I'm excited to welcome Dr. David Minkoff, to the show today. Formulator of a game changing line of amino acids called Perfect Aminos, Dr. Minkoff is here to discuss unlocking the mysteries of protein and amino acids and their relationship to recovering from injury & illness. There are many misunderstandings about aminos and our protein needs and their relation to human health.
More about Dr. David Minkoff:
Dr. David Minkoff graduated from the University of Wisconsin Medical School in 1974 and was elected to the “Phi Beta Kappa” of medical schools, the prestigious Alpha Omega Alpha Honors Medical Fraternity for very high academic achievement. He then completed both a Pediatric Residency and Fellowship in Infectious Disease at the University of California at San Diego.
He worked at the University of California and Children’s Hospitals in San Diego as an attending physician in infectious disease while conducting original research on Ribaviron, a broad spectrum anti-viral agent to fight disease. He also co-directed a neo-natal intensive care unit and worked in emergency medicine.
In 1992, Dr Minkoff’s wife Sue, a Registered Nurse, became interested in nutrition and health and began to go to lectures from some of the experts in the field. At the time, Dr Minkoff was pretty fixed in his view of traditional medicine and it took a lot of convincing to get him to come to one of these lectures. After hearing Dr Jeffrey Bland speak, Dr Minkoff had a eureka moment and began pursuing the alternative field with a vengeance. Based on this new knowledge Dr Minkoff and his wife set up a small clinic in 1997 to help some friends with their medical problems. What began as an experiment blossomed into Lifeworks Wellness Center, one of the most successful clinics for complementary medicine in the United States. In the process, he gained expertise in Biological medicine, integrative oncology, heavy metal detoxification, anti-aging medicine, hormone replacement therapy, functional medicine, energy medicine, neural and prolotherapy, homeopathy and optimum nutrition.
He studied under the masters in each of these disciplines until he became an expert in his own right. Dr Minkoff is one of the most in demand speakers in the field and wrote an Amazon best selling book called The Search For The Perfect Protein.
The demand for the products and protocols he discovered became a catalyst for founding BodyHealth.Com, a nutrition company that now manufactures and distributes cutting-edge nutritional solutions for the many health problems of today. Dr. Minkoff writes two free online newsletters, “The Optimum Health Report” and “The BodyHealth Fitness Newsletter”, to help others learn about optimum health and fitness.
Dr. Minkoff is an avid athlete himself and has completed 43 Ironman Triathlons. To keep his fitness maximal, he lives the lifestyle he teachers to others and tries to set an example for others, so they can enjoy a life free of pain and full of energy.
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Transcript:
Dr. Pompa:
If I told you this episode was about amino acids, you probably wouldn’t tune in. It’s about amino acids, but you better tune in because this is about why you may not be healing. This is about the foundation that crumbles, and most people don’t realize that they are amino acid deficient, even the greatest athletes in the world. Wait ‘til you hear these stories. They’re true, and they’ve taught us all a lot of lessons. There’s something that the greatest athletes in the world have in common and also the sickest people have in common.
You’re going to have to stay tuned to hear what that is, but there’s an answer. Again, it’s not what you think because dosing matters. What you take matters. You’re going to hear that, all of that on this show. It’s beyond amino acids. Trust me. Stay tuned.
Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith, and today we welcome Dr. David Minkoff, formulator of a game-changing line of amino acids. Dr. Minkoff is here to discuss unlocking the mysteries of protein and amino acids and the relationship to recovering from injury and illness. There are many misunderstandings about aminos and our protein needs and their relation to human health. I can’t wait to learn more, so let’s welcome Dr. Minkoff and, of course, Dr. Pompa to the show. Welcome, both of you.
Dr. Minkoff:
Thank you.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, David, thank you for being here. If I’m known for the guy of detox, you are absolutely known for the guy for amino acids. You formulated some of the best products out there around this topic.
Dr. Minkoff:
Thank you.
Dr. Pompa:
From a good friend, Ben Greenfield, he swears by your products. You and I just—we had a great conversation offline. We’re going to bring it online. One of the first things that you and I said is people have no idea that they’re amino acid deficient. That’s just something that I think not just you and I say, but most doctors who see a lot of really sick people, we find that to be the case. We’re going to answer the reason for that. We’re going to get into a lot of myths around this topic. There’s a lot of myths around this, and David, you’re going to bust them up for us. That’s for sure.
