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125: How to Fix Muscle Imbalance

Transcript of Episode 125: How to Fix Muscle Imbalance

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Special Guest, Dr. Kareem Samhouri

Meredith:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is episode 125. Of course, we have Dr. Daniel Pompa here on the line, our resident cellular healing specialist. Today we welcome a very special guest, Dr. Kareem Samhouri. We’re going to be talking about a topic that we haven’t broached yet on Cellular Healing TV, and that’s muscle balance therapy. Really excited to dig into this. It’s something I don’t know a lot about, so we’re really excited to learn and share with you guys.

Before we get started, I’m going to tell you a little bit more about Dr. Kareem. As it turns out, you can heal your body through increasing movement while decreasing inflammation, and there is no one more poised to teach you how to use movement to improve your health than Dr. Kareem Samhouri. Dr. Kareem has gained worldwide popularity as the go-to physical therapist and personal trainer for billionaires, professional and Olympic athletes, world-famous authors, and their families.

Dr. Kareem has rehabilitated and trained Olympic and professional athletes, baby boomers with joint pain who want to lose weight, older adults with balance issues, people in comas, others who have had stoke, spinal cord injury, rare disease, heart issues, or lung disease, pregnant women, children, and even babies. He’s worked with the highest and lowest levels of health, and he’s able to achieve shockingly beneficial outcomes in all categories.

He taught his oldest patient, who is 112 years old, how to dance again – love that – and helped his youngest, who is in the NICU and only four days old, to adapt to the world 18 weeks too soon. Your body is designed to heal or decay. From now on, decide on your own health momentum. Regain control while you begin to look and feel years younger. Very impressive bio, Dr. Kareem, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Kareem:
Thank you very much, Meredith. It’s a pleasure to join you.

Dr. Pompa:
The first question I always like to ask is, okay, you’re an amazing expert in this area, right? I do want to hear more about the 112-year-old and the infant. That’s amazing. How could this affect those ends of the spectrum? However, I have to hear how you got into this. When you end up an expert like you are in one area, there has to be a story to how you got so into this and how you got so good at this. Give us the story before we talk more about what this is.

Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. I appreciate it, Dr. Pompa. Thank you so much for having me, and I would be absolutely delighted to share this with you. Firstly, my mission all started because I wanted to help my mother with her health. I think, for a lot of people, we start inside of our own families. That’s where we want to create the most change. Before I knew it, my life and health took a turn in the opposite direction, as well, from where I had hoped or anticipated. I just had to put the pieces together.

I was a little bit imbalanced. I had to actually straighten out my posture. Before you knew it, I was able to actually graduate from physical therapy school, become a physical therapist, start teaching personal training, and open up the world’s first clinic where this was actually taught all under one roof for the master level certification. That’s what I here to share with everybody today. How do we actually integrate health, make it really, really brain dead simple so people can take one or two small strategies and move forward with them immediately?

This is the stuff that alleviates pain. This is the stuff that brings oxygen to muscles. It helps you heal faster. It improves your mood, your level of focus, your athleticism, and your performance all around in life. This is where it’s at. The body’s meant to move, and it’s a matter of getting it moving correctly.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I think the first question I would ask is this is obviously different than just regular exercise, right? We know regular exercise helps a lot of those things. Why is this different? Exactly what is it?

Dr. Kareem:
I think the long and short of it is we live in a 3-D world, and we tend to exercise in a one- or two-dimensional way, so a lot of forward/backwards movements. You’ll see people do a lot of bench presses in the gym. You’ll see people only go for runs. The end result of that are tiny, little muscle imbalances. These little muscle imbalances mean that your big muscles are getting strong faster than your small muscles, but the small muscles matter, too.

When you actually balance out your rotator cuff, you pull your shoulder back into position, and you take away this tiny, little nerve signal that’s actually shutting down your muscle. When a muscle gets shut down, not only does it stop you from being able to move the way you want to, but it slows down your metabolism. It decreases your mood, or it worsens your mood, and it makes you less effective at so many other things that you want to do.

Dr. Pompa:
We can get into specifics, but I see a lot of people in the gym. They’re doing bench presses, a lot of major exercise like we’ve all done and do. They could be throwing themselves more out of balance because they’re hitting the big ones, and yet they could have some smaller muscles or stabilizers out of balance, so they could be creating more problems?

Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. That’s exactly right. The last thing I want to do is discourage anybody from exercise, but that’s what I find happens. People go, and they work out. They either don’t get a result, or they uncover an old injury they didn’t know they had because it’s been a while since they’ve been exercising, or they get a result, and they plateau. Exercise is really meant to be very simple.

If we just go back to our ancestors, we’re meant to get on and off the ground. We’re meant to play. We’re meant to move in every possible direction. That’s how you would naturally hit all the different muscles. Fast-forward to today’s world. Now we go into a gym, and we try and simulate those movements, but we’re missing so many different diagonals, rotations, all these different areas that would otherwise balance out our body with real life movement. Instead, we create muscle imbalances that really just destroy our bodies over time. It can be extremely discouraging. It’s just not what I want for anybody.

Dr. Pompa:
Ultimately, the imbalances lead to injury. People watching this that are exercise enthusiasts, they could be getting chronic injuries, and it’s most likely probably from some imbalance that they have. They could be big and strong, and strong in certain areas, but these little stabilizers and little muscles throw the body out of balance, and it’s creating a functional problem of some sort.

Dr. Kareem:
That’s precisely it. Across different demographics, here’s the way it breaks down. In kids, it results in overuse injuries very quickly. It makes them less capable of excelling in a sport. In an athlete or, let’s say, sort of middle-age person, that person in their young adulthood, that person’s going to decrease in performance. They’re going to be less coordinated. They’re not going to be as fast. They’re not going to be able to learn new movements as quickly.

Then if we advance age a little bit, we get into a little bit of an older demographic. The end result of this is decreased coordination, decreased strength, joint pain – joint pain that seems to have come out of nowhere, but in reality, it was based off of a long history of moving with a nonspecific pattern or a less strategic pattern that resulted in this pain.

Meredith:
What are the most common muscle imbalances you’re seeing?

Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. That’s a great question, Meredith. Oftentimes, we’ll see that neck flexors actually end up quite stretched. Neck extensors will end up compressed. We’ll get a chin up position, a rounded shoulder, or even just elevating a little bit. This is kind of a dramatic example. If you really pull your shoulder all the way up as far as you can just on one side, a lot of people are just slightly that way and a little fit forward. Especially if you’re right handed, and you’re always writing with your right hand, or typing in that area, or reaching for a mouse or a stapler, you’re just learning to rotate through your spine in a very specific pattern and move that shoulder forward over, and over, and over again.

Now, when we get lower in the body, you’ll see a pelvis is tipped forward. For most people, that ends up really creating the wrong length of their hip flexors, the wrong length of their glutes or their butts. Those muscles are big muscles, big movers. It creates muscles imbalances at the front of your thigh to the back of your thigh, quads to hamstrings. That’s probably one of the most common things we see that lead to knee injury, low back injury. As it works its way up the chain, believe it or not, it creates a sore neck, as well.

Dr. Pompa:
With that said, you have people at computers all day, sitting in chairs. Obviously, that’s creating a lot of those imbalances. The head goes forward, and people make that adjustment, chin comes up, that horrible position. Now again, I can see, and I think our listeners and viewers can understand how that leads to injury. The structure affects the function. You go into something with this position, your chances of injury are great. How does it affect your general health?

I know because this is work that I used to do, structure affects function. Now, people get it. They look at the x-ray and say, “Okay, I can see how that could erode my discs early and cause injury,” but it was very difficult for me to get them to understand how that affects their immune system. The anterior head position that you just described is epidemic today because of computers, and games, and all that stuff. We see it in children. We know studies show those people die earlier, literally. It’s that traumatic to the central nervous system and their health. Explain that a little bit.

Dr. Kareem:
There’s a lot of different angles we can look at this. I think it’s best to divide between Western medicine and Eastern medicine for different philosophies because both are valid and are based off of different rationales.

In the Western medicine’s side, we know that if we don’t line the body up properly, it’s going to get weak very quickly. Pain signals are going to take over instead of muscle signals and contractions. We’re going to lose coordination. Ultimately, that means we’re going to move less. We’re going to be less motivated to eat right, and we’re more likely to assume fetal position, if you will, which is starting to branch over to the Eastern medicine’s side of really taking a look at how does this affect quality of life? When we’re stressed, we curl up in the fetal position, and that’s a position of self-defeat. That position of self-defeat results in anxiety, depression, and a lot of tension throughout the entire body.

As we take a look further into the Eastern side of things, we really need to consider – and this is where chiropractic nails it in my opinion as it relates to muscle balancing. The central nervous system and cerebral spinal fluid are just so important to overall system health. If you have a block in CSF flow, through your brain, through your spinal cord, and back up, then that CSF flow gets disrupted and ultimately changes the way your entire body communicates.

That, perhaps, linked with oral health are two of the most important foundational things you can do to improve your health, period. If you’re not taking good care of your mouth, and you’re not taking good care of the messaging system for your entire body, those are primitive areas of your body that change everything else. The body’s organized in a way where it’s going to work from the highest priority backwards.

If there’s something more critical going on in your body right now, like for example, your nervous system’s compromised because CSF flow is blocked, then it doesn’t care if you want to lose weight. It doesn’t care if you have a cut or a laceration on your skin. It’s not going to heal it as well. It certainly doesn’t care if you have wrinkles that you want to get rid of or if your energy level isn’t what you want it to be. You got to fix the root cause, the number one priority in your body, and a domino effect takes place. You just feel better.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You just said it, though. People are concerned more about the wrinkles and the weight loss so all their energy and focus goes there. They’re not considering the fact that root canals, cavitations, and amalgam filling in their mouth that are making them toxic, causing interference into all of those areas, the cells, the nerve system, and ultimately driving inflammation, creating wrinkles, and the list goes on, or the anterior head. They’re not concerned that that’s stretching their spinal cord, interfering with their nervous system. Well said. Well said. Going upstream to those major things first is a very hard message. People want that result down here, the skin, the weight loss.

Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. Thank you. That’s it, though. We are still attacking the skin and the weight loss, and we’re improving in those areas. How do we give it and reposition the methodology to get there? If you want to lose weight, that’s great. What do you do? Do you run on a treadmill? Do you lift some weights? Do you do metabolic resistance training? Do you go on a diet? Do you sleep more? Do you balance your hormones?

I’ll argue. What you do is you work on the number one system first. Your endocrine system’s under stress. Hormones are going to be much more important to you than going on a particular diet that doesn’t affect your hormones in a great way, although diet can certainly affect your hormones. I’ll make an argument that if what you want to do is reduce wrinkles or fat folds, but your pelvis is out of position, let’s just take your pelvis back into position, and you might just find that you’ve uncovered a six-pack or something you missed that you didn’t know you had.

This is one of my biggest lessons and one of my earliest personal training finds. This was an introduction for me to muscle balancing. You see, there was this girl named Lindsey, and she worked as hard as anybody could work. She wasn’t anorexic, but she was borderline at that point where she was just doing everything she possibly could in the gym. She was eating correctly, so she wasn’t really skimming off food, but she just couldn’t get that final six-pack. She just wanted a little bit of definition. She always had the four at the top of the abs, but nothing at the bottom.

Finally, I ended up doing a postural assessment on her. I took a peek. You know what? We just needed to tip her pelvis backwards a little bit. When we tipped her pelvis backwards a little bit, lo and behold, all those folds went away. Her love handles weren’t actually there. There was no extra body fat on her body preventing her from having the body she wanted. She just needed to be in a slightly different position.

Now, the coolest thing is not only did she end up getting the body that she wanted, but she starting moving so quickly, all her results accelerated. It was months of work to get to this point, where then all of a sudden, in the next 30 days, she hit every single one of her goals. Truth was, it only took two weeks to tip her pelvis back into position and a few simple exercises that anybody can do at home with just their body weight alone.

Dr. Pompa:
I want to talk about what people can do at home, obviously. What people have to understand is the brain, that unconscious or subconscious mind, knows all the time when the body’s out of position. If we turned the lights off in the room, you know your arms are behind you. You don’t have to look over to see that. That’s because there’s these little mechanoreceptors in every muscle telling your brain, “We’re over here.”

Same with when the head is forward. These mechanoreceptors are firing. The brain knows it’s out of position. It really just sucks the energy right out of the cell. People have to understand how disruptive that is to your, obviously,  your central nervous system, but ultimately, your whole body or how everything works, your immune system, everything. It’s an energy suck, if you will. If you want to suck energy, just walk around with your head forward.

Here’s the problem, Doc. Most people don’t know that. They don’t know that’s abnormal. They look at themselves in the mirror day in and day out. I remember when I did this type of work. Different than you, I was doing it more from a chiropractic standpoint. I think this marries it all perfectly. I would say, “Look at the low shoulder,” and they would look at themselves and say, “What low shoulder?” It was in Young Frankenstein, right? He said, “Oh, where did you get that hump on your back?” He said, “What hump?” The point is this becomes your normal, but meanwhile, that’s major interference zapping your energy. Yeah. That could be the reason why you can’t lose weight. That could be the reason you don’t feel well, don’t sleep well, etcetera.

Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. We’re organized in a smart way that makes this stuff even more confusing at times. You see, we’re not going to walk around with our heads tilted unless we’re actually stuck in that position. Our bodies are going to balance that out. What ends up happening if your shoulder’s actually up this way – excuse me – if your head’s tilted this way, you just raise your shoulder up a little bit to balance that out. That ends up being the imbalance, but in reality, maybe you just need to loosen up your neck a little bit.

I know a lot of this can be abstract. It just needs to be practical and tangible. If you don’t mind, I’ll just jump right into how somebody can assess this for themselves concrete evidence of it, and watch the change happen before them.

Dr. Pompa:
Please. Yes.

Dr. Kareem:
First thing is this: Take a string. Hang it from the ceiling, or have somebody hold it for you. With that string, what you’re going to do is divide your body between right and left sides. You’ll start to see when we take a picture of this whether or not one shoulder’s up a little bit more, whether or not you’re side bent a little bit, whether or not your head’s tilted just slightly. You’ll notice these sorts of aspects, not initially, but when you look closely at the picture. You might notice that one hip’s raised a little bit. If you’re taking this picture in a bathing suit or with your shirt off, you’ll notice whether or not you have a little bit more of a love handle on one side or whether or not it looks like one hip’s tighter.

Now, take a second picture, this time with the string dividing the body from front to back by taking it with the string at your side. When you take it from this angle, you’ll start to notice is your head forward? Is your chin tipped up? Is one shoulder a little bit higher or rounder than the other one? You can start to see that from either side. Is your pelvis tipped so that your low back is actually arched a little bit, and your belly’s sticking out? Maybe you’re working on your belly, and that’s not the problem.

Maybe you’re a runner or an athlete, and every single time you take a step, it pounds all the way up from your ankle to your knee to your hip and right into your low back. You keep wondering, “Why can’t I get my hamstrings stronger? Why can’t I get faster?” Bent-leg lifts are a great way to build speed. The only reason you’re not getting the signal there to begin with is because your back’s arched, and you’re tipped out of position. Work on those things first by identifying them with a concrete image that you can reference. From that point on, repeat it. It only takes 30 seconds to take these pictures. Set up a tripod, or have a loved one do it for you. It’s really, really simple.

Now, regardless of what you find, we need to tap into something that is being termed personalized health. That is adapting to your specific body. A lot of people say, “My right bicep is stronger than my left. Should I just lift heavier on my left and try and make up for it?” No. You actually want to back down. You want to cater to the more limited side of your body. Symmetry comes first. The fastest results come from slowing down to balance your body’s strength, and then everything accelerates from there. You want to back off from your weights on both arms to match the strength of your left, and then you would increase.

The same thing reflects ability and mobility in tissue release. If you can raise both arms up into the air, but one of them, the shoulder’s hiking up a little bit, don’t go quite as far. Cater to the more limited side just before your shoulder hikes up, and come back. Work on your mobility just here, opening up your chest, increasing your ability to take a deep breath through your diaphragm. Then what happens is before you know it, even just a few reps in oftentimes, you’ll start to get a little bit further. If you just keep pushing past that point of resistance, sure, the left can keep going as far as it wants, but the right’s never going to get any better. That just results in more twisting through your body.

More often than not, these twists, these rotations, these imbalances, they represent a little bit more than what’s tangible in the physical world. A lot of times, they have emotional root causes, spiritual root causes, psychological root causes. When you release them, wow, that’s kind of the biggest benefit. You start to feel optimized. You feel amazing. I teach five exercises that I find to be the absolute easiest for people to work on. These exercises are meant to be exercises that force your body to move symmetrically. If you tire out on one side of your body, you’re just going to back off and let yourself rest.

Generally, we say do 50 seconds of work and 10 seconds of rest before you transition to the next exercise. Everything’s one minute, and it’s a total of five minutes every other day. These exercises are squat, push, lunge, pull, and plank. Very simply, what we’re doing is working diagonal pattern in the body. It’s forcing you to pull into alignment. Naturally, what’s going to happen is your body’s going to do that. It’s going to crave that.

If you notice that there’s a particular area of weakness or a lack of flexibility, you can work on that independently. More often than not, it’s not a stretch and hold position; it’s a move into or out of. Take a tennis ball and a firm wall, and release it. For example, the pecs get really tight. If you just lay on the tennis ball or put your arm against the wall, you can release pec minor here, the whole chest is going to open up. When your chest opens up on the left, guess what? The right goes with it.

Now when you go to do those pushes up, either to push up, or you bench press, your incline bench press, and more often than not, you want to be weight bearing, you’re going to have a lot more success. That’s where the metabolic effect takes place. The coordination effect takes place. Ultimately, coordination leads to strength, and strength leads to speed. It all kind of fits together.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s amazing. It’s a completely different approach. These five exercises, where can people go to see them? Obviously, people are going, “What? You just went through that.”

Dr. Kareem:
Yeah, sure. DailyPosture.com is just a quick link to a specific blog post that I have. It goes through these five exercises. Again, it’s just DailyPosture.com. You go there. It’s just a free, five exercise circuit that you can do. In the beginning, just do these five exercises. As you get used to them, and you want to challenge yourself, start to move in different directions. Instead of just squatting forward/backwards like this, consider moving side to side. Consider moving with rotation instead.

What’s going to end up happening is your body will learn how to challenge these smaller muscles, as well.. In the beginning, just follow these five exercises. Do them every other day. Let your body balance itself out by recruiting the big muscles to then send the signal to the small. I always teach, “Train a nerve, not a muscle.” A nerve has a distribution that starts, actually, all the way up in your head.

You start thinking about a movement, and already, nerves are firing. In fact, just thinking about a movement, visualizing that – elite athletes use it all the time. They’ll see an entire race happen before they actually go and race.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Dr. Kareem:
The effect is – and it’s really well documented by some of the best sports psychologists in the world – up to 30% more contractile strength. That’s how much more strength you get from every rep of every exercise in every set of every workout. We’re talking about exponential benefit. When you think about things from that perspective, and you think about a movement first, visualize in your mind’s eye, then go and try the movement. Now you’ve created a feedback mechanism for your body to evaluate, “How did it go?”

The first thing is watch somebody else do it who knows what they’re doing. They know how to move their body correctly. That’s where DailyPosture.com is going to come in and help you out. They’ll have some exercise demos. Hire a trainer, hire a physical therapist, hire a chiropractor, somebody that can teach you movement correctly, that’s already aligned properly. What that movement. Then picture your movement in your mind’s eye. Do the movement, and then ask yourself, “How did it go? Did it actually end up the way that I envisioned it would end up?”

If that’s the case, great, continue what you’re doing. If that’s not the case, make a small correction, and evaluate it again. As time goes by, ask yourself that question less and less frequently because that’s the fastest way – is to just fade your feedback over time.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I know my kids, they’re skiers. Their coaches have them visualize the line. Of course, they show them. They have exactly what they should be doing, how to do it, and then it’s the visualization of them doing it just the way they were told to do it perfectly, and the body creates it. That’s what you do with your clients. You have them actually visualize themselves doing the movement first after they see it done right, and then actually do the movement, and then assess how they did it and how they felt. That’s kind of the pattern?

Dr. Kareem:
That’s exactly right. It’s the fastest way to learn any movement. I did a graduate school term project where I actually taught people – where I had to learn how to throw darts the most effective way I possibly could learn. Sure, there’s little pieces of, “Tilt your wrist this way,” or “Have your elbow close to your body,” or “Tilt your head.” Those matter, how you stack those pieces together. The number one thing that actually determines dart precision when you’re throwing darts is just simply visualizing where that dart’s going to go before you throw it.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. It’s so true.

Dr. Kareem:
In the same way, visualize how your body’s going to move. How many people get up from a chair, and walk across the room, and have no idea how they’re actually supposed to move, and give absolutely no thought to it whatsoever? I’m not saying you have to think about it every time. I’m just saying in the beginning, until your body moves the way you actually want it to move, take the time to learn it, how to visualize it the way that you intend to.

Hold that for six weeks, and your brain will actually create a plastic change. Your nervous system will create or a permanent change that represents this movement, a new pattern of movement for your body, and you’ll hold onto it forever.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt. All right. These are the five exercises people start, but you’re, most likely with your clients, doing more than that. Where does it go from there? Where does it progress? These five exercises, they could be for the trained athlete, or they could be for the person who’s just getting chronic injuries, or wants to be healthier, or hit a different health goal. Am I right? Where do you go from there?

Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. Generally what you want to do is back off initially from whatever you’re doing. You don’t have to get rid of it completely, but you want to lower the intensity so that you’re not overtraining, you’re not overly sore, and you actually give your body a chance to learn something new. Depending on your level of movement, it’s kind of the same prescription anyways. If you really are the weekend warrior, and you’re not moving at all during the week, then your weekend warrior activities are going to back off a little bit in intensity. If you’ve been playing two hours of basketball a day, cut it down to one just for a few weeks until you get the postural piece right.

If you’re an elite athlete, maybe you’ll cut out a little bit of the time that you’re spending in the gym weight training. What you want to do is just use these five exercises initially, and then replace them over time. Use these five exercises. Do your workout, I want to say, so you’re still playing basketball, or you’ll still play your sport. Then over time, within a few weeks, you’ll notice that your posture’s improved. Do that plumb line test, and you’ll see, “Where do I stand?”

