2015 Podcasts

Transcript of Episode 73: Lyme Disease

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and David Asarnow.

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David:
Welcome to Cellular Healing TV Episode 72. This is David Asarnow, and I am here with Dr. Pompa. Dr. Pompa, welcome.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Thank you.

David:
Can you believe 72 episodes?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s amazing. We’ll be saying, “Can you believe 150?” one day.

David:
I know. It is crazy.  Today’s topic is going to be about Lyme and Lyme co-infections, and we have an internal discussion group where a lot of – what their experiencing and –

-Technical Issues-

David:
There you are. I don’t know if it’s me or you, but one of us froze up. I was saying, we – and I don’t know if anyone heard this or not. We’ve been getting a lot of postings from practitioners about the patients experiencing Lyme or getting bit by a tick. We’re in the summer months right now. Is that something that people should be concerned about?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. This is the season, right, when your pets start bringing ticks home. If you look at your pets, they’re loaded up with ticks. Obviously, removing them properly from you and your children is very important. Hey, David. Turn off your video. See if that helps.

-Technical Issues-

Dr. Pompa:
Anyways, this time of year, ticks are a big deal – how to remove them properly. Obviously, ticks carry disease. We’re talking about Lyme, but there’s co-infections that they carry, as well, like Babesia, Bartonella. Of course, even out here in the Rocky Mountains, we have Rocky Mountain spotted fever. You want to get these things out of you quickly. What some believe is if you get it out within 36 hours, we know for sure, you definitely limit the chance of infection. Some people say it’s impossible to transmit Lyme in under that 36, 24 hour at least, period.

I think there are some that disagree with that, but the bottom is this, we know. The sooner you get it out and get it out right, the better. They even have tick removers now, David. It looks like this little double-pronged thing that kind of scoops underneath. It’s a piece of plastic like this, and it scoops underneath the tick in a V, and it holds it, and then you just twist it, and they come right out.

If you do not have one of those – but if you put tick remover online, you can get one, and you should have one. Tweezers is the best way. Don’t use alcohol. Don’t use matches, burning them, and all those things that you’ve heard. You want to remove it with tweezers and make sure –

David:
I know you performed surgery on me when I had a tick a little over a year ago. When I was a kid, I remember my mom heating up a needle and then putting it on the back of the tick for it to start backing out. That’s not what we do?

Dr. Pompa:
No, because it actually can cause it to vomit, so to speak. It actually can cause it to spew out its innards, and you don’t want to do that because obviously that’s a faster way to transmit the disease. David, we learn a lot about you, about mold growing up, ticks growing up. It’s amazing you’ve survived.

David:
You know what? You talk a lot about the bucket, and the bucket overflowing. It was interesting. I was with one of our practitioners this week, and the rash on my leg that you’ve seen and we’ve talked about is totally gone. I’ve used some of the new CytoDetox drops. It caused some other things that we talked about, but then all of a sudden, a month later, the rash is totally gone. All of a sudden – have I been exposed to Lyme? I don’t know. You and I have talked about it. Probably not, although I’ve been bit by a lot of ticks in my life, but the bucket comes down.

Also, when the bucket rises, someone could have been bit by a tick. We talk about the three-legged stool. Someone could have been bit by a tick 15 years ago. Lyme sort of masks itself if it’s not caught right away. You want to talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It can. First of all, this Lyme epidemic is a massive, growing epidemic. It wasn’t accepted into the medical world. Now, they can’t ignore it, but if you said you had Lyme, they basically thought you were making things up. Then they said, “Okay, Lyme, but if you’re treated with a course of antibiotics for six weeks, then you’re cured.” When people would go on and still be sick, they would say, “It’s not Lyme. It’s something else.”

Lyme – it can morph. It can change into different types of beings, so to speak. There’s a cyst phase. There’s the spirochete phase because it’s a type of bacteria that literally is a spirochete, meaning that it looks like this. It looks like a corkscrew if you see it under a microscope. It can burrow deep into your blood vessel, your organs, your tissues, your cells. Matter of fact, there’s a cell wall deficient state that it can literally slide into your blood cells.

This sucker can change. You start throwing things that kill it at it long enough, it will go into a cyst phase, and protect itself, and then come out later. If you hit it too hard with certain antibiotics, it can go into a cell wall deficient stage. We know this, that if you do treat it with antibiotics in the very beginning, it’s more vulnerable. It doesn’t have the ability to morph yet. It doesn’t learn different things. It hasn’t taken root into its environment yet.

We know that if you go at it with regular antibiotics, like doxycycline is the standard Lyme antibiotic – early on, you can actually kill it, but however, many do not, and it goes deeper than that. That’s when you end up in a whole lot of trouble.

There’s also a theory, David, that it’s the co-infections that go along with it – Bartonella bacteria, Babesia that keep people remaining sick after they go in and they kill the Lyme bacteria, the bordorfi bacteria. Guess what? They remain sick, so two theories: it changes; it morphs, and it can be co-infection. It’s probably a combination of the two.

David:
By the way, does someone have to have that bullseye pattern rash or red rashes after being bit by a tick in order to be infected with Lyme or one of these other co-infection bacterias?

Dr. Pompa:

No. No. That’s another thing, too. “Oh, I didn’t get the bullseye rash. I’m okay.” Many people don’t, so the bullseye rash happens at a smaller percentage than the larger. Bad sign if you do get it, but most do not. David, there’s even theories that it’s transmitted different ways even outside of Lyme disease. Many believe that you can transmit it via your spouse through other bodily fluids. There’s a lot to learn yet about Lyme disease.

One thing we know is it makes people very sick. It typically gives them the unexplainable symptoms, of course, the chronic fatigue, typically joint pain, typically smaller joint pain, knees. The knees seem to be a big deal. The ankles, the feet – that typically runs with it. Of course, then you end up with the sleep problems, the hormone problems, the weight gain. All the things that we see in neurotoxic illness, we see with this. I think that Lyme, you see typically a greater pain associated with this. They look more like they have fibromyalgia, not just in the muscle and the joints, but it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between Lyme and mold illness.

Both, by the way, David, produce a biotoxin, so mold produces a biotoxin, very, very toxic to a human. We’re going to talk next week more about mold, so hang in there. Tune in next week. We’re going to talk about – your home safe, how to look for things that aren’t safe because so many people, again, with unexplainable illnesses are living in moldy homes. Folks, if your home gets wet, if your basement gets wet, you have a mold issue. About one in four people really genetically don’t do well with it at all. It’s dangerous for everyone, and eventually will overwhelm your immune system. It’s very, very dangerous. We’re going to tell you things to look out for. Even high humidity, above 50, definitely above 60 will drive mold. Anyways, that’s next week.

Lyme produces a biotoxin that’s very, very dangerous, so a lot of the symptoms are very similar. Light sensitivity – you see that in mold. You can see it with this. Dry mouth, frequent urination – I’m kind of throwing down some things. Sometimes people get skin issues that go on. A lot of times, it disrupts sleep, but again, to reiterate, Lyme – typically, you’re going to have some joint pain of the smaller joints.

David:
The challenge out there is the testing that most people use is the western blot.

Dr. Pompa:
Right.

David:
How effective is that?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. The western blot is effective if you just get bit. Actually, there’s a bit of lull there. If you just get bit, it’s not effective, then it’s effective, but then with chronic Lyme, it’s no good for, either. There’s a window that it can be effective, but that’s it. Obviously, take that into consideration when you’re taking a western blot. For the most part, people that are using a test to see if they have Lyme have chronic Lyme. They’ve had it for years. The western blot is going to look negative, so not a good test.

We use a test called the iSpot Lyme, and it is a much more accurate test, the best one out there at this point, I believe, no doubt. NeuroScience is a laboratory that puts it out through Pharma labs.

David:
Is this something that people could order on their own if they’re curious, or do they need to work with a practitioner in order to get it?

Dr. Pompa:
They have to work with one or more practitioners. You could call my website number, DrPompa.com, and you’d be able to be hooked up that way.

David:
One of the other things with – one, you mentioned it – fibromyalgia symptoms. One of the things is a lot of times, most doctors, they say, “Oh, you’ve got this kind of autoimmune condition.” They don’t go to the cause and start looking, what could it be? Could it be Lyme? You could go down the path treating one thing or thinking you have one thing when it really is something else.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, David. You hit it. If you go back and watch one of our episodes on autoimmune, I compare it to a three-legged stool – the cause and a solution, meaning that you have a certain gene that gets turned on whether it’s Lupus, rheumatoid, Crohn’s – you can go down the list of these autoimmune conditions – scleroderma. The gene gets turned on. Great. We all have genes, though. We all have bad genes. It’s a matter of them being triggered or turned on.

The next leg of the stool is what’s turned them on? It’s a stressor, typically a combination of stressors – chemical, emotional, physical. These big boy toxins like mold, next week, and Lyme, these biotoxins, they can turn on these autoimmune genes. Now you’re dealing with another problem that you still didn’t realize where the cause was.

By the way, in autoimmune, the third leg of the stool is certain bacteria die off. They get in too low of numbers, and now you don’t make enough of a cell called a T regulatory cell. Certain bacteria in your gut actually cause and make these T regulatory cells. These are immune cells that tell your body that everything’s okay. Don’t hyper-produce all this inflammation. That’s what autoimmune is, right? You’re body’s producing too much of an attack. Without enough of these cells in your gut, you don’t produce enough of these cells that tell the immune system to back down. That’s the other leg of the stool. That needs to be fixed. You have to get to the stressor, and you also – my 5R's really is about fixing the cell.

If you look at the 5R's, most of them are about changing the epigenome, turning off the bad gene. That’s the cause; that’s the solution. Again, you have to look at that these types of exposures can turn on these genes, too. Not only are you up against the Lyme infection, you’re up against, oftentimes, autoimmune that gets turned on.

David:
You just mentioned another thing. The first thing that, if you’re bit by a tick, they’ll give you doxycycline, and it’s for several weeks. It’s a heavy dose for an extended period of time, and then all of a sudden, if you don’t take care of your gut – by the way, that’s what happened to me. All of a sudden, you can backtrack, and you get – all of a sudden, I started seeing inflammation, and I started seeing things reappear, like that rash.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes. It’s very prudent if you get bit by a tick early on. We don’t know if it’s carrying the Lyme. If you keep the tick, you could take it to the health department, and they could actually test it. That could be your indicator that, “Yeah, okay. I’m going to take an antibiotic.” Again, an antibiotic works in the beginning, not that it – with chronic Lyme. Antibiotics with other things can be effective. We can talk a little more about that, but you have to be careful.

The antibiotic, David, like you, it wiped out your microbiome. It wiped out your good bacteria in your gut, then you started manifesting other symptoms, right? You started gaining some weight again. Your skin rash came on again. Then we had to treat the microbiome again. If you’re going to take an antibiotic – again, I would say this: In the beginning, it’s most effective if you’re going to do it. Secondly, you better address the microbiome after this antibiotic because you’re going to end up getting set up for other problems, David, just like that happened to you.

David:
Most people are saying, “Well, I’ll just go out to the grocery store, and I’ll buy a probiotic.” Is that enough?

Dr. Pompa:
No. Most probiotics have seven to ten strains of bacteria in them. By the way, they’re all the same. You can go through your probiotic, and it’s mostly the same bacteria that they’re all putting in. It typically survives in too low of numbers to make a difference, and you’re talking about seven bacteria out of 2000, 3000 in the gut. Oftentimes, it doesn’t make the difference we need.

Eating fermented foods definitely makes a difference. We talk about the products Amasai and SueroGold. Those are fermented foods that come from grass-fed cows that are loaded with unique bacteria. There’s a product called Prescript-Assist that I like. It’s 21 soil organisms that are different from your typical probiotics in the store. I’m not saying that those bacteria aren’t good. Many people lack those bacteria, so it’s not like I’m against probiotic, but what I’m saying is it’s very limited on the types of bacteria we’d need to re-inoculate with.

Eating fermented food, which people stopped doing years ago with refrigeration. Those carry a lot of different bacteria with it. We don’t eat soil anymore. We used to take vegetables out of our garden and eat them. If you just rinse them with water, there’s still all these rich bacteria that we don’t even know about, right? You can test different soils and see all these amazing bacteria.

No, today we’re spraying soil. You want to rinse it off, wash it off. We wax the fruit. There’s nothing left. It’s the bacteria that was in our environment, in our soil, that makes up a lot of our microbiome that we don’t have in pills, David. Eating real organic food grown in a garden, grown in actual, real dirt and not sudsing it up with a bunch of cleansers to take all the good stuff away – again, that’s really how you can build a microbiome.

I think we’re past the day of trying to kill off every bacteria. It was anti-bacterial everything since the 1940's. We’ve learned our lesson that we’ve created problems. We’ve created more autoimmune. We’ve created more problems with weaker immune systems trying to kill all the things. However, if you go into most schools, in most churches, you’ll still see all the darn hand sanitizers, which destroy all of the good bacteria, which, by the way, is the line of defense against the bad guys. Again, you can’t run from the bad guys. You have to have defenses against them, and that’s what’s on our skin. This is your first line of warriors in microbiome, and then, obviously, through your GI tract is the second.

We talked last week with Dr. Shane Morris, the biochemist from Systemic Formulas. We talked about phage. Phage are these really cute, little space ship looking viruses that are all around us. Matter of fact, they’re in the water. They’re out in the seawater, and ponds, and lakes, and we’re exposed to them. They make up our microbiome and protect us against bad guys.

We’re not getting exposed to these things. Kids aren’t playing in the dirt anymore. They’re getting hit with all the hand sanitizers. Then every time they get an earache or a sore throat, it’s antibiotic after antibiotic. My gosh, David. The more you learn about how important this inner bacteria world is that we call microbiome, we realize how do we function?

We’re disrupting this very thing that really creates our immune system, this very thing that creates certain hormones and neurotransmitters in our brain. We realize our brain works because of these bacteria, and we’re trying to kill them.

Anyways, I could do off on a whole subject there because it’s sad. Then we’re spraying herbicide and pesticide Glyphosate on everything. It’s ubiquitous in our society. It’s every grain or conventional grain people are putting in our mouths, which is everything our kids are eating. They’re getting loaded up with Glyphosate, this chemical that disrupts and destroys these bacteria. We wonder why their brain doesn’t work.

Studies show that when this gets disrupted, this doesn’t work. We’ve talked many shows about that, how that chemical disrupts the [0:20:27] pathway, which you need to make neurotransmitters. That means brain chemicals. When you disrupt this, you don’t make enough brain chemicals. Okay, so we’ll just give kids medication. They need Adderall. They must.

There was a show two weeks ago that we interviewed Cameron about one of my clients, and watch that. You think those medications are the answer? Watch the show.

David:
He’s got a really interesting story.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Adderall poisoned, and you name it. But, David, look. You have to get to the cause, you know? Lyme disease is a bigger issue than people understand. When people have a lot of symptoms, they’ve tried every medication or every supplement, they’ve been sick for many years, you have to consider Lyme disease and its co-infections, the Babesia and the Bartonella. These are things that they get into the red blood cells and very difficult to detect. You have to do the right tests – very, very difficult to detect. I’m telling you, it makes people very, very sick, and nothing seems to work for them.

David:
You know what’s interesting? You’re talking about all these co-infections, and when I was with you when I got bit by the tick, and you helped remove it.  Then you’re like, “Get with your doctor. Tell him you got bit by a tick, and get on doxycycline because you can never be too careful.” It’s funny. It’s not funny; it’s serious.

On my phone, I just Googled Lyme disease, and Centers for Disease Control is talking about the 14 co-infections that you can get. It says doxycycline saves lives – how important it is because you don’t know what that tick has.

Dr. Pompa:
No, it’s true. Again, and antibiotic taken soon works, but once someone has chronic Lyme, they’re sick for years, it rarely every works. It just drives it into a cyst stage or drives it into a cell wall deficient stage, and it doesn’t work anymore. Listen, I can tell you from the people that I speak with, they’ve been down the antibiotic route. Again, timing is everything on that. No doubt about it. If you have chronic Lyme, I’ll reiterate, the iSpot Lyme test is the way to go. Matter of fact, there’s a newer test that they have for – some of these co-infections are very, very difficult.

PCR testing is a way that we test for many different bacterial infections, but regular PCR testing does not work, typically, for these co-infections. It’s called an ePCR testing. There’s a laboratory; it’s called Galaxy Diagnostics. They’re out of North Carolina. They do a test for these co-infections that works much better. It’s a newer testing, but absolutely works. It’s called an ePCR type of test. The problem with the test is they’re negative oftentimes because when the bacteria are too low in number, they’re not detected, so this test actually shows them in the lower amounts.

David:
Lyme is serious. It’s serious. We have a friend of ours, mutual friend of ours, whose daughter was about 30 years old, and she’s been fighting Lyme for years and recently passed away. This is a serious thing. What does someone do if they have all these symptoms? Where do they begin?

Dr. Pompa:
You have to work with the practitioner that understands this. First and foremost, get some of the right tests done, but again, that’s going to a practitioner who understands this. David, my passion is training more doctors around the country to understand what to do with these neurotoxic illnesses. These things are bad news.

Again, I think that my biggest criticism oftentimes with the alternative doctors is that they are still not getting upstream to the actual causes. “Oh, great. We’re going to put someone on a bunch of supplements,” which is oftentimes needed for certain things. “We’ll do this cleanse, this colon cleanse, liver cleanse.” Listen – not so simple. You have to go upstream to the cell first of all.

My 5R's are a roadmap on how to detox a cell and how to fix a cell. You don’t get well until you fix the cell. R1 of my 5R's is remove the source. You have to remove the source, and this is my criticism: Most doctors aren’t. You can give people the best, perfect diet in the world, and all the greatest supplements in the world, and run all the greatest tests, but if someone has a biotoxic illness from Lyme, or mold, or a heavy metal thing going on, these are big boys. They shut down the detox pathways. You’re never going to get them well. You’re never going to get them well.

Then finally they go into a doctor, and they get some tests – who knows? They say, “Oh, you have heavy metals.” Three months later, you’re heavy metal free? Are you kidding me? It took 20, 30 years to bio-accumulate those heavy metals deep in your nerve tissue and in your brain, and to think that you’re going to get rid of them in months, it’s ludicrous. Mold illness, biotoxic illness – very specific how we pull those biotoxins away from the biocomplex. It’s not even just about killing these bacteria. You have to pull this biotoxin out of the body.

Again, True Cellular Detox™ is something I teach. This is the key. You have to change the cell. Detox, real detox – you have to get the cell working so it starts to unload these toxins. Then when it does unload these toxins, you better be down here dealing with it and assisting it to get it out of the body. That’s True Cellular Detox™.

Colon cleanses, liver cleanse, this cleanse, that cleanse, this juice cleanse – that’s not real detox. That can assist the body downstream, but real detox has to occur at the cell, David, and that’s something you’ve heard me teach for years now, that message I’m passionate about. I just feel that it’s not real. A lot of what’s an alternative, it’s just not the real deal. It’s not upstream high enough, and it’s not at the cellular level.

David:
One of the things that I’ve heard you speak a lot about, it’s not just about supplements. It’s what you just said. It’s really taking the time to understand the source and what caused because otherwise it’s like putting Band-Aids on all over the place or it’s the street sweeper, which I’ve heard you mention many times, where it’s sort of just moving toxins around your body. They redeposit somewhere else, and then all of a sudden, it can cause more challenges.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, right. Most of the cleanses are like those street sweepers. You ever get behind those?

David:
Dust all over the place!

Dr. Pompa:
There’s dust all over the place! You’re thinking to myself, “Is this what my tax dollars are paying for? Really? This thing is cleaning what?” It’s amazing that those things still exist, right? Every once in a while, I see them. All it does is throw dust in the air, and it comes back down and makes everything look bad again. That’s what most cleanses are. It’s really not doing anything upstream. Yeah, David, that is the key.

Look, I could’ve eaten the perfect diet. I did. I exercised. I did everything right. It was until I got rid of, upstream, the mercury that was deep in my brain in my pituitary – listen, I did everything for my thyroid, which my blood work was normal, but I knew my hair was falling out. I was cold all the time. All the thyroid symptoms – wasn’t working. My adrenals were shot. I couldn’t adapt to any stress. My hormones were a mess, literally. No matter how much I tried to balance my hormones, my adrenals, my thyroid, didn’t work. Certain things would get better, and then it would just tail off again. It was always this massive dance that I was trying to do.

It was when I got the mercury out of my pituitary, which runs my thyroid, runs my adrenals, then I got my life back. It’s not rocket science. You have to figure out what’s going on upstream. Lyme infection, these co-infections of Lyme, these are the big guns. It’ll shut down all your detox pathways. Now you start bio-accumulating heavy metals. By the way, David, this is another big problem. Many people who have treated years trying to get rid of Lyme, the problem’s heavy metals. News flash – the heavy metals allow the Lyme to protect itself from your immune system around the metal.

We have these things we talked a little bit about last week called biofilm that protect our bacteria from our immune system. In these biofilms, these bad guys take root – the Lyme infections and other infections, Candida and all this, parasites oftentimes. They hide from our immune system in the biofilm, so our biofilms become, instead of a safe haven, it becomes a toxic playground for bad guys. We talked last week about how we utilizing these phage to go in and kill some of these guys, but the bottom line is is that in that biofilm, you have heavy metals that exist. These Lyme and bad guys protect themselves from the immune system in and around the heavy metals. Crazy, symbiotic relationship, but we know it exists.

Even throughout the body, we know that these guys can hide from the infection. Even ingesting mercury – that’s how crazy that symbiotic relationship is, so our immune system doesn’t go after it. The point is is this: Many times people don’t get well completely because they’re not addressing the heavy metal component of the Lyme disease. I have seen most often – not always – most often, if you have Lyme, you have heavy metals.

Listen, here’s the thing, David, you have to understand about these infections. They are opportunistic, meaning that they – many people in areas – that there’s estimates that there’s certain areas on these east coast that 90% of certain communities have Lyme in them. Why aren’t they all sick? It’s because their immune system is dealing with it just like a herpes virus, just like Candida, just like anything else. They’re in us, but our immune system keeps it in check. Everything’s fine. What happens?

Things like heavy metals can come in and lower that immunity, and now these things take a hold, and take a foot, and now you’re in deep trouble. They’re very opportunistic. Typically, they don’t happen by themselves. They happen with other stressors, perfect storm. That’s something I’m always saying. It’s never just one stressor. You get physical, chemical, and emotional things going on at the same time, boom. The bottom falls out. It lowers that immune system, and now these guys take over.

David, I could never ever get rid of my parasites or my Candida until I got my heavy metals down to a certain point, and then magically, these things start taking care of themselves. It’s very similar with Lyme. Oftentimes, we have to be dealing with these downstream other stressors before we can get the immune system to beat back the Lyme itself. Listen, no product on the market is better than your own immune system. That’s what can kill off the Lyme. That’s what can figure it out. That’s what can chase it back is your immune system.

Really, we need to be asking ourselves, “How do we better that? How do we better that?” That’s everything that we do, of course, but oftentimes, we have to get rid of these other big boy stressors. Oftentimes, it can be mold, too, David. You end up with mold exposures in Lyme, so it’s this triple combination perfect storm.

David:
You mentioned that. We were down in Florida, and we went to my grandmother’s, remember? All of a sudden, we walk in, and we start – our noses are itching. Our eyes are itching. We start sneezing, and it was in that lobby. Could it be as simple as that, or does that stick with you, or is like the chronic where you’re in your house, or you grew up with the ceiling that was full of water, and it was probably up there?

Dr. Pompa:
I don’t want to tip our hand next week too much, but I’ll say this: If you’re healthy, you go into an exposure like that, you leave, your body deals with that. You may not feel well for a day, a couple hours, who knows? If you are already stressed – heavy metals, Lyme disease, or living in a mold exposure – and you walk into that exposure, you can be sick for days, weeks at a time. That is the bigger issue. When you get these – my dogs are going to bark here.

David:
I hear them jingling.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. There was an explosion outside or something. Anyway, so that’s the bigger issue. By the way, if people have these serious mold exposures, now they become sensitive to mold for years, so they’re feeling good. They got out of their mold exposure. They did the right detox and got the mold or the biotoxins out of their body, but now they walk into a restaurant that has mold, and they’re triggered.

Matter of fact, there’s a saying that Dr. Shoemaker uses called sicker quicker. Their immune system flares up this major attack, and all of a sudden, they’re as sick as they were two years ago or a year ago. They’re going, “Oh, my god. What happened?” They walked into a mold exposure, and it just triggered everything all over again. It takes some years to turn off those genes, those pathways that set up that massive immune reaction.

That was me, David. I was well, and then I would get exposed to certain chemicals. It would still make me sick. Then I would get into a mold exposure, and I would get sick. Now that doesn’t happen. We went into your grandmother’s, and it was a nasty mold exposure, and I was fine. In the past, that would have made me sick for days. Yes, we have to get someone out of the exposure. We have to get the stuff out of the body, but then the healing has to occur. Again, a lot of my cellular healing work, that’s what that does.

David:
You know, the body has the ability to heal itself, and what can you do to support these different functions? What does someone do? We have listeners here, both on our podcasts as well as watching the video of Cell TV here. Let’s say they’ve got these chronic conditions. They’ve been to doctor after doctor. It’s like one of the unknowns. “Oh, you’ve got this. You’ve got that. You’ve got fibromyalgia.” What’s the first step in discovering is it Lyme? Is it something else? Where should they go? What should they do?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, David, again, I think that they have to have access to these tests. We’re training more doctors around the country that have access to these better labs, and better tests, and doing the right heavy metal tests, and things like that. Absolutely, they need to – again, DrPompa.com, my website, is one avenue that we can find someone for you.

There’s three of us that do virtual appointments, so I have clients all over the world. I do it via Skype or phone. I don’t take that many on, myself, anymore. I do still take on some. I still love it, but we have doctors. We have two others that do virtual appointments, too, so just because we don’t have a doctor in your area, that doesn’t mean that we can’t help you. That’s really the avenue that I would go. When you call in the 1-800 number, you wind up actually speaking to Marilee. I speak to most of the people that call in. I try to, just to interview them. David, you know that. You’ve seen me do it just to see if it’s something I think we can help or at least point someone in the right direction, which is oftentimes very helpful.

Our goal is to train more people, trained in cellular detox and cellular healing, trained in these proper detox methods that really work. Again, my pet peeve is most of what’s out there on the market with detox, David, at best, it does nothing. Oftentimes, it is stirring the bees’ nest or the street sweeper just throwing things in the air.

Ultimately, I have more – I have conversation after conversation with people who think that they just live their lifestyle the way they want to live it, and then they do the juice cleanse. Then they do the 10-day cleanse they picked up at Whole Foods. Really? It’s not so simple. The biochemistry doesn’t work that way. The real deal is what I’m passionate about teaching. It’s what I’m passionate about bringing to the world. It’s why we do this show.

We combine my cellular healing work – it’s the most science-based work that I believe is out there – connected to epigenetics and all the pathways that are really being affected by the onslaught of toxins that we’re faced with today, but it’s combined with ancient healing. I’ve done a show on ancient healing. Watch it. Listen to it – about bringing intermittent fasting, and different types. Way water, bone stock, these types of ancient things, even just water fasting together with the cellular healing – the new and the old. Magic happens. Go figure.

We’re training doctors in this method. It works, David. It does. You’ve seen it. That’s what we’re about. That’s what we’re about. We have something very, very unique that most, even alternative doctors, I believe, need to tap into. Bringing the ancient with the modern is the magic.

There’s a massive gap right now happening in the science world. There’s all this amazing science, and yet what are we doing with it? We know that we can change genes with chemicals, but we also know that we can change genes for the better. Frendo, relax, okay? He’s all upset because things are going outside, so you hear him in the back.

David:
Poor Frendle.

Dr. Pompa:
All you hear is grrrr, grrrr. Anyways, it’s a passionate topic of mine, David, because the answers are out there. I lived it. Most people around us, even the practitioners that we’re training and surround us, they lived it, either them or their wives. They have an amazing story. There’s a group of us that are really trying to get this message out. That’s what this show’s about, too.

David:
Any final thoughts for today on Lyme?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I think that if you have symptoms that aren’t going away, some of the symptoms that I mentioned at the top of the show – if you have just unexplainable things going on, and you’ve been looking for years – listen. You have to rule this out. This is a big, growing epidemic. It’s massive. So many people have it who don’t know what’s wrong. Lyme and its co-infections, this is big deal.

I’ll tell you what. Stay tuned next week because again, if you have an unexplainable illness, if you’ve been sick, and you don’t know why, if you have some weird things going on, stay tuned next week because mold could be your answer.

David:
Thank you, Dr. Pompa. Everyone, thank you for tuning in to Cellular Healing TV, episode 72. This is David Asarnow with Dr. Pompa. Wish you an amazing rest of your day and a fantastic weekend, and we’ll see you next week.

Dr. Pompa:
Thanks, David.

David:
Thank you.

