he’s allergic to is dust mites. That’s hard with a house that’s carpeted. We just stay on top of vacuuming, but we can’t get rid of all the dust mites in the world, so I like to listen to his breathing. But he was in the same room as us, he’s in the same house as us, we hugged him. I’m sure he grabbed our glass and started drinking from it. He’s obviously breathing our air. Apparently, this is highly contagious, what I’ve been told, and he never had any symptoms. What I’ve heard is that people can get exposed to the virus, the body will mount a response, the immune system will figure out how to handle it, and they won’t have any symptoms. But some people develop symptoms and develop this COVID-19 sickness. Maybe you could explain why some people either have incredibly minor symptoms or no symptoms at all. Is there anything we can do proactively to support our body so we’re one of those people?   [01:04:33] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, I mean, look, we’re all unique biochemical individuals. I can’t explain why some people’s households got nailed with it and some people got very minimal or didn’t get it at all. I mean, that’s life and that’s how things go. But there are things people can do to minimize the risk of becoming a statistic with COVID, becoming a severe statistic or a death statistic. But it’s not just COVID, it’s with any viral illness, it’s with any infectious illness. If you have a properly functioning immune system, we were designed to withstand things like this. How do you do it?  You do the basics. Number one, eat a clean diet free of refined sugar and other refined food products like refined salt, flour, oil, and sugar. Number two, maintain adequate hydration. Drink half your body weight in water. Take your body weight in pounds, divide it by two, and that many ounces of water a day should be your minimum.  Number three, maintain adequate salt levels. My book, Salt Your Way to Health talks about that where salt is the second major constituent next to water. We need adequate salt levels. Many people find themselves every flu season in the hospital because they become hyponatremic. Their sodium levels fall when they become ill. We want to start off with good sodium levels when you get sick, good salt levels. Part of the basics for my practice is maintaining adequate iodine levels. Iodine levels have been falling over 50% over the last 40 years across the United States. The vast majority of people are iodine deficient. My testing has shown over 97% of people are iodine deficient, most of them severely iodine deficient. Iodine deficiency explains the epidemic of cancer of the breast, ovaries, uterus, prostate, pancreas, and thyroid that we’re seeing in this country. One in seven women has breast cancer, and one in three men has prostate cancer. Thyroid cancer is the fastest-growing cancer in the US. I say, iodine deficiency, if not the underlying cause, is a huge part of that underlying cause of why we’re suffering so many endocrine cancers across the US. That’s just basic stuff that I think people should be doing. And then you should work with your holistic doctor to correct your nutritional and hormonal imbalances. When you get exposed to a viral illness, bacterial illness, a parasitic illness, or a stressor in your life, your immune system and your body can fight back and do what it’s designed to do, do what we were programmed to do by our maker. The proof is what I’ve seen in my practice for 28 years. It does work. On the other hand, you can eat the typical American diet and call it the standard American diet or the sad diet full of refined foods, way too much sugar, way too much refined flour, salt, and oil and be overweight like 2/3 of Americans are. We don’t exercise, we don’t drink enough water, and we probably drink too much alcohol, especially during COVID. And then what’s going to happen to you when you get hit with some stressors, some viral illness? It’s not going to be kind to those people.  I think that this COVID-19 brought forth everything that I’ve been talking about for 28 years, everything I’m seeing in my practice, everything that’s wrong with our country health-wise, and everything that’s wrong with conventional medicine all in one package. It’s an ugly look for us. Here we spend 20% of our GNP on health care. What the hell do we get for it? It’s 600,000 people dying when Dr. McCullough and others feel that’s probably at least 75% of people with coronavirus, if we treated them early, tried to support their immune system, and treated them with therapies that were known to help support the immune system or to help other viral illnesses, we probably would have had over 75% of people still alive from this. Maybe we’ll get 150,000 people dead from Coronavirus, which is basically a bad flu season. We wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. We wouldn’t be still talking about masks, social distancing, gloves, and all that stuff. But we’re not, we are here. People need to wake up. They need to get past that fog of fear; start reading for themselves; and start adapting eating better, exercising, and taking better care of their bodies. The proof is in the pudding. It’ll pay off when you’re exposed to something like SARS-CoV-2.   [01:09:29] Ashley James: Your protocol, which you’ve used for many years for other viral infections and lung infections is working tremendously well. I love the statistics that you have that you’re showing. The proof’s in the pudding. The proof in the pudding is in the eating. You are showing that you are having a better outcome than we’re telling you all to sit on your hands and stop treating them and just let him go to the hospital and wait until they get a trial vaccine. That which just again blows my mind that that’s what doctors are being told. So you have this great protocol. I do have a question. Have you looked into glutathione and supporting glutathione? I’ve heard people have really good success with it. I personally also took oral glutathione and noticed a very positive shift in my health while my body was fighting the infection.   [01:10:40] Dr. David Brownstein: We use glutathione in our practice both orally and intravenously. I’ve used glutathione for the majority of my holistic practice. However, it wasn’t part of our holistic protocol. You should certainly want to have optimal glutathione levels when you get sick. The best I can tell you is it wasn’t part of our protocol. We just didn’t use it and we got the results we got. But I use glutathione in my practice and it is very important. When you take Tylenol, Tylenol blocks the production of glutathione. So if you take a lot of Tylenol, you’re going to be glutathione deficient. I was talking to my patients on the phone when they were calling and they couldn’t breathe, don’t take Tylenol, unless you absolutely have to. Just get in the bathtub or sponge off with cool water to keep your temperature down. I didn’t want people taking Tylenol unless their fever was over 103.5. It’s because it would deplete glutathione levels, but we didn’t use it as part of our protocol.  It was high dose vitamin A—100,000 units A day for four days. Vitamin C, 1000 milligrams every hour until they got loose stools and they felt better. Vitamin D, 50,000 units a day for four days. Iodine 25 milligrams a day if they weren’t using it, and double whatever they were using if they were going into it with iodine for four days. And then nebulizing 0.03% solution of hydrogen peroxide and iodine every hour while they were sick, and then lessen it as they got better.  Then they’d come in the parking lot, they’re still coming in. Not doing as many now, thank goodness. It’s not as bad here. But coming in the parking lot for IV of vitamin C and peroxide and ozone shots. Keep in mind, ozone stimulates glutathione production. Vitamin C helps regenerate glutathione in the body. So, there are mechanisms to get glutathione levels up through doing what I was doing.   [01:12:52] Ashley James: And these patients of yours, you’ve seen them for a while, you’ve helped them adjust their diet, you’ve already been working on helping them with any comorbidities they may have had such as high blood pressure, obesity, or type two diabetes. These are patients who have been seeing a holistic doctor and have been working on building their health.   [01:13:14] Dr. David Brownstein: They were part of our practice.   [01:13:16] Ashley James: Hopefully they were already healthy, to begin with, or at least they didn’t step into this illness with nutrient deficiencies. These were healthier than normal people, would you say?   [01:13:30] Dr. David Brownstein: Probably. That’s one of the criticisms of my study is that they were healthier than regular people. Well, I don’t think that’s a criticism. I think that’s praise. I’m glad they were healthier. But look, we had our share of people with low pulse ox, who couldn’t breathe, who we were scared. We called them every night, the sick ones, to check on them until we felt they were out of the woods. There were some people that kept me up at night that I wasn’t sure are they going to make this or not?  COVID was very random and it seemed to hit harder than others. I was shocked that sometimes some of the healthiest people got really nailed with it. But again, the end of it is our results speak for themselves.   [01:14:12] Ashley James: They do.   [01:14:13] Dr. David Brownstein: It’s a powerful message.   [01:14:17] Ashley James: It is. Who should read your book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses?   [01:14:23] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, I think anyone interested in how to properly support the immune system, so it can overcome viral, other illnesses, and other stressors. So who should read it? I think we should all read it. I’ve written 16 books, people ask me, how do you write? I have a full-time practice, I write a newsletter. I was blogging every night during COVID and still writing all this stuff. The books come easy for me because either I write them in one of two moods, either I’m really excited about something, or I’m really irritated about something. But there’s a passion either way with it. What I write in my books is what I see works in my practice, or what I see doesn’t work in my practice like my Drugs that Don’t Work book. What I see work is easy for me. I’ve done this enough to know this therapy works. I’ve done testosterone enough to know that it helps people with heart disease. I’ve diagnosed thyroid enough to know that I feel like I know what I’m doing. It’s not like I’m not learning, I’m learning every day in my practice and I’m changing things up. I write about what I see works in the practice. I wrote this book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses because we were seeing it work. We’ve seen it work for 28 years, and we saw it work through COVID. I told you the story. I wasn’t sure, this was a different corona strain, but it helps a third of the flu-like illnesses every year or coronavirus, why wouldn’t it work? That was my view, and it did.  Who should read this book? We’re dealing with SARS COVID 2 right now. Next year, it’s going to be SARS COVID 3 or some other thing. The year after that it would be SARS COVID 4, 5, and 6, or whatever else is out there, This isn’t going to be the last of this stuff. We’re going to have to learn to have a good immune system going into this, otherwise, we’re going to be going through what we just went through over the past year and I don’t want to do that again. I don’t think our country can handle it again.   [01:16:40] Ashley James: No. I mean, we’re the 99%. We need to help our fellow friends, family, and neighbors learn this kind of information. We all need to protect ourselves with knowledge and with the truth. So absolutely buy A Holistic Approach to Viruses. Read it, then pass it along, get all your friends and family to read it, and share this podcast with them. They need to understand that there are doctors like Dr. David Brownstein who are successfully helping those who are infected with the coronavirus. They’re having way better outcomes than just sitting, waiting, and being sick, way better outcomes. And that we can support the body’s ability to fight it off, support the body’s structure and function of the body to heal. We can do that with natural medicine. And I just love the work you do. I love your books. Definitely, please come back on the show.   [01:17:50] Dr. David Brownstein: I’d love to.   [01:17:50] Ashley James: Thank you. Yes, absolutely. We got to go through more of your information because every book you’ve written, I feel like Alice in Wonderland, I don’t know which rabbit hole to go down. There are all these rabbit holes, I can’t wait. I’m very excited. I do have a few questions about your protocol, and I’m sure that you specify in your book as well. The A, the C, the D, the iodine. It doesn’t matter what form someone gets it in. Like vitamin C, there’s Ester C, there’s these Buffered C’s or whatever. Does it matter what? Obviously D is D3? But is there a specific kind that we make sure that’s the most bioavailable, it’s the cleanest, or are there certain brands that you say this is the best because they’re better quality?   [01:18:39] Dr. David Brownstein: It’s a good question. Before we get into A, C, D, and iodine, the more important thing is to eat a clean diet free of refined sugar and other refined foods. Drink enough water. Maintain adequate salt levels, and maintain optimal iodine levels going into any illness. But having said that, I recommend in the book, ascorbic acid is the form of vitamin C. I don’t think it’s that crucial what form of vitamin C. I certainly don’t think you have to spend expensive amounts of vitamin C. Some companies complain there’s is more absorbable than others. I haven’t seen that occur in my practice. As far as vitamin A goes, that’s really the only thing I guess to make a point of. I’m talking vitamin A here, not beta carotene. Beta carotene does not have the immune support properties that vitamin A does. I use an emulsified form of vitamin A. Vitamin A can be toxic like all the fat-soluble vitamins we take large amounts of. The four days of this is, in my experience, hasn’t been toxic to anybody. But the emulsified form has less chance of toxicity too. Vitamin D, like you said, is vitamin D3. And then iodine is a combination of iodine and iodide. I write about that in my iodine book. It’s Iodine: Why You Need It, Why You Can’t Live Without It. It is important to use the right kind of iodine for whole body support of iodine.   [01:20:10] Ashley James: Oh, man, I got to have you back on the show because I want to start going down this iodine rabbit hole but it’s not really relevant to this conversation. It’s more of just I want to talk more about iodine. I definitely have to have you back. We’ll just leave that on a cliffhanger and say listeners got to keep listening because we’re going to have you back for a whole iodine talk for sure. I’d love to finish off the interview by discussing these experimental tests, this experimental thing they’re doing where they’re calling it a vaccine, but I don’t even think you can actually call it a vaccine yet because it’s still an experiment. We’re the guinea pigs. We’re not even doing an animal trial. You know, all the animals died or a majority of them died when they did animal trials in the past.  Just like they make flu vaccines, they’ve been trying to make corona vaccines for a long time and all the animals died. But let’s just skip the animals and go to human trials, incredibly scary. This is a trial. This is not an approved drug. This is what really scares me. We have to understand, this isn’t about anti-vax or pro-vax, and that’s what the mainstream media wants to just taint this picture. This is not about that. I know doctors who are incredibly pro-vaccine who like, yes, I got all the shots. They are very pro-vaccine and they’re incredibly scared of what’s going on right now. So I’d love to know, if you could just paint the picture, what are your thoughts on these trials that are going on right now?   [01:21:55] Dr. David Brownstein: Okay, so the vaccine for COVID. I wrote a long chapter about that in my book, my virus book. I hope the vaccine is safe and effective, but the last two words in that chapter are we’ll see. This is a phase three experiment undergoing right now. As far as the animals go, the animals are waiting for us because they’re not going to take until they see if the human trials are favorable or not. They’re waiting. This is the first time in history that a vaccine has been used like this. The best two words I give you are we’ll see. Do I think the vaccine should be used for kids? The death rate for kids is near zero, as near zero as you can get it. No, I don’t think the vaccine should be used for kids. Should the vaccine be used for people under 70 where you have a 99.7% chance of surviving? I guess the people can decide that one. Should it be used for over 70 when there’s up to a 5% death rate for those who get COVID? Maybe we could consider it for them. But look, I think if people had a healthier immune system this thing overall doesn’t kill the same percentage that kills the flu. The problem is, it’s killed more people because it’s a novel virus and we’re so unhealthy in our country. I think the big mistake we made was telling everybody to just wait for the vaccine, wait for the vaccine. This is a new technology that hasn’t been used before, and I am not very quick to use new drugs as I told you with Vioxx.  Let me give you this analogy. I remember when I was a resident, I was rounding with Dr. Solomon. He was so knowledgeable, I thought he knew everything. He was a good family doctor. I said to him, Dr. Solomon, how do you keep up with all these new drugs that are coming out all the time? He says, David, that’s easy. The drug hasn’t been out for two years, use something else. Why would you consider using it? They don’t study well enough. I was a resident back then, I wasn’t even a holistic doctor. I was just a regular doctor and I took his advice to heart, and I certainly took it to heart with Vioxx, which killed all those people. What do I think about this vaccine? I tell you, I think we’re moving way too fast. And if this vaccine turns out to be problematic, we have vaccinated half of our country right now, 160 million people have it. What the hell are we going to do If this turns out to be a problem going down the road? We’re really not going to know if it’s a problem for a couple of years fully, but we’re going to find out a lot this fall when coronavirus comes back. We’ll see how people’s immune systems respond who have had this vaccine.  I hope it’s safe. I hope it’s effective. I hope it’s a wonderful thing and it’s protected a bunch of people, but I can only leave you with we’ll see. People need to study it, people need to make their own decision. I’m not so thrilled about rolling out something that hasn’t gone through proper safety studies. If this turns into a problem, what the heck are we going to do in this country?   [01:25:36] Ashley James: Especially because all our first responders got it.   [01:25:38] Dr. David Brownstein: Not all the first responders. Not all of us. That’s not true. Now remember, if you look at some of those numbers, I still see the numbers. There’s 40% to 50% of nurses out there who aren’t getting it. The reason they’re not getting it is because they’re on the front line and they’re seeing some of the side effects with these vaccines. We’ve seen in our practice some serious side effects with it.   [01:25:57] Ashley James: What are the side effects that you’ve seen?   [01:25:59] Dr. David Brownstein: In our small practice, we’ve seen three strokes, we’ve seen a couple of pulmonary embolisms, we’re up to six blood clots, and then the host of other problems, some serious other problems. If that’s happening in my small practice, we’re not solely just seeing this, this is happening elsewhere too. I think that time will tell. I’m hoping it’s safe and effective. I think people need to, again, not react as part of fear with this issue but study it and make their decision about what they want to do.   [01:26:44] Ashley James: I’m not a guinea pig. I don’t put myself in drug trials.   [01:26:53] Dr. David Brownstein: This is a drug trial.   [01:26:54] Ashley James: This is a drug trial. And the fact that there are companies, not that I would go to Dick’s Burgers anyway. But here in Seattle, we have Dick’s Burgers. It’s like a really popular local burger joint and they have a sign outside that says, if you’re not going to wear a mask, you have to show your vaccine card to us. Doesn’t that violate HIPAA? That blows my mind.   [01:27:23] Dr. David Brownstein: Show us your papers.   [01:27:24] Ashley James: Right, show us your papers. And then I went to Chipotle a few days ago and they have a sign up that says if you’re, you don’t have to wear a mask. I’m like, oh, all I read was you don’t have to wear a mask so I walked in and the manager’s like, wear your mask. Where’s your mask? I just pointed at the sign, I’m like, your sign says I don’t have to wear a mask. I mean, they can’t. It’s against HIPAA violations to ask me medical questions like that, at least that’s my understanding.  But the fact that we’re being pushed in this direction by businesses, by the media, and we’re being peer pressured. The way they’re doing it, they’re getting your friends and family to pressure you. I’ve heard from several people that they’re feeling pressured by their friends and family. I can’t go to my bridge club or I can’t go to my book club until I get it. Why in the world were you even discussing your private business? That’s private. Your medical decisions are private, and yet the way that they’re marketing it is that we got to do it right now. You mean, you want the entire population to be in a drug trial? We don’t know the long-term efficacy and safety of this. What is going on? Again, very Orwellian. I’m very concerned for people.   [01:29:04] Dr. David Brownstein: Concerned for our country.   [01:29:05] Ashley James: I’m very concerned for all countries. Look at Israel where people’s freedoms are completely taken away because if you don’t have your vaccine passport, you can’t even practically be a citizen. This is what we’re hearing is that all rights are being taken away, it’s very scary. I keep hearing about they still have outbreaks there because again, trial, right? Maybe you could speak to explaining vaccines because I think this would be good for those of us to understand the difference between marketing and reality. Marketing is vaccines are this bulletproof, all of a sudden, you won’t get the infection. You won’t get the infection. You won’t be infected, but that’s not what vaccines are. Vaccines don’t stop you from getting an infection.   [01:30:03] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, a true vaccine should. The measles vaccine should stop you from getting measles. The chickenpox vaccine should stop you from getting chickenpox. This vaccine has never been shown to stop you from getting coronaviruses. In the original studies, they were shown to stop severe illness and hospitalization. It has never been shown to stop transmission, and it’s never been shown to stop you from getting sick. So this is different from other vaccines that we’ve had, and that’s why you’re seeing some places on the internet where they’re saying, well, it’s really not a vaccine. It’s a genetic device or the kind of medical device to modify your genetic material. But this is a whole different mechanism that they’re titling a vaccine, which is different from how we’re used to vaccines as we know them.  If we take the chickenpox vaccine, I was a resident when the chickenpox vaccine came out and that really stopped chickenpox. Kids don’t get chickenpox anywhere near what they used to get it. This is different. This one’s different. It is a grand experiment and we’ll see. There are many people out there who feel like you do, they don’t want to be part of any big pharma experiments. But this is where we are. I think if people were more aware of that, we see some more hesitation and some more thinking about this. Right now, people aren’t thinking, they’re just reacting in fear that that’s the only way to protect themselves.   [01:31:58] Ashley James: Yeah, that’s the sad part is buying into the fear. So we don’t need to buy into the fear, we need to educate ourselves. Knowledge is power. The more knowledge we have, the more we can utilize the more tools we have in our tool belt.  Slow down, take a deep breath, take in the information. Anytime you make a medical decision, one of my friends was deciding whether she was going to get radiation or not after chemotherapy, or when she was deciding to do chemotherapy or not. They want to just rush her in and they tell her all statistics that make her afraid so that she’ll take immediate action. I thought that was very manipulative.  Let her take a deep breath, let her do the research, and let her decide for herself. They wanted to schedule, okay, we’re going to start your chemo tomorrow. If you don’t do this, you’re going to die. Do you really need to give someone that just found out they have cancer scare tactics? You don’t do that, that’s not helping. Let the person Take a deep breath and give them true informed consent, give them all the information—the good, the bad, the ugly, and also tell them about alternative therapies.  But we’re not experiencing true informed consent with this drug trial because we definitely don’t know all the side effects yet. People are still reporting to VAERS, and that’s even being manipulated. And then they’re not allowing physicians to practice any kind of alternative therapies, so we can’t really get true informed consent. It just boggles my mind.  But what we can do is we can get your book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses, and we can learn what’s really working to support the structure and function of the body to fight viruses. Thank you for writing this and thank you for coming here and sticking your neck out. They’re trying to silence you and you’re sticking your neck out. I love that you found a workaround by publishing your book. I’m excited that this information is getting out there.   [01:34:05] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, thank you for having me, Ashley. It was a nice talk. Hopefully, we can take the fear knob and start turning it down and then we can become rational people again and make better healthcare decisions.    [01:34:20] Ashley James: Absolutely. And listeners should go to your website, drbrownstein.com. And also, I love this because you’ve been doing this for so long. You bought these really good URLs, centerforholisticmedicine.com. I love it. Those are your websites, and of course, the links to everything that Dr. David Brownstein does including his books will be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. We’re definitely going to have you back on the show because there are so many rabbit holes we could go down with all the information and all your wonderful books. I’m very excited to have you back.   [01:34:54] Dr. David Brownstein: Thank you.     Get Connected with Dr. David Brownstein! Dr. Brown’s Holistic Medicine Center For Holistic Medicine Books by Dr. David Brownstein A Holistic Approach To Viruses Drugs That Don’t Work and Natural Therapies That Do! 2nd Edition Iodine: Why You Need It. Why You Can’t Live Without It. 5th Edition Ozone: The Miracle Therapy The Guide to a Dairy-Free Diet The Guide to a Gluten-Free Diet   Check out more wonderful books by Dr. Brownstein!  