Once you know your body’s moving the way you envisioned and it looks right in the camera, after that, you can replace the five exercises with something different and something more powerful for you whether it’s going to be coordination training, speed training, balance reaction training. If you’re an older adult, avoiding falls is going to be the number one predictor of your longevity and quality of life. You replace it with these activities. Take the same five minutes and use it as your five-minute mini circuit, if you will, or five-minute circuit in anything that you’re doing to enhance your health.

If movement isn’t something you need to work on anymore, then think about the five minutes as something that you can do to balance out your diet, to balance out your gut, to balance out your hormones. What can you do in five minutes for meditation to be able to get a better night’s sleep?

Dr. Pompa:
You’re suggesting all of us start this? Whether you’re a trained athlete or not, start this, and no matter what your goal is, you’re going to get better at it. The trained athlete, or the person who’s getting injured, or just wants to be healthier, add this five minutes three times a week to your program now. That’s what you’re saying, correct?

Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. I would start with it. Make sure your body’s properly heated or warmed up, and then go through this five minutes because you’re going to preset your body to get a better training effect from everything that follows. If you align your body before you start your workout, now your body’s going to get a better effect from that workout.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay. What’s different about these exercises? In other words, why does it align your body? Why does it bring balance? Why does it fix the posture?

Dr. Kareem:
There’s a lot of different theories and philosophies out there. Overall, what I can offer you is sort of clinical experience and expertise. I think that’s the number one place that I can answer this question intelligently. The rationale. We want to create diagonal pull. If we’re firing our glutes, we want to fire our. The next thing we want to do is get our chest because that’s a diagonal. We want to pull our body into alignment first in one direction, and then secondly, in another direction.

By trading between front of body, back of body, lower body, upper body, what ends up happening is we’re really stimulating all of our nerves. That’s also forcing us to get the smaller muscles involved. Most of the time, people are plenty strong enough to be able to do a pull-up, but just have no idea which muscles to recruit and when.

What are we going to train? We’re not going to train the big muscles, like your lats. That’s the biggest muscle in your body. We’re going to train your middle trapezius and lower trapezius, specific fibers that get missed all the time that set your shoulders down and back, that open up your rib cage, and let your diaphragm get a better breath. When you do that, and you just focus on the small stuff for a few minutes a day, the end result of it is better muscle contractions, better oxygenation, and faster recovery. That, of course, leads to a better training effect over time.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Okay. It’s focusing on different muscles, obviously, and doing it in a specific order to create that neurological component that activates these muscles. By getting these muscles right, then, now, training the bigger ones makes a whole lot more sense.

Dr. Kareem:
Yup. Another thing is, really cutting down the time and the dose – a lot of people are used to three sets of 10, three sets of 15, or five sets of whatever. Whoever proved that that was the right number? I’ve never seen really good evidence that says that that has to be the number instead of three reps or instead of six. The best experts I’ve spoken to and worked with, they don’t think so. The reality is your body just wants the cue in the right direction, and let it take over. Nature’s really powerful. We can self-optimize, just small cues to say, “Hey, body, I want to do this now.” When we send that signal for the first time, the body will understand, and it’ll start to superimpose it onto our lives and our body.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re doing something for 50 seconds, and then you’re taking 10 seconds off, right? Fifty seconds, ten seconds, there is the five minutes. Got it. Meredith, you had a question.

Meredith:
Yeah. I’m just curious, too. Have you seen any conditions specifically to be really impacted by the muscle balancing therapy?

Dr. Kareem:
Yeah, great question. It’s pretty limitless. From arthritis, that’s a really big one. Speed in the athlete, that’s huge. This is really a fast way to build speed, and speed builds reaction time and everything else that athletes tend to really want. I’ve seen the difference between people with chronic pain and disease having a lot of muscle pain, and the muscle pain going down to two out of ten, or even in some instances, it’ll get down to a zero.

Chronic fatigue syndrome, this is something that really plagues more people than generally is acceptable to talk about. Most people feel really self-conscious about that. What ends up happening is there’s so many factors that play in. There’s hormonal balance; there’s oxygenation; there’s all these different things. When we get right down to it, that’s just kind of working back to the point of working on the most critical element first, improving cellular health based off of the cells that need your attention the most.

If we take a look at it, what could be a higher priority than your circulatory system and your nervous system? How does your circulatory system get blood to the rest of your body? Those red blood cells carry oxygen, and that oxygen mitochondria to create energy production for every other cell in your body. What we want to do is allow that oxygen to get where it’s going.

On the nervous system level, how is it going to happen? Muscle pumps this, and it’s going to feed that blood. If we learn how to contract a muscle at the right time in the right sequence by targeting our nerves instead of our muscles, then we’re going to create a pump effect that allows all that deoxygenated blood that stuck in your ankles and your fingertips to find its way back to your heart efficiently and easily. Then your heart can focus on getting nice, rich, oxygenated blood back to the rest of your body.

Nerves need that blood, too. When your nerves get fluid, and they get that blood, they fire really easily. When they fire easily, the synapses improve in their speed and in their precision. That speed and precision through your nerves leads to all of the other benefits.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That makes complete sense.

Meredith:
I’m curious, too. You had mentioned before about utilizing a tennis ball in some of the exercises. Do you recommend foam rolling or other tools to incorporate in the exercises?

Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. Actually, there’s a lot you can do in terms of myofascial release, which is really what we’re getting at with this tissue release stuff. Most people think of it as the good hurt when you get a massage. It’s kind of like, “Oh! Just keep rubbing in that one area.” That one area is one of two thing. It’s either your rib’s stuck up, which is a total muscle imbalance. Your joints are out of position. The second thing is you’ve got a knot in your muscle. You want to release that knot because your muscle’s moving up until the point of the knot, and then it’s kind of skipping over it, and then it’s lengthening the rest of the muscle or contracting the rest of the muscle.

When you release it with a tennis ball by putting pressure on it, with massage techniques, hands on yourself or with somebody else’s help, you have myofascial release, which is an option, with a foam roll, with many other devices, you’re ultimately doing the same thing. You’re taking something that functions almost like scar tissue, and you’re giving it more slack. When you give your body more slack, you give it more forgiveness. Ultimately, that leads to a more effective, younger-feeling body.

Meredith:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I got to ask. The infant that Meredith read in your bio, how old was – four weeks? Was it four weeks or four months?

Meredith:
Four days old.

Dr. Kareem:
About 21 weeks, actually, 21 ½.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay. What did you do? How’d you do it, and what happened?

Dr. Kareem:
The thing is in the NICU, the place where they have the preemies is so loud, and it’s so intense for these babies. This baby, it was actually a record at the hospital – and I happened to be working there – the youngest baby that they had ever had born there. They didn’t think this baby was going to survive. It was one of those desperate situations where everybody’s idea was a valid idea.

What we did is we positioned the baby in different positions. Instead of it cringing into fetal position because of all the noises, and sirens, and bells, and whistles going off, we would open him up, and let the baby’s chest breathe a little bit. We would move the baby’s arms in diagonal patterns for the infant so the baby could actually get at the breath. We would put a little pressure on the diaphragm so the baby could get a bigger, deeper breath. Then we would just take that pressure off as the belly would expand and contract.

We learned to work with the ribs a little bit, too. It’s really the same principles, but in the end, there was a lot of hands-on care that went with it, as well. All of these factors led towards the baby really just developing a little bit more easily and a little bit faster. Of course, in an infant that’s that young, you really just have to be as gentle as can be. Oftentimes, instead of a hand, it’s just barely a fingertip touch that you’re going to do. When it came to actually moving the baby’s muscles, light, little taps in the areas where the nerve ties into the muscle to say, “Hey, right here. This is what needs to happen next.” Sure enough, baby got better, grew up totally healthy, and ended up living a healthy life.

Meredith:
Wow!

Dr. Pompa:
What about the 112-year-old guy that learned to dance or could dance again? What did you do with him?

Dr. Kareem:
Yeah. Actually, it was a woman. She’s one of my favorite patients I ever had in all time. She just had this great spirit about her, but she was stuck in a wheelchair. She couldn’t get up. She just didn’t have the strength or coordination. We started with really simple exercises. “Pick your foot up, and put it back down. Step on the gas.”

Then once she figured out how to do that, we said, “Squeeze your knees together; move them apart.” At first, we kind of had to help her. I would help her move in both directions. Over time, it was, “Lift your knee up towards your chest, and then go ahead, and push back down against the floor.” Before you knew it, it was, “Rotate your shoulders.” She had a bit more mobility and strength there. “Go ahead and push against me. Push against me. Push against me. Okay. Now the other way. Pull against me. Pull against me.” We just started to really get her muscles and nervous system to fire coordinatively again.

Then we worked on pulling her up out of the chair with her doing 10%, with her doing 20%, with her doing 30, 40, 50 until she was at 100%. Then she got up out of the chair. Her first request was, “Is there any way that I can dance?” We turned up the volume on the music, and we got her going. I helped her, and we just started moving through the movements. You know what?

Something that she enjoyed that much made it all fall together for her. It was like she had to think about all these different, individual movements. Once she just had 50% or 40% of it helped dance, it was like she – her body was already organized. Her nervous system was organized to be able to do her absolute favorite thing that she had done for her entire life. It was the thing that she missed the most. Gosh! The smile on her face, it was incredible. I’ll never forget her. She was just a wonderful woman.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s amazing at 112.

Meredith:
That’s awesome!

Dr. Pompa:
How much of chronic low back pain and chronic neck pain is this imbalance of these little muscle groups, do you think?

Dr. Kareem:
Gosh, that’s a great question. The reason I find it to be such a fascinating questions is because where does pain come from? Is it emotional, is it physical, is it spiritual, or is it psychological?

Dr. Pompa:
Yep.

Dr. Kareem:
It’s all of it, right? Okay. How does that mean we should approach it? Should we approach it from the physical pillar, from that world, or should we approach it from the emotional side? Oftentimes, people get results from both, and it can be confusing. “Which way do I go about it?”

Where is memory really stored? Is it stored in our muscles? Where is that tissue holding emotion, anyways? Is it stored in our tissues? A lot of times, they say the issues are in the tissues. I think that’s accurate. If we get the body moving again and we balance out these muscles, we’re just reverse engineering the pain in a different way because it led to this imbalance, even if it was emotional, even if it was spiritual, even if it was psychological. Oftentimes, we can get a result from the physical realm.

The opposite can be true, as well. If it is just a physical issue, of course, this is what leads to the result. Balance out the body. It’s meant to be stacked on itself in a very specific way. When it is, it gets really happy, and it starts moving well, and pain resolves. Pain’s simply a signal that something’s wrong that we have yet to address. When you learn how to address that simple thing, the body stops screaming at you.

At first, it might just be a little bit of joint pain. Then it might be a headache. Then it might be a lack of focus. Then it might be a temper tantrum or a loss of – or an increase in anxiety, let’s say, that you might be feeling. Before you know it, it could just be something as serious as really walking through life depressed. Every single one of these things – or a gut issue. Every single one of these things is your body saying, “Hey! Check me out. I got something going on.”

I like to use, as a physical therapist, the tools that I have. Movement is one of those tools, and it’s really addressing any one of those categories why pain initiates or exists to begin with. It’s important to take a look from all different categories because it’s not like movement’s an end all/ be all. It’s just something that our bodies are meant to do, that does a great job of healing. It does a great job of education and makes it easier for us to remember.

You see, there’s ancient philosophers like Aristotle and Socrates that used to actually have their students walk backwards while they learned. They would walk around, walking backwards where I studied abroad at one point in time, and they would read to their students, and have them read back the information. Why? Their nervous system had to organize the information. They understood memory was stored all over the body, not just in the brain. That’s not where it was.

When you have to coordinate movement with a particular feeling, with a memory, with information, the body can integrate it. That sensory integration changes things from short-term memory to long-term memory and makes it more accessible from both directions. That’s what we’re talking about with movement, and that’s what we’re talking about with pain. Get rid of the pain signal. Send those mechanoreceptors back into the blood stream to be absorbed, and then take a look at the end effect. It’s wonderful.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Interesting. Just how simple, doing just five exercises five minutes three times a week can change your physiology at the cellular level. My gosh! It really is remarkable. I hope people listening and viewing this do it. Oftentimes, the risk is that, “Ah, it sounds too simple.” People want the complex answer. I know. Yet, this isn’t just five movements. That’s why I asked the question. What’s special about these five movements that really coordinates the central nervous system into bringing balance?

Balance is homeostasis. If you look at what all disease is, dis-ease, it’s a lack of homeostasis, meaning balance in the body. This neurological imbalance represents itself in our structure. I love it. You said, “Start with that plumb line. Put up the plumb line. Take your pictures because that’s a key.” You’re used to looking at yourself in the mirror all day. Start there to look for balance represented in our physical structure. It’s really representing an imbalance, to me, at the cellular level.

Dr. Kareem:
Absolutely. Well said.

Meredith:
I’m really excited to try out these exercises. What were your websites again, Dr. Kareem?

Dr. Kareem:
The easiest way to find those five exercises is at DailyPosture.com. If you would like to take a more comprehensive look at your health, we have those tools, as well. ReadyToLookYounger.com is a great place to find those.

Meredith:
Great. We’ll include those in the show notes. Wow. Thank you. This has been so informational. I’m so excited to go home and try the exercises. Five minutes every other day, there’s no excuse to not do that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I think it’ll benefit every one of the clients that our doctors have because this is – it’s a missing link. We have to bring balance to the body in every possible way, at the cellular level, neurologically, which it ultimately represents in here. Great stuff, man. We appreciate you coming on. We appreciate the knowledge. This is something that I know people are going to utilize.

Dr. Kareem:
Dr. Pompa, it’s my pleasure. If I could just add one closing thought – a lot of times, health can be overwhelming. You’ve already learned just one, little thing that you can work on. Work on that one, little thing. See what kind of profound effect a few minutes of your time can have just every couple of days. Then as that becomes easy and normalized, and you reach that homeostatic state, that equilibrium in your body, replace that five minutes with another thing that you work on for five minutes that can have a profound effect, whether it’s to improve your sleep, your hormones, or anything else. That five minutes that you spend today that’s strategic and targeted can completely turn around your health. Most people just need the time to think about it before they get started.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s great, great advice. Something so simple, everybody should do it. I’m going there next. I’m going there after the show.

Meredith:
Yup. I’m inspired. All right. Thank you so much, Dr. Kareem, for bringing your wealth of knowledge to Cellular Healing TV. It was just such a blessing to have you. Thank you, Dr. Pompa, as always. Thanks, everyone, for listening and watching. We so appreciate you. Hope you have an awesome weekend, and we’ll see you guys next Friday.

124: How Kim Got Her Life Back

Transcript of Episode 124: How Kim Got Her Life Back

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Special Guest, Kim Emrich

Meredith:
Hello, everyone and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host Meredith Dykstra, and we have Dr. Pompa here on the line of course, and today we’re welcoming a very special glass, very special guest. Not a glass, a guest. And we have Kim Emrich here. She is one of Dr. Pompa’s clients, and she’s going to be sharing her testimonial today on where she’s been, where she is now. And she really has an incredible story, and Dr. Pompa wanted her to come onto Cellular Healing TV to share. So before we get started, let me tell you a little bit more about Kim.

Kim Emrich is currently a stay-at-home mom who is in the process of regaining her health without the use of any medications after a decade long journey with Hashimoto’s. Kim has spent several years of her life around the sick and dying. Working in the past as a lab tech, ER tech, and EEG tech. She’s run in-house laboratories for private practice doctors in an inner city hospital emergency room. She provided patient care at one of the largest epilepsy monitoring clinics in the world. In addition, she’s volunteered her time helping to launch and operate remote jungle medical clinics in the Caribbean, South America, and Papua New Guinea.

Most recently, Kim lost her mother after a long battle with poor health. Her mother fought relentlessly and outlived her prognosis by 16 years. She became lovingly known as the “Energizer Bunny.” Kim truly believes her mother would be alive today if more time was spent searching for root causes of her illness and removing the source. Kim believes that both traditional and alternative doctors and researchers all have an important and special role to play in assisting and helping people achieve optimal health, but firmly believes that as individuals, we are ultimately responsible for our own health. It is our job to ask questions, to educate ourselves, to find root causes, and choose our own path to healing. She believes that if you continuously seek, God will always open up new doors, and lead you down sure pathways to improve health, and even cure so-called incurable diseases. So welcome, Kim. Thank you so much for being here today.

Kim:
Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Well, Kim, I thank you so much because I always—I’ve asked so many of my clients to come on and tell their story, and so few do, right, I’m going to be honest with you, because it’s scary, right? It’s like, oh, my gosh, on the show that they watch to be on. So you’re scared because everyone is, right, but there’s—we always say there’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a conversation. But I believe it’s our God duty to tell our story. When we look at biblical times, people told their stories, and that’s how people learned, right? Jesus taught in stories. It’s our story that transforms the world.

We can tell all the facts. We can tell all the science, but ultimately, my story has changed more lives than really any of the facts and amazing shows that we do. Really, I mean, it is our story that gives us the purpose, and it’s not by chance that you’re a world changer just listening to that little bio there. You’re doing amazing things. Because I always tell the doctors that I coach look for your purpose in your pain and so too do you. I’m sure if you looked at your life and said, gosh, look where God brought me from to where I am now, there is amazing purpose, and you wouldn’t be the woman that you are. So thank you for being on this show.

Kim:
Thank you for having me.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re welcome. And I just pulled up, and I just looked at a brief history that I remembered getting day 1 when we—I can’t say sat down. Sat down like this. You said, and this notes it, it all started around 2000, and I’ll let you reiterate on that. You were diagnosed with an autoimmune condition at that time, postpartum depression after having a baby. And by the way, I remember your lead test had high lead, which often comes out of pregnancies. So the lead pours out of the bones, and we see this symptom change after pregnancy. We see autoimmune often times develop after pregnancies. So no surprise there to me.

In 2002, you were diagnosed with Epstein-Barr. You were—had major energy depletion, joint pain, mood swings, depression, heart palpitations, insomnia, PCOS, fibroid cystic breasts, heavy chest, hard to breath, thin skin, bald spots. 2004, joint pains started. You had chronic joint pain, tendonitis, neck/shoulder pain, back. Somewhere in that time your thyroid malfunctioned. Increase in TSH, autoimmune thyroid where your antibodies were up, thyroiditis, inflammation. They showed your thyroid. You had a goiter. Basically, your thyroid was growing. So all of these things I’ll let you reiterate on, but you’re a different woman today.

Kim:
I am.

Dr. Pompa:
Here with us changing the world. So tell us your story.

Kim:
That’s really funny you mentioned about the goiter, and this—you probably can’t see this, this little necklace that I’m wearing. I bought this. I think it was three years ago now. My—it was the day before Mother’s Day, and my husband took me out to this place. We got this as a Mother’s Day gift, and on our way home, got a phone call that my stepfather had suddenly passed away. And my mother was just two days coming out of a diabetic coma.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow.

Kim:
And so she wakes up and finds out that her husband had shot himself, and so I couldn’t wear this necklace. My goiter got so big that I wasn’t able to wear it, and I’m wearing it today. And I’m really pleased that I get to wear it now.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow. That’s a good visual. Because people don’t understand the thyroid literally can grow to that big. I can visually even see now how big that would be.

Kim:
Yeah. And so, I mean, it wasn’t huge or anything, but tight enough that I wouldn’t want to wear a necklace like this, and so yeah, I mean, I grew up pretty healthy. I mean, I was young and active, never had issues with weight, never—and it was—I mean, I really feel like the bottom fell out after I gave birth to my son.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Kim:
I did everything that they told me to do in pregnancy, and I had a hearty, wonderful pregnancy. Got very—I had delivered a fairly large baby, especially for my size, and being here in Colorado, I think the average birth weight is around 6½ to 7 pounds just because of the lack of oxygen in the air. I had a 9 pound—almost a 9 pound baby. And instantly, after I delivered this ginormous child, I mean, Raynaud’s disease of the nipples. It just immediately started in, and I—and really, from that time on I struggled.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Kim:
And tried many, many, many different things, and I never—the whole pathway, take this drug, do that, I just—somehow, innately, I knew that that was not going to—I’d always say—I’m questioner. Why is my thyroid malfunctioning? Oh, here, just take this Synthroid, and if you had a really nice doctor, they’d say okay. Well, here’s Armour instead. You know? But why does this happen? And they don’t really have an answer. Well, it just happens. There’s no cure for it, and you’re going to have to take this pill for the rest of your life, and I just was not okay with that.

And you turn on your television, and you see these commercials about all these drugs. And they say, oh, by the way—they show everybody having the time of their lives, and they say but you might fall down of sudden cardiac death. But that’s okay. Look, I’m not okay with that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, right? I know. Yeah. No doubt. No doubt about it. I remember…

Kim:
And so…

Dr. Pompa:
Go ahead. Say it.

Kim:
No. I was just going to say when I turned from—well, so the turning point for me away from the whole conventional thing where I just thought I’ve got to close the door on this for a while was after I had tendonitis so bad in my shoulder. It destroyed the tendon, and I was so desperate. I decided to have the surgery done. Interestingly enough, after the surgery was done, I was in more pain than I was before I had the surgery, and…

Dr. Pompa:
I forgot about that.

Kim:
And it ended up being frozen. I couldn’t even move it anymore. And I resorted to taking narcotic drugs just to take the edge off of the pain, and then I knew that, oh, my gosh, here I would be faced with the possibility of becoming addicted to pain medications. And that’s when I met my chiropractor who eventually then referred me to you, and it’s interesting because in my chiropractic journey, several times over a few years he said, Kim, I really think you’ve got heavy metal issues. But I was the only one in his office who could pass that VCS test or that visual screening for that, and so in my mind, I just dismissed it. But it’s interesting because that seems to be what the problem—what the root cause was.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. When I’ve looked at your history, I mean, just some things I’ve jotted down. You grew up, and you had remodeled homes or at least you grew up in some homes that would be remodeled. I remember in my notes—I’m looking at it now. I said need urine toxic metal test, lead. So I suspected lead just from your history alone. Remodeled homes, lived in old homes, worked—and here’s another thing. I suspected mercury in the brain.

You wore contact lenses from 1978 to the present. Guess who else did that? Me. Yeah, so I had—obviously, I had fillings, and I think you had a filling removed.

Kim:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Pompa:
You had several in the past, right?

Kim:
I only had one.

Dr. Pompa:
You only had one. Okay, only one. So then you had that removed, and you wore the contact lenses like I did. Through the 70s, the 80s, and early 90s, where would we put mercury? So brain mercury and I told you that that probably won’t show up in the test, but I’m thinking the lead will. It did. So just looking at your history, how you got things changed after the pregnancy. Man, we grew up in the lead generation, in the mercury generation, and the problem is is that it’s deep in those tissues.