Transcript of Episode 71: Gut Health, Microbiome, and Bacteriophage

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Warren Phillips and special guest Shayne Morris.

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Warren:
Hey, we’re live, Episode 71, got an amazing special guest, actually, and a good friend of ours, Dr. Shayne Morris, with us this morning, and of course, our main expert, Dr. Dan Pompa. We’re really excited. This is a huge topic, a lot of interest, a lot of emails, especially from our female audience, on your gut. We’re going to talk about—throw out some buzz words like microbiome, phage, some big scientific words. Dr. Shayne is a PhD biochemist, so some of those will just squeak out of him, but between the—an interaction between Dr. Pompa and Shayne we’re going to get some great truth on gut health. How to get control of it and how it affects you at the genetic level, all kinds of great things today. If you want to learn about your gut health today, you’ve turned on to the right show. Dr. Shayne, welcome. Dr. Pompa, take a hold of the reins, and let’s get on this topic about gut health today.

Dr. Pompa:
Hey, Shayne, Dr. Shayne, let’s decide right now we’re going to call it phāge or phäge. Now, I think the correct is phāge. However, we’ve always…

Dr. Shayne:
It is, indeed. Phāge is the correct term.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, we always evolve back into phäge, right?

Warren:
I know.

Dr. Pompa:
So we all do that, for sure.

Warren:
Phāge.

Dr. Pompa:
We’ll try to keep ourselves on the phāge word. But anyways, look, this is a topic, Dr. Shayne, that you know a lot about. It’s a topic that interest me some years ago, and just understanding what these little guys are. When we talk about the microbiome, I think everybody knows all the probiotics and all the buzz words there. But what the heck are bacteriophage, Dr. Shayne, and why are they so significant for a healthy gut? And microbiome, and guys, when we throw out that word microbiome, we simply mean all the good bacteria, bad bacteria, fungus, viruses, all of these organisms that live in the gut. That’s the microbiome.

Warren:
Even parasites, right, Dr. Pompa?

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right, even parasites. When that’s healthy, you’re healthy. When that’s healthy, you have a healthy immune system. Your brain works normal, but what the heck are these phage guys all about?

Warren:
You mean phäge, just kidding, phāge.

Dr. Shayne:
These phage guys are pretty amazing. So when you think about bacteria, and yeast, and fungi, they’re very, very small, right? And then when we talk about our overall bacterial load, we carry through our gastrointestinal tract or our gut billions and billions of them. I’ll take it one step smaller. You could literally fit a thousand phage inside of a bacteria. So they’re extremely small, and what we think their job is they’re essentially a virus that keeps the bacterial cultures in check.

And when we think about it, this is both good and bad, right? So Dr. Pompa and Warren, you guys have all experienced through your years of clinical practice dysbiosis, and SIBO, and all these issues where the GI gets a little bit disrupted. For the most part, we usually focus on the pathogens to do that disruption, but in many instances, it’s the good guys growing where they shouldn’t be growing, right? We don’t want good guys in places they shouldn’t be.

Dr. Pompa:
Right.

Dr. Shayne:
So in those instances, we turn to herbs. We turn to diet. We turn to so many amazing things to help us, but a lot of times that leaves us with questions when we can’t quite make it happen with your patients. And so this is an old technology. Bacteriophage have been on the planet as long as we have. They are—like I mentioned, they’re a virus that only attacks bacteria. They’re completely harmless to us, and they’re everywhere. They’re ubiquitous. They’re in every ocean, in every river, in every soil. There’s, literally, trillions of them. There’s more of phage than there are…

Warren:
Oh, no, we just lost Dr. Shayne.

Dr. Pompa:
Well, I saw his reception going in and out.

Warren:
Yeah, I noticed that.

Dr. Pompa:
Well, while we get him back—Warren, you can work on that, but…

Warren:
I wanted to bring this back really quick because there’s something that I was going to ask you, Dr. Pompa, at the beginning of the show, and I think it’s timely and it’d be a reason. It’ll also explain the reason why I haven’t been on the show for a couple weeks. But where do you—where does a human microbiome start?

Dr. Pompa:
From mama, yeah, so Warren just had his new baby, of course, and yeah, so you inherit your microbiome, your good, bad, all these bacteria, bacteriophage that we’re talking about, which are actually these little viruses. But yeah, you inherit that from your mom when you come through your uterus. So if mom has a good microbiome, a good balance of these microorganisms, then guess what, baby does. If mom doesn’t, baby doesn’t. Oh, if baby doesn’t go through the birth canal…

Warren:
That’s what I wanted to bring up, yep.

Dr. Shayne:
Did I lose you guys for a second?

Dr. Pompa:
Anyway, oh, we were just—we segued because we lost you. Yeah, no, we lost you.

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, that was very, very peculiar. Sorry about that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so we…

Dr. Shayne:
Back to the phage though, the phage are nature’s way of balancing all the bacteria that we live with. How do they do that? Well, phage actually destroy bacteria, and there is a phage for every bacterial species. So of course, we have phage for E. coli, phage for salmonella, phage for staph, phage for Clostridium, and so on and so forth. So the variance is they’re already in you. They’re around you, but what we can do as clinicians, and healers, and scientists is we can say, well, we want to take advantage of these phage, and load them when we need them.

It’s no different than these old stories. You guys may have heard where they take people to rivers, people that have leprosy, and they douse them in a river, and this was back in the 1900's. And then, amazingly, they would heal. Their sores would start healing. Well, since that time, we’ve studied those rivers, like the Ganges, and they have phage that kill leprosy. So they’re just an amazing little virus that kills bacteria, and that is an amazing part of keeping our microbiome healthy.

Warren:
So leprosy is a microbiome issue on the skin?

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, it’s a bacterium that attacks your skin, right? It took us years to figure that out, of course, because we knew about the disease before we looked at the possible issues. However, so what we look at phage as is they are a prebiotic. That’s what we like to refer to them as, as a prebiotic. They allow for the good bacteria to flourish when bacteria want to flourish by allowing the phage to keep the other elements of the terrain under control, if that makes sense?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and Dr. Shayne, I can tell you from a clinical perspective.  You spend much of your days in the laboratory. I spend many of my days working with very, very sick people, right? And when the brain doesn’t work, when their gut doesn’t work, obviously, or when they have immune challenges, whether it’s autoimmune with different things, we know that the microbiome, according to studies, affects these things greatly. I mean, the more and more studies come out to show that a balanced bacteria in this gut right here or this brain, because this is actually called the second brain, dramatically affects the way this brain works. We look at people who can’t lose weight. We can actually see certain shifts in that microbiome for the negative, and realize that that’s somebody who’s going to have trouble losing weight, or we have seen people who have certain memory problems, depression, certain psychological problems, and now they’ve correlated certain bacteria down here with this.

Matter of fact, you’ve heard me talk a lot about Stephanie Seneff’s work from MIT, she’s the senior scientist there, showing that glyphosate, a chemical that is ubiquitous in our food supply right now—spraying it on every grain, every conventional grain. I’ve written many articles about it. Well, this chemical destroys certain bacteria in the gut, which we need to make certain neurotransmitters for our brain to work. So I mean, I say all that just to show the people the correlation of why this is such an important topic because so many people today have problems here, and so many people have problems with their immune system, with autoimmune. And this balance of bacteria really plays a role.

So from a clinical perspective, I can tell you, Shayne, throwing more probiotics at the gut hoping for a good result, which we see that in the autism world. We see that in practically every natural practitioner. My gosh, we see it on TV now. Use probiotics for this. Use probiotics for that. Yogurt, everyone’s advertising it. However, I find that often it doesn’t work. Well, why? And what I hear you saying and what I see clinically is that some of these bad guys, like E. coli, which is probably the number one bad guy that keeps your good bacteria from taking root, so there’s practitioners just throwing more and more good bacteria in a form of probiotics down their throat. And yet, the E. coli are just too darn strong, so going in there with a bacteriophage like the product Ec that you created—Warren, I don’t know if you have the product. I do downstairs.

Warren:
I probably do in my cupboard.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ll run down while you guys…

Warren:
Warren’s cupboard, you’ve been there. It has everything.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, and mine too. You’ve been there too. So we have it all.

Warren:
Mine is stacked deep. I want to show Shayne. Just so you know. I keep all my Systemic Formulas just in case I need them.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we’ve ran down with the thing and showed—and they see Systemic everywhere. And by the way, I don’t know if we gave Shayne the proper formal introduction.

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, he did well. Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, but Shayne is the leading biochemist for Systemic Formulas. Hey, look, I use a lot of different products like most of you. We have practitioners watching, and we also have public watching. It’s all over Warren and my cabinets, Systemic Formulas, and for many reasons that we’ve talked about. Shayne, I think you make the finest products in the world. I do. I think that you’re one of the brightest fellows that I know, man, and we have some…

Warren:
With integrity, that’s what I love about you.

Dr. Pompa:
My interest in cellular healing has been years and years. As a matter of fact, Shayne, I’ve talked about you on so many of these shows that most people are like, “Oh, so that’s the guy.” But, I mean, we’ve became kindred brothers talking about the cell. My interest of the cell was a clinical, from a clinical aspect and clinical experience. Your interest was from years of study through your biochemistry, your degree. I mean, we have great talks there. So anyways, that’s more of the introduction.

Dr. Shayne:
There you go. It’s funny that you—when you go back to your clinical side, there’s so many things you talked about that damage the cell, but that also damage the microbiome, right? That damage the bacteria within us, whether it’s the work that you’ve mentioned with Stephanie, the mercury, the heavy metals, the organophosphates, the organochlorides, PCBs. What we should point out is I think many people are getting an understanding that, wow, those things are not good for us. They’re in our diet. They’re in our lifestyles. They’re in our water. But what we can now say, I think, confidently, at least we will be the first people saying it, Dr. Pompa, you and I, is they can also hurt our phage microbiome, right? They can hurt the things that are keeping the bacteria in the prebiotic environment in check.

Dr. Pompa:
Right.

Dr. Shayne:
So they’re very sensitive. When we grow these things and we’ve manufactured, they’re not the toughest guys in the world.

Dr. Pompa:
Right.

Dr. Shayne:
So I wouldn’t be surprised that they’re a little bit of the canary in the coal mine. You hurt your phage dynamic. Now the bacterial dynamic comes out of sorts, and now you have—well, you mentioned, you lead to GI dysfunction. You lead to neurological and immunological where have all these metabolic, all these struggles, but it begins with some of the most amazing little creatures so to speak, our microbiome, right?

Dr. Pompa:
And I think, clinically, that’s what many people are seeing now. It’s not about just adding just, obviously, these popular seven to ten probiotics that you find in your store. I mean, when you have an overgrowth of something as strong as E. coli, these little bacteriophage, they go in there, and they just pick out these bad guys. Literally inject their DNA. I wish we had a picture of one of these. Hey, Warren, I mean, you’ll go on up and pull it because I think our audience would be really…

Warren:
As long as at some point I can show a picture of my daughter I’ll do that for you.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, and actually, I see some pictures of Shayne’s little girls back there behind him. You probably don’t even know they’re back there. Anyways, these little guys inject their DNA, and there’s a few ways that bacteriophage work. But one is by doing that, and then they can actually multiply, and when they kill that organism, that bacteria, they explode. And all these little guys go everywhere. So that’s one way of how they take over, and then guess what they do? They start going after the next bacteria. I mean, this is clever.

Shayne, I mean, listen, this got my interest when I started reading that this is the way that Russia and some of these other Eastern Bloc countries, this is their main form of antibiotics, and there’s a reason for that because here’s why. Number one, it doesn’t kill good bacteria. It specifically kills the bacteria that you’re trying to target. And here’s the other thing. When you give an antibiotic, it only goes so deep, meaning that it gets weaker and weaker as time goes on. So the bacteria only can affect so much in depth, really. But these guys actually get stronger and without ruining the good bacteria so, number one, target specific. Number two, it goes deeper, and number three, it doesn’t wreck the good guys. My gosh, I mean, Dr. Shayne, I have to ask that question. Why in Russia is this the number one antibiotic, and it’s cheap and easy, and yet, here in the United States, we’re not utilizing this absolutely amazing technology?

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, there was really a convenience factor. When they discovered antibiotics, like you said, it goes after everything, wipes out everything.

Dr. Pompa:
Everything.

Dr. Shayne:
And at the turn of the century, 20^th century, we were all about what we call infectious disease, right? That was our focus. Get rid of it. Get rid of infectious agents entirely. Well, in Russia, and Georgia, and Ukraine, they, of course, had the same problem, but they stayed on task with the phage. But it was much more a difficult challenge because instead of going after a molecule that you can just shotgun approach it, you have to set up a system to cultivate phage, right? You grow them. You have to find a phage for a particular bacterium. So it’s time consuming. It takes research and thought.

And if you show up in critical care with somebody in Georgia, let’s say, if they don’t have that on hand, they actually can’t help you immediately because they would have to grow what you need. And so that’s why, on the Western side of the world, it was not adopted. Because people weren’t putting the time and energy into making phage that would appeal to most different scenarios, right, so…

Dr. Pompa:
Well, it’s easier just to throw a napalm, and just wipe it all out is what you’re saying.

Dr. Shayne:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. Now let me ask you this. Can a drug company patent a phage and put it in…

Dr. Shayne:
Good question. I don’t know that they can patent them because, as you know, we’ve been using them since 1919 was the first case of using them for a particular condition. So I don’t know that you can patent them, but certainly, there are moments that I think they might try to convert them into drugs because they are amazing things. They don’t—you don’t develop resistance, right? And again, when we return to the idea that they’re specific, they’re natural, right, when we look for phage, we get them out of natural places, like water, like sewer, like our own feces, right? Not to bring that up because I guess some people might gag, but again, they’re everywhere. They’re in us. They’re among us. They’re throughout the planet. And we just go to those places, and we allow them to grow.

Just like you would a ferment, right? When we want bacteria to grow, we create a fermentation, and it’s that simple. So it’s the same concept with phage. So the nice thing is they’re harmless to the things that we don’t want to harm. They’re amazing to re-terrain your microbiome. So they’re essentially a prebiotic, and as a prebiotic, they set the stage for GI health. They’re one of the things to set the stage for GI health, all right? Not unlike fiber. Not unlike other foods that we love to ingest to help build our terrain for our microbiome.

They’re good for—excuse me, skin, skin microbiome. There’s a phage that we’re looking at for skin. So there’s all of these niches that we want to start offering up as a prebiotic to people like yourself, Dr. Pompa.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Warren:
Let’s take a look at some of these guys so we…

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, they’re really cute. You got to see them.

Warren:
Can you see my screen?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Oh, there they are.

Dr. Shayne:
There you go.

Warren:
Oh, why does it keep going away? Can you see it?

Dr. Pompa:
You have to talk.

Warren:
Click to hide or show participants. Present to everyone.

Dr. Pompa:
So Shayne, what—with that [00:18:48]…

Warren:
Oh, there we go.

Dr. Pompa:
Good. It’s holding with me talking. Shayne, why don’t you speak to that little guy right there?

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, so what you see is you see this little—well, it almost looks like a lunar lander, right? And at the very top, you’ve got the capsule that holds all of the DNA for that phage. Then you got the legs, and then you got the little channel. So what the legs do is the legs are what give it its specificity. Every phage has a different set of legs to attach to a different bacteria, and that’s where the specificity comes in, so for the thousands and thousands of bacteria that we care about, there are thousands and thousands of phage that attach to just that bacteria. So it’s fairly amazing.

So the DNA, like Dr. Pompa described, if you look closely, the DNA then, once this bacteria lands—or excuse me, this phage lands on a bacterium, it punctures the bacteria, injects the phage. And why it would do that is because it wants to reproduce. Phage don’t reproduce on their own. They need to reproduce inside the cells of the bacteria. So they inject their DNA. The DNA tells the bacterial cell to make a whole bunch of me. And as it does, it replicates inside the bacteria, and essentially bursts the bacteria. And like you said, there’s now a thousand phage where it started with one.

So this speaks to the idea that it can change the microbiome because the microbiome is essentially a biofilm. And if you can get deeper, and deeper, and deeper—but what happens when you run out of that specific bacteria? That phage simply just washes out of your GI tract into the sewer system because it no longer needs to be there. And then, hopefully, as you move through the rest of your life, and you tackle things like organic foods picked from the earth, and you’re drinking good water, you re-phaging yourself naturally. You go kayaking, and you swim a little bit in lakes and streams, again, your re-phaging yourself naturally. So these things are—they’re amazing, and they’re necessary for us to maintain our health.

Warren:
So when I was—when I go camping and jump into a stream, or like I used to do in Montana all the time, always getting in the water, that was good for my phagome, virome.

Dr. Shayne:
It was good for your phage, yeah. You were phaging.

Dr. Pompa:
I remember I was swimming in this nasty lake the other day, and a big one attached to my head. And the dang thing was kinda—what do you do when that happens?

Warren:
That was your brain. I mean, that was your head, Dan.

Dr. Pompa:
My kid had to rip it off, and the legs were—I mean, it’s just these things can get pretty nasty if you’re in the wrong water.

Dr. Shayne:
It’s good for a Halloween costume, though, Dan.

Warren:
So here’s a picture of a real one, which is pretty cool, right?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, they really look like that. I mean, you can see. I mean, look above that. I mean, there’s pictures above that one. Those are real shots too. I mean, these things really look like these little Martians.

Warren:
Yeah, right there.

Dr. Shayne:
The other point is you can see how small they are because the cells they’re attaching to are bacteria. And remember, bacteria are, compared to our own cells, extremely small. They’re the size of the mitochondria. So these things are really, really tiny. You can also now see how delicate they would be. Look at the legs. You break a leg, and the guy is out of commission.

Dr. Pompa:
This is—yeah, poor little guy, but I mean, these things, it really is amazing. I think the reason we haven’t seen it in this country is more and more some dollars and cents. Because I think the problem is drug companies making something natural into their own patent. And I think that if there was a way to make money for a drug company, I think we would be using more phage than we are antibiotics. That’s my personal opinion. Yeah, but…

Dr. Shayne:
And when you—your doctors that are watching, they can certainly take a moment after we’re done and do a little search on phage research. And it is a growing trend, even in the United States right now, because they are so amazing. For all the same things we’ve talked about earlier, there are no—remember the shortcomings with whether it’s herbal or drug approaches. These guys, they’re natural. They’re everywhere. So there’s no harm in humans. In fact, there’s very little—there’s a few instances where they’ve found antibodies against them in our bodies, but there’s been no reported issues with people having an allergic reaction, so to speak.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s another thing I love about it. As a practitioner, you don’t have to fear dosing, over dosing, side effects, like that. I mean, sometimes people do get a die off when these suckers go in, and they start wrecking their enemies. Boy, you can get a die off, which we call Herx reaction, and get some mild symptoms from the die off of that particular bacteria. I have to say, you glossed over something. A big problem with people trying to get rid of E. coli and other gut pathogens is that they get into the microbiome, which the microbiome is in all of—I’m sorry, the biofilm. A biofilm is in all of us. It protects our good bacteria. They could pull back into this biofilm, and protect itself from our antibodies and the things in our bodies, even our acids and things.

But the problem is when the bad guys overtake that biofilm. It’s very difficult with herbals, often times, antibiotics, anything that you’re trying to kill with to get into that biofilm. These little guys get in there, right, Shayne?

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, so based on that, again, that description. Where you have one becomes a thousand becomes a million, and they’re only going after their particular, what we call, host. Yeah, they’ll move right through a system of bacteria because they—as they explode one bacteria, they release a thousand more. So they grow exponentially. Everything else, as you mentioned, dilutes, right? It gets diluted as it goes. So it exponentially gets lesser where these exponentially get larger. And then in the end, when they run out of hosts, they move on. They move back into nature, back through the sewer systems.

Just a funny story, the company we’re working with, when we look at different phage, we—the samples we’re collecting, or they collected, I should say, and then we start to study, are mostly sewer system samples from around the world because they are so important—it’s important for us to be looking at the prebiotics that are related to humans, and those prebiotics, of course, are going to be found in the sewer systems because they were at one time in us, right? They were part of our own microbiota around the world. So it’s the best place to look, all right? If we looked in the oceans, it’s—of course, you’re looking for phage food. It would be for every bacterium. The ocean is full of phage. That’s too many. So we focus on the human phage, which tend to be found in human feces, all right, the human skin and so on.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s interesting. I found an article, and they were talking about—and we talked a little bit about fecal microbial transplants. Taking a human sample of bacteria from one person and giving it to another, and it’s lifesaving in the area and, obviously, many other conditions. Literally, there’s certain bacteria in humans, as we’re talking about, and in this case, viruses and other organisms that you just can never put in a pill. Well, these people doing this fecal microbial transplant from one human to another, the article was talking about that they believe that these phage are the reason why these things are so effective. I mean, I believe it could be it’s the phage, it’s this, it’s that, but again, the phage plays such an important role in you, in me, in this person. There’s so many of these phage and so many of these microorganisms that, literally, you put them into someone else.

So it doesn’t surprise me what you said about the sewer system. It’s when people are getting their life saved by a fecal transplant from one human to the next, I’m sure the phage, as in this article stated, play a significant role in why that’s so effective.

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, and I hope that phage stays a part of the natural products world instead of moving out of that world into whether you call it the drug world or what have you because they really are—they’re no different than fiber. They’re no different than other elements of what we need to engage in. Fermented foods, and healthy cooking, and pulling the carrot out of the soil, brushing it off, rinsing it slightly, and then going and eating it because it’s still covered in, well, good soil mind you, covered in bacteria that you want and the prebiotics you need.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah.

Warren:
Yeah, that’s why, when you’re fermenting, you don’t wash your vegetables because, if you do that, you wash off the bacteria you’re looking to culture phage, as well. So that’s why you—un-rinsed organic vegetables is the way to go with fermentation.

Dr. Pompa:
A hundred and eighty degree concept that we are always blowing up, if you will, myth busting, is this whole topic of trying to kill off everything, right? Everyone’s very into—if you go into every school on the planet, there’s always the bottle of Purell, right? There’s always the bottle of, basically, killers that everyone’s putting on their hands constantly, right? I mean, all the time, all the time. And again, we have—that was very popular. Science has really moved away from that in many ways, and yet, it’s still happening. That people really are thinking kill, kill, kill because that was very popular at the turn of the century, and in the public’s eye, it still is. Let’s run from every virus. Let’s run from every bacteria.

On the scientific end, we know that’s impossible. As a matter of fact, the people who don’t get sick have a very good microbiome starting on their skin, starting in their mouths, starting in their ears, their eyes. And they are very comfortable around all types of different bacteria and viruses, and they don’t get sick because their balance is so good. So as you know, the hand sanitizers or the triclosan in every soap that we use, we’re really disturbing that microbiome, our first line of defense, correct?

Dr. Shayne:
That’s right, and you’re probably disturbing your virome, which is, of course, the phage and the other natural viruses on you. So I’m really glad you pointed that out because the killing piece is where people want to naturally go, and I don’t want phage to be thought of as even that, right? They’re there to reset the microbiome terrain. So they’re a prebiotic.

Dr. Pompa:
Right.

Dr. Shayne:
Not a killing tool. Because I think the killing tool, even when we talk about E. coli, E. coli is—many E. coli strains are friendly to us. They absolutely inhabit us, and they become part of the normal microbiota. So even when we look at phage products to work with our terrain, we’re avoiding good E. coli. Just so you know. We’re avoiding good versions of what people have demonized because we need them. It’s really—you made the point brilliantly that we really want to benefit the terrain for the prebiotic. We’re not going after killing or any antibiotic effects because that is the wrong approach.

The hygiene hypothesis, which you mentioned, is where people went too far, and people are chronically ill. And then what happens is it takes you years to get your microbiota back, and as you mentioned earlier today, once that’s dysfunctional, you’re dealing with now physiological problems. Not bacteriological problems, right? Because you’ve destroyed the bacterial issue—or the bacteria that you needed, you now have true physiological issues that were being fed and maintained by the bacteria.

Warren:
So is this is good argument for not bathing, and then is it—so I cannot bath anymore or shower?

Dr. Shayne:
Well, there is an argument to that, yes.

Dr. Pompa:

But you know what? But that’s a good point, right? Yeah, you bathe, and you use just a real good natural soap, which utilizes fatty acids, etc. You’re not knocking down your good bacteria. It’s not going to kill your microbiome off. But when you’re using soaps with triclosan, which are basically, I mean, literally, insecticides, if you will. You can use them as such, even killing herbs. I mean, they’re herbicides for goodness sakes, and they’re putting it in all these soaps. So anytime you see antibacterial on a soap, beware. You’re killing your good guys as well.

But I think this is a really important topic though, Shayne. Because think about what’s happening today. You’d be hard pressed to find a human today that hasn’t been on many rounds of antibiotics. There’s a time and a place. We both would acknowledge that, right? But many rounds of antibiotics for all the wrong reasons, right, whether it’s a simple sore throat that, yeah, they’re giving you antibiotics because they’re worried about strep, or a simple earache, or this and that. I didn’t grow up that way. That’s for darn sure.

But here’s the deal. We’re putting people on antibiotic after antibiotic. They’re using all these hand sanitizers. They’re using antibacterial everything. It’s all around. They’re antibacterialing every surface in their house, and at the top of the show, I made the point that your microbiome affects the way that your brain works. The way, obviously, your gut works and even how your immune system works. We can tie it into almost every process in the body.

So we are disrupting this important thing that shares these bacteria in your gut and on your skin. Share their DNA with your bacteria, with your immune system, with your cells. Even to make cells, to make other cells and other immune cells, and my gosh, I mean, it’s amazing today that—but it’s not. It really gives an explanation of why people have to go from one antibiotic to the next, and this thing, and that thing, and they’re sick all the time. I mean, it’s a microbiome disrupted world.

Dr. Shayne:
It is, and you made a point that you could actually be helping another industry in what you just said. It just occurred to me. Not only are we—we’re becoming more prudent with what goes into our own bodies, right? We’re becoming more prudent about how often we want to engage in an antibiotic. You’re telling your patients don’t engage in it if it’s not critical. However, there’s still a huge source on the planet of antibiotic abuse, and that’s in the animals, right, and in our food supply.

So what you just—you just gave, maybe, someone that is friends with someone that raises cattle on this show that they need to look at the animals’ microbiome, the animals’ phage, maybe phage products they get their hands on, so that they’re not shooting their animals full of things that end up in our food, in our water supply. Because that is now one of the leading sources of antibiotics in the environment is through the animal world that we want to keep in check, right?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Dr. Shayne:
Probably not intentional but you just gave someone on your show an idea to go out, and work in a different world to help us all out.

Dr. Pompa:
Well, it’s funny because they actually use phage in the animal world. In the sense of you have to have the meat, infection becomes a big problem, right? You have raw meat hanging around. Well, they spray it with phage because it’s harmless to humans, and it kills instantly. Matter of fact, I have to say that, and that leads me into where I wanted to go. One of your latest creations was a salmonella phage. That it should be in every kitchen in America. Explain what it is.

Warren:
Here it is. I have it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, go ahead.

Warren:
You got it.

Dr. Shayne:
One of the—for the fermenters on the planet, and of course, Dr. Pompa and I both and Warren hang out with a young lady. She’s a fermenting wizard, and whenever we are talking to her, salmonella tends to be an issue with sometimes organic food, food prep areas, and so on. So yeah, what you just said is you could take what Warren just did on a surface, on a plate, or on a dish because it is just a phage. It’s a prebiotic.

Warren:
On your hands, right, you could do?

Dr. Shayne:
On your hands, yeah, oh, he’s even got the…

Warren:
How about my face?

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, it is completely harmless, and it’s…

Warren:
My eyes? Is that fine, my eye virome?

Dr. Shayne:
Well, I don’t know that we’re quite ready for that yet, Warren. That’s not a good idea. But the great thing about that is, you’re right, you can now level the playing field with something like salmonella. Unfortunately salmonella is never really a friendly guy, unlike E. coli. Yeah, so when you talk about food prep and other things, you’ve now got a tool that allows you to—and for those of you that do ferment, it’s challenging but quite exciting. This is the tool in one way. You can use it as a prebiotic. You can use it as a pre-food prebiotic, so to speak.

So what is it? It’s a phage that is—actually, it’s a grouping of phages, just so you know, that is specifically grown to target salmonella, right? So it’s just salmonella. If you’re trying to create a prebiotic environment for, let’s say, staph, this isn’t going to work, right? This is—remember they’re very, very specific, and that’s what makes them brilliant. It also makes them a little bit frustrating for people that want the shotgun approach. I want to kill everything. Well, that’s a mindset change. This isn’t—you don’t want to be in the mindset of kill everything.

In fact, the hygiene hypothesis shows, as Dr. Pompa said, the more we do it the more sickly we become as an environment, which means we have to do it more, right? The more sickly you become, the more you have to be worried about what you’re going to come up against because now you’re in trouble immunologically. Your immune system is weak. You have no—you haven’t, essentially, trained your body to become tough, to see the environment and react appropriately. You’ve been aseptic, so the first time you come in contact with, essentially, a weak pathogen you could be on your back for a week, right?