Follow the Learn True Health Podcast on LBRY: https://lbry.tv/@Learn-True-Health:f Join the Learn True Health Community on Facebook: LearnTrueHealth.com/group   Study Outlines Key Factor In Chronically Sick vs Healthy Children https://www.learntruehealth.com/study-outlines-key-factor-in-chronically-sick-vs-healthy-children   Highlights: True informed consent Are face masks safe and effective in preventing COVID-19 transmission What you can do to prevent yourself from getting COVID-19 Absolute risk reduction vs, relative risk reduction of COVID-19 vaccines   Dr. Paul Thomas is back on the show, and he catches us up on what has happened to him since the last time he was on the show. He shares his research about vaccinated and unvaccinated kids and also some studies about COVID-19. He also touches briefly about masking and its safety and efficacy for children and adults. Dr. Thomas also gives some tips on how to stay healthy.   Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This episode and the next two episodes after this one are going to be a series. I am excited and nervous to publish them. There is a threat that might eliminate my podcast and that is free speech, so I bring you three doctors, these are medical doctors. One of them is also a PhD, cardiologist, and research scientist. Today’s doctor, Dr. Paul Thomas, is a pediatric general physician of over 30 years, and each of my guests—this and the next two, the three episodes—are all doctors who’ve been practicing for a very long time, 30+ years each I believe, and they are being silenced for speaking the truth, for sharing science, and it’s a science that has been so controversial because it goes against what is being taught in the mainstream. So, I invite you to open your minds, take in all the information, become critical thinkers if you’re not already, and use this information to empower you. We will not fear monger, we will not coerce, it is all about sharing free information and allowing us to think for ourselves. Please share my podcast with those you care about, share this episode with those who want to keep learning, growing, and continue to educate themselves on the best choices possible that they can make for themselves and their family as it pertains to their health. I interviewed Dr. Paul Thomas back in episode 224 and he shared the stories in his life as a child growing up in Africa to white missionary parents and the perspective it gave him in order to become a doctor. And then his experiences in his early career watching children go through regular wellness checks as we know them today, and experience side effects from vaccines, and see how the CDC schedule was not optimal for every patient. That led him to create his solution, which was to use one vaccine at a time and watch and see how the child reacts to it. He then wrote a book called The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, and his whole approach is that he’s not anti-vaccine, he’s also not pro-vaccine. This sort of upsets people on both sides of the spectrum. I hope that you, like me try to stay in the middle, take in all the information, and not vilify either side. But just take in all the information in order to make informed decisions. Instead of being pressured by fear or coercion, make informed decisions. He shares some amazing information, and he did back in 224. So you can go back and listen to that episode as well. But today, he shares some information that is so empowering, that is so mind-blowing. I hope you go to the links of the studies he has published in journals that show the findings of his studies. And if you’re like me, you will get excited because this information is empowering when we take it all in without emotion and we really look at it, and then we can decide how to navigate our health choices based on all of the research in this information. So, I’m excited for you to listen to this episode, and I really, really want you to share it with those that you think will help them to also make informed choices in their life to help them. So, thank you for being a listener of the Learn True Health podcast. Thank you for sharing. If you ever go to your favorite podcast directory like iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, wherever you listen to my show. If you ever go there and you find my show has been all of a sudden not there anymore, then I have been censored. I post my show also on LBRY. I believe it’s called LBRY. I post it everywhere I possibly can. But just so you know, if you don’t find me there, you can also email me, support@learntruehealth.com. If you ever all of a sudden can’t find my podcast, if I’ve been censored, deleted, and blocked, just know that I’ll still be publishing in places where censorship doesn’t exist or where there’s still parts of the internet where freedom of speech is still protected. So I will continue to publish in those areas. You can follow me on LBRY and come to the Learn True Health Facebook group as well. As long as Facebook allows us to be there, we will be there. We’ve got a robust and beautiful Facebook community. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook and we have a wonderful community of people who are answering questions, seeking advice and seeking solutions to grow, to learn, to achieve true health. Enjoy today’s interview and please also listen to the next two interviews that I’ll be publishing because I think that this is a very interesting series to publish and get out there, especially for those who didn’t know this information before. Take care.   [00:06:14] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 461. I am so excited for today’s guest. I’ve had Dr. Paul Thomas on the show. It was episode 224 back in February of 2018. Can you believe how much time has passed? Can we just get on a time machine and go back to 2018? That’d be so great.   [00:06:48] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yup. Well, thank you, Ashley, for having me on your show again. So much has happened in my life since early 2018, oh my goodness.    Ashley James: Well, when we had you on the show, you shared some amazing stories. I’ve always referred back to our episode together because I like to try to stay neutral on many topics that are controversial and allow the guests through science and through real research help people to better understand their medical choices. I think that when we polarize a topic, we really become ignorant because making a choice that’s emotional, making a medical choice based on a belief that’s uninformed can end up harming us. Or making a medical choice based on, well, my doctor just told me to and he created a lot of fear. My mother-in-law is really pushing for it. When there’s fear, emotion, and people are pushing us or we feel peer pressure to make a medical decision for ourselves or our children, we’re not fully informed. We end up paying the price, and so many have.   [00:07:57] Dr. Paul Thomas: Absolutely.   [00:07:58] Ashley James: What I love about what you do is you believe in true informed consent. and I really learned that from you on such a deep level. I’ve actually had to say that since you and I talked on the show in 2018, I’ve had to say that to several doctors—I want informed consent. They just stopped in their tracks and they switched gears. They’re like, oh, okay. It was great because I could see that they were like, okay, I can’t just tell this person what to do. I have to show them all of their options and really go through them. I actually had one doctor get very excited. My son ended up in a children’s hospital with respiratory distress, it was very scary. Before they stuck a needle in him for an IV, what they were actually giving him magnesium, I had no idea what they were doing. I’m like, I need informed consent. She stopped and she got really excited. She’s like, okay, great. Let me tell you, this is what we’re doing, these are the possible side effects, these are the benefits, these are the alternatives, and she really walked me through it. I’m like, wow, the doctor that wants to give you true informed consent wants to empower you to make good choices, to make the best choices that you can. The doctors that get upset, that’s a doctor I’d be afraid of. So, I learned so much from you and our listeners learned so much from you. I heard the other day from one of my friends who’s in the medical field that you have been up against it, and she heard you in another interview talk about some very interesting things that have been going on. I’ve been watching you, I follow you on Facebook, and I would love for you to share with the listeners what has happened since 2018 since we had you on the show.   [00:09:41] Dr. Paul Thomas: Oh my goodness. A lot, and I’ll walk you through the key points. Thank you for highlighting informed consent. It is the ethical principle upon which all medical procedures should be judged. If you’re going to die right in front of me, if I don’t do something, you would just jump in and do something, right?   [00:10:02] Ashley James: Yes.   [00:10:02] Dr. Paul Thomas: But anything else, if you’re not at risk of dying right now, then if I’m proposing a procedure or a treatment—whether it be medication, surgery, vaccines—you deserve as a patient to be informed of the risks, the benefits, and the alternatives, and one of the alternatives for any medical procedure should always be putting it off, not doing it. Because if I’m just here to coerce you, to convince you, to get you to do my procedure, that’s not true informed consent. I mean, you could pretend like it is, but you as the consumer, you have to know that it is your option, and you’re not going to be judged, you’re not going to be looked down upon, you’re not going to be made to feel bad if you choose not to follow the advice. Doctors typically have what they think is best, so generally, we go with whatever our doctors say. But, in the area of vaccines, which has been the world I’m most known for, I mean, I’m a general pediatrician. I also do addiction medicine. I really focus on preventative health and wellness, but the area that I’ve become well known for is this vaccine issue, which like you said, it’s so polarizing. Part of the reason it’s so polarizing is that the mainstream mantra that is funded by huge pharma dollars is the simple marketing slogan—vaccines are safe and effective. That, folks, is not a medical fact. It is a marketing slogan. But unfortunately, physicians, the public, everybody has just adopted that as if it were a truth, as if that were science. So just to dispel that, vaccines are safe and effective because I’m not anti- or pro-vaccine, just like I’m not anti- or pro-antibiotics, or any other procedure. We have to look at the specifics and individualize for this patient in front of us and go through the pros and the cons—risks, benefits, alternatives. So, vaccines are safe. Well, that’s obviously false. There is no safe medication. How risky a given vaccine depends on the vaccine, and we’ll probably get to this, but COVID is by far, the COVID vaccine is the most dangerous vaccine that has ever been brought to market. We have over 5000 deaths already from the vaccines reported in VAERS, which we know catches about 1%-2%, no more than 10% for sure of the adverse events. It’s more deaths than all other deaths for the past 30 years from all vaccines combined, think about that.   [00:12:47] Ashley James: Can you say that again?   [00:12:49] Dr. Paul Thomas: There are more deaths from the COVID vaccine than there have been deaths from all other vaccines combined over the entire duration of the VAERS system, which is 30 years. This vaccine is so dangerous it should be pulled from the market, in my opinion, and in the opinion of many physicians and scientists. But those opinions are silenced, you don’t hear it on the news, and there is massive suppression of that sort of information because it just seems like this program has a life of its own. They don’t seem to know how to pull back because they’ve invested I don’t know, hundreds of billions of dollars or something, some massive amount. I mean, they’re trying to vaccinate the planet with an experimental vaccine. Anyway, I went off on the COVID vaccine a little too soon because this guy’s crazy. You know folks, you got to look at the data, and the data is very convincing. But let me walk you back through my journey since we were last together. So, in 2016 I wrote a book, The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, and that book is not anti-vaccine or pro-vaccine. In fact, I pissed everybody off with that book because the people who truly hate vaccines call me baby killer because I am recommending vaccines, and the people who are pro-vaccine hate me because I’m not recommending all the vaccines or I’m making it too complicated to follow the CDC schedule. People are not going to get all their vaccines, therefore, I’m harming public health. Well, that is the narrative that has been used by the Oregon Medical Board to come after me. And actually, since around the time you and I talked, actually it was that month I believe. Maybe it was after we talked, around that time I got a notice from the Oregon Medical Board that said prove. They’d already been hitting me with a few complaints. I know there’s an effort to attempt to get rid of me, let’s just say it that way.  I am seen by some as dangerous for the public. If I’m causing patients not to follow the CDC schedule and all I do is give informed consent. I tell people the risks, the benefits, the alternatives, and when you really get the truth about risks and benefits, some vaccines just plain don’t make sense. The easy one is Hepatitis B for newborns. So in America, every newborn in the hospital is given an injection of 250 micrograms of aluminum for a disease Hepatitis B that you catch from sex and IV drug use. The babies in my practice frankly are not having sex and not sharing dirty needles, so unless their birth mother has Hepatitis B, their risk for that disease is absolutely zero. The risk of injecting that much aluminum is known, it is fairly significant, although it’s not recognized so that’s the issue. Those of us who are aware of aluminum toxicity, it creates problems with your immune system, allergies, and autoimmunity. We know that it affects neurodevelopment. Since 1990 and before, there were studies about aluminum toxicity and how it harms neurodevelopment, so why would you cause something that’s going to affect your baby’s development and brain for a disease they have zero risks for? So that’s the kind of informed consent. When you as a parent are actually told those facts. I think I’ve had 1 patient out of the last 3000 in my practice still want to get the Hepatitis B vaccine. That one’s so clear. Now, a lot of them are not so clear because they have risks, but they also have benefits, and that’s where it gets muddied. That’s where in my book, The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, I tried to navigate that whole issue. Let me go back to the fact that the board asked me to prove that the vaccine-friendly plan that I talked about in my book was as safe as the CDC schedule. So, I got this letter from the medical board, and you have to produce, by the way, when the medical board comes after you. If you refuse to cooperate, they just yank your license. So, I hired a doctor to come into my office. He was a former pediatrician neonatologist who had then morphed his career into medical record informatics systems. He had designed, I think, almost 50 informatics systems around the world. I mean, this guy’s a nerd genius data guy.   [00:17:33] Ashley James: Just to explain what that means, he’s able to take all the records and he’s able to quantify certain information? Can you just explain what it is he ends up producing?   [00:17:45] Dr. Paul Thomas: What he does. So I asked him to answer the following question. He came and spent a week in my office. Extracting data about vaccines is pretty complicated when you have different health care systems. I had transferred patients from an old practice, and our systems had changed from one to another. It took him a lot more work because of that, but I basically asked him, identify every patient born into my practice. So this practice, Integrative Pediatrics, was opened in June of 2008. At that time we had 10 ½ years of data. I said, find every patient born into the practice. We want patients who were seen from birth because I get a lot of patients come into my practice because they’ve had other vaccine injuries and they know that I will listen to them, whereas other practices will just kick them out if they don’t follow the CDC schedule. So I attract a lot of higher-risk families, and I wanted a pure sample of just kids born into the practice. So that ended up being over 3,000 kids. And then I said let’s look at every vaccine they got, every single diagnosis they were given, and let’s just plot out the data. Actually, he wasn’t even going to plot out the data. His job was merely to find the data. He then had it de-identified by an honest broker so that when I sent that data set to my co-author, James Lyons Weiler, he had no clue who was who. He was purely working from raw data. Now, the guy that came in, when he came in he was not really a believer that vaccines can cause harm. He was more of the old-school vaccines are safe and effective. I said, well, we’ll see. I mean, I honestly didn’t know what we would find. After the first day, he came out excited like a kid in a candy store. He’s going, oh my God. The data just jumps out at you. I said, what do you mean? He says, well, I’m not looking for the results, but you cannot not see it. The unvaccinated kids just don’t get sick. They don’t get anything. I knew there was some signal he was seeing, but then when we analyzed this data and we published it, we took it through peer review. The article for your listeners is called Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses Along the Axis of Vaccination. It’s published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, published November 18, 2020. Now, that’s a mouthful for a title but I just wanted you to have it if you’re looking it up. But basically, if you just look for International Journal Environmental Research Public Health 2020 I think you’ll find it, Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses. Sorry about that. Maybe on your show, you can give a link or something. I think I sent it.   [00:20:39] Ashley James: Yes. We actually transcribe all of the interviews and put it on our website, learntruehealth.com. So we’ll make sure the link is there.   [00:20:48] Dr. Paul Thomas: Perfect. For those of you who go and get this article, which I highly recommend, see if you can print it out in color because we have a page of graphs all on one page. It’s Figure 5 Analysis 5, and what it shows is for all the major conditions that were looked at, in orange, you have over that whole 10 years the increase in the diagnosis of the various conditions. So we’ve got asthma, allergic rhinitis, breathing issues, behavior problems, ADD, ADHD, ear infections, other infections, eye infections, eczema, dermatitis, and urticaria. So skin problems and anemia. For every single one of the conditions, the orange line, which is your vaccinated kid—and by the way, these are children in my practice following the vaccine-friendly plan, so they’re getting about half the vaccines that a CDC schedule kid would get. But even then, when you compare them to over 500 kids who were unvaccinated and it was age-matched, so we’re comparing kids of the same age, the unvaxxed kids just don’t get these conditions. It’s almost a flat line in blue and this rising level of problems for the vaccinated kids.   [00:22:03] Ashley James: I’m looking at the graph right now, I just googled it. I’m looking at Figure 5 and it’s unbelievable. There’s no question when you see this data.   [00:22:12] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, it just jumps out at you, and that’s what he was I think seeing when he was just looking at raw data. I didn’t expect it to be this dramatic. Here’s the problem, for listeners to understand, doctors don’t realize that these things have anything to do with vaccines. I mean, who would think that asthma, ear infections, ear pain, dry skin, itchy skin, or even anemia—who would ever have thought that they had anything to do with vaccines? It seems that they do, and we now have other studies. There’s something called the control group that’s just incredibly powerful. You can go to thecontrolgroup.org and they did a survey. What they found was one-quarter of 1% of Americans are totally unvaccinated. One-quarter of 1%. 99.9.74% have had at least one vaccine, and that was mind-boggling. They surveyed 48 of the 50 states, they had a sample size of I think over 3,000 surveys done. And when they looked at things like heart disease, cancer, or diabetes, the unvaxxed adults had zero—no heart disease, no cancer, no diabetes, zero. And of course, the incidence we know of heart disease in adults is somewhere around 50%, I believe, diabetes 10%. People don’t know that the chronic things for which you need medication could be related to vaccines because this has never been done. That’s the tragedy of our health system. It has never, because of the sales marketing pitch of vaccines are safe and effective, they’ve never bothered to look. Some of us are waking up to the fact that whoa, we got a problem and we should be looking. That vaxxed-unvaxxed study was published on November 18, 2020. It was first available online at the end of November, and five days after it was available online, the Oregon Medical Board had an emergency meeting and they immediately suspended my license to practice medicine.   [00:24:43] Ashley James: So they asked you for the proof, you gave them the proof, and they suspended your license because you gave them the proof that they asked for.   [00:24:54] Dr. Paul Thomas: There you go. I mean, obviously, I can’t prove that they emergently suspended my license because I published this data. But it’s pretty close to guaranteed proof because of the following. A week before that or maybe it was two weeks before that, they had just sent a new complaint that was absolutely ridiculous. They’ve been sending me new complaints that are anonymous by the way so we don’t know where they’re coming from, who’s initiating these complaints.   [00:25:23] Ashley James: The pharmaceutical company could be.   [00:25:24] Dr. Paul Thomas: I don’t know who, I’ll tell you, but they’ve been endless. I would say the last two, three years, I get complaints every other month and I have to address them. I dig for the data that they’re asking for and give it to them, never hear back. So they’ve never filed any charges, just they’re fishing. So they complain after complaint. So we were already in the process of trying to respond to another complaint, yet another complaint when this emergency happened. Well, what was the emergency? Nothing had changed. My patients are the healthiest patients in town, and I’ve got data to prove it now that’s been published in a peer-reviewed journal, so where’s the emergency? There can only be one explanation, in my opinion. So we have other good news to report. Just a couple of weeks ago, I got my attorney to take their situation of yanking my license without making any charges, which is basically illegal, and he took it to a judge. The judge ruled in our favor, and the board actually just two weeks ago gave me back my license.   [00:26:36] Ashley James: Congratulations.   [00:26:38] Dr. Paul Thomas: Thank you. The loss of my license caused me to lose all health insurance contracts. I don’t have health insurance, I don’t have insurance contracts. I lost my board certification from both the Board of Addiction Medicine, the Academy of Pediatrics, and I haven’t worked for the last six months. It’s taken a huge toll on our practice. We’re still open. Thankfully I have four actually, but three mostly working in the trenches nurse practitioners who are doing an incredible job of taking care of the patients. But it’s not been easy.   [00:27:16] Ashley James: Wow. When we spoke, I thought you also had a few doctors and a Naturopath that worked with you.   [00:27:23] Dr. Paul Thomas: I did. You and I talked, at that point, there were 10 of us in the office. So we had a Naturopath who was just amazing. I think we were three doctors, five nurse practitioners, and a Naturopath, 10 in total. If you count me, we’re down to four with one nurse practitioner doing a tiny bit of fill-in here and there.   [00:27:47] Ashley James: I know with Washington state there’s some weird law where you have to be a doctor to employ doctors or something. I don’t quite understand it. Were they not allowed to be employed by the clinic because you lost your license? Why did they leave?   [00:28:04] Dr. Paul Thomas: Most of them left in fear.   [00:28:08] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.   [00:28:10] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, they were targeting me and it looked like they were starting to target the practice. So, one of my nurse practitioners, just a lovely, lovely lady, oh my gosh, but she was young. She had gotten her PhD or whatever the doctorate level for nurse practitioners was. She had ambitions to teach. She just had to move on because it was just too risky for her career. I had another doctor who just left, it was just too risky for her career. She still had young children. Yeah, it’s a lot of pressure that doctors who speak up for informed consent are—I mean, what’s happening in California, it’s just any doctor who’s written exemptions for vaccines is having to fight for their license. I mean, it’s like a witch hunt.    [00:28:59] Ashley James: Wow. So I have a friend, actually, he’s a listener and we became friends. They contacted your office, but it wouldn’t make sense to have a medical exemption written in Oregon if he’s in California. But his son has had major problems, surgeries, and based on his history, of his past, and the kid is I think six now because he’s about the same age as my son. Just based on all of the health conditions he’s gone through and is currently going through, he’s a candidate for exemptions right now because his immune system is compromised, there are all these other things. Because they’re in California, he can’t find anyone. If he were to go to any other state, a pediatrician would say, absolutely, this is not a candidate right now for a vaccine because he’s compromised. You’re saying there are effects. I don’t even like the term side effects. There are effects of certain medications, and when a person is compromised, those effects are more dramatic.   [00:30:13] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah. The problem is, somehow, pharma has captured the CDC. So the CDC makes recommendations, they also make money on vaccines, and they also are kind of a marketing arm in a real sense for vaccines based on what data they choose to collect and then what data they choose to publish. But the CDC has never done any of the research that’s necessary to answer the question as I did, for example, comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated. Your friend that was hoping for an exemption, I would actually guess that 90% something, close to 100% of pediatricians would not write an exemption even though it sounds like there’s pretty strong evidence that that would be a mistake to vaccinate that child with all that’s going on, either because they truly believe vaccines are safe and effective. They, in a way, drank the Kool-Aid. I mean, they’re just not doing their own research, or in this day and age, it’s career suicide. I mean, if you write medical exemptions, you’re waving a big old flag to the medical board, come get me. Unless you’re close to retirement, that’s just not an option for a young doctor who’s trying to build a career and maybe feed their family.   [00:31:39] Ashley James: Wow. That’s actually something I wanted to bring up was talking about safety testing. But first, I wanted to point out, I loved that near the end of our interview back in 2018 episode 224, you shared a story. At that time in February, it’s the tail end of “flu season.” And at the time, I’m up in Washington state. So in the pacific northwest, we had a really bad flu outbreak. My family didn’t get it, but in all of the clinics, all of the hospitals, it was like a four or five-hour wait. They were just full. And down in Oregon as well, you guys had four to five-hour waits in the emergency rooms and clinics were just full. We got hit really badly with some form of influenza and you said to me, last Friday, our clinic closed early because we didn’t get one phone call. I think you said 10,000 patients, not one phone call from 10,000 patients saying my son Johnny has a fever and sniffles, I need to come in or what should I do? You didn’t get one phone call from all your patients. About 50% of your practice I think you said was unvaccinated and the other percentage would follow not the CDC schedule but would follow what’s laid out in your book, which is one at a time, wait and see, how does the kid react. And then I said, well, what do you guys do for the unvaccinated children for those that choose to not do it? What do parents do to help keep a child healthy? And you say, well, all my patients take vitamin D. They all get outside into the sunlight, get fresh air, and exercise. They all eat very clean, very healthy fruits and vegetables. I think you went down a list of everything that regardless of vaccine status, you make sure they all follow these guidelines.    [00:33:48] Dr. Paul Thomas: Well, they’re recommended. I’m not sure how well—    [00:33:52] Ashley James: They’re followed?   [00:33:54] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah. Lifestyle is tough, right?   [00:33:55] Ashley James: It is.   [00:33:57] Dr. Paul Thomas: For adults, you’re supposed to exercise, not drink, eat healthy, and you get your sleep, and how many of us are perfect on that? But no, you’re absolutely right. To this day, I have two waiting rooms—a well and a sick side—because at my old practice, before I started this one, there was this one giant waiting room and it was always like three quarters filled with sick kids, and you have these little well babies and well kids sitting amongst coughing, sneezing, a snotty nose, feverish kids, something. This is not good. You’re exposing healthy kids to so much stuff. I mean, it’s like, stay away from the pediatric office. So I set this up with two separate completely separate waiting rooms. Our sick waiting room almost never has anybody in it. It was true back then, and of course, it’s really been true with quarantine. Quarantine, for sure for most practices, reduced the volume of visits just in general. How much of that was just people wouldn’t come in for fear of being exposed to somebody with COVID, or that they truly weren’t sick? I think it’s a little bit of both. I mean, the fact that people were not in school, we know as a pediatrician, once school opens, just give it a few weeks and we get busy. The states that had no direct student contact schooling, so if it was completely at homeschooling, it definitely reduced illness.  But the other thing that happened with COVID is we had what I’m going to call diagnostic substitution. So, traditionally, in the United States, the CDC has reported there’s, oh, I would say from 30,000 to 60,000 cases of influenza in the US per year. As a practicing busy pediatrician, I can tell you that probably at most 10% of those cases were actually influenza. It’s usually less than 5%, but definitely no more than 10%. How can I say that?  Well, it’s reported by the CDC that’s the case. But when we get a really sick kid in the winter and they’ve got a cough, fever, maybe a little sore throat, body aches, a flu-like illness, today you would call it COVID, probably not even see them. You don’t want to bring that patient into the office, you just assume it’s COVID. But back then, before COVID, you would bring these sickest kids in to figure out what’s going on because they could have bacterial pneumonia and there are antibiotics for that. So you want to know who needs to be treated or are they so sick they need to be in the hospital. Maybe they have a requirement for oxygen. So, those sickest kids, the last few years we were doing something called a recipe path where you would actually swab the nose and send that off to test for maybe 20 different most common things that would cause an infection in the kid. And it would include influenza a, influenza b, rhinovirus, and the various cold viruses, even coronaviruses on that panel before COVID came around, the bacterial causes, et cetera. And that’s why I know at the height of flu season back then, 5% to 10% max. So now, I’ll bet you it’s similar to COVID even though it can be a very devastating illness for those who are high risk, it’s no big deal for kids. So if a kid comes in with flu-like symptoms, if we could test them for COVID and use a proper test, not the PCR test that’s high cycles of amplification, we can talk about that. That’s giving so many false positives. But if we had a real test, those with a flu-like, COVID-like illness, I’ll bet you it’s less than 5% who are actually COVID. We just changed.  So, now all the people that used to be labeled as flu because that supported the flu shot campaign, now we’re labeling them as COVID because that supports the COVID shot campaign. The truth of the matter is do that panel of 20 tests and you’ve got some mycoplasma in there, you got some pneumococcus, you got some rhinovirus, some adenovirus, some different coronavirus. You’ve got RSV, parainfluenza, pertussis, influenza a, influenza b. There’s a long list of things that are causing that person’s symptoms, but we don’t bother to figure it out anymore. Right now you just said, stay home until you get better. If you get really bad, go to the hospital. That’s not good medicine, folks.    [00:38:31] Ashley James: That kind of blows my mind because we’re told “flu season,” it’s just a bunch of influenza and that’s it. But really, it’s only ever been 5% to 10% percent and the other infections are different bacteria or viruses. That marketing, that’s right, we’re marketed to. I remember when the flu shot came out, I was a teenager. I grew up in Canada and the marketing was big. It was all happy people dancing in a field and downhill skiing. Get the flu shot, prevent the flu. And I even got the shot, I think I was 19. I got it at my chiropractor’s office of all things. She was so excited. Free flu shots or maybe it was $25, I don’t remember. She was so excited, it was so innovative. It was so new. And my mom and I never got sick. I don’t know why we were excited about the flu shot. I guess we totally bought the marketing, but my mom and I never ever got the flu ever. I don’t even remember having the flu my entire life. And then after that shot, my mom and I were so sick. We turned to each other about a week later and said never again are we going to get this shot. This is ridiculous. What were we thinking? I started to go, that’s interesting. It made me question a little bit. And then when my mom was dying in the hospital of a medication the week before she died—she was in the hospital for the last two weeks of her life and I was there with her. I had the radio on and they announced on the news that the medication she had been on that her doctor feared her into taking. It was a synthetic estrogen. Her doctor said, if you don’t take this, your bones are going to be brittle and you’re just going to break a hip and die, basically. I remember my mom who was the strongest woman I knew came home in tears crying, leaning to get on this medication because her doctor told her she was going to have brittle bones and die if she didn’t take it. And then a few years later, she’s dying in the hospital of cancer, and it was this drug that was taken off the market for causing an insane amount of cancer in women. The doctor that prescribed it got cancer too because she was on it because. She believed the marketing.   [00:40:56] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, doctors believe it themselves.   [00:40:59] Ashley James: Right, they do. I mean, they have conviction around it as well. Something in my brain switched and I’m like, I was raised to blindly trust the marketing, blindly trust it to get excited about drugs. Like, oh, this is going to make me better, this is going to help me. If I have an infection, I can’t fight it naturally, and it’s getting bad, then yes, I want allopathic medicine at my side. But when we go to a doctor with symptoms that are symptoms of nutrient deficiency, symptoms of lifestyle issues, and we’re put on medication after medication after medication, this is a system that’s failing us, especially when we look at statistically the number one and two and three causes of death in the United States. These things aren’t getting better, and we’re medicating them more and more and more and they’re not getting better. I have interviewed so many holistic-minded doctors who have amazing results, like you do with your patients, who have outstanding results, and have published these results with reversing chronic illness and preventing disease with natural medicine. So, in my mind, it’s like, if I could help the listeners to think critically and not buy the marketing. I don’t want to say never get X drug. The whole black and white thing, that doesn’t work either, it’s dogmatic. But they’re being dogmatic and saying always blindly trust this and take it, and I’m saying use critical thinking. Definitely read Dr. Paul Thomas’s book, use critical thinking, and look at his studies and see that we need to question everything we put into our body. People will question a supplement. You recommend a supplement, they’ll be like, well, who manufactured it? What are the safety studies? But then they’ll just go and blindly trust a doctor with a medication. We have to use critical thinking with everything. Where our food comes from too nowadays.   [00:43:12] Dr. Paul Thomas: Oh my goodness, absolutely.   [00:43:13] Ashley James: There’s GMO potato. I had a whole episode with Jeffrey Smith who’s an advocate for non-GMO, and he talked about apples and potatoes are now GMO. It’s not just corn and soy. These things are having major health problems. It’s destroying the bacteria of the gut, the microbiome of the gut. The microbiome of the gut produces our serotonin. It actually helps convert some of our thyroid, I think it’s T4 into T3. If we don’t have a healthy microbiome, we begin to just lose health on all fronts, and GMOs are causing that. Not to go off on a tangent, but just to say that we really need to question everything and educate ourselves on everything we put in our body—clean water, clean food. Even when it comes to medication and supplements, we have to do our own footwork basically. What always, I guess, confused me, we were told that vaccines are safe because they’re tested. There must be safety studies, right? I mean, drugs are tested for years. My mom died of this, so every drug that was approved to be given to patients in Canada, in the states, any country—I’m going to use the FDA as an example for America—but every drug that’s been taken off the market for doing harm was also first approved. So, these drugs that have then been rescinded, the drug that was rescinded off the market for killing my mother and killing other women was approved at one point. We have to remember that. Just that alone, we should start to just question things more instead of blindly follow them. But in my mind, I always thought that vaccines were tested. Aren’t they safety tested for years like drugs are safety tested, and don’t they do double-blind studies because that’s their thing, right? Double-blind studies. And then I heard somewhere that vaccines are not safety tested with double-blind placebo studies. They don’t do a placebo that’s inert. Can you explain that? What I mean is, you think they’re injecting water or saline solution into someone’s arm and they’re the placebo trial, and then they’re injecting the actual vaccine to the other person. But that’s not the case. If they were to take people and just inject saline versus a vaccine, then they actually might show the negative effects like you said with VAERS, the negative effects far outweigh the inert placebo. How do they “do safety tests”? How do they study safety before they release it to the public?   [00:46:21] Dr. Paul Thomas: Awesome question. The problem with vaccine science and research when it comes to safety testing is they have very cleverly gotten completely away from using a true placebo, which would be an injection of just saltwater, saline which is at the same concentration as your blood or plasma. On one group you would have the vaccine, and on the other group you would have saline. The trick they use is in the case of aluminum, which we know is extremely problematic, they’ll just give aluminum instead of saline, and then the vaccine will be the vaccine antigen plus the aluminum. Their side effects are, look, oh they’re the same, therefore the vaccine’s safe. I call that tobacco science. So for example. Ashley. why don’t you smoke one pack a day, I’m going to smoke two packs a day, and we’ll have a third group smoke none. We’ll see who died in a week. Nobody died, so it’s safe. That highlights the second problem with vaccine research, which is the duration of the study. How long do they follow these people is very short, much too short to pick anything up other than a little redness at the injection site. That’s why they say, oh, it’s one in a million to have bad side effects except of course you’re going to get a little redness where you got your shot and it’ll be a little sore. They completely intentionally don’t look for long-term side effects. Autoimmunity and allergies take years sometimes to develop. They’re never going to pick that up. They don’t use a proper placebo, they’re not double-blind controlled studies, and they’re not long enough. That whole phenomenon creates a situation where really, oh, a couple of other huge things because the belief almost like religion is that vaccines are safe and effective, they don’t look at all health outcomes. They only look for a few things that they know are known side effects from vaccines. So, in my research, for example, they would never be looking for asthma, behavioral issues, ADD, ADHD, allergies, breathing problems, ear infections, ear pain, or eczema. They don’t recognize these things as related to vaccines. If you don’t look, you don’t find it. The trials are set up specifically to look at a certain set of things, and then they shut off the trials before there’s a chance for there to be any difference in the two groups. They can say look, the two groups are similar so the vaccines are safe. There’s another problem. If you are funding a study. So I’m a pharmaceutical company let’s say and I’m going to study product X. Let’s say I set it all up, I want to show that product X is going to help you live healthier. We get going with this study and it’s not going well. It’s not looking like this study is going to help. Generally, we’re just going to abandon that research. This research isn’t working, we must have designed it wrong. We’re not going to do this research. Sometimes they’ll even get to the point of publication and why would they publish it? It’s going to harm their product. The people funding the research obviously have a desire for a certain outcome. When they get the outcome they like, they publish it, if they don’t, they often don’t publish it. Worse than that, pharma money has infiltrated the academic institutions, universities, all the PhDs who are doing research in their labs have to apply for grants so they can fund their research. Most of these grants are coming from somehow pharmaceutical money. You don’t get a grant unless you’re researching something that they’re interested in. They have never ever, ever yet funded a true vaxxed-unvaxxed study. This is why my published study is so important because there was no funding. We just did this. The next set of problems comes. If you ever get something published, which we did with a very rigorous peer review process, they try to get it retracted. And in fact, we are right now under review. Somebody complained and said, well, our methodology is new, it’s not valid. Well, the reason they were complaining is we did it the old way, which is do you have the disease or not right? So if we looked at asthma, ADHD, autism, or whatever, it was just a yes, no. That’s how most research is done. Well, what we did in this research is we looked at every single diagnosis even how many times it happened. So, if you’re in the study and you’re seen once in your lifetime for an asthma attack, compare that to a child who’s had 20 visits for an asthma attack. That shows an increased severity. The way we designed this study, we did it the old way, we analyzed it that way, and it was significant in a few things. But when you look at severity, it’s highly significant. So we also published this as sort of a shot across the bow for future researchers saying look at all health outcomes and look at all visits so you can pick up severity. It’s a really clever design, but it’s new. People who want to try to discredit research, they don’t want anything new if it’s going to show what they’re trying to protect in a bad light.   [00:51:53] Ashley James: That’s amazing. I like your way much better because it shows the severity. That makes so much sense. Instead of this black or white, they have it or they don’t have it, well, how many times did they have that incident occur over a period of time shows the severity. That makes so much more sense.   [00:52:14] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, exactly.   [00:52:16] Ashley James: You really spent the extra time to go into it. I love that that guy came in believing one thing and then the numbers don’t lie. The numbers don’t lie.   [00:52:29] Dr. Paul Thomas: It’s data, and when people take offense to data that’s been peer-reviewed and well researched—what’s so ironic is that as we pointed out at the beginning of this interview, this was the data they asked for. They sure didn’t like what they found. We also published another study that I’ll just mention, it’s a short little paper. Well, it’s actually not that short, but it’s called Vaccine Practice Payment Schedules Create Perverse Incentives for Unnecessary Medical Procedures – at What Cost to Patients? So this was published in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research. Basically, what we did was I took a month’s worth of data from my practice back in August, September a year ago, and we looked at every single superbill. In other words, everybody that walked through the door for that month, and on the back of my super bills, I have a vaccine refusal form. Because we’re so meticulous about documenting informed consent that anytime vaccines are discussed, we flip the superbill over, it’s just a piece of paper that we click off what we’re doing that day so the billing people can double-check they bill appropriately for what was done. That’s all our superbill is. So on the one side, say they got a CBC to check for anemia, or they got a breathing treatment for asthma, we just check off what we’ve done. And then on the flip side though is this checklist of all the vaccines that we could possibly give. We go through and say, well, looking at your vaccine status, you’re behind on this vaccine. Here’s what other pediatricians would tell you to do so that you’re following the CDC schedule, and the patients either agree to do them or they refuse them. So we had the ability to actually tabulate which vaccines were given for an entire month by which company because some insurance companies pay better than others. I mean, this was real-world data. The vaccines that were accepted and done, and the vaccines that should have been done if you were following the CDC schedule but were refused. And then we extrapolated that for 12 months and learned that our practice of about 10,000 patients where we bill out about $3 million—well, before all this happened to me it was about $3 million. It’s dropped to about $2 million now. But our gross billings was about $3 million. We have 30 some employees. At that point, we had close to 10 providers. For a practice billing out $3 million, we were losing over $1 million dollars in just administration fees. You can’t survive as a practice if you’re losing a quarter to a third of your overhead because pediatric practices run about 70%, 80% overhead. So, no wonder I haven’t been able to give my employees a raise. I think they got one raise in the last 10 years. It is a service of love by everybody that’s working in my practice because we believe in what we’re doing, we’re helping kids. Money’s tight when you’re not getting vaccine money. If I’m leaving $1 million on the table for the last 13 years, that’s $13 million. My employees could have had nice raises and bonuses, and I’d probably be doing just fine, right? I’m the sole owner of this practice. I haven’t taken a paycheck in six months. The vaccine compensation is set up in such a way that it is so enticing, and pediatricians deny this. I used to deny it. I used to say, oh, no, no. We don’t make any money on vaccines. That’s because the markup that most practices do on vaccines is very, very low. If I buy a vaccine for $100, I might charge you $103 or $105 for it. I’m not making a massive amount of profit on selling vaccines. But the insurance companies give you this payment, it’s called administration fee, and it’s over $1,000 in the first year of a baby’s life. One baby, I’m getting over $1,000 in just the administration fees by the time they’re age one.   [00:56:32] Ashley James: For keeping them on the CDC schedule?   [00:56:36] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yup, if you follow the CDC schedule.   [00:56:38] Ashley James: How many babies does a pediatrician typically have in their practice?   [00:56:42] Dr. Paul Thomas: Well, a busy pediatrician like I am, I would get about 30 babies a month. I’d say $5,000 to $10,000 maybe?   [00:56:51] Ashley James: So, it’s $5,000 to $10,000 a month, upwards of $30,000 a month if a pediatrician were to vaccinate 100% of their infants each month?   [00:57:03] Dr. Paul Thomas: That’s just the admin fee. You still get paid to see the patients.   [00:57:07] Ashley James: Oh yeah. But let’s say a pediatrician gives zero vaccines versus 100% of the CDC schedule. So pediatricians are incentivized, if they see only five to ten babies a month, it’s $5,000 to $10,000 a month in their pocket.   [00:57:25] Dr. Paul Thomas: Per year. No, that is per year.   [00:57:27] Ashley James: Per month, they see five to 10 new babies per month?   [00:57:33] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yes.   [00:57:33] Ashley James: So, if they see five to ten new babies per month, then it’s $5,000 to $10,000 a month.   [00:57:37] Dr. Paul Thomas: Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah. I see how you’re doing the math.   [00:57:42] Ashley James: If it’s 30,000 babies a month for you because you’re busy, then that’s $30,000 a month for keeping them on the CDC schedule versus a pediatrician who does informed consent and only attracts parents who wish not to vaccinate 100%. That is significant.   [00:57:42] Dr. Paul Thomas: It’s huge, and pediatricians deny that they’re incentivized by money. I think honestly, they don’t know. I just got this published this past year in October of 2020. Or wait a minute, when was this published? This was March of ‘21. That’s right, I knew it was more recent. We just got this published two, three months ago. I don’t think pediatricians are aware that—here’s the reality in my town. Almost any other pediatrician will not see you unless you follow the CDC schedule. So, that is now a process that the Academy of Pediatrics is okay with ethically. In other words, you can kick people out of your practice if they won’t follow the CDC schedule. However, there is a little caveat. They have to have alternative care available. So here’s the funny thing. They’re trying to take my license away because I’m honoring informed consent, but I’m the only place these people can go. So if they shut me down, they’re not going to be able to kick these people out. It’s kind of weird. Financially, they’re getting to benefit from getting rid of the patients that kind of costs you money. If you see patients and they’re not vaccinating, it’s actually costing you money because the overhead is so high. So, let’s get these patients who aren’t getting us in the profits, let’s send them over to Dr. Paul at Integrative Pediatrics. We’ll keep the ones that are lucrative. They’re not thinking that way, but that is the reality.   [00:59:47] Ashley James: You got to imagine, some of them have figured it out.   [00:59:50] Dr. Paul Thomas: Maybe. I’ll tell you what, the office managers know. I remember back in my old office, back in the early 2000s when we figured out we were injecting too much mercury because a lot of the vaccines had mercury in there to prevent fungal infections in those vials. There was data accumulating that that was causing health problems and probably linked to certain cases of autism.   [01:00:15] Ashley James: Wait a second. Mercury is not healthy for you?   [01:00:19] Dr. Paul Thomas: It’s not. I think that was called mad hatter disease or something. Chimney sweeps would get too much mercury. No, mercury is not healthy for you. You’re absolutely right, Ashley. Good memory there. I mean, think about it, the old thermometers, you’re not old enough to remember.   [01:00:35] Ashley James: No, no, no. I went to Mexico with my family when I was a kid back in the ‘80s, ‘90s. They used to sell—I don’t know if they still do—this glass jewelry that had mercury in it and I had broken one and played with it. Because it was like the Terminator. Remember the guy would turn into mercury, and I was touching it and rolling it around playing with it. Oh yeah. mercury is not healthy.    [01:01:02] Dr. Paul Thomas: Mercury is a liquid metal but it is not good for you. Anyway, where was I going with that?   [01:01:12] Ashley James: You figured out on the mercury.   [01:01:14] Dr. Paul Thomas: I know what it was. I went to my office manager and I said, I heard they were going to get the mercury out of the vaccines. So I went to my office manager at the time and I said, as soon as we get options to get the vaccines that don’t have mercury, please, please let’s get those instead of the mercury ones. And she said to me, Well, they just became available, but are you willing to pay the $6,000 extra it’s going to cost to buy the newer, more expensive ones because your partners aren’t willing? At that time, I was a younger pediatrician with a huge family to feed, and no, I couldn’t do that. They wanted me to pay for the difference for everybody. So we kept on using the inferior vaccine until they were no longer available. And that was an economic decision. And unfortunately, pediatrics and medicine, in general, is a business, just as pharmaceutical companies are a business. Sometimes, you’re making decisions that are more important for your business bottom line than are really in the absolute best interest of your patients. And so, folks, if you’re listening, parents, if we’re talking about making vaccine decisions for your children, you’re the last hope that your child has that you will save them, that you will protect them. They don’t have a choice. You take them to a pediatrician, the pediatrician says this is what you should do. And if you’re not protecting them, if you’re not doing your research, then unfortunately, they are at the mercy of the system. You are so right, Ashley, earlier to point out this is a sick care system. It’s not a wellness system. Our bodies are naturally capable of being very healthy if we stay away from toxins. You mentioned it near the beginning: drink filtered water, don’t eat pesticides and herbicides, make sure you’ve got non-GMO, if possible organic food, and avoid injected toxins, which are your vaccines. I’m not telling anybody what to do with vaccines. This is just an educational and informational conversation we’re having here. But folks, look into it. When you really look at the research, vaccines are not safe. They’re borderline effective, depending on which vaccine. And exercise, take vitamin D. You cannot get enough unless you’re living at the equator with your clothes off.   [01:03:40] Ashley James: I’d love to do that. Let’s go to the equator and eat mangoes naked.   [01:03:44] Dr. Paul Thomas: Wouldn’t that be nice? Yeah, that sounds good to me. Count me in. I never could bring myself to go to those nude beaches. But yeah, it sounds like a good thing anyway. So, there are things we can do to be healthy. And mostly it’s just letting nature the way it was beautifully designed to keep you healthy. If you want to pivot a little bit more to COVID, I do want to talk about it a little bit.   [01:04:09] Ashley James: Yeah. All right. So, we were doing a catch-up on everything that happened since our last interview. I love everything you’ve discussed so far. I did see a few times on Facebook you talking about masking children. And, that’s been something that is so cringy to me. I’d love for you to touch on that at some point.   [01:04:35] Dr. Paul Thomas: Sure. So the mask issue I can touch on quite simply. Masks, the medical ones that we use in hospitals, were not designed to prevent viral particles from going back and forth. They were designed to make sure the surgeon doesn’t sneeze on the operating field, drool, or whatever. To try to keep the operating field where you clean the belly. Let’s say you’re doing an abdominal surgery, you clean it really well, scrub, scrub, Betadine, drape it with sterile drapes, and then you’re cutting the abdomen open. You don’t want a surgeon leaning over and sneezing or dripping into the surgical site. I mean, that’s the purpose of those masks. They are very ineffective at preventing viruses of the size of COVID, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. That virus can get through those masks so easily it’s kind of a joke to think that’s going to protect you.   [01:05:37] Ashley James: It’s like a bumblebee flying through a chain-link fence.   [01:05:40] Dr. Paul Thomas: Exactly. And certainly, if you’re talking about the cloth masks, it definitely is like a fly or a bumblebee going through a chain-link fence. It’s just completely almost worthless. In fact, it’s probably worse than worthless because what you’re doing is you’re creating moisture that’s trapping things. And so you may actually be creating more risk for yourself than benefit. So, that being said, if I was a very high risk person and I was truly scared of coronavirus, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 virus, I would probably wear N95 and the face shield when I was going to be in close proximity to other people. So, if you are yourself afraid, there’s something you can do and do it. I mean, if that’s going to help you be able to go shopping, put on an N95, make sure it fits nice and tight, and put a face shield over that and I think you’ll be fine. Except be careful to wash your hands before you touch anything that’s going back home with you because I think the virus does have capability of going from your hands, then you touch your face or whatever, and you get it onto yourself. So, that’s masks. Children don’t need them for a couple of reasons. One, they don’t work. Well, lots of reasons. Two, they’re more risky than they’re beneficial. Most studies are showing that. So, there’s plenty of garbage studies that show benefits, folks. Remember, that’s pharma trick. Whoever’s got an agenda, we want people to mask up, can fund a study that will show benefit. It’s so easy to do studies like that. But good studies show that they’re not only mostly worthless, but they’re actually probably causing more harm than good. One of the harms that has not been well studied, I think I’ve read one or two articles about this is when you mask up children and now they’re not being exposed to facial expressions, to smiles—I mean, we’re social creatures. We’re supposed to be interacting in a loving, supportive way with one another. You become a little robot almost. And then you add the fact that we’ve kept kids at home in front of screens. Before COVID hit, my number one problem in teenagers was anxiety and depression, it was triggered by screens. I mean, that was crystal clear to me. Now we add COVID, isolation, and so much more screen time, and we wonder why we’re having increases in ADD, anxiety, suicides. It’s a disaster. Now, when we know that children—unless they happen to have severe underlying medical conditions—most children, their risk of dying from COVID is less than 1 in 100,000. I mean, they just don’t get seriously ill. Of course, the news is going to report those rare cases and get everybody afraid. So fear is what they’re selling. The strategy was, we’re going to mask everybody up, we’re going to isolate everybody, and get them so tired of it that when we come through with a vaccine as the savior, they’re going to line up, and it’s worked. I mean, we’re getting so many people vaccinated. And it’s truly tragic, especially now that they’re starting to target children. Parents, the science is in, it’s crystal clear. You’re not hearing it on the news, however, because the news has already been bought and paid for. You can go to The Highwire, Del Bigtree, his show. You can go to my show, Against the Wind: Doctors & Science Under Fire. You can go to the Children’s Health Defense and look at their daily news called The Defender and get all the science and all the information you need to understand that oh my Lord, the science has been done. This is a very dangerous vaccine. It probably is time. Dr. McCullough was on my show twice already. He’s a mainstream doctor, that’s probably the most published physician in the United States who’s also treating COVID. He’s now calling for the program to be abandoned. That this is no longer safe for humans. So, we’re at a turning point, and it’s not too late to save the children. If you’ve already gotten this vaccine, I don’t want you to be afraid because fear does not help your immune system. So, if you’ve already gotten the vaccine and you start to have any new symptom, don’t discount it as being unrelated to the vaccine. Just see a physician or healthcare provider who understands natural healing processes. You’ll see we give at the end of my show, every two weeks, I’ve got the show. Just go to doctorsandscience.com. At the very end of each show, we give you resources. And you can use those same resources that are to treat a COVID-19 infection to treat the side effects. The spike protein in this vaccine is what’s causing the mischief. You can get exposed to the spike protein from the infection, but you also get exposed from the vaccine. My best guess is we’re going to have an interesting fall and winter. I have a feeling based on what I’m reading in the research is it appears that those who have gotten the vaccine are actually going to be at greater risk of problems than those who did not. Just like my data showed, natural immunity appears to be superior. So, whether it’s a new strain that comes through, they’re having trouble in India, England, and across different parts of the world with new variants they’re calling them. I think the unvaccinated will do much better against new variants than the vaccinated, although time will tell, right? But the good news is there are treatments that work whether you’re vaccinated or unvaccinated, so don’t despair. But please, if you’re a parent, they are pushing hard on the teenagers. I’m hearing stories already of peer pressure, big peer pressure, to get the vaccine.   [01:11:44] Ashley James: The universities are saying that they have to vaccinate if they want to attend class.   [01:11:51] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah. The pressure is immense. They’re now talking about rolling out passports. Vaccine passports, to me, are like apartheid South Africa. I grew up in Southern Africa as a kid, and if you are white, you could move about freely, you had total access to the country. If you were not white, you had to carry papers just like a passport. If you didn’t have your papers, you couldn’t enter certain parts of cities. That’s where we’re headed with the vaccine. Don’t call it a vaccine passport, call it a slavery passport. I mean, it is ridiculous. The least risky people are those who aren’t vaccinated, okay. This is clear from my research on all illnesses, but it’s becoming clear with COVID as well. So, it’s the unvaccinated who should be given free rein, you’re at no risk from them, or let’s not say no risk. That was an exaggeration. There’s risk everywhere, but less risk because the unvaccinated are not as likely to get sick. Their immune systems are going to keep them healthier. And you know what? COVID-19 illness is real and it can be fatal, it can be serious, so I’m not trying to tell people to be reckless. But it’s not a big deal for kids. They can go to school with no masks, no shields, just go to school. I mean, if it appears that natural infection will give you long-lasting immunity, that will be much more robust than the immunity you get from vaccines.   [01:13:25] Ashley James: Well, that’s right. There are three studies that I know of, and I’m sure more will come up. But there are three studies recently that show that if you’ve had the coronavirus, the COVID-19, that you have lifelong immunity. They even did a study where they took samples of bone marrow and found that months and months and months later, the antibodies were there. The media has told us that you only have three months of protection. If you’ve naturally had wild COVID-19, that in three months, you could get it again, and then another three months you could get it again.   [01:14:10] Dr. Paul Thomas: No.   [01:14:11] Ashley James: But this is what people have been told.   [01:14:13] Dr. Paul Thomas: That’s not true, and the other truth is that those who have had natural infection are actually at greater risk of vaccine side effects.   [01:14:23] Ashley James: Really? Why is that? Do you know why?   [01:14:24] Dr. Paul Thomas: I had a guest on my show who went through that fairly well a while back. He’s a strong proponent for test before you vaccinate. I mean, we have enough testing capability now. So, anybody who’s going to get a vaccine should be tested to make sure they don’t already have antibodies because we’re just simply seeing more reactions. And I think what it is, they call it pathogenic priming. And somehow, having been exposed to that virus before, you already have some immune capability to respond, actually, a very robust capability to respond. And then if you get the vaccine, which is such a massive dose of spike protein and you’re already primed to respond to it, you can have this massive inflammatory response. It’s an unnatural trigger, right? If you get a natural infection, you just get a few little antigens coming in through your nose, your immune system, boom, knocks it out before it becomes a big deal. If you get a vaccine with a massive exposure to spike protein and you’ve got the capability to respond to that, you need a massive response, so I think it’s related to that. I did want to cover two things. I want to talk about PCR testing, and I also want to talk about absolute risk reduction and relative risk reduction. So, let’s cover those two things because they are critical to understanding what’s going on.   [01:15:47] Ashley James: I want to cover those. Before we cover those, just wrap up the last topic. You talked about spike protein and people can have reactions to it, regardless of if it’s of through a vaccine, or through natural immunity, or naturally having COVID-19. If someone’s had COVID and they’ve had the spike protein in them, how long until it’s out of them? You mentioned that you have some resources for supporting the body around that. Is this something that we should be watching for problems with spike protein like six months after an infection, or is this only days or weeks after the infection?   [01:16:30] Dr. Paul Thomas: I’m not going to claim to be an expert to answer that question with every authoritative piece of science. I’ve done my best to keep up, but boy, it’s coming fast. I have read that two weeks after a vaccine, you can find spike protein in the blood. I’ve read that for longer than that, after a natural infection, you can find SARS-CoV-2 in the stool. So, some people, I think it’s around 10% of people who get diarrhea, and that virus is present in the stool longer. So, that’s speaking to natural infection. The other study was speaking to the presence of this in the blood in a vaccinated person. There are these reports—I think we’ll hear more in the very near future—of vaccinated people somehow being able to transmit the spike protein to unvaccinated people. And, so I get a lot of questions about that. I don’t know quite what to tell people because it’s just starting to come out. It’s something that’s just starting to be discovered and researched, but it appears that that can happen. I’m not exactly sure of the mechanism. But it’s one of those things where if you’ve been vaccinated, maybe for a couple of weeks you don’t go around your unvaccinated loved ones. Just a thought. I mean, I don’t have enough hard science to say that’s a firm recommendation. It’s just a thought.   [01:18:08] Ashley James: I’ve heard that. There’s a lot of anecdotal stories out there. So it’ll be interesting to see the studies as the science comes out. I hate that term, the science is settled.   [01:18:23] Dr. Paul Thomas: Oh, it’s never settled.   [01:18:24] Ashley James: You know what, dogma, religion is settled.   [01:18:28] Dr. Paul Thomas: Even that.   [01:18:30] Ashley James: But the idea that science is something that’s constantly moving, the target’s constantly changing. We’re constantly learning new things. We’re constantly disproving hypotheses and disproving old studies. The science is settled is a marketing term, is a brainwashing term.   [01:18:50] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, it’s a brainwashing term. I was just reading a report. Dr. Kelly Sutton is an MD who wrote some exemptions in California and she’s on trial right now. It started yesterday. And the report was the other side, the people that are trying to take away her license, their attorney was able to silence several complaints by saying, well, that science has been settled. And so, it’s that same thing, we’re not going to go there, it’s been settled. What’s so ridiculous about that is just think about it folks. Kids born today are so different from their grandparents in terms of the world they’re growing up in. Their grandparents got zero or one or two vaccines. They’ve had 72 vaccines by the time they graduate from high school. They’ve had 40 by the time they’re in school. They live in a world that’s got all this glyphosate, pesticides, and herbicides, and it’s just a different toxic world. You cannot compare the science that was done generations ago to what’s going to happen to a kid today. Just like with vaccines, most research is done on people who’ve already had so many of them. And so when they’re adding one more and going, see, it hasn’t made anything worse. But you don’t know because you’re not comparing them to an unvaccinated person.   [01:20:15] Ashley James: Okay. The spike protein causes inflammation in the body. Is that also what’s causing the increase of blood clots, especially in healthy people that never had an issue of blood clotting before?   [01:20:29] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, it seems to be definitely the trigger of that. Again, I’m not the scientist that should describe the exact biochemistry or biology of how that happens, but yes, they are definitely related.   [01:20:43] Ashley James: And I definitely urge listeners to go back and watch the previous episodes of your show where this has been discussed. What was the name of the doctor again that talked about it on your show?   [01:20:54] Dr. Paul Thomas: Dr. McCullough.   [01:20:56] Ashley James: Dr. McCullough. Okay, so we can go check out that episode for more information as well, and follow Dr. McCullough’s work as well to get more information if listeners are interested. Okay, you want to talk about PCR tests, right?   [01:21:09] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yes, please. So, when this epidemic started rolling out, none of us knew what was going on. And the main form of testing—especially in the United States, but in a lot of places around the world—was using PCR, polymerase chain reaction testing. This testing has this methodology where they call it amplification. So you throw your sample through a number of cycles of testing, each time you’re analyzing a more dilute sample to try to detect the most minute amount of material. I’ve read two published studies out of Europe that are both showing the same finding that’s just absolutely conclusive and important to understand. So at somewhere around 13 to 17, or 18 cycles of amplification, if you get a positive test, they can actually grow the SARS-CoV-2 virus. So, in other words, that PCR represents a real virus being there. Think about it on a graph and up to 13,14, 15, 16 cycles, you’re getting a positive culture 100% of the time. Now, as you get into 30 cycles, you’re down to like, I don’t know, 20% of the time you could actually grow a virus.  By the time you get to 34, 35 cycles of PCR amplification, you never grow a virus, it is just noise. And this is why you’ve been able to get positive tests on healthy people who there’s absolutely nothing going on. They don’t have the virus, it’s just genetic noise. They never are able to grow the virus. So, guess what the cycles that are being used in the United States until very recently, how many cycles of amplification are they using?   [01:23:04] Ashley James: How many?   [01:23:05] Dr. Paul Thomas: Thirty-five to 40, sometimes more than 40. And at 35 to 40, you have a 97% chance that it’s a false positive. In other words, that positive test, it’s not COVID.   [01:23:17] Ashley James: Wait, 97% of the time it was a false positive?   [01:23:22] Dr. Paul Thomas: A false positive.   [01:23:23] Ashley James: Are these the cases that they reported to us every day in the news for the last year and a half to fear us?   [01:23:29] Dr. Paul Thomas: You got it. So, it’s a case epidemic, not a COVID epidemic. And then the death numbers are equally amplified because anybody that dies, if they’re in any way connected to a health system which is where most people die, you get sick—   [01:23:47] Ashley James: Heart attack, stroke.   [01:23:48] Dr. Paul Thomas: Well, it doesn’t matter what. Motor vehicle accident—oh, nursing homes. If you die of old age and you test and it’s positive—and remember, 97% of the positives in many instances is false, it isn’t COVID—it gets labeled as death with COVID. It wasn’t from COVID, but it’s with COVID and it gets counted. There are ample reports of this going on. The other phenomenon that’s jacked up the numbers is that you can get tested multiple times, the same person. So if I’m positive and I go back for another test, I go back for another test because I’m trying to get back to work or whatever reason, I need a negative. Each time I’m positive, that’s a case. In most states, the system doesn’t differentiate, oh, that’s the same person. They’re just reporting positive tests. We have this scare tactic, fear tactics on all the channels of the news, the mainstream media of look at all these deaths, look at all these cases, and then we’ve got a vaccine for you that will solve the problem. So let me move over to absolute risk reduction and relative risk reduction. Folks, if you get this, you will no longer live in fear. You can set yourself free, walk outside without a mask, which by the way, there are states—I have one of my nurse practitioners who just came to help out from Ohio and nobody’s wearing a mask indoors or outdoors. Florida is the same way. There are several states where masks are a thing of the past. I’m in Oregon, and I was just at the Oregon Zoo with my grandson, and it felt like 95% of people outside were walking around with masks. So, why is it so different? Is the virus just so much more dangerous in Oregon? No. Oregon has one of the lowest rates in the country. We have fear. Our government, our governor, and our health department have done a masterful job of making sure that everybody is scared out of their wits. It’s a fear campaign. But here’s the trickery. It’s unconscionable that that reporter can report what they do and not be aware of this fact. So the studies that Pfizer and Madonna did that showed their vaccine was 96% effective, 90% effective, you hear that on the news, right? Get this vaccine, it’s 90% effective or it’s 96% effective. What they’re talking about is a relative risk reduction. So I’m just going to average out numbers. I’m not giving you the exact numbers because I don’t have them in front of me right now. But take for example with Pfizer, and that initial study had 40,000 participants. So 20,000 people were given the vaccine, 20,000 were given saline, a placebo.   [01:26:31] Ashley James: Were they given an inert placebo, or were they given something with other antigens in it?   [01:26:38] Dr. Paul Thomas: I think in that one it was an inert placebo. But I know in some of the trials, they were actually given a different vaccine, which is just weird to me. They picked a really yucky vaccine for side effects and we’re going to give that instead. That will be the placebo, you get this vaccine. It’s like, oh my God, my point is this. When they were about three months into it, I believe, when they stopped the study, as far as their numbers, there were about 200 cases of positive COVIDs. So out of 40,000 people, there were only 200 positives, and that’s when they stopped the analysis. They found that, wow, 96% of the positives were in the unvaccinated group. So of those 20,000 people who were unvaccinated, what was your risk of having a positive? It was about 1%. Now the real risk reduction, so the absolute risk reduction, not the relative one. So the 96% was relative to the vaccinated, but the absolute risk was 1%. And what was that risk for? It was at risk for mild COVID symptoms—runny nose, cough, maybe fever. They didn’t look at hospitalizations, they didn’t look at deaths. So folks, would you like to take a vaccine that has about a 50-50 chance you’re going to have side effects, and maybe a 1 in 10 chance you’re going to have serious side effects, and maybe a 1 in 10,000—I don’t remember what the exact number is of death—when your chance of it helping you avoid mild symptoms is 1%. It makes absolutely no sense at all, but it’s never presented that way. There was an actual mainstream journal, I’m trying to remember it. It was one of the biggies. Was it The Lancet, or The New England Journal, or JAMA—one of those big threes. They had an article titled The Elephant in the Room, and they talked about this very fact. They went through I think three or four of the major coronavirus companies—Moderna, Pfizer, and a couple of the other ones—and they pointed out the percentage of real risk reduction, actual risk reduction (ARD) was around 1% or less. And they’re going, what’s going on. It’s the elephant in the room, nobody’s speaking the actual truth of what’s actually going on. So, that’s why I get a little frustrated when the narrative is so off. It is just fear-mongering. Especially when it comes to kids, folks. They are just not at risk from this disease, and the risk of the vaccine is just pretty horrendous. I mean, now we’re getting all these heart inflammation reports that are real. A good friend of mine is writing an article about that, actually, it’s my co-author for my book, The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, Jennifer Margulis. She’s a really good investigative reporter. She says, can you tell me, Dr. Paul, you’ve been doing pediatrics for a long time. How common are pericarditis and myocarditis? So this is the inflammation around the heart or of the heart. I have seen zero cases in my career.   [01:29:57] Ashley James: And how many patients have you seen in your career would you guess?   [01:30:01] Dr. Paul Thomas: Oh my God, 100,000, I don’t know? I mean, we have 10,000 patients, I don’t see them all because I have a team. I mean, if you take everybody over 30 years, 10,000 patients times 30 years, that’s a lot of patients who some of them are the same patients year to year, but it’s a lot. I mean, it’s a massive number of patients, and zero.   [01:30:26] Ashley James: Had you known anyone or have heard a colleague talk about, I treated this condition today.   [01:30:35] Dr. Paul Thomas: No, my co-author’s husband got pericarditis before COVID came around. And it’s so rare that he had to be seen up at OHSU, the Oregon Health Science University for Oregon. Rare complicated things, you end up there. I mean, they had the top of the top people in the country consulting to figure out what the heck is going on here. Some rare, I’m guessing autoimmune, they just give it a label that’s just a descriptor. You have inflammation around the heart, but nobody knows why. We are aware that autoimmunity is a growing cause of a lot of chronic problems, and vaccines are definitely on the list of possible triggers for autoimmunity.   [01:31:20] Ashley James: One thing that you brought up in episode 224 when I first had you on the show—okay. When I was a kid, we didn’t get vaccines as an infant, as a newborn. They didn’t roll that out until—in Canada, they were giving the Hep B. I remember I was in high school, so it’s the late ‘90s. I would be first in line. I was like, oh, their marketing was so good. I rolled up my sleeve, I ran up because I’m not afraid of needles.  I’m so happy that I’m not into drugs and alcohol because I mean, I’m not afraid of needles. I might have been a heroin addict. If I was into drugs, I might have gone there because I’m like, I’m not afraid of needles and I wanted to prove how macho I am. I’m kind of a tomboy. I’m like, yeah, look at me, because all these kids are afraid and I’m like, I’m going to run up and I’m going to get this new Hepatitis.   [01:32:10] Dr. Paul Thomas: How old were you?   [01:32:10] Ashley James: I was in high school, it was in the late ‘90s. I just remember, they were like, oh, this is really great. And I’m like, okay. I mean, in Canada, it’s socialized medicine so their marketing is more about let’s keep costs down by keeping everyone healthy and preventing illness. But in the States, was it 2005 that they started to say, we’re going to give a vaccine that we’ve only previously ever given sex workers, drug addicts, nurses, and those that basically get exposed to this. We’ve never given it out to the public as a common vaccine, and all of a sudden now 100% of the population, the moment they come out of their mother, we’re going to give it to them. Was it around 2005? Was that it?   [01:33:02] Dr. Paul Thomas: A little bit earlier. Your recollection is correct, though. My kids are around your age as well, my oldest ones. I was following the CDC schedule for my kids. They got the vaccine as teenagers, and that was in the ‘90s.   [01:33:23] Ashley James: When did they start giving it to newborns, though?    [01:33:25]Dr. Paul Thomas: So the newborn shift in Oregon, and it felt like it was a national push here in the US, was around 2000, 2003, right around then. Because the interesting thing was I specifically remember it because it was right when they got the mercury out of the vaccines. And I thought to myself, is this a coincidence or is this a planned event? Because I was so excited about getting the mercury out of the vaccine. I remember going to my youngest son’s kindergarten teacher or first grade teacher, and I said, you see a lot of autism now and a lot of ADD and ADHD. She said, oh, yes. I said, well, don’t worry, in five years, it’s going to be gone. I mean, I was so convinced that that was the leading cause of that brain issue. And it never went away. In fact, it got slightly worse, but we replaced one bad thing—the mercury—with something that’s probably equally bad, maybe worse—huge doses of aluminum. By shifting that Hep B vaccine to newborn, two months, six months, that’s three big doses of a really bad aluminum product. The data is out there that that birth dose of aluminum is just horrendous or just the Hepatitis B series itself, it’s not a good thing.   [01:34:46] Ashley James: My point that I was getting at is as a child, me growing up in the ‘80s—I was born in 1980 and I never attended school with a child that was autistic, I never saw it. I think I knew one person with asthma. Never did I know a child in any of the schools I attended that had childhood cancer or any autoimmune conditions. Actually, I remember one kid that was allergic to grass, and so she’d get a weird rash if she sat on the grass. But everyone is growing up, super healthy, no problems. So sometime in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, 100% of all newborns are on a different schedule than when I was growing up. I had very few vaccines growing up comparative to today. I went to a pediatrician who was actually quite famous in Toronto for being a fantastic doctor and he was well known to this day. I followed the schedule that Canada had laid out in the ‘80s and the ‘90s. Nowadays, the children who are 10 years old, 15 years old, that kind of thing, the levels of childhood cancer, the levels of autoimmune condition comparative to 30 years ago, let’s say like, look at the before and after. What you brought up in our last interview you said, when we take a child and we overexcite the immune system with multiple doses of vaccine—because a vaccine, its intention is fantastic. Its intention is to train the immune system to mount a healthy response, so if you ever come in contact with it, you can have a healthy response and have better outcomes. That’s the intention. That’s a great intention, I want that for everyone. What happens in actuality is it overexcites and makes the immune system become hyperactive.   [01:37:06] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, immune activation it’s called. Think of it almost like carpet bombing. The attempt was, we’re just going to get antibodies against X, Y, or Z. But when it goes wrong, the immune system is now attacking yourself, that’s autoimmunity. So, if you’re attacking the islet cells of the pancreas, you’ve got type one diabetes. If you’re attacking the myelin sheath of your brain, you’ve got MS. If you’re attacking your cartilage in your joints, you’ve got arthritis, and so on and so on.   [01:37:41] Ashley James: So, these children end up with a hyperactive immune system that then becomes autoimmune which is what you just described. And then these children with autoimmune conditions, who are still children, are then put on immune suppressants and years later developed cancer because the immune system is not functioning correctly and can’t clear out the unhealthy cancerous cells. We’re creating wonderful customers for the pharmaceutical and medical industry. We’re creating wonderful customers. Customers for life until they die.   [01:38:13] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, you just outlined what I like to point out is vaccines are probably the number three moneymaker for pharma. They trigger autoimmunity. When you’re autoimmune, you have to give immunosuppressants as you stated. That’s the number one moneymaker for pharma. And when you suppress the immune system, you get cancers, the number two moneymaker for pharma. So numbers one, two, and three are all intertwined, turning you into an ATM cash machine for pharmaceutical companies. Trust me, folks, their interests are not in keeping you healthy, their interests are financial.   [01:38:48] Ashley James: It is such a dilemma to go upstream. Even me publishing this episode, I’m putting my career at risk. I’m putting my podcast at risk. And you have put your career at risk. I’m so grateful to your bravery and courage for continuing to speak out for the health, wellbeing, and safety of all children and adults.   [01:39:14] Dr. Paul Thomas: Well, thank you as well. You’re absolutely right. You are taking a risk, and you obviously are doing that because you care. That’s the only reason I do this. I mean, that financial incentive paper that I wrote just shows, for example, that there’s no financial reason for me to do what I’m doing. I mean, I walk in and I talk to the patient. I can’t right now, because one of the conditions of getting my license back was I can’t talk about vaccines to patients. I figure I’m covered by free speech on a show.   [01:39:47] Ashley James: Hopefully.   [01:39:49] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, hopefully. And folks, everything we’re discussing here is just informational. Run this by your trusted health care providers, hopefully somebody who’s really aware of what’s going on because too many doctors are not. It’s a real risk because of censorship that’s going on at a very pervasive high level. If you speak out with facts, real data, and science, or even if it was your opinion. I mean, we could say you and I have opinions. We should be allowed in this free country. If it truly is a free country, we should be allowed to share opinions, disagree, and still be civil to one another. And I am trying to do that better these days. I think because you and I might be a lot on the same page, it sounds like we don’t like vaccines, but I’m with you. At the beginning of the show when you stated, everybody’s got to make their own decisions and we need to love one another and support one another’s opinions because this way of keeping people divided is really not a good strategy for us to have long term good health. It just gives more power to the big businesses that are trying to take more control. They can keep us fighting over you name the issue, whether it’s political, whether you’re this party or that party, or whether it’s over a hot topic of the day. If we can keep people divided whether it’s on race or some other issue, parties, it doesn’t matter, religion, anything that keeps people divided keeps them distracted from what’s really going on, which is that you are slowly giving up your freedoms, you’re slowly giving up your rights. And right now, they are attacking your body. We’re turning humans into GMO humans. It’s never been done before, it never should have been done, and it’s being done on a massive worldwide stage with an experimental vaccine. This vaccine is not FDA-approved, by the way, folks, it is still experimental. And that’s the one thing I think maybe could put this to an end is these companies that are requiring vaccines. So if I have to go get a vaccine because this company made me do it and I’m injured, I can sue that company. They aren’t protected, the vaccine manufacturers are protected because of the way the laws have been written, so they’re just going like crazy. Everybody should get it, cha-ching, cha-ching. But companies that insist that you get it in these schools, these universities that are insisting, they are liable. There’s going to be some lawsuits, and when that finally starts hitting in a big way, I think businesses will have to think twice about whether or not they want to become liable for the damage these vaccines are causing because these damages are just going to start accumulating to the point where it’s not going to be possible to keep them hidden.   [01:42:37] Ashley James: You just mentioned, I hope we’re protected on our amendment rights to be able to have freedom of speech. The next episode I’m publishing actually after this one is an interview I did recently with a doctor who has practiced for many years, and he’s an MD who studied holistic medicine. He chose to treat all of his COVID patients with the same formula, the same protocol that he has treated all upper respiratory illnesses for the last 20,30 years using natural medicine. He had such a huge success rate. He published it on his blog. He’s been running a blog since the ‘90s. And it was something like certain vitamins, certain things, you inhale—all-natural substances. And he also would do an injection in the buttocks of ozone. Most of the stuff you could do at home and take it home, that kind of thing. At that time, he had treated just about 100 patients and all of them survived. This was early on last year. The FCC wrote him a letter—FCC, not FDA—saying, you’re in violation, you have to take this down. You have to take your blog down. He said, what are you talking about? They said, you cannot make claims that you’re treating COVID-19, you can’t do that. Because there are no published studies. He said, well, I’m practicing medicine. I’m a doctor. Aren’t I allowed to practice medicine the way I see fit? They said, no, you are not allowed to do that. If he said, I treat arthritis with these vitamins and minerals. I cure arthritis with this, this, this. If he said that, they didn’t have a problem, which he did on his blog for many years. They had a problem with the fact that he was treating and publishing that he was treating COVID-19. So he said, okay, I’ll do what you say. I’m going to go publish a study. Then he got all of his information together. He’s now out of 400 patients at this point with COVID, and all of them lived and very few hospitalized. I don’t remember the exact numbers. It was like five or something, It was a very small amount. But he had great, great, great success. They recovered really well. And so then he found a journal, and he published it. He came back to the FCC and said, here, a published study proving that I can claim that this is a treatment. They said no, it needs to be a placebo double-blind study. So they keep changing the target. But he said that’s unethical. When I know what works for my patients to then do a placebo and let them die or let them be harmed, that is unethical. I hope we still have our first amendment rights, he’s married to a lawyer. He tried to fight it. He then took his blog down and then he wrote a book. He found out that a blog on the internet is not protected, for some reason. When he’s laying out the treatment plan for COVID-19. And then he said, but apparently, a book is still considered a protected free speech and so he wrote a book and published it with all of his findings basically. That definitely scares me.   [01:46:30] Dr. Paul Thomas: So I wrote a book early on in this COVID outbreak because I had a dear friend almost die. He was hospitalized before I even knew he was sick. They wanted to intubate him so badly and he just said no way. He’d already been hearing the reports that once you’re intubated, it was an 80% chance of dying. He went with almost very low oxygen for three nights, and couldn’t sleep. You know if he fell asleep he’d be dead. I was able to help him a little bit by just texting him once he could get access to his phone. But yeah, my book was accepted on Amazon and then last minute was taken down because I did not adhere to the World Health Organization criteria. I didn’t meet World Health Organization standards on the management of COVID.   [01:47:15] Ashley James: What are the World Health Organization standards on the management of COVID? Is it to wear a mask and wait until the vaccine comes out?   [01:47:22] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yeah, you’ve got it. At that point, it was do nothing and wait until you’re bad enough to be intubated. I mean, it was insanity. It was pretty clear that having really robust vitamin D levels is probably the most important thing you can do. Everybody should be doing that now and forevermore, just because that’s the one vitamin we’re almost universally deficient in because you have to be in sunlight to make enough active vitamin D, and we wear clothes when we’re outside. If we’re in the Northern Hemisphere, far away from the equator, the sun doesn’t do its job very well, anyway.   [01:47:56] Ashley James: And you also have to have a healthy liver, healthy kidneys, and enough healthy fats.   [01:47:59] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yup. Anyway, censorship is alive and well, and it’s getting worse and worse. It’s a real problem for our democracy.   [01:48:07] Ashley James: There’s a concerted effort to make the population do what they say, and that is not in our best interests when we look at the data, and that scares me. There are so many listeners who are like, I trust these people, I trust these organizations. These organizations have good people in them. Yes, every organization has good people in them. We don’t know what’s going on at the top, right? Why is it that these different organizations, why is Amazon is so eager to comply with the World Health Organization instead of the Constitution? Why are these independent companies so eager to follow this one direction when this one direction is showing it’s doing harm? And why is showing alternatives that are proven safe and effective becoming illegal?   [01:49:09] Dr. Paul Thomas: Yup. There’s a huge financial incentive. It’s all about control and money. Power, control, and money have always been underlying in any major shift. This is modern-day book burning. I mean, we really have a problem on our hands. Listeners, if you’re still with us—this show has been going on a while—take your power back. You the individual have the power to live free, but only if you insist on it because they’re coming for you.   [01:49:44] Ashley James: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Paul Thomas. I value your work. My listeners are used to long interviews because they love really, really learning the nitty-gritty from our guests, and you’ve definitely laid out some very interesting points. We’re going to make sure that all the links to everything that Dr. Paul Thomas said are in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Is there anything that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview or anything that you really want to make sure came across in today’s interview?   [01:50:12] Dr. Paul Thomas: Listeners, please, just be kind to yourself. Do whatever you can to get away from fear because fear is bad for your immune system. So number one thing for that is just turn off the TV. Get outdoors as much as you can. If you get out into nature, you’re walking in a forest, you’re swimming in the ocean, or in the garden, in any way you can get out in nature, you will notice that the rest of the animal kingdom is absolutely fine. Isn’t that interesting? None of them are lining up for a vaccine. They are absolutely fine even in the toxic world that we have. So, remember that. You are uniquely gifted by your birth with a very good immune system and a way to heal yourself, but you do need to get the right nutrients, you need to avoid toxins. Just be careful about what you might put into your body, consider it your temple, and take vitamin D if nothing else. And then prepare yourself in the event that you do get sick with this COVID. It’s pretty rare, but if it happens, don’t just sit around waiting to get sicker. Go to the frontline doctors. Check out my show, doctorsandscience.com. The show is called Against the Wind: Doctors & Science Under Fire. I’m trying to bring to you what you need to know to remain healthy despite this crazy world we’re living in. I’m sending you love and wishing you the very best. Thank you Ashley so much for having me on your show.   [01:51:50] Ashley James: Thank you so much.     Get Connected With Dr. Paul Thomas!  Official Website Pediatric Health Outcomes Initiative Vaccine Friendly Doctors Facebook – Dr. Paul Thomas Facebook – The Vaccine-Friendly Plan Facebook – Integrative Pediatrics Facebook – Dr. Paul Thomas MD Twitter Book by Dr. Paul Thomas   The Vaccine-Friendly Plan Book Recommended Book by Dr. Paul Thomas An Epidemic of Absence by Moises Velasquez-Manoff

To buy the Nadovim NAD supplement that Ashley recommends, use coupon code LTH at nadovim.com or use this link to apply the coupon code directly: https://bit.ly/3uL3FEl   Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucliotide Supplement, NADOVIM (NAD+) The Missing Link to Energy, Brain Function and Longevity https://www.learntruehealth.com/nicotinamide-adenine-dinucliotide-supplement-nadovim-nad-the-missing-link-to-energy-brain-function-and-longevity   Highlights: What is NAD+ Benefits of using NAD+ Importance of having passion and purpose for the overall well-being  Anything that’s a toxin required NAD+   NAD+ is important for the body’s overall function, but not a lot of people have heard of it. In this episode, Caspar Szulc explains what NAD+ is and what are the benefits of taking NAD+. He also shares how Nadovim is different from other NAD+ supplements on the market.   Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This episode is about a supplement that I had never heard of. It’s a molecule that our body absolutely needs in order for the mitochondria to convert food into energy. I’m surprised I had never heard of it until a few weeks ago. My friend and I were sitting around talking while our kids were in gymnastics. She said, you know my favorite supplement, have you ever heard of it? And I had not.  She said this is the difference between me just dragging through the day and me skipping through the day, and she’s a very busy mom with a demanding career. I’ve always known her to be full of energy and always be standing and moving around completing stuff. When she has days off she wants to go for hikes. I mean, she’s that kind of person. I’m like, you’re on a day off, why don’t we just chill here? She’s like, no, let’s go. Let’s go do stuff.  She’s one of those people that has such energy, and I never thought she had energy problems. But she told me that she really relies on this and a few other supplements just to make her body function more optimally, which then, in turn, gives her sustainable energy. That’s when I got really excited about learning more about this, and it just so happens that I was interviewing this guest the next week. Now, when I did the interview, I had never tried the supplement before. Since the interview, I have tried it. I’ve been taking it for the last few days and I really did notice a difference, which is cool because there are so many supplements out there that I haven’t noticed a huge difference. This one I was having a particularly hard day, it was a few days ago and I was having kind of a rough day. If you’ve been a listener and you’ve listened to past episodes, you may know that I was pregnant, I lost my daughter at birth, and then a few days later I got COVID and my body was just really run down because of grief, being in shock, and healing from postpartum. The last month, my body’s been through a lot, and on top of that, we’re moving. We’re actually downsizing 2700 square feet into a Fifth Wheel RV. Our life has been kind of crazy the last month and a half. So a few days ago I just had really low energy. Emotionally just very drained, kind of feeling depressed but pushing through it. Definitely feeling grief, and I was just continuing to mentally stick to focusing on this positive outcome we’re going to have, focusing on what I’m grateful for, but still, my body was not where my mind wanted to be. It was definitely very low energy.  Caffeine can wake you up, but it doesn’t really give you energy. You can still be awake and exhausted, so that’s not really the answer. I take all my vitamins and I eat as healthy as I can. Then I took this supplement and about an hour later I just noticed I’m not exhausted anymore. It’s not jitters, you’re not feeling hyper. I wasn’t feeling hyper. I haven’t felt hyper on it. I just noticed that all that fatigue was gone. We’ve gotten so much more done since then. We’ve been able to complete so much more of our moving, decluttering, selling, giving away, donating, or getting rid of all of our stuff. That’s really neat. I’ve also noticed that sort of deep depression has really eased up, the sensations of deep sadness have really eased up. And then in this interview, he talks about that. He talks about how this supplement really supports the brain as well as the body in producing energy, but people have noticed better sleep. I’ve noticed I’ve had, since taking it, much deeper dreams, much more vivid, colorful, detailed dreams, which is really interesting, so I must be getting deeper sleep.  Not that I ever really have had brain fog lately, it’s just coming down from all the events that I’ve had recently, I’ve noticed that this supplement has made things a bit easier. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of really positive payoffs for me. Even late into the evening, I just have the ability to keep going whereas I might have just called it a day at 4:00 or 5:00 PM and said, okay, I’m done with these tasks until tomorrow. Like last night, it was much later in the evening and we’re like, oh, I could keep going. This is really interesting. It’s what the body uses to convert our food into energy and we’re often depleted in it. We talk about in this interview why we’re depleted in it, where it comes from, and how we can take this supplement. The guy I interviewed, he formulated one that’s very high quality, so I recommend you check out his. The links are going to be the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. He gives us a coupon code. All the listeners, we get a discount which is great. The coupon code being LTH.  Enjoy today’s interview. Share it with your friends who might be going through some mentally or emotionally stressful times. I think it’s good for anyone who wants good sustainable energy, but it’s also good for people who have brain fog or are just really stressed out because I have noticed it has made it easier for me the last few days that I’ve been on it. That’s really exciting. Enjoy today’s show, share it with your friends. Let me know if you do try it and what your results are. I’m always curious to hear how different natural supplements or natural programs help people. You can join the Facebook group. Just search Learn True Health on Facebook or go to learntruehealth.com/group, that’ll redirect you to the group. Share what your experiences are with Nadovim and let me know. I’m really curious, let everyone know. I will keep sharing my experiences. I also shared it with my husband and he noticed that there was just—it’s not like this boom like if you take a shot of espresso, you feel something jittery almost right away. It’s not that, it’s just like an hour later you go, wow, I can feel it. I’ve got more energy. You got more drive, you got more motivation. Your body’s just functioning better, so that’s really cool. Awesome. Well, enjoy today’s show and let me know what you think. I’m really curious to hear the results that the other listeners get, so stay in touch.   [00:07:11] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 460. I am so excited for today’s guest. Caspar Szulc is on the show, President and co-founder of Innovative Medicine. Now, what’s really serendipitous is about two weeks ago I was hanging out with one of my friends while our kids did their gymnastics class together. We were talking about different supplements. She goes, have you ever heard of NAD+? I look at her, I’m like, that sounds familiar but tell me more. She goes, well, it is my favorite supplement. And I said, okay, why? Now, this is one of my friends who’s super healthy, crazy. Probably the healthiest friend I know. She’s so fit, she always has energy. She has two young kids. She has a career so she’s just like always, always on. She’s always standing or hiking, and I’ve never seen her sit. She just has energy, and I never ever think of her as someone who needs a supplement. But what she tells me about NAD+ is she said she experimented with a lot of supplements and NAD+ had the most noticeable energy boost for her. I’m quoting her, “It’s the difference between dragging through the day and skipping through it,” and I always see her skip through her days. Now I know her magic formula is not cocaine or coffee, it’s NAD+. Then I saw that I was interviewing you and I thought, whoa, this is so cool because you, your father, and your company created this supplement. I’m really excited to learn about what it does and how it supports our body’s ability to properly produce enough energy so we can skip through our days. Welcome to the show.   [00:09:07] Caspar Szulc: Thanks for having me, and that was a great intro. I’m hoping to skip through this and give people a lot of good information.   [00:09:14] Ashley James: Now, do you take your own supplement?   [00:09:16] Caspar Szulc: Of course. I mean, honestly, I think a lot of what started like why go into the supplement world because we were really in the medical world—we have a medical clinic—was what would be something I would like to take. That’s why I started a company. It’s like what would I want to see? That was the basis of it. So I take Nadovim daily.   [00:09:35] Ashley James: So Nadovim, which the links to everything that we talked about today are going to be the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com, and you’re giving us a discount code. You’re giving us a coupon code. The coupon code is LTH as in Learn True Health. Of course, that’s the one we like to use, so all the listeners know that one. Nadovim is a supplement, it’s an NAD+ supplement. I have so many questions. We’re going to talk about why is it better than the other brands out there, what it does, how it affects the body, and how it supports the body’s ability to make energy in a really healthy way? But before we get into all that, I’d love a little bit of background information. What happened in your life that led you to where you are now? What happened to lead you into helping create being part of the team that has created and distributed this supplement?   [00:10:34] Caspar Szulc: It’s a good question, one that I get asked a lot. It’s like what happened? I was recently asked this for a survey for top entrepreneurs to fill out that my PR team had me do. It was like, what was your aha moment of all this? I don’t have one. I don’t know, I was frustrated. I was born into this, first off, in a sense, meaning my father is a doctor, my mother’s a psychologist. They come from Europe, they have a little bit of a different background, but I’ve always been around medicine, health, and this idea of being healthy is just something that was really ingrained in me from day one on this earth. It’s not that this is something new or I had anything happen to get me into the field somewhat. I used to travel around the world with my father. When you go to conferences and just be around doctors as a five-year-old in China or something, that was just normal to me. I had that sort of upbringing, that happened in a sense. Then I went to school. I went to Boston University and got into finance and marketing, which was a little bit different. My father definitely wanted me to be a doctor. I was just like, you work really hard dad. I see patients and blood isn’t my thing. Here I am 20 years later after that conversation in medicine talking to a lot of patients and working really long hours also.  