2017 Podcasts

Transcript of Episode 201: How to Block Fast

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Meredith Dykstra

Meredith:
Hello everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa on the line of course, and today we’re going to do a short little episode that’s going to be very specific because I know, Dr. Pompa, you get a lot of questions about this topic. Today we’re going to delve into this very specifically, and we’re going to be talking about block fasting today.

We get so many questions, and comments, and just wonderings about the strategy and the implementation, and what it looks like, and how often we should do it, and if we can have certain things while we’re block fasting. A lot of people today talk about intermittent fasting, and it’s become a huge hot topic in the health world today, but block fasting, there’s a lot of miseducation, misinformation, fear surrounding it so today we’re going to break down block fasting for you. I’m excited about this topic because it’s really transformed my life.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I think I’ve had many requests for this show. We have a few shows on fasting. While we’re doing it, you could actually pull them back up, but they were interviews with people, so what people wanted was hey, could you do one just on block fasting aka extended fast. Every question we get, right? Can I take my supplements during a fast? How do I break a fast? Who should fast? When not to? When’s the best time? How long should I go? All of those questions are going to get answered on this one, so gosh, I hope I don’t forget one question that somebody asked because here’s the show. It’s short, concise, and we’re going to answer all your questions. That was really the request.

Let’s start off with that right there. Who should fast, and maybe who should not fast? Well look, I think there are a lot of health challenges. I think you need an extended block fast. You should have a supervised practitioner that understands fasting and the things to look for. Let’s say that right off the bat; however, most healthy people watching this could fast. Our bodies are set up to fast. I don’t recommend pregnant women to fast, women that are nursing fast because, obviously, there needs to be a certain caloric intake to help that, although there’s things in the literature talking about when women were forced to fast during pregnancy, and everything was fine.

All I’m saying is this: there’s nothing that harnesses the body’s innate intelligence more than fasting. The adjustment releases that innate intelligence, right? Misalignments can block the nerve flow from the brain to the organs, but I tell you, fasting harnesses the innate intelligence, meaning—here’s what I mean. The intelligence in the body does the right things. It finds what we call homeostasis, perfect balance. It knows how much protein it needs. It knows how many minerals, nutrients because people always say—we hear well, how does your body get protein? How does your body get nutrients? It does.

It gets protein by taking all of your bad proteins, and muscles, and the bad stuff, all of the bad muscle fiber, the bad tissues, the bad proteins, breaking them down into amino acids, and it has its perfect protein from bad protein. The protein that keeps you from putting on healthy, good muscle. As a matter of fact, one of the strategies for extended fast is actually to gain muscle, so they know a month later—I challenged my son Isaac. He’s a very skinny kid, three percent body fat type of kid. I said do a fast for five days and watch what happens a month from now. Sure enough, he was able to put on muscle, so that’s one of the questions I always get. I’m underweight. I’m 90 pounds. I’m 100 pounds. Can I fast? Yes. Matter of fact, the body’s that intelligent. If you are 90 pounds, your body will literally—you might lose four or five pounds, mostly water, and it will selectively pull the bad proteins. That’s the only weight you lose.

After the fast you start to gain better muscle, better proteins, and you actually gain some weight. People who are overweight. Is it going to mess up my metabolism? Not at all. When it’s done right, the body finds perfect metabolism, and as long as you eat healthy after a fast, you don’t gain the weight back. I mean, you gain your normal three to five pounds back of glycogen and fluid. That’s completely normal, so fasting, yes, for weight gain, for weight loss. It, of course, you’ll understand this more as we go through the show, things like autoimmune, digestive problems. This is the real way to fix the gut in a microbiome. You’re going to see why it affects so many different conditions.

Here’s the best part: you’re not treating any of them. All you’re doing is bringing the body into this perfect homeostasis, and then the body figures it out. It detoxes perfectly, and it heals perfectly, so that’s the art of fasting. One of the things that will answer our questions, because I know that you’re thinking of them too because you get a lot of the questions, Meredith, but let me just give a review of why fasting does such amazing things in the body. I’ll make it very simple. I’m not going to dig too deep into the science because this is a how-to show.

A few things happen. Number one, if you haven’t heard the word autophagy yet, meaning that during fasts, your body gets rid of the bad stuff, like the bad proteins, the bad DNA, the bad mitochondria that keep us from being good, efficient fat burners and have good energy. All of the bad cells, the body gets rid of them. Bad white blood cells, the white blood cells that go around, they’ve lived almost too long, and they’re hyper-reactive. They create food allergies, allergies, autoimmune. They overreact to things in your blood. They drive inflammation. I always say that most of the inflammation we have is driven by our own immune system cells. The body gets rid of them. That’s part of the magic.

The second part, made more popular by a guy named by Valter Longo, who you and I are going to spend some time with, doing amazing research here, shows that the body gets rid of these cells. It raises up something called stem cells. We all know what those are, but those are the cells that help you make new white blood cells that aren’t as reactive. He calls them more naive. They’re like yeah, I see that protein, your thyroid antibody. I’m not reacting to that anymore. I see this. I’m not going to react to that. The immune system up here driving inflammation comes down to a normal level. These stem cells also are the ones that make the new muscle, the new protein. They’re responsible for making the new, healthy tissue, so that’s why we get the stem cell rise. This is kind of cool. You’re going to hear this.

Longo’s releasing a new book soon, and in some of his research that most people haven’t heard about—you’re hearing it here first. Five days, which is going to answer one of the questions, is being a perfect time, amount of time for people to fast. Some people arguably would do better with longer fasts, but five days. Ironically enough, he has a scientific reason for that; however, I always found that clinically, I said the magic happens day four. That’s when you become this efficient fat burner. You transition. Your brain’s using the ketones. You feel better. It takes three days to get there. I’d say if you can ride it out one more day to five days, that’s the perfect amount of time. Longo’s work showed it is because what he showed was that stem cell rise. You get the most dramatic rise day five into a fast, and by feeding on day six, he says it feeds these stem cells, these new ones, and you get the most out of them. There’s some pretty cool stuff coming off his research.

He also talks about a 30 hour mark, so if you’re doing fasting once or twice a week, if you make it over 30 hours, you also get a nice stem cell boost, so there’s some little facts about how long should I fast. I would say for the average person, there’s a really good number. At least five days, and refeed on day six, and we’ll talk about how to do that here in a moment.

Let me finish with the benefits of fasting. We have the stem cells. We have the autophagy. You also have a reset of your DNA, so a lot of genes that have been turned on tend to get turned off. The bad ones that get turned on. They get turned off during a fast, so you kind of reset your epigenetics, your DNA, so you have an opportunity to turn off bad things. Also, your microbiome, your bacteria, they get reset, so this is another good opportunity to reset your microbiome and come out healthy.

I believe ancient cultures were forced into times of fasting, so to reset the DNA, to reset their microbiome, to develop new stem cells, new immune cells, new muscle cells. The problem with today is we’re not being forced to fast, where our ancestors were, so it’s literally a time to reset. You also have this hormone optimization that occurs. During a fast, your cells down regulate inflammation, and the receptors on the cells become very sensitive to hormones. That’s a really good thing, so that works for conditions like thyroid, diabetes, and really every hormone starts to function better. I call it hormone optimization, as well as these growth hormone rises.

Again, on day five, according to Longo’s work, you get the highest rise in growth hormone. Your body raises growth hormone to protect its muscle and its good tissue, so the only protein or muscle that you would lose is the bad stuff that enables you to build better. I know I get a lot of questions on that, but that’s how intelligent the body is, so those are the benefits of fasting, and I answered a few of your questions in there. Meredith, let me turn it back to you because you have some questions, and then we can go into some different areas just to make sure all the questions get answered.

Meredith:
You talked a lot about the why. I’m echoing again, but can you talk a little bit about the how? We’ll get into that, so five days seems to be magic for a block fast, or if you’re doing the intermittent fasting, more than 30 hours you start to get those benefits. Let’s say this show, I think it may be coming out in January. Somebody wants to start the new year off and kick it off with a block fast. They want to do five days. What if it’s their first fast? What would you suggest them fasting on? Would you think they should go full-throttle with pure water? What about bone broth, or the probiotic whey water that we’ve talked about? What do you suggest for a first fast?

Dr. Pompa:
I think that’s a great question. One of the things that we teach to the doctors is by putting someone in ketosis first, you’re teaching their mitochondria, their cells to use fat for energy. The first three days of a water fast, or really any fast, the first three days is the hardest. Of course, you have cravings, but really, most of it is driven physiologically because your body’s not used to using fat, so it wants you to eat sugar. You get these horrific cravings, but of course, because you’re not using sugar, and you’re not efficient at burning fat as an energy source, you have low energy the first three days. Remember, I said day four is the magic. That’s when you become—day four you’re going to become more efficient.

People who are really toxic, they still can have low energy because their cells are just so inflamed. That doesn’t mean they don’t fast, but every fast they tend to get more efficient. The average, healthy person by day four, their brain turns on. They feel energy again. They typically do too much. They typically go out and exercise or work too hard, and then they can be run down. Day four that transition occurs. I think been in ketosis first -inaudible- the symptoms you would get those first three days, and it really does make a difference. That’s, I think, a way to—do you have to do that? No, but does it make it easier? Absolutely yes. Did I answer that question?

Meredith:
Well, if you can be a little bit more specific though. Yes, being in ketosis prior to fasting definitely eases the process and the symptoms, but as far as a fasting liquid. Water? Bone broth? Whey water? What do you suggest, especially for a first timer?

Dr. Pompa:
I think that if you’re fearful to fast, definitely do a whey water or a bone broth fast first, for sure. If you’re not fearful, if you’re like oh, I really want to do this -inaudible-, then go right for water. I think the greatest benefit is water fasting. I think that because you’re offering the body nothing, you rely on the innate intelligence the most. No doubt, you get the most autophagy. No doubt, you challenge the mitochondria the most to use fat, but I think psychologically for some people, water fasting is the hardest. For me, I’ve done all of them. Bone broth and whey water, I believe, doing them I’m getting sick of the bone broth and the whey water, and I just yearn for something else. I don’t want to do it anymore, so for me, water fasting is the easiest. It’s psychologically hard for people. What about you? What do you think? You’ve done them all too.

Meredith:
I have, and when I first started with fasting, I started with a probiotic whey water because that just seemed the easiest, and it definitely is because you’re getting the calories, and you’re getting the milk sugar, so that helps to maintain your blood sugar. It’s definitely the easiest fast, by far. It’s typically suggested you can drink up to six bottles of the probiotic whey water each day, which you get from Beyond Organic, and you get it through Youngevity. We’ll put a link in the show notes if you want to get those bottles of the whey water, so easiest for sure. Then, I gravitated to the bone broth fasting because I thought that was easier as well.

I was very intimidated by the water fasting, but the bone broth fast, after a couple of days, you get really sick of it. It can be kind of fatty, and it can be tough to go down. It can even be a little gaggy for some people after many days of it, so I finally did a water fast after having done the whey water and the bone broth for a while, and it was so much easier. I couldn’t believe it. I had been so intimidated by it, and just the simplicity of it was amazing. It’s the most healing thing I think I’ve ever done for my body is a water fast. I just did a short one a few weeks ago, and I’m going to do a longer one in January in the new year for 2018 to just have that reboot for the new year as well. It’s an easier progression to it, if you just want to get your feet wet. Whey water, then bone broth, then move to the water.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. I think you’re right. The whey water, you don’t get the down for the first three days because there’s some lactose. Really, metabolically for people who have struggled the transition of using sugar constantly as their fuel source, which is not good. They struggle to transition to fat. That helps them. For me, I don’t have that problem. I can transition to fat, so therefore water, just because I don’t crave, feel getting sick. I even get sick of the whey water, so for me, the water is easiest, but you’re right. I think that is a natural psychological transition the way you said it. I mean, eventually, dig in to the water fasting, and then here’s a question we get all the time. What should I take? Can I do lemon in my water? Can I take supplements?

Meredith:
I was going to ask that too. Coffee? Or tea? Or even you have different vegetable juices. What are your thoughts on other liquids that may not -inaudible-?

Dr. Pompa:
I would say are the other two fat? They whey water, and the bone broth? I would say yes. You could do those things, but for water, no. You just want to do the water. The only two supplements that I would make a recommendation on is Restore because it’s redox. It’s not offering the body anything. Acacia is the same way. Acacia is another redox for the mitochondria, but that’s it. No pills. Then, I’ll make one more suggestion. This does help people. For the first three days, having some salt in your water really helps people because they just lose a lot of electrolytes. The body eventually balances that, so it’s really the first three days where you’re kind of balancing that it helps. I allow that.

Here’s another tip. That sipping the warm, or the hot water in a thermos all day. It really helps people. I think that that’s what people like about the bone broth. They have something warm. Do the same thing with water. The Chinese, actually, drink warm water. It curbs appetite. It helps if you’re getting a little nauseous. It helps with that as well, so just in a thermos, put some warm water. Those are the basics before and during the fast. Can you think of anything else?

Meredith:
That’s a great tip as well, especially in this cold season, having that thermos of something warm. Maybe that warm, salted water to sip on can be definitely very soothing. It’s kind of a funny question to, but I’ve thought of this myself, so I think maybe other people have wondered as well. Sometimes with water fasting, I’ve done sparkling water, or maybe even some of the flavored sparkling waters. Would you think that would have any negative effect?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I find that sparkling water doesn’t do good for people. It’s too harsh on the digestion that you’re trying to rest, so I know people say you don’t get hydrated from sparkling water the same. I don’t know that that’s necessarily true, but there is a more irritating component to it for sure, so stick with clean, distilled water, or reverse osmosis water, or if you know your source of spring water, stick to a clean water.

Here’s the other question we get all the time. How much water should I drink? Drink when you’re thirsty. It sounds silly, but you have to understand, when you’re fasting, you’re innate intelligence is functioning so perfect, and it’s so high tuned that you’ll know when to drink water. Drink when you’re thirsty. People that are trying to chug a lot of water during a fast are forcing the body. You’re forcing the kidneys to work. Let the body direct it. Just listen.

Meredith:
Great. I get this all the time. For block fasting, how do you know when to stop the fast? Especially, what if you’re feeling really good, but maybe you’re many days into it and getting a little concerned? Where’s that fine line there?

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a great question. I think for most people who listen to this, again, go with Longo’s, Valter Longo’s thing of five days, right? It gives a nice—a minimum four, right, a minimum four, perfect number, if you will, five. Yeah. You’re right, Andrew. Andrew, I just called you Andrew, Meredith. There’s going to be people who might benefit from a longer fast, especially obese people, overweight people. They have a lot of supplies, and the body will use them.

Remember, not my last seminar, the one before. We had a gentleman there that was—he was obese, and he was on day 120 of just water, folks, 120. I’ve said this in past shows. The neat thing is by then every nutrition marker is balanced. Every inflammation marker is balanced. I think he was on five or eight medications. By that point, he was off of them all. His depression lifted. I mean, it was remarkable. You read about those things, but hearing him testify there was remarkable.

We had the discussion with him of when to break the fast, right? One of the key things is looking at your tongue. Folks, what to expect when you’re fasting, we’ve been throwing little things out there, but a white tongue you can expect. Again, the body does get rid of toxins. Bad breath you can expect. Smelly odor that just emanates from you, you can expect. Now, that’s not everyone. I don’t get that anymore, but most people will get that, right? The tongue can go from white to yellow to green, and I’ve even seen black, furry tongues.