Dr. Pompa:
It’s an opposite thinking, Shayne. Look, I went—this whole year, I was around so much sickness. You have five kids. They’re always sick, I mean, because they’re around schools, right? And my kids, they don’t get sick as often as other kids, no doubt, but, I mean, they were around me, wiping it on me, sneezing in my face. Not once, I didn’t get one cold. I didn’t get one flu. I didn’t even—I mean, nothing.

Warren:
Or if you did, you took a nap and you were better.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly.

Warren:
You started feeling a little tired or…

Dr. Pompa:
Maybe I’m being—never once. I think my kids were trying to get me sick at one point. Because they were like, “You’re the last to go. You’re going to get this one. You’re going to get this one.” And I don’t worry about not drinking out of their glasses. If they have a full—I drink out of it. Honestly, I think because I purposely, often times—I do not care.

Warren:
I used to think you were nuts, Dr. Pompa, just so you know, back in the day when I first met you.

Dr. Pompa:
What’s that?

Warren:
When I first met you, Dan, I was all freaked out how you lived your life. I’m like, ah, yeah, just don’t worry about it. It’s all over anyway, and you’re eating their food, and I’m washing my hands. Doing my 80's training from growing up, and everything you learned on TV, and washing your hands, and not touching things. Now I don’t care. I don’t purposely, like you, run through sneezes, but I’m not afraid anymore.

Dr. Pompa:
No, I mean, listen, if you had a—if you don’t have a good immune system yet, then I wouldn’t practice my habits because, most likely, you will overwhelm your immune system. But, yeah, I mean, I travel a lot too, right? So I mean, I have these snotty people sitting next to me. I’m just going, eh, no big deal. I’m really not worried. Even our dogs are always in our bed licking our mouths. That’s the other thing. When you look at the study, people who grow up on farms…

Warren:
Gross.

Dr. Pompa:
People who grow up on farms have the greatest microbiomes in the world. I mean these people are exposed to animals constantly. And it’s funny, I always say, my father, my father was the bricklayer who knew nothing about nutrition but, yet, knew everything. My father always said, “It’s good if your dog licks you in the mouth.” So he always—somehow that guy just knew it, man. I mean, honestly, my father was a big—not worried about the typical things that someone coming out of his generation were worried about. I don’t know. He just had that intuitive spirit about him.

Dr. Shayne:
Breaking out of the irrigation ditch, that kind of stuff, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Let me go get a bottle of Ec.

Warren:
I have—I actually have it here.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay.

Warren:
Here is one of Dr. Shayne’s creation, Ec, and then the other one is SI. I’ve been spraying SI on my skin. That’s why I have a little spray bottle top that they gave us and Ec.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, both of those in your kitchen, obviously, are fantastic.

Warren:
Maybe they could take these on Naked and Afraid. You could sneak them on the show, Naked and Afraid, and they could put Ec and SI in the water before they get sick and have to get carted off.

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, there you go.

Dr. Pompa:
Shayne, clinically, I’ve used both of those to go in first as a prebiotic, just as you said, and just, basically, open up. Because I don’t—all of my bacteria work, which you know I love to do, it—so many people have overgrowths of E. coli and have too much E. coli. I don’t care what bacteria you give them. You could eat all the ferments you want. You could take all the good bacteria that you want, and it just simply will not take root with those overgrowths like that, especially of E. coli because they’re so dang strong. But when you go in ahead of time with some of those guys, now you just set the stage for your good guys to take root.

I don’t know the analogy. What that would be for gardening because I am not a gardener or planting. Anything that I plant, typically, doesn’t take root, but that’s—it just makes that soil that perfect soil, so to speak, so all your good plants can rise up.

Warren:
That’s why a lot of these people, when they take—do ferments and they have done this. I take probiotics, and they’re like, my gut’s still—I’m still constipated. I’m still sick, still bloated. Still can’t eat certain foods. They’re virome could be off. They have a—well, not their virome as much, but they don’t have enough—they have too many of these bad bacteria. So no matter how much they eat they’re still not able to digest food, and bloat, and all these different things. And of course, constipation is really important too if you’re missing certain bacteria and inflammation that happens in your colon.

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, and what you’re referring to is the wonderful connection between the gut and the brain, right?

Warren:
Yeah.

Dr. Shayne:
If the gut isn’t telling the brain to function properly, then the brain’s not sending messages to do peristalsis and other amazing things. But I want to circle around real quick. When you mention things like, Dr. Pompa, with the lifestyle, I want to remind everyone that this is—these are two—I wish I had a thousand phage to offer everybody, but we really only have two at the moment. So really, to be prudent, you still want to do all the other things that we recommend regarding the microbiome, right? We still want all those other recommendations. These are two tools, but they’re very specific tools, and they’re just the beginning. They’re just the beginning.

The microbiome is the new frontier. I mean, it really is. I mean, you and I have been talking about for a while with the respect to cellular healing, but we’re just at the tip of the iceberg. So if we keep pushing the frontiers of what to do next, you’re going to make huge strides in your doctor’s practices, right, because we’re just beginning this process. We’re just beginning to know what it means to deal with phage, and microbiome, bacteria, and environment in prebiotics, right? There’s a whole new message to be said about what we eat and why we eat it. And that’s going to be the new frontier that I hope you and I can tap into.

You and I talked a little bit about prebiotics. You and I discussed that I think that some of those herbs we eat aren’t about the medicinal properties physiologically but are about the medicinal properties to bacteria. It never even makes it into our body. It changes our bacteria enough that they convert it into things they need to grow and to—and it’s all those things that we’ve given up over time because we’ve decided that we want preprocessed food, and we don’t like to hang out on farms, so to speak.

Dr. Pompa:
I think you just raised one more good point. And it’s today, I think the focus is on the macrobiotic foods, right? I mean, we eat our vegetables, and good grass-fed meats, and these things, but as humans, we’re not eating the herbs that we used to eat. We’re not eating a lot of these things that really have a major impact on our microbiome and our cells at the cellular level. The one thing I love about Systemic Formulas, in every formula you make, you always have a combination of—well, I shouldn’t say always, most often, a combination of nutrition, and what you have named the herbalomic component to that formula. Meaning that certain herbs that target certain function as well. So it’s really, look, when we look at God’s medicine, people say the food, but really, it’s the herbs. Herbs are really God’s medicine.

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, absolutely.

Warren:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
You do this combination, and Systemic is really known for that, that combination. I have to say that, as your grandpap—people love stories. He was the Doc Wheelwright that years ago formulated—he’s the guy that didn’t have a biochemistry degree. Shayne does, folks that are watching, but his grandfather didn’t. He just traveled the world and, basically, learned from the world, Aborigines, tribes. Matter of fact, your mom—she would tell stories just saying he would just—all of a sudden he’d be gone for months at a time, right? I mean, do you—I’m sure you don’t recall that.

Dr. Shayne:
Well, I do recall because there wasn’t very many Christmases I would see him, right?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Dr. Shayne:
There was one time they had to call up Coast Guards in other countries to find him because they really needed to find him once, so they had to start going through government agencies in a different country to actually track him down because we needed him.

Dr. Pompa:
I say that to show you here’s a guy that gained his knowledge—I mean, a brilliant guy, right?

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
I mean, most people would have trouble having certain conversations with him. Went and learned from the world. I mean, gone.

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
I mean, just those types, right? And then here you come, the grandson, with that brilliance, man. I mean, you know I have so much respect for your brain.

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, I appreciate it. You guys, you bring the clinical element to the story, and I bring the big words just to confuse people, right, like herbalomics. That’s my job is just to confuse people.

Dr. Pompa:
No, no. You do a—I always say that Shayne’s not your average biochemist. He actually can communicate.

Warren:
I’m sure he can.

Dr. Pompa:
But, hey, with all that said and like I said, Shayne, you and I have worked. We both have such an interest in the cell, and really, we need to bring you on this show more often to talk about more products. Because I think our viewing audience is a really educated audience, honestly, and they would love…

Warren:
They’re loving this stuff.

Dr. Pompa:
So where are we going next with phage? I mean, I’ve given you a list of bacteria that I know are associated with autoimmunes, like Crohn’s and colitis. That’s down the road, but what’s coming up next?

Dr. Shayne:
The next plan is we’re trying to—so because it is a costly endeavor, we’re going after the ones that we don’t have to redesign the growing process. So just to give you guys another little bit of a nerdy information. In order to grow a phage, you have to be able to grow the bacteria they live on. So imagine a big brewer’s vat, right? You fill that brewer’s vat full of the organism that you want to grow the phage on. So for example, salmonella, let’s just say. You need to grow that whole vat, let’s say it’s 500 gallons, full of salmonella. You add your phage, and then a few days later you can harvest the phage because it’s completely consumed the salmonella. And now you have trillions and trillions of phage which you harvest as useful prebiotic.

So the key here is you have to grow the bacteria in order to grow the phage, and so we’ve had to look at key bacteria that are easy to grow right now technologically speaking, practically speaking. Some of the ones that we’re looking at next are—the last of the easy ones is going to be staph, right, so staph aureus, Staphylococcus aureus. This is a skin microbiome issue, right? We want to keep the skin healthy, so there’s various species of staph aureus. Some of them we refer to as MRSA, right? They’re methicillin resistant. It means that there’s antibiotics called methicillin that won’t kill them and there’s others. Well, phage doesn’t care, right? So we’re going to be—that one can be grown with oxygen in the air, and that’s going to be our next go around. Beyond that, we’re working on the technology to grow what are called anaerobes.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, I can’t wait.

Dr. Shayne:
Bacteria that don’t use oxygen but we’re having to redesign that vat that I mentioned. Because that vat pumps oxygen in in order to…

Warren:
Get one to pump nitrogen in.

Dr. Shayne:
Right, exactly. We’ve got to pump in things that they like, and keep things out that they don’t like, like oxygen. So it’s a little more technically challenging, so it’s down the road a little bit. But each time we do this we get better at doing it too. We get smarter about it.

Dr. Pompa:
Well, I have to ask you this. Charlie is a chemist that I love there. That works down there at Systemic. How’s Charlie doing with all this growing of bacteria?

Dr. Shayne:
Well, it’s funny you mentioned that. So pretty good, he is a chemist. So what I’ve done is, as you know, you and I have a couple of concepts we’ve been playing with. One started with the NO/ONOO cycle. Won’t go there today. It’s just more confusing. But the NO/ONOO cycle led us down the pathway to ADMA, which allowed me to meet people at Utah State. So there’s a gentleman there that is becoming more interested in knowing the research we’re doing with him up there, but he’s actually becoming more interested in the microbiome. So he’s—I’m trying to coax him away from Utah State to the microbiome project here in Ogden.

Warren:
Is this a Cellular Healing TV job offer? Is it happening right now?

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, Warren, it is, yeah. So trying to get him down to Ogden so that he can take over the, essentially, fecal bacterial project. Because that’s what he—he’s better at it, right? That’s just what he does. He works with bacteria, and genetics, and other amazing things, so I’m in the process of trying to raise the bar just a little bit this year.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, Charlie’s afraid. He’s a chemist who’s afraid of bacteria whereas I’m not afraid.

Dr. Shayne:
Dr. Pompa, you and I have at least—we’ve taken him—he was the epitome of the hygiene hypothesis, right? He wouldn’t go anywhere without lathering himself in chemicals. So we have taken him from that guy to a guy that spills bacteria on him and doesn’t panic, right? He doesn’t run into the room, and strip down, and jump into a shower. So we’ve come a long ways with Charlie.

Warren:
He’s the little guy—like the mom with the little clip, the climber’s clip, with the little Purell thing, so he can sleep with it.

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Warren:
He has it on, and it’s hanging from his belt loop all the time—before I shake your hand, afterwards.

Dr. Pompa:
Well, hey, listen, this is a great topic, Shayne. We’re going to have you on more often. I think people are really interested in some of the deeper roots of some of these products, honestly. Obviously, you can bring that, so we really—Shayne, we just love and appreciate you.

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, thanks so much for inviting me. It’s been a lot of fun.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, we’d never have the products that we have, the healing tools that we do. I mean, they are some amazing tools that you’ve developed and still developing. So we love you man. Thank you.

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, we all love you, and I love you guys. You guys are awesome.

Warren:
And I appreciate—Shayne, the reason I got on the show today was because I knew you were going to be on. Because David does the show, I’m a busy guy, and I can’t do the show every week anymore. And I just—just to hang out with you because I can’t…

Dr. Shayne:
I know, but we get to hang out in the summer at Sunshine, so yeah, this is nice.

Warren:
So I was having a baby, and I want to show a picture, Dr. Pompa.

Dr. Pompa:
New dad, oh, yeah.

Warren:
There she is.

Dr. Shayne:
Oh, awesome.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, my gosh, she looks like Rebecca right there, holy cow.

Warren:
Well, she always looks like Rebecca. There she is. Five days old there. She’s now, I don’t know, it’ll be two weeks on Saturday.

Dr. Shayne:
I love that they love to be bundled up like that.

Warren:
Yeah, look at that. I mean, that’s like a little—like a little spider got a hold of her and spun her around.

Dr. Shayne:
You unbundle them, and you let their arms and legs come out, and they freak out.

Warren:
Yeah, they do. They do that response. I can’t do it right now because you won’t see, but they go [gasp].

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s the way they are in utero, man.

Dr. Shayne:
Taken where they’re from.

Dr. Pompa:
But look at those fingers. Talk about spider fingers. Those are long fingers. She’s going to have big hands.

Warren:
She’s a pro. She’s a swaddler. We swaddle her like crazy. See if there’s anymore pictures of her.

Dr. Pompa:
Hey, Shayne, was that picture, back behind you, is that your little girls, one of them, two?

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah.

Warren:
Hold that up.

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, right in the middle. Yeah, that’s when my—that’s when she was small. She’s now 16.

Dr. Pompa:
Come on. Go back there and grab that.

Dr. Shayne:
Want me to grab it?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Warren:
We’re big into family here on Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, can you see it?

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, that’s bigger than I thought. It’s just blown up on me.

Dr. Shayne:
So mine’s right here.

Dr. Pompa:
Ah, look at that. Oh, so she had a little cast on?

Dr. Shayne:
Had a little cast on. Yeah, she’s a little crazy rebel.

Dr. Pompa:
How old was she?

Dr. Shayne:
Also, she’s boss of the group.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I can tell. I can tell. I can tell. They’re all going off her lead. How old was she there?

Dr. Shayne:
She’s only 4, I think, 3 or 4. I mean, that’s just when they start—they started at 3, both of my girls, dancing. I’ve been a dance dad ever since. And I swore to myself that my kids would be ex-sports people, right? They’re going to wakeboard, and snowboard, and ski. And they do that, but they’re passion is dance so, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’ve got those. I’ve got those kids over that…

Warren:
Yeah, they’re the extreme. I always wanted to be a dancer.

Dr. Shayne:
It’s hard. I’ve tried. It’s really difficult.

Warren:
I was being sarcastic.

Dr. Shayne:
I was being serious. It’s hard.

Dr. Pompa:
Warren, those piano legs, he’s not dancing. I mean, he’s not getting his legs high enough.

Warren:
Nope.

Dr. Pompa:
But I guess I could’ve been the dancer of the group here with these legs.

Warren:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
We can regress here really quick.

Warren:
Oh, we have. We have.

Dr. Pompa:
Shayne’s like a brother to us so we could—it could go down hill fast. Speaking of wakeboarding, I was going to go there how you slammed me and slapped me on my face the first time I wakeboarded.

Dr. Shayne:
Oh, yeah. I didn’t mean to do that.

Dr. Pompa:
Slap.

Warren:
I was there. I was there. I saw it.

Dr. Shayne:
You only do it once, and then you…

Dr. Pompa:
Everyone on the lake heard a slap, and yeah, that was Pompa’s face hitting the water. Watching that toe edge. You’ve got to watch that toe edge, yeah. I didn’t even know what you meant by toe edge until that. All right, well, look, everyone, we’re going to have you on…

Warren:
Cellular Healing TV, happy 4th of July, have a great weekend. Go eat some. Jump in some lakes. Get some phage. Have some fun, and be safe. God bless.

Dr. Shayne:
Yeah, take care. Thank you all.

Warren:
Thanks, Dr. Shayne.

Transcript of Episode 70: Overcoming Multiple Chemical Sensitivity

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and special guest Cameron George.

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Dr. Pompa: Folks, welcome. It’s Dr. Pompa. If this wasn’t edited out, you would see that Dr. Pompa is here starting the show by himself for the first time. They trusted me to run the show. David Asarnow, if you were here live, you would see what actually happened. If you’re watching the recording, you’re going to miss semantics on Dr. Pompa’s first show that he got to do by himself, but I assure you it wasn’t just my fault. Things happen. No, I’m here with an amazing client of mine, Cameron George, who you’re going to have the pleasure to meet and hear his story, and I had talked a little bit about Cameron’s story, I think, before when I talked about fasting and the need for fasting, and fasting saves lives. Fasting, really, is one of those things that dives deep into the innate intelligence and utilizes it, and the body just knows what to do. It shuts down often times our desire for food, and sometimes we force people to fast. And in Cameron’s case, his body, his innate intelligence, forced him to fast. I’ve seen this many times, but Cameron, welcome. And say hello to our viewing audience.

Cameron: Yeah, I mean, thanks for having me. I’m always excited for these conversations, for sure.

Dr. Pompa: Absolutely, and I said this on one of our flip-flopped failures there in the beginning of you coming on with the technology issues. I believe, Cameron—just I really do love you and appreciate you. Because, I believe, like myself, you got sick for a reason, and you’re called to something greater. You really are. You’re just a pleasure to work with. You’re a pleasure to coach because you’re such a bright young man, and it’s your story that is going to give you and already has your authority. Just like in my case. So with that said, Cameron, I just—I want to go back. I want you to tell them story. I could never do it justice, but I remember the first time that I heard your story. I mean, my jaw hung wide open. I mean, I took notes, copious notes. I mean, just pages of notes because I really wanted to capture—there were so many unique details. So take us all the way back. There’s a lot here, but let’s see if we can…

Cameron: Yeah, I mean, the depth and complexity of my story is pretty vast, and just thinking about this, I’m trying to just hit on the most high points. And if there’s anything that you want to elaborate more on, then we can just do that. But you know—well, I can just, I guess, start where I’m at now kind of and then go back. So, basically, my most complicated set of symptoms has to do with chemical sensitivities and severe autoimmune, hyperreactive to everything in my environment whenever I was at my worst, absolutely. And so it led me—my entire process cumulatively led me to the point just being incredibly, incredibly sick to where, for a very long time, I couldn’t leave my own home or anything, and everything under the sun reacted to it. So I think that it’s easy to—well, it’s relatively safe to hypothesize at this point in time that I—just going back. Because me and my parents, me and my doctors, I mean, everybody who I’ve actually gotten help from, and going with that upstream thing and investigating, we’ve just talked about it endless times. We’re trying to go back to my childhood. Trying to go back as far as we can and try to get a good picture of what my biggest stressors were, and how this—how I ended up here because it didn’t happen overnight, but it was a long process. So, I mean, it’s pretty safe to say, at this point, that I came into the world, right, at birth with a little of, probably, genetic susceptibility. It was obvious to my parents, really, from—well, I don’t know about day one, but it was obvious pretty quickly because I’m a family of three brothers. I’ve got two brothers, one older, one younger, and I definitely was the black sheep of my family. Behaviorally, everything was just something, and my parents always described it as—they didn’t know how to describe it. They just thought that I was a little bit harder to deal with and handle, but I was still in a functional range to where no average doctor, your family doctor down the road, is going to say there’s something bad wrong with you. But they started small, and it tended to have this snowballing affect over time. As a child, as a baby, I was just—I guess now we could say that I had the—I had an impaired ability to be able to adapt physically, psychologically, and emotionally to anything, really. So everything new, I was always afraid of. I was just sensitive, afraid. Psychologically, I was either doing really—I was either really happy, or I was really, really sad, crying, throwing tantrums. Every single thing that I would start in my life, whether it’d be learning to swim, whether it would be riding a bike, it always happened much later because I was just—I would get in these comfort zones, and I was very afraid to step outside of them. It was just—I was more of a fragile, and they saw that, which led to, actually, me having a lot of different behavioral pathologies and stuff too that just made me much more prone to impulsive behaviors. Because now looking back on it, now what we know too is that, obviously, susceptibility, and then, who knows, vaccines early in life, or all that kind of stuff, or whatever my mom had in her fillings and things like that, just that kind of stuff. Anyways, my behavior was such at an early age that I was incredibly impulsive. I was constantly looking to—and my belief at this point, kind of self-medicate to get to a certain feeling or a state, right, which I felt comfortable in myself and having imbalance, right, whether it be neurologically, obviously, biochemically, and stuff. There ended up, at a certain point in my life, because I was so scared of certain things, it ended up I just felt—I had this instilled sense that grew over time of inadequacy. Actually, the show—what, two weeks ago, you guys were talking about orthorexia. I really resonated with that on so many different levels.

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, I’ve heard.

Cameron: Yeah, I can tell you why too, but just an instilled sense of inadequacy at some point because there was something wrong to where I didn’t have the confidence to do anything. I ended up getting made fun of. I was all over the place in a lot of ways, and it started at an early age with me just subconsciously—not consciously, obviously, doing it at the time, but just when you look back at the behaviors that I did, everything was a dopamine chasing behavior, right? I would go after—starting from as soon as I could start choosing what I wanted to eat, and even before then, I was incredibly picky. But it started out with things like the—self-medication, things like the drug like foods, the super sugars. Everything that I wanted to eat and was so picky—and I mean, that’s kind of normal for a kid, but for me, it was to the extreme. I would cry. I would do anything that I could. I would just—I would only eat the breads. I would only eat the crackers, the cookies, all this kind of stuff, and that was really something that I just sought after. Not just as a fun thing, but then whenever I would eat too, I would binge eat, and the binges got worse as time went on. I remember just sitting and buying—once I got old enough to where I could actually—I was actually going places on my own, I was carrying around all the money that I had. No matter what that was. From allowance when I was a kid or wherever, and I was going out, and I would just go to places like the gym where everybody else was playing basketball. And I would buy—hang out there all day, and I would buy soda after soda after soda. I would drink sodas all day, and literally, just feeling like that I had no control over it, right? When I got to the end of that soda, I remember feeling absolutely depressed. Like what am I going to do now? It was that bad to where it was I really felt like I had to have it, and obviously—so those things obviously created more problems.

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, and just fast forward a little bit. It went from that addiction to running. I mean, running…

Cameron: Oh, absolutely, yeah.

Dr. Pompa: So talk a little bit about that because you really—the OCD behavior came out there. I mean, you were running—and again, I’m going from memory here. I mean, 100 some miles a week running. Am I right on that?

Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. When I got to the point when I was in college, I was running about 140 miles a week, and that was—there were a lot of guys, a lot of athletes that do that that are able to find some way to create a homeostatic balance around their training. Where they understand stress, rest and they do certain things to do that. It’s very hard to do, and I certainly wasn’t doing that because, at that point, I was using running, basically, as a drug. I was using it to keep my head above water because I wasn’t functioning. I wasn’t feeling the way that I needed to. I had chronic fatigue at a very early age. Like I said, with the foods, the foods graduated into a little bit heavier things. Like becoming an insane caffeine addict at a very early age drinking sodas all day. I mean, for years, I drank soda more than I did water, for sure, hands down, and I would do anything for a soda. And I’d be mad when we went out to eat, I was kid right, and my dad would say, “Hey, you need to get water.” It’s just because I was constantly seeking—I was seeking medication on some level, and it’s safe to say now. And I never just felt right, and I didn’t really think about it. I just was—I just figured that’s the way that I was. And so that graduated to, obviously, worse and worse things, and I hit a point where, obviously, the foods and stuff became a problem. And I was a little bit obese, and so that created a lot of different problems emotionally because now I’m in the—I’m about at the age where it’s important, right, to look good, the junior high-ish type of age, right? And so now I feel even more inadequate and some of these emotional deals. And so then I go firing back, and I switch my addiction, which is always what I was doing. I was switching. I was always trying to find the right answers. I’m someone, I wanted to be healthy, but I just had no clue. So I said, okay, I’m going to switch it to something that is healthy. I found distance running, which I still love to this day. I think that there’s a healthy way to do it, a very unhealthy way to go about it, but I found that once I found that, I just rolled with it. I mean, I put absolutely everything into it, but because I didn’t really—I still was using it as a drug, if you will. I could never keep my training balanced, and I put so much, an enormous amount of effort into it. I mean, the way that I would train—overtraining was always my problem in that, for sure, hands down. I mean, it was just—I couldn’t stop myself.

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, and then you started to get injured after a while. Injuries started coming. You could’ve predicted that, right?

Cameron: Yeah, so there was always the highs and the lows when it came to that. I was either running really, really well just because I was putting out so much effort, but then I would just crash. I’d have three injuries at once. I’d have an Achilles, a knee, this or that, and then obviously, I was totally crap for months or even—and then I’d get extremely depressed based on that because I was putting everything into that, and that was my current level of self-medicating what was going on inside my body in order to feel a certain way. But, yeah, so that started sometime in adolescence, early to mid-adolescence sometime. Probably 12 years old or so, and then I did that for several, several years. But then in that time, I still was doing caffeine stimulants, and at some point, I switched to drinking Diet Cokes because now I’m concerned about my weight. So it’s like I was under the illusion, just like everybody else was, right, that okay, well, I’ve got to stay light for distance running, right? I’ve got to do that. I was so focused on it. So yeah, I just started drinking Diet Cokes.

Dr. Pompa: Let’s fast forward to what I believe is the tipping point. I do like to talk a little bit about—so you got the job. I guess distance running, I guess you should bring that to a close. I mean, you got injured. You weren’t able to do that, but you ended up working at Best Buy, I believe, right?

Cameron: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Pompa: Well, then Best Buy, and I believe the tipping point was the apartment. So let’s get there just for the sake of time.

Cameron: Okay. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, so the whole distance running thing, obviously, it got to a certain point I crashed. Finally, it was just up, down, up, down, up, down. I ended up going and running in college at the University of Arkansas, and that stretch just became even more, and more, and more. And so I accumulated so much stress. Like we said, the 140 miles a week to where, all of a sudden, literally, I just crashed and, literally, had three injuries at once. So that was what I was—I was totally dependent on that to even function in things, to put a function, to feel good …

Dr. Pompa: That’s gone now.

Cameron: Yeah.

Dr. Pompa: So that’s gone because you couldn’t do it anymore. Literally, it got to where you couldn’t do it.

Cameron: Right, exactly.

Dr. Pompa: Is that when you started working at Best Buy? I mean, how did—where was that connect?

Cameron: Right, so I crashed, and all of a sudden, now I’m on the couch for weeks, months, and I dropped out of all my classes. I was in college at the time at the University of Arkansas. I just—now, whatever was masking my symptoms, which would have been, obviously, the insane amounts of working out and things, now it’s the veil was lifted, and I’m on the couch with debilitating chronic fatigue. I couldn’t force myself to do anything. I was so depressed, so everything. Months went by. I moved back into my parents’ house, and then that was the point in which they said, “Hey, we need to get some help.” And I wanted to get some help too because I didn’t know what was wrong. So what do I do? I go to the campus psychiatrist or whatever. I think we shopped around a little bit. And I ended up seeing a psychiatrist, and just put my total faith in them at the time because I was just desperate for something that could help me. And then, obviously, they said, well—they gave me all these labels for my symptoms, anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, this and that, and then attention deficit because I couldn’t focus and things like that.

Dr. Pompa: If they label you, then they’re able to medicate you.

Cameron: Right, exactly, so they gave me the label, and they told me, okay, well, but you’re in luck because we’ve got all of these great drugs that actually—I believe they refer to Adderall as a miracle drug, which now it’s a laughable thing, but, yeah, and so I ended up being put on Adderall. And that was really the big tipping point in which my life—yeah, I was already chronically sick, right? I was chronically fatigued. My body was giving all these symptoms, and I was just trying to control it wherever. But Adderall was a massive stress for just…

Dr. Pompa: Cameron, if I had a nickel for every call that I get with a damaged kid from Adderall and what it does to the brain. It always starts off pretty darn good..

Cameron: Right, right, yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Pompa: But anyways, yeah, so that was a tipping point for you.

Cameron: Oh, it definitely was because it’s like I’m susceptible. I’ve accumulated a lot of stressors. I couldn’t get off the couch, right? So I’m already sick as we know now, and now, we say, okay, well, they told me this drug can get you off the couch immediately, and it will get you back working and functioning. It’s a miracle drug. It’s just great. I mean, all these kids are on it, and it’s absolutely great. And obviously, for me, someone who is prone—my situation is prone—at the time, was prone to going after stimulants of any type. So obviously, Adderall was going to have me at hello. It was going to have me from the beginning, and it was just going to—I was going to be addicted to it. Because, obviously, yes, the first time you take it, when you’re debilitated on the couch and everything like that, instantly, obviously, it gives you endless energy, and you feel like Superman, and all of the things that—it’s this massive—it’s this illusion affect because we don’t really understand at the time, biochemically, how it creates that.