After I graduated with a finance and marketing degree I went into finance, became a financial analyst, thought this was the corporate road, the ladder to success, and living the American dream. Within a year I was burned out, frustrated, and miserable. It wasn’t what I thought. It wasn’t creative. I was just hitting buttons really and just typing in trades and seeing that they are correct and answering to 10 people above me that didn’t want any input on anything. A year of that is someone that is creative that really did value health and feeling burned out when you’re 21, 22. That’s not good. That’s a sign that something is going on. There was an opportunity actually that my co-founder who was a family friend growing up who was in medical school at the time and was also frustrated with things and saw what my father was doing in this integrative field because my father left the conventional field and being an anesthesiologist at a hospital to start to help patients regain their health rather than just mass symptoms and manage the disease.  He said, there’s a great opportunity here to get involved with a company side so that would get more people to know about this because not enough people do know about this idea of advanced integrative medicine, of personalizing, of really approaching things at their root causes, and mind, body, spirit, and all these things that are now pretty popular but this was the early 2000s when no one was really talking about it so much. That’s what led me into this, into starting a company in innovative medicine, into really pushing the boundaries of what we do in our medical center, and still traveling the world as I did like a little child to find out what is new out there. Experts in different countries and continents, what are they doing that we can apply in medicine to help people because we do have a problem right now? Over 60% are chronically ill and people are depressed. They have less energy than ever. They’re just depleted. It’s become a mission. The whole thing is I’ve done this my whole life, been around it, and I just want to expose more people to it to empower them. That’s really the backstory to everything I do and what I’ve been doing in this company for about 20 years now.   [00:14:29] Ashley James: Now, what you told me before we hit record is that your team for 10 years was researching and developing Nadovim, this NAD+ supplement, but in the last two years it was very intense R&D research. Can you tell us a bit about that?   [00:14:51] Caspar Szulc: Yeah. So I mean 10 years ago would be from the point of, hey, let’s do a supplement. We know there are great things that we’re utilizing within the clinic that are getting great results with patients, and they’re all different types of things. It wasn’t just NAD+. NAD+ we probably introduced around five or so years ago in an IV format into the center after learning more about it. We were looking at everything early on—glutathione—and we were kind of like, what will it be? What will our supplement be? And that was like 10 years. And then around two, three years ago, maybe a little bit more, we started to really focus on NAD+ because what we saw when applying it intravenously was that patients who had brain fog, neurological disorders, early-onset dementia—anything related really to the brain—saw a vast improvement when using this compound. We’re seeing it firsthand in really tough cases—parkinsonism, Lyme disease, neurological Lyme disease, again, dementia, anyone with a brain injury, and they were improving drastically in some cases.   [00:16:05] Ashley James: Multiple sclerosis?   [00:16:07] Caspar Szulc: MS. I mean, you could go across the board naming neurological pieces or something with a neurological function. When you talk about brain fog or depression, that’s linked to so many chronic conditions also. That’s a symptom, and that was greatly improving as we added this into the treatment—NAD+ infusions.   [00:16:27] Ashley James: What about autism?   [00:16:29] Caspar Szulc: Again, I look at everything from the source. Autism, while it’s a neurological disorder, you could also say it’s a toxicity disorder, it’s a disorder of emotions, and all sorts of things there too. I don’t like to ever say diagnoses that are multi-pronged outside just neurological, especially in children that this is the key or the answer. Again, NAD+ isn’t the answer to anything, I would say really. It’s a wonderful addition to help with the functioning of something, and we could get into that later.   [00:17:05] Ashley James: Perfect. Yes, absolutely. Now, my limited understanding—I’m really excited for you to help us dive in deep and understand it much more—is that this supplement supports the mitochondria, which is the powerhouse of the cell. I definitely want to get into that. First, can you tell us what is NAD+? What does that stand for and what is it?   [00:17:26] Caspar Szulc: So nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. NAD+, and there’s a plus added, is basically a coenzyme factor that is in the electron chain transport—the whole transition of it basically. Actually, when I talked to experts about this originally, it was explained to me that it’s as important as oxygen in the body. Every single cell in your body needs NAD+, and it’s basically the way we transfer over from food and everything we take in water into energy within the cells within the mitochondria. It’s incredibly essential. The one thing I also learned is NAD+ gets depleted rather quickly as we age, and especially with modern-day living, meaning whenever you drink alcohol, one molecule of alcohol, it requires two molecules of NAD+ to get that out of the body. Same with prescription drugs, same with oxidative stress or just general stressors in general.   [00:18:33] Ashley James: This is fascinating, sorry to interrupt. Does the body make NAD+?   [00:18:39] Caspar Szulc: The body basically has stores of NAD+ that it will require to create this energy, but no, it requires an outside source, and you get it from food as well. It’s just things that are usually higher in protein or anything. You could actually do that, it’s just not a large amount you could say. Again, at the rate we deplete today, it is problematic. This is probably the reason so many people don’t know what NAD+ is because if it’s as important as oxygen to life and every single cell needs it, how come we don’t know about this? I was thinking the same thing, and everyone I spoke to answered because we never really had a problem with it before. We always had these stores, as we age it goes down, but it’s not enough to really cause an issue. If we eat normally, then fine. We have no need to know about this NAD++ because things are working fine. If it’s not broke don’t fix it or you don’t even need to know so much about it.  But because we live in a day and age where we are go, go, go, where we consume lots of things that actually take up our NAD+ supplies, we’re being depleted at an exponential rate. We basically have NAD+ depletion or something called NED that is happening to us, and it’s happening faster and faster and faster. It’s almost like as we’re aging a little bit quicker as well, it’s really the NAD+ that’s shifting out of us. And with that, we have the myriad of things that can go wrong when your mitochondria don’t have the energy to replicate, to do all the functions a cell has to. It’s really at the cellular level that we’re looking at where dysfunction starts to happen and that could turn into so many different things.   [00:20:32] Ashley James: To simplify it, the mitochondria, which is this part of the cell that makes energy, and actually, fascinatingly enough, mitochondria is like a bacteria. So it’s this really interesting beautiful symbiotic relationship we have with it. It needs NAD+ in order to take our food and turn it into energy, and when we don’t have enough of it, we can eat lots of food but it’s not getting converted into energy because NAD+ is being used up because of the stressors in our life—the alcohol, the toxic stress, drugs over the counter or prescription.  70% of adult Americans are on at least one prescription medication, so 70% of Americans are being depleted, their NAD+ is being depleted, and almost everyone drinks alcohol. I feel like an oddity because I very, very, very, very rarely drink. We don’t have alcohol in our house. I could enjoy a glass of wine maybe twice a year, but that’s just it. It’s a very rare treat, and it’s not even a treat. It’s just a very rare thing in my life, and everyone’s ordering drinks. It’s very interesting.  So I imagine the greater population is consuming alcohol on a daily or weekly basis, so they’re depleting their NAD+ significantly. In addition to the NAD+ being depleted from the drugs they’re taking, in addition to the NAD+ being depleted from the toxic environment that their liver is trying to get rid of all the toxins. There are 50,000 man-made chemicals that are new to our body that has been invented in less than the last hundred years. It’s over 50,000. I’ve heard other doctors quote 80,000 chemicals that are in our air, water, and soil, so they’re in our food, they’re in our environment, and our liver does not know what to do with it, but it takes up a lot of resources for the body to have to get rid of this. No wonder we’re feeling so sluggish. So thinking back to my friend who says NAD+ is the difference between just being draggy all day or just skipping through her day, that makes so much sense. So Nadovim is your NAD+ supplement. Is there anything else in Nadovim? Is Nadovim in any way different from all the other NAD+ supplements out there?   [00:23:05] Caspar Szulc: Yeah, it’s actually drastically different in a number of ways. So Nadovim is one of the first to market that actually uses fully formed NAD+, so it’s not a precursor. Most of the others go with the precursor, which is nicotinamide and nicotinamide riboside (NR). So anytime you take an NR supplement, you require other elements to it as well to then recombine and turn into NAD+. Absolutely, I’m not saying that won’t help, but there are processes that have to happen in the body. Some energy is actually expensed to require you to take that precursor, turn it into NAD+, bring it to the cells, and then fuel those cells. What we realized was that listen, you don’t use NR in infusions and no doctor does that. They use real full-formed NAD+. It is a larger and delicate molecule, but we also realized when we looked at the research is taken alone, it is true that it gets somewhat hydrolyzed within the small intestine and you lose some of that bioavailability. But when you combine it with other elements, especially ones like coenzyme q10, which have been studied when they take it orally with NAD+, it’s great for chronic fatigue syndrome patients. They showed a study out of Spain that showed great improvement in HRV and general energy levels when done together in specific ratios. We did that and really we approached this as what is the best synergistic model of different elements we could use in ingredients to get the best results? I always say it’s like creating a wonderful meal. If you’re going to a Michelin star restaurant, they’re never going to just put a really nice piece of steak on your plate and say eat it. They’re always going to garnish it with something. They’re always going to put some nice vegetables that complement it, whatever it is—mashed potato, anything with it that comes together and you get a really good meal. That’s what you should be looking for also in a supplement—something that enhances each ingredient and works together synergistically. So we also included glycine, great for the brain, great for memory. We included thiamine. We included bacopa, which is of course a known herbal and enhancer of cognitive function. Cat’s claw, inflammation was an issue we looked at as well. So there are eight ingredients in it together and we looked at the precise dosage of everything in there. So when you have 33 milligrams of coenzyme q10, it doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s really there to boost the actual NAD+, which you get 200 milligrams of. That increases the bioavailability, which helps with the actual delivery of it. Why we say where most people look at NAD+ or NR supplements is just cellular health and overall well-being, we looked at the brain because we added those elements such as bacopa and everything and realized 20% of all your energy and NAD+ is consumed by the brain. That is where you should be looking if you have things like brain fog, if you have things like memory loss, and even very small.  While we used it in the first year or two strictly within the clinical aspect, gave this to doctors with our network and used it on the tough cases of neurological diseases. Once we opened it to the public and started getting the feedback, you get things like I used to forget certain words, where I put my keys, that doesn’t happen anymore. I used to need that second cup of coffee in the afternoon, that doesn’t happen anymore. I used to forget different things throughout the day, that doesn’t happen anymore. It was wonderful to see that what we looked into the research, what we planned out, what we did lots of R&D about was actually happening, both in the population that was sick and really required to boost, but also the population that thought they were healthy and thought this was just declined in aging but it really wasn’t. It was NAD+ depletion. Lots of people are going through just fatigue and brain fog, that’s a huge population.  That’s why we created this product because we said, what’s the lowest hanging fruit that could impact the most people? What we saw on our patient basis was brain fog, neurological decline, and then that also related to the general population because I think everyone can say we have a little bit of this depletion and this need for focus more than ever. Where most people thought they were aging and going through this decline in their just general being, we realized that they were probably being depleted of NAD+, so this addition of this formula that gave them not just NAD+ but gave them the coenzyme q10, gave them bacopa, gave them thiamine, gave them the glycine. These were all together really helpful in restoring the proper brain function, getting rid of that brain fog, and also increasing energy throughout.   [00:28:15] Ashley James: That’s fascinating. You guys, for two years, did almost like a clinical trial? Drug companies do clinical trials. In that, you worked with doctors and their patients, had the doctors observe what was happening with their patients and then reported back to you. Then, of course, you and your own clinic, you’d been using NAD+ intravenously like you had shared, and then you’re using Nadovim in your clinic and seeing the results you were getting before you opened it up for the public to buy.   [00:28:49] Caspar Szulc: Right. And we were fortunate enough that we started as a company that really worked with practitioners first. Where we started this company was really education with other practitioners to show them what we were doing within our clinic. So we built up a network around the world of doctors that we went and spoke to. We were in India, we were in Brazil, we were in all these places showing them different techniques in integrative medicine. So when it came time to introduce a product, we said, well, why don’t we prove it on the medical side of things? It’s one thing to prove it in a lab, it’s another thing to prove it with the toughest cases and actually get the medical and clinical experience of what is going on and to have that come from the doctors themselves. When the doctor said, I did nothing, I changed nothing in the protocol. I gave this supplement to someone with parkinsonism and their tremors greatly reduced. That was a testament to us. And while that’s not a double-blind placebo, we understand that. We really do value that clinical experience because as we know, tons of things have gone through double-blind placebos and shown great, great success in them only to then be used by the general population they don’t see that same level of success. We value doctors’ opinions. We really value those connections we had with the medical community itself that was already in this integrated world and trying to look at what else can I give to my patients that can improve their outcomes. When we were able to provide them with Nadovim and some of these people already doing NAD+ infusions, but perhaps it was supplemental to take that home because NAD+ infusions are costly, number one. They’re lengthy, they’re several hours. They do sometimes have some—they’re not side effects, but they’re unwanted. If you push NAD+ too quickly intravenously, you’ll get this tightness in the chest and a feeling of anxiety, and a lot of people don’t like that. When you could provide them with a daily dose of NAD+ orally and they’re seeing similar results to what they were doing in the IV on let’s say a bi-weekly basis, that’s a wonderful extra option for any doctor to utilize. And then to be able to provide that safely to the public as well, we were really happy with the outcome from what we saw, probably more so than what we thought would happen.   [00:31:06] Ashley James: Oh absolutely. Now, the IV is getting right in the body. How did you figure out how to make NAD+ orally be readily absorbed by the body? Is it the cofactors that are also in the Nadovim supplement? How did you guys figure it out? In many supplements, so much is lost through poor absorption. If someone has a messed up gut, they’re not absorbing all their nutrients. How do you bypass that?   [00:31:40] Caspar Szulc: First off, knowledge of bioavailability is really important and understanding. We’ve worked with so many different compounds orally over the years at the clinic understanding that number one, quality is always the most important I think. There are so many different sources of NAD+, and that’s what sometimes upsets me is just this idea that NAD+ is NAD+. That’s the same idea as like, all right, a car is a car. Show me a Ferrari and then show me like a beat up old car, they’re not the same thing. You will gladly pay a premium for one and some you don’t even want to get into because you might not make it to point B in that. The same thing goes for supplements that goes for medicine, and I always say, in no other realm is it more important to put quality first than in medicine and health where it literally dictates your results. We had to go around from different suppliers and different nutritional manufacturers and see and test their NAD+, look for those purity sources, look for ones that are unadulterated, and really look for ones that had the highest quality to them. Then when you add in the cofactors on top of that, I think that alone is already a successful way to increase bioavailability. Now the one thing I’ll say about NAD+, I think it’s still often misunderstood as to how it really works, and I think we’re still learning about it because a lot of the competitors or people in our world state that yes, once you ingest it, it’s hydrolyzed and it won’t make its way into the bloodstream. That’s based on a 1980 study of rats that you could look at, and we did. There were definitely some flaws to that and some conceptions there that didn’t really make all that much sense. Once we did look at other studies that were more recent coming out of Japan and other places, you could see that there is new knowledge to understanding how it can be broken up and basically recombined. My co-founder who’s a doctor looked into this and started looking at those studies and published an article on the bioavailability of not just precursors but NAD+ itself. There’s a couple of conclusions that it came to.  Number one is that it gets broken apart but then it gets recombined. If you had to take a car through a smaller space than it could fit, what would you do? You take off the wheels maybe, you’ll separate a little bit, but once it’s back in there, you can recombine it pretty easily. As opposed to even the precursors do need to be broken as well to go through and be available, and then they need to recombine with something else that’s in the bloodstream before they become NAD+. So you’re going to require those extra elements whereas you already had the whole car going in. Then there are new understandings of how certain transporters in the gut can actually take the whole molecule and bring it through. That’s something scientists are just tapping into I think just last year they found that larger molecules host that NAD+ and those that are actually associated with some of the precursors that even larger the NR are crossing fully formed through the gut barrier in and become bioavailable and useful that way. I mean, science is ever-changing. That whole idea of the science is settled always makes me chuckle a little bit when people say that because science by nature changes almost every single day when we make new discoveries, and we’ll never stop making new discoveries about these things. It’s kind of interesting to see it anecdotally because that’s where we started. We started, okay, you give someone NAD+, they get better. All right, what about oral? They got better too, that’s anecdotal. And then you start to see the data that’s coming out that you research and it’s matching up. We didn’t even know when we first started putting coenzyme q10 with NAD+ that there were any research papers or anything. We just went off the knowledge of each individually. And then it got brought to our attention, hey there is this study out of Spain where they did it and they put the two together and supplemented over eight weeks and saw a vast improvement in HRV. It was like, oh, wow. That’s basically validating what we were seeing. That is the breakdown of where we went in this idea of bioavailability—always looking at quality first, looking at the purity of it, looking at what the cofactors can be that can increase not just absorption rate but effectiveness once it gets in, and then, of course, looking at what the data is showing. Are we seeing a placebo in all these patients, or is there something to it? And I think the science is catching up that there is something to it, and I know there are a lot of great, great researchers out there that are just looking at NAD+ and finding new things all the time. I think we’re still in a relatively early stage of understanding the usefulness and also how it works, the mechanisms of NAD+ within the body that go beyond this understanding of it just supplies the mitochondria with energy, it gets in through this, and you need precursors or you need this. It’s ever-evolving, which is kind of cool. At the same time, I understand it could be a little bit confusing for some. But at the end of the day, we care about results. We care about actually helping people. If that comes first before the data and research can really validate over and over, we’re okay with that. We hope it’ll catch up soon enough.   [00:37:14] Ashley James: So, Nadovim is giving the body the nutrients that are natural to the body, the body needs, but the body is depleted in. That’s vastly different from taking a drug or even self-medicating with coffee, with sugar. I remember a time in my life where I would go to coffee and sugar just to wake up in the morning. I had a really, really bad chronic adrenal fatigue in my 20s, it was ridiculous. I went to see a functional medicine doctor who actually performed in the Olympics twice. She and I are still friends today, she’s amazing. She’s in her late 70s and she still runs marathons. She’s just super awesome. I want to be her when I grow up. This was 12 years ago and she looked at my cortisol levels and said, I have never seen cortisol levels this low. You absolutely have chronic adrenal fatigue based on all my symptoms and my blood work. And then back then, I went to several MDs and they just brushed me off. They hadn’t learned about chronic adrenal fatigue. They’re like, well, you don’t have Addison’s disease. Just go home, drink coffee, or whatever. But I went to her and she’s like, okay, we’re going to get you better with supplements, a better diet, and lifestyle changes. It validated me because doctors said there’s nothing wrong with me or whatever until I saw her and she knew to run the labs to see that I had chronic adrenal fatigue. She said, I’d never seen someone so low. The closest I’ve ever seen was after I finished the Olympics, after her training. After very intense, she goes, my cortisol levels were about the same, but I bounced back and you’ve been this way for years. I know she would absolutely have put me on Nadovim if she had had access to it back then, but how she helped me to start to get on the path to healing was finding out all the different vitamins, minerals, and things that my body was missing and changing my diet. It took me years of just constantly researching and looking through natural medicine and working with several Naturopathic doctors until it all clicked and I found the keys to solving my health problems. I’m really excited about Nadovim because it’s what the body is missing, and when I started taking what my body was missing, even a really high-quality methylated multi B vitamin supplement was life turned on. All of a sudden, the lights turned on in my body because my body was depleted. And then I started taking different minerals, 60 minerals highly absorbed by the body, all of a sudden it was like the lights turned on even more and I started to feel my body come online. These are things that should be in our food but aren’t in our food because they’re food supply. They’re not our food in the amounts that our body needs, and our body is under way more stress so it burns through our nutrients much quicker. Doctors wanted to put me on drugs. They had different drugs for me, and of course, my body doesn’t have a deficiency for whatever drug they wanted to give me. My body was missing these key nutrients that are in Nadovim. So it’s very intriguing. I’ve had clients who say, because I’ll help them get on like a really great multi B vitamin that’s highly absorbed by the body and actually all 16 vitamins and some minerals. They’ll say, well, how long do I have to take this? I take it every day but when can I get off of it? It’s just such an interesting question. It’s like, well how long do you want to feel healthy because this is what your body uses every day. When you’re supplementing, when you’re filling in the gaps of your nutrient needs, you want to take that every day for the rest of your life. Your body needs vitamin C every day right, so if you’re not getting enough from your diet you need to supplement in order to give your body all the raw building blocks it needs to have a proper cellular function. So your body’s using everything in Nadovim to properly function. We have to think this isn’t a drug. You get on a drug and you want to know when you’re going to get off the drug, right? But with this, this isn’t a drug. This is supplementing what you are lacking, what your body needs in order to optimally function. Now, that leads me to my question because biohackers and athletes have really latched on to Nadovim and NAD+ to boost their results. I’d love for you to talk about it because we talked about people who are feeling sick or even just people who think they’re healthy but notice they have a decline in their energy or their mental clarity. But what about those people who are just super healthy like athletes, why are they so excited about Nadovim?   [00:42:27] Caspar Szulc: Well, one thing I want to get to that you say was really interesting that I’ve heard echoed by so many doctors is this idea that you will never be depleted of a chemical. You will never be depleted of a drug or anything. You will be depleted of so many other things, and that’s a cause of the way we live. Even our food supply is depleted, even our soil somewhat being depleted. I had Dr. James DiNicolantonio recently wrote the mineral fix. He said basically the soil we have right now is 30%–50% less magnesium than it was 30 years ago. So we have 30%–50% of Americans are basically depleted of magnesium. The numbers add up right there, and so much of what is going on is not a depletion of a chemical. It is a depletion of the nutrients, which we require, which are building blocks to our body’s functioning. That’s really important for people to realize that when you go on a drug, that’s just keeping you in a state where you’re managing something, you’re managing the depletion in a sense that is more natural, and then you start to become dependent on a drug. We never like that approach. I do think it’s really important to state that something like Nadovim and everything we do at our company and how we try and teach other doctors to work is not to look at someone as, oh, you’re depleted of a drug, let me give it to you. But let’s find out what’s really going on. What’s at the source of this? What is that underlying dysfunction or root cause and go after that? That’s a really important distinction of how you approach your health as well because anyone could say, oh, you want more energy, just take in more caffeine. Drink 5-hour Energy all day, some people do it. But trust me, that’s not healthy. That is the opposite of healthy. Our biorhythms and the chronobiological system are totally screwed up when you do that. That’s what causes adrenal fatigue, causes hormones to go out of balance and everything else, and a cascade of other things you don’t want happening. Now, to get into that idea, I’ve always said that if you look at biohackers and performance optimizers, they are doing the same thing that medicine should be doing, which is absolutely just how do we get you to your best self? How do we optimize your body, mind, and spirit? When we approach medicine, it’s not that we’re just trying to get you to this absence of symptoms, which most of medicine would say, yes, we did it. We cured you because you don’t have symptoms right now. Meanwhile, underlying dysfunction is still there. You probably require ongoing maintenance and you may not feel that good here and there. Really, if you push the goal and the end zone, let’s say, to having complete optimization of your health, of self-healing, of self-management, of getting you to a state where you don’t require caffeine or other things to wake up or pills to go to sleep, that’s what the aim of any medical treatment should be. And that’s also the aim of where biohackers go. They know this because they’re very, very passionate about it. So when they’re looking at compounds to help their mitochondrial function, to help how they’re feeling throughout the day, to give them that 1%-2% edge. I was on Dave Asprey’s podcast and he told me about his experience. He said, it’s really nuanced and that’s when I know something works because I’m already healthy. I’m already taking so many things to optimize me and I’m not in a sick state anymore. But you’re looking for these nuanced improvements and being able to say, okay, I could focus for 20, 30 minutes longer without having to take a break. I can go a little bit more in my workout. We had a professional soccer player who said I’m 21, 22. He said, I’m already full of energy on the field. What was great for me was when I was doing the back area looking at tape and doing all the training that way and the homework you got to do, I was zoned in so much longer after a long day of doing practice. After the physical exertion, I would usually be a little bit mentally exhausted. But with Nadovim, I had that extra edge to now have that mental strength to keep going, to stay really focused when others were zoning out on these things, and I could pick up on the reeds and different offensives I had to defend against. That’s where when you’re talking about these top performers, they’re looking for just any little edge to get ahead, and Nadovim was able to provide that. So I think that’s why they latched on. You had these big guys taking them, talking about it, and saying yeah, I noticed it. I do everything I can. I take 100+ pills sometimes to see what works and what doesn’t, and Nadovim was one of those that actually did bring them to those nuanced senses of improvement and they actually saw it. For them, that means the world. We’re really pleased with that. We started with patients, we started with people that are pretty sick and said, hey, can we help you guys? We didn’t even focus, but what became of it was, yes, the biohackers and athletes know what NAD+ is. They’re also depleting it with lots of energy and just what they’re bringing into their body and also expelling. They understood that if you could optimize and even something that we call pre-plenish your NAD+ levels.  It’s not about replenishing. Many of them would probably show that they’re really taking care of themselves and have pretty good levels of NAD+, but what about really stressful times? Can they pre-plenish so that when the stress hits, when they do have to work 12, 14 hour days, or really go deep into the competition, will they have the levels to keep going? That was something really interesting and something we didn’t see and just kind of happened. It happened very naturally that these top biohackers just got into it as something that started in the medical community. That’s something I’m really looking at right now, how do we bridge that gap between medicine and biohacking? Because I think it’s one in the same really. It’s about how do we get you to your most optimized self and basically the spot where you’re healthiest and happiest.    [00:48:53] Ashley James: I love that you brought it pre-plenish because it reminds me of when athletes carb load. They don’t need all the extra glucose stores for day-to-day function, but they are about to do something really big. They know their body is going to go through the stressful event of a marathon, their competition, or their game, and so they’ll make sure that they’re getting enough carbs and then extra so that they’ve got all the full stores of the blood sugar, the glucose stored in their muscles and their liver. So that when their body is under that stress, it can reach into those reserves. There are certain athletes that are choosing to use ketones for energy, and they don’t have a lick of fat on them so they can’t really wait for the body to burn off some fat for ketones. They’ll supplement with ketones before they go into an event so the body can use up those ketones as energy. My friend had a question and I thought that was interesting. You just mentioned this so this is perfect. You mentioned that we can preload if we know we’re about to go into a stressful event. Let’s say you’re going out for a night drinking with your girlfriends, you can pre-load some Nadovim. And please, take your B vitamin, hydrate, and all that. I don’t advocate for alcohol, but I understand, once in a while, if you’re going to blow off some steam with your girlfriends or something, there are things you can do so you feel really good the next day instead of really crappy the next day. You definitely want to add Nadovim to that to preload if you’re going into that kind of stress. You’re having fun but you know you’re putting stress on the body. But is there a point where it becomes toxic? Is there a point where there’s a dose we should avoid, or is it something the body uses? It doesn’t hurt the body to use it. Getting into understanding that, how long does it take for the body to clear it out of the system? Is it cleared out through the kidneys or through the liver? Can you just explain a little bit about just understanding how much we should take? Is there an upper limit to the dose, and what happens if someone takes too much? How is it cleared out of the body?   [00:51:16] Caspar Szulc: With everything, you could have too much water, you could have too much oxygen, you could have too much of anything in this world. I don’t like when people like there’s no way this could ever harm you or anything. I mean, listen, you could take a bunch and this isn’t anything that is toxic. It will be flushed through the liver. It will be broken down. Will it cause some stress? I’m sure if you took an enormous amount. But you have to understand that a lot of times when you do these infusions, you take in thousands and thousands of milligrams sometimes at a time. We’re talking about 200 that’s going through the oral system, as opposed to 1000 that’s going through an intravenous directly into the bloodstream. There are no toxic elements to that, and that’s a completely safe method of getting NAD+ into the system and utilizing that. It will be somewhat utilized within the cells, and those that aren’t are easily passed out without any of that toxic element that you would have in many synthetic drugs and chemicals. We found it as an incredibly safe method of delivering something that will provide you with energy and that every single cell utilizes, so you go through a lot of NAD+. Again, if you’re talking about someone that is depleted, then it’s important to look at that as a cause of symptoms as a cause of dysfunction in a healthy state. When we look at this idea of are there toxicity, I think at any high, high rate, anything can be a toxin to the body. We all say the devil is in the dosage, but there’s a lot of forgiveness with something like NAD+. There’s a lot of forgiveness with applying it through an oral method where you could take double the dosage, four-pill, that really wouldn’t do too much as opposed to something where if you took a synthetic material, if you doubled that, it may have a huge impact on you. The body is utilizing it. It’s just like with oxygen or anything else, it knows what to do with it. Even if it’s too much, it will change and adapt to that in a way that doesn’t make it toxic that the kidneys can expel, that goes out within the urine and through just through your GI system.  