As we—I’m looking at my notes. As we went through the detox, that goiter kept shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, and I remember you telling me, my goiter’s shrinking. And then there would be times where it’d increase again. Then it would shrink again. I can’t even see a goiter there today. But yeah, I mean, to fix hormone problems, which you had, to fix aches and pains, which you had, really is impossible without getting to the upstream cause. So yeah, you tried a lot of things. You did a lot of things that were very good and helped you I’m sure even, but ultimately, until we got to that, we weren’t going to get you to where you are today.

Kim:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Pompa:
And Kim, I’m a—as a reminder, because this is something that I went through, once certain aspects of my life were better again, number one, we forget where we were. Number two, we will go through times that that lead and even mercury will come out, and all of a sudden we revisit certain things or new things even crop up. I went through that for years. I always say seven years, probably, I went through those episodes. I just wanted to be done detoxing. I just wanted to be able to make more exceptions. Maybe, people say, live life normal, right, which I believe I’m living life normal now. I don’t know what we mean by that, but I guess live life like everybody else that got—how we got sick.

However, I would revisit some of those things because the metals would just come out at random. As we age, we lose bone, and out comes—different lead can come from the deep bone. Even stuff will mobilize even from the deep tissues in our nerve tissue like the brain will come out. And I became better at understanding what was going on, and know that, okay, I just needed a cycle.

Right now, you’re still cycling. I mean, we took you through the prep phase. We took you through a body phase. We took you into the brain phase. That’s where you are now.

Kim:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Pompa:
So I do want you to share because that was journey, right? I remember diarrhea happening with ALA. I remember this happening and just different things. So I don’t know. Think back through that journey, and just what are some of the dietary changes? We now intermittent fast. I remember a time where you couldn’t go without food, right?

Kim:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Pompa:
So that’s many people watching this show. We talk about intermittent fasting, and they go I can’t go without food. That was you. So talk a little about that there. Start right there.

Kim:
Yeah. I mean, it’s not an easy journey as all of us who’ve have been through it can testify to that. But boy, I just tell you. If you do it, if you—people would tell me in this journey, Kim, you have so much discipline. You’re such a disciplined person. You can do this. You can do the fasts. You can do this and that, and I’d say no. I don’t really consider myself to be very disciplined at all, but I do consider myself to be very determined.

I was very determined to get to the bottom of the issue, fix it, and then get the health back, and be on my way back up. And I—it was interesting to me. As you had me do—if I couldn’t fast, you would have me do certain things, and it’s like, wow, now I can fast. I was doing so many good things before. Like even with diet, I had cleaned up my diet pretty well a few years before I met you.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Sure.

Kim:
And so a few years before I met you, when I made some of these dietary changes, I cut out wheat and several other grains. I thought I was going to die. I thought that’s it. I mean, eating is my social life. Eating, I’d just—I’d go to restaurants. I’d sit there and not eat and just struggle the whole time. Why can’t I be normal like everybody else around me? And I’m looking. I mean, I’m now to the place where I can sit at a restaurant, and look at what everybody else is eating, and go, ew, I don’t want that anymore. But it takes a while.

It also takes a really good family to walk through you with it. And I remember more towards the beginning. I mean, my husband has blessed us by being able to just financially provide the means for us to try a bunch of different things, and so for that, I’m very grateful. And he would even do it even when he wasn’t sure whether or not it was going to make a difference or not.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s hard.

Kim:
And nobody likes to waste money, and so I think over time, he could see that I was getting better. I think for me, like the mood swings, I wasn’t agitated all the time.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Kim:
I wasn’t depressed all the time, and I knew—in my head, I’m like there may not be anything to be agitated or depressed about. I just couldn’t seem to control it. And so as the journey went on with you, I’m like, wow. I actually feel pretty happy today. I can tell people—when they say how are you doing today, I can say I’m doing awesome. I feel great today.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It’s funny. As you just said that, I looked down, and this was probably seven, six months, seven months into me coaching you. And it was the third brain phase. Okay? And you said, oh, much less severe hot flashes. Yeah. Excess hair loss was less. So your hair wasn’t falling out as much.

But you said right there. Still some mood swings, tiredness at the beginning of each cycle but got better, less brain fog but better mood in general. Not as angry anymore, and you had more stress than ever at that point. So that’s what I wrote down. So you had more stress, but yet, you were tolerating the stress better. And that was after three brain cycles.

Kim:
Yeah. That was a really good test. When the stress doesn’t stop and—I mean, I know—I mean, I told Meredith a few things, maybe a few things about me. But during this whole journey with my health, we had just had—well, my counselor calls it chronic PTSD. Just we’ve had several tragedies in our family, and I’ll never forget returning home from just being—well, it was after I couldn’t wear the necklace. I had left my family to go take care of my mother who eventually died, and I really feel like that was the mercy of God. She was ready to go, so no regrets there. But I left my family for an undetermined amount of time to make sure my mother was taken care of after her husband had passed away, and—I forgot where I was exactly going with that.

So I come back home, and I just—the stress was just so high. I mean, you’d have to manage your family and the relationships there. Marriages get stressed. Kids are like—I have an adopted daughter from China, and I just left her for two months, and she doesn’t know when mommy’s coming home and all of that. And so when I get home, my counsellor said you know what? This is after the second suicide in the family. Things are going to get better. And my husband—the next week my husband broke his neck in a bicycling accident. So I’m like, okay.

But what I could see is that, as I got better, when those kinds of stressful situations would come, I could actually handle them. I actually felt like I had the ability somewhere inside to reach down deep to just know, God, things are going to be okay. And then I would actually be able to walk through some of those horrible situations, and not freak out, and not slip into deep depression. Not get so angry that I just can’t function, and I’m yelling at my children. Of course, if they listen to this, they’ll say, yeah, right, mom. But it is true. I do think that my family is definitely seeing great changes.

You know one of the things I love now? I can dream again. When you go through such a long period of time of having no direction and not knowing where to go with your health and you just kind of—getting worse and worse, you just don’t feel—you start losing your dreams. You start forgetting why you’re even here on this earth, or you forget about what energizes you and those activities that you love to do, and you stop doing them. You don’t even know what you like anymore.

And the most beautiful thing out of this process, I’m like I don’t care about diarrhea. If I can feel good about the day and my life and what’s going on and handle the stress, boy, that’s huge.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No. It is, and you said it right too. It’s like when I was sick, I couldn’t handle any stress. I couldn’t even handle loud noise, a crying child. Anything too emotional. It’s like we know the emotional stuff in our life is huge, right? But it’s like, when you’re healthy, you can adapt to it, and it doesn’t zap you down.

Again, it’s getting the stress out. This chronic stress of toxins in our nerve system, that’s what kept me from adapting. You too, right? It’s like that’s when—once that started coming out, then we’re realizing, gosh, I can handle it. We all have stress. But it’s like unloading that bucket of chemical stress allows us to deal with the emotional stress so much easier. You can get a handle on it. I’ve watched you go through that. And then hormones, right, so many people focus on different hormones, this hormone thing, that hormone thing, but your hot flashes got better as the detox went forward.

Kim:
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Pompa:
I forget how many hot flashes you had, but they were severe.

Kim:
Yeah. I would have them all through the night. Every 30 minutes, I would just be drenched in sweat, and I thought—I was never understanding. I was thinking, the whole menopause thing. Wow. Ladies never really said it was this bad, but this was different. It was every 30 minutes just profuse sweating, and the further—I mean, I’ll still go back to those, and I’ll get them, and it’s interesting now. Because as I’ve gone on this journey, I know exactly in the cycles when they’re going to be worse and when they’re going to be better.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Kim:
For example, just last week they completely dropped off. They’re gone. They’re gone and I’m feeling fantastic. So there’s a cycle to it too.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, toxin related. How do you feel—I mean, I know in the beginning it’s very typical to feel worse on an on cycle. But did you cross over to where you feel better on on cycles? What’s the difference of on cycles? And for those watching that don’t know what we’re talking about, we’re talking about on a detox cycle. So when I say brain phase, that’s a detox cycle where we’re detoxing the deeper tissues like the brain.

Kim:
Well, I do know at the beginning, whenever I would be out in public in general—let’s just say I’m playing tennis. In the beginning, people could tell something was going on with me, and sometimes I would just explain to them just briefly what I was doing. I would get brain gaps or something. I would just sort of forget where I was supposed to stand, and I still get that once in a while. But yeah, at the beginning of each cycle, I would feel good, and then towards the end of the cycle, I would start feeling really bad. And it has changed over time, and sometimes I have to go through a few cycles to figure out what exactly is going on. I can honestly say I just finished a cycle, an on cycle. I felt fantastic through the whole thing.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Kim:
I didn’t even feel like I needed to go off of it whereas before it was like, okay, my body needs a break. It’s been working really hard. There would be times around day 4—and my family knows I never do this. They’d come home. I’m laying on the coach, and I can’t even get up.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Kim:
I needed a nap, and I never do that. And so some of those days are gone. I don’t ever get that fatigued or that tired, and life feels more normal. Once in a while, things will cycle around.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Kim:
And I know it’s just all part of the healing process. Sometimes I can tell my body is dumping more toxins.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Kim:
I don’t why it did that, but it does it. The body is ready to release it, and it does it. But for the most part, I didn’t think that people can tell anymore that something different is going on with me.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. I mean, I went through the same thing. It’s like cycles were hard, and then they got easier. But then randomly my body would dump, and then starting a cycle would be like the greatest thing. I’d be like, oh, my god. I’m normal. It’s like—and then if I went too far, I’d say, okay, I’m going to keep it going. Of course, I learned that that didn’t work either.

So my goal is always with every client is to teach them the process. You learned the process. You know now when to do it, how to do it. So I love hearing that.

Kim:
Yeah. I think there’s got to be a place out there—as you and others start making this more known out there, I just feel like there’s a place for people like me who would love to get out there and help more people. I mean, unfortunately, I think people—you have to get sick and become symptomatic before anybody will even consider what you’re saying to them, and I’ve learned how to just back off. You can tell when a person is ready to get well or not, or you can tell that if someone isn’t symptomatic yet, that they’re not really interested. And I’m okay with that now. I used to think that I had to push it on people.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, me too.

Kim:
But I feel like you know what? There are plenty of people out there now, which—as I’ve gone through this journey, now I have people coming to me saying wow. How are you doing this? I’m like do you really—do you want to hear it? And so I’ve been open to sharing with—I mean, I’m a little more selective on who I really jump in and dive into exactly what is this program that I’m doing, and how is it helping me? So I just think that people like me really have a desire to get out there and just raise awareness. That you know what? You don’t have to take drugs to fix those problems. There are other viable ways of, better ways of actually getting healthy and here’s how.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Kim:
And it’s not going to be easy. It’s not the easy road. It’s not the magic pill, the magic bullet. It’s not that. But if you’re willing to—you don’t have to be disciplined, but if you can find the determination, you can do this.

And so I don’t know if you can see this. This is something I found in my mother’s home right before she died. I mean when I was cleaning out her house. Sorry. And this was the motto of her life, and it’s become mine as well. And I don’t know if you can see this. I don’t know. Have you ever seen this?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Never ever give up.

Meredith:
I have. I love that picture. I’ve seen that before. It’s wonderful.

Kim:
So that was my mom’s story and her testimony, and I feel like the key was as I was watching her literally dying in a nursing home—she was in skilled care, had a giant gapping gangrene wound on her leg. They wanted to amputate it. It just was a really heartbreaking situation. And one of the things my mother never did is she never laid in that bed—and she’d be moaning in pain and groaning. And she would never say, God, why? Why does this happen to me? Why? Why this? And you want to just blame this or blame-why, God? It’s your fault.

And she had a message. She knew that once she ended—when she left this life, she always believed that she had a special place in Heaven. That God had this special place for her to do this special job, and I believe that that’s true. I believe that God had that for her, but I also believe that He has that for us here and now. And so I don’t ask God why? Why? Why? Because I feel like the more we sink into that kind of thinking, the more we want to give up, and the more we just give into fear, or we give into just blaming and saying this isn’t really working. This isn’t doing any good. But now I ask myself, okay, God, how can you work in and through this situation to make me a better person and give me a better stories that I can tell others?

Dr. Pompa:
Kim, what you just said there, when I interview for a client that I’m going to coach, those are the things that I’m looking for. My doctors, we’ve trained them. Look, through my pain, I’ve now coached and trained doctors around the world in this. The world needs what you went through. That’s why thank you for telling your story.

Kim:
Oh, thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
Because there’s so many women, there’s so many people out there I feel need—they were like, oh, my gosh. That was me. That was me. And I’m telling you. You just encouraged them more than me. So already you’re serving. No doubt. Again, now there’s doctors trained in this with cellular detox and cellular healing around the globe because of what I went through.

You chose to take that and say I’m not going to—you learned it from your mom. That I’m not going to just complain. I’ve done it. I’m going to push through for answers. I’m going to do whatever it takes. I’m going to live life. I’m telling you. That’s the healing attitude. Meredith, we call those three percenters. Kim Emrich, you’re a three percenter. That’s why you are where you are.

Those listening, that’s a choice. Being a three percenter, it’s a choice. Saying, darn it, you made that choice that I was going to do whatever it takes. And darn it, I’m going to serve God in it, and I’m going to get better from it, and I’m going to make a difference because of it.

Kim:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Pompa:
Any one of those choices.

Kim:
Yeah. I was telling Meredith just before this call about how my journey is a long journey. It’s been ten plus years, and there are times I go, man, I just wish my journey could’ve only been three years. I wish it could’ve been one year.

Dr. Pompa:
Right.

Kim:
I feel like sometimes God knows that your journey needs to be—your whole life is your journey. Your story—as long as you’re alive, your story continues.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Kim:
I feel like had we sped up this process, had I met you five years ago…

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Kim:
I might not have been ready, and so I—you say a lot of time trust the process. And just with timing and all that, we have to trust the process, and that whole thing about never giving up, God knows the timeframe. He knows the path. And just trust Him, and let Him do it. And you don’t have to get discouraged if it takes too long. I just feel like, as Americans, we just want that pill now. And I know a lot of people watched me struggle through hard times with my health, and I hope that the testimony is is that they see that I pushed through that and it gets better.

And it—I want to encourage people that it gets overwhelming. You go out there, and you watch your podcasts. It’s just full of so much incredible information. But it can get pretty overwhelming, and I tell people. You know what? Start small. Start small. Cut the grains out. Stop drinking soda.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah.

Kim:
You’ll find that if you don’t ever start somewhere, you’re never going to go anywhere.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah.

Kim:
And that’s how it was with me. It was a journey. I had to start—I had to take baby steps.

Dr. Pompa:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kim:
And now I—it’s not that I’m great or anything like that now. It’s just it took baby steps, and it took a long time for me to develop the discipline in order to be successful. I had—I beat myself up all the time when I would fail, but haven’t we all. But you just pick yourself up, and you keep going.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. You said a lot of amazing things. It’s like it takes us 30, 40 years to get sick, and then everyone just wants the pill. I mean, even beyond the medication. They just want the magic supplement, right? It’s like—you see. You did. You said it. It’s like, look, you did a lot of great dietary changes before you met me. It’s like but yet you still weren’t well.

It took years to bioaccumulate these toxins. You have been persistent, just never missing cycle after cycle, and that’s the key. It’s like I’ve done this long enough to know that people who stick it through just like you did learn the process just like you did. Now they realize that healing takes time just like disease took time, and get the toxins out. The body does the healing. It really does. It’s not magic in that sense. If we remove the interference, then the body does the healing. Your goiter would’ve never went away. Your thyroid condition, everything, the hormones, it will never change.

Meredith, what do I always say? You won’t get well today, with today’s illnesses, with the perfect diet, but you won’t get well without a perfect diet. So now it becomes this thing that’s necessary, but in and itself, we need to get these toxins out. You’re proof positive of that. God has a purpose in it for you, those watching this, right? But you have to ask what is it? You know you’re called to this now. I probably have that written down somewhere because I literally remember writing it. She is called to this mission.

Kim:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s like I’m stuck now. I can’t get out. What’s interesting too is you feel so alone in the journey.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Kim:
You feel like there’s no one else out there like you. But you know what? If you stick it out and you hang around long enough, it’s like we all have this similar stories that binds you all together. I’m not alone anymore. I know I’m not alone in this, and it’s a beautiful thing.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No doubt about it. Tell us a little bit about the fasting. Because, again, I could look down at my notes here and say here’s one, right? It’s like puffy, chubby fingers went away for the first time during a fast, right? I mean, there are some things that happen. Again, you were the gal who could not not eat. I mean and then you were doing these longer fasts.

I remember I put you on a whey water fast in the beginning, and that was probably pretty traumatic. I don’t know. But then you—it became part of what you did. It became easy for you, right?

Kim:
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Maybe you could speak to that a little bit.

Kim:
I remember the whey water thing, and I was into that before I even knew you because the Garden of Life people and Jordan Rubin and all that. I tried several of them, and I’m so determined. I forced it into my body, and it just wasn’t happening.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Kim:
Then you had me do it. I thought, well, okay. We could—and just—one of the things I like about you is you say okay. Well, if that doesn’t work, it’s okay. Let’s back off on that. Let’s try something different.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Kim:
We did a bone broth fast. I never felt better in my life, and I had some road blocks with that the longer we did it. Then we did water, and I’m up to—I can intermittent fast now. I can even do 24 hours. I could do it two, three times a week. I rarely get hungry. It’s pretty easy.

It’s so funny. My husband will say, wow, this diet is really, really expensive. You’re buying the raw milk, the grass-fed beef, the pastured chicken eggs, and the more expensive butter, and all that. And I’m like I don’t even eat two, three days a week. How can that—I’m making up for it. I’m pretty resourceful. So there’s no excuse out there. You can make it work. You can make it happen.

You can—if you want, you can pay on the—later on when you’re in the ICU or like my mother who we had to have skilled nursing care past time that Medicare would pay, and then it’s a hundred-fifty bucks a day out-of-pocket. And so if you keep yourself well upfront, it’s going to pay off.

Dr. Pompa:
Always, always, yeah and that’s amazing. I mean, you do what I do. I went all day yesterday; I didn’t eat at all, honestly. It was just effortless. You encouraged a lot of people though. Because I know a lot of people watching this show, many of my clients, many of the doctors that do cellular detox and their clients, I can’t go without food. I can’t go and do 14 hours. I get—it’s like you started it. It’s like now you said it. It’s like I can do it several times a week without eating.

My wife was that way. It wasn’t easy for her at first, but you get more efficient. The body becomes more efficient at using fat for energy, and that’s part of the healing. It’s like—but we put it all together, the ancient healing strategies and the detox, and that’s what works. Right, Meredith? That’s the multi—part of the multi-therapeutic approach that I see.

Meredith:
Yeah. And that’s what I was going to say too. That all of this does fit into the multi-therapeutic approach: the fasting, the detox, the diet changes. Supplementation, we haven’t really talked a lot about that and then exercise either so maybe if you want to hit on those.

Kim:
Is that for me, or is that for Dr. Pompa:

Dr. Pompa:
No. That was for you.

Meredith:
For either of you, yeah.

Kim:
Oh, go ahead again.

Meredith:
So what was your experience with them, with the supplements first? Maybe if you want to start there.

Kim:
Yeah. Well, before I met Dr. Pompa, I was highly supplemented, but I was on good supplements because…

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You were.

Kim:
Through my chiropractor, we were doing Systemic Formulas, and it was interesting. Because I felt like, as long as I was doing those religiously, I could become pretty asymptomatic on a lot of my symptoms. But as soon as I would, I’m not kidding you, miss a day, symptoms would come right back, and I just knew something wasn’t right about that. I can’t go the rest of my life taking all these supplements. And I find it interesting now that, as I’ve been working with Dr. Pompa, the number of supplements, it decreases over time.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s true.

Kim:
And there’s a lot of changing and switching, but there’s also—like I remember I needed so much magnesium that I had to carry around a bottle of liquid magnesium. This is before I met you Dr. Pompa. I used to carry it around in my car because I would get heart palpitations so severely.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Kim:
And they wouldn’t stop, and I would get—I would start to get—I would start thinking I was going to pass out, even while I was driving. And so I would—it was like having an—like for an asthmatic, having an inhaler. I used to take so much magnesium. It was amazing how much I would take, and never have too much of it, and now I don’t. I don’t really take that much, and I very, very rarely ever get a heart palpitation.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s the thing. It’s getting upstream, right? I mean, it’s just like people taking all these hormones, whether it’s all the supplements. Ultimately, you remove the upstream cause. In your case, no doubt lead and mercury had bioaccumulated deep into the tissue, and that messes with magnesium. It does. It depletes magnesium. You can eat all the magnesium you want, but it’s not going to stay because the heavy metals compete for the same receptors.

So it’s like I hope everyone hears the lesson. You were patient enough to get upstream to it. Determined enough to get upstream at the real cause of why you have mineral deficiencies, why you have hormone trouble, etc.

Kim:
I think too, over the this process—I’m sorry. There’s a delay, and I may be interrupting. I don’t mean to do that. I’m sorry.

Dr. Pompa:
No. No.

Kim:
When Meredith was asking about exercise, there were years that I couldn’t do anything.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Kim:
I mean, the time that they said, oh, it’s mono, Epstein-Barr virus. I was having a hard time getting out of bed during those days. But then, for someone who was—I was always very active, played sports my whole life. I could barely run for a very long time, and I used to take my kids to the tennis courts and watch them play and wished so badly that I could be out there. And there were all kinds of things that went through my mind. Oh, I’m just getting too old. You know? I’m in my 40’s now. I can’t do this. It just comes with age. And I’m running out on the tennis courts just like I did when I was a teenager.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Kim:
And so it comes back. It all comes back.

Dr. Pompa:
I couldn’t work out. When I was sick, I couldn’t exercise either. It would just leave me more exhausted and more sleepless nights, honestly, and I, this morning, biked 12 miles. It’s like probably—I did a climb up this mountain out here. You probably won’t see it. But anyways, I finished in my age category in the Top 10 of anyone who ever went up that climb. So that was the guy—where I started was I could not literally ride my bike down the street without becoming exhausted.

I think that—I think both of us just gave a lot of people a lot of hope, honestly. It’s like it can be you. But honestly, you have to choose it. Honestly, it’s not going to come with the magic pill. It’s not going to come by just some dietary changes, just that alone. You see it took all of these things together to get both of our lives back, and that’s the magic.