Look, I have to start with your story around this, how you got into this. I mean, how did you become known for the guy that knows all about amino acids? This is something that you think everyone would know. I mean, don’t we learn about these way back in school? Yet, we forget about them. Tell the story because I think it brings a lot of these topics to the forefront.
Dr. Minkoff:
Sure, thanks, Dan. The way I got to this is that I—in 1982, I saw the Ironman Triathlon on TV. I saw Julie Moss was winning the race, and a hundred yards from the finish line she fell down. Probably everybody’s seen the Wide World of Sports video. She gets up, and she ends up being second. I was with a buddy of mine watching the race. We looked at each other after we saw her struggle across the finish line. We had to do this, and we were going to go do the Ironman Triathlon.
At the time, I’d been running marathons. He had started a new financial services business, and I was brand new in practice. He said, “Give me all your extra money, and I’ll invest it. In five years, we’ll both be independently wealthy. Then we’ll train, and we’ll go do the Ironman Triathlon.”
Dr. Pompa:
Sounds like fun.
Dr. Minkoff:
Yeah, so I went to bed that night with that idea. I was all excited about it. I woke up in the middle of the night, and I said I can’t wait for five years. The last guy I gave money to lost it all, and it’s too long. I have to do this now. The next morning, I looked in—I was living in San Diego. I looked in the newspaper for used bicycles, and I found a used Nishiki bicycle. I went over to the guy’s house, and I bought it. Then I went to the YMCA, and I joined. I had been a lifeguard in college, so I had swimming experience. I’d been running marathons, so I could do that.
That was in February of ’82, and in October of ’82, I was—I went and did the Ironman. It became a hobby, and I’ve done 43 since then. About ten years ago—and I was eating mostly a vegetarian diet. I thought that was healthy, been doing that since age—about 12. I was a Boy Scout. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. They took us on a tour of Oscar Mayer meatpacking company.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that would make someone a vegetarian.
Dr. Minkoff:
It made me a vegetarian. I saw the hot dog processer, and I saw the animals. I was like I can’t do this. Anyway, I got injured. I strained very badly my hamstring, and I tried everything I could to get it healed. I massaged it and chiropractor it and heated it and injected it, and it just wouldn’t be stable. I would go out to run, and if I would try to push it, I could feel that if I went any harder I was going to tear it. This went on for about a year.
A friend of mine who had been over in Europe came back with some capsules, and he said, “Why don’t you try these capsules and see if it’ll help you?” I tried the capsules, and within six weeks, my hamstring was healed. I went a couple months later. I did Ironman Canada. I had my best event ever, and I had a lot of physiologic changes. My maximum heart rate went up 14 points on a maximum heart rate test.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s a lot.
Dr. Minkoff:
A lot.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and by the way, my cycling background, these stories, I get a lot of this.
Dr. Minkoff:
Right, so the other thing is I had an increase in body weight with no change in body outside dimensions. I started looking into it, and what I found is that if you’re protein malnourished the size of your liver and the density of your bones are going to be lower. I got stronger, and my organs health improved. I then started using it in the clinic experimenting with people. I wrote and I found that people got benefit from it. I started measuring serum essential amino acid levels in all my patients, and virtually, all of them were low, not only the sick patients but a lot of the athletes that I was taking care of.
I wrote an article in Triathlete magazine on my experience. We got about 1,000 calls because everybody who reads that magazine wants performance. Where do we get this stuff? We already had a product company selling some detoxification products, and so we threw it in the mix. We started manufacturing it, and so that’s been about ten years. It’s just been thousands of success stories from patients and from athletes on faster recovery, better performance. Then, when you look back on it, amino acids are the base of proteins, and if you’re amino acid deficient, you may not make all the different proteins. The body has about 50,000 different proteins, skin, hair, nails. Enzymes, neurotransmitters, cytokines, these are all protein-based products or amino acid-based products.
The other thing that happened to me was a couple years before I started using the amino acids a friend of mine who was counseling cancer patients using real high-dose pancreatic enzymes—there’s this doctor. Actually, he was an orthodontist in New York named William Donald Kelley who cured himself of pancreatic cancer using high-dose pancreatic enzymes. She had studied with him, and she was using these in her patients to help them with cancer. The idea was the cancer protects itself with a protein coat. The immune system doesn’t see it, and if you take these high-dose enzymes, it digests off the protein coat. It exposes the cancer. The immune system activates.