Meredith:
Lovely, black, furry tongue.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, with extended fast. Here’s how cool the innate intelligence is. When the tongue turns back to pink, it’s time to quit. Now, that doesn’t mean you’re like—you’ve just detoxed every toxin out of your body. No. It just means the body knows its supplies are running short. Its electrolytes are dropping. Its nutrient supply is diminishing. His tongue, by the way, had already started turning pink.

Then here’s another cool thing to watch for. His hunger comes back, literally. All of a sudden, you’re like—you’re not hungry, believe me. By day four of a fast, you’re not hungry, nor does the hunger happen, but all of a sudden, boom, I’m hungry. Listen to your body, or what happens is you—your body odor starts going down. Your breath doesn’t stink. I mean, isn’t that cool? The body’s just stopping the detox, and here’s another one, very simple. The weight loss stops for two or three days. You’re pretty much ending your fast.

Those are the things, just some simple things that you can look at. Again, I don’t recommend anyone fasting that long without supervision, so I don’t want to go there. You need a supervised fast. Monitor those things and the electrolytes. I’m not recommending that for everybody, but to answer your question, that’s—I think it’s a cool example of how intelligent the body is in a fasting mode so really neat.

Meredith:
Do you know how long he actually went on that fast, that man?

Dr. Pompa:
Not long after that. Maybe it was 129. It was not long after because I had told him there that I think your body’s wrapping this thing up. I mean, he lost 100 pounds. I mean, it was pretty remarkable, and the cool thing is the gentleman who fasted the longest, gosh, it was 381 days, something like that.

Meredith:
Yeah. It was over a year. It’s amazing, Scottish man, right?

Dr. Pompa:
It was over year. Uh-huh. Yeah, exactly. He lost hundreds of pounds, and he kept it off. I think to this day he’s 180, 190-some pounds, but again, it was another situation where all of his nutritional markers went normal. His blood markers went normal. Everything normalized.

Fasting is a way to harness that intelligence. The body knows how to heal, and fasting gives it that time to focus all of its energy on healing. It’s getting rid of the bad cells, rising the stem cells. I mean, all those amazing things happen during a fast. It really is incredible.

Meredith:
Right. I get this a lot as well; how often can I block fast? Many people today, not because it’s cool and you and I included, of course, just because of the health benefits, that we intermittent fast almost on a daily basis, but block fasting, maybe we don’t want to do that too often. How often do you typically recommend that, every month or seasonally, once a year?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, some people with certain health challenges, they benefit from a fast a month, whether it’s five days every month or five days every other month. Maybe it’s five days every quarter. We call it multiple block fast where we’re doing not very extended like we were just talking about, but these four or five day fasts.

Meredith:
Now, is that over the long term, like over a lifetime, or is that just a few years?

Dr. Pompa:
No. No, over a time of them getting their life back. Look, I think that if everybody healthy, everyone listening to this should fast at least once a year, right? I mean, the Hunza people, the Hunza, they fasted once a year. They called it starvation spring. It became a cultural thing. Thomas Seyfried, who wrote the book Cancer as a Metabolic Disease, talks about reducing cancer 95% by just one fast.

I think, no matter what, all of us should fast at least one time. Of course, January is an obvious great time. It starts out so easy to start something new after a fast. Your palate’s clean. You’re not craving sugar. Your addictions go, right? It’s magic. You can do anything after a fast.

However, I will say this, my favorite time to fast—although, I’m about to do a five-day fast, so I’m breaking what I’m saying. However, in the summer when you can go outside in the sun, it’s nice, right? Fasting in the summer or spring is easier than in the winter because you do get cold. Let’s talk about some of the things that you can expect. Expect to get cold. I mean, you just—it’s normal. Your body is pulling energy, and it’s using it for healing. It’s pretty normal to get a little cold, absolutely okay.

Meredith:
That’s where the warm water really helps too. If you’re doing the water fasting, just sipping on that heat feels really good.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Expect to not have a bowel movement except maybe one, maybe day two, maybe day three. You hear things like people ought to know or have another bowel movement. That’s typically a toxic bowel movement. By the way, the gentleman that we were talking about…

Meredith:
I didn’t know that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. The gentleman that we were talking about, 120 days, he actually—every 30 days he was having a black tar bowel movement. I mean, imagine. It was just coming out of him. Yeah. I mean, that’s pretty intense. I just had someone this week actually say, oddly enough, day six I had a bowel movement. He went seven days. Again, it’s typically not a normal bowel movement, so you shouldn’t have bowel movements but maybe one because you’re not eating. There’s no fiber. Anyways, that’s really normal.

What else can you expect? I said about the bad breath. The whites of your eyes will clear, for sure. You may get an area of your body that’s healing, and each fast, your body can focus on healing something else. Merily just did a five-day fast a couple months ago. In her hips, which were a problem—her hips were off, but they went away. The pain went away. She wasn’t having problems, but during the fast, she got that pain back in her hips. It was healing. The body was driving a healing response there. She’s had no problems since.

You may get one area that is pain, or I have this pain in here. A lot of times, it’s tumors shrinking, cysts shrinking, cells getting rid of—something healing. The body’s that intelligent that it will drive a healing response, and you could feel a symptom in one particular area. You might want to expect that. Expect, again, by day four or day five you have plenty of energy but rest. Use your energy for healing. People say can I exercise during it? After day four or day five, typically, you can exercise, but I’m under the belief you should let that energy be used for healing. If you’re a really healthy person, I think Longo in his work says you get such a growth hormone rise on day five that, if you’re going to exercise, that’s the day to do it, but for challenged and sick people, just use your energy for rest. There you are.

Meredith:
What about those people who get so—who feel so sick when they’re healing, just massive symptoms, very weak, maybe racing heart, just feel so terrible? Are they a good candidate? Should they stop the fast? Is that an indication that maybe it’s too much for their body at that point?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, again, I think someone who’s really sick and challenged, that’s why you have a supervised fast. Of course, your practitioner can answer those questions for you and judge your specific situation because it’s different for everybody. One of the things I’ve seen, though, is, first of all, every fast -inaudible- people because the cells get better and better and better. Bad cells die. Good cells get stronger. Bad mitochondria die. Good mitochondria get more efficient at using fat as energy, etc., but toxic people -inaudible-. I mean, that’s why doing cellular detox while this process is going on—not while like taking pills because we don’t take pills during it but meaning that you’re doing it in the process of. You’re not just fasting. You’re doing the cellular work as well.

The point is, though, is that rest. I’ve watched enough people just not feel well, and they just rest. It’s a time for healing, and if you can get through it, your body got better. Even if you didn’t say, gosh, I didn’t have all the energy. People say that. They heard some of the past interviews. I’m like I didn’t get that. These people’s moles were falling off. They had plenty of energy. That wasn’t me. I was still energyless.

Listen, each fast you’ll get more efficient. Just curl up and ride it. Just let the body heal and do its thing.

Meredith:
Yeah. Since you mentioned TCD, I get this question a lot as well. If someone’s going through the True Cellular Detox program, when would be a good time within that program, even if maybe they’re just doing the 90-day program, to do a fast? Would that be in between the phases, maybe during one of the phases where they’re just taking a break from the supplements? Is there an ideal time for that?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, I think any time after the prep phase, right? The prep phase is getting some cell function going, opening up downstream pathways. Any time after that I think is a great time. It even gives you time a month to switch your diet around. Then after that, there’s really no right or wrong time.

Meredith:
What do you think too about during the fast to maybe help the body out a little bit with removing the toxins? I know sometimes I try to add in dry brushing and maybe walking, Gentle Yoga. What about a colonic during a fast? What do you think? Would that be something good to do?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, great question. Look, again, the dry brushing, I think it’s fantastic. I think an Epsom salt bath can be helpful, but be careful with too hot of water. You don’t have the energy often times to adapt to real hot water. Coffee enemas, I would stick to the first three days, like the salt thing. Just let the body—let the innate intelligence roll. Just let it do its thing. Day four, day five, it’s just—you’re relying completely on the innate intelligence. Even a coffee enema can force the body to do something. Don’t force it, right, but the first three days, your body’s going through that adaptation. It might be a benefit to do it.

Meredith:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. What about children and the elderly? For those who are maybe just—those who are a little weaker or very young, how do you suggest incorporating fasting if they really need it?

Dr. Pompa:
In the United States, it’s not considered good practice to recommend a child to fast. However, my child fasted. He chose to. Simon fasted 12 days.

Meredith:
It has to be on their own volition, so to speak. They have to do that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, -inaudible-. In Europe, it’s more—it’s okay. They fast kids more often, so there you have it. I mean, of course, kids were forced to fast when the culture didn’t have food, right? Kids were able to fast, but it’s not cultural in this country to fast children.

Meredith:
With their young growing bodies, would they be missing out on vitamins and minerals and maybe get some nutrient deficiencies if they’re fasting?

Dr. Pompa:
Innate intelligence says no. It figures it out, honestly. I mean, that would be the logical thought process that, oh, of course, they need—nah. There’s still plenty of bad proteins for it to eat, and it figures it out and balances it. Again, because it’s not cultural in this country, I would shy away from it.

Meredith:
Mm-hmm. Right. I guess this is the same for the elderly as well. Of course, they can fast, even if they’re weak?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. You watch the elderly. When they start getting closer to that age, they’re fasting. I think at the seminar I showed a gentleman who was 146 years old. Remember [Gutman] or whatever? He wanted to die. He had been through six wives. He outlived his kids’ kids’ kids. I mean, that’s crazy right? I mean, it was like—this guy was like I don’t have any friends anymore. It’s like he’s ready to die.

What he did, he stopped eating. It allowed him to live longer. Then he would start eating again. The poor bastard kept fasting himself into living longer, but what happens in old age is they eat so little, right? I think I showed another woman who was 115, right, from Italy, and she was eating two eggs a day and some biscuits, right? It’s like they literally live longer because of—they automatically just lose appetite.

Meredith:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. The irony of that is very funny, great, great. All right, well, any other common questions, Dr. Pompa?

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, the most important of all. How do I break a fast?

Meredith:
Yes, of course, of course.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, right. Okay. Yeah. That’s a common question. Okay. How do I break the fast (slow and low)?

Here’s what I typically—just some guidelines. People love simple guidelines, right? Soft foods the first day, things like avocado. Steam your vegetables really good. Don’t eat raw, so don’t even eat salad. It’s a little harder to break down.

Meredith:
Blending them is helpful too, any of the veggies.

Dr. Pompa:
What’s that?

Meredith:
Blending them, like putting them in a blender, like a blended soup or stew.

Dr. Pompa:
Blending them, right, and the fermented veggies seems to do good too, right? It’s like they’re easier to digest. Fermented veggies, blended veggies, cooked, steamed veggies, avocado, some berries, I mean, all of those things are great. Oils, some avocado oil, olive oil, coconut oil, ghee, just little bits of oils to give you those fats, that’s a great first day. I would say this. Ladies, most of you, 500 calories first day back. Men about 800 calories so low calories, soft foods.

Day two, day two you can up that. Ladies go to 800, men maybe 1200. Just up your caloric uptake. You could now bring in some eggs into that, of course, all the same foods. Oh, we didn’t mention yogurts, right? That’s a good day one, some yogurt. Some fermented yogurt is perfect. Day two, you can bring in some seeds.

Meredith:
Smoothies.

Dr. Pompa:
I would stay away from nuts. What’s that?

Meredith:
Smoothies are great too.

Dr. Pompa:
Smoothies, yeah, still perfect on that but still no meat until the third day. The third day, then you can bring in—by the third day, you’re pretty much eating normal calories. Bringing in what you would normally eat, I would say. Just progress it along like that calorically and how you introduce the foods that are harder to digest, right? Don’t eat legumes the second day, big thing of grain or meat. Those things are a little harder to digest.

Meredith:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Very important to ease back in because you want to get all the benefits of the fast and feel good easing back into the food. I forgot this question too. This show is off the cuff for you guys, but we wanted to bring it to you. Are there better fasts for certain health conditions? We get that a lot. Especially with SIBO, there’s a lot of bone broth fasting talk with SIBO. I don’t know. Are there specific fasts that you would recommend for specific conditions?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, I think when you’re dealing with autoimmune, I mean, I love the regular water fast. You get the most autophagy, so you’re getting rid of a lot of bad cells that are hyper-reacting, right? It really has a strong impact on the gut. I think bone broth fasting is still really healing for the gut, right? People that have inflamed guts, I think the collagen in there can be really healing for them. SIBO does really well with bone fasts. I wouldn’t do whey water with SIBO.

For more severe gut conditions, I would stick to broth or water. Yeah. I mean, I think that the more serious, sensitive person, water does best because they’re not reacting. Some of our very sensitive people react to even bone broth, right? The very sensitive do better on the water. Yeah. I mean, those are conditions that I think apply to very specific fasts, but SIBO does good with water as well.

Meredith:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. We delve into bone broth fasting and whey water fasting I believe in Episode 76 and 77, if you want to check out any of those fasts where we really dive deeply into how to implement those. Then there have been some past episodes as well. If you go to podcast.drpompa.com and just search fasting in the tab, many different episodes have come up. We’ve interviewed Dr. Jason Fung who’s a fasting expert, some of the doctors who you coach. I know Dr. Derrick Dempsey, Dr. Don Clum. They have done extended water fasts. We’ve also delved into the ins and outs of long-term water fasting in those episodes if you want to check those out for more information.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is a definite how-to, right? I think it’s really important to get these questions answered, which many of these questions we hadn’t answered on those past shows, but those past shows will give you probably other bits of information that will bless you no doubt. I’ll say this just as a wrap-up. I’ll even speak for our group of doctors that are coached in cellular healing and detox. We could never help the people that we help if it weren’t for these block fasts, and I would say the same for the cellular detox. Putting it all together in a multi-therapeutic approach is magic. I mean, it really is, trusting the body’s innate intelligence. Remove the interference; the body will heal. Remove food and the body will heal.

The history of fasting, which we didn’t get into, I talked about it in my seminar. I went through study after study, but even the history alone, it is the oldest health modality known to man. It’s done by every religious practice. I mean, all the way back, as far as we can in the history in writing, it talks about fasting as a healing modality. I want to point this out. Not just physical but spiritual and emotional. They lift great depression, psychological problems. Fasting is amazing for all of it. That’s why fasting is mentioned more in the Bible than literally any other word. It is that common for a healing modality, so there you have it.

Meredith:
Yeah. Fasting is so, so powerful. Just on the spiritual end to, I know it’s amazing. If you’re going into this new year, if you’re seeking answers, if you’re seeking just guidance, or if you’re praying over a situation, it’s really incredible what fasting can do when you take that part out of our lives, food, which we think so much about. We’re spending so much time in the kitchen cooking and thinking about what we’re going to eat and then actually eating a meal. Food takes so much time up in our lives. It’s an amazing pleasure and joy that we get from this life, but when you remove it too, you have so much time to get quiet and think and really hear some answers if you’re seeking. It’s really, really powerful spiritually too just to bring it in your life as a regular practice.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s an amazing practice if you want to move something in somebody else’s life. As an example, I mean, biblically, it talks about that. My wife fasted for my son Daniel. I was only able to fast two days because I had a conference. I fasted two days, but my wife fasted five days. We have these people in Africa who pray for us, and they said, oh, you have to fast. Certain things you have to fast and pray, and the Bible talks about that, fast and pray. I even talked about that with Esther at my last seminar in the Bible. Fasting and praying, she did, and breakthrough, major breakthrough happened. It is a way. You fast for somebody, and I’m telling you, the ground can move.