Dr. Pompa: You thought you found your answer. You became Superman again, right?

Cameron: Oh, absolutely, and so that worked in the beginning, or I thought it did. Even though it made me feel good but, really, my perception under the influence of a drug like that was never balanced. I just had massive rush of dopamine all the time. I felt good, but really, a lot of times I got less things done while I was on it just because I was all over the place. But sometimes I did. So I did that, and all of a sudden, I was able to go back out. And I had already previously worked at Best Buy, actually, that you mentioned, back three, four years before that. So I went back and was just trying to get back on my feet, and my goal was to get back into running, eventually, after I took care of my injury and stuff. So I got back, and I was working in Best Buy. And man, the longer that I was on Adderall, I lost my mind more and more. Just, it’s no different than a drug addict on the street. I mean, the kids…

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, no doubt.

Cameron: Adderall is an amphetamine. Okay? It’s speed, and whenever we say—it’s got the same mechanism of action that the meth does. And you see how it destroys people’s lives, and it does. It totally hijacked my brain, which that’s what drugs do, but hijacked it in a way that it took all of my preexisting impulsivities, and just put them on steroids. I mean, it put them on steroids to the point—once I was doing so many things. I was working at Best Buy and whatever. I just started doing things. At the end of the day, I didn’t even recall what I was doing. It’s almost like they were doing themselves, which this is the experience that you get if you talk to people on campuses who take Adderall. They say, “Oh, I love Adderall because I take Adderall, and I have a paper due, and it does the paper for me, and I don’t even remember doing the paper sometimes.” Yeah, so I was doing that, and before you know it, I was going on buying sprees, applying for credit cards, doing absolutely crazy things. And then once I was on Adderall more, and more, and more, I just became much more uprooted from this objective reality that a healthy person would experience on a daily basis. And that’s what happens to all drug addicts. That’s why drug addicts act in such insane irrational ways, but it appeared that it was working right because now I’m working 16 hour shifts, no problem. I’m Employee of the Month at Best Buy. I’m bouncing all over that place.

Dr. Pompa: You were Employee of the Month every month I think I remember saying.

Cameron: Right, yeah. Oh, yeah, exactly. Like month, after month, after month, and everyone was just like—I mean,  I’d just be right from customer to customer, just jumping in their face, and they’re just like—and then I was very incredibly articulate because it’s a brain steroid. It’s an override to the brain, for those front parts of the brain. That you can just talk really quickly, and you can be really smart on your feet, whatever. But yeah, it just precipitated a whole host of different circumstances and events that unfolded after that, and I just continued to go farther and farther outside of my reality, massive buying sprees. Once you’re on a drug like that for a long time, you tend to start to connect with people who are in a similar unhealthy cognitive state or state of perception.

Dr. Pompa: Always, always.

Cameron: Always, it is. Because what’s going on in here, you don’t like to be around the people that aren’t necessarily like you because those people make you feel uncomfortable. You would rather—they don’t support your justifications. Because inside me the whole time, I knew that what I was doing was not fixing the problem, but since this was hijacked, there was always a justification every single day. So I continued to do that and continued to—as that unfolded, before I knew it I’ve got a whole host of incredibly toxic people in my life that before I was around all healthy guys, distance runners. It was totally 180°. And now I’ve got a whole new set of problems because where there becomes—once I was on Adderall for a period of time, my system was so jacked up. Now it’s brought my brain and my body out of balance enough to where now we have to add in other drugs to control the symptoms that are created by the imbalance, right?

Dr. Pompa: Always going, it’s always going.

Cameron: Exactly, which is why so many people end up on cocktails of drugs later on down the line when they go this route, and so before I know it, I’m on Adderall to get up in the morning. I’m on a benzodiazepine like Xanax, or a Klonopin to go to sleep, or alcohol was what I was doing at the time. I just turned 21, so I had to…

Dr. Pompa: It brings you down, yeah.

Cameron: Yeah, no, exactly. And it got to the point where, obviously, just like with any drug, you get tolerance, right? Receptive tolerance to where, all of a sudden, you need more of the same substance to get a same effect. I was doing that, but it just created an insane set of circumstances. So like I said, the massive buying sprees included everything from—I had a good employee discount, right, at Best Buy, and I was buying things, and then reselling them because I got them for cheap and stuff, and doing all this kind of stuff. And I had an apartment. I had a 700 square foot apartment that was full of just thousands…

Dr. Pompa: This is what I’ve been wanting you to get to. I mean, this is a major point.

Cameron: Just to paint the picture of where this insanity took me.

Dr. Pompa: All right, go ahead.

Cameron: I had a 700 square foot apartment that was full of, at any time, dozens of very expensive flat panel TVs, speakers, speakers that are $2,000 a piece. I mean, we’re talking, you’d walk in here, and it was like an electronic store. When I was just at work all day, and I was—I never left work without buying something, right? And I was constantly just on online. I was flipping things. I was buying things, all that kind of stuff, and then that wasn’t enough, and so I’m like, well, I’ve got to have something more interesting in my apartment. And so before I knew it, I was buying exotic animals. Well, I started with dogs. I got a couple dogs. I got a Great Dane and a German shepherd. Which 700 square feet, it shows you…

Dr. Pompa: For people watching this, this is for real. Okay?

Cameron: Yeah, this is absolutely for real.

Dr. Pompa: I’m pre-framing him for the next part. Yes, this is real.

Cameron: Obviously, when you’re in these hyper-impulsive states that are just so imbalanced, you can’t—there’s no control, and I’d just go higher, and higher, and higher. My behaviors do too, especially since I was already prone to impulsivity before this, and I ended up buying—so just cut to. I ended up having a 700 square foot apartment with thousands of dollars of electronics everywhere, high-end electronics everywhere in my apartment. It looks nice. Nice furniture. Nice everything, incredibly nice. I had three monkeys, two dogs. I had two exotic parrots, and I had some other things coming and going. There was some different small reptiles, things like that, even the—I actually had a fish tank that had some piranhas in it at one point, which was totally insane. You find these people who—had some breeder who was willing to sell me anything I wanted to. I mean, it was, but my apartment was just a direct reflection of the chaos and the imbalance that was taking place in here. That’s what I created. It was just—I mean, it was a cluster. It was absolutely just insane. I mean, it was absolutely insane. But not only that, the toxic people that were around me, endless life threatening horrible situations came with that, people coming over, people doing things. I was impulsive. I ended up just having so much money charged in credit, but also from buying TVs, and then reselling them, and doing all these kind of things. I ended up just buying things for people. At one point, I even—I was so out of it I just bought somebody a car, one of my friends. It was, hey, anyone need a car? But this is—never prior to my Adderall situation would I ever have done any of these behaviors, absolutely not, but I was, literally, just—I mean, for lack of a better term, I was tweaking on the stuff. I like to use that term because I can’t think of anything else.

Dr. Pompa: Fast forward just due to time. These animals, I mean, starts—I mean, they’re pooping and peeing all over the apartment.

Cameron: Yes, at least in the night. So one toxic maintenance, which would be the Adderall, precipitated deeper imbalance, which led to more unhealthy decision making processes, which were the animals and all those different types of things, and then now, I have—I’m way in over my head because I’m delusional, right? I’m straight up delusional, and I get all these animals, and have no clue what goes into taking care of these things. And so I end up with an apartment full of animals that there’s poop everywhere. I mean, the amount of poop, I had a room full of dog poop, literally. I mean, the amounts, you couldn’t even see the floor. It wasn’t even that just—it didn’t even register at some points because I was out of it, and I was all over the place. I was at work. I was doing a million things. I was out partying with this person or that person at this point, which it never was a part of my life before that. And I just would come back, and I was just, nah, I’ll deal with that later. Deal with that later. And yeah, I mean, there was animal feces everywhere, bird, monkey, everything. I had to have people next door, a girl next door, actually come and babysit my monkeys, and change their diapers.

Dr. Pompa: One of the big—another tipping point was the parrots died, right? Didn’t the parrots die?

Cameron: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Pompa: I mean, it was like the bird—the canary in the coal mine was the parrots, correct?

Cameron: Yeah, exactly. Literally, canary in the coal mines.

Dr. Pompa: They’re getting sick, right? I mean, it’s if the animals start getting sick, hello? You’re living in a toxic environment.

Cameron: Exactly.

Dr. Pompa: So the parrots die and then tell—go ahead from there.

Cameron: Right, yeah. So that’s actually even worse than the canary because this is a parrot, an African grey that’s supposed to live 60 to 80 years. He was 5 years old. I come in one day, and he’s dead. Well, actually, one of my monkeys died first. It’s about as likely for one of these types of monkeys that I had to die as it is for a human child to die. That’s what I’ve been told. At least it’s not—it’s very close because they’re primates. He died first, which was devastating. I mean, that was just a horrendous thing to watch and experience and everything, for sure. And he just died. And I came back, and he was laying in his own vomit, and he was already gone. Then I got scared, and I re-homed the other two monkeys because I didn’t want anything else to happen. And I came in, what was it, the next day or two days later, and my parrot, like I said, he was dead. And so my animals were dropping like flies, and now I’m to the point where even in my amphetamine induced state I’m thinking, okay, something’s wrong here, obviously. So then I believe—I think I even asked my dad. We started talking—because at the time, they didn’t know about any of this stuff. My parents didn’t until later on down the line, but I remember going to him and asking him what—do you know anything about mold inspecting or anything like that? I don’t know, but there’s something in the air. I mean, there has to be. And I think it was a combination of a few things, right? You have all that waste product that you have that’s just accumulated everywhere, and only someone in my condition could justify that, first of all. So you have all that. Ammonia or whatever is coming off of that in a small, small enclosed space. Then you’ve got—well, then I got to a point where I couldn’t stand the smell anymore, so I was like, I’m going to clean it up. So I went and I just went to Walmart in the middle of the night and bought dozens and dozens of different cleaning products, Febreezes, and Lysols, and everything that I could find and just sprayed whole cans of things everywhere. I mean, I dumped a massive amount of chemicals to try and cover up that smell. At the time, I was just looking for that fix, that quick fix to it to get the smell away.

Dr. Pompa: It did impact your brain, right? It’s like with your body you did with the apartment, a quick fix.

Cameron: Right, exactly.

Dr. Pompa: The bottom line is your dad finally comes in, and oh, my gosh. What’s happened, right?

Cameron: Yeah.

Dr. Pompa: They saw the carpets in just an absolute—between the mold and chemicals, an absolute disaster.

Cameron: Absolutely, and he…

Dr. Pompa: I mean, he said he got sick for a few days, him and his friend that helped right after dealing with it, right?

Cameron: Right, and he just almost had a nervous breakdown seeing that. He was like, this is not my son at all. This is like something you see out of Hoarders, someone with severe psychological imbalance, or someone that you see out of—I don’t know. It was something that you’d walk into an apartment and see off of one of these TV shows, Breaking Bad. I don’t know. I mean, it was something…

Dr. Pompa: I saw that episode. I saw that episode. That is it. That’s exactly what I envision, right? When the party, the people sleep next to—so how can anyone live this way? Only because of what the drugs did to their brains that this was acceptable.

Cameron: Absolutely, absolutely.

Dr. Pompa: Cameron, that’s no doubt the same experience you were having with the different drug called Adderall.

Cameron: Absolutely, I was living in a totally alternate—I mean, it’s like everyone around me, right, that is in a healthy range of functionality. We’re all occupying the same space, but when you are a drug addict, you cross a certain line, a certain level of imbalance. You perceive the world in an entirely different way, so you’re experiencing an entirely different reality. And suddenly, things become okay that they never were, and just, behavior is just absolutely crazy. I mean, there’s really nothing that you, I mean, that I can think of that’ll drive the brain in the perception of someone out of balance faster than drugs because that’s what they’re engineered to do. To create a quick…

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, and the tragedy is is these are legal drugs. Adderall is stronger than cocaine, really. I mean, and of course, this was an extreme, right? I mean, you were set up for it from the toxic childhood all the way through. But I hear multiple stories somewhere in between this, right? It’s doing the same thing where it creates this false reality. It creates this stimulation, and then they start using things to bring it down. See, when you give Adderall to a young child, it actually calms the brain. When you give Adderall to an adult, you get this amazing stimulation. There’s an opposite effect. Anyways, so just in the sake of time because I want to tell people where you’re at now, right? So your dad comes in. Of course, you’re sick. I mean, they—your parents are amazing people. They really are.

Cameron: Absolutely, absolutely.

Dr. Pompa: I met both of them via Skype. That’s the way, the virtual world. You’re my virtual client. But they’re amazing people, and they’ve done everything for you. So they brought you into this healing. I mean, they got you into some serious therapy. But, really, fast forward because you end up with, literally, allergic to your world, right?

Cameron: Absolutely.

Dr. Pompa: I mean, multiply chemically sensitive. And by the way, I hear this story day in and day out. Chemically sensitive, food intolerances, basically, now you can’t function.

Cameron: Absolutely, yeah, just to skim through a couple different things, after I was that sick, my life broke down very, very quickly. I had a lot of different things that had taken place. End up getting a massive amount of money stolen from me from my toxic group situation that’s going on. All that fell back on my parents who came in and saved my life. We were able to pay off my debt because they knew that I was sick at this point. And I had made the decision—we didn’t know what to do.  We went back to the psychiatrists. They played musical medications with me and said, “Oh, well, no, you just need more of this, more of this. You need this, Prozac here to calm down this symptom,” and all that kind of stuff. And by this point, I was starting to realize—I had a very humbling experience, life changing experience at one point where I just had this moment or series of moments of clarity. Where I felt what was going on. I’d been brought down so low that I just—the ego dissolving thing where I really feel like that God was speaking to me at this time. I realized—I started to really understand what balance was, and that that was really the secret to health and the secret to life in general and that I couldn’t create balance with these drugs because they’re not part of the innate intelligence of the body.

Dr. Pompa: That’s right.

Cameron: Yeah, for short-term this and that but they will drive the body out of balance and create—and I just wanted my old self back, even though that wasn’t great, but it was—you know what I’m saying? And at the time, I didn’t know it was possible. So cut to we ended up going to—I took myself off of Adderall. I said this is absolutely enough. My parents weren’t sure what to do about it, and I just said I’m not going to be this person anymore, which is not an easy thing to do because there’s a denial. You want to keep taking it. I took myself off of Adderall, and that brought me into the most horrendous—when I took myself off, the masking effect was lifted, and now all the damage and dysfunction was now brought to the surface. All of a sudden, my brain completed crashed. I couldn’t function whatsoever. Didn’t know where I was half the time. What day it was. And at certain points, couldn’t even recognize my family. I was so, so bad. Perceptual disturbance, I mean, my brain had been totally fried, and we ended up going to a lot of different places. We went the first year doing the musical drugs things because I got so desperate. I actually got checked into a psych ward just because I was so suicidal. Because I was so—I had nothing going on up here. I needed some sort of stimulation, and I didn’t want to take drugs at this point, but I did until that didn’t work. And I ended up going to a few different places to try to get help, started out getting some intravenous nutraceuticals, which didn’t work out so well because, still, it was just throwing things allopathically at me still. Instead of drugs, it was the amino acids, vitamins, minerals. And then I went and did some hyperbaric oxygen for a while. That was beneficial in the short term, but now I know afterwards that, I mean, it was the wrong time and place. I was very toxic, neurotoxic, sick, inflamed. And that was whenever I—shortly after that, about the summer of 2013, one day things just switched. I mean, I was deteriorating, deteriorating, horrible brain fog, incredible fatigue, was on the couch for a year. Literally, was on the couch for almost every single hour of the day for a year, and all of a sudden, I was eating one night, and my throat started to close up. I never had reactions that I knew of, right, in the past or severe symptomatic reactions. My throat closed up, and through the next few days, everything that I ate or everything that I was doing, I was getting these massive adrenaline attacks that just came out of nowhere, and I could not breathe, and some of them even got to the point—they were so severe at that point where my fingers were hyperextend. Literally, I couldn’t move my body, and I was, basically, in a mild seizure. That is what it was. Because my—I would start to shake. I couldn’t even move anything. It was just absolutely horrendous, and it was a total adrenaline attack. And that led me to trying to figure out what was going on. Obviously, I went to—we ended up going to this place in Dallas, which is a medical research facility that a lot of chemically sensitive clients end up at because they do some things to help control these reactions, and they really educate you to help you bring together this information of the bucket theory. I had gathered bits and pieces of information. I was doing research throughout the entire time trying to survive, but I was able to really pull it together and see, look, this is how toxic I am. I knew that toxicity was a factor, but I didn’t understand that it was the thing that I had to remove. I mean, that I could never get well without. And this is why hyperbaric didn’t work. This is why some of these things I tried, more downstream things, didn’t work was because of that. But then, once I got down there, I really got educated to that. That’s whenever, really, I started formulating the plan of what to do. Unfortunately, at that point, I was so reactive that I could not—I crossed another line where, all of a sudden, I couldn’t put any foods in my mouth. I was allergic to all foods, literally. Any food I put in my mouth, I’d get a massive adrenaline attack where I felt like I was dying every time. The worst experience I can imagine. My throats closing up, I’m gasping for air, and this would last 24 hours.

Dr. Pompa: I want to point something out because I get calls like this weekly, almost daily, where I hear these stories, right? It starts with a food. Most people are down here where they’re reacting to a certain set of foods. Some people don’t even know, right? And then it becomes this symptom, that symptom, this—and they’re realizing that they’re allergic to all these foods, or at least intolerant to all these foods and have no idea.

Cameron: Right.

Dr. Pompa: Then, after a while, they end up, literally, intolerant to just about everything they’re eating. I have many, especially young kids today; this is more prevalent with younger kids, where they’re eating three to five foods without reacting. Oh, and then when they eat those for a while, then they actually start reacting to those, and they have to go back to foods they haven’t eaten in a while. I want our viewers to understand that this is becoming a massive epidemic.

Cameron: Oh, it is.

Dr. Pompa: Because of massive amount of neurotoxins that we’re exposed to, watch our previous show to figure that out. But this is a massive problem. This is not something that you—is exclusive to you.

Cameron: Right, and I mean, honestly, when it happened to me, I thought that it was because, obviously, no one in my particular environment here, my immediate family, or even friends, or anything, have. It was just so bizarre. All of a sudden, one day—which it didn’t happen in one day. I started becoming somewhat sensitive to supplements, but not anything like these, and then got to this realm to where I couldn’t eat anything. And now I’m sensitive to smells, and things just kept getting worse and worse. I thought that I was some sort of a crazy anomaly because, obviously, every single doctor that I went to either laughed at me, or they said that it’s impossible. You can’t react to everything. Of course, I mean, we’ve heard it a thousand times. I mean, it wasn’t until I found this place, and at least they understood that that’s what was taking place, and then, all of a sudden, I find myself in the middle of this community of people who are exactly like me, some even worse. They’re in wheelchairs coming in every single day and so bad to where it really—this whole situation has just totally expanded my perception of what’s possible, right? Because before, I mean, I’m sure I would’ve been one of those people who said, this guy says he’s reacting to his refrigerator or his iPod. Are you crazy kind of thing? I get here, and I’ve seen people, and I’ve met people, and spent massive amounts of time with clients that they’re living conditions are so horrendous. I mean, people could not imagine what these people deal with every single day. I mean, they get severe reactions that are what would be considered suicidal reactions. They’re getting them dozens of times, even hundreds of times a day. And I’ve met some people…

Dr. Pompa: They’re reacting to chemicals or a food. You go to an event. Someone comes in with maybe a lotion that has a fragrance on it. These people will go into convulsions. These people react massively.

Cameron: Oh, gosh, and so you end up being—absolutely, your freedoms are taken away one, by one, by one, by one. And then, all of a sudden, or maybe a lot at once to where all you can do is quarantine yourself in some sort of a safe housing trying to make your house as safe as possible. Rip up the carpet. Do air purifiers, air exchange systems, or whatever. Eat completely organic as much as you possibly can, and then you try to clean it up as much as you can. But some of these people, they can even react to their clothes. I mean, I’ve known people who have had to stay quarantined, and stay naked all of the time. They can’t leave their house, and they’re literally just reacting to almost everything. And the EMF, the EMF sensitivity is horrendous because…

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, that’s electromagnetic frequencies is what he’s talking about, folks. Like he said, people reacting to the refrigerator, I’ve had several of those clients that couldn’t stand next to the refrigerator. A moving fan, it puts off an amount of electromagnetic frequency that most people would be able to tolerate. God forbid they put a phone to their head. They literally—it sends their system into a reaction. Why? It’s one more stressor that a healthy body can deal with. They’re body can’t deal with one thing that causes any oxidative stress. Of course, an EMF does. So this became your reality. Just like so many clients.

Cameron: Absolutely.

Dr. Pompa: Your way of getting there was different than some other people’s way, right? I mean, some people’s way is this massive—it was a combination, mold, chemicals, stressors. You’re right, genetics, toxins before you were born, I mean, all of these things come together. I call it the “perfect storm.” Each storm is a little bit different, but what you’re experiencing is a modern day epidemic of people at some level on the scale. Yeah, you’re out here, but I see people all the way across the scale of sensitivities. Most of them don’t know it. They don’t realize they’re reacting to smells. They don’t realize they’re reacting to their carpet, their new furniture, their new phone, the flame retardant on their new computer, but they are. And this is a massive epidemic. And so fast forward because of the sake of time, and there’s so much to tell, right? It is an amazing story.

Cameron: Oh, yeah.

Dr. Pompa: Your body, just like so many of these cases that I see, finally brings you down to where you literally can’t eat anything. You literally went 14 days without food, and at least 5 days, even without water. You even started reacting to water. So quickly take us through that, and let’s tell them what you did. How your body came out of that.

Cameron: Right, and I think, at that point, I’d actually done some at least minor healing for sure because, for the first year, I spent time in Dallas, which is where this facility was. I live in Arkansas, but we just had to move down there, and stay in this safe housing. Stay in a different apartment that was safe, eventually. But the only things that I was able to do for a year were just very basic non-invasive modalities, things that work with the energy systems of the body, some chiropractic stuff to just try to get things—keep things moving. Get my body detoxing enough. A lot of grounding outside, things like that. Just to try to get my body strong enough to where I could actually do some things that truly do detox, right, obviously, and that was a year, a year and a half. And then, at this point, I probably, my guess—I got to a point where, I was, I was moving things around. Maybe I was detoxing something really heavily. Who knows? But I actually had gained back a lot of my—some of my foods, at least, couldn’t do supplements. No way, at this point. No way. I had a few foods that I was working with, for a long time I only had one. It got to this point, and then all of a sudden, I couldn’t—yeah, like you said, I couldn’t eat any food. I couldn’t even take a sip of water. I couldn’t put anything in my mouth, down my gastrointestinal tract without my throat closing up and having a horrendous adrenaline attack that lasted a day. I was just getting worse and worse. And so the big thing was the water. Because a lot of people do things, like fast and stuff, but the water, you deteriorate so, so quickly. So long story short, I ended up going five days without drinking water. Now, I didn’t go five days without foods in my system. I went three—almost three days without anything, once this happened. And on that third day, I was in an emergency situation, obviously, because I was already chronically sick, and yeah, I was on death’s door. And so we got some IV fluids into me finally, which I didn’t do right off the bat because I had reacted to them in the past. So I was afraid I was going to react, and I was going to be worse, and I was going to—so at this point, you start to get dehydrated, you’re even that much more hyperreactive. The more—because that fight or flight system. So I terrified of doing anything because I thought it was going to kill me at that point, when I was that weak. But it came down to that point where, on that third day, I had to get fluids in my system. I tried to drink. It didn’t work. I could not. So I had to, basically, go back to this facility, which is like an emergency facility for chemically sensitive clients. I’m really glad it’s there, for sure, and I just had to take a leap of faith. They said, “Well, you have to get fluids in your system today because your body is shutting down.” I mean, I looked absolutely terrible, and we did. Me and my mom were in there. I was trying not to be in tears to work up my system anymore. My mom was. I was wanting to call my brothers, my dad. I was wanting to call everybody and just—because I was at that point where I knew this could go either way. If I didn’t get fluids in my system today, then I possibly was going to die. And so I did it, and we just prayed right before. My mom and I, I think, held hands while we were doing it, and we just—they took—they brought out the saline, and put it in my arm. Started bringing it in, and sure enough, I didn’t react. It was the only thing in my environment that I wasn’t reacting to, and it was just like, oh, my gosh. That wasn’t the end of it. They were only able to do a liter that day. And that wasn’t nearly enough, but it was enough to keep me—get me to the next day. And for the next few days after that, they did that, and I actually continued to deteriorate because I just wasn’t getting enough to even come close to catching up to—because I’d been dehydrated in the weeks before that too. And so I—but the interesting thing was—so basically, a long story short, throughout this—I was already going out—I was going without food for a while before this five day water thing was going on. But basically, I went—through this whole process, I went almost 2 weeks without food, 12, 13 days without food at all, and during that process, golly, I was—some things I noticed. I was smelling. My tongue was turning all these weird colors, and there was this enhanced detox reaction that was going on. And I did, I stunk worse than anything. I was barely able to walk. I barely was able to walk, and I’m surprised that I was able to do that. But it hit a certain point. On that fifth day, it was down to crunch time where, yeah, I’d gotten some fluids in my system. It wasn’t nearly enough. I had to have more water. I had to be able to drink. All of a sudden, we were sitting in there, and they do these little skin testing antigens where they can get a reaction down by finding a particular endpoint. It’s murky exactly how it all works down to the T, but it does work for a lot of clients. Anyway, so they skin tested me, which I was afraid of doing bad because I was just—we were trying to get fluids in my system, and I was starting to react to the IVs now too. And I felt like I was about to die. I mean, I felt like I was—I was in full-fledged delirium at this point. I was saying things that were so out of—like crazy, so I had them skin test me on water. They had a skin test, actually, for mountain valley water. They made one up, and sure enough, there was no wheel. There’s no reaction. I’m just saying, whoa. There was a point where I felt like my body made a shift. It was within a couple of hours. It was like I’d been brought to a certain point of my lowest, and I was like, oh, my gosh, give me the water. Give me the water. And then they tested me—I had them test me on—because I wanted to get some calories in my system. They tested me on apples, and I had no reaction to that where I was welting like crazy and crazy. It was this massive hyperreactive circumstance, and I didn’t react to that either. Just all of a sudden, this switch went off. And I had my parents go grab me some apple juice, and I started drinking it, and I didn’t react. And I started drinking it, and I just started…

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, we’re running out of time, Cameron, so bottom line is the fast, like I’ve seen many, many times.

Cameron: Yeah.

Dr. Pompa: Things happen. Things shift.

Cameron: Absolutely.

Dr. Pompa: Now all of a sudden the things you reacted to you were able to do, right?

Cameron: Yeah.

Dr. Pompa: You said 12 days without food, 5 days without water. The body went through this process, and sure enough, the body opens up again. And again, seeing that many, many times, I mean, that’s the power of the fast. And then you started—there was a product, ASEA.

Cameron: Yeah.

Dr. Pompa: You were able to take little amounts of, and of course, that was when you and I started working together and little bit more of that. And now we’re to the point, because we have to draw this to a conclusion, I mean, you’re absolutely—you’re eating almost everything. I mean, it’s remarkable. Yeah, I mean, we’re still all healthy foods, but you’re eating all these great foods. You put on weight. You don’t look like the same person that when I sat across the screen from you the first time, man, you still looked close to death, right? I mean, you look like a different person. And now, you’ve even started some detox. I mean, the ASEA product you’ve been detoxing to. But that little liquid product is often times one of the first things that people can tolerate. It’s redox molecules, and we don’t have time to get into that.

Cameron: Right, right, yeah.

Dr. Pompa: So you’ve been tolerating some different other supplements that we’ve been giving you, and you’re starting to take on some cellular products and even small amounts of detox. So you’ve come a long way.

Cameron: Well, that’s a huge—yeah, that’s a huge thing because I haven’t been able to tolerate supplements of any kind for years without severe reactions. And after I came through that fast, like you talked, just to touch on real quick, I was better. All of a sudden, I could do more things, and then we tried some of these things, obviously, in small amounts at first. Like the ASEA, like the cell detox drops, and I can tolerate them, and I can work with them. I have to work with them slowly, but it’s just amazing. I mean, I feel like all the things that we’re doing with the bacteria, I mean, everything, the combination, it’s just great. I mean, I still have a long way to go. I mean, honestly, I do, but just where I’m at right now, I’m just so grateful. Like we were talking about before, it’s all relative once you get to this point. Yes, I still experience hell to some degree on days, but absolutely, from where I’ve been and where I am now and the fact that we’re making progress. And I understand the concepts involved, and you’re so incredible at explaining. And I’m so blessed that you decided to take me on because I could see that you were worried whenever I talked to you the first time, for sure, because it’s hard, a very complicated situation.