She was here. She was a patient of mine, and she was here. She said, “Why don’t you do a trial of these enzymes? If you have a brewing cancer or a subclinical cancer, these will expose it, and you’ll heal it.” I said, “Okay, I’m game.” She said, “You take 12 of these tablets 6 times a day. You take first thing in the morning 12, then breakfast 12, hour before lunch 12. You go through this.
After I took the 12 on an empty stomach first thing in the morning, within an hour I felt like I was burning a hole in my stomach with the enzymes. I was really worried, and I had to drink baking soda and try to cool the thing off. I went back to her, and I said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t think I have cancer, but I can’t take these things because my stomach can't take them.” I never knew what to do with that, but then after I started taking the amino acids and I got this healing in my leg, I thought maybe that has something to do—an amino acid deficiency might have something to do with my stomach not being able to handle these enzymes. Maybe I don’t have enough mucous layer or something like that.
I did a new trial, and I took 12 of these enzymes, got no effect; took 12 more, got no affect. I did it for three days, got no affect. My stomach was fine. Then it dawned on me that, holy smokes, maybe the deficiency is a lot broader than what I thought. It isn’t just muscle development. Maybe it’s other things. Maybe depressed people need amino acids. Maybe anxious people need amino acids. Maybe menopausal women need amino acids, and maybe people whose hair won’t grow or their nails are soft need amino acids.
That’s what turned out to be true. That these things are building blocks for the body and that you need to have extra. Because virtually very few people have a decent gut with enough digestive enzymes and hydrochloric acid and so many people are taking acid blockers, Nexium and these kind of drugs because they have heartburn, that they don’t digest protein and that this would help them.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, people are saying, well, I eat a lot of protein, so I’m fine. Aren’t amino acids for protein (yes, if you break it down)? There’s some other misconceptions about protein that we’ll get to. My cycling background, you told them a little bit—a story about George Hincapie. If people don’t know this, he was Lance Armstrong’s right-hand lieutenant taking him into the mountains in the Tour de France. He’s somebody that is an athlete, yes, but he also got physically sick. They said, hey, could you figure this out? Tell that story a little bit because that really tells both stories.
Dr. Minkoff:
It was early in the year that year, and he got ill. It turned out that he had a parasite, and it had debilitated him. We figured out that the parasite was the problem why he couldn’t digest and absorb food and diarrhea. We did an herbal parasite remedy, and he got better from that. He was still quite debilitated. He’d lost a lot of weight. He’d lost muscle mass. It was March or April, and he had a tour to be ready for by July.
Dr. Pompa:
What season was that?
Dr. Minkoff:
I don’t which year.
Dr. Pompa:
I watched them all. I remember a season where he just crushed it in the mountains, and they were just astounded that he was staying there. His job was to bring Lance early into the mountain, in the early part of the mountain. There he was at the peaks where someone his size and stature should never have been and he was. I think it was that year, but go ahead. Finish the story.
Dr. Minkoff:
He won a mountain stage that year.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right, so that is the year. Yeah, I mean, he had the year of his life. I remember the year clearly. I didn’t know this part of the story, though.
Dr. Minkoff:
Everyone was so surprised that he’d been able to recover and then get probably the best fitness he ever had, and he was taking PerfectAmino. The next year, the three top riders were given the product. What Jeff Spencer told me because he was there…
Dr. Pompa:
Jeff Spencer, he’s coached Lance for some years.
Dr. Minkoff:
Every year he won he was there.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, every year. Did Lance get on it as well?
Dr. Minkoff:
I’m not allowed to talk about any of this, but anyway, the three top riders took the product. No matter what they did during the tour, by the end, they were all broken down. It didn’t matter. They have a chef, and they got IVs after the thing. I didn’t know about the hormones that they’re—the medication, the doping that they were doing, but they were all broken down. What Jeff told me was that this was the first time during the tour that at the end they were fitter than they were at the beginning. The three guys that were taking it were—just couldn’t believe that they were able to recover with all the trauma when they added the amino acids to it.
This is something that I’ve seen over and over again. That people get better performance, better recovery, faster recovery. There’s really thousands of success stories from people who were like I took this, and my chronic plantar fasciitis got better or my whatever it is healed. The body was actually able to heal.
Dr. Pompa:
I just had a client. I put him on amino acids for one reason. This was a recent client. She says, “Oh, my gosh, my energy, it’s like I feel so much more energy, and I’m doing things. Could it be those amino acids that I’m taking?” I said, “Absolutely.” I mean, you’re right. I mean, it applies to so much.