Meredith:
That’s beautiful and beautiful way to end it. Thank you, Dr. Pompa, for your research, for just getting this information out on fasting. It’s changed my life so much, and so many people who watch this, the doctors, patients, who watch this and who are coached by those doctors, there’s really nothing like fasting to transform your life physically, mentally, spiritually. We encourage you to try it, to not be afraid but to be open. If you haven’t done a block fast before, just do it. Just try it. There’s no harm in trying it out, seeing what you do. Give us your feedback, your comments, woo, phone call. Let us know what your results are. Keep us posted. Thank you so much for walking—watching, and thank you, Dr. Pompa.

Dr. Pompa:
You got it.

Meredith:
All right, everybody, have a great weekend. We’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.

Print & Reader Version...

Transcript of Episode 200: We’re Celebrating!

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Meredith Dykstra

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra. Today we have a special guest, Dr. Dan Pompa, because he’s always a special guest.

You’ve got a special shirt on for the season. It is Christmas time. I don’t know when you’re watching the show, but it is the holiday season here now. You put a special shirt on for this show because we’re celebrating today Episode 200 for Cellular Healing TV. That is pretty amazing.

It has flown by. It’s been such a blessing for us to be a part of this show, to share this information with all of you. Because it’s Episode 200, we thought we’d bring you a little special segment where we’re going to count down the top five most popular topics on Cellular Healing TV in the past 200 episodes.

Dr. Pompa:
These are the topics that we get the most questions about. It’s really easy to pick them. I can’t wait for this show. It was funny, Meredith, she saw this shirt right when we came on. She said, “Isn’t that the shirt you wore at Cal Jam?” She was right. This was the party shirt.

They do a 60s party after Cal Jam. Cal Jam is California Jam. It’s a big chiropractic seminar. I’m usually a speaker there. They have the big 60s party. This was the shirt. You actually recognized it. That’s so funny.

Meredith:
It’s kind of an unforgettable shirt. That is a bold pattern with some bright colors. That’s not really a shirt that’s easy to forget.

Dr. Pompa:
No doubt about it. It’s my 60s Cal Jam shirt. I wore another one year. It’s black and white and has these swirly things. I thought it might too psychedelic for the camera. I like color. There’s hearts on here and everything.

Meredith:
I love the color, love the love, all the hearts. We’ve got nothing but love for all of you listening and watching. Today this show is for you guys because these are the most popular topics that you call in about and write questions about. This is it. We’re going to break it down. We’re going to share these top five subjects in celebration of 200 episodes.

Dr. Pompa:
I think because we get a lot of questions on it, just giving the most important parts, the highlights of each one of these subjects, I think people are going to gain a lot of benefit from this show. That’s the things that people can remember. That’s the benefit of this. I think this show’s going to give you that, the main points, the main highlights. Let’s do it.

Meredith:
We’re going to start with number five, and we’re going to do a countdown. Number five hot topic is emotional healing. We’ve done a number of episodes on this. We’ve talked about it a lot.

The past few episodes you can have for reference if you go to Podcast.DrPompa.com or Episode 102 where Phil Kaplan was the special guest. He’s a fitness guru. He’s awesome, and he talked about mindset for healing, which is so important. I know, Dr. Pompa, you talk a lot about chemical detox and we talk about physical detox, emotional detox. Those three types of detox are key for healing. Why is that?

Dr. Pompa:
This year was my search about the topic. I may have started a little bit before 2017, but knowing that we have to get rid of any stressor – the body doesn’t the difference between stressors, physical, chemical, or emotional. I’ve taught that for years. I’m not an expert over there. I would still not put myself there.

I’m definitely in the chemical part of this, but I understand how relevant it is, so much so that I see people that aren’t getting well. They’re not achieving their health goal. Oftentimes it’s a hidden emotional stress or hidden trauma. We’ve talked about these traumas. They can be stored in our DNA, in our cells.
Bruce Lipton, we’ve done some shows on him. Watch those shows too because he talked about how our thoughts, our emotions can cause cellular inflammation. We can also turn on bad genes with bad thoughts. Also, the opposite is true. We can also down regulate inflammation, change genetics for the better with our thoughts.

In the Phil Kaplan episode, I talked about chemical sensitivity in him as well and how we had to change our thoughts about chemicals, to literally change the pattern that was in our nervous system. The example that I always give is if a lion walks in the room, we have a neurological set up that we’re going to see a lion and think this could be death.

Meredith:
Fight or flight.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s going to release a lot of cortisol and adrenaline, and we get a certain feeling inside that lasts for hours. The same thing happens with people when they smell chemicals and different things. They get this reaction that’s neurologically set up, and it becomes a physiological reaction. We talked about how to break that.

You said that was 102, correct? In Episode 102 we talked about how to break that pattern and once I got rid of my chemicals, especially the chemicals in my brain, now that allowed me the ability to re-pattern that nervous system. Even once I got rid of the chemicals, I still had these patterns that when I would smell a chemical I would get the same physiological reaction. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t good even though I knew I was so much healthier.

That’s when I started having to learn that mindset and changing my thought patterns to change my neurological patterns. It’s called neuroplasty. It really is a big deal to healing. We have stored emotions. We have stored traumas.

We have to rewire our neurology around these things. Getting rid of these and uprooting these things, we even talked about different methods through the year. We talked about tapping. We talked about EMDR therapies. A lot of these shows we really didn’t narrow it down to one.

What we learned, Meredith, is it seemed like based on the response that we got back from people, certain ones were better for other people. The tapping didn’t help me, but this one sure did. That didn’t help me, but the tapping did.

My encouragement to everyone is this plays a factor in every one of is, emotional traumas, emotional healing. It’s part of all of us. No doubt, watch all of the shows that you can. You’ll figure out which one gravitates to you the most. That was our feedback throughout the year on that, I think.

Meredith:
Again, it goes along with the theme of variation as well. There’s so many different types and styles and tools that work for different people. If you search on the podcast site, you can search for the tapping episode. You can search for the emotion code episode, search for the EMDR episode, Bruce Lipton’s episode where he’s proven scientifically that our thoughts create cellular inflammation.

Also, I was thinking the neuro feedback, the TCD Clear is a wonderful way to help re-pattern irregular brainwave patterns as well to help our brains function properly. That’s a really cool tool as well. All of those episodes you can find on the podcast site. We understand the issue with wrong mindset for healing.

As you said, we’re never going to get to where we want to be. We can do all these perfect things with diet and lifestyle and supplements, but if our thoughts aren’t right, we’re never going to reach that ultimate goal. There’s some -inaudible- tools to help you.

Dr. Pompa:
We got so much feedback of how it really changed people’s lives. Each one was a little different for everybody. That was really neat because you and I were searching for the right answer. I’m always going what’s the best one? I interviewed these people, but as it turned out, it wasn’t the best one. It was the best one for the person. They all had a place.

Know that up front, that the TCD glasses, I use mine all the time. I did this show with those on. Flashing lights and certain sounds is an input into the thalamus. It’s a way of re-patterning.

It’s called neuroplasty of the brain. It’s new technology. Even the tapping, all these strategies, watch those shows. They’re big ones. What’s number four?

Meredith:
Number four, a topic near and dear to your heart, true cellular detox. This was Episode 76. It’s a big one.

Dr. Pompa:
I think I talk so much about this. You want to hit the major thing. Cellular detox, I hope because of our show, is really catching the ground. One of the takeaways is every time I have the opportunity to have a conversation with a scientist, cellular biologist, chemist, biochemist, they get the fact that real detox is at the cell. I think we’ve made it popular.

I just said on one of my doctor trainings today, I remember having a conversation with Martin Pall, who’s a brilliant biochemist who developed the NO/ONOO cycle. It’s a chronic inflammation feedback that makes people very sick. He saw my five Rs. He said, “Dr. Pompa, you’ve captured something here. This is the core of what’s going wrong, and you did it in such a simple way.”

The five Rs is really the core of cellular detox. It’s become a roadmap that we teach on how to get the cell working to detox itself. Real detox is about up regulating that. We can do colon cleanses and saunas and all these things that we’ve talked about on the show that matter, coffee enemas and good stuff. Ultimately, if we don’t get the cell detoxing, and the five Rs is a roadmap to do that, we’re not really detoxing. That’s the magic.

Of course, the system of true cellular detox is so relevant today. When we look at what’s happening with all of the chemical exposures from glyphosate all the way through heavy metals, we are being exposed in utero. I was asked to speak this year from big stages like Bulletproof about generational toxicity. We are being affected by our parents’ heavy metals like lead and mercury. We don’t think of it that way, but our generation is getting slammed by what our parents were exposed to in utero. We inherit it.

The gene is turned on, and in utero we’re getting the physical inheritance of mercury and lead. You saw, Meredith, because you sat through many of those lectures all the studies that showed this. Toxicity in utero is where it starts, and then it builds. The only real way to break this – and this is why people don’t feel well. This is why we have a surge in neurodegenerative disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, why people can’t lose weight, diabetes, thyroid conditions, chronic fatigue, all the symptoms that people don’t want. This is a toxic issue.

True cellular detox is the answer. Again, I always say we don’t have all the answers, but it’s the answer. Part of this process is grabbing toxins, that toxic biocomplex that’s happening in the liver because the toxins make their way into the bile, and it’s dumped into the gut. Ninety-five percent of the bile is reabsorbed back to the liver, and it brings the toxins around.

Part of true cellular is up regulating self-function, but also using true binders to grab this biocomplex. It’s why our digestion is compromised. Most people out there that have bad digestion and can’t fix it, it is this toxic biocomplex that’s just running its cycle; heartburn, irritable bowel. I can go through the list. Understanding that we have to up regulate cell function, that’s detox, but saying that we have to pull the toxins out of that biocomplex, all of that together is what makes up true cellular detox and using real binders.

Cellular detox caught wind this year with everybody. Using cellular detox to bring the toxins from the cell to pathways like the liver and grabbing these in the gut and making sure it goes all the way out, that process has saved so many lives. At the last seminar, Meredith, in Carlsbad, we had 300 doctors there. The testimonies that were given by some of the doctors, practitioners in the room of how true cellular detox saved their lives and why they were in the room – we have the gentleman that was there, he was addicted to prescription pain meds. Suboxone is the hardest one to come off of because of its half life in the body is so long.

True cellular detox was how he did it, and he gave that testimony. I thought it was amazing. There was another doctor there who gave her testimony of how her adrenal fatigue led to her being put on Cortef. Again, almost impossible for people to come off of, and how her life was changing because of true cellular detox.

This year has been a big groundbreaker or tipping point, if you will, for true cellular detox and the science around it. The biochemists now that support this, the doctors who are supporting it, I think that was a huge tipping point for true cellular detox this year. The generational toxicity has been a big part of why we need this so much. Definitely near and dear to my heart.

Meredith:
The generational toxicity component really puts everything into perspective as well. Is that better now?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I can hear you fine.

Meredith:
I think the challenge with it is that it’s not a simple process. Many people want a colon cleanse, want something really simple, the chlorella, the foot bath to detox. I love that you say it’s real detox because it is complicated. It’s not so simple.

That’s what makes it so powerful. It’s so important. The generational toxicity perspective is key. I think it really helps people understand why they’re suffering.

Dr. Pompa:
We have coaches. We have practitioners around the country. Most people that have these challenges, you need a coach, the dosing, the cycle lengths. Our goal is always to teach people that process of learning it themselves so they can do it long enough to actually matter.

I know we’ve already impact this country in some fashion. Hopefully, we’ll have an even greater impact in the year to come. We’ll pray for that. What’s number three?

Meredith:
Number three, huge topic that you’ve been talking about since the beginning of Cellular Healing TV. It is fasting. If you go to Podcast.DrPompa.com and just type in fasting, a plethora of shows, many hours’ worth of episodes you can sit and listen to and watch to learn more about fasting. Dr. Pompa, you’ve been talking about this for a long time. Fasting has become cool lately.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s so true. I was trained in water fasting years ago. We did bone broth fasting, whey water fasting. All of those are still relevant and amazing. It’s just now got leverage.

Jason Fung helped out with that with his book, The Complete Guide to Fasting. Longo, who we’re going to get on the show in the new year to come, I know he is doing all these amazing studies. It’s now in vogue. Years ago it was like I’m not sure why this works so well. We had different ideas, but the science now is showing that this is why fasting changes lives.

I would say, and I know our doctors watching this would agree, the conditions that we would see we would never be able to get well without cellular detox and fasting. It is such a tool. It’s such an undervalued tool. I’m happy that we were part of making this the utmost ancient healing modality. It really is used by every culture and every religious group.

When we look at the science around it, the 2016 Nobel Prize winner won it for a word called autophagy, which simply means during a fast the body gets rid of the bad stuff first. That’s something that we’ve known for years, but now scientifically we see why it’s happening. Not only that, in that process of getting rid of all the bad stuff, it raises up stem cells to create new cells. Now we go that’s why the immune system gets this bolster. That’s why it can down regulate autoimmune. That’s why the body all of a sudden can actually grow better muscle and tissues because you got rid of the bad.

Now you raise up stem cells and go I feel like I have new joints; you do. My immune system is much better; it is. My hair is better. Yeah, you got rid of bad proteins, and now you’ve actually created new ones. Remember, your hormones are proteins. Your hair is protein, skin is protein. When you’re getting rid of bad ones with new via the rise in stem cells, magic happens. I’ll tell you, wait until 2018 because we’re going to be bringing on some of these scientists who are doing some of this research that we’ve been teaching about. You will always be kept up to speed with the newest research about fasting.

I think, Meredith, intermittent fasting really caught wind. I think all of our viewers, most of them intermittent fast in some form or another. I made this term popular; don’t eat less, eat less often. That’s really the key about intermittent fasting. I think the block fasting is going to be the surge. If intermittent fasting was the surge in 2017, I think block fasting will the surge in 2018. We’re going to focus on that for sure.

Meredith:
2018 predictions, I like it. Block fasting is so magical. You were the one who taught me all about that, Dr. Pompa. Intermittent fasting to me is a lifestyle. I don’t even think about it, it’s so natural. When I see people eat many times a day, I’m just like that’s crazy. I used to do that as well.

Now once we’ve retrained our body to shift over to a fat burning mode, we don’t need to rely on those exogenous forms of glucose and carbohydrates for fuel. It’s such amazing freedom, but the block fasting for me personally is where the magic has happened as well. It goes back to number two because spiritually and emotionally what can happen during a fast can be really incredible and life changing as well. You get so many different benefits, physical and emotional, from fasting.

Dr. Pompa:
I think we made it popular doing these shorter block fasts, four or five days, multiple times. We as a group of doctors have watched the magic of that. Being able to work with Fung and Seyfried and others about this, we have the largest clinical group of practitioners doing these fasts and getting clinical data back going this is working. Even partial fasting, what we’ve done with that.

I think going back, if you put in the search fasting, you’re going to see all these shows. If you haven’t done this, if you have challenges, supervised fast. I want to make it clear that I believe a supervised fast is the way to go, especially when you put it in conjunction with our multi-therapeutic approach, the cellular detox, the cellular healing with some of these ancient healing strategies like ketosis, the fasting, diet variation, all these things we’ve made popular.