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, no, no, I mean, I’ve been down this road enough times with enough people, and myself included. It’s somewhere on that thing. I became intolerant to my world as well. Food, chemicals, I couldn’t function. I couldn’t go out ever with comfort because of a smell, a cologne. You just become isolated in your own little world. The only way I can understand it, Cameron, is because I’ve been there, and that’s it. There’s no other way a doctor can understand. Just like anything. We tap into the innate intelligence, and often times, I said it in the beginning of the show, your body made you fast. Now, today, I’m doing fasting, different fasts with people, because that’s a way of healing. And then you bring in enough cellular function, and the body will heal. Really, you remove the interference. The body will heal. We got your cells functioning enough to this point, and now we’re able to start doing some light detox, and start emptying the bucket. But man, I could go on with a whole other hour even just of what we’ve done, and how we got there.

Cameron: I know. It’s so hard to condense.

Dr. Pompa: I have. It was a very—and having trouble at the top of the show with the technology put us back, but it’s just—really, it’s a remarkable story, Cameron, and we’ll have to bring you on in the future again because that way we can—people can watch the beginning of the show, and then we’ll talk about some things we’ve been doing. You know, Cameron, I want to do that because you’re not an anomaly. I mean, your story on how you got there, I think, is really unique with some of the things. I think the monkeys tipped that off, but really, it’s not unique at all. Kids on Adderall, kids eating the foods that they eat today, it really is a story that I hear again and again. And the story that I hear most often is I can’t eat these foods, and I’m allergic to this and that and this, and this story is being told again and again. And there’s a way out, Cameron, and you’re proving that. There’s a way out. You just have to be willing to do it. And so I hope you join us again so we can just see this progression. And I think many people are looking for answers, Cameron. And this show, they probably wanted us to go into these things that we’re doing even more. You know what I’m saying? But cellular healing, I mean, honestly, just the things that we’re doing. The fasting is really what gave the leverage even to get to where we are now, and cellular detox, I mean, that’s it. You remove the interference. The body can do the healing, Cameron.

Cameron: Absolutely.

Dr. Pompa: And again, so I hate to draw it to a conclusion, but we have to because of the sake of time. But we’re going to have you back on so we can talk more about some of these things, okay?

Cameron: Oh, yeah, definitely, any time.

Dr. Pompa: Yeah.

Cameron: Yeah.

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, absolutely, but you know what? It was worth running over because you have an incredible story. And I said it also at the top of the show. I believe God has allowed you to go through this because you are going to have major authority in this area. You’ve been called to something very great. Just with your story alone, you’re giving many people watching this right now a lot of help. You were on death’s door, and look at you now. I wish they could see the Cameron that I saw across the screen not that long ago, and how fast your body is really pulling it together.

Cameron: Well, yeah, and if—yeah, if you would’ve seen me too a year before that.

Dr. Pompa: Oh, yeah.

Cameron: Where it’s just, absolutely, knocking on death’s door there, for sure, and living in effect…

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, no doubt, so thank you for sharing. That’s an amazing story, Cameron, and I can’t wait to have you on again. Tell your mom and dad thanks. I saw Marion earlier.

Cameron: Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Dr. Pompa: All right, well, thank you so much, man. And like I said, I can’t wait to see you again.

Transcript of Episode 69: Hashimoto's Disease and Autoimmune Tips Part II

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Warren Phillips.

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Warren:
Hey, we’re live, Cellular Healing TV, Episode 69, Hashimoto’s, Autoimmune Related Thyroid Conditions, Part 2. David did Part 1. I am blessed to talk and ask Dr. Pompa questions along with all of our listeners today. Dr. Pompa, let’s jump right into this topic. I know that thyroid conditions are an epidemic. There’s a lot of conditions that are epidemic, but it’s one of the most undiagnosed conditions, especially in this topic of autoimmune because autoimmune affects probably 90% of America. Eighty percent of those who have a thyroid condition have an autoimmune related thyroid condition. That’s what they say, so Dr. Pompa, let’s go through Part 2 today.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we had such a strong reaction just to the little bit we spoke about thyroid conditions last week that—actually, it was two weeks ago for those looking for Part 1, so it wasn’t last week. Last week, we talked about orthorexia, and we discovered how many people out there actually have orthorexia. We don’t think about that and eating disorders in males, but wow, what a show that was. So go back and watch it. But it was the show right before orthorexia, and we just had so many people respond with concerns about their thyroid in general. And I had made the comment on that show that, look, about 80% of thyroid conditions is estimated to be autoimmune. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. “Well, my doctor checked and mine wasn’t.” Well, unfortunately, by the time the antibodies—and that’s what they look at, thyroid antibodies to see if your thyroid condition is autoimmune. By the time they’re actually elevated, you’ve been autoimmune for quite some time, so there’s undiagnosed autoimmune.

Now here’s the worst part, Warren, is that most doctors, they don’t even check. They run TSH and total T4. I mean, the typical standard thyroid panel, and the reason most doctors don’t check is because their treatment’s the same whether you have autoimmune thyroid or whether you don’t. And that’s a shame because it’s really—the way we look at these two conditions, it’s completely different. So I can’t imagine that most of the medical community looks at these conditions as the same. Well, look, they treat them the same. I mean, that’s a more fair statement, and that’s why they don’t measure autoimmune in most people.

But the facts are this—and there is a lot of debate, and I know because I’ve got the questions, even from two weeks ago, about, well, great, what do you do for thyroid? Can we take iodine? Most people know that the proper iodine, in the proper ratio, in the proper molecular amounts has a dramatic effect on hypothyroid. However, many said, “Well, how do I know? Because we know that if you have autoimmune, then you can’t take iodine because there’s a lot on the internet on that.” Well, that’s simply not true. We’ll discuss today on the right way to take iodine. And I believe, like many experts out there, that you actually need iodine for every thyroid condition, even the autoimmune, so we’re going to break that false thinking today.

Warren:
One of the things on that, I mean, iodine deficiency, does that lead—because I know that iodine is a big thing, and then people are afraid of it too because of what’s out there on the internet. But is iodine deficiency, Dr. Pompa, pretty rampant? What causes someone to be iodine deficient?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s estimated that at least one-third of people in this country are severely iodine deficient, which goes along with, by the way, having problems with the brain IQ. As we see iodine deficiency levels drop, we see IQ levels drop in children, so it plays a very important role in the brain. Not just the thyroid. Also, hormones, we know that it plays a large role in breast health, tissue health, so it plays a large role in certain types of breast cancer, other types of breast conditions. So, yeah, I mean, look, we know that iodine, the lower dose the more thyroid problems that we have in certain areas, and the places at greatest risk are typically the places inland, so looking at the central part of what’s happening in the United States.

Now, again, that was one-third. There’s other estimates that two-thirds of the United States have some type of iodine deficiency. Not severe deficiency, whether it’s moderate or mild. And again, most of it becoming—people around the Midwest. Now, simply, that used to be the case. I think that’s changing, Warren, because what’s happening on the West Coast with Fukushima. We have larger amounts of radiation, radioactive caesium, things like that, that play a deficient role. So we have other reasons why people on the Coast are becoming more iodine deficient. Also because people just move, right? I mean, so the statistics are really spreading out.

Warren:
So the Fukushima radiation, radiation massively depletes someone of iodine then?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and by the way, another really good reason to take iodine. I said the proper iodine with the proper ratio. I’ll explain this in a minute. This is one product that has the proper ratio of iodine to iodide, and iodine has different functions in the body versus the iodide. So a five to two ratio is what’s been shown to work for our thyroid conditions. But, yeah, so iodine, actually, Warren, people on the West Coast, they all should be taking iodine, and we’ll talk—unless you have Hashimoto’s, we’ll tell you a different strategy here, but, anyways, the iodine protects against these types of radiation. So as we’re doing more and more urine challenge test from people on the West Coast, we see these caesium levels that have just risen dramatically. I mean, a thousand, two thousand, even three thousand above what’s considered normal, so we know that there’s some connection to Fukushima there. In fish eating also because, obviously, it’s getting into the fish.

So the point is, though, is iodine is the antidote to that. Iodine is magic when it comes to—if you do have high radioactive levels, iodine is critical. When I go to Hawaii, Hawaii has just naturally really high radiation levels, probably from the volcanic activity, but I take a lot of iodine. When I fly, I take a lot of iodine. Why? Because when you’re flying, you actually, believe it or not, get massive amounts of radiation, and people with thyroid conditions, they really have a lot of problems with jetlag, and just problems just feeling fatigued. And it’s typically your thyroid people because of the amounts of radiation.

Well, if you take a lot of this stuff right here, people go, “Oh, I don’t have as much problems traveling.” So we have another little antidote we use, Gf (Thyroid) with that and some Melatonin. But anyways, all kinds of good little treats today of how to not get jetlag and how to deal with radiation. But our topic is thyroid, and we want to make sure we hit that but great topics. I love this stuff.

Warren:
Well, so let’s get into this topic. If someone has Hashimoto’s and they’re diagnosed, and everyone—most doctors in the natural health world and, of course, medical doctors—and rightfully so, not to take iodine because it’s going to throw them in what they call a “thyroid storm.” I never experienced that. I know I never—I’m not in—I don’t deal with clients or health participants on a weekly or even daily basis. So what is it to go into a thyroid storm, and how can they navigate taking iodine? Because iodine, in a lot of the literature, you’ve shared this in the past, Dr. Pompa, is the solution to Hashimoto’s, but yet, there’s a special way to do it. And it’s not being talked about, so it needs to be talked about today.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, look, first of all, there’s many people out there that says, “Oh, well, I’m allergic to iodine. Every time I take it I get a reaction.” No, you’re not allergic to iodine. You would die, so the point is is you’re having a reaction to iodine. Iodine, there’s a lot of different hypothesis of why iodine causes this negative reaction. Some of it’s severe. And you mentioned the word thyroid storm where people get—their legs get weak. I mean, they get—they feel like—put it this way. Many of them end up going to the hospital, and thinking they’re having this massive allergic reaction, or you get emails of people’s, “Oh, okay, I took iodine, and now I just feel horrible. I have no energy.” Any of those reactions can occur.

So what is the cause? There’s some theories. One is we know that iodine, it goes in and attaches to these receptors. A lot of those receptors have heavy metals that are all over these receptors. And it has an affect where it kicks these types of toxins, even halogen types of chemicals, chloride, bromine, which so many people are exposed today. These chemicals affect the thyroid very negatively. And these chemicals come in, and they attach to those receptors, and they block your thyroid hormone. They can actually trigger the autoimmune. Well, iodine can kick those off. That’s one of the reasons why I believe you need iodine to fix the thyroid. Even just to clear the receptors, but, again, we’re going to talk about a more reasonable way to dose it.

Warren:
Can someone get symptoms? And I know that I’ve gotten symptoms taking thyroid, and I’m definitely always taking iodine. And then if I take too much, I get symptoms. Is it because I’m knocking off toxins possibly?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, that’s exactly what it does. It does. It clears the toxins from thyroid receptors, whether it’s on the cell, the thyroid itself. So we know that’s part of the case. We know that people who are in a state of inflammation, certain pseudo kind of activity and even certain hormones that are elevated that shouldn’t be elevated can drive this inflammation, and therefore, cause these—we’ll call them thyroid storms for now. These negative reactions, at least, to the iodine; so therefore, downregulating inflammation. Downregulating pseudo kind of activity plays a big role.

Now, it was Dr. Brownstein that for years has talked about the need for iodine, and how to take it with autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto’s properly and reasonably. He talks about building up your selenium levels first as being part of this too. So I’m a believer just in general. You have to downregulate inflammation to a point first. So typically, iodine with someone with Hashimoto’s, it’s not something we start with. It’s something that we lead to as we decrease some of the inflammation. Put people on antioxidants.

And one thing that he talked about is looking at somebody’s selenium levels. If somebody’s selenium levels are below 140 on blood—which, by the way, is still in normal range. A lot of the normal ranges go to even 120, but according to his work and others, if you have selenium that is below even 140—so you could be sitting at 140, 135, and that’s not a good number. We need to raise up the selenium first as well as something called methylation. So there’s a product, and I don’t have it in front of me, it’s called MoRS. The same company who makes this TMI makes it, Systemic, and it’s the perfect combination of selenium and methylation donors. For people that have methyltetrahydrofolate problems, that is the gene that predisposes you to methylation problems because…

Warren:
I have some. Hold on.

Dr. Pompa:
You can’t use certain folates, right? And, well, MoRS has the active form, and it has the selenium. So it has the active form of folate and the selenium. It has all the methyl donors. So we definitely want to start people with that product first. I think Warren went to try to find it, but anyways, so raising up the selenium above 140. Raising up people’s methylation or methyl donors and giving them certain antioxidants. So there’s another product that the same company makes, ROX.

Warren:
You’re going to make me grab all the supplements I have on my shelf, my personal stash right over here on my shelf. But here’s the—I do the liquid MoRS because, honestly, the pills are so powerful. This doses it down for me. So I do one to two dropperfuls of this every day for methylation. I have the MTHR, whatever they call that, that new code word to add more fear into your life. It doesn’t even mean it’s triggered, but the way to un-trigger your genes, obviously, is to do high levels of methylation. I know that the research is clear on that, so I take this a lot, and it makes me feel better. And then I also take the TMI every day, so those are on my shelf.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m homozygous MTHFR gene type.

Warren:
There it is.

Dr. Pompa:
That means that I got the gene from my mom and my dad, so they’re the, typically, the people who really have problems with methylation of folate. And years ago, I had did a SpectraCell. A SpectraCell is an intracellular nutrient test, and I came out with one thing that I was deficient.

Warren:
Folate.

Dr. Pompa:
Go figure.

Warren:
I remember that. I remember that day, yeah. I was too.

Dr. Pompa:
I didn’t know that I had the gene, methyltetrahydrofolate gene, but some people can’t take folate. I could always take folate. I never got a reaction even though I was the double gene, so there’s a lot of science that we don’t understand yet about those snips. I’ve looked into them a lot, and I can tell you it’s not as clear cut as people think. Yeah, another story, but that is a great show, by the way, that we should do because a lot of people—we get a lot of emails on that, Warren, that I answer.

Warren:
Yeah, but it’s fear based. You live in fear when you don’t have a solution. And a lot of people sell things on fear. Pain and pleasure, I mean, that’s it. So you just can’t—there’s always an answer if you’re willing to look, and search, and spend the time. So don’t live in fear. I won’t even—if it’s going to put you in fear, do the things—assume that you have it, and just live the right life, and you won’t have to worry about it. I mean, it’s good to know. Testing’s great. But if it’s going to keep you sick because you think that you’re broken, make sure you’re strong enough to understand that you’re not broken or something’s wrong with you.

A lot of people have these bad genes, and they have to be triggered, and they’re triggered by lifestyle. So if you’re living an amazing healthy life, and you’re methylating, and you’re watching shows like this, and listening to amazing podcasts, don’t—I’m not trying to make people, like, you have to overdo life, but if you get a test, make sure it’s not—someone’s not forcing you to do something because just because the test says it as far as—let me—here’s the point I’m trying to make, Dr. Pompa. I haven’t made my point yet. It’s not my gift. I’m an interviewer. I’m not a health expert. I’m not a radio show expert. I’m Warren. Warren does his thing, and he says off-the-cuff things, but the name—who was that? Angelina Jolie, right? She had this bad breast gene, right?

Dr. Pompa:
Yes.

Warren:
Yeah, and so she cut them off. She cut them off because she had a bad gene. That’s what I’m saying. So if you get the test and something’s wrong, don’t think that you’re broken and have to cut anything off.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You should have started with that example. That was a good example.

Warren:
Yeah, I knew it was in there. Since I already take us off topic a little bit, I have to say—I paused earlier because I forgot what I wanted to say.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, so I’ll finish part of your point beings we went down that way.

Warren:
I just wanted to say congratulations. You’re daughter has—your first daughter has—your first kid has graduated high school, so I just want to bless you, and tell the community that Dr. Pompa is letting one go of the five into its world all by herself, so congratulations. I saw her picture back there, so that’s my second cousin. So I’m very proud.

Dr. Pompa:
Here, let me show that.

Warren:
Yeah, she’s beautiful, beautiful girl.

Dr. Pompa:
People love when we take breaks and do this stuff, so there she is.

Warren:
Yeah, look at that.

Dr. Pompa:
There she is on those pictures.

Warren:
That’s a beautiful girl. It brings tears to my eyes. I remember coming to your house sick, Dr. Pompa, and you had these two beautiful children in your life that you inherited, and adopted, and made your own. And it just brings tears to my eyes to see. I’ve been through everything with you, and the journey has been challenging but, yet, amazing. And to see the fruit of your labor, of your hard work and dedication to this mission, and never losing focus on the calling of God on your life, and getting to see that fruit. It truly does bring tears to my eyes.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s amazing now when we look at that, and we shed some tears over this graduation because we had a long struggle there. We were under severe attack when we took those children on from another side of the family, and it was horrific and very, very difficult. And people always say, “Oh, you still have the kids?” And I always go, “Oh, you must’ve read the media stuff back when,” when they say that because they were saying things like the kids were taken from us. And those kids are 18 years old now. We had them since they were 7 years old, but what a journey. What a journey it’s been, but the blessings are on the other side of every adversity, folks. I can promise you that. Gosh, my life lays witness to that. There’s no doubt about it. Well, anyways…

Warren:
Finish my point.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m going to finish the point. Those polymorphisms as they’re called, the body—it’s not so simple. The body adapts. The innate intelligence has ways. Yeah, you may have these two genes that, yes, predispose you to certain problems, but the body’s so darn intelligent that it strengthens other pathways. And I think that’s what we’re just now learning. That we can look at these genes, and yes, we see predispositions, but the body, the innate intelligence, it knows.

So guess what it does? It finds other ways to increase folate, for example. It finds other ways to break things down. It’ll find another enzyme. It’ll find another enzyme pathway. I mean, it really is remarkable, and I think that as I studied those topics, I’d become less reliant on just because somebody has a gene that we have to even treat them a certain way. So I think we have to be a little bit careful. But it still gives us some information. But remember, the body innate intelligence is far superior, and when we see 15% of the population with something that looks like a problem, well, that’s a pretty large portion of the population that has what I have and you have. So the body figures it out.

Anyways, okay, so let’s finish this point about iodine. Warren, I think that what we have to realize is that when you have these autoimmune types of thyroid conditions, you have to—you need the iodine. You have to start really slow and low as I always say. Start slow, start low. Meaning low dose and go very slowly as you increase it.

Warren:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
But we start sometimes, even with—by the way, this same product comes in a liquid. So we can start with even the most minute amount of iodine. I mean, even 1 gram, 3 grams, and we work up to maybe 50 or even 100 grams.

Warren:
Milligrams, you mean.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, milligrams, I’m sorry, milligrams.

Warren:
Milligrams.

Dr. Pompa:
So this product, for example, 1 pill in this is about 12 milligrams, okay? So often times, for the average person, that’s perfect daily amount. However, for someone with autoimmune, we want to start with the liquid, and we start with drops. And we start that low, and you work your way up. You’re not going to see these reactions.

Okay, now just as a reminder because we got off topic. What did we start with first, downregulating inflammation via diet, downregulating inflammation with methylation, that MoRS product, increasing selenium levels? There’s another product, eNRG, that I like to take because there’s certain things in that that help the energy pathway, which reflects methylation. A lot of Brownstein’s work, he talked about giving them B1 and B3 and different things, again, to affect ATP. So we want to raise up ATP. We want to lower inflammation. We want to raise up methylation. Oh, my gosh, I just spit out the 5R's didn’t I, Warren?

Warren:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
There they are, right? So energy is R3. R5 is methylation. R4 is inflammation. So you want the 5R's. Folks, if you don’t know what that is, I have articles all over the website about each one of those R's. The 5R's is a roadmap to how you fix the cell. So we want to—in brief, we want to get—upregulate cellular function, 5R's, before we start the iodine, so that may take a couple months. And then we start low dosing the iodine from drops to pills. All the way up to 50 even 100 milligrams which is called an orthomolecular amount. Okay, that’s the iodine part of that protocol.

Warren:
Now just—I want to make a point there though. You best be working with a natural health practitioner that understands the 5R's, that understands methylation. That understands how to dose you up properly. Because if you take this and it throws you into thyroid storm, it is—it’s not good. It’s bad. It’s a bad thing to do that. So you need to be careful, and do run that bloodwork. Know where you stand. So just be careful there, guys.

But there is an answer and no one wants to tell you that you can support your thyroid naturally. You can support your Hashimoto’s condition, and you can, and your body can heal itself. You may not need…

Dr. Pompa:
Hey, look, we’re not allowed to—we’re not telling you to say the word treat. The word is support, right, in our world.

Warren:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
And that’s fine. It makes no difference to me. However, you’re going—many of you out there are on meds. We can’t tell you to stop your meds. We can’t tell you to…

Warren:
Nor do we want to.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, nor do we want to. You can work with your doctor on that, but I will say this. You’re going to need to work with one because you’re going to need less and less levels, and that can make you feel worse because you’re taking too much. And I’m sure many of you have experienced that.

Warren:
Yeah, you just talk to your doctor. “Hey, this is too much for me. Can you back me down here?” And before you know it, he may say you don’t need it anymore. You’re doing great.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, of course, it happens all the time, Warren. It happens all the time. I’m not sure what we would call that when you need thyroid and now you don’t. I can think of a word that we’d get in trouble if we said. But we won’t say that.

Warren:
But your doctor will be happy. I don’t know how that happened, but that’s awesome. I mean, I hear it all the time.

Dr. Pompa:
The healing that the body did. That’s what I call that.

Warren:
Your body did it. It always does.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, it is amazing. Now here’s what’s going to back your point that you really need a coach for this because, look, the thyroid—I’m a believer. You never completely get well until you go upstream, and figure out what the cause is and remove it. You can take iodine and feel better. You could take the MoRS and feel better. You could take some of the 5R's stuff and feel better, but where does the answer truly lie? Removing the source upstream, that’s R1, folks. We’ve covered every R in this program. R1 is remove the source, and now the body will heal. That’s the incredible part about that innate intelligence that God put in our body. You remove the interference; the body does the healing every stinking time.

Now here’s why this is an important topic with thyroid is the thyroid is the canary in the coal mine, meaning that it is very, very sensitive to toxins. Remember they used to bring the bird, the canary, down in the coal mine because it would die first when certain gases were coming out in the coal mine. Whether it was the, I guess, methane gas, whatever, all the gases that are released in potential mines. But those canaries would die, and they would get the heck out that mine. Well, that’s your thyroid. Very sensitive to chemicals like chlorine that we’re exposed to everywhere in our water, and what we do. What we drink. What we put on our body.

Warren:
Trihalomethanes, right?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, they’re halogen type of chemicals, and really, is the category, right? By the way, it's iodine, halogen chemical, halogen. So it is the same, but it doesn’t have the toxic effects, right? So they bind to the same receptors, bromine, which is just about in everything that people are doing.

Warren, we did the video where we showed the steam out of the shower, whereas a ten minute shower is like drinking ten glasses of chlorinated water. Some people say, “Oh, I drink water, filtered water.” Yeah, but most of you are showering in water that has chlorine and fluoride, which is another halogen type of chemical that binds to the thyroid receptors. Remember, this is the canary in the coal mine. Binds to these receptors, blocks all function. Creates all types of problems and autoimmune. You’re breathing that in, going right into your lungs and your bloodstream, these toxins. Oh, and then maybe every once in a while you take the—what are the—Jacuzzis, which we never get in, right, Warren?

Warren:
Nope.

Dr. Pompa:
The Jacuzzis are loaded with bromine. They’re loaded with chlorine. I mean, it literally is a thyroid storm bath that you’re sitting in, and people get out of those things and wonder why they don’t feel well. They just sat there and absorbed and breathed chlorine and bromine. I mean, you want to talk about two—both of those are in my thyroid toxic top five as well as heavy metals. People that have silver fillings, these metals are sitting right above your thyroid, and they have such a profound effect on your thyroid.

Warren:
No wonder why people are having so many—I mean, again, it makes sense that so many individuals have thyroid challenges. Something just went loud in my office. But if it’s a canary in the coal mine, if it’s that sensitive, and it’s the main players, we’re at most watching this—even this show today. I mean, even if they have a RO System which some of the more educated folks that watch this show do—and it’s not just about you. That’s the point. It’s what about the group out there that’s still drinking chlorinated water? What about the group that doesn’t have whole house or can’t afford whole house water filtration? It’s actually pretty—or still have amalgam fillings.

I mean, there’s no—you don’t have hope. No wonder why you’re weight loss resistant. No wonder why your hair is falling out. No one wants to have any answers. That’s why this show is—it’s not negative. It’s not fearful. We’re giving hope because your body can heal itself.

And again, a lot of the natural health world, they ‘ll—they just did another great amazing show. I think it was Dave Asprey. He did a great show on—called MOLDY, and he pitched the whole thing of how toxic it is. He had Shoemaker on there, Dr. Mark Heinemann, two friends of Phil’s. You’ve seen Phil on the show. Close friends with both of those individuals, but they didn’t give an answer. They just created the fear, and you should be fearful of black mold. I’m sure it jacks up your thyroid.

Dr. Pompa:
No, it does. I mean, look, any neurotoxin attaches to these receptors.

Warren:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
And it can create a problem, I mean, obviously. I mean, the heavy metal issue is a big issue. Warren, mercury attaches, heavy metals, period, and mercury the worst of all of them.

Warren:
Right to your thyroid.

Dr. Pompa:
These thyroid receptors that are on every cell and your thyroid, what happens is they have a—they’re called selenium receptors. That’s why this selenium plays such a big role, right? So we know that the selenium receptor acts as this magnet that pulls these thyroid hormones in. And well, guess what else binds to selenium? Heavy metals, you see. So the heavy metals start blocking the receptor. Your immune system starts looking at this selenium heavy metal combination as something really dangerous and bad.

So what does it do? It starts drumming up antibodies against it, aka autoimmune. Now your body’s creating inflammation, creating a bigger problem. Yeah, and your doctor’s treating it the same? Are you kidding me? So, I mean, step one is know if you’re autoimmune, folks, and it’s sometimes difficult because the tests do take some years to go before they show up on the…

Warren:
And that’s reverse T3 right, Dr. Pompa?

Dr. Pompa:
Well, that’s a whole other topic that we probably need a Part 3 to because we really—when we look at reverse T3, most doctors don’t even run that bloodwork. So they don’t even run the right bloodwork. Reverse T3 is to show if your stressors, chemical, emotional, or physical are driving your thyroid problem, and we use a reverse T3 at a ratio of three T3. And there’s a certain ratio that we look at that, if you don’t fall into, then yes, your stressors can be blocking your receptors on the cell. So I’ve spoken at length in the past, and now I’m going to have to draw a circle or two, but…

Warren:
We’re going to have to start drawing your circles, Dr. Pompa.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m going to actually use a very toxic marker so everyone can see it. I don’t usually use these.

Warren:
You’re going to use a Sharpie?

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, god, can you believe it Warren?

Warren:
No, I can’t believe it. Back in the day, you would’ve never have ever…

Dr. Pompa:
Folks, these things are toxic. Don’t use them. I’m going to use it very quickly. That’s the cell, right. Here’s is—oh, god.

Warren:
You’re holding your breath.

Dr. Pompa:
Here’s the receptor on the cell. So I said that mercury, which is Hg, can bind to that. I can put a mold guy on there, which is a biotoxin. I could put chlorine. I could put fluoride, so any of these chemicals can bind onto that receptor. And now what it does, your immune system looks at that and it starts to form antibodies on that. That’s a problem. So this is a problem.

These receptors are the key. This is where T3, active thyroid hormone, has to bind to, okay? Reverse T3 is made to block. Instead of it—meaning it’s the opposite of T3, right? So the reverse T3, which we call RT3, binds to these T3 receptors instead. Well, why would your body do this? Well, when you’ve had the flu in the past, do you ever feel like you just didn’t want to leave your couch, right? You had no energy. Well, what happens in times of stress, RT3 is formed instead of T3. RT3 then binds to the receptors to block the energy that the T3 gives when it goes into the cell. So your body is purposely blocking energy, so you have energy for other things in healing.

Warren:
Isn’t that amazing?

Dr. Pompa:
It shuts down—it is. It shuts down one pathway in a time of stress to conserve its sources to deal with the stress because it wants to survive. Well, hold on a second. After the flu goes away or the chronic emotional stressor, right, of whatever happened, then it stops that process. It starts to form more of the T3. Not as much of the RT3. And then you feel normal and have normal energy.

But what if your stress becomes chronic, chronic emotional stressors, or chronic toxic stressors? Now you start producing, always, more RT3, and now the RT3 is blocking, literally, your own thyroid receptors. It doesn’t matter how much medication you take. It doesn’t matter how much anything you take because your body is literally causing the blocking, and again, the same with autoimmune. The body is blocking it with inflammation driving it and causing it. So you have to go upstream, and ask what is up here that’s causing the RT3 to rise up, the body to block the receptor either via autoimmune or this, what we call RT3 dominance, too much of this that’s blocking the receptor?