Kim:
Mm-hmm. I just want to thank you so much, Dr. Pompa, because, I mean, it was very timely. You were a godsend to me. And all the different times in my journey where I just said, God, show me. Open the next door. I’ve tried all these good things, but somehow we just haven’t gotten to the core of the issue. And just at the right time, you came along, and I feel like I’m starting to be able to dream again and do some of the—regain some of the things I’ve lost. And I’m forever grateful for that, and I just want to thank you so much.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s what our story brings us, deeper into that service. You know what? And I guarantee you, just this show alone, you’re changing lives. Obviously, you have people coming to you now going so what did you do?

Kim:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Meredith, I think she might be at one of our seminars one day.

Meredith:
All right.

Kim:
You might disagree on that one.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.  Ask Meredith. Her and her family were clients of mine for years, and now she’s a world changer. She’s doing this, and she’s taking people through cellular detox, and she’s an amazing dealer today. And she started exactly where you did, Kim, so some encouragement.

Kim:
Yeah. Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And honestly, you have—already have an amazing background with helping people in the health field, so God has a purpose for each of us.

Kim:
Yeah. It’s interesting because I was going to go to medical school and become a doctor. And just all—I just thought I’m just not sure they’re doing it the way—I don’t want to say the right way. Because I’m so grateful for all the great doctors that we have out there, but I just felt like for me there was more to it. I wanted to know, well, why are people getting sick? Why?

Dr. Pompa:
Why?

Kim:
If you can’t answer why, I’m not satisfied.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. The why, right? My brain automatically asks why. My 12-year-old, Simon, asks me why so many times a day that if I—a certain time in the evening I have to say, okay, no more. No more. So but yeah, asking why is a good thing.

Well, Kim, thank you so much for sharing. I told you. It takes a lot of guts to come on here and share your story. And I hope my existing clients and some of our doctors clients get encouraged, and say, okay, I’m going to tell my story too because we have hundreds of you out there.

Kim:
Yeah. I might need EMDR after this. We’ll see.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s awesome.

Meredith:
Well, thank you, Dr. Pompa, and thank you, Kim, so much for sharing your story. You’re a true inspiration to us and to all of those who are watching. And just the progress and changes you’ve made within the multi-therapeutic approach as we’ve discussed, that it’s really magic. It is the synergy in doing all of these different strategies because it’s never just one thing. But you stayed course, and you are just on your way. So thanks so much for sharing.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. Thank God. Thank you. Thank you, Meredith.

Meredith:
All right, thanks, everyone, and we’ll see you next time. Take care.

122: Best Fats For Your Brain and Body with Dr. Barry Sears

Transcript of Episode 122: Best Fats For Your Brain and Body with Dr. Barry Sears

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Special Guest, Dr. Barry Sears

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is episode 122. We have Dr. Pompa, our resident cellular healing specialist on the line, of course, and today we’re welcoming a very special guest, Dr. Barry Sears.

Before we jump in with Dr. Barry, let me tell you a little bit about him. Dr. Barry Sears is a leading authority on the dietary control of hormonal response. A former research scientist at the Boston University School of Medicine and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Sears has dedicated his research efforts over the past 30 years to the study of lipids. He holds 13 US patents in areas of intravenous drug delivery systems and hormonal regulation for the treatment of cardiovascular disease.

Wow. Dr. Sears, we’re so honored to have you. You’ve done such prolific research in this area. I know you and Dr. Pompa are in alignment with a lot of your work on fats. We are so excited to discuss good fats, bad fats, toxic fats, cellular inflammation, and we’ve got a lot to talk about. Welcome to the show, Dr. Sears.

Dr. Sears:
Thank you very much.

Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Sears, I could refer to you as Barry, and you can call me Dan. What a pleasure! You’re an icon in this regard. I remember years ago reading some of your work when you were talking about fats, and I don’t want to date you here. I’ll tell you, you tool a lot of criticism in the beginning. Now we hear a lot about what you and I talk about, but back then, you were a forerunner, I’m telling you.

When you were talking about high fat, and how fat heals, and just a lot of your work, and low carbs, and high fats, like I said, you paved the way. I think you’ve authored, since The Zone Diet, 12 or 14 books. Am I right on that?

Dr. Sears:
That’s correct, 14.

Dr. Pompa:
Your background is biochemistry. How did you get into this? Years ago, how did you get into this?

Dr. Sears:
It actually began with the death of my father. Died of a heart attach at 53. That’s obviously a young age, but he was also a world-class athlete. Also, we had family history of heart disease. All his brothers had died in their early fifties of heart disease, as did my grandfather. I knew many, many years ago that genetically, I was predisposed to an early death from heart disease. I either could accept that fate or somehow try to basically change that fate. That led to a greater journey of the role of, really, lipids and hormones in all chronic diseases. The Zone Diet nearly 40 years ago.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You know, it’s amazing. It takes us, all of us, a story to really bring us into something alternative or at least contrary to what’s out there in modern medicine, if you will, to buck the system like you have early on. It was the same with me. It took my story for me to step outside what normal healing would be. I guess I don’t even know how to put it.

I tell you, one of the topics that I love and that you love is the topic of cellular inflammation and also epigenetics. You said the gene word, right? You and I both believe that hey, we have susceptibilities genetically, but you and I both believe that hey, it doesn’t mean you have to end up with a heart attack. I don’t have to end up with diabetes. I don’t have to end up with high blood pressure, although when I was in ninth grade, I had it because my gene was turned on. I’m 50, and I don’t have high blood pressure, so I’ve turned off a lot of the genes.

One of the things in your new work that I don’t believe was in The Zone Diet, but you really talk about these three areas that really are needed to downregulate cellular inflammation. It’s three areas that I believe strongly in, as well. You also give some different tests and ratios that we can look at – our viewers and our listeners can look at on a blood test to really get an idea of how you’re doing. I agree with these markers, and I use these markers. I love what you say in these three areas. Just to put them out there – and I want to break them down individually, the diets, and we can talk a little bit about that.

Then polyphenols and flavonoids, which I don’t recall being in some of your earlier work, and them omega-3s and other fats. Really, I think we believe that it’s – even beyond omega-3s, but omega-3s is definitely needed today. Those three things, you say, “Hey, when we put these three things together, that’s” – as I like to say, “That’s where the magic happens.” That’s what really downregulates the inflammation, and better put from your perspective, that’s how you hit the zone, right? Let’s start there. How did you come up with that? We’ll start with diet, even.

Dr. Sears:
My previous background was not nutrition. I have really had no training whatsoever, but it was in the area of intravenous drug delivery for cancer drugs.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, wow.

Dr. Sears:
When you deal with cancer drugs, if you give too little of the drug, the patient dies of cancer. You give them too much of the drug, the patient dies of the drug. You try to keep that drug, as with all drugs, within the therapeutic zone, not too high, but not too low. When the 1982 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded in 1982, I realized that you can now begin to use food primarily initially with the fatty acids to maintain a zone of inflammation. We think of inflammation as something that’s dangerous and evil. In reality, it keeps us alive in a very hostile world.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Dr. Sears:
If our inflammatory response was too low, we’d be an easy target for microbes, our injuries would never heal. If our inflammatory response is too strong or we did not turn it off sufficiently, the body begins to attack itself. When we talk about the zone, we’re really talking about a [therapy] not by using a drug, but by treating food as if it were a drug by taking it at the right dosage at the right time, and for how long? The rest of your life.

That was really the generation of the zone concept. I found out with time that unless one controlled certain aspects of the diet that omega-3 fatty acids by themselves would not be sufficient. You about polyphenols. When I first wrote my first book 20 years ago, there was really no knowledge of polyphenols in the scientific literature. That’s why The Zone keeps expanding because as we get new information on how nutrients affect hormonal and gene expression, you begin to incorporate them into the overall super-structure. In medicine, we often talk about evidence-based medicine. What does that mean? It says, “Show me the data.”

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Dr. Sears:
We can use the same principles to talk about evidence-based wellness. It’s not basically looking at treating disease; it’s looking to maintain wellness as long as possible. We have many clinical tests that can tell you how sick you are. We have very few clinical tests that tell you how well you are.

That’s why I chose to work with those three markers. They’re really markers of wellness. You can walk into Harvard Medical School, and they will agree with you. Your goal, whatever you dietary choice or lifestyle choice, is to basically maintain those markers within the appropriate ranges that allow you to control wellness on a lifetime basis.

Dr. Pompa:
We’ll get into those markers, but let’s talk about these three areas. Then we’ll talk about these three markers or ratios that you and I both like. Look, you and I both agree that the average American today is eating far too many carbohydrates even in healthy diets. Even studies that I read, Doc, that look at low carbohydrate diets, I look at the amount of carbohydrates, and I see 200 grams of carbohydrates a day. I say, “My gosh!” That, to me, is a high carbohydrate diet, and they’re calling it low-carb. What is the right diet? What have you found with diets just as some general overview guidelines?

Dr. Sears:
I think that one thing that we have to be cognizant of, that calories still count. There’s no question about that. What you have to do is have the right balance of protein, carbohydrate, and fat to control the hormonal responses, so two things happen. You can restrict calories without hunger and without fatigue. If you can do that, that’s the goal to a longer and better life.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a hormone thing. The only way you can do that is if your hormones are optimal.

Dr. Sears:
Exactly, and that’s why we have to look at nutrients. We have a very, very complex interplay. Another one has to go down.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Dr. Sears:
Each of those nutrients, protein, carbohydrate, fat will affect different hormonal responses. In many ways, you have to basically say, “Are we all genetically the same?” Of course not, but the blood can tell us how well we’re doing on the individual basis that keeps those three hormones, which are changing through our diet, within that appropriate therapeutic zone. If you can do that, then you’re not hungry, and then you’re not tired.

Why do people stop diets? They’re usually hungry and tired. I’ll say, “That’s the Gordian Knot you have to cut.” Hunger is an incredibly complex neurochemical phenomenon that starts in the hypothalamus. Really, we look at our obesity epidemic, much of it is due to inflammation of the hypothalamus and what is causing this distortion of hormonal signals, and as a consequence, we’re more hungry, we eat more calories, and surprise, we get fatter. Again, we have to look at inflammation at, really, the molecular level to understand to a greater extent our obesity crisis, our diabetes crisis, and our corresponding crisis in virtually every chronic disease today.

Dr. Pompa:
You know, Doc, I always way, “Look, the reason why people can’t lose weight today – we’ll call it weight loss resistance, even people eating well and exercising well – it’s a cellular issue.” It’s a cellular inflammation issue. You’re right. Particularly, I focus on what’s happening in that center brain, the hypothalamus pituitary, which drives the adrenals, which drives the thyroid, which drives – which influences appetite, and when you’re hungry or not.

We know that this is a key component of why people can’t lose weight. I could not agree more. This is a hormonal issue, but more specifically, it’s a cellular issue, which is affecting the hormones, which is also affecting why people can’t lose weight, or even control their appetite, or just even being a fat burner. We preach that –

Dr. Sears:
I agree 100%.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s great. The diet is great. I think when we go over these three things that you look at, I think it’ll really help people understand. Is the diet that you’re on a factor? We understand that even toxicity drives some of these markers that you’re looking at and also drives inflammation of the hypothalamus pituitary. That can even be another factor.

Okay. Let’s get into the topic of the polyphenols, the flavonoids. This is some new stuff that I know that you’ve really been excited about and researched. We have the diet, and then we have polyphenols. Most Americans are really lacking this. Talk about that.

Dr. Sears:
Polyphenols are those chemicals that give fruits and vegetables their color, and for millennia, that’s all we thought they did. It turns out that our knowledge of what polyphenols actually did had to wait for basically new breakthroughs in biotechnology to understand their impact as gene activators.

Basically, the polyphenols become gene therapy in the kitchen, assuming you take a therapeutic dosage. Like a drug, you take a placebo dosage of polyphenols, you will get placebo effects. If you take a therapeutic dosage of polyphenols, you get to have some very exciting therapeutic effects. This is what is a very exciting thing about polyphenols, as we can now get concentrates of higher levels, we can begin to see different genes being turned on depending on the intake of the polyphenols.

At the lowest levels, which is still far beyond what most American consume, they turn on anti-oxidative enzyme genes. At still higher levels, they turn off inflammatory genes. At still higher levels, they turn on anti-aging genes. We hear a lot where new breakthroughs coming in from biotechnology to have gene therapy. We have gene therapy right now; we just have to be able to use it. The key thing, you have to use a therapeutic dosage, and you have to have, again, polyphenols that actually enter into the blood.

Most polyphenols do not. They’re very good for gut health, which is an incredibly important aspect, too, but very few polyphenols actually enter into the blood to basically affect, now, the expression of our genes in our human cells.

Dr. Pompa:
I read that in your work, and I want to know how do we get those polyphenols? Also, I think what I read – and you can tell me if I’m wrong – you need at least one gram of those particular polyphenols a day. Is that correct?

Dr. Sears:
A minimum. That’s if you want to basically begin to turn on some of the anti-inflammatory genes. Let me use some examples of what you might have to do to eat one gram of polyphenols per day. You could eat two pounds of vegetables. Most Americans will say, “Mission impossible.” I could basically drink 10 glasses of red wine every day. Okay.

Meredith:
Some would like that.

Dr. Pompa:
That is not easier because I have to deal with the alcohol part of that.

Dr. Sears:
That’s true. Now, say, “I don’t like red wine. It’s too bitter.” Say, “Okay. You only need 100 glasses of white wine per day.” “I like olive oil” – a great source of polyphenols. Plan to drink about three liters of olive oil per day. You begin to see that trying to get polyphenols from natural sources is a very difficult process, and that’s why these new breakthroughs in making polyphenols extracts, where you can concentrate the polyphenols up to very high concentrations, allows you to do this.

Now, that doesn’t say, “I’ll never eat vegetables.” There’s a gazillion reasons to eat vegetables. It’s saying it’s the only way to get the higher levels, therapeutic levels. Cocoa is an example. Cocoa extracts been shown recently in Nature and other journals that have very profound effects on cognitive improvement, but the effects are found in very high levels.

We have to be thinking – using pharmaceutical thinking applied to food. We have to find the therapeutic levels of the nutrients, which are essential nutrients. There are essential amino acids. We’d have to have an adequate level of protein in our diet to get them. There are essential fatty acids. We need to have adequate levels and the right balance to maintain these eicosanoids, the hormones coming from these.

Likewise, I think within 10 or 15 years, we’ll come to understand that polyphenols are also essential nutrients. We have to have them in the diet, and we have to have them at adequate levels, and enzyme reactions or hormonal formation, but gene activation. That’s a very exciting area.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Most people watching are going, “I can’t do that. I can’t eat that many vegetables.” Are there some specific supplement choices that you recommend, or are there some specific other things.

Dr. Sears:
You’ll see more of these extracts. Surprisingly, in terms of cocoa polyphenols, one of the leaders in the field is Mars candy bars. They’ve put many millions of dollars into clinical research to make polyphenol extracts and have published the data in terms of their ability to improve cognition. The data is growing out there.

Yes. Mars wants you to eat more candy bars, but they’re also cognizant that within the candy bars are very low levels of the polyphenols, which have all -inaudible- health benefits. If you can concentrate them up, then you would have something that’s more powerful than any drug because it can alter gene expression. That’s a very exciting aspect. They realize it, and a lot of food companies are realizing it. They have an opportunity to play with the big boys.

Dr. Pompa:
A lot of people take these green poly drinks, and then have very little affect on people’s health. Of course, polyphenols; however, I don’t see the clinical support there. What’s your feeling on those things?

Dr. Sears:
You’re quite right. The number of clinical studies with polyphenols that are meaningful, you can count on the fingers of one hand. I mentioned two already, with cocoa polyphenols. Another one that basically has recently published in terms of reducing oxidative stress, taking people who are smokers. They create a lot of oxidative stress. By giving a polyphenol extract from a certain berry, which is very water soluble, you could see within 30 days a significant reduction in the levels of oxidative stress in the blood.

When you stop taking the polyphenols, the levels of oxidative stress went back up again. The data’s there, and that’s data you can take to Harvard Medical School. You say, “Here’s the data, but I have to have a therapeutic level of these polyphenols, and especially those that can get into the blood.” Just like a drug, if a drug is not water soluble, it will not enter the blood and have any therapeutic benefits. The same is true of basically nutrients. They have to somehow make the transitory aspect from our gut into our blood to have effects.

Polyphenols are, again, very tricky to work with because they have low bio-availability and a very, very short lifetime in the blood. If you can overcome both those aspects, you now have the ability to do very, very carefully controlled clinical experiments that are basically – have significant clinical benefits that are not – say, “I hope you might get some benefits.” You see it in a relatively short period of time. Thirty days for a drug study is a relatively short period of time. With polyphenols, basically if they get into the blood, you see significant effects, which are basically highly dose-dependent.

Dr. Pompa:
It still begs the question, “How do we do it?” How do we do it, which we – is there something we need to add? Are there more foods that are highly, highly concentrated we can eat? What is the goal here? How do we –

Dr. Sears:
I think the goal is going back to say, “What type of diet should we address?” Your grandmother had a pretty good feeling. Who knew she was at the cutting edge of biotechnology? She told you four things. She said that, one, always eat your vegetables. She didn’t say, “Eat your toast. You can’t leave the-”

 The second thing, you have to have some protein at every meal. How much? About the amount you can put on the palm of your hand. Next thing she said, “You can’t leave the house until you take your tablespoon of cod liver oil.” That’s the most disgusting food, still is, but every child in American two generations ago – now, probably three – had to have a tablespoon of cod liver oil. That tablespoon contained 2,500 milligrams of omega-3 fatty acids.

The typical intake of omega-3 fatty acids today in America is 125 milligrams. That’s a 95% drop in one of the primary essential nutrients of the body. We wonder why our healthcare is out of control. Your grandmother had a very, very – a clear idea because she was basically the repository of millennia of observations of what works and what doesn’t work. Now, we basically have some research to back it up, and say, “You know, Grandma was right.”

Meredith:
I love it. I just took my cod liver oil right before the show, so I’m feeling really good about that.

Dr. Sears:
Don’t feel too good because unfortunately, today, all fish are contaminated with things like PCBs.

Meredith:
Oh, man!

Dr. Sears:
The worst contaminated fish oil in the world is cod liver oil.

Meredith:
What do we do?

Dr. Sears:
That’s why you have to now – sometimes refined is better than natural in terms of fish oils. There is no fish in the world today that is not contaminated and primarily PCBs, were banned worldwide in 2001, but are persistent. To get, basically, now the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids without the toxic side effects of PCB is to concentrate and refine the fish oils.

The thing about the polyphenols, yes, you want to eat lots of vegetables primary for the fermentable fiber. If your gut microbes aren’t happy, you’re not going to be happy.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s correct.

Dr. Sears:
To get adequate levels, if you can’t eat the two pounds of vegetables per day – and it’s really not that hard. I try to do it every day, myself. If you think it’s too hard, then think about refined polyphenol extracts. Here’s another dirty secret: Everybody loves chocolate. I know no one who doesn’t love chocolate, but here’s a dirty secret of the cocoa industry.

All chocolate is contaminated with cadmium. The only way you could basically get rid of the cadmium is to concentrate up the cocoa polyphenols. Now you have cocoa polyphenols in high concentration, which are cadmium-free. Who’s been the leader in that so far? Mars candy bars. Who knew? Who knew that the evil ones were actually trying to make the world healthier?

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a good idea.

Dr. Sears:
Then we have to have the final analysis guidelines because everybody is genetically different. That’s why I go back to my three markers of wellness. This is not a multiple-choice question. Either you’re well, or you’re not well. You might not be sick enough to call – have chronic disease, but you’re no longer well.

You look at these three markers, which look at three different aspects of your diet that can be modulated until you’re in the appropriate range for all three. Only at that point are you considered well. By all the available criteria, probably less than 1% of Americans are well. They’re running out of control.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Let’s talk about the markers. We talked about the diet, obviously the importance of healthy fats, omega-3 because hey, we’re not getting a lot of these things. Before we get to it, I have to ask this question: What about these people in – I visited a tribe in Africa. These people were in the bush. I was the first American white guy they ever saw. They had no disease. It was a remarkable thing to see.

They had just come down out of the mountains. The men went off hunting in the day. The women were gathering. They didn’t ever have a grain in their life. They didn’t grow. It was really unique to see. It really took me back and even changed my paradigm about what American’s do. These men would go off hunting. They didn’t eat breakfast. They would go, and they would run, and they would come out, and they would come back with the game, and things later in the evening, and they ate a big meal.

Obviously, they were getting game that contained high levels of omega-3 in perfect ratios, right? They were eating some – they were gathering some different things, so there was their vegetable intake. Do you believe they were hitting these marks, they were hitting these polyphenol levels because of the wild animals easier than we are today with processed food?

Dr. Sears:
No. Actually, it was the women who were doing the polyphenol gathering. By basically gathering plants, which are rich in polyphenols, they are basically supplying the polyphenols. Animal contain, actually, very low levels of polyphenols.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m kind of fill in the blank. Here’s the diet, here’s the good fats in the perfect ratios, and then here’s the polyphenols.

Dr. Sears:
We, again, eventually have to go back to science. Actually, in 2010, there was a very, very good article in the British Journal of Nutrition, where the top Paleolithic researchers basically did their very in-depth analysis to the best of their knowledge of what the Paleolithic diet in east Africa would have been 15,000 years ago. They came up with a answer, about 40% carbohydrates, about 31% fat, and about 29% protein, but their estimate of the omega-3 intakes were between 6 and 14 grams a day of omega-3 fatty acids.

Meredith:
Wow.

Dr. Sears:
Massive levels, but those massive levels would basically help you modulate the inflammatory response. That’s why when you see the African indigenous people, they were not chronically ill, but they did age. That’s why there’s a difference between aging – we all will age.

Dr. Pompa:
Sure.

Dr. Sears:
I’ve never gone to a parking lot and seen too many cars which are 25 years old in the parking lot. It doesn’t mean we have to develop chronic disease.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Dr. Sears:
Chronic disease is a consequence of unrelenting inflammation below the perception of pain.

Dr. Pompa:
No doubt.

Dr. Sears:
One way to address that is by having adequate levels of omega-3 fatty acids to not only lower the inflammation, but to start a whole separate process we only know now, recently, called resolution. We think of inflammation like a burning log that eventually dies out to embers. That’s not true.

The inflammation will continue. The turning off the inflammation is a completely different response. It’s called the resolution response. We have the inflammatory response and the resolution response. The resolution response is 100% controlled by the levels of omega-3 fatty acids in the blood. If we don’t have those levels, we cannot turn on that resolution response mediated by hormones, very powerful hormones, that basically bring the levels of inflammation back to equilibrium.