I think when you look at block fasting, let me hit some of the main things that happen. When we look at what happens in a short fast, even something like a 24-hour fast, 30-hour fast, we have some autophagy happening where your body is getting rid of the bad cells. That’s even been shown in 15-hour fasts. Just fasting overnight, missing breakfast, you’re getting some autophagy where your body gets rid of bad stuff. You’re getting hormone optimization.

Your cells become more hormone sensitive. You get a growth hormone rise. You get that in a shorter fast, but when you fast longer, you get the stem cell reaction that starts taking place. I believe it starts happening mostly around day three. I always say that’s where the magic starts to happen. You completely shift over.

You get this massive rise in ketones that you’re not going to get on a shorter intermittent fast. You get this massive rise in ketones, which get high enough to where we know it’s healing for the brain. It turns off bad genes, down regulates inflammation, changes your microbiome. Also, not eating for at least three days, your body starts to use fat as a primary energy source, which burns cleaner. It rests your digestion. It changes and resets your microbiome.

Once you get into day four and ride that out even one more day to day five, you get this massive stem cell rise where your body is getting new white blood cells. It’s getting rid of those hyper cells that are causing food allergies and autoimmune and over reactivity, which drives inflammation, which is why most people don’t feel well. When you fast, your body is getting rid of those cells. It raises up the stem cell and creates new ones that aren’t as reactive.

Longo in his work calls those more naive. They’re not just running around creating inflammation. All of those things kind of differentiate why doing a block fast versus just intermittent fasting daily, you get more benefits of these things.
Seyfried said just one fast a year, one block fast a year decreases your cancer rates up by 95% because you’re getting rid of all those bad mitochondria. That’s where the cancer forms. Block fasting is transformative for people. It really is. We’re going to focus more on it this year.

Meredith:
Stay tuned, everybody. Number two is the ketogenic diet. Boy, do we get a lot of calls and questions on this. Episode 32, we delved into it way back when. I think that was my first ever episode.

Then 104 and 105, we dug into it. It comes up on so many shows. We get so many questions about it. Ketogenic diet has become quite popular. It really became mainstream this year as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Again, totally mainstream. It’s amazing. I just did a summit with a gentleman who’s doing a ketosis summit. He said, “Dr. Pompa, you were my mentor for years. I think back about ketosis and these topics, and you’re the first person who I think was making this stuff popular back then.” I appreciated that.

I have been talking about this a long time, so much so that it became boring because I didn’t think anyone cared or was listening. Fat adaption, I loved the subject years and years ago. I always talked about the fat and how important it was.

Dominic D’Agostino, I take my hat off to him. I mentioned Thomas Seyfried. He wrote the book, Cancer is a Metabolic Disease. D’Agostino we’ve interviewed on the show a few times. I think some episodes in the 70s with Dominic. He’s doing some of the research with the defense department. I think he’s a big reason ketosis really caught popularity again.

I said this at the seminar. I said caution; my crystal ball prediction about ketosis is it’ll be around for five years in popularity, and then it’s going to be the next thing. That doesn’t make it bad. It’s just the way the things cycle. It will be the next thing.
It was vegan diets, it was vegetarian, it was Paleo. These things kind of cycle around. I will say this; I’m not a believer in keeping people in ketosis all the time, which we’ll talk a little bit more about. I am a believer in it. It’s a very amazing tool.

Ketones do down regulate inflammation. Ketones can reset the microbiome. Ketones do burn very clean. The brain loves ketones. We know it does magic in the brain that we haven’t even figured out yet. It can remake neuro connections.

It bypasses the brain’s inability to use glucose because we burned out a lot of the glucose with insulin receptors because we eat too much sugar in our diet as Americans. Ketones have the ability to go around that and fix the pathways. We’ve learned a lot about why ketosis is healing. Our ancestors didn’t stay in ketosis.

Even the Eskimos who you would think did; actually, they didn’t. They would break out of ketosis the moment they had other carbohydrates. They went for it. They’re human. Throw Snickers bars on the ground, and they’re going to find them and go dang, these are good. It might ruin their health.

The point is this, humans will seasonally shift out of ketosis. They’ll be forced back into ketosis. We know that it resets the DNA. It resets the microbiome. We know that being forced into times of ketosis, there’s magic that happens just like in a fast.

They used to call it the fasting mimicking diet because you get a lot of the benefits in ketosis that you do in a fast. When you do fasting and ketosis together, look out. Now we have something again, ancient healing strategy here.

Meredith:
A lot of magic there. Just one critique I have of the ketogenic diet, which I know you do as well. If you look online and check out a lot of the websites, I’ve had friends I’ve seen on social media who are very into the ketogenic diet because it’s mainstream and it’s a great way to lose weight, which is the number one reason why most people are doing it. Some of the websites out there do not specify the importance of organic and grass-fed animal foods when you’re eating them. A lot of the keto recipes out there just say full-fat cream cheese. Some of them say to use more toxic sweeteners like NutraSweet or some of those chemical sweeteners out there that we know are toxic to our cells.

There’s definitely some caution there that we need to take with the keto diet as well when you’re searching for recipes and experimenting with it. You really want to be very careful with any kind of animal products, proteins, dairy, and meats that you’re eating, that they’re organic and grass fed whenever possible and using healthy sweeteners as well. Stevia, non GMO Xylitol can be helpful, a little bit of raw honey, maple syrup once in a while. You can use those as well on a healthy ketogenic diet, especially after you’ve been keto adapted and you’re in that fat burning.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s great advice because eating toxic dairy products, conventional dairy products, which people will gravitate to that, conventional grain-fed meat, those are very toxic things. You could make something potentially good really toxic really fast. By the way, we did a little study with Joe Mercola throughout the year. We took some of our doctors, one of which was on a vegan diet and successfully went into ketosis. We can think about that. It can still be a very plant-based diet. Ketosis can be done many different ways.

Let just hit some of the pitfalls. I’ve got emails, I can’t get into ketosis. Those are typically toxic people. Toxicity plays a major role. I know a lot of people struggle not just to get into ketosis, but they don’t lose weight on ketosis. Again, in very toxic people that can be the case. They get into ketosis and yet they seem not to be able to lose weight.

We always put out restriction is a big part of it. Doing ketosis with intermittent fasting is very important because when people go into ketosis, when you start using fat as energy, you release something called cholecystokinin, which diminished appetite normally. You end up eating less not because you’re pushing food away, but you’re full. Therefore, that ends up in weight loss.

Seyfried and many others pointed out that if you don’t get that food restriction, caloric restriction, it happens naturally, not because you’re trying to eat less. You don’t get the results of the ketones, you also don’t lose weight, and tumors don’t shrink. By doing intermittent fasting with it, you’re automatically eating less by eating less often. You get the restriction with the ketosis, and that can be a real help for weight loss.

Another pitfall is electrolytes. A lot of people the first month or two, you lose a lot of electrolytes because you’re losing glycogen. The electrolyte depletion, potassium, magnesium, calcium can cause some muscle loss and even energy loss, not feeling well. Always pay attention to that. Those are some pitfalls about ketosis. Again, watch the shows. There’s many.

Meredith:
A lot of key pitfalls. Don’t just give up. If you’ve been trying the ketogenic diet, think about some of the suggestions and tools that we’ve just offered and play around with it. Adding in that restriction is such a game changer.

We had number five, emotional healing. I was going to go back and do a little review before we do the drum roll for number one, which number two leads beautifully into number one. I was looking at all of them as well, just a beautiful part of your multi-therapeutic approach, Dr. Pompa.

We started the episode with number five, emotional healing, and the importance of getting our minds right for healing and having that healing miracle mindset. I think number five is so key. It’s a hugely popular topic. Number four, true cellular detox, what we talk about a lot on this show. It’s a key component to getting results with any program.

Number three, fasting. There’s so many different episodes and tons of research and resources on fasting. If you want to incorporate fasting into your life, definitely check out all of our resources. Number two, we just talked about the ketogenic diet.

Without any further adieu, number one is diet variation. We get a lot of questions on this. It was Episode 157 where we really dug into the concept of it, explaining it, and its implementation. In case people haven’t watched that episode, which definitely I recommend checking out, what is it and why should we care?

Dr. Pompa:
It was hard for me not to talk about fasting and ketosis and not talk about diet variation. I pulled back because I didn’t want to tip my hand. It is an ancient healing strategy. When we think about eat different foods, that’s kind of it, but it’s so much deeper than that. It really is feast/famine cycles and utilizing this.

Let’s talk about ketosis. One of the pitfalls is people go low carb or ketosis for a long time. The body eventually goes if I’m only using fat as an energy source because remember, cells can use sugar and fat, so in ketosis we’re forcing the cells to use fat as its major energy. Eventually it goes I feel like I could potentially be starving. I’m going to hold onto this fat fuel.

It starts to burn less of it where it becomes more efficient at utilizing it. Now it says I’m going to hold on, and it does it by blunting insulin receptors so you hold onto more fat. It can plug fat cells up with water. It does a lot of clever strategies.

What I noted years ago is the body builders know if you do carb days every once in awhile, you kicked in fat burning again. Why? It reminded the body you’re not starving. You have plenty. We’ll start burning fat again.

That’s a principle of throwing in one or two carb days or even feast days, higher calories, higher protein. It just reminds the body it’s not in a starvation mode. It breaks that pattern that it’s set up to hold onto its fat, and you start to become a fat burner again.

It goes far beyond that. We know that people with hormone conditions, adrenal issues, thyroid conditions, they don’t do well in ketosis. They can’t intermittent fast or fast. The truth is they can, but they have to understand diet variation. Throwing in carb days just does hormonal magic.

We know that elevating glucose and insulin, you need insulin to make certain hormone conversions. You need insulin to actually help estrogen work, take thyroid hormone from T4 to T3. You need insulin for those. If you’re chronically low carbohydrates, you’re chronically low insulin, you can actually affect those hormones. These days where we throw in the feast, it just works magic with the hormones, hormone optimization. Then we even take it a step further to do diet variation monthly.

Monthly is where we realize that – ladies, you’re a great example. You can get cravings the week before your period or maybe the week of your period. We said why don’t we listen to those cravings? Let’s give the body the chocolate that it wants. Let’s give it the carbs that it’s desiring.

Low and behold, we took one week before the period or the week of the period and did high carbs. Boom, magic happened. Now all of a sudden ketosis or whatever you’re doing the rest of the month, total magic.

Meredith:
Why do we have those cravings during our cycle or before our cycle?

Dr. Pompa:
I think because the body is so intelligent that it knows it needs them to make these hormone conversions. It needs to use estrogen more wisely. Guess what? Insulin helps that process of estrogen. It helps the utilization of estrogen. Insulin does that.

I think thyroid hormone gets more pressure around that time. If your thyroid is already struggling, then the low insulin can be a factor. You need insulin to convert your stored thyroid hormone, T4, to the active T3. There’s a greater need for that hormone during that time.

Guess what? The body’s intelligent enough to say please eat some carbs. I need this conversion. It’s following the body’s innate intelligence. That’s it.

Then there’s seasonal diet variation where we talked about fasting once or twice a year or maybe even monthly for people who have greater challenges. Those are ancient healing strategies. We have times where we move into ketosis. Maybe it’s in the heart of winter when people were forced into ketosis.

Then summer, spring comes, we have different foods now. You have all your greens that start to grow. I think our microbiome adjusts to that, and now we start making more enzymes that need the greens outside. Eating the greens and moving out of ketosis, now we have a focus on some of the fruits coming in, which would tend to move people out of ketosis.

What happens at the end of summer, we start getting the grains that start coming, storing up for winter. We can move out of ketosis again and get ready for winter where we can move back in. The point is, seasonally it is very important to change your diet and not just stay in ketosis or low carb. Stay healthy, but healthy higher carb, healthy higher plant-based, fruit-based diets in the summer or spring, moving that around.

Diet variation weekly, monthly, and seasonally, I believe there’s magic to it. Science keeps showing that we’re right on this. There’s not one diet. I think there’s room for all of them.

Meredith:
It makes such sense from more of a primal perspective as well why this works so well. It’s not new science, it’s understanding and applying it in a new way once we’ve untrained ourselves from all these cultural believes that haven’t been serving us for a long time.

Dr. Pompa:
Even the debate over grain and gluten, we’ve said it’s not just gluten. That’s always been our argument. It’s bad digestion, toxins that really are causing the leaky gut, some of the problems with gluten. When you look at cultures, we have a culture where we’re eating grain all year round. That’s bad. That’s going to lead to obesity and other things all the time.

If we look at ancient cultures, they ate it when it got harvested in the fall. Now we develop wheat where we can harvest it twice a year, but it was just once a year in the fall heading into winter. Ironically enough, that seasonal change that I talked about, the sun position, changed the microbiome. We start producing an enzyme called amylase in a much greater amount, and it gives us more of an ability to break down these hard proteins that can be hard for people with poor digestion to break down like gluten. There’s a time to eat that. All of those arguments are diet variation.

Meredith:
Just the variation principle in general applies to so many things. It’s not just food, but we have fasting variation, we have detox variation. It’s being able to apply it in a strategic way where it’s most effective is really where the magic starts to happen.

Dr. Pompa:
Exercise is a great point, Meredith. We know if you go into the gym and do the same exercise every time, the same routine every time, after awhile you see no results. In the beginning you saw results, but then it’s the same thing. You’re not getting results. The moment you switch something, all of a sudden you get results again.

It’s because the new stressor, the new exercise forces adaptation. Adaptation makes the body better. The same with diet. The moment you shift your diet again, all of a sudden it goes I feel better on this diet.

It’s not the diet. Now you’re making your body adapt again and all these amazing hormone changes occur. That adaptation process, your microbiome gets stronger and better. There’s no doubt humans are meant to shift their diet. The problem today is we don’t have to shift our diet. We can stay on the same diet year round, but I believe it’s creating health problems.

Using the strategies of weekly variation, feast/famine cycles – some examples there, instead of just a feast day a week, add a couple fast days in a week where you don’t eat a day. Go 36 hours or maybe 24 hours, feast/famine cycles. Our ancestors were forced to do it. Once or twice a week we don’t have as much food. Watch what happens with that as well.

Meredith:
Just mimicking nature, brilliant. Those five topics, I’m sure a lot of you are going to be excited to hear about because we get so much conversation and dialogue around these. Please share this episode with your friends and family because these are such key concepts for all of us to understand to really optimize our cellular health and to live our best lives. Thank you, Dr. Pompa, for helping to bring these topics to the world.

Dr. Pompa:
I want to thank our viewers and our fans and listeners. We’ve been able to impact many. It’s because you all do share the shows and tell your friends about us. Thank you.

I know that we have a message that’s real and it’s different. It’s part of an answer to a world that needs this, that has a lot of health problems. If we’re going to change the world, health has got to be a part of it. Thank you all.

Meredith:
Amen. Thanks so much for watching. We will see you next time. Have a great weekend. Bye-bye.

Print & Reader Version...

Transcript of Episode 199: Is Generational Toxicity Real?

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Dr. Michael Skinner

Meredith Dykstra:
Hello everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra and this is episode 199. We have our resident Cellular Healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa on the line. Today, we welcome very special guest, Dr. Michael Skinner. Dr. Skinner has been doing some very interesting research on something Dr. Pompa talks about a lot on this show, generational toxicity, which actually Dr. Skinner calls epigenetic transgenerational inheritance, so another name. He’s bringing some really, really interesting research to the forefront to bring this information to people who really need to know it because it can really have major effects on our lives, but help us to live better lives as well when we talk about some of the solutions.