Listen, Warren. This is what I want to finish the show on because many people watching this say I think I have a thyroid shift. My hair is thinning. It’s falling out. My skin is dry. I have no energy. I can’t get rid of this fat like I used to, even with a perfect diet. It doesn’t matter how much I exercise. How often do we hear that, Warren?

Warren:
All the time.

Dr. Pompa:
All the time. This is a massive epidemic. Can’t lose weight, we call it weight loss resistance. Have no energy. I have a thyroid problem, maybe. My girlfriend did. She told me I should go get tested. I went and got tested. My bloodwork was normal.

Warren:
Mine too.

Dr. Pompa:
Why does this occur? Well, without taking the lid off the Sharpie, which I’m not going to do, and I’m going to enjoy my fresh air at the moment. So, ahh, okay, I’m struggling with this. There, okay. So now, these receptors right here, once they get blocked, your bloodwork looks normal with your T3. It sends a signal to your hypothalamus and pituitary, and your brain thinks that all is okay because it sees normal levels of T3, the active hormone. So what does it do? Your TSH looks normal. Everything looks normal except you’re not getting the message in the cell. That’s bad.

There’s one other thing I’ll add, one other thing. T4 is typically the medication that they give people. It’s the hormone. That’s called T4, Levothyroxine (Synthroid). That has to be converted to the active form of T3, okay? This conversion, most of it takes place in the liver. What if your liver’s toxic or not functioning well? Bloodwork typically looks normal there too on liver enzymes because that’s a diseased state. But let’s say the function of converting T4 to T3 is being affected because certain enzymes are affected.

Now you don’t convert the T4 to the T3. Your bloodwork looks normal, or worse yet Warren, you’re taking the medication. The medication will make these levels come up, but the T3 doesn’t get in the cell. So even though the medication made your bloodwork look normal, you still don’t feel well. How many times did we get that story told, right?

Warren:
I’m taking medication, and I still don’t feel well, yeah, all the time.

Dr. Pompa:
The medication made these hormones out here normal, but they can’t get in the cell.

Warren:
Bloodwork is normal.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re not converting the hormone that they’re giving you. It looks good on blood. It makes the TSH look better, but you’re not converting it. Toxins play a role there. Lack of selenium, drop in selenium which we mentioned at the top of the show also plays a role in this not converting.

Warren:
Why can’t they just give straight T3?

Dr. Pompa:
Well, and they do, and that helps some people more. When they go to their doctor and say my friend took T3, but doctors hate giving T3 because it’s not normal protocol. So they feel at risk when they give people T3.

Warren:
What is T3? Do they have synthetic forms or natural forms?

Dr. Pompa:
Well, Armour Thyroid was the more natural form that had T4 and T3, and that’s why so many people did better, and desiccated thyroid…

Warren:
Desiccated.

Dr. Pompa:
Right.

Warren:
Which is essentially ground up pig thyroid or ground up…

Dr. Pompa:
Pig hormone, pig hormone, exactly, which people that didn’t make that conversion, Warren, did better with it. But then now…

Warren:
Makes sense.

Dr. Pompa:
And Armor Thyroid is made with gluten now, another protein, so people are having allergy reactions that change the formula along…

Warren:
It can never be simple can it? Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Here’s the problem. Even by taking the T3, if your cell’s inflamed—which what is that, 95% of America? The hormone, the receptor to the T3 on the cell is blunted because of the inflammation or reverse T3, right, and so it doesn’t matter, even taking the T3, because it can’t get the message in the cell. I mean, this is…

Warren:
That’s why the 5R's works. I mean, that’s why those are God’s gift to cellular healing, R1, R2, R3, R4, R5, R4 reduce inflammation.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, exactly. And by the way, R1, what’s driving that inflammation besides the…

Warren:
Your amalgam fillings, your water, those sorts of things, so these little switches that people can do are massive. The information is there, man. We have the toxic top ten. Get those out of your life, I mean, toxictop10.com. That stuff is still really important to getting your life back.

Dr. Pompa:

My wife put something on Facebook about fabric softeners, and her Facebook people were like, “Wow. We didn’t know this.” I’m like, wow, really? I mean, she was talking about how many chemicals are in them, and how toxic they are, and how hormone disrupting. Then she put something about the laundry detergent people were using. People are still using Tide and these main brands that are out there. They are loaded with toxins. Your neighbor starts doing the—you know when they have fabric softener because you can smell it through the neighborhood. You can smell it on their clothes. People would come into our office, Warren. They would stink the whole office up, these fabric softeners users.

But listen, that’s one of the toxic top ten. Get that stuff out of your life. If you don’t remove the sources, it doesn’t matter what you take. It doesn’t matter how you eat. So you’ve got to…

Warren:
I had a conversation with a guy on the phone today. He was actually a—I’m into bass fishing, and he’s a professional bass fisherman. And he was saying, he asked me what I do for a living. So I just called him up. That’s what I do. If I do something, I want to talk to some of the best around, and he’s like, “What do you do?” “Oh, I’m natural health and wellness.” We down played it, of course, because most people don’t know even what this—what I do here in Pittsburg.

But he’s like, “Oh, great, I need to lose some weight. Can you get me a supplement?” Of course, I had to tell him. “You know what, man? You build houses. You build custom homes. Taking a supplement is like having mold behind your walls. Having shoddy construction and putting a nice finish on it with junk drywall from China.

“When you build something, you put on the best drywall. You make sure the job is done right.” I said, “If I gave you a supplement, it would just be like maybe—it may help you lose weight, man. Yeah, I can give you a supplement that could probably help for a time upregulate metabolism. Maybe make you less hungry so you lose a little weight because you’re not overeating as much.” But I said, “At the end of the day, man, I’m lying to you. I’m just putting—just like those other contractors that just do a shoddy job. It has to come down to your”—for him, I told him diet, man. I mean, that’s the biggest thing because that is the true reason you’re going to reduce your inflammation and have normal blood work.

And I told him the story about my brother losing 55 pounds because he switched his diet. He used to be in a big exercise side of things. You got to get to the source. You can’t just throw a supplement at it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, Warren, how many people today—you had thyroid issues with normal blood samples.

Warren:
Absolutely, and I took desiccated thyroid, yep, and I made sure that I—it took me months to find the right one, the one where they wouldn’t put fillers in and all this stuff, just a pure desiccated thyroid. And it was so hard to find. I had to go all over the country compounding pharmacists to do it, and it did. It made a difference.

Dr. Pompa:
Well, we’re going to get that question. Well, should I take a hormone? Should I not? It helps some people. It doesn’t help others. But it could be a crutch. It’s only a crutch. It’s not a cure. We know that, while you’re working upstream to the cause, and Warren, as you got the metal out of your brain, out of your hypothalamus pituitary, off of your cells, you got well. Hey, you got warm…

Warren:
Do you know what the amazing thing is?

Dr. Pompa:
Your hands got warm. Your feet got…

Warren:
You’re right. You just told me—you just reminded me how bad my thyroid was because I used to have cold hands. I don’t have cold hands all the time.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, they would turn blue, man. I mean, it’s like—I mean, it was…

Warren:
Yeah, these things are hot. I mean, this is amazing. You forget. I talked to Phil the other day. It’s like I forgot how sick I was. I really do. I mean, he was telling me about a symptom that somebody had, and I’m like, oh, my gosh. I remember feeling that way. Until you said that, I forgot.

I forgot taking a hit, we used to call it. I took a hit, and literally, wiping me out for four days where I couldn’t sleep, anxiety, heart palpitations, all this stuff. Four days of my life would be ruined because I tried to live a normal life. And then, the crazy thing is is in it, you’re like, am I just crazy? Could this really be happening to me? You live in denial because no one else believes you, and you can’t believe that you’re that sick over a chemical exposure. How could it happen? And then you come to the realization. You come to the awareness.

First it’s anger. You go through the whole process. Then you’re, yeah, it’s true. You come to accept that that really did happen to you because it’s so mind boggling that it could happen to you, and it’s not even—it’s hard to comprehend when these things happen because they’re so uncommon.

Dr. Pompa:
You have—listen, just to…

Warren:
Well, they’re common but uncommon knowledge.

Dr. Pompa:
Bring this to a close.

Warren:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Very important to work with someone who understands true cellular detox, how to understand the brain detox, because in this condition, these thyroid and adrenal issues that are chronic, most of it starts in the pituitary, which is in the middle of your brain, that runs the thyroid and runs your adrenals. Every article I write about this, that’s the magic one. That’s what ultimately fixed us. The mercury from amalgam fillings and other sources goes right up into the pituitary, which is the control tower for your whole hormonal system. So it’s important that you work with a practitioner who really understands getting to those sources, understands cellular healing and cellular detox. Doing it right. You remove the cause. You remove the sources. The body does the healing.

Yes, iodine plays a really important role. Yes, all these new nutrients. We talked about selenium, and antioxidants, all this stuff. That’s only part of it, folks. The key, though, is going upstream. Removing these sources from your life, removing these sources from your body, that’s what R1 really is. Read them. We have systems that we teach doctors around the country. We have 60 trained around the country to do what we do. That’s really where my passion is.

I want to remind people. Two weeks ago I talked about the three-legged stool of autoimmune. Please go back and review that because it plays here with Hashimoto’s as well. When you look at this three-legged stool, that really brings us a different type of solution that most doctors are not aware of. But that’s the real science. That is the cause of these conditions, and that is also the answer to these conditions. So please go back and watch that, and it’ll put in context a lot of the things we talked about in the show.

I want to just leave them with one thing that on Facebook, one of my patients saw this, and said, “Well, I started doing it, Dr. Pompa,” and they just—now it’s like, “My hair stopped falling out, and I’m actually losing weight again.” “What was it?” “Well, that RENU you gave me”—I gave them this product for another reason, okay? It was a diabetic neuropathy—but anyways, because it has amazing healing. I cut my finger so deep the other day. I couldn’t stop the bleeding. I came and I put this on it. And I put it on it. It immediately stopped the bleeding, and the next day I showed my wife my finger, and she was like, “That was”—I’m like, “Yeah, it was this.” So I’m a firm believer, but this person…

Warren:
Well, I did the same thing. Look. This little cut. I cut myself, sprayed—I did the liquid ASEA on it, and it stopped the bleeding. I mean, it was a gusher.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you did that—remember with the elbow?

Warren:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
The thing going around…

Warren:
I was with your son. I took him bass fishing. This one, on Erie, laid it open because the crank came back and laid me open. So he quick grabbed ASEA. I mean, this was a gusher. I self-stitched myself with the little things. Sprayed it on it, it stopped the bleeding. I mean, I never…

Dr. Pompa:
Amazing, yeah, that’s what I did. Anyways, so she saw this on Facebook.

Warren:
This is what I sprayed.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve heard—yeah, that’s the liquid. This is the one that we use on our skin. I took all my age spots out. I mean, amazing, right?

Warren:
There’s clinical research that says it does that.

Dr. Pompa:
This is where it goes to thyroid. She saw on Facebook to rub it on her thyroid, okay? Now, I knew of this. I knew people were doing this, but I became a believer when she said that this—she saw it on Facebook. She did it, and she said, “Dr. Pompa,” she’s like, “my hair’s not falling out now, and I actually started losing weight again.” So RENU 28 rubbed on the thyroid. Now I’m going to tell you men out there. There are many men who are rubbing this somewhere else, on their testicles for other reasons, as I said the word.

Warren:
I can’t believe you. You’re getting like me. You’re not afraid.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah but honestly, it’s a redox signal that absorbs, and redox plays an amazing role in the thyroid. For those that have problems directly with their thyroid, I think those are the people who massively see the change. So I started doing it.

Warren:
This is in my basket.

Dr. Pompa:
I don’t even have thyroid problem, but because…

Warren:
Hey, if it works for her and it was on Facebook, I believe it, so what the heck.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly, so I thought I’d leave the show on that note.

Warren:
That’s a great—I mean, hey, no clinical research, but we have some anecdotal evidence that this stuff, this redox signally product, which it is—they have it. The molecules—isn’t it they can say redox signaling now, right? They can say that it really does do what it says that it does.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep.

Warren:
I know when I take it—again, it’s a nutritional supplement. It has to be—it’s not a FDA approved product. It is a—it’s considered a food, right, and all supplements are that way. They’re trying to steal those right off us, obviously, but these nutrients, these breakthroughs, man, really do what they say they’re going to do. It’s amazing, and this is one of those special products, man. It’s one of those huge ones. It is a direct sales product. Who cares? I mean, only way to bring it out there, I don’t care.

And some health professionals, we stay away from MLMs because we don’t—if it’s helping people, man, do it. If it’s helping you, do it. That’s it. Does it make a difference? I want to be a part of it. So it makes a difference. I got my basket over here. It’s in this basket. I got my shelf full of supplements. We live what we do, and now I’m going to start rubbing this on my thyroid but nowhere else.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I don’t believe that. I think he’s going to rub it everywhere else, but anyways, yeah, so, I mean, honestly, you’re right in what you said.  I mean, it really is one of those products—I drink the liquid every day. Years ago I started drinking because the athletes, the cycling world, uses the liquid that you showed, the ASEA, to raise their VO2 max naturally, and that’s where I got addicted to that product. It is a product that really does work, and it’s not sodium chloride, folks. It’s redox. When they came out with this skin product, Warren, I don’t know that I’ve missed many days putting it on my face.

Warren:
Because you lost Florida.

Dr. Pompa:
I did, exactly. I lost that big—I called it Florida. I had a big…

Warren:
Well, you can’t see it right now because of the lighting, but I actually put it on my arms.

Dr. Pompa:
Well, you can’t see it anyway. It’s gone. And I had another one that I hated over here, and it was really bad, and it took that one off too.

Warren:
I have one of those right—I don’t know if you can see it, but there’s a little indent there that…

Dr. Pompa:
You have to use it twice a day.

Warren:
I know because I only do it once a day.

Dr. Pompa:
I did it that way for, probably, three, four months, and then that big bad one started decreasing, so there you go. Well, we’ve got to wrap it up. We gave them so much information today, Warren, that I think that we’re going to get too many emails. It’s probably going to take me a day to answer them.

Warren:
And some would say maybe too much information.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly.

Warren:
Have a great day, a great weekend, guys. Thanks for watching. Share this video with your friends online. Like us on Facebook. Go type in the Facebook Dr. Dan Pompa. Like our fan page. God bless. Look up—like Cellular Healing TV too on Facebook. We got that too. Share the media. Bye-bye.

Dr. Pompa:
Bye.

Transcript of Episode 68: Overcoming Orthorexia, with Kevin Rail

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, David Asarnow and special guest Kevin Rail.

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David: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV, episode 68. This is David Asarnow, and I am here with Dr. Pompa. Good morning, Dr. Pompa.

Dr. Pompa: Good morning.

David: Can you believe last week we were talking about 67?It's just so hard to believe we've been doing this show for 68 episodes. It's fantastic, at the same time.

Dr. Pompa: Absolutely. It's amazing how it's caught on. This show, we originally just said, “Ah, you know, we want to bring our message out there. It'll help SEO.” Here we are, that many shows in.

David: It's interesting. You look at it, we've got tens of thousands of podcast followers now, that are listening to what we have every single week.

Dr. Pompa: Hey David, we actually started this. Do you remember where it was, in that hotel? Of course, this was your idea.

David: I remember.

Dr. Pompa: Was that Tampa or Atlanta? Where was that?

David: It was Tampa, where I had a really bad fever.

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, okay. I didn't know that. I was sitting outside, and we did the show.

David: Oh, wait. That was in Charlotte, the first Hangout that we did.

Dr. Pompa: Oh, okay. Charlotte.

David: Right after one of our Masterminds with a bunch of the doctors in the program, launched that. Here's the great thing. We get to not only talk about the real truth, the 180° Solution and the things that people need to do, we also get to have special guests on. We get to hear what they went through and what changed their life. People get to hear, “Oh, I can identify with that. I've got things like that going on, too.” Why don't you introduce today's guest?

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, I almost said Dr. Kevin Rail.

Kevin: I'm okay being called Dr. I've got no problem with that.

David: At least on TV.

Dr. Pompa: He is—Kevin, how would you describe yourself? An exercise—

Kevin: I like to use the word tactitioner, to be honest with you.

Dr. Pompa: I love that. Especially, saw what Kevin did. Today, you're going to hear a little bit about some of the really unique stuff that Kevin takes his people through. My wife is one of his people. I think the thing that I really love about Kevin the most is y'all out there know that I love a good story. I believe that the story, the adversity, I should say, makes the man or the woman. Kevin has an amazing, amazing story. I ask Kevin to share that story with you this morning. Of course, he will share some of his ideas. He's going to give you some exercise things out there that we'll talk a little bit about. I don't know what we could give them today, but maybe you could think of something. Anyways, so hang in there. We're going to give you some really cool—what you call neuro load. I call it neuromuscular type of exercises, some of which you've come up with yourself, Kevin. You're a pretty amazing innovator. Anyways, with that said, Kevin, welcome, and I want to hear your story. First, I have to ask this question to our audience. How many of you have ever heard of orthorexia? Orthorexia? Probably not that many. David, have heard of it before?

David: No, I didn't. When I saw that, Kevin, you were going to be a guest on the show today, I googled you and I found your website, and I started reading your story. By the way, the whole story about wanting to be a professional wrestler, I remember when I was a kid, and my dad brought me—jumping on beds, sitting there tackling each other, throwing people, body slamming—I'm reading your story and I'm like, “Hey, I remember that when I was a kid.” Then my son wanted to do that, but that's a whole other story. I never heard about it until I went to your website and I started reading about it. I think it's something many people probably experience. One of the things that you wrote about was eating disorders, especially for men, are not reported and misdiagnosed.

Kevin: Oh, yeah.

Dr. Pompa: Kevin, what is orthorexia, but more importantly, tell us your story.

Kevin: Okay. I'll define orthorexia first, before we get any further. To put it simply, it's a fixation on righteous eating. That's the technical, scientific definition of it, if you wanted to summarize it quickly. In the big picture, it's a flat out eating disorder. There's no two ways around it. I have this over fixation on food, basically, is what it boils down to. Several years ago, it was July or August, I would say, of 2008. I'm 6'3, first of all. I got down to 145 lbs. I was totally ready to go down to 140 lbs. I just kept challenging myself to see if I could go farther and farther. Basically, what orthorexia is all three of us on this call right now, we're all healthy leaders. We all live the organic lifestyle, and we're all into it. We spread the word. We spread the message. We motivate as many people as we can. There comes a time where that road gets a little bit bumpy and the clouds start rolling in and things start getting a little hazy. What happens is you cross this line where you become obsessed. Basically, it's great to eat healthy and worry about high fructose corn syrup and all those other things and GMOs and the whole nine yards, but you also can flip a switch and go too far, to a point where you become alienated from society, where all you do is think about food and how many calories you're taking in, how many calories you're burning every single day. Then you start worrying about, “Oh my gosh, if I go to this party, there might be cupcakes there. There might be alcohol there.” You start talking yourself out of going to public places and going out with friends and going to birthday parties and going to fairs and going to picnics, just because you think you have an opportunity of cheating. You get majorly guilty, and then the next day you get up earlier in the morning than normal, you work out extra, and then you cut your calories down even more. Back in 2008, the summer, I had a perfect game plan set up. I would get up at 20 to 5:00 in the morning; I'd get to the gym at 20 to 5:00 when it opened at 5:00. I had an insider who worked there who let me in early. I would do 90 minutes worth of interval training on a treadmill. I'd get off, take a shower quickly. I'd eat my oatmeal, which I had perfectly portioned out. I knew exactly how many calories was in it. I had one tablespoon of this, one tablespoon of that, a pinch of that, a little squirt of agave syrup on top. 210 calories, I was good to go. I had it memorized. Then I'd go upstairs happy, train three clients, run back home, have another small meal, hop on my bike, go for a two-and-a-half hour bike ride, get to the point where I was about to pass out, stop at a health food store which I really liked. I would get a banana and two of these little sesame treats and a coconut water. Then I'd get another 250 calories or whatever. I was literally on the verge of passing out when I hit that spot. I made sure that I got to that point, while riding in the 95° F heat every single day. Then all of a sudden, I was like Superman. I was like Clark Kent, jumping into a phone booth and getting recharged again. I was like bam. I was like oh, I've got all this energy. Then I'd fly home, which was another seven miles, take another shower, and the first thing I would do was I'd go on the computer and I'd open up this caloric expenditure website. I'd punch in all my data, all my information, my height, my weight, everything. Literally, this happened every single day in the summer of 2008, from June until the end of August. I found out that I was burning 1600 calories a day, and I made an effort to only consume 1400 calories a day. It then became my obsession to burn more calories than I was consuming. If a day went by that I was unable to do that, I would just flip out. It was like a roid rage, although I was never on steroids. I don't buy into that stuff at all. It was very similar to that. My mood swings were up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down. I got to 150 lbs and I'm like, I'm going to 145. It just became my obsession and my goal to keep losing weight and keep getting, as I would say, lean and ripped, lean and ripped, lean and ripped. In reality, I had a massive eating disorder beyond belief, and every one of my friends and colleagues saw it, my clients saw it, everyone in town did, and they tried to allude me to it all the time. I was just like—it's just like an alcoholic who doesn't believe they're an alcoholic. You're in complete denial. It's very similar to alcoholism. I was completely out of control. One day, I just got fed up with everyone pointing fingers at me and saying I had a problem and all this stuff. I'm like, “I'm going to show all you people. I'm packing my crap and I'm moving to New York City and I'm going to pitch this show to Spike TV, and I'm going to be internationally known. You're all going to regret ever saying a word to me.” You start having all these crazy thoughts, too. You're very unsettled, you're very disheveled, and you're all over the place. Basically, your hormones are all over the place too, because your body fat percentage starts getting so low your brain starts getting decomposed for energy. You're just a huge, hot mess. That's all there is to it. One minute, you're really happy. The next minute, you're really depressed. The next minute, you're really sad. The next minute, you're suicidal. I basically flatlined when I was out in Manhattan, because it occurred around September 20th or something like that. Matter of fact, Dan, I just found an old journal I had sitting back in my storage cabinet from 2008. Every day, I'd write a few things in it. I saw this journal entry that said, “145 lbs!!! So excited.” It was September 20th, 2008. “Can't wait to go for 140.” It was literally September 20th when I completely hit the wall mentally. Yeah, it was pretty rough.

Dr. Pompa: To me, I look at an exercise guide—now you're filled with muscle and everything. To me, this defies logic of what I would think a guy like you would want. Why would a guy like you want to get skinnier? That means less muscle. Yet, you're working out. Why was the goal less weight? I know it makes no logical sense, but I have to ask that question anyway.

Kevin: I felt like the only way that I can achieve a lean, muscular, ripped body is by sacrificing weight. That's really what it boiled down to. Then it just became this goal and obsession to try to lose weight, because it almost became a game to me. I'm like, “I wonder if I can get to 145. Oh, maybe I can get to 140. Wow, I wonder if I can get to 135 even.” I just kept on trying to push myself. I didn't have anything specifically I was training for. A lot of people are, especially in our town, Dan, they're enduros, and they do 5Ks all the time, triathlons, all these other things. Always training for something. There was no goal for me. It was just like I want to do it for fun. The fun ended up being, it turned ugly, and I got way out of control. Then I realized, and I started sifting back through my years growing up, and it all started as a child. It just went forward and forward, and it went unrecognizable until literally 2008. That's finally when I realized what was going on, what was happening. I literally probably had this condition ever since I was five years old.

Dr. Pompa: You know what, Kevin, that's what I wanted to talk about. I believe there's a cause for everything. Certain stressors pop into our life, and then we end up with things later in life. Every client that I have, I always go back to when things started. That's the key. I want you to go back to that time. However, your brother played a big role in waking you up. Tell us about that.

Kevin: Okay, well finally it got to a point—when I was in Manhattan, I went over to a client's house who lived over by the East River. This was around that time, around September 20th or so. At this point, I was physically, emotionally, and mentally and spiritually bankrupt. I was literally ready to die, and I didn't care. I remember working out in the mornings. I was living in this really dumpy apartment over in Edgewater, New Jersey. I had to take the bus into Manhattan every day. I was struggling big-time with my finances, with bills. I had a mortgage back in Pennsylvania that a house I rented, and I was way late on that. They were going to, whatever, foreclose on it. I was so done it was unbelievable. I remember exercising in my bedroom in the mornings. Just every time I would do a crunch—I had this medicine ball. I remember, I'd hold it behind my back, and I'd do a pull-up crunch, and I'd sit up. Every time I'd come up, I'd be like, “God, just kill me. God, just kill me.” I just kept asking God to kill me. Literally, that's how bad I was. It was awful. Then I'd just get up, and I'd send someone an email, right before I'd go over to hit the bus stop, and be like, “Going over to Manhattan today. Hopefully, I'll get hit by a bus that gets out of control,” or “Hopefully, I'll get shot by some kind of gang warfare, and you'll never have to worry about me again,” and all this stuff, “because I know I'm a big burden on you guys.” I would say messages like this to my friends. I was out there. I was gone.

Dr. Pompa: You were reaching out though.

Kevin: Yeah, I was reaching out in a disturbed way, but I was doing it. Then I went over to Manhattan this one day, in the middle of the afternoon, it was right around that time frame, and I was standing on the handrail of the East River. It was cooking. There was a lot of rain before that. It was in December, I think, and it looked like chocolate milk. It was really hard and it was really high, and there was this big concrete drop-off going down to it. I was looking down at that water, and I said to myself, “I wonder if I could survive if I jumped in the water.” It wasn't like I was suicidal, but I was to a point where I just didn't care about living anymore. I was in this gray area where everything was flowing, and I just didn't care. I'm like, “I don't care if I make it out alive. I want to find out if I can do it, thought. If I can do it, then I can do anything, and I can turn myself around,” and all this stuff. I had weird thoughts like that flowing through my head all day long, right up until the time I went to bed. It was really hard to do. Right at that point when I was about to jump off, my friend Jessica called me from back in Pennsylvania. She was one of the recipients of one of my disturbing emails. She's like, “What's wrong with you?” She started nutting up on me, and I was all, “Ahh.” I said, “I don't really need to be around anymore. You guys would get along without me.” She just started crying and she started screaming, and she's like, “Think of how your mother would be if you left,” and all this stuff and everything else. She made me feel guilty, and I hate feeling guilty. She talked me off a ledge. I sat down on a chair. I talked to her for a little while, and I was like, “I'm coming back to PA tomorrow. This is enough. I've got to get out of New York City, first of all.” When I came back home, my brother had come up from Washington DC. He throws this pack of information in front of me. On top it said, “Orthorexia Nervosa.” He points at it and he goes, “You have that.” My brother and I, we've never really saw eye to eye that well. We get along, but he's always been sarcastic to me, and a bit of a nut breaker, if you will. He was being sarcastic with me. I'm trying to keep it PG here. He throws that paper on the table, he's like, “You have that.” I'm like, “What are you talking about?” I got in this little argument with him, and I looked at him. Although he was being sarcastic, he was 100% on the money. I looked at this paper, and it said, “Orthorexia Nervosa.” I read all the way through it, and then I started writing this article on eating disorders when I was working for this one company. I had to do research on it. Combined with what it said on that paper, and all the research I had done from CDC and all the other websites out there on eating disorders, I wrote this article, I put it out there, it got accepted, and then it got put out into cyberspace. I realized I had 90% of the symptoms of eating disorders, plus one, probably. Finally, it struck me. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” The big aha moment finally hit me. I realized, I was completely, 100% eating disordered and I needed to turn things around, or I was going to just pass out and die. One of the symptoms when you have an eating disorder is your body fat gets so low that your organs just start shutting down randomly, with no rhyme or reason, no questions, nothing. You'll be sitting there talking and I'll be talking to you, and then all of a sudden, my liver stops like that and I'm gone. That's what happens. That woke me up, finally. That's when I started making my transition, right there.

Dr. Pompa: Okay, we'll talk about your transition. Let's go back to age five. What were the stressors that caused it?