We felt it was a wonderful option for those who are suffering from any type of brain fog, anything like that. And again, I do believe that too many people don’t even recognize that they are suffering from some small kind of version of brain fog, short-term memory loss, all these things. I think it’s almost an epidemic right now where we’re required to focus so much. We’re required to use our brains. You talk about the industrial revolution, we’re required to use our muscles a lot. Now we’re in the information age. We’re in an age where we sit in front of a computer for long bouts of time and need to process things very quickly. All these tabs open you think about and then you have your phone. You walk around anywhere in this day and age, everyone’s going to be looking down their phone and processing so many pieces of information. That’s just the brain at work. We’re asking so much of our brains these days. That’s why it was really important to find something, well, how do we protect that one thing that top scientists said is the most complex object in the universe is your brain? It was really important to find out how to do that without being like this limitless pill, let’s say, from the movie that had so many side effects, that was a chemical. There are definitely ways you could stimulate the brain that is chemically induced. Lots of drugs do that. Adderall is a type of methamphetamine that does that, but that has serious consequences. While I would never compare having Nadovim to something like that, to a drug, I would say that I think it’s a happy medium between nothing or just going about your day and being in that state of brain fog and trying something like Adderall or anything else. We’ve actually had people that were Adderall utilize this and say that it was actually really good to utilize that instead of that and get away from the jitters, get away from the side effects of that, get away from the sleepless nights. I mean, NAD+ is really useful for chronobiological restoration. So people have deeper sleep and we noticed that with people wearing Oura rings. Their sleep score went up dramatically and their deep sleep went up. That was again an unintended benefit for many people who are just trying to enhance their cognitive functioning, then saw better sleep, and saw better skin because again, this is getting into every single cell and helping it regenerate, and helping it do what it needs to do. That’s absolutely going to impact your skin, which needs to regenerate so much. It needs to get toxins out of it, how do you do that? Every cell needs to do that also and expel. When you really break it down, we are truly happy with creating this because while we were honed in on the brain, it had so many other uses, and we hear that from users all the time that so many other improvements happen on top of improving brain function.   [00:56:47] Ashley James: ADHD, people who have problems with concentration, they were enjoying the benefits of Nadovim and seeing that it helped them much better than Adderall, which like you said has those side effects. I have a really close friend who 15 years ago was on Adderall and to this day still suffers from the side effects because it compromised his ability to make healthy stress hormones. This is 15 years later after he’s off those drugs, his body is still not regulating his stress hormones appropriately, that is a side effect. You can get off a drug and you may have side effects years later, which just blows my mind. We’re not given true informed consent when we get on drugs. Informed consent is when the doctor tells you here are all the possible things that could go wrong, here are all the things that could go right, and here are all the alternatives that you could choose to do instead of this. I mean, have you ever had that talk with your doctor? No. They’re like, hey, get on this. You might notice diarrhea, call me if you do. They might list three side effects, but they’re not really telling you you might have long-term damage from this. They’re not going to sit down with you and give you all the studies and explain to you, give you true informed consent. We have to essentially advocate for that and also go do our own research, read through some papers, and inform ourselves about the effects of a drug or a treatment, not just leave it up to the doctor. That’s what true informed consent is. I think if everyone got true informed consent, a lot of people would ask for a second opinion, go see some other kinds of doctors, hopefully, holistic doctors, functional medicine doctors like at your clinic so they’re getting better integrative medicine, and look at other options, look at other choices that would have less side effects or hopefully no side effects and just side benefits seeing other parts of their body healing. Like we’re doing with Nadovim, seeing all these other side benefits like skin. You already knew it was going to help with the brain but seeing that it’s helping improve other systems of the body because every cell that has mitochondria will use NAD+. That makes so much sense. But the fact that you had the testimonials from people who have been on Adderall or know they have ADHD and are seeing that they’re able to perform better on something natural that isn’t going to harm them. It’s natural in that the body is deplete of this substance. It’s what the body needs, not an artificial substance that has all these side effects that actually ends up depleting the body more of NAD+ because the body has to use up more NAD+ in order to clear out those toxins of the drug. It just blows my mind. We take someone with an illness or with symptoms like ADHD, give them something that then depletes them further of NAD+ when their brain actually needed more NAD+ to function better.   [01:00:23] Caspar Szulc: It’s a vicious cycle and you can’t blame the doctors if that’s the option they’re giving. You can’t blame a handyman if he comes and he only has a hammer and he’s trying to fix the pipe and just using that instead of a wrench. Can you really blame them so much? Another point to that whole informed consent is that I think it’s really difficult nowadays to truly have informed consent because it’s so hard to weed through so many different pieces of information. You have one piece of data that shows it’s good, you have another research study that may show you something else. The thing that I would love to see with people that are going through anything is the ability to go in a pattern that makes sense to try things that are the least toxic and easiest to get and then work your way up. Why would you come in with a little bit of pain and go straight to surgery? That happens a lot. A lot of doctors are like, oh, this could be this. Let’s go in with back surgery, which my father performed back surgery. There is a lot of complications that may arise when you start opening and start working on the spine, tons. When I looked at medicine, I thought we had it positioned incorrectly. Aside from the whole informed consent piece of it, it’s that we went from 0 to 100 way too quick. We went from I have pain to being on painkillers like that. Why didn’t you go to a chiropractor first? Why didn’t you go to acupuncture? Why didn’t you try this anti-inflammatory? Why don’t you try turmeric? There’s a list of things we should try. For me, the same is with, okay, you have some brain fog, why go directly to Adderall? Or you have someone with ADHD, why would you put them on something that is a Class III or so drug that can be abused so easily, that has real side effects? That even if you were informed that much, you could easily find stuff that is just like, whoa, that kind of scares me a little bit what I’m hearing about some people that use this. And of course, you could look at something like Nadovim and be like well, it’s not a double-blind placebo and it doesn’t have a vast, vast improvement in this. Yeah, but sometimes that’s what your body is just craving a little bit. You don’t have to go all-in on something that has all of these side effects. I sometimes have to sit there and laugh when I watch a pharmaceutical drug commercial. It’s like 10 seconds of people being happy followed by 30 seconds of really quick talk about everything that could go wrong with you.   [01:03:07] Ashley James: It could cause inner leakage and death.   [01:03:09] Caspar Szulc: And then they’re happy in the background, dancing to the nice music and everything. It’s like, why would you turn to that as your first recourse? Unfortunately, what happens and what we see in medicine is that they turn to that, they turn to surgery, they turn to really big things, they still don’t get better, and then they turn back to the easy stuff like Nadovim, going to a holistic center, or something like that when already, it’s like, whoa, there’s a lot going on wrong now. If you came to us first, maybe it would have been much easier. So I think it’s a little bit backward in that sense alone. Even with informed consent, it’s just about the number of options. If you started training like if you were just out of shape, maybe a little overweight, you wouldn’t go to an Olympic trainer and be like, all right, I’m going all-in with this Olympic trainer—six times a week, three hours, moving into this big gym out there. It would be like, why are you doing that? Just do some push-ups in the morning, start there. Start with something simple and easy that won’t require so much of you and go from there. On top of doing their own research, which I think is incredibly important, I think what I’ve heard from a lot of people is it’s confusing. There is a research study by the manufacturer of this drug that shows it’s amazing. Then there are people on forums that say they grew a third arm from this. Then there’s this, then there’s that. The paradox of choice isn’t good, that’s not informed consent either in a sense. I think you just want to go with, well, why don’t I try this?  And again, I think there is this element of what do you feel? Don’t listen to the doctors, to the commercials, to the people trying to get your money. Don’t even listen to me in a sense, I would say. What are you feeling? What does your intuition say? And I feel that’s something we’ve totally gotten away from. Because I see patients all the time being like, should I do this? It’s like, I’m not answering that question for you. This medicine isn’t for everyone. There’s a lot of responsibility involved. You’ll have to change your lifestyle, you’ll have to do a lot of things that you may not want to do, but I think this is a great option. But at the end of the day, you have to make the choice. What feels good to you? Maybe going on the drug is right for you right now because you know you won’t go through those lifestyle changes right now. Maybe in a little bit you will. Where we are with Nadovim is like well why won’t you start there instead of let’s say Adderall or going to something even bigger or really undergoing some big medical procedures for the brain or anything like that. Give it a try. It’s not a huge investment. It is relatively safe, you could say. I won’t sit here and be like it’s absolutely 100% safe. I mean, you could have some reaction to something in there, thymine or something maybe, but incredibly small because again these are all-natural elements. You should be getting them from your food anyway. That’s my input on that because I do see that happening a lot within the medical field and within just this idea of all right, what are my options? It’s like, whoa, you went really quick from being like I have a little pain to again going under the knife, or I have a little brain fog to being on a high dosage of something that’s addictive and has a lot of side effects.   [01:06:28] Ashley James: Right. I have a friend who’s a Naturopathic physician and she became—I don’t know, jaded maybe because when she first started out, she’d get patients that came in with high blood pressure. She’d be like, okay, you’re going to walk 20 minutes every day, you’re going to eat this way, and take these supplements. Then they’d come back and they still have high blood pressure and they hadn’t done anything or maybe they did one out of three things that she told them to do. It’s like, no, you’ve got to make these lifestyle changes because that’s what’s causing the high blood pressure. We’re going to listen to the symptoms of the body and give the body what it needs. Not everyone is willing to, motivated to, or are ready to make lifestyle changes that would give them better health, which just blows my mind because I’m like, tell me what to do, I’m ready to do it. I want to be better. I want to be even better. I’m always striving for better health because I suffered for so many years. So many of my listeners are sick of being sick and they’re motivated. They’re here listening, they’re listening for over an hour because they are motivated to make healthy changes in their life. But maybe they have a husband, a friend, an aunt, or whatever that has these problems but they’re not willing to stop drinking a bottle of wine a night. They’re not willing to go for a walk for 20 minutes every day. You can’t do it for them. The Naturopathic doctor or the functional medicine practitioner isn’t going to come home with you and get you to make these lifestyle changes. It is up to us as individuals. I like that Nadovim is a small thing you can start. If it seems too daunting, too overwhelming to exercise every day. If you haven’t been exercising for years, it’s like oh gosh, that just seems overwhelming. But could you start your day off with a big glass of water and a capsule of Nadovim? Yes. That’s what my friend does who says she just floats through her day, bounces through her day. She gets up at I think 5:30 in the morning to be able to beat the traffic to drive because she lives pretty far away from Seattle. She has a beautiful cabin in the woods, so she has to get up before everyone else and go downtown Seattle. Then she manages this huge, huge ordeal. She does manage this big company, all the people below her that report to her, and all the decisions she has to make throughout the day. Every time we make a decision, it uses up our brainpower. There are some fun studies about that at the end of the day, that’s why at 11:00 at night you can’t stick to your diet and you’re standing there in front of the fridge, I’ll just eat everything. Because every time we make a decision, we only have a certain amount of decisions. The power of our brain can only handle so many decisions in a day because the brain now ran out of its NAD+ and it’s just shovel food in my face, I can’t take it anymore. Throughout the day, every decision we make depletes more of that energy of the brain.  I just wonder how NAD+, how Nadovim would help since it’s supporting the brain’s ability to have energy. How that would then translate into increasing our ability to have willpower at the end of the day? So there are fun studies about willpower and how it gets depleted if we work at a job that requires us to make a lot of decisions, a lot of choices throughout the day. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that where you had to make a ton of choices and at the end of the day, your brain is spent and you can actually feel it. It’s like it’s depleted of its energy and nutrients. But yeah, she just always has energy and always bounces around. I’ve always been impressed by her, now I know her secret, and I’m so excited to know that it’s because she’s been taking the supplement. She said it’s her absolute favorite supplement. What about depression? You kind of mention that. How does Nadovim help people who have depression?   [01:10:42] Caspar Szulc: Again, depression is one of those things you got to look at from a holistic standpoint. I even read and interviewed Dr. Jodie Skillicorn who wrote a book about healing depression without medication. She basically said the idea being chemical imbalances has been debunked and we’re going about all wrong, depression. There are so many different contributing factors—diet, of course, your microbiome now is really linked to depression and certain strains even being there. I mean, there are so many different causes of depression. But at the end of the day, if you have the vitality or the energy to make decisions that are going to be better for you, I think that’s everything. I think that’s a huge part of getting out of a depressive state somewhat. Depression is a terrible state to be in, but it’s also one that drains you considerably. It’s one of those states that if you look at the scale of consciousness and what David Hawkins put out there, it’s a negative conscious state, very low and draining of energy, and keeps you down. You need to work yourself up from there—from feelings of guilt, hate, depression, shame—up into neutrality. The idea that you would have more energy to make certain things, to go to certain things, to get outside, and have these small wins can be the difference in starting to get out of depression. Of course, each case is different. I’m not going to say that if you’re chronically depressed and take Nadovim you’ll be better. There’s a ton of things you probably have to do to get your state into a good emotional state out of depressive moods. The one thing that I keep turning back to when people ask about these things in general wellness, depression, depressive moods is this idea of you never have time or you’re just stuck and you have this outlook on life that is depressive. I think when you have energy and vitality that shifts. The greatest resource, everyone has 24 hours in the day, do you have the energy to actually do things? Do you, like you said, come home and just lay around, turn on Netflix, sit there, and then start to question your life, what am I doing? I’m just sitting around not meeting people. That could keep you in a depressive mood. I think what we’ve realized even through this whole lockdown is we need connection, but at the same time, if we don’t have the willingness, the vitality, the energy to even get up out of bed when we get in really early at night, just sit there and like you said, just veg out because we have no will power left, and just sit there and kind of become zombies to a TV screen or even a computer screen. That can lead to a loss of purpose, a loss of connection. I think those are some of the biggest causes of depression. I would much rather look at those sorts of things than look at chemical imbalances and just drug you up and say take this pill, this antidepressant. We know that can have serious consequences as well as dependency. When I look at something like depression, this feeling which I also correlate with a feeling of lack of purpose, which I see in tons of patients. At one point, we were creating a program for patients of things they could do outside of the office because we knew we only had them an hour or two a week in the office for treatments. So many would ask, what should I do outside? And of course, we gave them all these tips but we wanted to put in a program. We interviewed hundreds of patients, hundreds of doctors, and really wanted to get it down to an X factor. What’s that one thing that was the difference between two people with the same diagnosis, same treatment plans, same everything, demographic. So what we saw when we took two patients with a similar demographic, similar diagnosis, similar background, and went through similar treatment plans was that if one got better and one didn’t, we wanted to know what the difference was. Why was one receiving the same type of treatment plan getting better and the other one would maybe see improvement but then slide back after the treatment plan was done? The thing we really broke it down to, this X factor, was purpose. It was this idea that one had a purpose to go live, see her grandchildren, and travel the world. Whereas the other one didn’t. They were still very much stuck on I am disease X, that is who I am. They didn’t really have a purpose. Maybe they’ve been out of work for a while and were chronically ill in bed, and suddenly even the idea of what do I do, what is the next step in my life kind of scared them. And they didn’t have that purpose. We really ingrained in this program, what we did was first, create a purpose for you. It could be anything. It could be I would love to go skiing in the Swiss Alps, or I’d love to run a 5K and just keep that in mind.  I think something like a supplement like NAD+, it gives you the vitality and the cognitive functioning to be able to really focus on that, to be able to do certain things and take those steps. Have that little bit of energy to start with one small win, one small step. Like you said, if it’s getting better, start with just waking up and having that glass of water and that’ll be one step. The next day, get up and take a few deep breaths. The next day, have a little bit more energy and stretch a little bit. See yourself running that 5K more and more and be positive. The next day takes a few more steps down the stairs, maybe walk outside, maybe do 0.1 k your first time right and then keep going from there. I think where Nadovim falls, it gives you that little bit of energy, edge, and clarity to do that and to always be focused on this purpose.  So I think when you look at anything, whether it’s depression, whether it’s getting out of a state of feeling stuck in your life, or being disconnected, it’s about finding what really brings you passion and that purpose. It could be something small, it could be something big. That’s up to you. Don’t look anywhere else for that. Really sit down with a journal. Write that down. But then use little things, little pieces, little tips. Whether that’s breathing techniques or anything else, or Nadovim to then give you the best chances to see that through, to take those little small steps. I think when you’re really stuck on that, when every day before you go to sleep, when you wake up you’re thinking about that thing, what you want to do, what you want to accomplish, that becomes a priority. Like you said, I think right now what people are suffering from—health isn’t a priority to them. That’s the truth. The unfortunate truth is that for too many people, they have the ability to make the right choices, they have the ability to do these things, and they don’t. They will drink every night. They will stay up late, take pills, or whatever. That’s not to fall. I never like to put blame and guilt, but it’s just to say take responsibility. If you truly prioritize something, if that means the world to you, you’ll put it at the top. You’ll stop, you’ll close your computer screen at 9:00 PM because you know that’s going to screw up your circadian rhythms and probably keep you up at night stressing. Then you’ll have a bad day, you’ll need coffee again, your adrenals will go down, it’ll become habitual, you’ll need sleeping pills to go to sleep, lots of caffeine in the morning, and suddenly you’re wondering why your hormones all screwed up and you’re chronically ill. That’s the thing. I think when you take something like Nadovim, it gives you an edge to actually see through those choices. It gives you that little bit of a boost to then say, okay, I want to do this. That’s what I realized. I mean, I’m not immune to any of this. Even though I work in a center, I have access to wonderful things. I live in New York City, it’s stressful. I run multiple companies, that’s stressful. Sometimes I work way too long, but when I do realize, hey, I prioritize health. I have the energy to see through certain things and do them correctly, then I do take 20 minutes to meditate on a stressful day. I do drink more fluids and stand up a lot more even though I could be glued to my computer doing work all day. I think that’s what leads me to believe where Nadovim’s place in something like depression isn’t the treatment of depression so much. Although it could be the source, you never know. I’m not saying it is or isn’t. NAD+ depletion may be a cause of depression for sure, but at the same time, even if it weren’t, I would say take it also because I think it’ll lead you to have that clarity and that extra mental boost to then see through actions that bring you out of a depressive state, that get you connected again to the world that brings you into your purpose and passion.   [01:19:35] Ashley James: Oh, I love that answer. That’s so fantastic. So many studies have shown that those who have depression or even suicidal, if they volunteer, they find that they get more joy and more out of volunteering than what they’re actually giving. We think volunteering is almost like being a martyr. Oh, I have to give away my time and my energy. But really, you actually get back more. It’s just amazing. You can make an impact on the world and then that is helping you even more. There are so many studies that show that it not only helps with depression, it actually increases longevity. Those who volunteer, who have a life purpose, or feel that they’re making a difference in their community live longer. That makes a lot of sense. That NAD+ depletion, in and of itself, could be the factor that’s having them feel depressed. Like you said, we’re just starting to understand how this very complex system works—the brain. We’re even discovering that the gut is like a second brain, and then they’re discovering now that the heart is almost like a third brain. We always thought it was just the brain telling the organs information. But what we’re seeing is that all this new information that we’re discovering is that the heart and the gut is actually giving information back to the brain. It’s like these three brains in the body are communicating. The book, The Holographic Universe—a fantastic book to read—talks about how we think all of our cognitive abilities and all of our neurological functions happen in the brain. It actually happens holographically throughout the entire nervous system. That we can store memories not just in the brain, but in other neurological tissue throughout the body. I recommend reading that book for anyone that wants to just have their mind blown literally. Understanding that what we think we know, what we’ve been taught about neurology is so far off from what we actually are and it’s very complex. Of course, a nutrient deficiency could be the root cause of these issues. That makes total sense. Also, everyone benefits from focusing on a life purpose, focusing on feeling like they’re making a difference in this world, a difference in their family, or a difference with their friends, whatever is within your value system. Anti-aging was a big buzzword for a long time. They call it other things now, even reversing aging. Dr. Daniel Amen, I’ve been fascinated with his research and have been following him for the last few years. He was able to scan the brain and see that there are certain pockets in the brain that as people aged, and it depended on their diet, their lifestyle, and their nutrient deficiencies because a 20-year-old can start to have these sort of age spots within the brain. When he did these scans, he could see that there were pockets of the brain that weren’t functioning optimally that it was almost like Swiss cheese. That there are pockets of the brain that weren’t getting enough oxygen, weren’t getting enough nutrition. The blood flow was being restricted. When we think about heart health, there are certain diets that actually will blood flow and make the arteries healthier and you can reverse heart disease. I had Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn on the show who has performed the world’s longest study on using diet to be able to reverse heart disease and prevent it. He wrote the book How to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. He shows pictures of hearts that were totally clogged and the arteries that were not getting blood flow through. Then two years later, the same patient completely clear heart. So we can reverse arterial sclerosis and calcification of the arteries. It’s amazing. You go to a regular MD or maybe most cardiologists and they want to put you on drugs or put stents in, and they haven’t seen this research. They haven’t seen that we can completely reshape, restore, and reverse the aging or the damage. Maybe we shouldn’t be calling it anti-aging anymore. It’s reversing the damage of living and your lifestyle. If you eat fries every day, that kind of thing, it puts a huge strain on the cardiovascular system. But Dr. Daniel Amen sees that the same things that cause heart disease, we’re basically having heart disease in the brain. That we’re having cardiovascular disease of the brain. It’s like Swiss cheese brain where there are just whole parts of the brain that aren’t getting enough blood flow and they’re kind of dying off or just not functioning optimally. He’s been doing this for over 30 years. He’s been able to follow patients, change their diet, get them on supplements. I wonder if he’s using NAD+ or Nadovim as one of his supplements, and you should definitely reach out to him if he’s not. He has then maps and does these scans and he can see the blood flow coming back, the brain’s restoring, and the Swiss cheese going away. People were having dementia reversing that. Anti-aging is one of those keywords, one of those catchphrases, but really, it’s reversing the damage that has happened from living—I don’t want to say from aging but from living—because I think there can be a 20-year-old that’s unhealthy as a 60-year-old given lifestyle choices. With Nadovim, I know that there’s a lot of anti-aging experts that are really excited about Nadovim and have been using it. What are they seeing in terms of reversing the damage or slowing down the aging process?   [01:26:00] Caspar Szulc: Well, there are two parts of this that are pretty exciting when you look at aging and the reversal of aging. Number one would be the mitochondrial theory of aging. That really all aging starts with the mitochondria, which as you said, was originally a bacteria, one cell kind of an organism that predates as far beyond where humans were around and exist in. Really understanding that that’s where it starts on a cellular level. You want to understand everything. I think there are two ways to understand it. Number one is through energy because we all are energy really—frequencies and vibrations, and that’s Einstein’s wonderful contribution and many other quantum physicists’ contribution to science and changing it forever was that understanding that we aren’t matter at all. The other way is also to look at things really at the building blocks that are kind of visible are physical. Energy packets are in your cell. Understanding that the function of the cell to regenerate and to get the ones that are no longer functioning out requires energy. Once that stops happening, you’ll have aging occur. You’ll have dysfunction occur. That’s really what is triggering an aging response so that this max life potential is really just dictated by mitochondrial function. So if you can improve your mitochondria, that is one great way to increase the age you can live for. The other way to look at of course is somewhat through DNA and understanding telomeres and understanding how DNA starts to basically work against this in a sense and how we protect DNA and how we again regenerate ourselves. NAD+ does have a positive impact on both of those. NAD+ is directly correlated to something called [inaudible 01:28:00] which helps out with telomerase and also helps with longevity that way. Looking at it from those perspectives is that NAD+ is a vital compound into great arenas that you could say are dictating how we age. Now, the other element outside of NAD+ and I think something you mentioned there as well is this idea of us aging. I think aging, what we’re doing is living unnaturally. If you’re closer to nature, if you live a natural existence, I think you age at a natural pace. But when we live with light bulbs on all the time, that disrupts our endocrine system. When we eat things that are unnatural and also disrupts so many systems within the body. We have to kind of reap what we sow, in a sense. Part of that is aging, it can be seen as disease. If you age the body, the functioning of everything doesn’t work as it should and leads to dysfunction, which leads to disease or symptoms and then a disease really. Those are things you got to incorporate as well because I hate to sit here and be like, take NAD+ and you won’t age, keep eating poorly, smoking, and doing all these things negatively. Live a natural life and you might not need NAD+. Now, at the same time, I have to say, we live in a day and age where you can’t really go out and just hunker down in a cave and be away from everyone and just live naturally there. We do live within the constrictions of being in this modern world, meaning most of us have cell phones, most of us are around light bulbs all the time. You could protect yourself as much as possible, but you’re still going to have an impact on your body. All the actions you do, you’re going to be impacted in this world right now. That’s the reason also when people like, well, I probably don’t need NAD+, right? I’m really healthy. I get it, you really are. I take care, I’m really healthy, but you still live in a world that unfortunately has introduced so many unnatural things in it that you’re going to be impacted. Even if you’re living far off now, you’re still impacted. That’s just where we are right now, and that’s why I say something like NAD+ is useful for everyone because even if you’re quite healthy, why not pre-plenish? Why wait? Why not take proactive steps? That’s what I think health really is. I talk about choices and everything like that, but it’s also being proactive to prevent it. To prevent aging and prevent disease, which I say synonymous, are taking the action before they happen. Every one of us usually waits to go see a doctor until something’s wrong. With a dentist, you get your tooth cleaning. Unless it’s in pain, why would you go see a dentist, right? Really go into it. The same is for a doctor and all these things related to our health.  I wish medicine became more about prevention. I wish it was more proactive. I wish we could catch things earlier on. Even if you didn’t go to a doctor, why not take things like supplementation that you know can absolutely benefit your cellular function, mitochondrial function, all these things that can relate so closely to aging? You could say beauty, to preventing disease, preventing really tough chronic things that again, right now, if you’re healthy, you’re in a minority in the United States. That’s crazy to me. That is a crazy stat that most people don’t realize. That right now, if you’re healthy, you’re a minority. Trust me, in 20 years, you’re going to be a really small minority the way it’s going. It’s going to be 80%, 90% are going to be comorbidities through the roof. Obesity, all of this chronic fatigue, diabetes, it’ll be so normal, then you’re going to be a freak if you’re healthy. That’s scary to me because health is the greatest wealth. If we don’t start turning things around, we’re in for a really sick society, in many different ways to say that. I will say, be proactive. It doesn’t have to be Nadovim only. I think that’s one little thing. That’s not everything I do. Drink more water, breathe more. All sorts of things. I just wish. I think by taking a pill though you kind of put a burden. You put some money into that pill so there is like a value intrinsic that I’ve seen. It’s almost like when people take medicine they start acting differently almost like a placebo. I’m paying for it, I might as well do other things, and I think that’s a good thing too. I do.   [01:32:45] Ashley James: Yeah, it motivates you.   [01:32:46] Caspar Szulc: It’s why I think you should pay your trainer. Pay them more than you pay up because you won’t skip workouts if it costs a lot and then really take care of yourself. This idea of also free and not having to be responsible for your health, it’s crazy to me. I think it’s part of the reason that the majority of us are sick and waiting for someone to help us out when in reality, we could absolutely take a lot of preventive and proactive steps to being healthy.    [01:33:15] Ashley James: Yeah. The listeners listening right now, we are the people who in a sense we’re like salmon. We’re swimming upstream. We don’t want to be a statistic. One in three people will have a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. That is ridiculous. If you’re in a room with three people, one of them is going to have cancer. That is insane. That is absolutely insane. The idea that our soil is so deplete of minerals and plants can’t make minerals, animals can’t make minerals. They have to come from the soil. If our body is minerally depleted, especially magnesium, which out of all the 60 essential minerals, magnesium is the most important. 