Before we jump in, let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Skinner. Dr. Michael Skinner is a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Washington State University. He did his BS in chemistry at Reed College in Portland, Oregon; his Ph.D. in biochemistry at Washington State University; and his post-doctoral fellowship at the CH Best Institute at the University of Toronto. He’s been on the faculty at Vanderbilt University and the University of California at San Francisco.

Dr. Skinner’s research is focused on the investigation of gonadal growth and differentiation with emphasis in the area of reproductive biology. His current research has demonstrated the ability of environmental toxicants to promote the epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of disease phenotypes due to abnormal germline epigenetic programming in gonadal development. Dr. Skinner has over 250 peer-reviewed publications and has given of 260 invited symposia plenary lectures in university seminars. His research has been highlighted on BBC, PBS, and Smithsonian documentaries, and selected as one of the top 100 discoveries in 2005, and 2007 by Discover. In 2013, he received the American Ingenuity Award from the Smithsonian. Dr. Skinner has served on numerous journal editorial boards and as an officer for several scientific societies. In addition, Dr. Skinner’s been actively involved with the startup of several biotech companies. A very impressive resume Dr. Skinner. We’re so excited to have you on Cellular Healing TV to share your research.

Dr. Skinner:
Thanks very much. I appreciate the -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s quite the resume. I sure appreciate your work because it really has been something I’ve been speaking about for many years. In 2017, I have been blessed to go on the road even in the public and talk about this problem of toxicity. Like you, I’ve made a lot of enemies in the chemical world. I don’t think they like our message too much. I’m not the science guy. I take your studies and others, and I present them showing people a problem that really, again, it’s a generational problem. The title of my talk this year, as Meredith will tell you, it’s been generation toxicity. I talk about how we’re inheriting physical toxins from our mom in utero. The number of silver fillings that she has in, the [Jurass] study showed how much mercury is in the baby’s brain in utero, the amount of lead she has carries on physically to the baby. However, the second part, and potentially the bigger issue is that the toxins are turning on genes that get transferred from mom and dad, and those genes are turned on. Talk about that because those are the studies. Transgenerational epigenetics, what is it? How is it affecting us and why should we care?

Dr. Skinner:
Sure. Alright, so the classic concept for inheritance that’s developed over the past 100 years is that your DNA sequence, it’s passed from generation to generation. That’s what creates the traits you have, the characteristics, what kind of diseases you might develop and so forth. All of that is DNA sequence based. Essentially, the only cell that’s going to transfer anything from one generation to the next is your germ cell, your egg or your sperm. It’s going to transfer this DNA to the next generation.

About 15, 20 years ago, what we found was that there’s another source of inheritance called epigenetic inheritance, where it’s in addition to the DNA sequence. It’s these molecular factors that are around the DNA, chemical modification of the DNA that also get transferred from generation to generation. This is called epigenetic inheritance. It is probably equally as important in transmitting phenotypes, and disease susceptibility, and all sorts of things to the next generation as genetic inheritance, which is just your DNA sequence. Essentially, it’s a non-genetic form of inheritance. It’s called epigenetic inheritance.

It turns out, in contrast to DNA sequence, which environmental factors really can’t change DNA sequence very easily. In fact, vast majority of environmental—or exposures and chemicals cannot change that. However, the epigenetics, the DNA methylation, these small methyl groups that are attached to DNA or the non-coding RNAs. There’s a number of different types. They can actually get dramatically modified by these environmental stressors or signals. During development of the individual, both early on and then later on, if the germ cell develops an altered epigenetics, that gets transferred to the next generation, gets programmed, and that one gets transferred to the next generation, and slowly this becomes going forward. Just to clarify, in plants we’ve actually demonstrated, or other people have demonstrated that an environmental exposure of heat can alter an epigenetic programming of a germline in the plant that gets passed for 100 generations.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow.

Dr. Skinner:
In insects, it will go for 15 to 100 generations depending on the insect you’re looking at. In humans, and rodents, and things that we study, we’ve actually taken it out about 10 generations and we don’t see a decline. This is a long-term effect generationally. This is a new form of inheritance. The difference is environmental exposures and environmental chemicals like toxicants can have a significant impact to promote these epigenetic inheritance phenomena.

Dr. Pompa:
I had the opportunity to go to Flint, Michigan. I was teaching the doctors the right way to get lead out of the body. It was very frustrating for me because what I was up against was them seeing lead in blood, and then they’d fix the water issue. Then they didn’t see lead in blood anymore. My point was okay, the problem is two-fold. Number one, what’s bioaccumulated in the tissues? Number two, what genes were already triggered? Unfortunately, and we know that Flint—there’s many Flint, Michigans around the country right now. These kids, whether it’s ADD, ADHD, all these different conditions that were now triggered, it’s not just going to affect that generation. We’re affecting multiple generations. I’m just bringing that home. We’re being exposed to so many different toxins today. Your point is yes, we as a generation are being exposed, but now these future generations are going to have conditions and things that are turned on genetically whether it’s a psychological thing, bipolar, maybe diabetes. It’s endless, is that correct or are there specific diseases or conditions?

Dr. Skinner:
No, essentially, if you think about this, all tissues are affected. For example, let’s say your germ cell, your egg or sperm, gets passed to your offspring in the early embryo when the sperm and the egg come together. Then it creates what’s called embryonic stem cell after that, which then generates all the different cell types in the body. If the germline is passing forward an epigenetic shift that then changes the epigenetics of the stem cell, every single cell that develops from that stem cell early embryo, whether it be your brain cell, your bones, whatever else, all the cell types are actually affected. We’ll have a shift in their epigenome, and a shift in their gene expression, what genes are on and off. That’ll change the phenotypes and disease susceptibility of your offspring later in life. Then if it’s programmed into the germline, when that individual that your offspring grows up to becomes an adult, reproduces, has your great-grandchildren, it gets passed to your great-grandchildren. When they grow up, it goes to your great-great-grandchildren. It keeps going in your germline being passed, so that’s the transgenerational effect. This is not just for the generation exposed. This can go for all generations to come.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, I think one of the frustrating things is most doctors today are still functioning from an old paradigm or at least an old dogma of well you have diabetes because your father had it, thinking it’s the inheritance of the gene, not the epigenetics. Most doctors, really they don’t know the science. They may have heard the words, but they don’t really get the fact that we have the ability to turn on and turn off these genes. It wasn’t just your doomed because your mother had diabetes and now you have it. It doesn’t work that way. This is a gene that was triggered, typically by a stressor of some sort, and mostly I see the chemicals that we’re being exposed to. Are there other stressors that you see that can turn on these genes?

Dr. Skinner:
Oh, yeah. The number over the past—Our initial ones we showed the phenomena with were environmental toxicants chemicals. Since then, there’s now dozens of other labs that have found other things. It depends on the organism, but for plants, it’s drought and heat; for humans or mammals, your diet. What you eat is your largest exposure every day. What you take in in your diet and what you drink is basically your biggest exposure. Essentially, there’s lots of stuff your taking in through your diet. The other thing is, basically, it’s environmental chemicals. Things we breathe or just touch and basically get exposed to. Another major one that’s been found over the past five, six years now is stress. Your stress, either maternal stress, fetal stress, early and postnatal stress, pubertal stress, all of these stressors can then actually influence this process as well. Essentially, everything we have around us, including our stressful situation can be involved as well.

Dr. Pompa:
I remember the video. I thought it was well done. It was a study at Duke University. They took two groups of identical twin mice, so exact same DNA, separated them. They feed them the same, same environments, same stressors, nothing different. They exposed one group to a toxin. It triggered the agouti gene. They became obese with some other conditions. Now, I think what they showed in this study was is the next generation that was born with that gene turned on. They became obese without any dietary changes. The one group didn’t. It proves what you’re saying. In that study, they actually did some things with methylation and they turned off the gene. Talk about this because right now we’ve doom and gloom. We’ve presented that you’re not only what you eat, you’re what your grandparents ate, and what they did, and what they were exposed to, and you don’t feel well because possibly of what’s been turned on in them. Can we turn these genes off and what are some of the strategies? This is a lot of what I teach, but I want to hear what you have to say.

Dr. Skinner:
What the Duke University, Randy Jirtle’s group showed was yes, you could alter it with the environmental toxicant, which is phytoestrogen that was actually promoting this, if you put folate in during the exposure, which is a vitamin basically, a supplement. Essentially folate would suppress the ability of the genistein to actually promote the transgenerational or the next generational effects. What that suggests is your nutrition, supplements, and things like that will be very critical to suppress your response to an environmental stressor that may influence you and potentially your germline of future generations.

What we have found more recently though is once the generation gets defected, and you go forward a couple generations, and it’s programmed, those supplements that have negligible effects to actually change that. Therefore, we’re not able to—It’s really during the actual exposures that that’s the critical thing. Once it programmed, it’s programmed, and you really can’t reverse it per se. We’re not aware of any way to do that at this point, and on a molecular level, we also can’t really fix it. It is doom and gloom, but it turns out by knowing that these phenomena exist, what we’re right in the process of doing is showing that we can identify epigenetic biomarkers. We can actually map on your genome, on your DNA sequence, where these methylation marks are. We can use those marks to diagnose specific diseases, to diagnose whether you’re susceptible to get this as you get older, whether you’re going to have these characteristics potentially going forward. We can use those things as diagnostics to then put in place a preventative strategy, whether it be through diet and supplementation, lifestyle changes to then basically delay the onset or suppress the onset of the disease later in life.

We also know there’s a series of therapeutics like Tamoxifen with breast cancer can be used to suppress or delay the onset of the breast cancer by a significant amount of time. The problem today is we don’t know which women that are potentially going to get breast cancer, to give the Tamoxifen to because they don’t have it yet. If we know from the epigenetic marks that they had a susceptibility they were going to get it, we could give them Tamoxifen for a period of time, which would delay the onset 10, 20, 30 years. Essentially, I think we won’t be able to necessarily fix it, but we definitely will be able to treat it through a variety of lifestyle changes, potential therapeutics and so forth going forward.

Dr. Pompa:
We have a large and growing doctor group where we do a lot of these things. We get the epigenetic component. Through some more dramatic I would say dietary things, feast/famine cycles, emulating what our ancestors were forced to do. We see dramatic changes, which we know are affecting the epigenome. More so than like you said just giving the one nutrient so to speak. When we do these feast/famine cycles and fasting and different things, we have a dramatic effect on stem cells and the epigenome. My work, which I call True Cellular Detox or taking the toxins out; it’s working. Like you said, there is hope beyond that. I have to ask this question. The testing that you mentioned is this different? Who has access to this testing? The SNIP testing became popular for a while, but we realized epigenetics was going around a lot of the SNIPs. Where can you get this testing and really what kind of testing is it because people are thinking the ancestral testing, the 23 and Me, they’re thinking SNIP testing? Define that a little bit.

Dr. Skinner:
I think right now we’re at the early stages of research to show the presence of these epigenetic signatures that are associated with disease, both in animal models and now we’re moving to humans and then validating these signatures. I think eventually probably with within the next five years, you’re going to see a number of companies come up like 23 and Me, but they will be mapping the epigenome instead of the DNA sequence. What we’re starting to find is there may be a finite number, maybe it seems like a large number, but it’d be 40 or 50,000 sites in your genome that are sensitive to these shifts. We can actually analyze them. If you have this set, you go with this disease. Where if you have this set, you’re going to go with this disease susceptibility, or you’re going to have these—so we think we’ll be able to actually get to that place hopefully within the next five years. It would be more of a publicly available so that medical community could use it to help diagnose and manage it’s -inaudible- better, but it’s not available today.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean I knew that was the answer. When the SNIP testing started, and just to give people a relevance what I’m talking about is the MTHFR genotype, where the I don’t methylate well. All of this SNIP testing became popular. I, like many, jumped on the bandwagon; was very excited about it so I studied. Then I brought it into the clinical world and realized this is not holding up like I thought it was. It’s not as clean as we thought. Oh, you have this SNIP. You have this genetic type. Then this is going to be the treatment or the outcome. Didn’t work out and I believe epigenetics is a big reason why some of these SNIPs aren’t as clean as we thought. Am I right on that?

Dr. Skinner:
Not necessarily; to a degree you’re right. The way to look at it is this. In 2000, when we sequenced the human genome sequence, the prediction was that we could sequence your DNA, and from looking at mutations, we would diagnose what disease you were going to get, all this stuff. For the past 18, 17 years, we’ve been doing that. Literally, it’s the most expensive—we put more money into that than any other area of science. NIH funds, probably 90% of everything it funds through the National Institute of Health, is to do genetics and this type of thing. They’ve been doing it for quite a while. They’ve done every single disease you can think about, neurodegenerative, every disease you want to think about.

Across the board, most of the diseases do, not all but most of the diseases do have a mutation like the SNIP or something that they find. The problem is that all across the board, it’s in less than one percent of the people that have the disease. If you have 100 breast cancer patients, and you have these SNIPs, or prostate cancer, or whatever, you’re going to have 1 out of 100 with the association. The other 99% don’t have any correlated mutations. It was a useful exercise. It shows that genetics is involved, but it’s not the mainstream.

Now, when we do an epigenetics analysis on a population with disease, we see 90% or plus that actually have these epigenetic shifts. It’s not a minor thing; it’s the majority of the population. That’s going to be the switch on why the genetic testing didn’t really come through as much as we thought. I think epigenetics is actually going to do it because we do see it across the board. It’s the driver basically.

Dr. Pompa:
I couldn’t agree more. Yeah, I mean because clinically the SNIPs really wasn’t what we thought. I believe the epigenetic testing will be what really matters. Again, you’re the expert here. That’s just my opinion clinically.

Dr. Skinner:
Just to clarify, I think what this does, it opens up this whole area of preventative medicine. In other words, there’s a reason you have a susceptibility to get breast cancer when you’re in your 50s and 60s. More than likely, it was an early life exposure or an ancestral exposure that actually promoted this, and you have this shift in your epigenome. If we can diagnose that, and we have therapeutics and lifestyle changes, and so forth that you can do in your 30s or late 20s to actually then prevent this from developing for another 10—shove it out there for 10, or 20, 30 years. That what we’ve been talking about for preventative medicine becomes a reality. We can actually do it. Today, we simply don’t know which patients are susceptible to disease until they get the disease.

Dr. Pompa:
Michael, I don’t know if your work crosses into the microbiome and the role that the microbiome has on epigenetics. There’s a lot of research here. I’ve been reading and following it. We get that the microbiome is a major player, bigger player than we thought. What’s it role into the epigenome and turning on and off these genes?

Dr. Skinner:
The microbiome doesn’t directly turn on and off genes. They’re like a symbiote. In your body, you have this microbiome in your gut that basically will produce things. Those things that are produced will interact with your cells in your body. There’s this communication that we now are realizing exists. How healthy your biome is will determine how well that communication goes. It’s more the factors produced and so forth. If you have a certain microbiome that produces negative type factors, then you may be having some problems. If you have a good biome that’s producing more positive type factors, then you’re going to have those types of things happen. It’s more of an external environmental influence, not an internal molecular influence. It’s more the things that are produced by the microbiome. I would treat it like nutrition. The diets you have is going to directly impact your health. The quality of your microbiome will do the same thing. It’s giving you things that your body then takes and uses.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, got it. Is there a generation that is hit the hardest? Meaning, let’s just say I was exposed to a chemical, which I was. Is it my generation that’s hit the hardest, or the second, or the third generation? Has that been in any of your research?