Kevin: My father was old school and he was old fashioned, big time. He grew up on a farm, and he was all about, not exercising per se, but staying healthy and staying fit and always doing chores around the farm and stuff like that. He tried to make me and my brother do that as we grew up. Of course, we're kids, and we're resistant, and we want to play Atari. We didn't want to go out and pick rocks out of the garden. That's a bunch of crap. We were at odds with our parents growing up. One thing that stuck in my head is he was always—he would joke with us sometimes, and he'd say, “Oh, you guys have potbellies. You've got to get rid of that pot belly.” Jokingly. I took that to heart. You're five years old. How impressionable is a five year old? It's like a puppy. If you kick a puppy, a puppy's going to think you're an idiot its whole life when it grows up. It's not that my father was an idiot, but he was just trying to instill good habits in us. As a child, that's not how you think. I'm a very emotional person, and I attach to things more than the average person does. At five years old, I'm thinking, “Oh, I can' have a pot belly. I don't want to disgrace my father. I don't want to let him down.” It was always like—I made sure I exercised all the time and I worked extra hard with every single thing I did. Sometimes, I'd sit at the table at school, when I was eating lunch, and I would suck my stomach in the whole time I sat there. I was afraid kids were going to look at me and point at me and laugh and say I had a pot belly. I'm serious, that went on for years. Sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade. I would literally sit upright and I would suck my stomach in and I would eat really slow and really weird. No one ever really noticed it or said anything to me about it, but it happened, and it was going on. It all started when I was five. Those habits just kept on accumulating as I got older and older until finally, 2008, they all culminated. That's how it all kicked off.

Dr. Pompa: Wow, that's amazing. Just thinking of that, it just shows you how, as humans, how frail, sometimes, we really are. We look back at our childhood, and it's amazing what comes out of it. That was a stressor. That was something that set up a mindset that now has affected you years later. Anyways, okay, so how did you transition out, man? There's people watching this, I promise you, that they're going through this. Somehow, some way, they're relating to this conversation going, “Oh crap, maybe this is me.” A lot of the clients that I see, Kevin, they get there for other reasons, too. They get there because they were so sick. Then they start getting fearful about certain things, and it sets up these patterns. I've seen this so many times, different ways. How did you get out?

Kevin: For me, it was a long process. First of all, I want to say this to all the people out there. The male population is very underserved when it comes to eating disorders. It's shocking to know that there's as many people out there, as many men out there, in my opinion, that have eating disorders as women. They just don't know it or they don't realize it. It's a macho thing. I denied it for years. I'm like, “Oh, men don't have eating disorders. That's a bunch of crap. I don't believe it.” In reality, once I put all the pieces together and thought back in hindsight, it was absolutely true. Men have it just as much as women. It's just that we don't come forth and say it, because we're afraid we're going to be judged or looked at weird or people are going to say things to us, like, “Oh, you have an eating disorder,” and laugh at us or something like that, but it's not the case at all. It's just like people who are afraid to go to a gym because they think everyone's going to stare at them and look at them. That's not the case at all. If you feel you have an eating disorder of any kind, you need to just come right out and say it and come clean with it, and you've got to find a circle of people that you know and trust to talk to about it. I've spoken to you about this before, and that's usually the question that I get from students and everything. “How did you recognize it, and what did you do about it, because I might know someone who does.” It's always the “might know someone who does” is actually them, I can tell by their eyes, but you know how it works. What I did is exactly that. I have a very good network of close friends back in northeast Pennsylvania that always have supported me and have helped me. They're big into organic food and eating and spirituality and the whole nine yards, but they know how to do it right. They all basically cornered me. Basically, I guess it was an intervention, if you will. They said, “You look absolutely sick.” They said, “You look like you have rickets.” My eyebrow went in the air, and I went, “Rickets?” I'm like, “Last time I heard the word rickets was on an episode of Little House on the Prairie, I think, years ago. I'm like, “Does that even exist anymore?” My friend's like, “Yeah, you look like you have rickets. Your cheeks are all sunken in. Your eyes are black and blue. It looks like you got beat up. It looks like you haven't slept in weeks.” They basically came out and told me, “It's your eating habits. You're got to change it, or you're going to die.” Basically, all that happened at the exact same time. My brother handed me that paper, and I was writing articles and doing the research, and it all happened exactly at the same time.

Dr. Pompa: God was looking -inaudible-.

Kevin: Exactly. God just dropped all this stuff right in my lap at the exact same moment. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” Then I started thinking about hypocrisy. Dan, you can probably easily attest to this, how many hypocrites and charlatans there are in our industry, fitness and wellness. One thing I pride myself in is being a straight-up gunslinger. I practice what I preach every single day of the week. I walk the walk and I talk the talk. If I'm sitting here with a massive eating disorder and I'm writing articles on eating disorders and telling people how to get help and how to get changed and fixed and all these other things and I'm not doing it myself, then I'm a hypocrite. It was partially that that really propelled me forward. Then I started worrying about my mom and everything, because my father passed away when I was 19, from cancer, which was also a big motivator for me to start my whole, super-healthy trend. I just took it one day at a time, and I realized, I'm going to disappoint a lot more people if I die or kill myself than if I stick around. I just decided, I've got to make this happen. I've got to change. One day at a time is all it took. Literally, I just got up in the morning, and I'm like, “I have to accept the fact that I'm going to gain some weight.” The hardest part is, a lot of it is an image disorder. It's dysmorphia. You look in the mirror and you say to yourself, “Oh my god, I need to get rid of this fat on my side,” but you're just pinching skin. You have to basically accept yourself for who you are and what you are and what you will become. That's usually the hardest thing that anyone in the whole world has with anything at all. I just took it one day at a time, and I was like, “I need to start increasing my calories.” I had a support system of five to ten people deep that I could text or call or just knock on the door, any hour of any day. If I didn't have that support system, I wouldn't have been able to do it alone. I would've had to absolutely get into a clinic. I've spoken to people at some of my talks before about eating disorders, and they came afterward and told me, “You're so motivating,” and stuff. “I had an eating disorder myself, and I had to go to a clinic and everything. Did you go to a clinic?” I was like, no. They gave me a little back story of their situation. I've spoken to people whose situations were one tenth as bad as mine who had to go to clinics for six months, eight months, ten months. Most people are pretty shocked that I didn't go myself. Now that I look back at it, I'm pretty shocked as well. It was a daily grind to get back into the swing. It took me probably a good year and a half before I got to what I would consider a more normal weight. I went from 145 to 195 or something like that. Right now, I'm about 190 I'm hovering around.

David: That's amazing.

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, Kevin, I have to ask this question, because you're in the industry too and you know a lot about this, because you experienced it. Do you see the opposite happen, where you see a kid who is ultra skinny, and then all they want to do is put muscle on? It becomes this obsession. Obviously, that can lead to even steroids, but let's say it doesn't. It just can become this obsession. Honestly, it's like when I was a kid, I never wanted to be that skinny kid. That interested me in exercise. Fortunately, it didn't get to be the obsessive thing, but I have my one son, he just doesn't want to be looked at as the skinny kid. He's got my genetics. He just wants to put on muscle. I worry about that. I worry about him. Do you see that as a problem? Do you see it the other way, meaning that lose weight, do people go obsessive gaining weight?

Kevin: I think people go both directions. I think obsession is a big thing when it comes to body image and aestheticness and all those other things. High school kids, I remember several years back, when—what was that supplement called? Everybody was doing it MuscleTech was the big thing. You'd go to gyms, you'd see kids, 15, 16, 17 years old, just shaking these shakers up and slamming these MuscleTech stuff left and right, every time you'd turn around. All they'd think about was getting bigger, getting bigger. It was all they could think about. That is actually called bigorexia, so there is a name for that, too.

Dr. Pompa: I've seen that. I've seen this habit. Steroids, all the way to where it literally dominates their life to where they are this odd person—like, who are you, and what have you become?

Kevin: Yeah. Interestingly, most of the time in that age group, it is about looking good and impressing chicks. 15, 18 years old, guys are out to impress chicks. Let's be honest here. They want the fancy car. They want the nice hat on backwards and sideways, grill in their mouth, and the whole nine yards. They want the big muscles to match. It can become an obsession, all the way up to steroids. That could be a huge problem. It's definitely there. Usually, on the eating disorder side of the story, where deprivation is the case, it has nothing to do with food at all. Zero. It has everything to do with inside issues, like feelings of inadequacy. It's being bullied, being overlooked or looked down upon. I had all those emotions growing up. When I look back on it, that's exactly what I did. I channeled my aggression of anger or disgust or hatred or whatever into exercise and into fitness and into eating and so on so forth, and cutting my calories. It was always like, “I'll show them. I'll do extra reps. I'll show them. I'll get ripped. I'll show them. I'll become a fitness model. I'll show them. I'll have my own TV show.” It just went on and on and on. The list just keeps going. That all started occurring to me as I started eating more food and getting my brain level back to where it should be. Literally within after about a week or so of increasing my calorie intake, my brain function started to come back and get better again. I guess when you start feeding the brain, it works wonders, huh?

Dr. Pompa: The brain needs fat, man. You bought into something that we don't buy into. I know you don't do it now, but you bought into caloric restriction. I hate that word. Low fat. I hate that word, too. The brain needs fat, man. You were literally starving your brain. It really is remarkable when you hear the extremes. A lot of it I've read, I've heard, it is about control. You find this one area. You said, “I wanted to just do this,” that you can control this area. How much do you think it is just simply about this one area of your life that you're able to control, because other areas, you aren't able to control? Is it just about these wounds that we get as a child?

Kevin: I'd say it's 99% about control. That's a good point you brought up, because it always boils down to that in the end. I don't have any control of what's going to happen at work today. I don't have any control of what's going to happen when I get my car. I'm not going to have any control of what happens when I walk into the bookstore to buy a book. However, I can control every single morsel of food that goes in my mouth and every single drop of liquid calories I consume. I can eat lavishly. I can eat hungrily. I can eat like a prince or a pauper or a queen or a champ, or I can cut my calories any which way I see fit. One thing I don't have control over is if someone's going to laugh at me or say I have big ears or call me a name or something today. However, I do have control of what I'm going to eat the rest of the day. If someone makes fun of me and calls me a name, I can restrict my calories and I can get on my bike and I can do 50 miles today and feel good about it. It's almost like self-medication. That's how I looked at it.

Dr. Pompa: That's where the I'll-show-them thing comes from, right?

Kevin: Exactly, yes.

Dr. Pompa: I'll show them. David, you probably have some questions. I've been so intrigued I've been dominating the questions.

David: A few. Here's the thing, and I think you've said it multiple times. Our love of our self, whether or not someone's going to say something, call us a name or say that we've got a funky-looking shirt on or whatever, it doesn't really matter. It's how we react to it. Here's a question that was going through my mind while you're telling your story. Okay, you've got this group of five people around you. You realize that there's a challenge. It's interesting, part of your control is being able to turn it off as well, and make it, “Okay, now I'm going in this direction, and I'm going to get my life back and I'm going to change.” How did you change your exercise pattern when you started eating more? Did you continue exercising like you were before?

Kevin: That's interesting. I have not missed a day of exercise since September 30 of 2007. I found out Jack LaLanne exercised 57 years straight, 2 1/2 hours a day. I said to myself, “Wow, that's impressive.” One day I decided, “I'm going to exercise every single day the rest of my life for a minimum of 30 minutes.” It could be as light as walking. It could be stretching. It could be yoga, but it has to be something. That's just going to create a brainwave to always stay physically fit. When I made the switch, I basically just did this. I just cut a lot of my cardio out or down significantly. That was the big thing. That was the big calorie burner. It was also a big muscle burner, because I was so low in body fat percentage, I was just eating my muscle mass. I look at old pictures and video footage, and my arm is just a bone with a ball of bicep here, and then striations in my arm. I look like something out of one of those Batman movies or Superman movies, one of the evil people or whatever. I was really, really, muscle, bone, and striations. However, it just didn't look right. It looked unhealthy. I just turned the switch very slowly, and I turned the volume up slowly, and I started weaning out the mass amounts of exercise. I only worked out maybe an hour, hour and a half a day at first. Then eventually, it just got down to an hour. Then I completely just transitioned over to weights for a while, and did light cardio and stuff like that. As I started gaining weight back, I just started feeling better. My brain was the biggest thing that was bothering me. Like I said, I was on edge all the time. Up and down, up and down. Then once I started including more calories and started allowing more fat in my body—and I know all about fats. I know how beneficial they are and everything, but at that time, I was like, “Fats are the most calorie-dense of the three macronutrients, so I've got to keep my fat intake low.” I was like, low fat this and no fat that. I wasn't buying low fat stuff. I just wasn't eating food with a lot of fat in it, for example. Yeah, it was just a gradual weaning out of the long high intensity workouts, and I just came back to basics. I started doing more compound exercises and more weight training that's going to be more conducive to putting on bulk and mass. That's what I did. I just slowly did it, though. Like I said, it literally took me a year and a half to get comfortable with that?

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, so okay, look. I said at the top of the show that I believe out of every adversity comes somebody's purpose. Matter of fact, oftentimes the bigger the adversity, the bigger the calling, the bigger the adversity, the better someone actually becomes. It's been my life, and I see it in your life, Kevin.

Kevin: Thank you.

Dr. Pompa: You're an amazing trainer. I've been in the gym my whole life, so I can see the guys who are really doing some unique work and doing some great work. I saw that about you, so when my wife approached me and said—actually, to be honest with you, I had been encouraging her to get a trainer. She always does the same thing in the gym, and I'm always like, “You've got to mix it up!” She was one of those people I said, “You need a trainer. You really do. You need someone to take you to the next level.” “Who should I get?” I said, “That guy right over there.”

Kevin: That tall bald guy over there.

Dr. Pompa: That's a lot of trainers. We live in Park City, Utah. Kevin had said it somewhere in the show, here, that we probably live in the most fit community in the United States of America. Kevin, would you agree with that?

Kevin: Actually, I believe it's been documented that Summit County, which we live in, is the fittest county in the United States. I heard that at a talk I went to. I do believe it's true.

Dr. Pompa: We joke and say, “Is he a one sport a day person, or a three?” They go out, they bike, they run, they hike, or they ski. Literally, three sports a day. The people around here, they can pull it off. Typically, they're young entrepreneurs, and their lifestyle, somehow. Anyways, there's a lot of great trainers. I said, “There's the guy.” I could tell you knew what you were doing. With that said, obviously, it evolved into some amazing stuff. You take that intensity and you put it into something good now. Obviously, you're over that. Maybe you never get over it. Maybe it's like alcoholism. Could you fall back in it? Let me start with that question. That's a really good question. I said you're over it because I'm looking at you.

David: It's something you have to fight every day.

Dr. Pompa: Do you still struggle with some of these thoughts, man? Does this come back into your head?

Kevin: It's a daily struggle. I definitely wanted to touch on that point before we close down on orthorexia. Once you have it, it's like celiac disease or it's like alcoholism. It's with you 24 hours a day, and it's always in the back of your head, chirping at you. You get a bad day or something bad happens, and you immediately start gritting your teeth and you start clenching your fists, and you want to do this long workout, and you want to jump on the bike, and you want to go for miles, Then it's almost like your head starts going back in that direction of, “Oh, I'll show them. I'll do this, or I'll do that, and I'll get extra ripped or extra lean.” Then the difference is, I now have it in more control, where I can stop myself and say, “Wait, stop.” Then I think back of what happened and where I came from and who I would be disappointing if I went back to 145 lbs again, and I don't know if I'd make it out this time if I went back down there. I think of the long-term ramifications, and I'm able to stop. I'm basically able to control it now. Is it gone? No. It's never going to be gone, ever. I go to a party and I see cake and I see all these things, and one of the telltale signs of orthorexia is you start sorting things out as soon as you get to a party or if you're invited to someone's house for dinner. You start making alterations to your meal. If someone says, “Oh, I'm going to have pork loin for dinner,” your brain starts thinking, “I wonder how it's prepared. I wonder if it's in butter, if it's coconut oil, if it's got grease, if it's got sauce, if it's got marinade, if it has gluten, if it has high fructose corn syrup, if they have organic, if it's not organic, is it hormone free? All these thoughts just swirl. It's always there. It never leaves. However, I'm more accepting now of when people cook me a meal, I'm not going to pick it apart like I used to. I'm going to be very accepting of it, and I'm very flattered that someone would go out of their way to prepare a meal for me. It's more important to have food on the table and survive than it is to have nothing. There's so many people who do have nothing or even more than me. I feel selfish at times to even think about my little situation of, “Oh, does that have high fructose corn syrup or GMOs in it?” It's always there. It's a daily battle, but I have it in control now. I just had my oatmeal this morning, but I have a system set in place. I get out a certain amount of this and a certain amount of that and I make it and whatever. That's the end of the story. My eating habits, they're still pretty rigid, but I eat more calories, obviously, now, or I wouldn't be able to gain as much weight as I have. I have it dialed in a lot better now, and I'm in more control. You never heal.

David: Let me ask you a question. Because of this, could you train for a triathlon or an iron man, or would that set you off on a pattern?

Kevin: I probably wouldn't do it, just because I can't stand the idea of swimming that far an long. I can swim one lap in a pool really gracefully, and then halfway through the second one, I'll just die. I'll be like, “Oh my god, get me out of this pool.” I probably could do it, but I would approach with caution. I don't know, David. That's a good question. I never really did think about that.

Dr. Pompa: My feeling is don't do it. When David asked the question, I thought to myself, “I think that's a bad idea for you.”

Kevin: It might be. It might just be a bad idea. I don't know.

David: I asked the question because there's people who are listening that may be going through the same thing. They, all of a sudden, someone challenges them to do an iron man. What does that mean? Does it set them back off? Who knows?

Dr. Pompa: I think it's a great question, but I think it's like an alcoholic to the bar. I don't know if that's good. That's an odd thing.

Kevin: I think that'd be case-dependent, to be honest with you.

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, you're probably right. Anyways, so here's the thing. I know you struggle with it every day, but intellectually, you go, “Okay, 195 lbs at 6'3, 6'4, I look better. Why the heck would I want to go back down to 145? Doesn't your brain just sort it out that way? It's like, “My gosh, I look so much better. Of course I'm going to stay with this. I would never do that.”

Kevin: Honestly, I think the weight is an afterthought, until you start losing the weight. At first, it wasn't about the weight. It was about lean and ripped. For me, it was like, I want to get lean and ripped like Bruce Li. Bruce Li's one of my all time favorite people in the world. I'm like, “Oh, he was three and a half percent body fat. I can get to three and a half percent body fat, no problem.” You know what? If you went back in 1968 or 1970, before he died, and analyzed Bruce Li's lifestyle, you'd probably find out he had a massive eating disorder as well.

Dr. Pompa: I was thinking that.

Kevin: Yeah, so great guy. Love him to death. However, it became my fixation in life. As David was saying before, when I was growing up, I was like, “I want to be a professional wrestler. I've got to gain weight, gain weight.” It was all about gaining weight back in the day, when I was in high school and stuff. Then early college years, early 20s and stuff like that. I found out that I'm not designed to gain mass amounts of weight. I'm not going to do steroids, because that's ridiculous. I'm like, “What other options do I have?” Then I realized, you know what? I've got broad shoulders. I'm tall, lean. I've got more of a fitness model type body. Let me just exploit that. Then I did it one summer, and I'm like, “Oh, I really like this lean, cut type physique that I'm building here, and I'm just going to stick with that from now on out.” Basically, it just started like that. I just exploited my strengths. I always tell people, “Try to work on your strengths,” and that's what I did. I just took it too far. Then, all the old things started rolling in from when I was five on the way up. Being emotional that I am, and being attached to certain things. It all just culminated and added all together, and that's what it became.

Dr. Pompa: We really appreciate you sharing that story. We have so many healthy people that follow us. Maybe they should reach out to you. I don't know how they could reach out to you, but offer your website, whatever you feel comfortable offering, that someone who's watching this that's going, “Oh my god, that's me—” how do we reach out to you, Kevin?

Kevin: You can find me on Facebook, first of all. Just Kevin Rail. That's R-A-I-L. Secondly, you can look up my website at ActofNutrition.com. That's Act of, not Active, Nutrition dot com. You can also shoot me an email at Krail@wellcoaches.com. That's Krail@wellcoaches.com.

Dr. Pompa: Write that email down and hold it up. People get all—you give them too many things, and—really, if someone's out there struggling with this, I really want them to reach out to you, man. Not that you're the end all solution for that—

David: I got his website here. ActofNutrition.com. Is that correct?

Kevin: That is. My contact info's on there as well.

David: Okay. ActofNutrition.com, if anyone can read my handwriting.

Dr. Pompa: Again, not that you're their end all answer, but I think reaching out to someone that's experienced it is the first stop. That could be the first step, and then go from there. Thank you so much for sharing that. I promised this at the top of the show, that out of that comes great things. That was my point earlier. You're an amazing trainer. You do stuff that I believe is so important, as far as exercise goes. Number one, I talk about diet variation on the show and how important that is and how that works with our adaptation. Exercise variation. Every time I see you with someone, you're doing different things. Nobody varies exercise like you. I'm also understanding of how the nerve system works with exercise. Neuromuscular load, neuromuscular reeducation, is something that I used to fix spines in my early days as a structural correction specialist, right? I completely knew. You put a lot of these things together. Just give them a quick thing of what you do and why it's so different than the average workout program.

Kevin: The way I see exercise, it shouldn't be about how much you can bench press and how much you can squat and how much you can dead lift and how much weight you can lift to impress your friends. All those movements are fine and dandy, but they're very linear. They're like one motion. Biceps curl, for example. All you're doing is flexing your arms. It's like drinking a beer. It's boring, first of all. Yeah, it's going to build your bicep, but so what, it's a muscle. Look at those guns through the shirt. Awesome. In life, you're going to be doing flexion all day long with bottles and stuff like that. Big deal. Big whoop. That's no big deal. Anybody can do it. In reality, your body is more like a glob moving around the earth, because you're always moving in circular patters and three-dimensional movement patterns, whether you're biking or running or scaling a hill or rock climbing or getting groceries out of a car or putting a toddler in a crib or situating rocks in your garden, you're always moving around in a three-dimensional type pattern and three-dimensional way. Why wouldn't you want to improve your fitness ability to improve your abilities with all the stuff of daily living that you're doing outside the gym? That's the key thing. What I do is I focus on strengthening the body in a way that's going to help you with all the activities you do outside the gym, because that's where your love and passion is anyway. When I start training someone for the first time, I don't just say, “Oh, meet me at the gym at whatever,” I say, “Why don't you meet me at the gym lobby first,” and I have a consultation, which I like to call an interview. I literally interview people before I train them. If I don't feel there's chemistry or I don't feel I'm a good fit for them, I won't take them on as a client. I want to know what they do outside the gym. I'm like, “What makes you happy? What do you do outside the gym?” “I play tennis and I swim and I do triathlons and all these other things, and I want to make sure that my strength levels are up,” and so on so forth. I'm like, “Good, so you told me you run, you bike, you swim, and you play tennis, all of which are rotational movement pattern motions, for a repetitive amount of time.” What I do is I collect all the data from what they're looking to do. I calculate what injuries they have and what they can't do. Then I formulate workouts based on what's going to improve their capacity with all those things they do outside the gym, whether it's a rock climber or a rugby player or whatever. Then I build my workouts around that. I think about the movement patterns that they do, and then I think about how I can apply that to exercise movement patterns. Then I either create them on my own or I just put combinations together of different movement patterns and what I like to call three-dimensional movements that have a lot of neurological load, as you call it, neuroscience something that you referenced to before. Something that has a lot of neurological load means that you have to think a lot when you're doing what you're doing. A lot of things I do involved cross-body motions of the arms and legs. For example, a log roll with a push-up is something you do in a plank position on the ground. You lift your one arm in the air, so your body forms like a T. Then you do a complete reverse plank, you put your hand on the ground, and then you roll all the way back around to the other side and you go right into a push-up. Then you pop back up and you roll the other direction. You're just on a three-dimensional movement pattern where you go complete log roll plus a push-up, so you're working pretty much your entire core, your chest, your arms, your legs, all rolled into one movement pattern. That's just one little small piece. Then sometimes, I'll add a walk-down, where you start from a standing position. Then you do a squat. Then you put your hands on the ground, walk out, do a push-up, then do a log roll, do another push-up, walk back up, walk back down. That's, I call it a series, or a journey. You're doing a whole series of movement patterns like this, back and forth, in a beautiful, graceful, motion. It's not just all the core muscles are working and the chest and the back and you're getting all this muscle recruitment, but you're also getting a high amount of neurological load, because you've got to think to yourself, “What am I doing next?” I've got to lower myself down, I've got to think about the position of my hands and my arms and my legs, put your hands on the ground a certain way, and walk forward with your hands. Then you roll a certain way. You've got to keep your hips up. You have to be thinking about it the whole time, as you're exercising. What that does is it also improves your neurological load as well, meaning it improves your brain function. I like to enrich the function of the brain, as well as the body, when I do exercise, personally, and with people that I train. I want people to be not only physically fit, but I want them to be mentally fit, as they age and as they get older. It doesn't matter what the age is, if they play a sport, it's very good to improve your concentration and your mental ability. That's where I come in with the whole exercise thing. That's my take on it. That's going to improve every aspect. Another thing that's really good about that is kids that are in middle school through high school, we've lost touch with PE, as you are well aware. The biggest aspect that's missing is there's no PE class. If it is, it's pretty lame. If they learn these movement patterns where they have to think about the position of their hands and their feet and they're crossing the midline of their body, the left hemisphere and right hemisphere of the brain are constantly working. It actually improves test scores and it improves brain function. I try to bring all of this together. I have clients of all ages, and I make sure that my high school aged clients do a lot of this three-dimensional type movement patterns that has a lot of neurological load.

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, sorry, something kicked on here behind me. I'm sorry. I had a question. One thing is, is people—you went through this movements on your website. Do you have video of that? Do you have some videos that people can watch? Hearing you do it, they're like okay—can they go to your website?

Kevin: I'm about to start building the video library. As we speak, I'm doing some test runs right now. I'm going to be adding them all onto YouTube and stuff, and they're going to be available through either YouTube or Vimeo, I'm not quite sure yet. I'm going to start adding all that stuff in in the upcoming year, starting this summer.

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, that would be amazing. Look, I can tell you this right now. It had such a transformation effect on my wife. It really did. A lot of her neuromuscular stuff was off. She really never did sports as a kid. You're right, the linear motions helped her to a point, but really, a lot of your work really has transformed her, even as an athlete. The difference of her on a bike this year versus the year before have been amazing. I actually threw her keys the other day, and was like, wham! She nailed it. I was like, “Okay, that would've bounced off your head in the past.” I can just see functionally how much better she is. Of course, her physique has also changed. You do amazing work, Kevin. You really do. Again, it doesn't surprise me that that type of amazing work came out of your diversity. You have your six things here—we have to wrap the show up, but you have these six things that you talk about, these motions, right? Tell us a little bit about that.

Kevin: The six things?

Dr. Pompa: Yeah, it's like these six things you gave my wife. She comes home and tells me all of these things. The six ways the body moves, or six movements—

Kevin: Oh yes, yes, yes. Okay, so basically, the body has six postures. That's what it was. You've got vertical, which is standing up. You've got horizontal, which is lying on your stomach or back. You've got flexion, which is bending forward, which is flexion of the spin. You have extension, which is going the other way. Then you've got brachiation, which is hanging from a bar. Then you've got inversion, which is hanging upside down from a bar. When I train her—that's another thing. I try to keep all those postures in mind when I train people. The key thing is, if you can work out, each one of your workouts, you should try to get as many of those postures involved with your workouts as you can. That's going to create the closest thing to a superhuman as you can find. It's going to create a nice flexible, supple, strong body with a strong core, and there's no two ways around it, if you keep those principles in mind. One of the things I love to do is hanging from a bar. The true definition of brachiation is swinging from limb to limb or branch to branch like a monkey. That's the true definition of brachiation. Just hanging from a bar is counted as brachiation as well. When you hang from a bar, you can reset your shoulders and you can reset your spinal column and stuff. People that sit at a desk all day and have rounded shoulders like this, the best therapy they can do is just grab a bar and hang from it 15 seconds a day, to start out. It's a simple thing.

Dr. Pompa: I agree. When she came in and told me that, I'm like, “Yeah, that's all true.” We used to utilize that in spinal correction. It's a lot of the same principles. Neuromuscular reeducation is the key. You're reeducating the nerves, the muscles, to really adapt a new position. You're like this all day, don't do anything to neuromuscualarly correct—

David: Are you talking about hanging like this or upside down?

Kevin: Brachiation is just hanging from a bar. Inversion would be flipped over upside down hanging from a bar with inversion boots on. Yeah, that's the difference.

Dr. Pompa: Kevin, man, I hope a lot of people go to your website and just see what you're up to, because it's amazing stuff. Obviously, you're changing lives because your life was changed. We appreciate you sharing your story. It does, it always takes a lot of guts to just talk about what we've been through, but I believe it is the adversity that makes the man. It makes you, man. There's no doubt. You'd never be able to affect the people you affect if you didn't go through that.

Kevin: I appreciate it. Thanks, Dan.

Dr. Pompa: I learned something in Africa, when I was there. They had a saying. Basically, your authority in life and whatever you're in, it comes from the victory God gave you in your adversity. It's not all the study. It's not all the things that we think it is. It's the victory God gives us. It is from the adversity that our authority comes from, and you move and walk in that authority, no doubt, Kevin, because of your adversity, so thank you for that.

Kevin: I appreciate it. I would like to say, it's been a pleasure being on the show today. I really appreciate the opportunity. If any of you out there have any questions at all, if you even think you might have an eating disorder or situation or you know someone who does, just please feel free to reach out to me. If you forgot my contact info, just contact Dan, and he'll get it to you ASAP.