1800 enzymatic processes in the body use magnesium. Zinc is the second most important at 800 processes. Calcium’s not even in the top two, and we’re marketed that we need to drink cow’s milk for calcium. Cow’s milk has a whole host of health issues that it comes with. It causes obesity and heart disease. It depends on who pays for the research, you always have to watch. If there’s a research paper that says cow’s milk is healthy, go follow the money and you’re going to find that it was paid for by someone who benefits from selling cow’s milk. It’s just crazy. People are unhealthy because of what they were taught, what they were told. We’ve been raised watching McDonald’s commercials and Kellogg’s Fruit Loop cereal, Lucky Charms commercials. We’ve been raised to see that these are actually foods. They’re not foods. They’re something that represents food that’s pretending to be food, but it’s not nutritious for the body. A lot of them are fortified with artificial vitamins that actually do more damage, especially for people who have methylation issues like the MTHFR SNP. So many people have MTHFR because of the toxicity in our environment. That’s what we’re seeing more and more. My listeners are like salmon, like me. I’m one of those people who’s going to go upstream. I’m okay with not following the herd because if I eat like, act like, and have a lifestyle like the majority of the people out there, then I will be a statistic. I don’t want to be one of those people that one in three has cancer, one in three has diabetes or pre-diabetic. I was diabetic. I reversed it with natural health changes and following holistic medicine. I’m not going back. My A1C is 4.7. I’m never going back to diabetes. I am just going towards better and better health. I know my listeners are doing the same. They’re highly motivated to make these changes. Even if it’s just adding a supplement and then drinking more water. It’s okay, baby steps. And then going for a walk three times a week. Just add what you can and keep on that path. My last question is about depletion. When people are on cholesterol meds, and I’ve had several doctors and cardiologists on the show say do not under any circumstances take cholesterol meds. I interviewed a Ph.D. and MD who is also a cardiologist, and he’s a cardiologist researcher. He looks at thousands of patients instead of just one at a time. He was the discoverer of the true cause of heart disease. That the true cause of heart disease is inflammation, and actually the cause of most diseases. You have to look to inflammation, then look to what causes inflammation, and then make diet and lifestyle changes to decrease that inflammation.  This was 30 years ago 40 years ago, while all the doctors were being told to put everyone on cholesterol-lowering meds, he said cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease. It’s a symptom that comes later after inflammation has done its damage. What’s causing inflammation? We have to go deeper, go deeper. The symptoms are being treated, but the root cause still continues to progressively do damage to the body. When people are put on cholesterol-lowering meds, there are so many side effects that happen. The patients end up not being able to feel their hands or their feet, then they can’t walk properly, then they stop exercising, and they live a more sedentary lifestyle. That leads to early death. So that’s just one problem that we see is happening with cholesterol-lowering meds because the neuropathy is caused by reducing the body’s ability to make healthy cholesterol that is used for the myelin sheath of the nervous system. So it’s doing damage to the nervous system. Well, another thing it does, by taking cholesterol-lowering meds, is that it decreases the coenzyme q10, which if you don’t have any coenzyme q10 in your body, your heart is not going to beat. Your heart will stop beating. That’s fuel for that wonderful muscle that we all love so much. It’s great that there’s some coenzyme q10 in because it’s one of those cofactors that you saw really benefited the nervous system. It’s absolutely needed. What doctors will say now when they keep their patients on cholesterol-lowering meds, they tell them to take a low dose actually of coq10. Now you mentioned that the body, when it needs to clear out drugs like the liver, has to process the toxins from these artificial chemical drugs and that depletes NAD+ in the body. Are there any drugs that significantly decrease NAD+, like absolutely what doctors should be doing if they ever put them on XYZ drug, that they should be taking an NAD+ supplement because it has such a drastic effect on our NAD+, or is it just like all drugs in general?   [01:39:38] Caspar Szulc: I mean, honestly, it’s all drugs in general. Every single drug has a toxic element to it and it’s going to require NAD+ to then flush that. Anything that’s a toxin and the body basically requires NAD+. That’s why you look at things like oxidative stress within the body and then just free radical formation—all these things are all part of the equation. Of course, the more toxic, the stronger drugs are, the more NAD+ is required. What do we do with everyone that’s on a lifelong intervention? At a certain point, you have to boost because you’re getting used to the drug, right? Your body is adjusting to it in a sense, which the body always does. It always adjusts. You’re giving it something synthetic, it’s not supposed to be there in a way, the body will adjust. It will try and maintain and go into homeostasis. What do we do? We give stronger drugs. We go higher milligrams and dosage. Guess what, that just depletes more and more NAD+. So we go in this vicious cycle of well, you’re going to need more because you’re not getting the effects of the lower dosage anymore so we’ll put you on this. And then what happens, you get a symptom from that down the line. Okay, that’s a known symptom. No worries. We’ll put you on another drug. Guess what, more NAD+ depletion. This approach we have with medicine right now, if you really took a step back, it makes no sense. It’s something that we’re just trying to manage everything in the body with something synthetic, which has lots of side effects that we’re not even incorporating. No doctor is thinking about NAD+ depletion when they give you a cholesterol medication. They can care less. They’re solving a problem, in a sense. Your cholesterol is here, we want it here, take this drug. That’s all I care about. That’s all I’ve been taught. And again, I’m not faulting doctors. I love them. My father’s a doctor. He was in conventional medicine for tens of years and I still have tons of friends and very close colleagues that are still abiding by the conventional and orthodox way of going about it. They are taught that way and they are doing good in the sense that someone comes in with pain and they leave without pain. But the long-term ramifications of chronic disease, you can’t really say that we’re winning that battle. That we’re doing something that’s really getting to the core of it and reversing disease. When you have this many people on this many medications, you’re bound to be depleting not just of NAD+, many other really, really important elements within the body that are critical to just regeneration to health in general.  To anyone listening, I’m not bashing it because it’s required at times. But I would want to take a different approach that yes, it’s required at times, but what’s the quickest way to get off of them? What’s the quickest way to get your body back to where it’s in a self-regulating space? It doesn’t require outside intervention of drugs within the body to do what it should be doing, and that’s really my mission is to show people. Because again, I’m not a doctor, I’m not going to go out there and push all the clinical data on everyone and go in that really technical analysis of each disease.  I’m here to tell you what I’ve seen within the 40 years or so I’ve been in medicine or around it to say that prioritizes health, and understand that your natural state is health. Don’t buy into that disease, I’m going to live with that forever because that’s not a narrative you want to be in because it is one that will lead to depression and this giving up on your own body to do what it should be doing. These miraculous things of healing itself every single day and so many processes that allow us to live are just really phenomenal when you take a step back and say, damn, my body does all of that in one second. Trillions of chemical actions that allow us to live and in perfect unity and harmony doing all this. Put more faith in your body in a sense and start to understand that there are options out there. One of them is taking, of course, something like NAD+ or Nadovim, but there are so many other options out there to bring you back into a healthy state because as long as you are taking any drugs or anything, that’s kind of the admission that you’re in a disease state. Without the drugs, you are in a disease state and you still are. Your cholesterol is high. Yes, we’re managing it. Then you’re telling me if you got off that pill you’d be healthy, no. It’s not making you healthy. It’s just managing your disease.  I want people to think about it differently. Stop managing disease. Yes, there’s a time and place you need to manage things, but it’s not a lifelong process. It doesn’t have to be. If you prioritize health and you start listening to great podcasts such as this one and start to appreciate a different approach to what health can be, what it should be, which is this natural state where you don’t need this intervention, other people giving you things to make you healthy, that’s when you know there is going to be a breakthrough, I think, not only in yourself but in society as a whole. That’s really what I’m aiming for. If Nadovim is just one of those hundreds of thousands of probably solutions out there, that’s great. Try it out. I will say, experience is what’s going to lead you there. You could look at all the evidence in the world, but until you start experiences, start taking an action, it doesn’t really matter what the evidence says because you’re not applying it to yourself anyway. It’s one of those things that so many of us rely on medication that in reality, if you broke it down even to this one thing of looking how can I be NAD+ depleted? Because you’re taking lots of medications, that’s one of the reasons. Even to take them, there really should be no contraindications of the medication. I won’t say that for everyone. I do think you need to talk to your doctor before anything. I can’t speak for every medication out there. I know there are somewhere if you provided energy to the mitochondria, you might have a reaction of pushing certain toxins from certain drugs that you may not want to and it may exacerbate some conditions. That’s true I think for anything you do if you’re on certain medications. Do speak with your doctor about it. I will say this, a lot of doctors don’t even know what NAD+ is, and that’s kind of sad to me because it is such an important compound. But we’ve had customers be like my doctor didn’t know what it was so he didn’t want me on it. I would say you have the power, doctors don’t. They think they do. I know doctors and they’re like, I’m telling you, I went to medical school. If they don’t have patients they don’t have a practice, they don’t have a career. They listen to patients, they really do. I’m not saying be nosy. Well, you should do research, but just ask your doctor. I’ve heard this, other doctors said this about, maybe you’d want to do a little research. Push back a little bit. I think this idea that doctors are infallible and know everything, that’s just crazy to me. They’re regular people. They don’t know everything, and why would you expect them to?   [01:47:03] Ashley James: Yeah, they’re not machines, they’re not computers.   [01:47:05] Caspar Szulc: No, no, no. They’re not computers. They’re specialists normally. I’ve met doctors that know nothing about other systems of the body and only about the GI. If you ask them anything about the brain, they would know very little. I mean that training, they forget it. You don’t remember everything you trained and learned about in college. I don’t remember my first year of college, what I learned in marketing there. Probably terms they’re completely outdated anyway now. I think there is something to be said. When a doctor says something, you’re allowed to ask why. Not in an adversarial way because I love doctors and I know a lot of people come in and just print out WebMD things and be like, oh, I think I have this. Doctors don’t like that, but I think there’s this ability to see yourself in a relationship with a doctor.  Our doctors here and everything, they’re coaches. You’re the athlete, you do need to listen, but it’s a back and forth. It’s a relationship of trust. It’s a relationship of being able to look at all the options and both sides doing the research. And be able to find a doctor that you really feel comfortable with I think. It’s not that all doctors are created equal, they are not. There are many different. All I think have good intentions, but that doesn’t mean every doctor is the right one, or just because they’re in your health insurance plan that you should just listen to them. Seek out other options and see, and then maybe one is going to be like, oh yeah, NAD+, I know that stuff. That would be great for you, you should do that.   [01:48:38] Ashley James: Your New York Center for Innovative Medicine, can people from around the world work with your functional medicine doctors through Skype? Can they do telemedicine basically with them, or do they have to go there in order to work with your doctors?   [01:48:57] Caspar Szulc: We’re old school in that way, we want to work with people here. This is where the treatments are. There’s only so much we could do. You could do a consultation. We have a patient ambassador that we speak with that is a practitioner here that you could do consultations with and talk to. But when it comes to actually getting treatment, it’s here because of the fact that we have over 100 therapies here. I mean, we really take pride in the amount of therapies and the way we personalize them to each. But if you’re not here, we can’t do that. The idea of being training with a coach and him not being there when you’re doing labs or doing all these other things, that’s difficult, that’s tough. A lot of times, if you require an intravenous infusion because you are depleted of something, it’s very difficult to do that when you’re not here. We want to be responsible for that. While we understand that traveling isn’t always easy, we also think health is a priority. If you want to get it done right with us, then come. We’ll make it as easy as possible, trying to do it as quickly as possible if you’re traveling. We have people come here from all over the world and it is unique in that way that you have so many options and it’s not just NAD+. That’s again just one of the tons of different ingredients we’d use in IVs, but we also have spiritual things, psychological. We have a psychologist on hand, psycho-emotional therapies, all types of energy medicines, anti-aging. I mean you got to run the gambit. Again, if you show up to a house with just a hammer, you may not fix the problem. You want a good tool kit, you do. You want all those things in there. That’s important. But at the same time, I will and everyone here will speak to anybody, even if they can’t come into the center, we have great resources, great information, and a great network of people that can help in some way, shape, or form. So if you’re not ready to make it over to New York or you’re not sure, I mean, there are still so many steps you can take. Whether that’s just taking Nadovim, that’s a great step. It’s learning, listening to our podcast, or doing anything like that. We wanted to make it easy for anyone to empower themselves and make the right choices for their health even if they can’t get into the clinic.   [01:51:15] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you, Caspar Szulc, for coming on the show and sharing about NAD+ and Nadovim. Back when I was just starting to get on the health train, I decided to buy my B vitamin supplements and I had no idea that I had MTHFR. I bought my B vitamin supplements from Trader Joe’s and I didn’t really notice the difference. I didn’t really feel that much more energy. I kind of felt nauseous actually when I took them, and then my pee turned a bright yellow. It wasn’t until years later that I met with a naturopathic doctor who formulated his protocol and it was life-changing. Within five days, I was waking up just so much energy in the morning with mental clarity. I felt like I was a kid again, and that’s the difference between really high quality and it was the same. If you look at the back of the package and they look kind of similar if you don’t know what you’re looking for and you don’t know about the companies, okay, this has B vitamins, that has B vitamins. Why was it that taking one kind of made me nauseous and didn’t really give me energy, and the other one no nausea and it was a total game-changer, totally life-changing, and yet they looked on paper sort of similar supplements? When you go to a company that puts so much into making sure there’s quality and bioavailability and that really they developed it so that doctors could see a difference, so that they could do blood tests and see a difference, that they could study it and study the effects of it, that company has put in all the work to make something that is quality that you’re going to notice a difference you’ll really notice a difference.  There are other NADs out there I’ve seen, and it’s buyer beware because, in the supplement industry, someone could sell a bottle that says they NAD+ on it, or says ginkgo biloba on it, or vitamin C and there actually has no ginkgo biloba, no vitamin C, or no NAD+ in it. It could be all filler, and that is the buyer beware of the supplement industry. It’s not regulated, which we don’t want it to be because the second it becomes regulated, then they will take it all away and make it drugs. We don’t want it to be regulated, but that means we have to do our research and make sure the company is legitimate and really the company has the ethics and the high-quality standards to make sure that what’s in the bottle is what’s on the label. That’s why I’m happy to know that Nadovim exists, the quality is there. It’s nadovim.com and the coupon code is LTH for our listeners. I’m really excited for listeners to try it. Get a bottle, just try it for themselves, and then come into the Learn True Health Facebook group and share their experience. I want to hear from everyone, I’m going to do it as well, and we’ll just see what differences we notice. Big differences, small differences, no differences. I’m excited about the energy and the sleep, I think that’s great. I’m looking forward to, over the next few months, hearing back from listeners as we try it out for ourselves. Just give it a try and see what differences we notice. The proof in the pudding is in the eating so let’s try it and see what happens. It was wonderful having you on the show. I’m excited to try all this and see for ourselves. Thank you for coming here and explaining it today.   [01:54:41] Caspar Szulc: Thank you. Real pleasure, Ashley.   Get Connected with Caspar Szulc! Nadovim – Website New York Center for Innovative Medicine Innovative Medicine Caspar Szulc – Instagram Caspar Szulc – Facebook Caspar Szulc – Twitter Recommended Reading by Caspar Szulc Power vs. Force by David Hawkins

Magnesium soak: Use coupon code LTH at livingthegoodlifenaturally.com   Radical Longevity: The Powerful Plan to Sharpen Your Brain, Strengthen Your Body, and Reverse the Symptoms of Aging https://www.learntruehealth.com/radical-longevity-the-powerful-plan-to-sharpen-your-brain-strengthen-your-body-and-reverse-the-symptoms-of-aging   Highlights: How to be mentally sharp How to keep skin healthy Importance of vitamin C, magnesium, and zinc Iron and inorganic copper’s connection to Alzheimer’s Disease Tribulus as a precursor to testosterone   Ann Louise Gittleman is back on the show to talk about her new book Radical Longevity. Ann Louise has written so many books about health and nutrition, and the focus of Radical Longevity is how to become a super ager. She shares how to have a healthy brain, skin, and sex drive.  Intro: Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love learning from today’s guest. Ann Louise Gittleman has been one of my heroes in the holistic health space since I was a teenager. I had her on the show back in episode 284, so I recommend going back and listening to that. She’s written 32 books in her career and quite an amazing woman. She is absolutely the expert when it comes to learning about detoxification, supporting your organs like the liver and the brain, healing the brain, and also parasites. I read her parasite cleanse book back when I was a teenager. My mom and I did her parasite cleanse and it was very effective. We got tested before and after, and I’ve been fascinated by her work ever since. I also recommend you guys listen to episode 348 and episode 349. I had her husband on the show, James Templeton. His story that he tells is just mind-blowing. He had cancer and he was in really bad shape, and he tells the story of how he actually escaped the hospital when he realized that they were going to kill him. The therapy was absolutely… well, you just got to listen to the story. But in the middle of the night, he escapes the hospital and says I am never going back to doing that kind of chemo and all that stuff. And then he discovered more and more holistic ways of doing things and he healed his body. He wrote a book on how he did it and how he’s been cancer-free for many, many years. Doctors did not think he would live for five years, and I believe it was something like 25 or 30 years ago. He ended up finding his now wife who has been a holistic hero for going on 40 years, and together they’re such a powerful team. One thing that we talk about in one of our interviews with him is that he has a YouTube channel where he interviews other people who are survivors of cancer and how they did it, interesting. Not every therapy works for every person, but you learn a lot of new holistic methods, or maybe they’re new to you, but they’re not new by any means, so just really beautiful, inspiring. Both of them love to focus on education and spreading this information which is my calling too. I definitely know that you’ll enjoy listening to those episodes and then following them as well. And Louise mentions magnesium, and she does have a really great oral magnesium supplement she likes. Now, if you’ve been a long-time listener, you’ve heard me share about how much I love the magnesium soak from Living the Good Life Naturally, and that’s just another way to get magnesium into you.  What I love about that is it bypasses digestion and so you actually absorb. She did tests of the water of the magnesium soak and we absorb 20 grams of magnesium while we’re soaking for one hour. You soak your feet in a bowl of water, any temperature you want, just as long as the bowl is not plastic. It could be metal, ceramic, just any glass, wood I suppose, or you could put it in your bath as well. It’s safe for children, it’s safe for everyone, and it’s natural. That the body absorbs as much as it needs, which is great. You can’t really overdose when you’re absorbing because it’s through diffusion.  We’ve had over 2,000 listeners purchase it and try it, and many of them have purchased it again. You have to comb through our Learn True Health Facebook group, which you can use the search function to do that. We’ve had over 200 listeners over the last few years share testimonials and stories about how the magnesium soak has helped them.  People have reported migraines going away pain. Aches and pains going away. Better sleep, more energy, restless legs going away. I love it because my son who is so energetic and never wants to fall asleep, it calms him down and helps him sleep. I notice that I just overall feel better. It’s also really helped me through supporting my liver and doing the heavy metal detoxing that I’ve been doing for the last few years. I’ve noticed that it really did support my liver and calm it down, and I got better results when I incorporated it in terms of my detoxification.  Plus I notice I just feel better—more vital, more energy. Not that I was getting a lot of restless legs, to begin with, but I did notice a few times that I’d have that sort of itchy feeling in the evening, my legs just kind of itched. The muscles just were like, it’s an indescribable sensation but restless is a really good way to describe it. I was already taking a very good oral magnesium, and then when I got into the magnesium soak, it completely went away. I thought that was really interesting. But listen to my episodes. I’ve had Kristen Bowen on the show several times. She’s the founder of the magnesium soak that I absolutely love. What I love about her, she has a health journey. Just to give you a little teaser, she was 97 pounds having 30 seizures a day in a wheelchair almost unable to talk, that was her 15 years ago, and today she’s very active, very healthy.  I’m not going to say this is a magic bullet, the magnesium soak, but it was one of the biggest contributing factors to her recovery after she had had surgery to remove some things inside her. Just go listen to the first episode, the magnesium foot soak episode with Kristen Bowen and you will be amazed at her story. So listen to the episodes with Kristen Bowen and learn more about the magnesium soak. You can listen to episodes 294, 341, and 381, those are my three episodes with Kristen Bowen. Definitely go back and listen to episode 294, it’s her story, it’s quite amazing. Now, to get the listener discount, she does give us a discount. Use coupon code LTH at checkout when you go to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and then click on the magnesium products and grab the magnesium soak. I also love the magnesium cream and the muscle cream as well, but really, the magic is in soaking in the magnesium. So that’s coupon code LTH at livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. I also interviewed sort of the magnesium doctor, Dr. Carolyn Dean. It was a very, very long, detailed, lots of information in that interview. It was over two hours, and she shared something very interesting. Now, she’s a naturopath and an MD. She’s been practicing medicine for over 40 years and is very well known in the holistic space as the magnesium doctor. She says that magnesium is the most important mineral of the body. It is used in 1800 enzymatic processes in the body.  Zinc is second most important at 800 enzymatic processes. So if you think about it, if you’re deficient in magnesium, 1800 things in your body aren’t able to fully function and are unable to fully do their job, and then the body starts to display symptoms. Symptoms are the smoke, not the fire. Symptoms are the body saying to us, hey, I don’t have the raw building blocks I need to maintain. Just like if your car was overheating or there was some weird smoke coming out of your car, you need to pull over. The check engine light comes on, you need to pull over. You need to get that belt changed and get the oil changed. There’s maintenance, there are things the car needs, and the body is the same way. The body needs a certain amount of all these nutrients to function.  If you’re zinc deficient, there are 800 things that can go wrong in the body, one of them is losing your sense of smell, losing your sense of taste. I know a naturopathic physician here locally who told me that one of her patients came into her after going to all kinds of doctors, doing all kinds of tests, and they told her it was in her head. She couldn’t feel her entire body. She touched things and her fingers were numb, her hands were numb. She didn’t feel pressure, her entire body didn’t have a sensation of pressure. My friend who’s a naturopath said, you know what, I’m going to get you on some zinc. And sure enough, it was such a severe zinc deficiency that her nervous system could not function properly. That’s how important these minerals are, and there are actually 60 minerals the body needs. So if you’re deficient in one, you’re usually deficient in several because it’s really hard to just isolate, eat food that only is missing one nutrient. If you have any symptoms of health issues, typically it’s a mineral deficiency because there are 60 minerals the body needs, and we’re usually deficient in a bunch of them. We have to supplement because we’re not getting enough in our diet.  We talked about this with Dr. Joel Wallach, I had him on the show a few times. He’s one of my mentors. He’s mentored me for the last 10 years. He has a degree in soil agriculture, a naturopath, and he’s a research scientist. He’s published so many things and what he saw was that there’s a deficiency in our soil because of the farming practices, and there is a direct link between that and 900 diseases. Over a 12-year study he conducted that was actually federally funded, he discovered that 900 diseases across species lines are linked to 90 essential nutrients the body could be missing. If you’re missing a handful of them, then you could have several diseases. Now the good news is we can reverse them through diet and supplementing the diet with specific nutrients. So the good news is we can heal the body. The body isn’t a pharmaceutical drug deficient, it’s nutrient deficient. Ann Louise Gittleman talks about this today. She talks about some nutrients that we can make sure that we’re getting. I also recommend checking out takeyoursupplements.com. These health coaches are absolutely amazing. They give their time for free, they help you to determine the right supplements for you, and I have been working with them. They’re really, really great health coaches that help you to pick out the right supplements for you that are based on the symptoms you’re having. The symptoms tell us what nutrient deficiencies you are experiencing. So check out takeyoursupplements.com and talk to them about how you can reverse the symptoms you’re having by addressing those nutrient deficiencies.  Excellent. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing the Learn True Health podcast with those you care about. Enjoy today’s episode. It is chock full of amazing, really, really great information. Have yourself a fantastic day.   [00:12:21] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 459. I am so excited for today’s guest. I’ve actually been a fan of our guest since I was a teenager. Not to age you, but you know what, given the topic today—Radical Longevity—you do live what you teach. Back when I was a teenager, I think I was about 15, my mom brought home a book called Guess What Came to Dinner. We did our first parasite cleanse. My mom was big into health and holistic medicine, and I was right there with her. As a young child, I remember going to the health food store with her. Well, we got on a parasite cleanse and we actually tested positive for three parasites. That’s what they could test for gosh knows what we actually had, but it was amazing. That blew my mind that why isn’t everyone talking about parasites? We all have them. If you’ve been to a different country, if you’ve had cats or dogs. There are so many ways that you can get them, and so I’ve been a big fan of yours forever. Then you came on the show in episode 284, so listeners can go back in and listen to that one as well. Today, you’re here to share about your new book that just got released, so it’s fresh off the press, and of course, the links to your book are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Radical Longevity: The Powerful Plan to Sharpen Your Brain, Strengthen Your Body, and Reverse the Symptoms of Aging. I look forward to learning how you’ve been doing that because you’re in amazing health. We’re all going to live to be 120 reading your books. Welcome to the show. We have the genetic potential to do it, why not? Let’s do it. Welcome to the show.   [00:14:28] Ann Louise Gittleman: Absolutely.   [00:14:29] Ashley James: Welcome back to show, I should say. I’d love to hear what motivated you to write this book?   [00:14:37] Ann Louise Gittleman: That’s such a good question, Ashley. This is my 37th book.   [00:14:42] Ashley James: I love it. I love your fire and I love that you have helped so many people for so many years. It’s just wonderful.   [00:14:53] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, in that regard my dear, and I’m so appreciative of your kind words. I’ve written about parasites, Guess What Came to Dinner. I’ve written about weight loss, detoxification, men’s health, women’s health, hormones, premenopause, post-menopause, menopause and beyond, so there was nothing else to cover except for the concept and the arena of longevity and anti-aging. Although I don’t like the term anti-aging, that’s really what we understand today to be the next frontier, so to speak. I’m 70 years young, so this was the time. This is like enlightened self-interest. I figured I had a conglomerate, everything I’ve ever learned, researched, and studied and put it into a book for my fellow compatriots and people coming before us and after us.   [00:15:40] Ashley James: Why don’t you like the term anti-aging?   [00:15:43] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, because I’m pro-aging. I really think that aging is a privilege, and I want people to really stop and appreciate that. It’s a privilege. Not all of us are going to have the opportunity to live long enough to say that they’re a super ager, so it’s a privilege. It’s denied to too many people. When I was looking at all the people—my friends, my associates, my compadres that had passed on before me and before their time and they’re all in the acknowledgments—I thought to myself, what were they missing? I wish they had this book in hand because maybe they’d still be with us.   [00:16:17] Ashley James: Super ager, I love that. I want to live to 120. I want to be a super ager, but also be very healthy through my golden years, which is the point, right? We want to be able to get out there, live, and be alive.   [00:16:34] Ann Louise Gittleman: That’s the point. We want to extend the youth span. I talk about preserving the youth span, extending the period of life when you have vitality, grace, gratitude, and resilience. We want to do this with resilience so that we learn to bend and not break.   [00:16:49] Ashley James: And the older we get, the wiser we get. We wish we had all these lessons when we were young, but what we really want to do is maintain a vital, youthful body throughout our life so that we can at least take advantage of all this wisdom we’ve been collecting so we can go live. So let’s talk about the first part, which is to sharpen your brain. What are some things that you teach that keep us mentally youthful, mentally sharp?   [00:17:25] Ann Louise Gittleman: To keep mentally sharp you have to keep physically active. Whether that means walking daily, it could mean walking up and down your stairs if you’re in an apartment or in a condo and can’t get outside because of the weather. It means moving your body. It means dancing on a daily basis. It means being physically active because that helps the body, mind, and spirit, so that would be number one. Number two, what helps the brain is physical contact, connectivity, which we don’t have because of the pandemic in this day and time, but hopefully, that will change. You want to have relationships with your family, with your friends, with your loved ones. It could even be virtual relationships, but connectivity is one of the traits of those super agers that we aspire to be. And then you want to have a purpose-driven life. You want to wake up every morning with a purpose. Whether that’s being a volunteer, whether that’s still working as I do at the age of 72 and going on, well I’ll be 72 in June so I guess I’m 70+. But it means really having a passion for what you do. Never give up on the joie de vivre of life, and that’s exceedingly important. Of course, eating properly, taking certain supplements, which I cover at length in the book. And then I think the other aspect that’s important is really having a spiritual, mental, or religious practice.   [00:18:44] Ashley James: You just listed the fountain of youth, the keys to life. That is exactly what people need to do. So many of us get caught up in the minutiae of life and we forget to move our body in a way that brings us joy every day. We forget to really make those meaningful connections. I love that you brought up volunteering because there are so many studies that show that people who volunteer do live longer and have less depression, less suicide. People who are depressed who go into volunteering end up having an increase in their mental health. That there’s something about serving and being part of a community, of being of service to others that actually rewards us more than the effort that we put out.  