There’s so much priority, the importance of the amino acids that it will prioritize them and steal from other places. There’s a lot of things there are left empty because the body will prioritize it just to survival. All of a sudden, now you’ll lack—you have no energy or your—like you said, your hair’s thinning. It could be, in fact, just amino acids.
Dr. Minkoff:
Right, and a good point on that is anybody who’s done training for endurance events or very hard training has probably had the experience that after the marathon or after the century where you trained hard and you worked hard and you gave it your all that within the next week you get a cold. You get an upper respiratory infection, and you get a cold. This priority thing is exactly what you’re saying. The body then has all this trauma from the event, muscles, tendons, ligaments, the whole thing. You gave it your all, and so the demand by the body is use resources to heal and repair that stuff. The whole immune system if built on amino acids, and you are going to rob Peter to pay Paul. What I found with people is, if you’re doing hard training or you have a big event like that and you load amino acids and then you keep them going for another five or six days at high doses like double dose, triple dose, quadruple dose of what you would normally take, that you don’t get the cold and you recover. Now the system has enough resources to keep the immune system strong and heal the rest of the body.
Dr. Pompa:
What’s a typical dose? By the way, we’ll provide the link here. We have it on our site. People are probably what is the product? We’ll provide the link. What is a typical dose? Where should people start? Then maybe for, okay, an athletic dose, someone recovering from illness dose, give us some ideas.
Dr. Minkoff:
The typical dose is 10 gm as a one-time dose per day. If you take it on an empty stomach—you could do it with a sports drink, or water, or electrolytes, but it works best if you take it not with a fat or protein. If you take it on an empty stomach, in 23 minutes, the amino acids are in your bloodstream, and that’s the best way to take it. When I wake up in the morning, I put two scoops. It comes as powder or tablets. The tablets have no fillers, or binders, or anything, so it’s basically compressed powder. I like the powder because it’s two scoops. There’s a berry flavor, and there’s a lemon lime flavor. I just put it in a glass of water or in a shaker cup. Shake it up. I might throw a scoop of greens in there with it like powdered greens, and then just drink it down.
On days when I’m having big workouts or hard workouts, I’ll do a second dose. Last week or two weekends ago, I did an Ironman competition, and I tripled dosed it all day for seven days. I didn’t get a cold. I didn’t get sick. I healed up really fast, and so people have to figure out how much that works for them. If you’re above 115 pounds, take 10 tablets. If you’re below that, take seven as a daily dose. I wouldn’t divide it. The package says take five tablets as a dose. Really, you need more than that, so I would say take ten tablets.
Dr. Pompa:
All right, yeah, well, there you go. That’s right from the man himself. You had mentioned vegetarians and vegans as being very vulnerable to this. There’s a myth, David, right? We both heard it. My nutritionist or dietician told me I needed this much protein in a day, and I’m getting that and sometimes more. I look at the protein on my yogurt. I look at the protein. I’m getting 80 gm or whatever they told you to get, so I’m fine. Is that true?
Dr. Minkoff:
No, it’s not true. Here’s the thing. When you eat, let’s say you have—when I was a vegetarian, there was this book called Diet for a Small Planet.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I remember that.
Dr. Minkoff:
The idea was you could combine beans and rice and corn, and you’d be fine.
Dr. Pompa:
That was from John Robbins after his first book, right, Diet for a New Planet or Diet…
Dr. Minkoff:
Diet for a Small Planet I think it was called.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that was the second one. What was his first one?
Dr. Minkoff:
I don’t know, but I love that book. I read it.
Dr. Pompa:
Anyway, yeah, exactly, go ahead. That’s right. It was the combinations, and you equal this. Yeah, go ahead.
Dr. Minkoff:
Yeah, so if you like Middle Eastern foods, if you eat garbanzo beans and sesame seeds, you blend the proteins, and you get what you need. It doesn’t really work, but it’s probably better than one of them by themselves. Anyway, when you eat a protein, assuming that you digest it, you’re able to digest it and absorb it, which is a longshot for most people. Most people have bacteria overgrowth in their small intestine and yeast and parasites, and they’re on medications, or they don’t make stomach acid because they’re body is missing other stuff. Assuming that all that system is working, there is two pathways when amino acids come into the body. One pathway is they get utilized to make body proteins, so proteins can be like growth hormone or insulin. Those are both proteins.