Dr. Skinner:
In terms of development, these various times during development where there’s more sensitivity versus not. Essentially, when you’re a fetus is the most sensitive time. Your most effected by anything that comes in that’s not supposed to be there: chemicals, whatever. Essentially, that’s the most— Also, because all your organ systems are developing in the fetus. In that early part of development when it’s going from a stem cell to a mature cell, that’s when it’s most sensitive to get shifted. Once we have the mature cells, then they’re actually fairly stable. The fetal period is the most sensitive. Early postnatal for the for the first five years, we have a number of organ systems like your brain and stuff that’s just rapidly developing. That’s another critical time. That’s probably the second one. The third one is actually, believe it or not, during puberty. There’s a number of organ systems and things that develop, including your brain, during puberty. Pubertal exposures during that fairly long period are very critical. As an adult, then we get this more matured state. Everything’s developed and we’re much less sensitive to these environmental insults.

The generational impacts really are because of the critical windows of sensitivity. If you’re exposed to it as a fetus, all your tissues are being affected, but also your germline. Once that germline gets affected, then when you reproduce it’s going to go to the next generation, and so forth, and it will go in the next generation. The fetus is the most sensitive. However, recently we’ve found that pubertal alleles with an exposure can actually alter the germline, the sperm, and goes forward for the rest of that individual’s life as well. That’s also another -inaudible- period. The exposures are based on the developmental sensitivity and whether the germline’s affected, if it’s going to go to generationally.

Now, for your question on is there a sensitive generation. Every generation we feel has a different set of exposures. In the 1950s, it was DDT. It was the major exposure in DDT. In the 1960s and ’70s, it turned out there’s a whole bunch of different things: lead, mercury, lots of other things became really big. Now, we have all kinds of therapeutics, and other kinds of exposures, so every generation’s going forward. Essentially, this can happen in any of them. What we need to do is—this is why the diagnostic ability maybe— We won’t be able necessarily to fix all these environmental things, but through the diagnostics we may be able to treat them much more effectively and keep things at bay going forward. In the future, but still, we need to clean up our environment and all sort of things to get rid of it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s remarkable what you just said because I’ve experienced this. My wife got lead from her mother who grew up in that major lead generation. My wife’s lead was off the chart. When my kids started having certain symptoms, we tested their lead; boom, off the chart. During pregnancy, you lose bone, out comes the lead where it’s stored, obviously effecting their epigenome as well. My son was going through puberty, and all of a sudden, he starts getting these symptoms, different things happening. Test his lead; it’s back off the charts. No doubt, he was then affected again by the lead. Now, here’s my concern. You’ve said it so well. Each generation has a different concern. Today, what’s your feeling on glyphosate. It’s being sprayed on all our food. You and I weren’t exposed to this, but the kids today are being just slaughtered with this chemical. What’s this doing?

Dr. Skinner:
Let me clarify a couple things. That’s a very good question. In the short answer, I think glyphosate is something we need to be seriously¬—look into. Now, we just published a paper with a compound called atrazine. Atrazine was the most commonly used herbicide worldwide and it’s used in concert with glyphosate. Essentially, what we found was—

Dr. Pompa:
I’m sorry, what was it called?

Dr. Skinner:
Atrazine.

Dr. Pompa:
Atrazine, okay.

Dr. Skinner:
Heavily in the corn and soy industry. It’s very similar to glyphosate in terms of its exposure. Essentially, what we found was, we just did the rodent study, as we exposed these gestating females at a critical first trimester period, when the first germline was developing. We induced these epigenetic shifts in the germline. Both the individual exposed mother and that first generation, all the animals generated, there was absolutely no toxicity, no pathologies. There was no effect. There was no effect basically. In a normal toxicology analysis risk assessment analysis, this would look like a completely safe compound. However, when we actually took this out two more generations, in the third generation, 90% of the animals had one or more pathologies. The major pathologies that were testes disease for the males. They were hyper-lean phenotypes, metabolic disease sort of situations. It was a very big turn up in the third generation. What we’re seeing is this transgenerational toxicity going forward is really what we need to think about.

We did another study with DDT and basically showed that when the DDT was exposed to the gestating female, in the first generation, there was absolutely no obesity. By the third generation, half the population of both males and females had a susceptibility to get obesity and became obese. In the 1950s, for 10 years the entire population was exposed to DDT at such levels that there was not a woman that was pregnant in North America that did not get DDT exposure. It wasn’t possible because of the levels of DDT used for over 10 years. Therefore, we are three generations now away from the 1950s. In the 1950s, our obesity rate was five percent. Today, it’s close to 50%; three generations. These ancestral exposures really are bringing up what we’re seeing in terms of today. The lead and the mercury in the 1960s and the early ‘70s, it’s the same thing. We’re basically seeing this -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, gosh, I feel like I’m the only one out there talking about this, right Meredith? I mean you’re in there doing the studies. At least you have someone out there talking about it. That’s exactly what I’ve been teaching. When you look at Stephanie Seneff’s work; she’s out of MIT. She showed that the glyphosate, it’s doing a lot of things. Obviously, it’s hitting the epigenome. It’s opening up the gut barrier, the brain barrier. It’s even making other toxins even more potent if you will, allowing them to cross deeper into the brain. This generation’s getting hit, man. I guess my question is this. You put it all together, with a chemical like glyphosate, what you’re saying. Is this just the perfect storm for disaster?

Dr. Skinner:
I mean I’ll step back and say the direct risk assessment for glyphosate shows that it simply is not toxic for the direct exposure. Essentially, this is a very safe compound with all the studies really published in the classic toxicology sets. Unfortunately, nobody yet has done a transgenerational study with glyphosate. We would like to, but finding funding for that sort of thing is extremely difficult. Essentially, if we do indeed find, just like we did with atrazine, which shows that it’s very safe for the direct exposure, but generational toxicology needs to be looked at. In the current field of toxicology today, it is not. It is not by the industry, or the governments, or anybody else at this state. The most they’ll do is the F-0 mother, and then the F-1 offspring; that’s it. They don’t go any farther. Essentially, I think for glyphosate, I can’t say whether it’s going to be toxic at this point. Right now, for direct exposure, it’s really not. If indeed it does show a transgenerational effect, then yes, you are absolutely right. It’s probably just a major of deal as DDT was in the 1950s.

Dr. Pompa:
One of the things, Monsanto hung their hat on what you said, it’s not a direct toxicant. Then what happened was, oh crap, we realized it’s affecting the bacteria, their shikimate pathway. Oh geez, we realize now to produce certain brain neurotransmitters we need these bacteria, and glyphosate, unfortunately, is defecting their shikimate pathway and they’re not producing them. It was more complicated than we thought once again.

Dr. Skinner:
I think the data’s suggesting that we need to look. With compounds like that, it’s difficult to get funding to look. Essentially, I think it will be looked at within the next year or two. My suspicion is there’s a good chance it will be transgenerational. We just don’t have the data yet and that’s really the critical thing. You can deal with something that is a low level of toxicity with direct exposure, but if it becomes transgenerational, then it’s a whole new ball game.

Dr. Pompa:
I mean, you look at mercury and lead that are both toxic directly and then transgenerationally. We know it’s nasty, so that’s why they’re such bad guys. You’re saying you believe then—the hope, and I agree a lot of it lays in some of the new testing. The epigenetic testing, looking at this genetic testing differently, being able then to prevent things, lifestyle, make these shifts in people based on that testing. That’s basically where a lot of your future research is going?

Dr. Skinner:
Yeah, basically we are. We continuate to test, usually if we can get the money for it, once a year or something; glyphosate is something we’d like to. The government situation, political situation, the funding for those types of things are becoming more and more difficult. In addition, we are heavily in the area of looking for these epigenetic diagnostic signatures that potentially associate with disease because that’s going to be the potential treatment part down the line. That’s going to be the translational thing to actually do something about these transgenerational phenomena.

Dr. Pompa:
I can tell you a good way to get funding is coming on shows like this because we have a lot of people. I’m serious because there’s a lot of people who watch this that we’re invested into this area. We got to get him on Joe’s show, Joe McCullough. You’ve got to get on his podcast. Pam Greenfields, some of our close friends. We’re reaching millions of people, but it’s the people that will fund this stuff. It’s the people who will—because I know. Thomas Seyfried, he wrote a book, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease. He knows this research very well. He said they get his funding from our group of people because the drug companies that fund that stuff, they’re gone. Yeah, they’re gone.

Dr. Skinner:
The government money, it’s drying up very quickly. Essentially, any time you start pushing against industries, it’s very difficult to get government money.

Dr. Pompa:
Meredith, you probably have some questions because this is a topic that you’ve heard me talk about so passionately, and here we have the man himself.

Meredith:
It’s such a fascinating topic. I’m wondering if you could speak to synergistic effects of different toxicants? If you’ve looked at those or if it’s been a more singular toxicant that you’ve looked at?

Dr. Skinner:
Yeah, it is interesting in the fact that we do have exposures with different toxicants. What we see is each one has a unique thing. Like atrazine didn’t promote obesity, but it promoted a hyper-lean genotype, which is just as health harmful as actually being obese. Hyper-lean is not a good thing. Then DDT promoted a very obese phenotype and there wasn’t any lean, so just the opposite. You see different things between them. There are given tissues: the mammary gland, the prostate, the ovaries, the testes, the kidney, and then your adiposities, your metabolism stuff, and your brain. Those are the most sensitive to environmental insults. The exact pathology in those tissues might shift a little bit, but it’s going to be probably that set of organ systems that going to be the first thing where we end up with a disease. There is some differences, but there’s also this going forward.

Now, if you’ve actually thought about—the other part of your question is maybe what if you had two or three exposures instead of just one type thing. We’re just in the midst of a three or four yearlong experiment where we actually expose the first generation to Vinclozolin, which is a fungicide, the second generation to DDT, which is a pesticide, and the third generation to—this is the same set of animals. The first one was exposed to this one. The second generation was exposed to another compound. Third generation was exposed to jet fuel, which is a hydrocarbon mixture. Now, we’ve taken it out three generations from that, and now we’re looking at the pathologies right now or over the next year. Then we’re going to do the epigenetics. In other words, just like we talked about, each generation has this major exposure over a 10 or 20-year period and then it shifts to something else. What happens in that situation? Do we amplify things? Does it plateau out at the same disease rate? Those are things we don’t know, but we’re in the midst of doing that.

Meredith:
Wow.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow, okay. I so appreciate your work. I want to connect you to get on some other podcasts because I know you’re going to reach the right people. You’re work needs funded, just the testing alone.

Dr. Skinner:
That would be a—This area, the federal funding is starting to dry out. To allow the science to progress, we’re going to have to get into more philanthropic situations because that’s the future source of our research money I think.

Dr. Pompa:
I couldn’t agree more. Dr. Skinner, we so appreciate you. Man, we appreciate you coming on. Obviously, we appreciate your work. We’re going to make sure that this gets out to a lot of people because you’re talking about something that I read about years ago. I probably stumbled upon your work and didn’t even know it was your work frankly. Then as of lately, just keep seeing it, so it’s getting out there. It’s a message that people aren’t hearing. It really is. It’s a message that people aren’t hearing. One of my goals is to teach and preach it, so thank you.

Dr. Skinner:
I very much appreciate the interest. Yeah, the more discussion and the more education to the public, the better. Hopefully, then people become more aware, and we can push things forward both scientifically and just lifestyle stuff too.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. We appreciate you. Thank you.

Dr. Skinner:
Alright, thanks very much for the interest.

Meredith:
Thank you so much, Dr. Skinner. Thank you, Dr. Pompa. Thank you, everyone, for watching and listening. Have a wonderful weekend, and we’ll see you next time, bye-bye.

Dr. Skinner:
Bye.

Print & Reader Version...

Transcript of Episode 198: Are Plants Making You Sick?

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Dr. Steven Gundry

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is episode #198. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, and today we welcome very special guest, Dr. Steven Gundry. We have a very interesting topic for you guys today, one that we haven’t dug into on Cellular Healing TV yet, and this is the topic on lectins. Dr. Gundry wrote a book called The Plant Paradox, which we’re going to dig into in a minute here, that explains all about what lectins are and how they might be affecting our cellular health.

Before we dig in, let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Gundry. Dr. Steven Gundry is a renowned cardiologist, New York Times best-selling author, and medical researcher. During his 40-year career in medicine, he has performed over 10,000 heart surgeries and developed life-saving medical technology. In 2008, his book, Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution, revealed a new career shift, helping patients to heal themselves and avoid surgery through diet.

In April, his second book, The Plant Paradox, which we have right here—it’s amazing—published by Harper Wave, hit bookstores and is now a New York Times best-seller. His latest book outlines a 90-day plan for some of the world’s most pressing health issues, from obesity to heart disease. Gundry MD, founded by Dr. Gundry in 2016, is a wellness blog, YouTube channel, and supplement company to further equip people with powerful tools in reclaiming their health. He practices medicine at his waitlist clinics, Center for Restorative Medicine, and International Heart and Lung Institute in Palm Springs and Santa Barbara, California. You can learn more at drgundry.com and gundrymd.com.

Welcome, Dr. Gundry, to Cellular Healing TV. We’re so excited to have you.

Dr. Gundry:
Hey, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I think that most people—you said, Meredith, that most people don’t know what lectins are. We’re going to get into that, but yes, they do, because the most famous one of all is gluten, right? Everybody knows gluten, at least our viewers and listeners, and the concerns about gluten, but years ago, in many of my articles, I talked about lectins and phytates, and I’m sure no one knew what they were, but I said, look, there’s other dangers beyond gluten as well, especially with those with compromised digestion, so lectins. Let’s get into them. This is obviously a category that encompasses gluten, these proteins, potential poisons. Tell our viewers about them.

Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, so I got interested in lectins actually years ago with a couple of people who had obvious autoimmune diseases. When my first book came out almost 10 years ago now, a lot of people with autoimmune diseases came in and said, gee, my autoimmune disease is getting a whole lot better eating the way you describe in your first book, and what’s going on? I could’ve been flippant and said, well, this is a very anti-inflammatory diet, and that’s why you’re getting better, but I said, I wonder what it is that I’m taking away from people. I had a no list and a yes list of foods that was really making a difference, and as I started looking at this, one of the big categories that was very clear that I was removing from people’s diets were plants that contain lectins.

Now, lectins are part of the plant defense system. They’re actually a major part of the plant defense system, and what I try to convince people to realize is that plants do not like us. They were actually here first. They had it really good before animals arrived, because nobody wanted to eat them. When animals arrived, they couldn’t run, they couldn’t hide, they couldn’t fight, but they’re chemists of incredible ability. Dan, you can look outside your window and see what plants can do with sunlight, and we haven’t figured out how to do that. They can actually make matter. They use proteins that are called lectins that are sometimes called sticky proteins, and they like to bind to specific sugar molecules, and we know what those sugar molecules are. The molecules that line our gut are loaded with sugar molecules like sialic acid. There are sugar molecules between nerve endings, and this was actually the original target of plants to paralyze insects, which was their original predator. If you could paralyze an insect, that was a pretty good deterrent against being eaten.

Plants used these proteins, and these proteins are actually very good at prying open the tight junctions between the wall of our intestinal lining. Surprisingly enough, you know, but most people don’t realize that the lining of our intestine is only one cell thick, and its surface area is the same as a regulation tennis court, all bound up inside of us. Those poor cells are all lined up side-by-side, and they’re held together like—when I was a kid, we played a game called Red Rover, Red Rover, where we all locked arms in two rows, and you ran across and tried to break through.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I did that.