Dr. Pompa:
Then let’s look at the Eskimos of years ago. They weren’t getting many polyphenols, but however, their good fatty acid levels were very, very high. Did it offset the need for more polyphenols because of their incredible fatty acid ratio?

Dr. Sears:
The answer is probably yes. That’s one of the reasons why I became interested in nutrition as an academic researcher because I read the early epidemiological studies coming out of Greenland, and saying, “Something is odd here.” These people are eating lots of saturated fat, and they basically seem to have no heart disease, and no diabetes, no depression, no multiple sclerosis. Okay, they’re bleeding to death a little faster, but they also seem to die of bacterial infection at a higher rate. They’re getting a lot to basically stop diseases we associate with inflammation.

This is, now, nearly 40 years ago, but perhaps they were getting too much that they were now depressing the immune response so they could not fight off microbial infection. To put all your eggs in one basket is a foolish strategy. Saying, “I’m going to put all my eggs” – it’s all the fat. No. You have to bring the polyphenols and the balance of hormones, so you have to take all of these and begin to work them around. That’s why I have those three markers of wellness. It was just basically in the fatty acids for your body, but you have to have all three systems working in sync to have really optimal health.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I agree. I totally agree. Let’s talk about it. Let’s start with the fat ratio, the arachidonic acid versus the EPA ratio. I think you were – 1.5 to 3 is the recommendation, somewhere around there. Talk about that marker.

Dr. Sears:
That marker actually comes out of the looking at the world’s longest-lived individuals who have legitimate birth records. These are the Japanese. Within Japan, there’s a subgroup, the Okinawans, which have even the greatest longevity. That’s the ratio you find in the general Japanese population and even a lower ratio, close to the 1.5, down in the Okinawans.

Interesting about the Okinawans or Japanese in general, their levels of bad cholesterol are identical to Americans, yet their rates of mortality from heart disease is seven times lower. Their ratio of arachidonic acid/EPA marker of inflammation is also seven times lower. Again, -inaudible- of the problem or disease. This is why I could explain why the Japanese rates of heart disease is so low, and explain why the levels of heart disease were virtually nonexistent in the Greenland Eskimos, and also in terms of basically the African tribesmen because the levels of the wild game would be higher in omega-3 fatty acids and much, much lower in omega-6. They were doing, by natural hunting techniques – of inflammation in the blood.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s a great indicator. Then the next one, of course, the triglyceride radio. Triglyceride, which is one that I love to look at just to look at, really, and insulin resistance. That’s what I love about it. Two simple numbers that are on those blood tests and you can get an idea of your insulin resistant or your particles of cholesterol, which is a big deal. Talk about that ratio.

Dr. Sears:
That’s another ratio, and that’s one that is another easy-to-extract one. Again, as you said, as the ratio of the triglycerides to HDL decreases, ideally under 1, which virtually no American has, then you start to see your LDL particles become these big, fluffy beach balls, which will never hurt you. As the ratio begins to increase, you now have the LDL particle become these small baseballs that can kill you.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Dr. Sears:
That’s one answer. From my standpoint, the best rationale for that marker, it gives you an indication of insulin resistance in the liver. Insulin resistance is something that is really a poster boy for, really, hormone resistance in general. The hormones are interacting with the receptors on the surface, but their signal is not getting through. When that happens, everything goes to hell in a hand basket.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Dr. Sears:
If you’d like to have your hormones talking to all your hormones, then reducing the ratio of triglycerides to HDL under 1 is your best marker. You’re doing a good job.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I love that ratio, myself. It gives us such a good indicator despite looking at total cholesterol, despite looking at all these other parameters that most doctors are looking at. I agree with you. We have interviewed Jeff Golic on a past show, and he agrees with that marker, that ratio, as well.

This is also one of my favorite markers, the HgbA1c, which doesn’t just look at glucose in the moment, but it looks at glucose over time. I always say if you want to age faster at the cellular level than anybody, just keep elevating your glucose and insulin. HgbA1c absolutely is a player. You like people 5 and under. Hey, I even give people a little more latitude. I said, “At least, let’s try to get you below 5.4.” You like it even under 5. Talk about that.

Dr. Sears:
You’re right that it’s a marker of glucose in the blood, but it’s really a better marker of oxidative stress. We can measure oxidative stress by a number of ways, but they’re not easily done. The glycosylated haemoglobin is easily accessible and through a drop of blood. People hate to give a venous puncture. That’s why you have your annual physical every five years, but a drop of blood, I can do that.

That drop of blood will tell you, really, the great extent of basically oxidative stress in the blood because its oxidative stress allows the linkage of the glucose and the amino acids, lysine primarily, and you have a long-lived aspect. If you look now at the overall most important thing, lack of death.

I like that. It’s a very easy endpoint. Basically, you see longevity maximized at about 5.0. Now, we use that marker for looking at diabetes, but the data is quite clear. As you increase levels from 5.0 to 5.2, 5.5, 5.8, your doctor’s saying, “You’re normal.” The blood’s saying, “Nuh-uh.” Basically, our mortality’s increasing. Why? Oxidative stress is increasing. Basically now activate the genes that now make the anti-oxidative enzymes. How to do that? I’ve got to consume a lot of polyphenols.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I love that. Yeah, no doubt. I know that when we interviewed Joe Mercola, he loves the marker looking at serum ferritin levels as something that can really drive oxidative stress. What’s your feeling on that, and what would be your number on a blood test looking at serum ferritin?

Dr. Sears:
I think serum ferritin can basically – obviously, it’s a mediator of oxidative stress, but rather than – there’s not too many ways you can lower it other than basically giving a lot of blood transfusions.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s my problem. Yeah.

Dr. Sears:
Most people say, “Hey, if I don’t like taking the venous puncture every year, I’m not going to take a blood transfusion, either.” Now, that being said, if you have relatively high levels, that’s okay, I say, “If I will increase the intake of polyphenols.” Even though the iron in the ferritin can act as an oxidative mediator, you could basically rate that reaction not by antioxidants, but again, by the polyphenols activating the gene Nrf2 that makes more of the more powerful anti-oxidative enzymes.

You say, “I can live with that. I know how to treat it through the diet. I just need to increase more polyphenols in my diet.” What does that mean? I eat more vegetables just like Grandma told me.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s always my thing. There’s nowhere in nature we should be losing blood. Again, there has to be another answer that we look at in nature. Some people genetically just obviously run higher levels, ferritin-wise, right?

Dr. Sears:
Diet as a way of basically addressing and circumventing a genetic aspect. That’s like my head about 20 years ago, but I’m still here because I have taken the opportunity to overcome by the diet, using the food as a drug, a genetic propensity for an early death from heart disease.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yep, absolutely. Those three markers, I think they’re great. I couldn’t agree more. The last two, triglycerides and HDL, that’s in every blood test that most people are running.

Dr. Sears:
Totally free.

Dr. Pompa:
HgbA1c, easy test, right? Add that to any blood test. The arachidonic acid and the EPA ratio, a little bit different. Can they add that? How easy is it to add that? My blood tests have it, but most don’t.

Dr. Sears:
Most don’t, however, the first use of the ratio of arachidonic acid/EPA as a marker of inflammation was published in 1989 in this very obscure journal called The New England Journal of Medicine by some of the top Harvard medical researchers. It’s been around for, now, more than 25 years, and is routinely used in medical research. It just is not routinely used in diagnostic testing. There are a number of independent companies that can do that for you. If I took only one blood test in my entire life, that would be the blood test I’d want to take.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s great. That’s great information, great advice. Again, I think it gives some people, our viewers, a goal, some goals to hit, and some markers to look at just to gauge your health, not just to. Meredith, I know you have questions, as well.

Meredith:
I always have lots of questions. Since we’re on the topic of fats, I want to go back to the omega-3 piece. What are your suggestions there for a proper amount of omega-3s to take to decrease inflammation? I know we don’t want to take too much, where Dr. Pompa used to say we go into omega-3 dominance, but we don’t want to have too little, either. What are your thoughts there, Dr. Sears?

Dr. Sears:
You’re quite right. We’re talking about a zone. Let’s start with basically a pretty good starting point. Your great-grandmother, when she gave your grandparents a tablespoon of cod liver oil, that’s 2,500 milligrams, a good starting point. Now, is it the ideal point? Probably not.

How do you know what’s the right amount? That ratio of arachidonic acid to EPA will tell you. Are you taking enough not only to reduce the inflammation, but to activate resolution? Can you possibly take too much? The answer is yes. Again, that’s why it allows us, in this area where I call evidence-based wellness, to titrate the individual and to titrate them so they can be optimized for their genetics.

Now, some people can get in that appropriate ratio with, maybe, probably three to four grams of omega-3 fatty acids. That’s what the Japanese take routinely in their diet. Others may need 10 grams of the omega-3 fatty acids. Those are very large amounts, but they are also therapeutic amounts. That’s why we have to begin looking at wellness and diet as using the same guidelines as we do with drugs. We have to take a therapeutic amount, and we can use blood to tell us whether we’re getting close to that amount or not.

For the amount of omega-3 fatty acids, that ratio of arachidonic acid to EPA is an excellent one. For the amount of polyphenols I should be taking, the glycosylated haemoglobin is an excellent one. For the control of my diet to control insulin resistance, the ratio of triglycerides to HDL. Each one is measuring different things, and you’re trying to bring them into alignment like the planets. When they’re in alignment, now you’ve known you’ve done everything possible to maintain wellness for a lifetime.

Meredith:
Do you think that cod liver oil’s better than a high quality fish oil or a krill oil?

Dr. Sears:
Cod liver oil, as I mentioned earlier, is probably the world’s most contaminated food with PCBs.

Meredith:
Right.

Dr. Sears:
I would rank it pretty low on the list. Krill oil is really not a fish oil. It’s really phospholipids, which means they can’t really be purified nor is it free of PCBs. Again, it does have PCBs, not as much as cod liver oil, but obviously less. The refined omega-3 fatty acids, you can get them in much higher concentrations, but most importantly, with the right conditions, you can remove the vast majority of the PCBs. I would rate them on that basis of saying we get increasing levels of PCBs as you take more, but the blood will tell you, “Are you taking enough of any one of those three whether it be cod liver oil, krill, or refined omega-3 fatty acid concentrates?”

Meredith:
You said you love olive oil as a good fat. What about coconut oil and MCT oil? What are your thoughts there?

Dr. Sears:
Coconut oil is, again, a MCT oil. That means medium-chain triglycerides. I give it a B minus the good points of coconut oil. One, it has virtually no omega-6 fatty acids. That’s great because that’s one of the drivers of inflammation. Two, it does contain saturated fatty acids like lauric acid, which has some anti-microbial benefits, so it’s good for the gut. Okay, two good reasons why I give it a B minus.

Now we have some negatives. As a medium-chain triglyceride, it will go directly to the liver via the portal vein. It’ll be rapidly absorbed through a different pathway than long-chain fatty acids. In the portal vein, it’ll be burned quickly to carbon dioxide and water, but in the process, you’re using up a lot of the glycogen in the liver, so you’re basically putting the body into a ketotic state. You have no reserve. It’s your liver, the glycogen levels in the liver, that you reserve to stabilize blood sugar levels. You’ve taken kind of the reserve out, and in the process of basically having the medium-chain triglycerides. That’s why I give it kind of a B minus.

I give vegetable oils like safflower oil, sunflower oil, I give them a D. Compared to a D, a B minus is pretty good. In terms of refined fish oils, I’ll give them an A. It’s just not olive oil; it’s extra virgin olive oil. It’s the extra virgin olive oil that has the polyphenols. I give that an A minus. Again, you pick and choose your fats.

Dr. Pompa:
Typically, the olive oils that have that very grassy aftertaste, those are your higher polyphenol oils, just so people know.

Meredith:
They kind of burn in your throat.

Dr. Sears:
It’s the polyphenols that give the olive oil all of its health benefits. It’s not the fatty acids; it’s the polyphenols.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Meredith:
I love a good olive oil that burns that back of my throat. It’s so good.

Dr. Sears:
It’s a very easy test. Most good olive oil never leaves Italy. The stuff that gets over here is the worst of the worst. How can you tell it’s good olive oil? You put some olive oil on a spoon. You put it on the front of the tongue. It should taste like butter, and back of the throat, and within seconds, you should start coughing. That’s great olive oil because it’s rich in polyphenols.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s exactly right.

Dr. Sears:
That’s why you get the cough. It tastes like butter. It basically is low in free fatty acids.

Dr. Pompa:
Great.

Meredith:
What a good taste test, too, because so many of the olive oils on the market today are mixed with other toxic vegetable oils, correct?

Dr. Sears:
Oh, yeah. It’s called adulteration. It’s been around since the Roman times. The Romans had the same problem. Basically, olive oil has some great health benefits, but it’s easily adulterated.

Meredith:
Do you have a favorite brand?

Dr. Sears:
In America, a brand that basically is fairly accessible, it’s called – I want to use the right pronunciation, Lucini. You find it in Whole Foods.

Dr. Pompa:
I like that one.

Dr. Sears:
It’s a great olive oil. It’s readily available. It’s going to cost you about $20 a bottle.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep. Yep.

Dr. Sears:
That’s a good rule of thumb. If it doesn’t cost $20 a bottle, you’re probably being ripped off.

Meredith:
Yep. You get what you pay for, right?

Dr. Sears:
It seems to always work out that way.

Meredith:
Yeah. To kind of bring it all together, too, I’m wondering if you could kind of walk us through a day on the ideal diet that you think – I know there’s customization involved, of course, for each of us, as we’re bio-individuals, but if you could kind of walk us through the meals through the day that you think would be really heart-healthy, beneficial from your research. Could you just kind of let us know what you think there?

Dr. Sears:
Okay. A typical day in the zone – because one thing we haven’t talked about in this interview is really the importance of fermentable fiber for the gut. We don’t basically feed our microbes in the gut – we’ve got some real problems in terms of basically a leaky gut, and that leads to metabolic endotoxemia.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep.

Dr. Sears:
It says I have to have, now, adequate protein, adequate essential fatty acids in the right balance, adequate polyphenols, and adequate fermentable fiber. How do I basically try to structuralize this to do this and get the least number of calories so you’re never hungry and never tired?

The morning might be an eight egg white omelet. Now, that’s about 30 grams of protein. I’m 6’5” so that’s – you need about 25 to 30 grams of protein. That’s high quality protein. That’s all pure protein. Second, it’s boring, so I add some guacamole to it. There’s some polyphenols. Now, what about the fermentable fiber? I make a small dish, very small dish, of slow-cooked oat meal just like Grandma did. That’s a hormone winner. How do you know? Watch the next five hours; you’re not hungry.

Now, the time to eat is when you’re not hungry. Now, five hours later, it’s noon. This is a good time for basically eating a piece of grilled chicken, a lot of vegetables, and maybe a small piece of fruit for dessert. If you eat lunch at 12, you usually eat dinner about 7. That’s more than five hours, so at 5:00, have a little hormonal touch-up, maybe a small piece of fruit – I mean small – but I need a protein chaser, maybe a piece of cheese. At dinner, a piece of grilled fish, some more vegetables, a small piece of fruit for dessert.

Surprisingly, if you can maintain – you really need to maintain peak mental and physical performance. Now, I’ve worked with many Olympic athletes, won at this count, 25 gold medals in the last five Olympics. They’ll need a little more protein, not that much more. They’ll need more carbohydrates and more fat. The Olympic athletes I have worked with who have won those 25 gold medals never have consumed anymore than 2,500 calories per day.

The average male will need to consume about maybe 1,500 calories. If you follow those dictates, it is hard to eat all the food. That’s why your grandmother said, “You can’t leave the table until you eat all your vegetables.” For the average female, it’s about 1,200 calories per day.

Dr. Pompa:
When we look at all the studies about living longer, it is the ones who eat less, right? Ultimately, caloric restriction, we always say, doesn’t work because you can’t just force yourself to eat. When you’re hungry, all of a sudden, you break.

Dr. Sears:
All bets are off.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. All bets are off. Metabolism gets lower and lower. One thing that I love to do is eat less often. I don’t eat breakfast in the morning. I intermittent fast. At the end of my day, I eat far less than the average person. I’m not hungry. My body burns its fat very efficiently. I could even exercise in that state. At the end of my day, again, all my numbers, really good. All the numbers that you mentioned, very good. Intermittent fasting does this hormonal shift where you raise up testosterone.

Your body becomes so much more efficient – glucose, HCB. We see all these things drop. I like to say try not to eat less because most people can’t, but if you eat less often, your body adjusts into that. That’s another subject for another day. I tell you, I loved your information. I thought you give some great advice that I think everybody needs. One diet is not for everybody. We know that.

Having some of these markers to look at for people, I think it’s great because it really gives us a gauge of how we’re doing. I think it gives us a gauge of trying to increase these polyphenols, which I’m a big believer in – all the healthy fats. You’re right. We need those saturated fats. We need this. You know, today, people are not getting clean sources of the omega-3. Imagine people eating grain-fed meat day in, day out. It’s loaded with the wrong fats, the high omega-6 fats. They’re not getting good quality fish, and the fish they do eat is polluted. Doc, this is what we’re dealing with.

Dr. Sears:
It’s the tale of our times, and that’s why the more knowledge your viewers have, the more they can make the right choices. The future of medicine is not going for more drugs; it’s going back to saying the ultimate drug, which the food we take – and really basically going back to the beginnings of modern medicine when Hippocrates said, “Let food be your medicine; let medicine be your food.” His words are still as wise today as they were 2,500 years ago.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, no doubt about it. Finding clean sources of these things are key. I always tell people, “Look, if you just try to eat as much organic as you can – if you just try to eat grass-fed meats, your omega-3 ratios are going to be in the zone.” If we’re eating wild –

Dr. Sears:
There, but that’s why – going back to what you said, you said, “There’s no one diet for everyone,” but there are one set of markers, I believe, of wellness for everyone.

Dr. Pompa:
I love that. I do. I love that because I agree with all of those markers. They’re great. Thank you so much. Meredith, I’ll turn it back to you. Doc, you’re an icon. You’ve done so much for health. You really have. Your books, you were one of the first out there taking the hits. You made it easier on us, you know. Come on. We love you, and we appreciate your information. Thank you. Thanks for being on this show. Meredith –

Meredith:
Yeah. Thanks, Dr. Pompa, and thank you, Dr. Sears. This is such an informational show. I know our viewers are going to love this. I’m wondering if you have anything else you’d like to share, and if you can tell our viewers where they can find out more about you, as well.

Dr. Sears:
Yes. I want to thank you for the opportunity of being on your show. Again, if they’d like to find out more about the concepts of, really, evidence-based wellness, I might recommend them going to one of my websites at ZoneDiet.com.

Dr. Pompa:
Perfect.

Meredith:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. Barry. It was a pleasure to meet you and for you just to share your wealth of information. Thank you so much for joining Cellular Healing TV. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We hope you learned a lot. I know I sure did. Thanks, everyone, and we’ll see you guys next week.

121: The Every Other Day Diet with Professor Krista Varady

Transcript of Episode 121: The Every Other Day Diet with Professor Krista Varady

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Special Guest, Professor Krista Varady

Meredith:
Hello, everyone and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I'm your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode 121. We're so excited to have you here. Today we have a very special guest along with Dr. Pompa, our resident cellular healing specialist, of course. Today joining us is Dr. Krista Varady. Dr. Krista Varady is a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago and does a lot of work in intermittent fasting and has done a lot of interesting research. We know our listeners are very educated in fasting, don't we, Dr. Pompa. We've talked about it a lot on the show.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. Krista, thank you for joining us. We want to hear about your research and more of what's going on. You have a really different concept even what we talk a lot about. It's fasting every other day. We want to hear a little bit more about that and what some of your research shows. Let's just start there.

Meredith:
All right. Before we get started, let me jump in and tell you a little bit more about Krista. Sorry I didn't do that initially. Then we'll get started. Krista Varady, PhD, is an associate professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Her research focuses on the efficacy of alternate-day fasting for weight loss, maintenance, and cardio protection in obese adults.

Her work is funded by the NIH, American Heart Associated, International Life Sciences Institute, and the University of Illinois. She's published over 50 publications on this topic and is also the author of a book for the general public entitled The Every-Other-Day Diet. All right, Krista, without further ado, welcome to the show.

Dr. Varady:
Thank you so much for having me. You just want me to jump in and tell you a little bit about what I do?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you know because for us it's a little different. I'm sure you start most of the shows by going, what? What do you mean? Our viewers are kind of beyond that. We get fasting. We get that fasting every other day, yeah that's going to cause weight loss. We understand it. One of the things I always like to say is don't eat less, eat less often. Dr. Sears and I talked about that too. We get it. Let's hear a little bit more about your research because it's a little different approach than what we do. You do every other day. Let's talk about it.

-Technical Issue-

Dr. Varady:

I'm not sure. Sometimes I wear ear phones when I do — oh, now it's gone. Okay. Anyway, I do something called alternate day fasting so that involves a fasting where somebody eats about 500 calories as a lunch or a dinner and then it's alternated with what I call a feast day. Basically it's where people can eat whatever they want. They're kind of free to eat meals and snacks as they choose. The thing that people really like about alternate-day fasting is really every other day they just get to feel normal again.

A lot of people are doing this type of diet for weight loss and also just metabolic health improvements as well. A lot of people will start this diet when they failed previously with daily calorie restriction approaches because they find those things a little too rigid. They like the fact that every other day they can kind of just relax and socialize and eat normally with their families.

One of the key things we've found recently is that people don't binge on those feast days. You'd expect if someone's just having 500 calories on that off day or on the fast day I should say, you'd expect them to have a whole lot more to kind of compensate for that lack of calories on the previous day, so just eat a lot more on the feast day. We show that people don't binge, and they only eat about 10% more than they usually do.

Dr. Pompa:
It's interesting because something that I call diet variation, I talk about it in a lot of different articles and web casts, is the fact that I believe in a feast, at least one feast day a week where you eat a lot on purpose. Even when we do eat on an intermittent fasting day, I believe in eating a lot for dinner just because it reminds the body it's not starving. You're kind of doing that every other day. It's like if you're eating less, less, less, less, you're body eventually says uh-oh, I'm starving.

These feast days I believe imitate what our ancestors were forced to do at times. There was feast and there was famine. You're doing that. I do have this question though because our viewers may be a little different than the average person. A lot of our viewers have different struggles; hormonal struggles, health struggles, whatever's going on.