Technically, a protein by definition is 30 amino acids in a chain or more. I think insulin has 89 amino acids in the specific sequence. The body has to take those amino acids, set up the sequence, and then that’s insulin. The beta cells of your pancreas do that. All the enzyme systems in your body, all the detox pathways, all the neurotransmitters, these are based on amino acids. If you take it in and that—let’s say you eat some—you have some yogurt, and there’s some protein in yogurt. That yogurt goes in, and you measure how much—and it’s digested. How much of the amino acids that are taken with that yogurt actually end up as a protein in your body versus how many of those amino acids get degraded and get—end up waste?
An amino acid by definition is a carbon, hydrogen, oxygen chain, which is the same as a fat and a carbohydrate. They all have the basic building block, but amino acids have nitrogen as part of them. Amino in Greek means nitrogen. You got a nitrogen stuck on a carbon, hydrogen, oxygen chain. If that amino acid—there’s 22 different ones that the body uses like an alphabet to spell out different proteins. Skeletal muscle, actin, which is one of the parts of skeletal muscle so it’s actin and myosin or actin, the chain of a single muscle fiber is 5600 amino acids. Think of the construction job in that myocyte, in that muscle cell. If those amino acids are coming in and all of them are available that it needs, the 22 different ones that are available, if it runs into one that’s supposed to be in slot 5,421 and that’s not—there’s a deficiency. It’s not there. That muscle fiber doesn’t get completed, and it doesn’t get made.
Dr. Pompa:
Your workout was for nothing. Again, it’s all about how you recover. Not what you actually do in the gym.
Dr. Minkoff:
That’s right. Either you’re doing workouts where you don’t recover, or you’re sore for five days because you can’t even lift your arms. Your body has tried to do the repair, but it couldn’t do the repair because it didn’t have the resources. When you start to look at different proteins, like if you did a trial of, okay, we’re going to just eat whey protein as our only protein source for a day and you can measure how much nitrogen you put in with the whey protein—proteins are about 16% nitrogen, so if you eat 100 gm of whey protein in a day as your only protein source, about 16 gm of nitrogen are going to come into the body. Now, if all of those amino acids get put into body protein, none of the nitrogen will come out because they’re all now part of the structure of the body. However, if you measure dairy proteins, say whey protein or casein, only about 16% of the nitrogen is retained in the body. Eighty-four percent comes out. The ratio of the amino acids that come in aren’t what our body needs to make proteins.
The analogy is let’s say you’re in the business of building cars, and the basic building block of a car is a chassis, four wheels, a motor, and a steering wheel. I deliver to your factory 100 wheels, 100 steering wheels, 100 chassis, and 100 motors. How many cars can you make? You can only make 25 cars because you’re short on wheels.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, right, exactly, good analogy, yeah.
Dr. Minkoff:
All the rest of the 75 extra chassis and the 75 extra steering wheels, they don’t—your body can’t use those. There’s no storage depot for proteins.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, they become useless parts. Like the nitrogen, you need…
Dr. Minkoff:
That’s why we pee.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Minkoff:
That’s why the liver—it goes to the liver. It takes the nitrogen. It combines it, makes it into urea. It goes into the kidney. You pee it out. That’s the main way we get rid of it. If you look at whey protein and you say what percentage of it is utilized (about 16%)? Soy is about 16%. Meat and fish are about 33%. Eggs, whole eggs, you got to eat the yolk and the white is the best food except for one, so it’s about 48%. If you want the best real protein is eat eggs. The only thing better is breast milk, but it’s hard to get.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, my biochemistry teacher always said—Dr. [Shahid], same thing, “Breast milk a number one protein, egg number two.”
Dr. Minkoff:
Yeah, he was totally right, totally right. Now, here’s interesting, spirulina, which if you go to the health food store—like spirulina, it’s this so great powerful protein. Whales eat spirulina, and look at how big they get. We tested 24 different spirulina products, and the average nitrogen utilization was 6%. Many of them didn’t have all the—see, if you don’t have all the essential amino acids, you’re not going to make protein. That’s what’s wrong with branched-chain amino acids. It’s only three amino acids. It’s leucine, isoleucine, and valine. You can take all the branched chains you want. You are not making one piece of protein out of it because you need all eight essential ones in order to make a protein.