Volunteering isn’t about you sacrificing or being a martyr. It’s actually you get more out of volunteering than what you give, and that’s so cool to be part of a community where you’re getting so much mental health, emotional health, and as a result physical health from volunteering. What kind of volunteering work do you do?   [00:20:01] Ann Louise Gittleman: I volunteer on Facebook all the time. I’m answering questions 24/7. I consider that a divine volunteering job quite frankly because I’m helping so many people. At least point them in the direction of their health. If I can’t answer them directly online because that becomes a little dicey giving that kind of advice on the people that have such severe issues, at least I can point them in the right direction. Give them the tools, give them the website, give them the book, give them the supplement, and then they’re on their own. So that’s what I consider my divine passion.   [00:20:33] Ashley James: Oh, I love that. That’s so great. You said that you cover in-depth the supplements and the diet, can you give us a few pointers, really, really important pointers around diet and supplements?   [00:20:50] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, the thing that I discovered that was the aha moment in writing the book was really the chapter on the brain and the chapter on minding your minerals. I think we call it misbehaving minerals. There are two minerals that can stockpile in the brain if they’re not the proper form of the mineral or the proper cofactor, and that is the iron and the copper. You have to make sure that your levels of iron and copper are kept in the minimum amounts. Taking a ferritin test on a yearly basis would be very important for those people that have a history of Alzheimer’s because stockpiling iron in the brain has been dramatically connected to all kinds of cognitive disorders, so that would be number one.  Get a ferritin test immediately. It’s got to be under a certain degree. I give you the levels of what’s optimally healthy and what the typical lab is going to show, but you want what’s optimally healthy. the healthiest people in the world have low serum ferritin levels, so you want to approximate what the long-living populations have of the blue zones.   [00:21:53] Ashley James: Yes. In the last year, they just published a study, I thought it was fascinating, that said this could be the reason why those who eat a more plant-based diet live longer because they have more managed, not deficient, but managed lower iron levels because they’re not you know over-consuming animal flesh, which contains high in iron. It’s sort of a very oxidative form of iron. They saw that people who had lower iron levels lived longer.   [00:22:27] Ann Louise Gittleman: They do, but if you’re a meat-eater or a carnivore, if you’re a paleo kind of person, there’s help involved with that because there are ways that you can circumvent the iron by eating iron blockers, and we talk about that, whether that’s red wine. See, red wine is healthy because of the fact that it’s a blocking agent to iron. That’s the secret of the Mediterranean diet and the French paradox. It’s the blocking effect of wine, which I go into the blocking effect of certain types of dairy foods, the blocking effect of tea, the blocking effect of coffee.   [00:23:02] Ashley James: Oh, that’s fascinating. I think there are a few listeners who are liking you even more right now.   [00:23:09] Ann Louise Gittleman: So here’s to some wine. Here’s to some vino. Healthy vino, not more than one small glass a day if you’re a female, maybe up to two if you’re a male because too much of a good thing is too much of a good thing.   [00:23:19] Ashley James: Right, exactly. And then also, just watching and seeing if you become stressed out. Some people have bad sleep and then that stresses them out the next day, and then that spirals downwards. We have to watch out. Some people can’t function properly when they drink any alcohol and they just have to check in with their body and see what’s going on. And listen to your advice because maybe they need to do some more cleaning up of their diet and killing parasites.   [00:23:49] Ann Louise Gittleman: But they’re easy fixes, this is not an involved program. I mean, it’s comprehensive because we talk about the brain, the heart, the bones, the sex drive, the hair, the nails, the skin. I’m not sure if I’ve covered just about everything there. We talk about all the major body organs and glands that people are concerned about, but the fixes are as easy as can be. If you want to spend more money, then go for that. You can as well. But taking that yearly blood test is a real key, and then of course the copper connection, which I go into in great detail is also important in checking the copper levels of your current water supply, which you can do easily online, and I give you the levels which are optimally healthy. Those that may be a precursor to Alzheimer’s.   [00:24:29] Ashley James: Is water the most common way we’re getting copper or are there certain foods that we should be avoiding?   [00:24:37] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, it’s the copper that’s the copper that you don’t want. It’s the divalent or inorganic. You see, what I learned from the book and it was because a researcher contacted me out of the blue, Ashley. I always think that the universe sends me messages and messengers when I’m writing a book. He is a researcher, his name is George Brewer. He’s out of the University of Michigan. He’s in the genetics department, and he called and said I think I have the key to Alzheimer’s. I said, oh my gosh, what is it? And we have a discussion. He’s written profusely and he believes it was the implementation of copper water pipes in Europe that started the Alzheimer’s epidemic. He’s correlated that in many of his different publications. It’s the inorganic copper, the copper that’s in the food is food-based, that’s fine, and we’ve got plenty of it in the diet and the avocados. That’s the seeds, the beans, the shellfish, but it’s the inorganic synthetic copper that the body has no method of metabolizing healthfully. It doesn’t go to the liver the way the food-based copper does, it goes to the brain.   [00:25:41] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that’s fascinating. I’m so glad you’re pointing this out.   [00:25:46] Ann Louise Gittleman: And nobody has written about it before, which just blows my mind. So the idea here is that if you’ve got issues with Alzheimer’s or want to prevent any type of dysfunction cognitively, you should get the book and read the chapter on the brain and on the misbehaving minerals because it will widen your eyes. It will open your eyes, it’ll open your mouth, it’ll be jaw-dropping as it was for me.   [00:26:09] Ashley James: I bet. Our brain’s the most important part. I liked learning from Dr. Amen. He helps people reverse aging in the brain, but it’s all about cardiovascular function, which your program is comprehensive. It’s treating the body as a whole. But that’s why I thought it was fascinating because if you can make your brain stay healthy, you’re actually making your heart stay healthy, you’re making your whole body stay healthy. So if you’re focusing on brain health, everything else falls into line. That’s why I love that you’ve given us this checklist—moving your body, that connectivity, eating healthy, the supplements, and watching those levels of minerals. Of course, I know that your book is going to be chock full of amazing information. Now, you did mention skin health. I know that sagging skin and loose skin. We’re vain, we don’t like it. We don’t like it when our skin gets a little saggy, a little wrinkly, so I’m interested to hear about some skin tips for firming up the skin. And then you mentioned sex drive and I think all of us want to know how we can feel youthful and still have fun with our partner no matter what age we are. So give us some of those pointers from your book for healthy skin and for healthy sex drive.   [00:27:42] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, I’m not a big believer in collagen per se, I’d rather go to the vitamin c, which is the precursor to collagen. I’m a big vitamin c believer. The Vitality C that I talk about from UNI KEY Health is the C that I use on a daily basis. And the more that you can accommodate without getting loose bowels, the more that you need vitamin C. I go to 20 grams a day without an issue whatsoever.  I’m a big believer in vitamin C, a precursor to hydrogen peroxide. It’ll stop cancer from progressing, as you know from my husband’s book. I used to have cancer, and that is in addition to lysine. Nobody talks about the amino acid lysine or proline, those are the two biggest assists for great skin, and I can say to you that at the age of 72, I have better skin now than I did at 25.   [00:28:30] Ashley James: Oh, I love it. You mentioned your husband, James Templeton. I’ve had him on the show. I absolutely adore his work. I definitely recommend listeners go back and check out those interviews with James Templeton.  Vitamin C is really interesting because a goat will have about 16 grams of vitamin C coursing through its veins at all times, and a wolf has about 32 grams, and we don’t make vitamin c, but animals do. So how many grams do you think we should have? We’re about maybe the same size or bigger than a wolf, so taking 20 grams a day isn’t that unheard of, isn’t that surprising. It’s actually what our body needs.   [00:29:14] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, it’s what my body needs is probably because of all the mercury fillings that I had years ago. But people are very individual. I believe in biochemical individuality. So I can say that what I can tolerate you might not be able to. But one scoop of the Vitality C gives you four grams of C plus D-Ribose for your heart, plus MSM for your skin. So my point being is it’s the best bang for your buck with this buffered vitamin C. And the more that you can tolerate, the more you need it. Some people can only tolerate one scoop. So for some reason, they just run through their system and they can’t accommodate it, but for those of us that can accommodate it, we’ll see a big difference in the collagen and the dewiness of the skin, the lack of wrinkles, and the lack of sagginess.   [00:30:00] Ashley James: Oh, I love it. Well, it’s so hard to get enough vitamin C from our diet because our food isn’t fresh.   [00:30:07] Ann Louise Gittleman: Impossible.   [00:30:08] Ashley James: You’re not going out into your garden and picking something right away and eating it yourself, and eating fruits and vegetables fresh all day long like we’re supposed to. That the food that you’re getting is weeks old, and the vitamin C is just not there anymore. We’re definitely, as a nation, not eating enough plants. So we’re not getting enough vitamin C from our diet, and that’s why supplements are so important because we are not eating in a natural way because we’re not walking outdoors and immediately eating fresh food. So we have to supplement in order to catch up with the modern diet.   [00:30:43] Ann Louise Gittleman: That’s a part of it, but modern-day stress will skyrocket your need for vitamin C. We’re all under stress. I mean, look at the news, that’s stressful. Seeing what’s going on in our daily political spheres is very stressful no matter what side of the aisle you’re on. So all that is going to be stressing us, plus getting older is stressing us, the pandemic is stressing us. There are so many things in the body that will respond to, and vitamin C, as well as magnesium and zinc, are lost because of a stress response. So you have to keep supplementing.   [00:31:15] Ashley James: That’s such a good point.   [00:31:17] Ann Louise Gittleman: But the other thing is for those of us that have had any kind of PTSD because we’ve had concussions and I’m one of them, the body needs more vitamin C because it’s an anti-stressor.   [00:31:27] Ashley James: What else does a body need to help heal concussions?   [00:31:31] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, that’s a good question because there’s one that had a near-fatal concussion back in 2007. One needs brain training. It’s not so much nutrients, it’s re-patterning the brain. So I’m a big believer in the brain training methodology that was pioneered by a group called Cereset. So I’ve gone and done the brain training myself. I’m out of PTSD to some degree, but once you’ve had the PTSD, you get re-triggered by any kind of life event, and then your needs for all these stress-related vitamins and minerals really go way over to the stratosphere. So that goes back to the brain, and whatever you can do to heal that brain with all the things we talked about—the connectivity, the volunteerism, having a spiritual practice. But not getting triggered is very difficult. So you have to work on it on a daily basis. I personally take GABA 750mg morning, noon, and night. I live on Rescue Remedy and take a great deal of magnesium.   [00:32:26] Ashley James: Excellent. What form of magnesium do you take?   [00:32:30] Ann Louise Gittleman: It’s the one I formulated called Mag-Key, which has the orotate, the glycinate, the taurinate, and the threonate.   [00:32:38] Ashley James: That sounds great. I love me some magnesium. I’ll take all of it.   [00:32:45] Ann Louise Gittleman: As well as some Epsom salt baths. So whatever you can do. Stress is a big killer, but it’s very difficult to escape stress in this day and time.   [00:32:54] Ashley James: Right. So we got to keep working on ourselves and stay conscious. We got to take the supplements, like you said, have a spiritual practice, get outside and ground yourself or do some earthing. Walk barefoot on the earth and breathe in nature. Take time to consciously bring down the stress is so important. Now, you talked about sex drive and we all want to know, how do we maintain those healthy hormones especially post-menopausally? How do we stay very youthful and healthy in the bedroom with our partner?   [00:33:30] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, I have one little tip in the book, which involves a particular vitamin which I will not give away to anybody until they get the book, and then we can talk about it then. But there’s one little tip that will heighten the intimate encounter. And then there’s an herb which I will tell you about called Tribulus which is a precursor to testosterone. Men and women can both take that at 250 milligrams three times a day. Very important for testosterone, which is the hormone of desire that goes south with both men and women once they reach a certain age and stage of life. So using the Tribulus, using this little particular vitamin to heighten the encounter, maybe a little lubrication for women, as well as some natural estrogenic products I think is really the tip of the iceberg, and that’s the key.   [00:34:16] Ashley James: Thank you. Now I know you’re pinched for time. I was so happy to have you on the show. You’re definitely welcome back anytime. I’d love to have you. You’re a wealth of knowledge. We’ve learned so much in such a short period of time. How can we find you on Facebook to be part of your community to continue learning from you?   [00:34:37] Ann Louise Gittleman: Let’s see, where do we go? To Ann Louise Gittleman, Ph.D., CNS, that’s the Facebook page. And then you can get the book at radicallongevitybook.com.   [00:34:48] Ashley James: Excellent. We’re going to make sure the links to everything you do are in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. We definitely want to all get the book, Radical Longevity. It would also be a great gift to give to our loved ones as well. Is there anything that you’d like to say or give us some homework to wrap up today’s interview?   [00:35:07] Ann Louise Gittleman: Well, I would say that the brain is very important, but so is the liver, and those are two organs that can regenerate themselves. So I put a lot of emphasis on the brain, of course, because we’re all afraid of Alzheimer’s, but the liver is the regenerative organ for metabolism, for metabolizing toxins, hormones, and all the poisons in the environment.  So taking care of your liver daily. Liver detox is not a seasonal event, it’s a daily event. So you’ve got to take something to get the poisons out daily. It’s not the fact that we’re accumulating poisons. It’s the fact we’re not excreting them that’s the key, and that’s where I like more fiber in the diet. I’m a big believer in psyllium husks, and that’s where I like some sort of liver-loving food, whether that’s artichoke hearts or artichoke chlorophyll. Maybe a little milk thistle and even Oregon grape root, but the liver is the key. It means long life. So keeping your liver will make sure that you enhance and ensure a long life.   [00:36:05] Ashley James: I am such a fan of taking care of the liver. My mom died of liver cancer, and I’ve had liver issues with detoxification. I’ve been working for the last six years now on supporting my liver, and I saw a huge shift in my health when I started doing that. So I absolutely, 100% agree with you. Which one of your books or maybe there’s several of them would you recommend we read for supporting our liver? Of course, Radical Longevity, but do you have any other ones that are more specific to liver health?   [00:36:34] Ann Louise Gittleman: Radical Metabolism.   [00:36:37] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. And that was the last book we talked about in episode 284. Excellent. Thank you so much again, Ann Louise Gittleman, for coming on the show. You’re welcome back anytime. We’d love to have you. I’m a big fan of your work. I definitely recommend listeners read all your books and continue following you. I can’t wait to interview you when you’re 120.   [00:37:00] Ann Louise Gittleman: We’ll see on the other side of 100, my love. You’re a sweetheart. God bless.   Get Connected With Ann Louise Gittleman! Official Website Bile Builder Facebook Instagram Twitter Youtube Books by Ann Louise Gittleman Radical Longevity Radical Metabolism The New Fat Flush Plan The New Fat Flush Cookbook The Complete New Fat Flush Program

Come join the supportive Facebook community: https://www.learntruehealth.com/group   Ashley’s Update For the Learn True Health Listeners https://www.learntruehealth.com/ashleys-update-for-the-learn-true-health-listeners   In this episode, I give an update about what happened during the last two months since the previous episode. I share how I’m coping with the loss of a loved one. I also share my COVID experience and how I recovered from it.   Hello, true health seekers, it’s so good to be back. I know many of you probably are wondering what’s going on. I took some time off. The last time I was posting episodes you may have heard me talk about how I was pregnant and I had a beautiful pregnancy. I was very healthy the whole time, as was the baby. And if you’re not in our Facebook group, then you probably haven’t heard but I lost our child during delivery. She was born still earlier this month. We’re still waiting for some answers, but it looks like perhaps the cord was interrupted right at the very last few minutes of delivery. She had a very strong and healthy heartbeat the whole time, and everything was smooth right up until the very end. And then just at the very end, sometime in the last three minutes, we lost her heartbeat right as she was coming out. Dealing with that, facing the grief, obviously recovering from labor, postpartum recovery, and then I got COVID. That was an adventure.   So this last month has for me been about emotional, spiritual, and physical recovery and healing. I kept thinking about you guys, and I kept thinking about what I would say, how I would share, and how much I wanted to share my journey with you. I’m really wanting to get on the microphone. If you’ve been a long-time listener, you know that all of my experiences I want to share because I want everyone to learn as I am learning. I’ve healed so many illnesses and diseases, I’ve come so far in my healing journey, and I continue to grow healthier and stronger. It’s not all just physical, right? It’s emotional, it’s mental healing and growth as well, it’s personal growth. When the paramedics were working on her, the paramedics came very fast. It was a home birth, and the thing is, this would have happened in the hospital as well because there’s nothing we could have done. Everything was going perfectly and then all of a sudden she was gone. There wouldn’t have been time for any kind of medical intervention. As I was lying on the bathroom floor and the paramedics were working on her and the first words out of my mouth were God, if it is in your plan, if it is your will please save her. That surprised me. I didn’t go to anger, I don’t feel any anger about it. I mean, obviously, I grieved and I grieved and I grieved because I lost. I lost the life I was going to have as a mother to this gorgeous baby girl. My husband and I grieved, and all our family and friends around us who are looking forward to being with her, they’ve all shared the impact with me that this has had. But I didn’t go to anger. Something in me trusted that my life, my fate is in God’s hands. And I’ve never had that level of faith before, I’ve never felt it. It was unknowing, it was a deep, deep knowing, and it’s something that I don’t think I could teach anyone to do. It’s something you have to go within and you feel it and it’s unknowing. I just knew. I have no control over this situation. I have no control and this is 100% in God’s hands. And so that experience surprised me. I didn’t know that I would grow spiritually so much from this. So I’ve really looked to God, and that spiritual component is I think really crucial in terms of mental and emotional healing. Being able to just pray and say, okay, I don’t have control over this aspect of my life, I don’t. There are things I can control. I can control what I eat. I can control how much water I drink. I can control the vitamins I take. I can control what kind of media I take in, which affects our mental and emotional health. I can control, for the most part, the people that are around me or the people I choose to be around. So there are so many things I can control about my life, but these moments like a car accident, a death, an illness, a sudden infection. You can control how you react, but you can’t control the outcome. Now, how you react can sometimes affect the outcome when someone’s already gone, when someone’s already dead. Now it’s time to focus on healing and growth and focus on what we can do. And then it’s okay. I really got that it’s okay that I can’t control everything. That there’s some peace, some grace in handing that part of my life over to God and just being this is out of my control, it’s in your hands. I’ve had some very spiritual experiences this last month since she’s passed where I know she was here with me. Very interesting and I’ve heard from other friends who have lost loved ones. A song will come on at a specific time, a rainbow will all of a sudden appear, or a lamp or a device will all of a sudden just turn on when no one turned it on, that kind of thing. So I’ve had a few of those and I thought that was very interesting. There’s a song that I chose to play at her funeral and that song came on the radio. It was Yo-Yo Ma’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and that song came on the rainbow the next day as I was talking with my husband about her daughter. What are the chances, right? It was really beautiful. So I wanted to come on the microphone and give you guys an update. I am every day getting better and better. It’s just one step at a time. I know everyone listening has lost someone or lost something in their life, has had to go through a process of grief. I’ve lost both my parents and so I’ve experienced it, but each one’s different. Each loss is different, but the feeling of going through grief, there are certain stages that are similar. What I can say is I’m really happy that I haven’t gotten stuck. When I lost my mom, I got stuck in depression for months and months and months and I didn’t move out of that. I didn’t move out of the anger and the depression really that first shock. I was in denial most of the time, just bouncing back between denial, anger, and depression.   This time because we surrounded ourselves with loved ones and we’re talking it through and we’re working on it, and I also believe in my faith that God has a plan. And I have those spiritual beliefs about where we go when we die. That there’s a purpose, there’s a reason. I think that really helped me as well. But of course, that still doesn’t help because I want her to be here, I want her to be with me. She was so beautiful, she is so beautiful. Join the Facebook group, I posted a picture of her. She is so beautiful, and she was very gentle in the womb. She had a calm, gentle, loving energy the whole time. Really a sweetheart. So I’m learning a lot about healing from loss. With every loss, we become stronger. We can, we have the potential to become stronger. So I’ve learned so much about myself those last few weeks, and I’ve thought about how I could then take that and incorporate that into the podcast so that I can help you. We all learn from each other. That’s something really beautiful also about our Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group is that we are learning from each other and that we’re growing together. I will continue to share the lessons that I’ve learned from this experience through the podcast as I find amazing guests to interview and have these great discussions with guests. If you’re new to the podcast, we focus on mental health, emotional health, spiritual health, and physical health. So there’s not a separation. When someone has a physical disease, they’re affected emotionally, they’re affected mentally. Sometimes, when people are in spiritual crisis, they experience mental and emotional health, as well as physical health issues. I mean, you can’t separate that. You may have a diagnosis like diabetes, for example, and changing your diet and changing your lifestyle can reverse type 2 diabetes 100%. I did it myself. I reversed type 2 diabetes. My A1C is 4.7. I have amazing blood sugar, and I was diabetic for years. The point is though that those health changes weren’t just physical changes. I had to change my mindset, I had to do emotional work, I had to work on myself on a personal growth level. So we enrich our lives by focusing on all areas, all aspects of health. That’s why the podcast is where I have doctors on the show, counselors, therapists, healers, and spiritual leaders on the show so that we can gain lessons from all these people. We can collect them all and apply what works for us. So having COVID, that was really interesting. I used homeopathy, I worked with a homeopath, I worked with my naturopath. I got on all the natural stuff, and my body was just really, really worn down because of the grief and because I was postpartum. I was a few days postpartum. It hit me hard and I recovered fast. That’s what I’m so grateful for is that I was sick for less than 10 days. It was really bad. On day eight, I was very worried. It was hard to breathe, very worried for myself. But by day 10 I was totally on the road to recovery. Now I’m exercising. I’m a month postpartum and I’m back to exercising. I thank God. I thank God I don’t feel any of the effects. Some people experience long-term effects. I don’t have any of that. I really contribute that to the fact that I eat clean and healthy. I take supplements. I’m not deficient in zinc. I take zinc every day. I did lose my sense of smell, and that was the weirdest because we have flowers throughout the house. So many people have given us beautiful flowers that are just smelling amazing as condolences for losing our daughter. All of a sudden I realized I couldn’t smell them. I grabbed my essential oils and I realized I couldn’t smell them either. I was like, oh no. So I tripled up on my zinc. I started taking 90 milligrams of zinc a day and the zinc I take I really like this. Pure Encapsulations is the company, and it’s a zinc picolinate. It’s just 30 milligrams, and 40 milligrams is a very common safe dose for adults, so 30 is even less. But I decided to triple up on it. I took three, but not the same time—one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening. And two days later, I got my sense of smell back 100%. My husband had a similar experience, and then I talked to a friend who was also going through COVID and they were having a similar experience, but they lost their sense of taste and smell. I told them that I had increased my zinc, they increased their zinc and it came back right away. I thought that was very interesting. I’ve had a suspicion, and we’ve had a few interviews about that last year. My suspicion is that we use up the zinc when we have viral infections, especially like COVID. So then we become extremely deficient. By increasing it, then we’re just addressing the deficiency. That’s my suspicion. I took all the supplements that I knew that have been shared through the podcast and that also we talk about in the Facebook group. Those all helped a lot. You know what really helped was glutathione. I ordered some liquid glutathione through a friend of mine who’s a holistic practitioner and that really helped as well. So there’s light at the end of the tunnel. I’m back on my feet, and every day I am healing and growing stronger. So jumping back into doing the podcast, I’m also in the process possibly of moving. We might have another disruption in podcast episodes, but I’m back. I want to start publishing weekly. I have some episodes I recorded before I gave birth. I’m going to be publishing those soon. If episodes, I might mention something about being pregnant so just a heads up. Those episodes were recorded about two months ago. They’re still very relevant, the information. So if that happens, just know that I am no longer pregnant currently. However, those were past recorded episodes, which I’ve been meaning to get up. I just got to the point in the pregnancy where I’m like, okay, my brain’s not working. I think it was at 38 weeks. I’m like, I need to take some time off. Thank you guys for being on this journey with me. There are over 4000 people in the Learn True Health Facebook group, and you guys have been so supportive as I shared my experiences of having lost our daughter. Your support and your comments were so helpful. I read every single one of them. Often I read them to my husband, and often I cried. There are so many listeners like me who have lost a child, either to miscarriage, to stillbirth, early infant death, or even later. You’re not alone. That’s something that’s really important to know. Surround yourself with loving people who make you feel like you’re not alone and make you feel heard and listened to, and continue to share. No matter how sad you are, how lonely you feel, or how upset you are around losing someone you love, especially a child, your impact on the world matters and you being here matters. Vale, our daughter, was only here for a short time living inside me, and she had such an impact on my life. And then I heard that she had an impact on others. A few friends came to me and said that this whole experience has given them so much gratitude for their children and for their health. They were worried that that would sound selfish, and it’s not. It’s raw, it’s real, and it’s their experience. Of course, if you’re hearing that I lost a child, you’re going to want to go and hug your child, or hug your spouse, hug the person you love most. We don’t know how long we’re going to be here, right? Sometimes we get so caught up in the minutiae of life, in the stressors of life, and that rat race of paying bills, coming home, and just popping yourself in front of the boob tube. We go unconscious, so many times in our life going conscious about what we’re eating or how we’re not taking care of our bodies, and then all of a sudden we’re 30 pounds heavier. We’re like, what just happened? Especially this last year with COVID, people changed their routines, they went unconscious, they started self-soothing with food, alcohol, drugs, and TV. It’s easy to lose sight of the people you love the most and the amount of gratitude you have for them. So sometimes we need that wake-up call, that reminder, what is most important to us? Put down the remote control. I’m guilty too. I’m talking from personal experience. But put down the sugary, alcoholic beverages, or whatever we are using to sell soothe, and go be present with the person or the people that you love most. Have that experience where you’re in touch with the gratitude for those people. I am hugging my son harder than ever before now. I’m so grateful for my husband and my son. That’s another thing I noticed that when I realized I’d lost her is I started to think about all the things I was grateful for. Obviously, I’m in deep sorrow. I was in absolute shock, and this was one of the most painful experiences of my life. But it absolutely immediately shined a light on what I do have. What am I grateful for, and that also really helped me is constantly thinking I’m alive. I could have died, right? There are women who in these situations, they die during birth along with the baby. I mean, I’m alive. I’m so thankful for that. I have an amazing son. I have an amazing husband. There are so many people I’m grateful for in my life, so many friends I’m grateful for. There are so many things I have to be grateful for, and I am. I’m grateful for the time I got to have with our daughter. So I keep focusing on that as well.   Gratitude is a healing tool. I’m not ignoring the sadness. I’m not ignoring the grief or any of those other emotions that come with it. I’m holding that, I’m honoring her in my heart, and I’m also getting in touch with the gratitude because that allows me to not be unconscious in my life. Stay on the path of taking care of myself, which is really important. I noticed both losing my mom especially and losing my dad, I stopped taking care of myself. I just went to self-soothe with food. Luckily, I was never one of those people that liked self-soothing with alcohol or drugs. It was more just sugar, which I’m not into anymore, thank God. I would self-soothe with TV and food, go unconscious, and not take care of myself, not even brush my hair. That’s why I really knew I was in a hole, I was in depression when I lost my mom when I just didn’t take care of myself. With this, I watched and I made sure I’m still taking care of myself. I’m focusing on gratitude. Keep listening to the podcast, join the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group if you haven’t already. Some amazing episodes, these interviews I did, like I said, before I gave birth. There are a few episodes I’ve got to post that are really good, and I’ve been looking forward to sitting down and editing them, getting them posted. And then I’ve got some great interviews lined up this whole month. I’ve got some really cool guests, so I’m looking forward to having you listen to all that. Come join the Facebook group so that you can be part of the community and part of the conversations that we have about guests and about things that we learn together and just come be part of that. It’d be great to have you. It’s a very supportive community, and I just love being a part of that growing community of holistic like-minded people. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for being on this journey with me. Life is a blessing, and it’s hard. Without the loss, how can we truly feel the gain, right? I am hopeful for the future. Of course, there are moments where I just completely break down, but I’m just present in the moment with all the emotions. I also have been doing some Emotion Code work. Oh my gosh, that stuff works. Go back and listen to that episode, it was a few episodes ago. A friend of mine who’s a mental health counselor, she’s been studying it, so she’s done some with me and it really works. I’m feeling it, which is really cool. I mean, I knew it would, but to experience it firsthand it’s very neat. It’s a very gentle process, and then all of a sudden you’re like wow, I feel different. I feel good, I feel better, I feel whole. I’m just noticing I don’t feel fractionated. It’s very interesting. So, yeah, check that episode out if you haven’t already, especially if you know you’ve got some emotional work that you want to release from your body. All right. Well, I’m about to go in a few minutes and do an interview. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Thank you so much for being a listener of the Learn True Health podcast. Get Connected with Ashley James! Facebook Facebook Group Instagram Twitter Learn True Health Podcast on iTunes Free Your Anxiety! Take You Supplements