In many of them, even my own clients and the doctors watching their own clients, they hate the darn feast days. I'm saying, hey, do a feast day, and they struggle with the feast day because when they eat they don't feel well; it's food intolerances. They just feel more tired that day because their body has to process. Do you have people that complain about the feast day?

Dr. Varady:
The major thing that I hear that they're a lot happier on their fast day than they thought they'd be. The one thing that they didn't realize is the energy boost they get that day. A lot of people thought that they would have problems with concentrating, but they don't have that at all. They basically feel really alert, they can concentrate, focus, and have a lot of energy. I wouldn't say people complain about the feasting in particular, but they definitely do notice that their energy levels are lower on that days.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. I think that's probably even more for us, our sake, it's people that have more health challenges can notice some of the differences. I also have the opposite, Krista. I have people that struggle to fast even 14, 15 hours. I just had one. I had a client this morning, she was trying to fast 16, 17 hours. We have people measure their glucose and ketones to make sure their glucose is dropping, their ketones are rising. Hers weren't. Her glucose was dropping and her ketones were dropping. It was the worst scenario. Then there was a part where her glucose was actually rising and not dropping.

Again, we have these metabolically, very injured people. We're trying to get her body to do the right thing. When I interviewed Joe Mercola, Joe Mercola said he'd found that over 15 hours his glucose kept rising. Now he only fasts for less than 15 hours. An interesting episode because it's kind of similar. Joe is wearing a Dexcom where it looks at your glucose all day. He was able to kind of see when his glucose started to rise and realized he was probably in a catabolic state.

With our clients a lot of the times we just measure glucose and ketones in the morning, and we measure glucose and ketones before their first meal and make sure that the right things happen; glucose is dropping, ketones are rising. When we see this rise in glucose, then they're typically burning muscle into sugar. Interesting. Do you have people that struggle in the feast because maybe that's happening? I'm sorry, in the fast day.

Dr. Varady:
On the fast day, yeah. We've run about 600 to 700 people, typically obese people through various trials. I'd say almost all of them are poor at having problems in the first week and a half, so the first five fast days they find that adjustment period, kind of adjusting to that up-down pattern of eating. Pretty much everyone after a week and a half, they just get used to it and they actually really like it.

Dr. Pompa:
There's that normal, even two weeks that we see people struggle metabolically. We still monitor because when they don't come out, then we back down the time of the fast until where their glucose doesn't continue to rise. I've got to ask you this question too. Meredith, I think it was you that sent me the study on alternate-day fasting, at least in this study they were doing alternate day. The study basically was that women have more trouble than men. I know my answer to that. I told Meredith, “How do you respond to that study?” I bet you've seen it because I'm sure people sent it to you.

Dr. Varady:
I've actually never seen that study. Are you talking about just in terms of adherence to the fast day?

Dr. Pompa:
Meredith actually found the study. It was basically saying that women didn't lose the same weight as men and even metabolically they were losing muscle when they did lose weight as opposed to men. Am I summarizing that, Meredith?

Meredith:
They weren't responding as well hormonally.

Dr. Varady:
What's the study?

Meredith:
I can send you the link. I'd found it on PubMed awhile ago.

Dr. Varady:
Okay. We just recently published a link called Determinants of Weight Loss, Success with Alternate-Day Fasting. That's specifically the type of fasting we use. We actually found that women can actually adhere to it a little bit better than men, particularly women between the ages 50 to 65 tend to do the best and they lose the most weight. We just ran a large NIH sponsored study and found that postmenopausal women actually lost twice the amount of weight with a year of alternate-day fasting compared to premenopausal women and also men.

Dr. Pompa:
I'm a believer in it because I see what hormonally happens. This study like that, there was a few factors that I noted. First of all, women often times have more thyroid struggles. We're getting a lot of neurotoxic women that have thyroid hormone issues. It takes much longer oftentimes to fix that. When you're looking at a short term that they did in the studies, you're going to get a skewed response because I  know even personally when I start doing fasting with women it takes me longer oftentimes with these hormonally challenged cases, especially thyroid cases, to get them responding metabolically.

When we look at it shorter term like that, of course it's going to skew the study and then people think, oh. What I get is, oh, well, this isn't good for women. No, that's not the case because when we look at ancient cultures, women and men intermittently fasted. It's just the fact that there's different hormone challenges with women. Again, it's my argument of why you need to work with a coach and not just try to tackle these things on your own. That was my answer part to that study.

Meredith:
I'm wondering too with your research, Krista, are you offering dietary guidelines? During the fasting, the feasting days, just in general, are these participants in the studies supposed to adhere to a certain diet?

Dr. Varady:
We have our participants come in once a week for weigh ins, and then we also provide them with weekly one-on-one dietary counseling with the dieticians. We're really teaching them just kind of the basics of increase your fruit and vegetable intake, and lower sugar intake, and try to choose some lower fat options, and consume less processed foods, and cook more of that type of stuff. We do offer them usually about a 12-week pretty intensive program and dietary counseling.

Dr. Pompa:
The magic comes from the fasting, would you agree?

Dr. Varady:
I think so, yeah. I agree with you, definitely. We found that sometimes we'll have other groups also doing the same type of dietary counseling, but really the alternate-day fasting people tend to have better — basically we show that alternate-day fasting tends to have better decreases in insulin and insulin resistance compared to just people on a typical calorie-restricted diet. There is some type of magic to, I wouldn't use the word magic as a scientist, but there's definitely some type of benefit to fasting that seems to be better than just doing typical daily restriction.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree 100% because that's why I like to say don't eat less, eat less often. That way when you're eating, you're eating until full so the body doesn't think it's starving. Isn't that the key? Caloric restriction eventually fails because eventually the body thinks it's starving and it starts to lower its metabolic rate. You have to eat less and less and less until barely you're not eating and you're getting fatter. What have you found in your studies? You're a scientist. What have you found hormonally that's taking place in these fasting states?

Dr. Varady:
We haven't measured hormones in particular. What I tend to look at is weight loss. We also look at metabolic disease parameters. I guess we've measured adipokines, so basically hormones derived from fat cells. We've done that. We've also done ingestive behavior, so we've looked at peptides released from the gut. Typically, just to give you our major findings, we find that people lose about one to three pounds per week. Bigger people will lose more, obviously.

We see really nice decreases in triglycerides. As I mentioned before, there's really nice decreases in insulin, insulin resistance, blood pressure. Those tend to kick in after about four weeks of intermittent fasting. In terms of hormonal changes, we see a decrease in leptin, but that tends to be pretty common if you're just losing weight. I think probably the most interesting hormone findings we've found so far are the changes in gut peptides. We actually find that people, they're not hungry on those fast days, and they actually start over the course of the trial to become fuller on those fast days.

We've seen increases in PYY, which is a hormone that is basically associated with fullness. We've also shown that hunger just stays low on those days. I think a lot of people are scared of doing these diets because they're scared that they're just going to be hungry all the time. What they don't realize is that the body after about a week and a half, two weeks kind of adjusts so it's not such a painful approach. Basically it becomes pretty easy to stick to those fast days both subjectively and hormonally.

Dr. Pompa:
I've found that clinically to be true. You're on one end and I'm on a clinical end, and it works. The one thing that I've read in many studies is just the rise in growth hormone. The hormone sensitivity, meaning that the cells hear the hormones better during these fasting states. We do get the growth hormone rise. I believe it's all the adaptation of the bodies wanting to survive, that it does these hormonal things to maintain its muscle, to maintain what it needs to survive, if you will, to make it very simple. They're going to see the shift in hormones sensitivity and even these anabolic hormones. Those are the studies that I think originally interested me.

Dr. Varady:
We've measured IGF-1 as well, insulin-like growth factor 1, which is related to growth hormone, obviously. With that we haven't seen any changes. Very interesting.

Meredith:
I'm interested too. What does this look like for a week in your book with the every other day? It's every other day is 500 calories and then one day a week is the feast day. I just wanted to clarify what exactly it looks like.

Dr. Varady:
It's really every other day is the feast day. Basically it's feast day, fast day, feast day, fast day. A lot of people choose to kind of alter that a little bit because it is hard to have those fast days on the weekend when you want to socialize with people, etc. I have a Facebook page called the Every-Other-Day Diet Facebook page where a lot of people write in and talk about how they're altering the diet to make it a little easier with their lifestyle. A lot of people will do the fast days, the 500 calories on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and that seems to work just as well. That kind of leaves the weekend open for them to socialize.

Meredith:
Do you suggest with those 500 calorie fast days that they eat within a compressed time window? Is there a time that you lay out that is effective?

Dr. Varady:
Oh, yeah. That's a great question. We originally had everyone eat the 500 calories as a lunch between 12 and 2 just because scientifically we wanted to standardize it between subjects. A lot of people were complaining about that where they were saying, “You know, I don't want to have it as a lunch. I would much prefer to have that fasting meal as a dinner where I can socialize with people or eat with my family.”

We finished a study that was published in the journal Obesity, and we looked at basically having the meal spread out through the day, so having a couple hundred calories as breakfast, lunch, dinner, and also compared that to a standard lunch group, and then also a group that consumed it as dinner. The results were it really didn't matter when you had that meal. You can actually scatter it throughout the day a little bit or you can have it at either lunch or dinner, and you will see the same effects for weight loss and cardiovascular improvement.

Dr. Pompa:
I believe that, again, coming from a clinical standpoint, I've tried it different ways. I have people that eat more lunch and less dinner, and I've had the opposite. The big dinner eaters and the less lunch, and it works. Then there ‘s Joe Mercola. He eats kind of that whole time in that window when he eats. I've seen it work every one of those ways. I totally agree with that finding, no doubt.

Meredith:
Before we get to that, we were talking about your initial research and how this in the first place was with mice and those studies. Could you share a little bit on what you're finding with them?

Dr. Varady:
Oh, sure. I started studying alternate-day fasting about ten years ago or so. It was when I was doing a post at UC Berkeley. I kind of fell into this actually because we were trying to disassociate the effects of fasting versus weight loss on cancer risk. We wanted to take mice and we wanted them to not lose any weight, but fast. We thought, well how do we do that? We thought, okay, well why don't we let them eat whatever they want on one day and then very little on the next day so that way they get to fasting but then they can kind of compensate for the lack of food on their fast day by eating more on the feast day. No matter what we did, they just kept on losing weight.

Our experiments kind of failed in the sense that we never got to tease apart weight loss versus fasting, but then from that I thought, well, weight loss isn't always a bad thing. I can test this out in humans and see if they also lose weight and see if there are any positive metabolic effects. That's what I started about eight years ago at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Dr. Pompa:
That's incredible. As a matter of fact, we interviewed on the show Dr. Thomas Seyfried, who wrote the book Cancer is a Metabolic Disease. We talked all about short fast, long fast, different fast. One conclusion was there is benefit to different types of fasting, even the block fast where you fast longer versus shorter. His findings with cancer, talk a little bit more about the fasting with the cancer. Have you done any other studies? Did you switch that one up? What was your finding in that study?

Dr. Varady:
What we found, this is just in mice, but we did find benefits for basically decreasing cancer risk. We were looking at cell proliferation rates, so kind of cell turnover rates, which is a cancer risk parameter. We found that it decreased. Basically in the mouse the tissue would be similar to skin, breast, prostate. Just basically various tissues of the body that cells were turning over at a slower rate, which could be indicative of less cancer risk, so kind of slowing aging and cancer risk potentially.

Dr. Pompa:
You know what's amazing is I'm just sitting here thinking, first of all our topic here so opposite of what the medical community would even understand. Do you understand? The word fasting just sends up red flags right off the bat. When we're talking about multiple different ways, I fast daily for at least 18 hours. Then I eat my bigger meal. I've done it this way too. I've done it where I've eaten very little a day throughout the week and then I feast. I feast on healthy foods, but I feast. I eat a lot on the weekend, maybe Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

There's so many ways to do it, but it's the fasting. It's these periodic fasts that really is what's causing these amazing changes, that we're seeing animals live longer and people live longer healthier. I love talking to the scientists like yourself because we really get the fact that we're able to measure parameters that we know cause people to live healthier; downgraded insulin levels, it's a fact.

We're seeing these things adjust and we know that this is really dealing with the epidemic of why people are sick. We're telling people, hey. These intermittent fasts, this is what does it. You're talking about cancer cells. Cancer is running rampant. How much cancer can we avoid if people just started doing the art of fasting the way we're talking about. How much? It's remarkable.

Dr. Varady:
Yeah. Sorry, was that a question?

Dr. Pompa:
It's a question just to hear your comments because just hearing your results from that study, we ponder the fact that we could be preventing cancer; of course, diabetes and all the major killers from just doing this fasting.

Dr. Varady:
Absolutely. I haven't done any of the cancer-related parameters basically since I was working in mice. We definitely saw beneficial effects there. In humans I've really moved towards heart disease and diabetes, looking at whether or not we can basically even reverse type 2 diabetes. That's a grant that I recently wrote, so I'm looking into that. I think there's a really major power to just having an absence of food in your body for fair amounts. You're just giving your body a break, letting it reset, letting it rebuild itself. Constantly eating all the time or just always having sugars in our system, it's not great. We're never giving our bodies a break, and I think it's problematic.

Dr. Pompa:
I couldn't agree more. Seyfried talks a lot about, and so do I, about apoptosis being caused by the body itself because of the innate intelligence, meaning autophagy where the body is getting rid of the bad cells before the good cells.

Dr. Varady:
We haven't studied that, but I think apoptosis really just means —

Dr. Pompa:
I'm talking about caused by the body, meaning that innate intelligence is going, hey, let's get rid of these bad cells.

Dr. Varady:
There is some research. I haven't done it myself, but there is somebody named Dr. Walter Longo. He really looks more at the aging and cancer side of intermittent fasting. I would definitely recommend talking to him as well if you're interested more in the cancer side. That's Longo, I believe he's at San Diego. He's looked at a lot of those mechanisms and parameters that I would definitely recommend to people who want to learn more about that. He's definitely seen protective effects for sure in mice, increased longevity, etc.

Dr. Pompa:
It's remarkable. There's more and more studies showing even just a one-day fast, what happens. Autolytic behavior occurs. The body starts getting rid of these bad cells. Obviously that's effective in cancer. Do you know Thomas Seyfried? Have you met him yet?

Dr. Varady:
No. Is he a clinician or researcher?

Dr. Pompa:
He's a scientist out of — where's he out of, University of —

Meredith:
Boston.

Dr. Pompa:
Boston.

Dr. Varady:
I recognize the name, but what kind of researches does he do? Obesity related?

Dr. Pompa:
Cancer research, I mean years and years. He wrote a book called Cancer is a Metabolic Disease. You would enjoy his book. For the average person it's a little heavy, but you would tear it apart. Hey, Meredith. Connect Thomas and Krista. I'm very into connecting the science minds. I want him to know what you're doing, and I want you to know what Thomas is doing. He does more block fast, whereas you and I are talking more about intermittent types of fasts. He believes in both. I think you need to share your research. I think that would be good.

Dr. Varady:
Sounds good.

Dr. Pompa:
Pick up his book, Cancer is a Metabolic Disease. He's a very bright guy. I'll be attending a conference in Orlando. I think it's September or October. My schedule gets mixed up. He will be there and some other cancer doctors, and he's going to be talking about fasting. Hey, Meredith, I'll send her the link to that. That's maybe another conference you need to go to.

Dr. Varady:
Is it the American Cancer Conference?

Dr. Pompa:
I don't remember the name of who's putting it out. Like I said, there are two that are flip-flopped in my brain. We'll send you the link. Mercola, myself, Seyfried, Dominique D'Agostino, we're going to be there. I think it'd be something you'd be interested in for sure.

Dr. Varady:
Yeah, great. For sure.

Meredith:
I'll send you the link.

Dr. Pompa:
Moving on in this topic, you had mentioned heart disease. You had mentioned diabetes. Are you doing any studies around other specific conditions?

Dr. Varady:
It just takes so long to run these studies. They're really long as well. Most of them are about a year long. They've been taking us awhile. My focus in research has mainly been heart disease and diabetes, so that's what we've been doing. I've also really been looking at adherence and whether or not people can exercise during these types of diets. We find that it goes back to people have a lot of energy on those fast days. It's absolutely fine to do exercising on those days.

Just a couple different adherence issues like can you have your regular diet during those days? Will you still experience those metabolic benefits if you don't change all of your food intake? Obviously, it's better to consume healthier foods, less processed foods, but we've noticed that fasting works even if people don't make dramatic changes to the types of foods they eat. That was interesting as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. We're dealing with healthy people, so I don't want them to misread this, but whether someone ate a pizza or whether someone ate a bunch of vegetables, the glucose goes up. The benefit is on those fast days. [28:46] challenge, that's another story on eating some of those other foods and if you have intolerances. However, the fast days is where the amazing hormonal shift occurs. Tell us a little bit more about your findings with heart disease and diabetes.

Dr. Varady:

With heart disease in general we see all the major risk parameters improve, so cholesterol levels, the bad cholesterol tends to go down, the good cholesterol HDL goes up, triglycerides go down. We've seen improvements in LDL particle size. It's a little counterintuitive, but for those people that don't know it, you actually want your LDL particles to increase in size because it means if they're larger, fluffier particles, they are less likely to embed in the blood vessels. We see that with fasting, that it tends to increase.

Dr. Pompa:

Absolutely. I'm not a believer in total cholesterol causing heart attacks. I'm a believer in particles as being the problem. The size and the number. Have you noticed a change on the number of particles? The size gets better. I see it all the time. What about the number of particles?

Dr. Varady:
We actually only have measured the size so far. The number, it's a little harder. It's just a much more expensive procedure, so we haven't done it yet, but we're hoping to do it in our next study.

Dr. Pompa:
What do you feel is more important, the size or the number?

Dr. Varady:
I really don't know. From the review articles I've read, it seems like most people are leaning towards the size are really important. You can have a lot of LDL cholesterol, but if they're all really big fluffy particles, then it seems like it's fine because they're not going to become oxidized and become plaques from what I understand.

Dr. Pompa:
How come the sciences get this? I've been preaching this for years, cholesterol is not the problem, it's the particles. Why isn't the medical community picking up on it when more and more scientists are speaking exactly what you're speaking?

Dr. Varady:
There's the National Cholesterol Education Program, which is basically the doctor's manual to how you treat cholesterol. LDL is mentioned in there, but you're right, it's just kind of overlooked. I wanted to touch base too on people being really scared of fasting. You mentioned that before in the medical community thinking. I think it's just really anti-American to withhold food. I think that's what the thing is. I don't think people are against the research or anything, but I think just psychologically and even socially it's just not something that you're supposed to do. We're in this land of abundance, so I think it's really hard for people to even just understand that.

I was mentioned in this New York Times article called Fasting Diets are Gaining Acceptance. That was out about a month or two ago. It was really interesting seeing it. It was a great article. It mentioned a lot of the researchers in fasting. The comments, if you read through the comments just from the general public, I do a lot of interviews. I get a lot of comments. Most of them are kind of positive, but the comments from that where you're a really massive journal where everyone's reading it, it's crazy. It's harsh. People are like, this is insanity. Why are you publishing? Why are you even mentioning this?

Dr. Pompa:
It's true. It is taboo. I started this show by saying that. It's just not mainstream. They can say what they want. It works. I know it's counterintuitive, but it works. We live in a land where breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It should be the biggest meal of the day, and we're saying to people, “Don't eat breakfast.” I mean, oh, my gosh.

Dr. Varady:
Yeah. All the research on breakfast was actually sponsored by Kellogg's, and it all had to do with children and cognitive development. It didn't have to do with obesity, and it really just had to do with kids skipping breakfast and not doing as well in school. Fine, I think kids should eat breakfast before they go to school. In terms of weight loss, recent large scale studies have shown that people that just naturally don't eat breakfast consume 200 to 300 calories less per day than people that do eat breakfast.

It's also been shown that eating breakfast does not boost your metabolism. I don't even know where this information came from. All of this stuff of if you don't have breakfast your body's going to fall apart is just ridiculous. It's not based on any scientific evidence.

Dr. Pompa:
I couldn't agree more. It's absolutely silly. What about diabetics. We only have a little bit of time left, and we appreciate your time [33:23]. What about diabetes? Again, counterintuitive, my gosh. A diabetic going without food. I mean, come on, Krista.

Dr. Varady:
Yeah. Admittedly I'm not sure if type 1 diabetics should be doing this fast approach. Have you done fasting in your type 1 diabetic patients?

Dr. Pompa:
Intuitively I said, “I don't know. They probably would really struggle.” Ironically enough, it's like they seem to struggle in the beginning, and then it seems like they can do it. Again, we've done some intermittent fasting daily with them. It seems like it stabilizes. Again, I'm not putting this scientific-clinically I've seen it. Can everybody do it that's type 1? The answer is no, but I have seen many type 1's very successful.

Dr. Varady:
Great. We've traditionally looked at people with pre-diabetes, and we found that people that were highly insulin resistant became completely insulin sensitive after about a month or two. It's incredible. These are people that it's right before their diagnosis of type 2, but they're basically just back to normal after just doing this for a couple months. It's amazing.

Dr. Pompa:
Have you got any ground roads into mainstream medicine, hospitals doing this for diabetics and heart disease patients?

Dr. Varady:
I am contacted by a lot of clinicians that use it their weight loss clinics or diabetes clinics. It's kind of scattered all over the country, but I would say on a major scale, no.

Dr. Pompa:
What a shame. Well, Meredith, you probably have a couple questions, and I know Dr. Krista has limited time here.

Meredith:
Yeah, just a few more minutes. I was just curious too as you were kind of talking about the social component of this. Did you address that in your book, and what did you say to that?

Dr. Varady:
I think that the social component is really you just need to let people be flexible with things. The thing that we say is it's fine to skip a fast day here and there just as long as it doesn't derail your diet. If you prefer to just fast on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, that's fine. We just want people to be able to stick to it. We don't want them to see it as being such a large barrier. Basically just make it easily incorporated into their lifestyle. A lot of the stuff is be flexible with yourself but make sure you get back on the fasting train or whatever you want to call it, even if you skip a couple days.

Meredith:
I love it. Just making it a lifestyle, which is what, Dr. Pompa, you do. I do as well. It's what we believe in. I love your message too in your book because it's so doable for a lot of people that think, oh, gosh. This seems too overwhelming, the fasting. Especially when we discuss block fasting. Every other day and making it a part of your lifestyle. It doesn't have to be every other day, just easing into it, but still utilizing fasting and getting a lot of the benefits. You don't have to be so strict about it.