Dr. Pompa:
You need all the amino acids, and then you need the nitrogen.
Dr. Minkoff:
Yeah, so the amino acids come in with the nitrogen. PerfectAmino is an exact ratio of the 8 essential amino acids so that if you measure how much of it gets utilized in your body it’s 99%.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, my point being is, if you’re just eating protein, you need a certain amount of nitrogen. Otherwise, you end up with spare parts, to the car analogy again, and then you need all of the amino acids as well. You can’t just take some of them. Back to the original question, when the vegan says I’m getting all the protein, it’s like, well, first of all, you just made the point that every one of those foods have different quality of protein. A lot of the vegetable proteins that people take, the soy, the pea, they’re horrible, I mean, horrible nitrogen balance, and the protein is very unusable. You can’t just look at the macro nutrient protein and think you’re getting enough protein. It’s not so simple.
Dr. Minkoff:
Right, and this is not known. This is not known in dietary science at all. I spoke at the annual meeting of the American College of Nutrition. I gave a talk basically explaining this concept to 300 PhD dieticians and nutritional scientists, and not one of them had ever heard this. When I finished the talk, there was dead silence in the room, and there was a question and answer period. It actually spilled over 45 minutes into the next guy’s talk. They were like why doesn’t anybody know this? Why didn’t we learn this? This is crazy.
If you go to the dietician and you’re a diabetic and they say, oh, you need—their formula is .8 gm of protein per kilogram of body weight. They will have you saying, well, you get 4 gm from a couple pieces of toast. You’ll have a yogurt, and you’ll get 13 gm there. You need a total of 55. We’ll make it up, and you’ll be fine. It isn’t true at all. The values of the proteins are really different, and it does make a difference what you eat. If you supplement with amino acids, you can make sure that you’ve got a buffer. You’ve got extra so that, if your body needs to heal or you’re in a program where you’re trying to build lean body mass, you actually can.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, which I think, again, this applies to the sick person as well. I mean, it really is the—it becomes the same person for a different reason. Whether it’s the athlete tearing themselves down or it’s someone that is in a sickness, a disease process tearing themselves down, both need to rebuild and recover. Both don’t have the building blocks to do it. There are really different ways of getting there but ended up at the same place, deficient in the most basic thing, amino acids.
Dr. Minkoff:
Exactly, and with your cellular healing, the detox enzymes in the liver are enzymes made out of protein. They’re made out of amino acids. What we found is that if we’re doing a detox program on people, that if we gave them amino acids, essential amino acids like PerfectAmino at the same time, they detoxed about 30% faster, quicker than if we didn’t give them the extra amino acids. They were then able to ramp up their liver enzymes, their Phase 1, Phase 2, in order so that they could detox, and the whole system just worked better.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, it makes total sense, obviously. There’s some other categories that put people at great risk, even certain disease processes. You mentioned a few medications as well.
Dr. Minkoff:
Yeah, I think one of the big ones is people who go on very calorie restricted diets. For about every four pounds that they lose, they lose a pound of protein. That PerfectAmino basically has no calories. Ten grams, the daily serving, has only four calories. What we found is if we’re getting people—we’re not doing it now, but we ran a bunch of people doing HCG diet some years ago where they get this hormone. They eat 500 calories a day. We found, if we gave them PerfectAmino during this period, they didn’t lose lean body mass. I think, if people are doing processes where they’re trying to lose weight, that you want to make sure that you’re getting amino acids so that you don’t lose your lean body mass because you will.
Dr. Pompa:
One of the things that I do is when I fast people—because we don’t want to turn off autophagy, right? Amino acids will do that. That’s not a bad thing always. Then, when we feast, adding amino acids in. Obviously, you want to stop autophagy, and you want mTOR, which is an anabolic pathway where your body’s building. My whole principle of feat-famine is based just on that, and amino acids are one of the most basic ways just to drive that anabolic pathway. Again, it’s a healing pathway.
In the antiaging community, mTOR gets a bad rap. I argue against it because we need it. It’s a very important healing process. Now, again, staying in that at all time isn’t good. We need time to feast and famine. Some people say, well, I can’t—I talk about feasting with higher carbs. I can’t do that, okay, great. I talk about utilizing high protein. Often times, the amino acids, it’s magic for them, by the way.