David: ActofNutrition.com. Thank you, Kevin.

Kevin: Yep, you got it.

Transcript of Episode 67: Hashimoto's Disease and Autoimmune Tips

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and David Asarnow.

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David:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV, Episode 67. This is David Asarnow, and I am here with the host with the most, Dr. Dan Pompa. Hey, Dr. Pompa.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Is it really 67? I was thinking 57. I don’t know.

David:
Can you believe we’ve been doing this for a year and a quarter?

Dr. Pompa:
I know. Yeah, that’s crazy. When you said something-seven earlier, I thought I heard 57. It’s really 67. That’s amazing. It just shows you we love it. I do. I love bringing this message, David. I do. It’s always opposite of what people think, where the truth lies, and that’s our 180° concept. This is one of my favorite parts of my weeks right here, and I love finishing with it.

David:
Mine, too because I’m a student that just sits here and learns. From the time I first saw you over three years ago, and I was like that kid in the candy store. Every single episode is like that. In fact, before we started today, we started talking about autoimmune, and Hashimoto’s, and the three-legged school. Every time we speak about that, it’s like peeling back the layer of an onion. Every time we talk about it, I’m learning more and more.

Dr. Pompa:
Right.

David:
I think that would be a great topic for us to speak about today.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No, listen. Hashimoto’s is a thyroid condition that’s autoimmune. Autoimmune, in general, David—it’s one of my very passionate topics. Here’s why. I am on the phone all the time with people from all around the world, and I hear these stories of unexplainable illnesses. They either read my story, or they watch someone else’s story, who was a client of mine who got their life back. They resonate. They call in, and it’s the same stories all the time. There’s always, always, always an autoimmune component to it.

Now, they’ve never been diagnosed, most often, meaning that they don’t go to the doctor, and get a blood test, and say, “Oh, you’re autoimmune.” It doesn’t happen that way because the testing for autoimmune—it’s in the stone ages, David. It really is. We have some tests that once you’re full-blown autoimmune—so deep—and then rheumatoid factor will show up, and hey, you get diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis or scleroderma. It’s only after the fact that your skin is tightening up like the tin man—your joints—and you can’t move. Then you get the diagnosis. Lupus—or I could keep going down the list.

Hashimoto’s—people have Hashimoto’s for years before it actually shows up on a blood test. That’s the problem. Autoimmune—David, it is so common today. No time in the history of man have we seen an epidemic like this that’s really undiagnosed.

What is autoimmune? I should back up one second. There’s people, maybe, listening, saying, “What is he even talking about?” Look, it is when your own body’s immune system is attacking specific cells or tissues in the body. We name these diseases based on what your immune system is attacking. For example, it’s attacking a certain part of the joint, we call it rheumatoid arthritis. If it’s attacking a certain part of the gut, we can call that Crohn’s disease. Lupus is the skin. Scleroderma’s the skin and also some of the deeper organ tissues like the lungs, the kidneys. We name these things depending on what the body’s attacking.

However, the testing is—David, it really is years—10, 20 years before you actually get a positive test. By then, these autoimmune diseases stack up on one another, meaning that you have one, you probably have five more in the bank waiting to come out.

David:
One of the things we’ve talked about is one, we’ve talked a little bit about epigenetics—the genes turning on or the ability for them to turn off. When that happens, it usually begins in the gut and that microbiome, and that’s not good, so everything starts piling up.

In fact, my daughter just told me about a friend of hers. A girl just graduating high school couldn’t go to her graduation because she was in the hospital. She was diagnosed with Crohn’s. Things like this are happening at a younger and younger age all the time.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right, and matter of fact, so many kids today have autoimmune, and it just will never go noticed. You brought something up, David. I want to put it in context so we can have an intelligent conversation here with everyone out there listening. Okay. Believe it or not, that is a stool. I know that my artwork is—I’m sure most of you could not draw such a great three-legged stool, but I’ve had years of experience drawing these stools. I’m obviously kidding, but that is, in fact, a stool.

Here’s the thing. I guess if we put the word autoimmune, which I won’t—I’ll make it big, so I’ll just put auto to stand for autoimmune. I give this, David, this analogy, and you brought it up twice. It really is an analogy of the cause of autoimmune, but also the solution to autoimmune. Listen up. You said that there’s a certain gene—genes that get turned on. You’re right, David. We know that you get the autoimmune of your genetic weakness, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll get that. I guarantee you, you have autoimmune genes. Matter of fact, David, you actually suffered from an autoimmune condition. We’ll talk—

David:
Yeah. I was diagnosed when I was 21, 22, or I was told I had one.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. When you came to my seminar, you showed me this thing on your leg. “My, god. That’s autoimmune.” “Really? Why didn’t someone tell me?” “Because there’s no test.” Right. It’s like your body was already presenting autoimmune.

Anyways, this is the DNA, so I’m going to put over here—I’m just going to put DNA on one of these legs, or I could put gene. Your DNA or gene gets turned on of your genetic weakness, okay? That means that yeah. You were, at one point, feeling normal. At one point, a gene got triggered. What turns genes on? What turns genes off? In the last 10 years, exciting science has shown that we can turn this genetic expression off, but before that, we realized that it was turned on. We could give animals certain chemicals and trigger certain genes of susceptibility. We could make them fat. We could make them sick. Yeah.

David:
You know, it’s funny you bring this up. I got a flashback. We’ve all seen the movie, or many people have seen Supersize Me. When I was in my 20's and I first starting having—where I had alopecia, and I lost all the hair on my face, I was in sales. I was driving 50,000 miles a year in my car. I ate fast food, probably, two or three times a day. I was a lot heavier than I am now, and the food hasn’t gotten any better that people are eating. Diet plays a big portion of this.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, no doubt. I mean, look. Anything that drives inflammation in a stressor into the cell—David, what are the three things that I always say drive inflammation the most? Toxins, bad fats—the type of bad fats like vegetable oils and all these things that are in everything everyone eats. Those things attach to the cell—drive inflammation. Toxins do the same thing, and also the glucose—raising glucose spikes. This is the American diet. That drives inflammation of the cell membrane. In a minute, I’ll tell you why that turns on genes so rapidly. You’re going to get that because that’s—the cell membrane plays a really, really critical role.

Just in finishing that up—so the DNA gets turned on—okay, these genetic weaknesses. They get triggered. Here’s the deal. We can give a toxin to a mouse, and we can trigger an autoimmune. We can give the same toxin to another group of mice, and we could trigger a different autoimmune. We can trigger a different obesity gene. Again, things trigger our genetic weaknesses. Stressors—I have that written over here as one of the legs. Don’t be confused. It could be physical, chemical, or emotional that trigger. Those are all stressors. The body doesn’t know the difference between stressors.

David, what happens in pregnancy a lot? Women end up with autoimmune conditions. What’s going on in pregnancy? Two things—the perfect storm, actually. During pregnancy, a lot of toxins come out of Mom because she’s pulling from deep tissues, and they release a lot of toxins, which, by the way, is why babies end up with susceptibilities and things like that. From bone comes lead, and we’ve talked about that—from amalgam fillings. All these toxins come out, so there’s a toxic exposure in pregnancy that’s more than normal.

Are you frozen? You look frozen here. Can you hear me? Nah! Hello. David? Hello. I don’t know if David—I think you all can hear me. Let me text David. Someone once laughed—one of my clients—and said, “You guys have so many problems on that show.”

-Technical Issues-

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It probably is. Yeah. Anyways, I kept chatting. I was telling the story. One of my clients said, “You guys have so many technical problems on that show.” I’m like, “If you only knew!” We’re dealing with Internet things, and we do them. David, you and I travel so much. We’re doing it from all around the country half the time, and our Internet’s not consistent—not that it’s great here by any means.

Anyways—the physical, chemical, and emotional—these stressors. The body doesn’t know the difference between them. During pregnancy, there’s also an emotional stressor, too. It’s a physical stressor, as well. Think about it. There’s so much. That’s why women are tired. There’s a hormone component to this. Autoimmune can be triggered at that time.

Any chemical exposure—we have people that get exposed to a chemical—I just had someone that said their autoimmune started after they got a root canal. Surprise, surprise. There’s an anaerobic bacteria that’s involved with root canals, and drilling out teeth with anaerobes. These anaerobes are strong enough neurotoxins to trigger autoimmune. People get their amalgam filling out incorrectly. That can trigger it.

Any toxic exposure, any physical exposure, emotional times—people have these emotional times in life. They tell me their stories. I go back to these times in their life where the perfect storm happened—where they had emotional traumas, where they had extra chemical exposures, and maybe even physical things—stressors happening. I look for the perfect storm. Typically, that’s when the gene is turned on.

One more thing, and then we’ll finish with that. Okay. The last one is—I’m just going to say the gut to make it easy. The gut is the third thing, meaning that there’s certain bacteria that can get disrupted in the gut. What happens is when you lose enough of these bacteria, you literally do not make certain immune cells that tell your immune system to shut off. It’s okay, meaning, “Back down. We’ve looked at this, and it’s okay. Stop attacking.” When you don’t have enough of certain gut bacteria, you don’t make enough of these cells called T-regulatory cells, meaning regulating your immune system. Therefore, your immune system is in hyper mode.

Leaky gut—when your gut opens up and allows these things to cross over, your body starts making antibodies in extra form. That can drive your immune system. The gut plays a major, major role in this, too. All of these things—I can draw arrows saying, look. The gut affects the DNA. We know that certain bacteria affect your DNA for good and for worse. We know that certain stressors turn on that gene. You see how this all works? Certain stressors can cause leaky gut. If you get it, the gut opened up, can actually drive stressors and toxins into the chemicals.

You see, all three of these legs play into a cause, but here’s the key, David. To have a true solution to autoimmune, all three legs have to be part of the plan—part of the solution. If one of these legs are missing, what happens to a three-legged stool?

David:
It falls right over.

Dr. Pompa:
It falls over.

David:
You and I were speaking earlier of a friend of mine. We were having a conversation about some of their challenges, and there happened to be a practitioner that’s not in our program, and they were just saying that, “You need to take this. You need to take this.” One of the things that you speak so much about is A—identifying that root cause. What was that perfect storm that caused the stool to fall over? – and then getting into your 5R's.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. Look, the 5R's, again, if I bring this back. The 5R's is a road map for—it started for practitioners—a road map to how to fix and detox a cell. Caught on with the public because it’s simple. It’s like, “Okay. Wow. That makes sense.” I always say, “You don’t get well until you fix the cell.” Where’s the DNA? It’s in the cell, right? How do we turn off these genes?

Obviously, we have to fix the gut. Obviously, we have to get rid of the stressors, right because these arrows are leading to that. However, many practitioners today are not understanding epigenetics. This is huge. Studies show that there are certain factors that we can change in the cell to turn off these genes. Many people are doing these things, but their practitioner is not focused on what we need to do to turn off your gene so now you don’t express Hashimoto’s anymore, which is, again, autoimmune thyroid—a very, very common condition that, again, most people have—they’re diagnosed with either hypo- or hyper-thyroid, and they’re not even given the diagnosis, David, of autoimmune.

By the way, most of the medications, when you’re autoimmune thyroid, they don’t work. In other words, you’re taking the medication. Your blood work looks normal. It makes your blood work actually change, but you still are losing your hair. Your skin’s still dry. You have no energy, and now, all of a sudden, that 20 pounds—you’re doing everything, eating perfect. It’s not budging. It’s your thyroid still not working.

Here’s the problem. The message isn’t getting in the cell, and autoimmune is turned on. You have to focus on turning off that gene. That’s where the 5R's come. If I put 5R's over here, all of those—and folks, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ve written many articles on each one of these R's. This is how you turn off these genes. It’s not my opinion; it’s science. It’s amazing how few doctors understand, or know, or practice this. You have to turn the gene off.

David:
We’ve talked about identifying the source, and there’s plenty of—on your website, DrPompa.com and on Cellular Healing TV, we talk a lot about that. Could we speak today a little bit about R2—regenerating cell membrane and R5—reestablishing methylation?

Dr. Pompa:
You actually pointed out the two that actually affect that DNA the most—changing gene expression. It’s called epigenetics, folks. We actually did a show on epigenetics awhile back, so look back at the archives of these shows if you want to learn more about epigenetics. You and I did a show on it.

It simply means changing gene expression for better or for worse. We’ve explained how the epigenome—we inherit from our parents a hard drive. That is the DNA that we got half from mom, half from dad, and that’s kind of the unchangeable thing. That’s your nose. That’s your eyes. It’s your hair color. The epigenome is your software. That’s changeable, and that actually is what drives all the function into the hardware. All right? We can change this software. It’s changeable. That’s the epigenome, meaning on the outside.

Now, these things—and I’m looking for a different pen. Okay. You said about the cell membrane. Studies show, David—and this is R2. Studies show that this membrane of the cell is what communicates into the nucleus, and this is where the DNA is. In all these new studies—Bruce Lipton’s work and other cellular biologists and very, very intelligent people in this area have realized that the cell membrane is actually how this DNA changes. Here’s why:

Very simply, this cell membrane is the communication between your cell and this outer world, meaning that—here’s thyroid hormone. I’m just going to put it over here—T3. T3 has to connect to a receptor. It then has to send its signal into the DNA, and then it produces a function from the DNA. The DNA then produces a protein. It helps you make cellular energy. It helps you make other things that you need to function—feel normal. All that happens from this communication.

When this cell membrane’s inflamed, whether it’s a toxic exposure—everything that Americans do in their diet, too much glucose, everything. When this becomes inflamed, which is, again, most people, the T3 hormone can’t get its message into the DNA. What we’re noticing is this: When we can fix this membrane—R2, regenerate the membrane—then we can change that gene expression. Pretty cool.

We know that if you can’t fix that membrane—if your target, as a practitioner isn’t to fix that membrane with specific fats that we’ve developed products here, controlling the diet, getting rid of toxins—all these things, you’re not going to turn the gene off for your Hashimoto’s. You’re not going to turn the gene off for your Celiac disease, your Crohn’s disease, your scleroderma, whatever it is. This membrane is new science as far as how to change the DNA.

R5, David, and I’ll just really quickly say this: R5 is something called reestablishing methylation. A methyl group is a—and here’s where I’m going to lose people—carbon and three hydrogens. Everyone just checked out. That’s called a methyl group—a carbon and three hydrogens. Something so simple—carbon is the most abundant thing in the planet. A carbon and three hydrogens—hydrogen’s one of the top three. These little guys act as a switch like on your wall. It will turn genes on and turn genes off.

These little methyl donors—these little things, if they get depleted, now we know that it doesn’t protect the gene, and now you can easily start to trigger these genes. Here’s the great thing. When we give mice and humans these [inaudible], we can turn off genes that were turned on for the bad. Ah! What depletes these methyl groups? Stress of any type—physical, chemical, or emotional. Hello. We know that if we give mice toxins, we can turn on bad genes, but we know that if we give mice these methyl donors in abundance, we can turn those genes back off. This is new science, David. R5—reestablishing methylation—is really important. Emotional stress can deplete you of these. Chemical toxins in abundance in the body will deplete you of these, and now your genes get turned on.

David:
Someone could be going along, and have a car accident, and all of a sudden, they have Hashimoto’s thyroid autoimmune.

Dr. Pompa:
Right. What is it? We know that a couple things happen. We know that these toxins, these stressors—physical, chemical, emotional—can turn the gene on, but does it do it via because it has such a depleting effect on the methylation? Therefore, now the genome is not protected, and then these things get triggered? I don’t know. I think it’s too early to tell, but we know this: We know that if we can deliver these methyl groups in such a way, now we can actually turn off the genome.

Here’s the problem: When people have bio-accumulated a lot of toxins, David, it’s hard to get that methylation up. I wrote an article. Read it. I wrote two articles on R5, I believe. One of them is regarding my wife, who had high lead levels. It depleted her methylation, and it affected her hormones. Even though we were doing all these amazing things for hormones, like so many people—the whole bio-identical hormone craze—her methylation was so depleted because of the lead in her body, that she got mostly from her mother, who had hormone problems and ended up with cancer—hormone-related cancer. We had to get rid of the lead and build her methylation up, and then we could turn off the genes, and then her hormones were normal. Read the article. It’s great.

You’re seeing how this is. This is how we approach this condition. We have to approach the three-legged stool—methylation. Those two Rs—R2 and R5—play a significant role in changing the gene.

David:
This is just amazing science. As you mentioned, most doctors don’t even focus in on epigenetics. I was speaking with a medical doctor just a few weeks ago, and they were saying, “Once you’re on hormones, you’re always going to be on them.” I started asking that question, and I, all of a sudden, was getting attacked that, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I said, “You’re right. I’m not a practitioner. I play one on TV. However, from what I understand, there’s a lot of other factors there. Why don’t we just leave it at that?” Why is it, do you feel, that it’s—is it a lack of knowledge, a lack of knowing where to go? Is it the mainstream is just not talking about it? Why do you think so many people just are ignorant to the fact of epigenetics?

Dr. Pompa:
In the allopathic medical world, there’s no place for really getting to the cause, and I say that in a nice way. It’s a system that really—it’s trapped in a paradigm of, “Take a drug. Relieve a symptom.” They don’t even have time. Insurance doesn’t pay for someone to sit knee-to-knee with someone and really get to their causes than turned genes on, or made them sick, or bio—I mean, come on. Think about that. It’s never going to happen.

I think the more disturbing part is that in the alternative world, the same things happen. We’re going to alternative doctors, and they’re looking at your symptoms, and they’re giving you vitamins and minerals for symptoms. “Oh, your adrenals are burned out.” More adrenal products, right? “Oh, it’s this. It’s thyroid.” It’s still a symptom and then giving things instead of really understanding that three-legged stool and really understanding that these are the causes.

When we’re talking about fixing the gut, we have to put in certain bacteria back in. That’s not going to happen just from giving someone a pill. It’s not a probiotic that’s going to fix that. We really have to go at it with a very unique bacteria. Again, on my website, I’ve written many articles about that. You need to understand that there’s a new science there, as well. We utilize, David, a lot of ancient healing techniques to really fix that gut, as well. You have to shut that off. It’s not about just giving more vitamins and probiotics—not so simple. Like I said, specifically, we’re targeting to change that DNA.

That leg of the stool that I talked about—going upstream, and getting rid of those stressors, and using specific detox agents that really grab things like heavy metals, biotoxins, and certain infections. That’s key while you’re using those 5R's to turn off those genes. You have to go upstream, and so few practitioners today—even alternative—are not doing that.

David, I have to agree with the doctor and his world that said, “Once somebody’s on these hormones, they’ll never come off.” He’s right because he’s not going to do anything to change that inflammation of the membrane. Therefore, of course the person would have to be taking hormones, and more and more hormones. When we shout at our kids, that’s like giving hormones, right? We’re getting a higher message. We’re going to give you more and more hormones. Eventually the kids become more deaf. They’re not hearing your message. More and more hormones—that’s what he sees in his world, so that is fact to him, and he’s right.

Here’s the deal: When this inflammation in this membrane can be fixed—now you can fix the receptor to the hormone. Now the hormone can get its message in. That’s really where the answer lies. If you don’t fix the cell, you will never get well. In his world—and he’s right. When you really understand how to target that cell membrane and you really understand how the membrane affects that genome, it really opens up a whole new world of getting people well who have been on medications and supplement after supplement. There’s a solution beyond what people think, and it really boils down to what’s happening in the cell. It really boils down to that three-legged stool.

David:
You know, it’s interesting—the analogy of the three-legged stool. Let’s think someone has a foundation problem in their house. Someone comes in, and they just prop it up, and they put some bracing under one corner. If you actually have a ground problem underneath, guess what’s going to happen. It’s just going to continue to happen—to sink.

One of the things that—it just hit me how you look at things and getting to the root cause and the source, it’s really building that strong foundation because we can never build anything. You can’t build a big company. You can’t build a great relationship without open and honest communication, mutual love and respect. It’s a strong foundation. What you’re talking about here is really getting down to the foundation and rebuilding the strong foundation of your body, of yourselves, of your gut.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt. Again, fixing the gut, David, something that I always am very proud of in the work that I teach to practitioners and my clients is we’ve really taken ancient healing with the most modern, scientific research and combined them. The 5R's would be over here with, really, the most cutting edge scientific stuff that’s going on. It’s at the cell. Epigenetics is part of that, as I explained.

Over here, ancient healing—things that have been around for thousands of years—we’re utilizing things like fasting and things like fermentation. All of these things have been there for years. We’re using things like bone broths, and [inaudible 0:28:52] waters, and things like that, and putting people on fasts, and intermittent fasts, and water fasts. That’s how you fix a gut. This is ancient healing. This is stuff that’s been around for how long, but how few practitioners are utilizing this. Why—because it’s hard. It’s hard to teach someone how to fast and do it twice a month.

This is really the key to fixing these epidemic of gut conditions, while—all the while, we’re bringing these two things together—the ancient and the modern. I did a whole show on that—ancient healing. Go back. Watch that show, folks. Watch it. Bringing these two things together, all the while, we’re up here, David. We’re moving the source and how you got there, looking for that perfect storm in somebody’s history, figuring out what those stressors are, removing them while we’re bringing these two things—ancient and modern healing—together in removing the source.

Gosh, as I say it, it’s like no wonder we’re on a mission. No wonder we’ve been given a purpose to teach doctors that concept. It works! It does. It works, but how few are doing it. We have trained about 60 doctors around the country—know this. There’s three of us that do virtual, where we’re able to reach places of the planet. David, I was on Malaysia yesterday, New Zealand. It’s like we’re trying to reach the planet, but my passion—you’re helping us do this with your brilliance and marketing. We’re trying to reach more people. We’re trying to train more doctors in what I just said. It seems so easy—bringing these things together. This is what really works in that while we’re doing the source.

We’ve done shows on how—what we do for true cellular detox. That’s key. It’s not a footbath, and all these things that you go in the store, and all these 10-day cleanses. God, if it were so simple. True cellular detox sits at the top of bringing these two things together—removing these sources—true cellular detox. Go back and read my work. Watch the shows. That’s what we do, David.

You can tell. See, I just struck my core of what I’ve been called to in life—my sole purpose is to bring that message individually for the people that God brings for me as clients. I still take on some clients. I do. I love it. I coach them. I call it coaching. I coach them on how to do what I’m talking about. [Inaudible] is bringing a teaching doctor to do the same. That’s my passion. That’s what I’ve been called to do.

David:
You are, and you’re amazing at it, and that’s why I was sitting as a guest, watching you speak at one of your events and sort of became the puppy dog that followed you around, you could say. One of the things that’s really important to know is it is—you talk about this a lot. It’s 180° difference. People have to be willing to change 180° and have the commitment to see this through. When they do that, they really, truly can get their life back.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. David, look at you. You’ve done everything we’ve just talked about on this show, right? You have. That autoimmune condition that you had is gone. You went through a little hiatus where you started doing certain things, you got—life kind of sucked you back in, and oh, what showed up again? Oh, geez. That gene started to—

David:
That’s the price, right? That’s what I said. It is a lifelong commitment to change.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Those genes will get turned back on if you go back to some of those stressors. The longer you stay away from it, the harder it is to retrigger that pattern in the body, but you have to change it. Folks, it’s a three-legged stool. If your practitioner out there is not doing one of those legs, then you’re not going to get well.

One of the things that I tell people about—I was just reading an article here. Let me see if I can find it. Yeah, right here. I was just reading an article, and it says here—I’ll give you the title. It says The Medicine of the Microbiome. In this article, and I’ll just talk about the article. It talks about utilizing fecal microbial transplants, which there’s been so much research here, and how they’re using fecal microbial transplants to turn off some of these genes—to stop some of these conditions for autoimmune. There’s a great website called ThePowerofPoop.com. Yeah, I’m not kidding. That’s a real website.

It’s a group of people, really, who have—by putting these unique bacteria in their gut, their world changes. There’s a whole thing of research going on there. It’s pretty amazing stuff. Of course, the FDA is making it much harder for people to get that type of care in hospitals. Many hospitals were starting to utilize this as a amazing therapy, even for really hard conditions—

David:
It’s becoming more and more popular in the mainstream.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but they made it much harder. Many doctors are just sending people out there to educate themselves on the topic. Anyways, that’s it. I think people need to just be educated about some of these things, but there’s so much new stuff that we know about the gut—how to fix the gut. David, any time I talk about holes in gut—because the gut is so important in fixing these autoimmune and unexplainable illnesses.

I’ve done an article on glyphosate, which is a chemical that I believe is at the head of why we’re seeing leaky gut in children—driving autoimmune. I did an article on gluten. I said it’s not just about gluten. I think that might be the topic. I talk about glyphosate, genetically modified food, and how it’s playing a role in the epidemic of holes in the gut. It doesn’t matter how many supplements you take, or vitamins, minerals, probiotics. If you are eating foot that is sprayed with this chemical glyphosate—the number one herbicide in the world—you are not going to fix your gut. Read the article. It’s not just about gluten, and it’s not. Read that article, please. It’s a huge, huge, important topic.

Chipotle went GMO-free. You know how much effort we’ve put into trying to communicate? My kids love that place. If they’re going to eat a simple meal out, that’s a really healthy place. I realized at one point, it wasn’t. They were using GMO-everything. That sparked some emails and some things, but not just on, of course, my bow, but I mean thousands of people said, “You preach this, but everything’s GMO. This is one of the number one causes of why people are sick today.” Sure enough, they changed, so I take my hat off to them. I hope other—

David:
I think that they’re going to be a leader. I think more people are going to follow that. You hear companies like Upthere are even getting healthier. They’re moving in that direction because it’s not—it’s interesting. It’s not that the granola—you know, the granola?—that is just interested in this. It is everyone. It’s liberals. It’s conservatives. People are realizing that they’re not as healthy as they were, and they’re looking at the root cause and source. A lot of it is this food that we’re eating. I think that Chipotle is going to be the leader, and more restaurants are going to follow.

Dr. Pompa:
I hope so. This is such a strong political topic, and Monsanto, the company that created the GMO crop, which, by the way, for those watching, just to give you a simple example, they create a crop—a seed that grows a plant that can withstand the chemical glyphosate, which—oh, by the way, yeah, they manufacture. They manufacture the seed. They put patents on these things both, and now they control the farmers.

Once the farmers have their seed, now they can’t buy seed from anywhere else. Oh, and by the way, they can’t even harvest their own seed. At the end of the season, the old days, they would take the seed from their plans and then replant those next seeds for next year. Oh, no. You have to re-buy seed from Monsanto. They control the seed. That alone is a recipe for disaster because now they control the farmer—bad, bad, bad. You have patents. Now you can sue farmers. This is a major, major, major problem.

David:
They are. We’ve heard that seed has blown into someone else’s farm. Monsanto tested their crop and sued them because they didn’t buy the seed from them.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right. That’s right, exactly. Meanwhile, the farmer that had their genetically modified seeds blow into their corn, they’re the ones that should be suing Monsanto—opposite, right—180°. This chemical now, in volumes, can be used on these plants that are genetically changed. Now we have plants that are just loaded up with these. Oh, you know what happened, David? Because now all these crazy, rogue weeds start coming up, and now they can’t kill them, so they’re using more and more glyphosate because the plant doesn’t die. The weeds do. Now we’re making super weeds. Oh, and so Monsanto just invented another chemical. They actually brought back an old one—2,4-D, which was basically—

David:
Outlawed.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, this stuff is nasty, and now they’re genetically modifying plants to resist it. Now we’re getting exposed to another cancer-causing agent that they took off the market years ago. Here’s the bottom line. Here’s the point I want to make. Monsanto is smart enough to affect both sides of the aisle—the conservatives, the liberal agenda—they’ve affected both so they are protected. Every state that says, “Listen. Let’s just label things GMO. Let’s just label it. Has GMO. Let the public decide.” They have knocked that down in some of the most liberal states that you would think for sure they would go for that.

California—nope. Labeling? All we want to do is label it. If it was so great, why wouldn’t Monsanto be for labeling? “Hey, we’re GMO,” and be proud of it. They know that the public would get educated on these studies. They’re showing that this stuff is poison.

Anyways, we’re off topic. We’ve done many shows on it, but how do you talk about autoimmune and not talk about GMOs and glyphosate? You got to get rid of the sources. The three-legged stool—that’s where the answer lies. It’s where the cause lies. That’s where the answer lies.

David:
Dr. Pompa, great show. Any final thoughts you’d like to leave everyone with?

Dr. Pompa:
Nope. I think that was it. That’s where the answer lies. There’s a lot of topics here, David, that we’ve talked about that I think, people, you need to go back and watch some of our post shows on. We are passionate about this answer, and it’s not our answer. I believe that we’ve suffered for it, and we have a responsibility to bring this to the planet. Help us do that. Spread the word about Cell TV.

David:
Awesome. Thank you, Dr. Pompa. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in to episode 67 of Cellular Healing TV. We will see you next week.