Dr. Varady:
Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
We're doing the exact same thing. My fast days, it's the days I get the most done in my busiest days. I look at the clock and realize, gosh, I didn't even eat. It really is that easy once you get into the practice of it. Message for this show, the magic is in the fasting. There's the science. Krista, you're bringing the science. Thank you so much for your dedication to bring us science because we are going up against what I call 180 degree solution here, meaning that we're bringing a message 180 degrees opposite of what everybody else is talking about. We better have the science to back it. Thank you for that. All right, I'll turn it back over to you, Meredith.

Meredith:
Awesome. Well, thanks, Dr. Pompa, and thank you so much, Dr. Krista, for joining Cellular Healing TV. It was a pleasure to have you. We'll look forward to your research in the future, so keep us posted on your findings.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, if you get more findings, we'll have you back on another show after studies. We can promote your studies, so get it out there because we reach the doctor world here as well.

Dr. Varady:
Oh, great. Well, thank you so much for having me. It was great speaking with you guys.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes, absolutely. Thank you.

Meredith:
Where can our viewers find out more about you and your research?

Dr. Varady:
I would say the best link would probably be The Every-Other-Day Diet Facebook page. I post stuff pretty much every other day, just fasting research and updates on my research as well. I try to answer some key questions. The book Every-Other-Day Diet, you can buy it on Amazon. It's got recipes and comprehensive review of my research and how to do the diet.

Dr. Pompa:
Great stuff. Thank you.

Meredith:
Awesome. Thanks, Dr. Pompa. Thanks, Dr. Krista. Thanks, everyone for watching, and we'll see you next time.

120: Cellular Healing for the Skin with Dr. Ben Johnson

Transcript of Episode 120: Cellular Healing for the Skin with Dr. Ben Johnson

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Special Guest, Dr. Ben Johnson

Meredith:
Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode 120. We have some special guests today, quite a few actually. We have Dr. Pompa of course, our resident cellular healing specialist, and his wife Merily who is joining the show today to share about some of these products that we’re going to be talking about. Our very special guest today is Dr. Ben Johnson of Osmosis Skincare. We’re going to be talking a lot about the skin today, which is something we’ve talked about on some past shows, but we’re really going to delve deeply into this subject today and how we can all improve our skin health, which is so connected to a lot of other systems. Before we jump in, I’m going to read a little bit about Dr. Ben. Then, he can share with us about his products and how they connect to our message of cellular health and healing.

Dr. Ben Johnson started his career in 1997 when he opened one of the first Medi-Spa chains with locations all around the US. Dr. Johnson then founded and formulated his first skin care line with a strategy that was unique at the time. Creating medical strength results using all natural and chirally correct ingredients, which you’ll have to explain to us about that Dr. Johnson; what that means. Dr. Johnson has developed Osmosis Skincare with the goal of changing the direction of skincare away from excessive exfoliation and renewing the focus of dermal remodeling. It works on every skin condition on every skin type. His holistic approach to highly effective alternative strategies that treat from the inside out to prevent and reverse aging, contradicts most of the current methods being practiced today, creating excitement in the beauty industry. Welcome Dr. Johnson to Cellular Healing TV. We’re so excited to have you here.

Dr. Johnson:
Thank you Meredith. I’m so happy to be here. Thanks Dr. Pompa and Merily. I’m looking forward to sharing some of my views on this.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you know my question; obviously, you got started putting these skin care places in and around the country, but how did you get involved in skin care and developing product?  How did that all come about? Even before that, what was your background?

Dr. Johnson:
I’m Western Medicine trained, MD; by definition, I’m a general practitioner because I started off at the University of – well, I was in residency at the University of Colorado and going into sports medicine. Then, I started to get an interest in lasers. That’s when I started my laser clinics, but what really sort of drew most of my attention was in the formulation area. I saw what was out there. I wasn’t particularly pleased with the direction that the skincare products, the choices I had. I began to formulate my own and that, of course, got me started on a whole path that now clearly appears to be exactly where I’m supposed to be. I really think this industry needs innovation. We’ve been doing pretty much the same thing in skin care for the last three decades and we’re not getting younger. The skin is not getting healthier in the process. I’d love to share some views on that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt about it. I have to say this on this topic; this will probably be one of our most downloaded shows because anytime we’re talking about the way people look, now we’ve got some people listening. Talking about the skin and the hair ladies, come on. I have people that are so fatigued they can’t even exercise, but yet they’re still emotionally worried about their skin and their hair. I have to say, even the one sitting to my left, especially as she’s – I almost said something bad. We’re not going to go there. As she’s gracefully aged, this has been the focus. I can tell you this woman, she’s had me look into countless products. She’s used countless products. I probably have a box somewhere; they don’t work, they don’t work, they don’t work. Honestly, I take a lot of the products she’ll take and I write more scientific about it. I put it in one area and I watch and I look. Listen, I’m not a big guy from the outside in right? When she started using some of these products I remember when I said, okay I actually do notice a difference.

Merily:
I didn’t ask.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, she didn’t ask. I said you know what? You’re skin does look different. Then, I started using them myself after my conversation with you because like always, Meredith and Merily will tell you, I have to understand the science. I got on the phone with you for an hour one day right? You started telling me why these products were different. It was after that that I said okay, send them to me. Then, I started to use them; once again, a little more scientific. I started using them on one side in specific places. I have to say, I can tell you, I noticed a difference. That made me keep using it. I’m still using them. Okay, that’s how we got here. I don’t even remember how Merily got introduced.

Merily:
I was introduced to them from Karen Bettis my esthetician at the spa I go to. I was consistently visiting with her. She was just doing her galvanic and her thing on me and keeping my face clean. She said, I think I have something coming that you are really going to be okay with, on a whole other level. A few months later when it came, I definitely followed her recommendations, used everything she said. Then I got your compliment and at that point —

Dr. Pompa:
That’s not easy to get.

Dr. Johnson:
Apparently!

Dr. Pompa:
Can I flip this for a second? Her compliment? Forget about it. Can I get one of my kids in here? My kids come home.

Merily:
Anyway, I then asked if he would speak with you just to make sure, because again, I’m after how it looks but I also understand how important standard is.

Dr. Pompa:
I asked you questions about some specific ingredients. I want you to come from the top down as far as why did each product support? What did you do different? I immediately started identifying different ingredients, said okay what the heck is that? The things that I identified actually turned out in our conversation to be some of the magic in the formula. Let me just turn it over to you. Why do they work? What did you do different?

Dr. Johnson:
Yeah, let’s start from a broader perspective, which is as a physician, I came initially to the formulation; and Meredith had brought up chirally correct. I came in first, just from a scientific perspective wanting to get the best ingredients possible. A chirally correct ingredient is essentially one that has the chiral shape. There’s left handed and right handed molecules. Picking a molecule, for example vitamin C is a more potent version when it’s in its left handed form called L-ascorbic acid than the other form, which is D-ascorbic acid. Whereas vitamin E, D-alpha tocopherol is the best form of vitamin E and that’s a right handed form of vitamin E. You can go down the list, there’s probably 20 key ingredients where the left or right hand makes a difference. In the pharmaceutical industry it actually changes the entire spectrum of side effects when they use left vs right hand. There’s certain drugs that were pulled off the market that were almost identical just they were left handed vs. right handed. They were put back on the market safely with the different shapes. That was the beginning of my introduction into really caring about the ingredients that I use in the products.

Where Osmosis stepped past where we are today with most skincare products, is I really came at it from a much more holistic perspective. What I mean by that is, in order to make the skin actually get younger; we do guarantee to our customers that they will see permanent changes in their skin, lasting changes that accumulate month after month, which is something the industry doesn’t try to do. The industry tries to create a plumping effect; essentially a tightening effect from ingredients that stay on the surface. Then, when you stop the products, that plumping effect goes away and throughout the entire process your skin was getting older.

What I realized was the most amazing aspect of the entire skin care industry is our skin; this incredible design, so complex, trillions of operations going on. There’s no way as physicians or chemists, anybody’s going to get that right without just simply one main focus, which is let’s make the skin so healthy, so healthy.  Like our 10 year-old where that skin heals wounds faster. It’s well oxygenated. It’s well fed. The immune function of that skin is operating at its highest and best. The cells that make collagen are plentiful. All of those things we used to have, right? I began to look deeply into what are the causes of a lack of these different aspects of skin health? One key component came into that and that was skin nutrition. Skin nutrition; what’s nice about that as a broad category, is that includes oxygen. That includes the amino acids. That includes the growth factors. That includes the antioxidants. All of those pieces come into the skin through your vascular system. All the blood flow on our skin feeds everything that’s happening.

Every year of your adult life, starting roughly at about age 25, you have 1% less circulation happening every year. By the time you’re 50, you have 25% fewer nutrients. That means your immune system works 25% less efficiently. Your fibroblast makes 25% less collagen. You have 25% fewer growth factors. Knowing that, and going into formulation with that basic premise that I need to make the skin just operate the way it was designed to operate; I created a bunch of patents and a bunch of unique approaches to do that. The quick summary of those is number one; I’ve got to get my ingredients into the skin because the deep epidermis, which is that first layer, the dermis; the second layer down, to reach those is almost impossible. The skin is well designed to keep things out, so we use liposomal delivery and other delivery mechanisms for our growth factors, called exosomes.

Certain key ingredients that I use are very small so that they fit into the skin without too much trouble. You start combining that strategy and all of a sudden we’re getting about 600% better penetration. Just for the people that don’t know liposomes; the liposome is sort of a water fat soluble molecule that squeaks through the fat in your skin and dumps these ingredients a few layers down. Then, the skin takes over and moves them where they need to go. That’s again what I’m saying is, the skin is so brilliant. It is so capable. If you put the right ingredients in, it recognizes those ingredients, it puts them to work.

First and foremost we said delivery has got to be the key. The second piece of the story is well, what tools is the skin low on? Not to go into too much detail on that right now; there are some key ingredients that I felt the industry wasn’t using adequately, either in amounts or simply wasn’t using at all that we put into the formulas. Then, a strategy of no harm. That’s really another big part of this is, so often you’ll get products; and they may have three or four great ingredients, but they include in the process harsh approaches to the skin. I don’t believe in daily exfoliation. I don’t believe in acid peels. I don’t believe in some of the really aggressive laser treatments that are out there today because they’re not proven to create sustainable – why would you ever want to harm your skin to get a result?

Dr. Pompa:
It doesn’t make sense.

Dr. Johnson:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
No, that’s great and I have to yield to Merily here because I know that our viewers and listeners, they want to know okay, what products? As a matter of fact, you should really just go get a few products to show them.

Merily:
Okay and I was also going to say, just because people do want to know, what is the foundation of what to use, right? I think that’s really important because when people come to our website or they watch this show, they’re going to want the essentials. I’ll go grab mine.

Dr. Pompa:
In the meantime, there are these products now and we used them for a while obviously before we started carrying them. Now even my doctors are carrying the products. These are professional line products. You can only get them through a doctor or esthetician. Of course, on our website we carry doctor grade products only, physician grade products. That’s why this product obviously was something we would be willing to carry. Meredith where is that on the website just for people to access? What do they punch in to find the products?

Meredith:
You go to revelationhealth.com and the products will be there. You can just type in the product name that you’re looking for and they’ll be on revelationhealth.com.

Dr. Pompa:
They’ll probably punch in osmosis, will they have some of the different products?

Meredith:
If you type in osmosis all of the Osmosis products will pop up.

Dr. Pompa:
I can tell you, I used one – Karen, the esthetician that Merily utilized, she put on one, this one called Restore. I had a damaged area and I used this Renew that took a lot of my oxidation areas away, it did. Over this one area hung out and she applied and she gave me some to take with me because I didn’t have that in my little regime that I was using. I’m telling you it worked. It was pretty remarkable. It’s a damaged sun spot. I think when I was sick Dr. Ben, I developed some bad skin stuff. My oxidation obviously affected my internal organs and my outer organ, the skin. That was one of the evidences it was still there. Although these other ones went away; some of them went away dietary changes, some of them went away with this redox molecule Renew, but that one didn’t. It worked, so that was part of my seeing it work.

Dr. Johnson:
Yeah, we actually did a clinical trial with a product. We didn’t do that particular product, but I do recommend that product for – I don’t know if you think it might have been actinic keratosis, if it was a chronic red, flaking spot, or if there’s just a…

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I wouldn’t say it was quite flaking, but it was bright red spot. This one up here was a chronic red, flaking spot that went away after using these products, which was still there, but it did get a lot better even with the Renew.

Merily:
You could scratch it off and it would come back.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly. Now, it doesn’t do that anymore. That one also fixed. This is the first one that I put on and Merily can chime in. Hold it up. It’s called StemFactor. Tell us a little bit about the magic here.

Dr. Johnson:
First of all, that is the large size so people shouldn’t expect for it to look like that.

Merily:
No, I buy everything in bulk.

Dr. Johnson:
Yeah, Merily is a product junkie.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s the bottle.

Dr. Johnson:
Yes, that’s the bottle of the MD line. The magic in StemFactor is that, like everything else in your skin, you’re growth factor population shrinks by about 1% every year. At 50, you have 25% fewer growth factors. I came across the technology from a lab who’s really the leading edge of this industry and this area. We used stem cells from adult donor fat and we used fibroblasts. Those two cells together in combination, create over 300 different growth factors. We’ve documented over 150 of them. We just talk about 150 plus growth factors in it, but where the magic of this one is, that’s different than anyone else is; they perfected a way to further the manufacturing process by these cells so that there is an encasement around it. It’s called and exosome. What that does is that protects the growth factor, allows it to get deeper into the follicle, and activates the wound repair activities that growth factors activate. The reason why I feel very comfortable with growth factors – some people are like well, is that safe for people who’ve had cancer? Is it safe for people that have other diseases? My answer is yes,because of this one reason. Growth factors are too big to go into your dermis. They don’t get into your bloodstream. They follicle and they activate your follicle. With our formula, we are getting deeper into the follicle. We are preserving these growth factors, which are pretty delicate, for longer periods of time. You’re getting a maximum activation. It’s a very gentle product, but it’s key. Especially for people with really thin skin because you keep your growth factors in your fat and your skin. The less fat you have on your face, the fewer growth factors you have. We find those people absolutely need it, but almost everyone almost 30 should have it in their tool shed.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s probably why I noticed a difference. As soon as you started talking, I wanted to apply it, I did. As soon as I hear the science, I get a little bit more excited because I—

Merily:
It’s going to cost you more.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so the next one, it’s called Catalyst AC-11. This is the one that Merily taught me to put on second. So the Catalyst AC-11 and it comes in different bottles so I don’t want to hold up the bottle.

Dr. Johnson:
One of the things I know you appreciated about us and one of the things that’s important to me as a physician formulator, is to have clinical evidence of efficacy. We did an eight week study on about thirty-five women with this product, only this product twice a day and it had phenomenal results. It showed 110% increase in elasticity, 32% increase in radiance, a 17% improvement in fine lines and wrinkles, a roughly 67% reduction in redness and facial capillaries, which are signs of wound healing. It actually promotes wound healing. It tightened the eye lids by 15% and it improved the appearance of actinic keratosis, which of course is a DNA repair component.

This has DNA repair technology in it. It’s kind of complicated, I’m not sure that the consumer wants to hear all of the details of it. Just understand something called zinc finger technology, which all we’re doing is helping your zinc fingers, which everyone has in their skin right now, accelerate the repair of DNA and wound healing. It is phenomenal. Those clinical trial results I just mentioned, with one product, that’s never been achieved. No one has ever achieved that much tightening and that much elastin being created in order to do that. Of course, we’re telling you this isn’t the temporary stuff. Remember, there’s a lot of clinical trials where someone does something; they measure the surface changes on the skin, but all those changes go away when you stop the product. That is not the case with Catalyst. It continues to work and I think that’s why Merily is pushing it on you. She’s a big fan, I know.

 Dr. Pompa:
I’m going to say this and then I’ll let her talk. Those are the two that I use, I use the Catalyst and the StemFactor. Merily goes to you – she’s uses the one out of all the things here folks, so don’t get overwhelmed. Those are the two that I use.

Merily:
I'm all in, Ben.

Dr. Pompa:
Just you talking about that makes me want to use it right now. You know what I'm saying?

Merily:
There is one ingredient that my husband had inquired about in that product. It was an emulsifier, right? Was that what it was? You were explaining how it penetrates, and it probably is what you had already said on how it only penetrates so far that it doesn't.

Dr. Johnson:
Oh, the dimethicone. My entire line is extremely natural and designed to not hurt the skin. When you're using the kind of ingredients that are in that formula, they are very sticky. If you research dimethicone, it's definitely not a good idea to use a lot of it, but we use a tiny amount of dimethicone to improve the slip and reduce the stickiness. It's such a large molecule, it never makes it past the surface. It actually never hurts the skin in any way.

The only time dimethicone is a challenge is when people are using some of those store bought brands with an amazing slip or they're using two or three products all with dimethicone, and that'll start to plug up the skin and reduce skin respiration. That is not happening with this product. That was one of the ingredients. In one other product we have a tiny amount of mineral oil simply, again, for performance reasons. Overall you're going to find very few cases where there's an ingredient objection. Again, the philosophy is do not harm the skin.

Merily:
I just wanted you to address that because one of our doctors had inquired. I alternate. This is my first time using actually Renew. I had finished a bottle of Correct and at Karen's suggestion I went to Renew. Do you want to talk about both of those at the same time and why would we alternate.

Dr. Johnson:
Well, they're the same formula other than the retinaldehyde percentage, which is about double in the Renew. If your skin is tolerating it fine, that's fine. The thing that people need to know, we do have a series of strength of vitamin A serums. Correct is sort of the middle strength and then Renew is the maximum strength. The reason why I did that is because when you ask your skin to make collagen, it's big demand. The skin has to really focus in on that. People who are not quite healthy enough, their skin isn't healthy enough.

Whenever I hear of sensitivities to vitamin A serums, and ours is a little different; for example, our vitamin A is so strong, it's a thousand times stronger than retinol, that I use very small amounts. I get activations as high as retinoic acid without irritating the skin. I don't like retinoic acid. I think it hurts the skin. Research shows it hurts the skin, but this is retinaldehyde. Retinaldehyde is as strong as Retin-A but it doesn't hurt the skin, so you won't be sun sensitized by it.

Not everyone can use Renew because Renew pushes the skin so fast that it challenges people whose immune systems aren't quite there. Sometimes we have people build up to it. Other times we'll send them to Dr. Pompa to improve their health and then watch and see how the Renew actually is better tolerated. You're alternating it now, pushing it. Eventually, yes, ideally you go to that every day.

Merily:
I use it every day.

Dr. Johnson:
Oh, good. That is another key component called liposomal niacinamide, and that is the thing that dilates your blood vessels gently. That's what feeds your skin so it kind of increases the nutrient level back to those youthful days, and that's a critical part of this. If I say, “Hey, skin. Make collagen,” but I don't have the food supply for the skin to respond to that stimulus, it won't make it. We realized the secret piece of the story, and that is you've got to stimulate the skin while feeding the process, and that's why we're able to get permanent changes in wrinkles.

Merily:
Yeah, so far so good. I've had, you know —

Dr. Pompa:
I better start this one too now, you know?

Dr. Johnson:
I'm sorry. Yes, you do now.

Dr. Pompa:
I'll start this one now too. You know what? As soon as I crossed over 50, man, this is when I started to concern myself here.

Merily:
So far, so good. I transitioned seamlessly. I ran out of the Correct, and I had the Renew, and I went right into it.

Dr. Johnson:
This is where the liposomal formula is primarily focused because vitamin A in general gets two percent penetration, so we needed to get the vitamin A down to the dermis. That was a critical part of it, but in general the formula has about eight different collagen stimulators that are all designed to work in synchronicity. None of them irritate the skin. It's a great formula to have. It's really when people say, “What?” If you have wrinkles and that's your main focus, this is the first product you'd want to use because it has the most bang for the buck.

Merily:
I keep trying to hide this stuff.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I know.

Merily:
Speaking of wrinkles because clearly that's one of the struggles that some of us have.

Dr. Johnson:
Aging women.

Merily:
Not everyone. Some women don't, God bless them. It is definitely something I am obviously pursuing a natural way to deal with.

Dr. Pompa:
My wife's had no Botox here. This is no surgery.

Merily:
Yeah.

Dr. Johnson:
That is rare! The no Botox story. I'm not a fan of Botox.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but we know. I treat people who it goes systemic and they end up with autoimmune. It can trigger autoimmune, you know, in our house.

Merily:
I do have a question about that.

Dr. Johnson:
Go ahead.

Merily:
We did talk about this on our first chat. You told me about the things about Botox that women may not know. You should share a few of those because they actually are counter-reductive to the outcome of what all women want eventually.

Dr. Pompa:
Speak to that.

Dr. Johnson:
Yeah. Again, anything that hurts you to try to get a result is just a bad idea. I find a lot of people, thankfully, they have good intuition. They trust their intuition, but Botox somehow has escaped that. It is a little magical in the sense that when you poison those muscles temporarily, that wrinkle does diminish quite a bit. They get all excited about that, and they lose focus on what their heart was telling them, which was this isn't a great idea.

The key two things to know beyond what Dr. Pompa just said about autoimmune is number one, they just did a study that shows that it goes to the brain stem. There are people getting weird little tremors. Usually you're on Botox over five years, maybe five to ten years, which unfortunately a ton of people are at that level. They start to get little neurologic things. The doctors will tell them, well, that's not Botox. That's something else. That's just dementia or early Alzheimer's or whatever story they're telling them. I'm telling you it is your Botox. That study is the beginning of the expose of why this should be pulled from the market.

The second thing on a cosmetic level. Let's just talk because I know that speaks to a lot of women. Why should I not do this if I see this wrinkle disappear, and here's why. When you paralyze that muscle, you permanently shrink it. Even though some of the neuroreceptors actually rebuild and come back to the surface, they don't all come back. Each time you do it, you are shrinking the muscle. That muscle is often as thick as your entire dermis. It's this huge amount of bulk that your face has from your muscles being there, and when you flatten that muscle time after time, you create a sagging event. Now all of a sudden the whole face comes down.

It was famous a couple years ago, Stevie Nicks, the famous singer, every time she laughed or sneezed, her forehead would collapse a little bit and she'd have to kind of prop it back up. It's a scary thing when you see it. What are people doing? They're not necessarily associating that with Botox. They're associating that with aging. They say, “Oh, I'm just aging,” and they start putting fillers in their face and pushing their face out again when the entire reason it happened was because they collapsed their muscle bed and they collapsed the volume.