Dr. Minkoff:
Yeah, exactly, I was just going to say for the—I wrote this book called The Search for the Perfect Protein, and it’s available on Amazon. If guys want to go to the BodyHealth website, they can download the PDF for free, and it really has a lot of information on what I’ve been saying here but a lot more stuff too with some case stories about how people—how it’s changed their life, the number of cases that I see. My practice is mostly chronic illness, and it’s just essential. These people are all nutritionally deficient. Not just in amino acids. Often times, other things too. You put the building blocks there. They can then heal.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it is. It’s the foundation, isn’t it? It is. It’s the building blocks. You have to build on a good foundation. Otherwise, the body will rob from Peter to pay Paul, and you end up with a new problem that you didn’t even realize was connected, right? Again, a lot of mental issues, as you pointed out before, can stem from this loss of the foundation from amino acid.
Dr. Minkoff:
Yeah, I mean, the big—the serotonin and GABA and dopamine, these are important neurotransmitters. Lack of them often leads to a depressed and anxious patient, and it isn’t really a psychological state. The psychological state is secondary. They have deficiencies of neurotransmitters. These are measurable now. You measure these things, and they’re low. Then you supplement them with amino acids, and they come up. They start feeling better. Their body can now make the things that it needs.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, people forget the brain chemicals literally—whether it’s dopamine, serotonin, they’re made from amino acids in the gut. Speaking of the gut, how—what have you see with amino acids in fixing gut problems, chronic gut problems, leaky gut, IBS, the typical thing that we’re seeing so much of today?
Dr. Minkoff:
It’s leaking because there’s openings there. It’s damaged. Most people with a leaky gut have an inflamed mucosa, whether it’s glyphosate doing it or some food sensitivity, or they’re on some prescription medication where the membrane gets damaged. In order to heal it, you need amino acids. One of the other interesting things is this—there’s this concept in the body of protein turnover. You’re supposed to turn over your gut mucosa every four to six days. If you’re amino acid deficient, it might only be every 10 or 12 days. Now you have a raw membrane there that’s been damaged that’s going to leak.
Same thing happens in the pulmonary tree. People get all these—and the blood-brain barrier. These barriers are made out of proteins that are amino acids, and when it’s insufficient, they will leak. When they leak, you either have brain fog, or you can’t remember anything, or you can’t sleep, or you’re anxious, or you’re depressed, and it’s the gut. You have a leaky gut, and then you get sensitive to every food that you eat, and you can’t eat anything. It’s works on a whole body basis.
Dr. Pompa:
One of my years of research is the cell membrane and how to fix it. There’s two critical components. The fats, of course, it’s made of the lipid bilayer. People forget about the proteins, those integral membrane proteins that are within the membrane that literally are the function and the life, bring life and action to the membrane. It’s like you can’t live without them. They bring often times a lot of the stability and the fluidity to the membrane. Proteins, amino acids with the fats is a critical—if you can fix the membranes, you can fix your hormones. You can fix your detox pathways. You can fix a lot of things. You could even turn off bad genes, so it even plays into that.
Dr. Minkoff:
Absolutely, it’s perfectly said.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, this is a big lesson for people, and I so appreciate your coming on, David. It seems so basic. My fear is that people go, oh, amino acids and not watch the show. I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen because this is too important of a topic. It’s like I often find that people just hear you when we talk about the subject, and it’s like when I talk about fats too. No, give me the real pill. Give me the real magic. Amino acids, I’ve heard about that. That’s something bodybuilders take. No, this is something that so many people are deficient. As we said, there’s multiple reasons.
Thanks for bringing it to life. Thank you for the product. It’s changed a lot of lives, man. It really has.
Dr. Minkoff:
You’re welcome. I appreciate being on here. So love the work that you’re doing and the education that you provide people. You’re really changing lives with your message.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, same with you. I so appreciate. Gosh, it’s been a while. I think the last seminar we saw each other at—I guess it was the [Low] Seminar.
Dr. Minkoff:
Yeah, you hosted the panel, and I was one of the panel members.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s right, exactly. Yeah, gosh, how long ago was that now? We’ve been in this spin for a while.
Dr. Minkoff:
Three or four years I think, yeah, probably three years ago.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, oh, wow, I would’ve—see, things like that, I would’ve said a year and half, two years ago, things flying out of my control here. Hey, David, nice seeing you. Glad we could not catch up at a seminar, but we at least got to catch up on Cellular Healing TV. Thanks for being on.
Dr. Minkoff:
Thanks, Dan.
Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv, and please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.