Dr. Gundry:
Yeah. In fact, it’s funny. As I lecture around the world, there is the equivalent game in every culture I’ve found, obviously different names, but actually, as an aside, the young kids don’t play it anymore. They’re too busy on their computer instead of knocking people down.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s exactly right.

Dr. Gundry:
What happens is, we know Dr. Fasano’s work showed that gluten, which you mentioned, is a lectin, and other lectins are quite capable to attaching to the wall of our intestine and flipping a switch so that those tight junctions break. When they break, two things happen. Number one, lectins, which are foreign proteins, get through the wall of our gut, but also, what I talk about in the book, there are pieces of bacteria. There are dead cell walls of bacteria, which are called lipopolysaccharides. I call them a little something different in the book. They’re LPSs. You can say little pieces of poop, but I use a little bit more stronger vernacular, even though I don’t swear. These two things, lectins and then these particles of bacteria, make our immune system absolutely go crazy, and one of the fascinating things is that our immune system goes around our body and looks for things that look like these proteins that are loose.

Loren Cordain used the expression molecular mimicry years ago, and I like that, because that’s exactly what I see in my practice. These lectins are cleverly designed to look like other proteins in our body. They are very similar to proteins that line the blood vessel, for instance, and when our immune system is turned on, the immune system does not want a mistake, and it goes, hmm, that protein looks really similar to a protein I’m worried about. I think I’m going to kill this. I’m going to shoot it, and I’ll ask questions later. We talk about, for instance, autoimmune disease as a mistake of our immune system in attacking ourselves, but in fact, it’s an immune system that’s been activated to look for lectins.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s –

Dr. Gundry:
-inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay. I’m going to ask the obvious, I think what my viewers would be asking. My gosh, okay, I’m already concerned. What foods am I getting exposed to these lectins in?

Dr. Gundry:
I was being interviewed by a reporter actually yesterday, and I made a statement that sometimes gets me attacked by my critics. I’m now convinced that almost every illness is, one way or another, connected to a leaky gut and to lectins, and if you had asked me that 15 years ago, I would’ve laughed you out of the room, but the more—I see tens of thousands of patients, and I do pretty interesting, sophisticated blood work on them. I can see, when we remove lectins from their diet, that their inflammation markers return to normal, that their autoimmune disease markers become normal, so where are these lectins?

I like to look at this from a period of time when things appeared in our food supply, and up until 10,000 years ago, none of us ever were exposed to grains or beans. For one thing, grains and beans have to be cooked, but even cooking does a pretty lousy job of destroying lectins. We’ll get back to this, but you can destroy lectins with a pressure cooker. The only lectin you can’t destroy with a pressure cooker is gluten. It’s resistant to even pressure cooking. Grains and beans were two of the real big problems originally.

Then, what’s fascinating to me is the longer we’re exposed to a plant or a plant compound, usually, we can develop bugs, bacteria in our intestines, and fungi in our intestines that are capable of eating these things. In fact –

Dr. Pompa:
Questions, yeah.

Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, believe it or not, we have bacteria that loved to eat gluten. They’re really good at it, and one of the things I talk about in the book is that many people go gluten-free who probably don’t necessarily need to, but when they stop eating gluten-containing foods, these bugs leave. They have nothing to eat, and so they may just be marginally sensitive to gluten, but when they eat gluten again, they don’t have that line of defense against bugs, and they really notice gluten. Then, they go, oh, see, I told you, I’m really gluten-sensitive.

The second thing that happened is, 500 years ago, all of us in America are not from America. Donald Trump may think otherwise, but we are from Europe, Asia, or Africa. Even Native-Americans are actually from Asia, so none of us were exposed to American plants, American lectin-containing plants until 500 years ago when Colombian trade started. Some of our most beloved foods are some of our most mischievous in their American plants. The nightshade family, for instance, is probably the most notorious, and that’s potatoes, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, goji berries. Believe it or not, goji berries are an American plant. They were called the wolfberry, and they were taken to China in trade. They actually did very well in China, and that’s why we still get most of our goji berries from China or Tibet.

The nightshades have lectins in their peels and their seeds, and interestingly enough, Americans avoided tomatoes until the mid 18th century, because they were considered part of the deadly nightshade family, and there was a gentleman whose name was Colonel Samuel Johnson, who stood on the courtyard steps in Summit, New Jersey, which is outside of Philadelphia. Most people think he was in Philadelphia when he did this. He ate a bushel of tomatoes on the courtyard step to prove that he wouldn’t die, and Michael Gregor, one of my critics, uses that example to prove that I’m wrong, that a bushel of tomatoes didn’t kill Colonel Johnson and hasn’t killed a lot of people, but in fact, it’s amazing. If you look at cultures that work with tomatoes—for instance, the Italians always peel and deseed their tomatoes or their peppers before they use them.

In fact, the chili pepper flakes and seeds that we put on our pizza were actually the discarded byproducts of getting the peels and seeds out of peppers, and they were thrown away. Now, of course, we think they’re a culinary delight. The Southwest American Indians always peel and deseed their peppers. The Hatch Chile Roast was just a month ago. They do that because the peels and the seeds have the lectins, and they do that before they even grind their peppers into chile pepper in New Mexico, so there’s a long history of cultures dealing with these sort of things.

The other problem-maker is the squash family. The squash family are also American plants. The pumpkins. We’re coming up on Thanksgiving. The squashes. Cucumbers are actually originally from China, and a lot of it is from Persia. Cucumbers didn’t actually enter our general population until Colombian trade started, so they’re actually a modern plant, too.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I think you’re mentioning a lot of foods that most of our viewers would be like, well, gosh, I mean, a cucumber? I thought they were—tomatoes? I thought they were healthy, so your argument is that it’s the way that we used to prepare them, taking—most of the lectins are in the seeds and the skins, and we’re not doing that as often now in one argument.

Dr. Gundry:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, so what about the Mediterranean diet? Everyone thinks that the Mediterranean diet is the healthiest diet. They eat a lot of baba ganoush. I know these things. I just came from Israel. They eat a lot of different foods that we’re talking about here as a mainstay of their diet.

Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, so I think the best book that was ever written—it’s actually a textbook, which is unfortunate, because it’s never gotten the wide use that it should. In fact, I’ll hold it up, because I have it. I always have it on my desk. It’s called Food and Western Disease, and the author is from Sweden by the name of Staffan Lindeberg. Staffan, I got turned onto him because he has studied the Kitavans, or Kitavans, depending on how you like to pronounce it.

As I write about in the book, the Kitavans were a real puzzle to those of us who considered ourselves low-carbers, and they have been studied extensively, but they basically have no medical care, and they smoke like fiends. They live well into their mid 90s, and there’s never been a case of heart disease and never been a stroke. They don’t have cancer, so the problem is, about 60 percent of their calories come from eating taro root. Another 30 percent of their calories come from coconut, and the rest come from a smattering of fish and some fruits and vegetables, but they drive low-carbers crazy, because they eat an incredibly high-starch diet.

Back to the Mediterranean. Staffan has looked and dissected the Mediterranean diet, as other people have, and what he and others found, and I reference this in my book, is that cereal grains and beans are actually a negative aspect of the Mediterranean diet that’s countered by the polyphenols in red wine, in olive oil, in the fish that they eat, and also in the fruits and vegetables that they eat. Again, the Italians always peel their tomatoes.

In fact, I was lecturing in Istanbul last year, and I went to a sidewalk café and ordered a salad for lunch. Shockingly, out came these wedges of tomatoes that had been peeled, and there weren’t any seeds in them, and the cucumbers, which were in there, had been peeled, and the core had been pulled out, so it was just a ring of the flesh of the cucumber. I’m going, wow, that’s fascinating that this culture did this, and here I’m on a street corner in Istanbul. You can actually see these things in action.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, in certain cultures. All right, look, let’s back up again, because—so, in review, these lectins can act just like gluten, open our tight junctions, drive autoimmune. I believe there was even a chapter in your book about how it can create weight gain, weight loss resistance. Maybe you should talk a little bit about that. Again, leaky gut, yes, but maybe you want to say something else about that. Then, I want people to understand—okay, great, let’s say we avoid this. How do we avoid it, because my gosh, you just named a lot of foods? Okay, Pompa’s already taken a lot of foods off my plate. Now these? I’m in big trouble here, Steven, but talk about the weight loss resistance connection first.

Dr. Gundry:
There’s really several factors that lectins contribute to weight gain, and one of the things that I talk about in the book is, we’ve always assumed that beans and grains came into our diet because they were storageable compounds, and when we started farming, we had to have foods that we could eat during the winter. We couldn’t wander around, looking for animals to eat or for leaves to eat, so most historians, including—this was my major at Yale—believed that grains and beans got -inaudible- because we can store them. I went back and said, well, wait a minute, maybe there’s another reason why we did this, and having grown up in Omaha, Nebraska, Farmland Central, we know that the only way you can fatten an animal for slaughter is to feed them grains or beans or both. That’s how we do it, and that’s how we’ve always done it, so I said, well, wait, a minute, if we fatten animals with grains and beans, and that’s the only way we’ve ever found to do it, maybe grains and beans allow us to store more fat for a given amount of energy than any other food. If you look at that research, in fact, you’ll find that it’s true.

There is a lectin in wheat, for example, called wheat germ agglutinin, and wheat germ agglutinin is actually far more mischievous than gluten, and it’s in the hull of the grain. Gluten is more in the endosperm, the seed. Wheat germ agglutinin is this interesting little lectin that, on fat cells, attaches to the insulin receptor of the fat cell. Now, normally, when a hormone or a message attaches to a receptor, it’s like a plane docking on the jetway, and the passengers get off. In this case, the message is delivered. They’re like, insulin here, store some fat, and then the jet leaves, and the gateway’s open again.

The problem with wheat germ agglutinin, it sticks onto the receptor on a fat cell, and it just absolutely keeps pumping sugar into the fat cell and turning that sugar—it turns on lipoprotein lipase and turns it into fat. The other fascinating thing is that, on a muscle cell, which has the same receptor, wheat germ agglutinin attaches to the muscle cell but doesn’t allow sugar in but actually blocks the airplane from getting to the gate, and that’s one of the theories why, for instance, marathon athletes who just live on carbohydrates, particularly wheat-based carbohydrates are actually so skinny and actually have very little musculature. I talk about that in the book, but marathon running is a pretty dumb idea. No offense. My wife did the hundredth running of the Boston Marathon, and then I showed her the data, and she hung up her spikes. It’s really dumb, but that’s a whole ‘nother subject.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree, but yeah, that’s a whole ‘nother show.

Dr. Gundry:
That’s part one, wheat germ agglutinin. Part two is getting back to leaky gut, and one of the things that’s always intrigued me and many, many other people is, why do we have—why do we store fat that’s so dangerous in our gut? Why do we have a beer belly? Why do we have a deli belly? We’ve got all these guys—we’ve got these foreign invaders coming through the wall of our gut, and most of your viewers know that 60, 70 percent of all your immune cells line the gut. They’re basically our border patrol, so there’s—when these guys get through, there actually is a war occurring right at the wall of the gut. Now, during a war, what you do is—in any war, you have to stockpile supplies for the troops, and where best to stockpile the supplies than at the site of the invasion, so that’s why we actually store fat in our gut, because that’s where the process is going.

Now, the old view was, well, we have inflammation in our gut, and it’s inflammation that’s triggering the fat to be there. The inflammation is coming from our white blood cells attacking lectins and these LPSs that are getting through, and that’s why the fat accumulates.

Dr. Pompa:
Are some people more—we know that there’s different levels of gluten sensitivity. You said that in the beginning, so there are two parts to this question. Number one, are some people genetically, because of their ancestors, etc., more affected by these lectins, some people less, and is it a bad thing, as you’ve kind of said, maybe, just like gluten, that we get rid of all of them? Now we stop producing all of the enzymes, and our microbiome changes, so two parts to that.

Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, so we measure the HLA genes that associate with gluten sensitivity in all of our patients, and there are about ten percent of my population that has one or more of these genes. These guys, I absolutely say, get gluten out of your life. You’re already presensitized to it. On the other hand, we have a number of people—we measure all of the autoimmune markers for celiac in everyone as well, and we have a number of people who have active celiac disease that do not carry any of these HLA markers, so it doesn’t mean that, just because you have celiac, you carry these genes. Conversely, though, if you carry these genes, you probably should stay away from gluten.

Now, the other thing that I think is important in the book is, we’ve been eating these things for 10,000 years and doing a pretty good job, most of us, with it. Why have we had this sudden increase in autoimmune disease? Why do we have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis in 30, 40 million women? That gets into what I call the seven deadly disruptors, and we won’t go through all of them today, but a couple things have really, really changed. Number one is broad-spectrum antibiotic use. We not only swallow them. We unfortunately gave them willy-nilly to any patient that walked through the door with a scratchy throat or a sniffle, and what we didn’t know about broad-spectrum antibiotics was that not only do they potentially kill what you took it for but they wipe out your entire gut flora.

It’s like throwing napalm or Agent Orange on a mature tropical rainforest, and people say, well, that’s fine, and I’ll just take some probiotics, and I’ll be fine. Unfortunately, that’s like we burn a forest down, and then we put some seedlings, and we naively think we’re going to have a mature forest in a couple of weeks. In fact, that doesn’t happen, and sadly, most of the probiotics out there are not spores-forming bacteria, and so we actually—most of our stomach acid just destroys these things.

The other part of the antibiotic problem is, we’ve been using antibiotics to feed animals for weight gain for a number of years now, and we’ve been naïve enough to think that that was harmless, either to the animals or to us, but we know that those antibiotic residues appear in their meat. This low-dose antibiotic, while it’s not enough to get the attention of the FDA—well, it is enough, but it’s enough to change our microbiome, and one of the things that they learned about fattening animals is that, if you change the microbiome with antibiotics, the animal would gain weight. Lo and behold, change our microbiome with antibiotics, we’ll do the same thing, particularly if you feed us grains and beans like we do animals. Antibiotics are a big part of this mystery.

The second that I think gets not enough attention is the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory, the NSAIDs, particularly ibuprofen and naproxen, like Aleve and Advil, vice versa. We chew these things like candy. I’ve seen a number of sports injuries that have been taking a lot of Motrin or a lot of Advil or a lot of Aleve and then develop an autoimmune disease. This literature is well known about in the pharmaceutical company, and I show a bunch of them in the book.

What we didn’t, as doctors, know is that the damage that NSAIDs do is to the lining of the small intestine. They don’t damage the stomach, which is really why NSAIDs were really popular, because aspirin damaged the stomach lining, but the NSAIDs, unlike aspirin, we couldn’t see the damage, because our gastroscopes and our colonoscopes couldn’t get into the small intestine. It wasn’t until the pill cameras came out that we swallow that we could start seeing that, in fact, these things are literally like swallowing a hand grenade. It’s amazing to me. We have Children’s Advil, and we give this stuff away like candy.