If you look at muscle design, as you know, Dr. Pompa, you look at facial muscle design, brilliant design. Amazing how it holds everything up, keeps everything moving fluidly. It's designed to keep it that way, and when you start poisoning that muscle, you really do age yourself literally in the process. Not a good idea. Then you get to the general health effects of it and, again, it's something that I think that needs to be pulled from the market.

Dr. Pompa:
Now, Ben, another five years you're going to hear a lot more because I'm seeing it in these sick people. It just is a matter of time before people wake up. Unfortunately, five maybe ten more years of people getting poisoned by a neurotoxin meant to paralyze nerves to muscles. My gosh, what a horrific idea. You know what? I don't like the way it looks anyway. That's the thing. I see women, I'm like, that looks so horrible. You're meant to have these lines. You take them all away, you lose character. To me, it's phony. I hate it. That's my opinion.

Merily:
That's good for me.

Dr. Pompa:
Poor Keith Rhodes. He had Botox. You can see that.

-Technical Issues-

Dr. Johnson:
I was gone just for a little while but I agree, the face looks unnatural, especially when they can't smile. It's very unnatural. Go ahead, Merily.

Dr. Pompa:
I upset a lot of people who are out there with all the Botox; so did you. We have upset a lot of people, but it's my show, so we're okay. Go ahead.

Merily:
Quench and Quench Plus. Talk about the difference.

Dr. Johnson:
Yeah, you know, I'm going to tell you where I also may sound a little crazy from an owner and a manufacturer of skin care products, but my main goal is to try to use the key products to get your skin so healthy that it's naturally moisturizing. Just like your ten year old, we're not throwing moisturizers on them every day because their skin stays moist. Quench and Quench Plus I consider your temporary solution as you build your skin up to a point where you don't need it, but they're great moisturizers.

The real difference between them is Quench Plus has a collagen, it's a fish protein from fish cartilage, basically, that builds up in the epidermis gently. It doesn't cause any harm. It provides a nice plumping effect. That's really the difference between those two. The formulas are also different. Some people prefer Quench over Quench Plus, but like I said, it's a nice finish to the routine. If you want to do some makeup over the top of it or adding sun protection to protect or shade. At the same time, I hope people will spend the bulk of their resources on the products that do the most permanent change.

Merily:
I can actually see that I really don't need either one of those. I just do because I have it and because

Dr. Pompa:
You're a junky.

Merily:
Okay. Then let's freeze that when you talked about sun protection. Obviously you do have a sunscreen. You also have a drinkable sunscreen, and then AC-11, the Catalyst, also has a sun protection factor. Go ahead before I move on, address those.

Dr. Pompa:
Drinkable sunscreen. When I heard that I was like, “Why? What do you mean?”

Dr. Johnson:
I know. It's crazy.

Merily:
That was before we loved you. That's when we were in the same plane.

Dr. Pompa:
Well, Merily I don't know if this guy's crazy or if he's really brilliant. I haven't figured that out yet with drinkable sunscreen, but go ahead.

Dr. Johnson:
First of all, yeah, you can imagine as a skin care owner, selling a fake drinkable sunscreen is not the best of ideas. We did a clinical trial on it, and we're actually doing a second clinical trial on it starting June 1st, so I'm very excited about what that leads to as far as worldwide recognition. Right now I have to admit most people are like, that's impossible. What are you saying?

The summary of this, I'm going to go back to one thing that people can look up themselves. It was just a couple of years ago that MIT announced that they just imprinted information on the molecules of nitrogen. The whole world stood up and listened. They're talking about how it's going to make computers have super memory and what the potential of this great impact was. No one really stood back for a moment and just really thought about what was just said. They imprinted information on atoms. How did that happen?

I use a different technique, but essentially I'm doing the same thing. The vast majority of the world still says that's impossible. Water can't hold memory. I'm here to tell you we're proving it. We just did an acne clinical trial that proved that this water holds memory. What I did was I figured out, and there are some mathematical calculation special formulas that I used, but I figured out since everything in the world is waves of energy, you know, quantum physics tells us every one of the atoms that make up our cells actually comes from energy waves. It's not solid. We're at our very, very core sub-atomically, that's what we're made of.

If you can imagine, as you might expect, everything that looks different on your body, everything that functions differently is a different wave. It's a different frequency. All we're essentially doing with this harmonized water technology is communicating frequencies to specific components of the body that we've learned through time and practice. There was a gentleman by the name of -inaudible- whose whole career was finding out what frequencies did what. I used some of those frequencies for sure. I've created some of my own.

The drinkable sunscreen, essentially the quick summary of it is I figured out waves because you know you have headphones that cancel noise, I figured out waves that cancel UVA, UVB, infrared, UVC, and then I imprinted them on water like we've been doing for the last eight years. When you drink it, it goes to the water in your dermis. Just like any kind of pulsing wave, it has a distance that it reaches. It literally reaches above your skin for a period of three hours, and it works really well. The only places I tell everyone be cautious is it doesn't work as well in high UV index, so extreme places like Mexico, possibly other areas in South America.

We found it works pretty darn well in Hawaii, so that's not a problem. Also, when people sweat, that is the big one. When I go to Mexico, I'm perspiring very lightly all the time, and I can't use that as my sun protection in those environments. If you're not perspiring, and that is usually in exercise or in really, really hot stagnant situations, than this sun protection works like an SPF 30 if not better.

Our clinical trial was on 24 people in San Diego where we laid them on their back for an hour. Sixteen of those people didn't burn. The eight people who burned generally said to us, we don't lay in the sun. Our skin's not acclimated to the sun. This was just something we wanted to try. It kind of would make sense for the first time getting that much sun, they might burn a little.

Here's how you test it. You put your normal sun protection on your whole body, but let's say leave an arm exposed. Take the oral sun protection. Go out in the sun for an hour. If that arm doesn't burn just like the rest of you doesn't burn, then you know it's going to work for you. If that burns and the rest of you burns, then you're part of that population that has to be really careful in the sun. We definitely find people on medication, sun sensitizing medication like hormones, birth control pills, even antidepressants.

I know, Dr. Pompa, you like to get people off their medication when possible because so many of those things are compromising the immune system. I feel the same way. That's the summary of that drinkable sunscreen. It is phenomenal. It's really all I use when I'm in America, and I encourage people to give it a shot. It's pretty phenomenal.

Dr. Pompa:
We worked a montage for her birthday at Laguna beach and they had it. They had the sunscreen. I'm thinking that someone severely dehydrated, it may not make it to the skin. It may be utilized throughout the body. Maybe that's another factor, severe dehydration.

Dr. Johnson:
It's another reason to do the test first. Don't just go jump out and lay down and go two hours and say, let's just see how it goes. It's been a labor of love because most of my physician friends roll their eyes like, come on. If you don't try it, you know, just —

Dr. Pompa:
What's the name of the product because I haven't used it.

Dr. Johnson:
It's called UV Neutralizer. There's two kinds. There's one that increases a tan. People say, “Well is that damage?” No. If you go in the sun you increase your tanning hormone, melanocyte-stimulating hormone. I've got a frequency that excites that hormone, so it gives people who never get a base tan, they will see a base tan on that water. Some people who love their alabaster skin, we have a UV, no tan enhancing version.

Dr. Pompa:
I've got to say this because when we first talked, you're one of the only people that I've had a conversation with that knew what MSH, melanocyte-stimulating hormone was. Here's from my perspective. We know that people that get neurotoxic exposures, especially like mold and Lyme disease, their MSH tanks. We know now that MSH acts as one of the protectors.

When we raise MSH these people tend to do better. They become less sensitive. It's going to be very interesting to see if these mold people that are out there, and we have tons of them watching this show, if by drinking this product than if that helps them because it's raising their MSH. Which one is it is that's the one that helps you tan? What was the name of that one?

Dr. Johnson:
It's called UV Neutralizer Tan Enhancing. I will tell you, sun sensitivity is the general category. It's where people that erupt in hives and have trouble going out in the sun, they can't use topical sunscreens because their skin is so sensitive and topical sunscreens are typically those chemicals that actually increase your inflammation. They're tolerating it with this UV Tan Enhancing formula, UV Neutralizer. I do think it will be beneficial. It will be interesting to see if it also improves the overall health is what I think you're suggesting.

Dr. Pompa:
I am.

Dr. Johnson:
I wasn't as familiar with that. It definitely mimics that hormone. I figured out a way to mimic hormones with these frequencies. We're mimicking thyroid hormone. We're mimicking sex hormones, androgens and estrogens.

Merily:
Wow. Okay, so moving through the regimen, the Refresh PM, the eye cream that I use.

Dr. Johnson:
That's a heavier one that's designed to increase moisture and plumping around the more delicate areas around the eye. It's usually used at night because of the density of it, but it's made of liquid crystals, which is this great intracellular matrix of plants. It has a really vibrant color matrix that comes with it. People really appreciate that product. Again, it's primarily more for eye dehydration and temporary plumping, not so much designed for the permanent changes, but it's definitely a fan favorite.

Merily:
I don't use it that often because quite honestly I'm sensitive to it. I'll use it and when I seal the deal with the Clear Plus, I will then try to have it diluted perhaps a bit with this. Is there another eye cream that maybe I should try instead of this one?

Dr. Johnson:
We have the Refresh, which is the daily use one. That's for puffiness, dark circles, wrinkles to some degree. Again, I recommend on the eyes, my products go all over the eyes. A lot of people are like, products are too irritating to put on my eyelids. That is not the case. I would put Catalyst on your eyes. I would put Renew on your eyes once you can handle it.

Merily:
I tried the Refresh.

Dr. Johnson:
The Refresh is great. You brought up Clear Plus. Clear Plus uses this frequency enhanced water strategy. It has a variety of frequencies designed to help with collagen and hydration and really antibacterial, antifungal. The biggest reason you're going to want to have this with your regimen is because once these products are on the surface, you want to drive them in manually to help push the liposome through, to help push the catalyst in. After you apply products, you then spray Clear Plus over the skin and massage it in thoroughly once or twice. The more you massage it in, the more you're going to get out of this skin care routine in general.

Dr. Pompa:
She did tell me, “Use this one,” after I used the two because I'm always using the two products. She said, “Finish with that one at least.” I didn't do that. These other frequencies you have, admittedly I haven't tried some of these hormone frequencies. We have a lot of different thyroid clients. What are some of the products there?

Dr. Johnson:
I will tell you, I've just lately been formulating, and I used to give a little teaser. I've come up with a frequency that appears to disrupt viruses in basically a single dose. People are having massive die off reactions. We're seeing changes in endometriosis. It's a painful process they go through because literally it seems to be killing — I believe endometriosis is a viral-induced condition, of course, related to hormone imbalance.

We are definitely helping menopausal women. We are helping women with fertility issues. People are actually getting off of their thyroid medication while using this hormone product. It has all of the hormones in it. It's for men and women. It has testosterone in it as well. You just have to try it to see.

Dr. Pompa:
What is the name?

Dr. Johnson:
The name is Hormone Health for the female product. We found men prefer the name Vigor for their version, so we have Vigor and Hormone Health. It's basically the same formula. We have some hair challenge frequencies in there as well, so women who are seeing thinning hair, you're going to love that.

Dr. Pompa:
Did you hear that? I know who you are out there that want to have information. Is it the same product? It's that product?

Dr. Johnson:
What ended up happening in the beginning of my formulations, I had twice as many formulas and people were on six or seven bottles, which I didn't think was cost effective for them. I started to put them all together. Just this morning, believe it or not, I calculated out the frequency to block DHT. I'll be adding that to the hair formula in the next month, so that should be shipping out.

I was already blocking excess testosterone, and I had another frequency for hair for women specifically. Women definitely, they're the most impacted by the hair formula. Men, I'm personally working on my own challenges. The DHT formula I think is going to actually put us over the top.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that applies to men. The thyroid hormones are typically why the women really lose their hair through estrogen and cortisone imbalances. The DHT for the men, all in one formula. America, you better make sure we have that one because I'm telling you, we're going to get calls and calls, so you better be ahead of that.

Dr. Johnson:
I am. I put HGH in it as well because I don't believe in HGH injections per se, primarily because it shuts down your natural production. There's not a huge advantage. Once you're on it, you get off of it and I don't know how many people fully recover at the pituitary level.

Dr. Pompa:
Years, if they recover. I mean, honestly.

Dr. Johnson:
Of course, it's so expensive they might in the beginning have all of these high hopes and then they're like, oh, my gosh. I can't afford $1,000 a month anymore. What this frequency does is it does not interfere with natural production. That's what all my hormones do. They simply make the body feel like they have a full balance of the hormones, thyroid included. I'm telling you, tons of weight loss stories, people that think, you know what? My thyroid tested fine but their fine is not everyone else's fine. They got on the thyroid formula. They noticed energy changes. They noticed hair changes. They noticed weight loss changes.

I'm not going to say if you don't have significant thyroid imbalance, you're not going to have significant weight loss as part of that formula. Everything, like I said, from menopause to fertility to a variety of conditions. That's a big hitter for us. We have a formula that replicates  GABA that helps with sleep because that's so critical in the health rebuilding process.

Dr. Pompa:
Is that a separate formula? What's the name of it?

Dr. Johnson:
That one's called Relax. We have a formula for acne that treats what I think are the two causes of acne, which is Candida. I'm sure you deal a lot with Candida. Then a formula that deals with estrogen toxins.

Dr. Pompa:
That's our son. That's one that helped our son.

Dr. Johnson:
Oh, good, it did help your son. Good, good. If they wanted to go to our site to check out the face map, when I see acne here, I attribute it to Candida. This is also Candida, and then acne down here I attribute to pesticides that resemble estrogen, chlorine; a lot of swimmers and people exposed to chlorine in Florida and stuff where their water's heavy in chlorine, they're seeing it come out of their skin as acne. This is a new concept. We haven't talked a lot about it, but it's definitely something they'll see a benefit from the skin perfection water, which helps treat acne from the inside out.

The last one I was going to tell you about was the digestive formula. A ton of people struggling with digestion, we give them frequencies that help calm their digestion while you're treating their cellular health. We're working on an energetic approach. The two could work very synergistically together. That formula is called Inner Harmony. We just get great, great feedback.

Dr. Pompa:
Let me tell you something. Just those formulas alone, Merily's writing them down, thank God, because we need to write them down and carry them. You're speaking at my November event to all my doctors. Our doctors need to know about these products because the frequency avenue is really new technology. It's really something that I'm excited to work more with and our doctors.

Merily:
Of course, he has an exfoliator called Polish, and he has a cleanser called Purify. You have one too.

Dr. Johnson:
We have Cleanse, we have Deep Clean, and we have Purify. Those three cleansers, you find which one suits your skin best. Some are for the more oily acne skin like Deep Clean. Cleanse is the most gentle formula. Purify has some enzymes in it that helps remove some of the dead skin. We're not trying to exfoliate very much.

Polish we'd just really like you to use once or twice a week. It's a fan favorite but, again, it's designed at a percentage of L-lactate acid [48:44] lactate acid, which moisturizes your skin, that won't disrupt the barrier. We're all about keeping the barrier intact and maintain moisture and reduced irritation. A lot of people are using devices that they realize after they keep scrubbing away every day, all of a sudden they're like, oh, my gosh. My skin has become so sensitive. That's because they were tearing down the skin instead of building it up.

Merily:
I use it very seldom.

Dr. Johnson:
That's excellent. I think I've just lost you for a second. Meredith, did we lose them?

Meredith:
They're frozen.

Dr. Johnson:
Last time they got frozen were you also waiting for them or was I frozen? Was it frozen ten minutes ago for them? They froze on me. Are you guys back?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we're back.

Meredith:
We lost you guys for about a minute.

Merily:
Okay, he has made that, obviously, which I love. I use everything. I love your mascara. I love your eye shadows. I use your concealer as a shadow base. I tried your foundation with the pressed powder, even though this is a time of year when I don't really like to use that. Your CC Cream is amazing. I even used it all winter long because it's just enough. Really, I'm just super impressed. I'm a top customer.

Dr. Johnson:
Yeah, you are. I'm going to be honest. Makeup was not my specialty, it's not my specialty. I hired the formulator for two major lines in the country today, one of them called Mineral Fusion. She's just phenomenal. She really built a very simplified line, so you don't have to have a thousand products on your shelf, that is so high performance, and yet natural based with goji berry extract in it. The minerals are very carefully milled.

She really did it right. She taught me a lot about how makeup should be done. That's what we hear from most people that try this product is that it performs better than any product they've had. It's very easy to use. Of course, it's good for the skin. You can actually go to sleep in it at night, although I don't recommend it because I want you to apply a few products first and reapply twice a day. I'm so glad you enjoyed it, Merily. Are you frozen right now?

Meredith:
Looks like they're frozen again. Oh, goodness.

Dr. Johnson:
Hopefully I'm not frozen, Meredith, since you can hear me. I'm sure everyone got a chance to hear about it. That's called Osmosis Color. I think those products are available on your website as well, right?

Meredith:
Yeah, we're definitely going to have a selection in by the time this show airs. You guys can check them out on Revelation Health for sure. I know we're coming up on the end of the hour, so I don't know if you have a few more products that you wanted to share with us, maybe some essentials for someone that just wants to generally improve their skin. I know there are so many different categories and conditions, but I don't know if you have a few more stand outs that you wanted to discuss.

Dr. Pompa:
My internet's in and out today because I'm not plugged into my hard line because I wasn't in my office. I apologize for that. I'm sure they got the information. Meredith, I'm going to turn it over to you because it may happen again. He answered one of your questions but you probably have more.

Merily:
I wanted to say I missed the whole thing about the mineral fusion, but just tell her she's killing it on the nail polish because that's what I use. I do. That's the one I use. I just go grab it and it's like a smorgasbord of colors.

Dr. Johnson:
She doing Osmosis Color now. She's not really sharing in that anymore. Thank you for supporting that cause. I was saying while you guys were frozen was just talking a little bit more about how some of these products are going to be available on the website by the time this airs, which is awesome. She was just saying since we're coming to the end of the hour to do a summary of how I recommend people go forward with Osmosis, what's the best way to get started. Let me just do that.

Each serum has its own specific point of importance. You can pick from the cleansers based on the descriptions of what is best for you. Most people are opting for Cleanse or Purify. Everyone is going to want Clear Plus in their routine. It has its own benefits even if your skin is irritated and you're just spraying that alone on the skin, you will see the effects that it has because of the frequencies that are in it and the other ingredients that are in it.

When it comes to just general strategy, we have a strategy for skin type. If you're rosacea skin, you want to start off with a product called Rescue, which has that ingredient that Dr. Pompa used on his little red spot. It is phenomenal for inflammation. It is phenomenal for age spots. It actually heals the source of age spots. It has a permanent potential, which is way better than a lot of the lightening options you may opt for. It also works on enlarged pores. That's your product for really sensitive skin.

We often include StemFactor in that. They can link from your site to our site, and they can actually look up their skin condition and see the products that are recommended on OsmosisSkinCare.com. That may make it easier for them to figure out which products to use. Then if you're just a general aging person, which so many people are, your vitamin A serum Correct or Renew is your first choice along, again, with Clear Plus. You would add other products in as you desire, depending on your budget.

All my products are designed to last several months. It is really designed to be as cost effective as you can be with such high-end technology that we're using. Catalyst AC-11, you heard the clinical trial results. It works in so many different ways. I love it for acne scarring. It's one of the few products in the world that actually accelerates the wound healing in acne scaring even if it's 10 years, 15 years old. I love it for all the other reasons we talked about; elasticity, redness, and broken capillaries on the face. It helps with age spots and wrinkles. It does so much. It's just kind of a good core product to have.

Ideally, I would have them using Rescue, Catalyst, Renew, and StemFactor in some way, shape, or form every day and just stretching out the use of them. Focus in on what you're most concerned with. One part of what I talked about today was the most important, that product you want to use twice a day and every other product maybe once a day. A lot of people want to know what I do. I do Stem Factor once at night. You really don't need it more than once at night unless you're really thin skinned. That goes on first. The routine is I mix one pump of Rescue, one pump of Renew, one pump of Catalyst AC-11 in my hands, massage it into my skin. Take my Clear Plus, massage one more time. I do that twice a day.

I'm telling you, that is the best way to just see rapid age reversal results. Then you'll really appreciate that permanencies happen. When you stop the products, the changes you're seeing will stay. That is something that skin care lines just don't say today.

Dr. Pompa:
That's awesome.

Merily:
I don't have to layer them. I can actually mix it all together, so that just cut a few minutes out of my —

Dr. Johnson:
There you go.

Dr. Pompa:
That'll be a lot easier right now. I'm happy about that.

Dr. Johnson:
Hey Meredith, make sure Mark has the connection to their website with ours so people can go on there. That's a big deal. They can go to your website and they can't order from there, but that gives them the ability to see more of what they need and then order from Revelation Health.

Merily:
By the way, he was whispering over her, “Do we have Rescue? Do we have Rescue?”

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, my doctor's watch this and play this show for their customers. If one of our doctor's carries the products, buy it from them. Honor them. Do not buy it from Revelation Health or anywhere else. Honor the doctor that did this video for sure. Why would you not do that? We appreciate that, absolutely.

Dr. Johnson:
That's great. I so appreciate your support and enthusiasm. I know Merily has been such a big fan. We're staging a coup on this country. We're trying to change the way skin care is being done. I so appreciate that you recognize the uniqueness of it. I think it fits perfectly with your amazing system for restoring cellular health.

Dr. Pompa:
That's why we adopted it. When I spoke to you I said, “Gosh, this is cellular healing.” which I said I'm not a fan of until I realized it was going into the inside, which I am a fan of. You've made me a believer, that's for sure. Meredith, I'll turn back to you. Dr. Ben, thank you so much.

Dr. Johnson:
Thank you, Merily and Dr. Pompa. It's been a pleasure.

Meredith:
Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Dr. Ben. This has been so informational. I think these products are amazing as well. I've been using them and really enjoying using them as well. Perhaps we can have you on a future show because I have so many more questions about just the skin, the connection to the gut and our overall health, and how our skin is just so integral to cellular health and overall health and vitality. Maybe we can have you on a future show to kind of share a little bit more and delve into more of the science behind the products and skin health in general.

Dr. Pompa:
That'd be a great idea. She's the one that schedules the show, so she'll get you on again.

Dr. Johnson:
I would love it, guys. Thanks so much.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. Thank you.

Meredith:
Thanks, everyone. Take care. We'll see you next time.