The pharmaceutical companies know this. In fact, I was talking with Joseph Mercola a few weeks ago, and when he was in medical school—he’s a D.O., but when he was in medical school, he was an extern at a pharmacy, and he remembers distinctly that the FDA prescription Motrin had just come out, and prescription naproxen had just come out, Naprosyn. There was a black box warning that you could not dispense over a two-week supply, because it was so dangerous, and he said –when he was reading my book, he said, that just came flooding back to me. These were prescription meds, and they carried a warning about how dangerous they were. We’ve forgotten all that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It is. I stay far, far away from them. Many people, even healthy-concerned people, take them like it’s no big deal. It’s like, my gosh, it is a big deal. You’re right. It’s like a hand grenade in the intestines, for sure. What about glyphosate? We know that it’s opening up these tight junctions, affecting the microbiome, and now we have a perfect storm going on.

Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, glyphosate is another one of these perfect storms. They convinced the FDA that glyphosate is not metabolized by humans, which is true, but they didn’t mention to anybody that the shikimate pathway is used by bacteria, and so our gut microbiome is actually pretty well killed off by glyphosate. The other thing that nobody realized was that glyphosate was going to appear in conventional crops. Originally, it was developed just as a weed killer for GMOs, but now we use glyphosate to actually make crops die—conventional crops—so that you can harvest corn, and you can harvest wheat, and you can harvest soybeans, and you can harvest flax, and we don’t wash the stuff off. We then feed it to our animals, or we grind it up into our consumer products, so 24 hours a day, we’re consuming this stuff.

In fact, you probably saw recently that most California wines are loaded with glyphosate and even some of the organic wines, and that’s because—in fact, I was just on the phone with a Texas farmer about this yesterday. They use glyphosate between the rows of vines and also, in Texas, between the rows of plants to kill the weeds, and it obviously gets into the grapes, and it gets into the plant.

The really scary thing that we were talking about yesterday was, as you know, Monsanto is now being purchased by Bayer, and Bayer has been trying—well, Monsanto’s been trying for years to get into the European Union, and they’ve been pretty successful in blocking them, but now that Bayer owns Monsanto, Bayer pulls the strings in Europe, and I think it’s only a matter of time before we see glyphosate in Europe, which will be a disaster.

Dr. Pompa:
What a disappointment, because the wine, of course, it’s outlawed. They’re not using glyphosate, and the other thing is the way that obviously they do the crops in Napa. It’s not dry farm, so they’re irrigating, and then the glyphosate, as you said, sprayed here, it ends up in the water, even in organic –

Dr. Gundry:
Yeah. Yep, it’s in the water. Yep.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so it’s horrible, but—so you put these three things together, and no doubt, it’s the perfect storm, which makes these lectins that are actual toxins to protect the plant now even more toxic to us as humans, driving inflammation, driving autoimmune, as you pointed out, even weight gain and weight loss resistance, so this is a big problem.

Okay, so one more question I want to give. Okay, what can we do to—you have a 90-day program in your book, which is great, because people are going to go, okay, how do I get rid of these things? Let me do it for 90 days, and let’s see how I feel, and I would challenge that you do that. Norman Borlaug, he did some hybridization plants, and Bill Davis, that was his big thing is that, it’s what we did that made these different strains of glutens, AKA lectins, so how does that play into this? Did we hybridize things to make it even more toxic, or is that really not a factor in your mind?

Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, I don’t think that’s a factor in my mind. In fact, ancient grains are just as mischievous as modern grains. For instance, the famous Iceman of the Northern Italian Alps, who was frozen and perfectly preserved 5,000 years ago, he’s riddled with arthritis, and in the pockets of his cape are both einkorn and kamut varieties of wheat, ancient grains, and unfortunately, you see that these grains are just as mischievous as our modern wheat. I think that’s a bit of a—it’s a great story, but I think we have far better reasons like antibiotics, like Advil and Aleve, and like glyphosate that have really tipped things over. I don’t think it was the wheat variety.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, those three things you pinpoint, for sure. Okay. All right, let’s talk about—hey, I want to see if this makes me feel better. Talk a little bit about your 90-day plan, because right now I’m confused. Here’s what people are going to say, I don’t know what to eat. When people say those words, they eat whatever they eat usually. Know this. Tell them how to do this in 90 days.

Dr. Gundry:
The most important rule, and I wish it wasn’t true, but it’s not what I tell you to eat that’s important. It’s what I tell you not to eat, and that I see over and over again. I was taught this when I was a fellow at Great Ormond Street in London, England, by a gastroenterologist, and I thought he was kind of crazy, but looking back, he was really smart. For instance, our sisters at Great Ormond Street, where I did children’s heart surgery, after an operation, they’d send the morning to the corner little store and have them bring two cups of fresh yogurt to feed their babies. A smart American like me said, what a stupid idea to do, and they’d say, oh, no, Doctor, you’ve killed off all my babies’ bugs, and I must put new bugs in. We’d go, yeah, sure, but this is real, so back to the question.

I like people to eat like it’s 9,999 years ago, just before the advent of modern agriculture. We ate a lot of tubers. There are plenty of tubers besides potatoes. We didn’t eat potatoes, because they’re an American plant, so have some sweet potatoes. Have some cassava. Have some yuca. Have some taro root. Have jicama. We were designed to eat lots of leaves, so all the leaves you want.

One of my favorite sayings is, the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth, and getting back to the Mediterranean diet, there are cultures, particularly in Crete and Sardinia and in Spain, that use a liter of olive oil per week, and one of my favorite studies that I always bring up—the study was just finished about two years ago. They took 65-year-old people in Spain, and they divided them into three groups. All had to eat a Mediterranean diet. The first group had to have a liter of olive oil per week, and they actually had to bring their empty liter back to the clinic and pick up a new one so they knew that that’s what they were doing. The second group had to have the equivalent calories in raw walnuts, and the third group ate a low-fat Mediterranean diet. They followed these people for five years, and the original part of the study was to look at memory. The walnut and the olive oil group had preserved memory at the end of five years. In fact, the olive oil group had slightly increased memory. The low-fat group had deteriorated memory.

They then looked at breast cancer, and the women in the olive oil group had a 67% less incidence of breast cancer than either of the other groups. They then looked at heart disease, and lo and behold, the walnut and the olive oil group had diminished episodes of heart disease compared to the low-fat Mediterranean diet. Finally, I think the most interesting thing is, the walnut and the olive oil group lost weight during the five years, and the low-fat group gained weight, so people say, a liter of olive oil? That’s 12 to 14 tablespoons of olive oil a day. I’m going to gain weight. In fact, we know that fat does not make you fat, particularly if you don’t eat it with carbohydrates. Fat and carbohydrates is a great recipe for disaster.

The other thing that I go into in the book, and again, having grown up in Omaha and Milwaukee, it makes me sad to say this, but animal protein in two large international studies has been shown to be equal to sugar consumption in causing obesity and diabetes. Equal. That’s because—this is something that Dr. Atkins unfortunately didn’t know, is that we, as you know, have no storage system for protein unless we’re building muscle, but we don’t waste energy, so we convert protein into sugar, gluconeogenesis, and one of the problems with our high-protein diet in America is the protein is the last to be digested of the various things we eat, and so we’ve already met all of our glucose needs of all of our cells by the time protein is available. Protein is basically automatically converted into glucose and then stored as fat.

This is actually why Dr. Atkins died a fat man. My first book was bought by Random House, and my editor had done all the Atkins diets, all the South Beach diet. I got to know Dr. Atkins’s ghostwriter and pick her brain, and then I got to know his head nurse, and actually she’s still my patient today. She’s in her 90s now. This is what Atkins didn’t know. He was originally a high-fat doctor, but he got into so much trouble with the American Medical Association that he morphed into a high-protein diet, and that’s actually his unfortunate big mistake, and he died a fat man. It’s actually very true. His nurse confirms it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s amazing. Okay, so avoidance, that’s a—what does your 90-day program do?

Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, what we do is, we have a three-day kickstart program where people get addicted to this smoothie. There’s a wonderful woman from Santa Barbara who did the recipes, Irena, and she has a website called Catalyst Cuisine. She’ll make meals and ship them all across the country, FedEx, cheap, so she can actually do the whole program, but all of the recipes for the three days are in there. They’re easy to do. I like people to make a green smoothie out of some romaine lettuce, some spinach, half an avocado, some mint, and some lemon juice, and it’s really addicting. My wife has it every day of her life. She can’t get off of it.

The reason we did that is, there’s really good evidence that you can completely change your microbiome in about three days, and there’s also compelling evidence that, if you stray back into the way you’re eating within three more days, your microbiome will return to its former bad state, so what I like to do is really kind of kickstart cleaning up the bugs in our gut and then start having people really avoid all the grains, the pseudograins. Corn is a mischief-maker. Avoid the plants from North America that you think are good for you. The other thing that’s important to realize is, most people—most of the vegetables that people eat in the United States are not vegetables at all. They’re fruits, and one of the things we’ve forgotten is that, up until about 50 years ago, we only had fruit once a year, during fruit season in the summer and early fall.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Dr. Gundry:
Then, there was no fruit, and we, like great apes, used fruit to gain weight for the winter when there’s less food, whether it was a dry season, rainy season, or a cold season. All great apes only gain weight during fruit season, and it’s one of the things I go into in my first book. Tomatoes are a fruit. Cucumbers are fruit. A pepper is a fruit. A squash is a fruit. A pumpkin’s a fruit. We really have to be wary that we take fruit fructose and convert it into triglycerides to store as fat, so we really eliminate fruit. We say give fruit the boot. Sorry about that. If you’re going to eat fruit, eat fruit locally in season. A piece of fruit coming from Chile in February is not natural. There’s no such thing as blueberries in February. That’s what we do. We like people to really increase their olive oil. If they don’t have -inaudible-, we like them to use coconut oil, avocado oil. Avocadoes are great, even an avocado a day, but again, the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. I actually pour olive oil on my avocado.

Dr. Pompa:
I do, too. I really do.

Dr. Gundry:
We also have a program for what I call my Intensive Care Program, which is a ketogenic version of my program, and so if you’re a diabetic, if you have cancer, if you have signs of dementia, if you have kidney failure, there’s an entire chapter for you where I get even meaner and nastier, but I want people to eat about an 80% fat diet if you have those conditions, and it really does turn things around quite dramatically.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you’re pro-keto. The diet obviously works so well with ketosis when you’re eating moderate protein, high fat. You kind of start eliminating lectins like crazy.

Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so those watching, because we have a lot of keto people, it’s like, yeah, ketosis is probably the easiest way to avoid lectins, no doubt about it. Meredith, I know you have some questions. I had so many, but I think it’s a fascinating topic, because not a lot of people are speaking this.

Meredith:
It sure is, and something interesting for me that came up when I was reading the book as well was the testimony of a woman who had been following your program and getting a lot of great results in general but still had some persistent eczema on her eyelids, and you kind of really did some detective work with her diet and realized that she was eating chicken that was organic, but this chicken was still eating possibly soybeans and corn and some feed that wasn’t natural to that animal’s diet, so can you speak to a little bit about what we eat eats and how important that is?

Dr. Gundry:
Yeah. We are what we eat, but we are what the thing we’re eating ate, and a number of years ago, there were a couple of little articles in the alternative medicine literature that said that, if an animal is eating lectins that it isn’t used to eating, those lectins will appear in its flesh. I kind of said, oh, man, that’s really out there, but I didn’t discount it, and then this particular woman—I now have a number of them—she is a psychologist in Los Angeles who had pretty bad lupus, was on two-drug therapy, and realized that that probably wasn’t a very good idea for the rest of her life.

We got her off of her drugs, and she had some pretty bad skin lesions from lupus. She completely cleared except for a little bit of eczema on her upper eyelids, and so we’re going through the list. She was avoiding the no list like a saint, so I’m going through the good food list, and I get to chicken. I said, now you’re eating pastured chicken, chickens that go out and eat bugs, and she said, oh, yeah, yeah, I eat free-range organic. That’s my favorite food. I went, wait a minute. Free-range is kept in a warehouse, along with 10,000 other chickens, and they’re fed corn and soybeans, even if they’re organic corn and soybeans. I said, I tell you what, stop the chicken, and I said, call me back. A month later, she says, eczema’s gone, that was it, so it was this organic, free-range chicken. Since her—that’s been about five years—I have a number of particularly women who it’s their organic, free-range chicken that’s their culprit in their autoimmune disease.

There’s another gentleman in the book who is actually from St. Louis who travels a lot, and his autoimmune disease and his irritable bowel went away, but he noticed that, when he was traveling, things would kick up, even though he was really being religious, and I said, well, what are you eating? He says, well, there’s only two things I’ll eat when I’m traveling of meats. It’ll be shrimp, and it’ll be chicken, so I said, ooh. Most of the shrimp in a restaurant comes from Vietnam or Thailand, and it’s fed grains, and I can guarantee you you’re not getting a pastured chicken in the restaurant. I said, just—he thought he was getting gluten kind of dusted on it, and that’s why he was reacting, so I said, just humor me, don’t eat that stuff, and just have salads and vegetables, and you’ll be all right. You’ll survive. Sure enough, those were the two factors that had kicked him over.

I think our food supply has changed so much, whether it’s the antibiotics in our food, whether the fact that a chicken, which is an insectivore, is being fed corn and soybeans, which it’s never designed to eat, whether our cows, which are grass-eaters and alfalfa-eaters, are now being fed corn and soybeans. I could talk about, cows get such heartburn from the lectin in corn irritating their esophagus that they actually stop eating, and half the world’s production of calcium carbonate, Tums, is mixed into cow food so they’ll keep eating. Yeah, it’s just—if this is getting a cow’s attention, maybe we should pay attention.

Meredith:
That’s so true, and I’m wondering, too, though—so there’s a lot of things we can do to mitigate some of the effects. Oh, there goes that -inaudible-—which we’re peeling, we’re deseeding, we’re avoiding some of the major offenders, but is there, for some of us who maybe just want to treat ourselves to those lectins, is there maybe a supplement or some kind of gut support that we could take to mitigate some of the damage?

Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, it’s one of the reasons I have a product called Lectin Shield. It has seven different ingredients that absorb lectins, and it actually works pretty well. Now, the problem is that it’s not a license to cheat. Some people view it as that, but if I know I’m going to a friend’s house or a dinner party, and I know that I’m not going to be able to avoid the things I should avoid, then I’ll pop a couple when I’m traveling in Europe. I carry several jars, and I put some videos on my YouTube channel, kind of before and after what my belly looks like when I’m unfortunately dabbling in their pasta and bread with and without Lectin Shield, and it’s pretty funny.

Yeah, you can take these, and there are other supplements that work. I’d love you to go to Gundry MD and buy my supplements, but in the book, but in the book, if I tell you, here’s a great supplement, I not only tell you my supplement but I tell you the dosage of the supplement, and you can go to Costco, or you can go to Vita-Dose, or you can go to Amazon. The point is, some of my critics say, the book is to sell supplements. The supplements are way at the end of the book, and supplements are supplements. They supplement what you’re doing the rest of the time with what goes through your mouth, and I’ve had so many people that say, all I’ve got to do is take 20 supplements, and I can get away with murder. I got news for you. You can’t. I see it over and over and over again.

Meredith:
Hmm, that’s so true, and I’m just curious, kind of as the final question, what’s a day in the life look like for you with the diet? Are you having three meals a day? Are you doing intermittent fasting? What kind of—what are you consuming?

Dr. Gundry:
I wrote about this in the book. From January through June, every year for the last ten years, during the week, I eat one meal a day. I fast 22 out of 24 hours. My meal is between six and eight o’clock at night, because quite frankly, that’s when I’m home with my wife. If I had it to do perfectly, I’d probably have that meal between 12 and two in the afternoon, but that’s impractical. On the weekends, I’ll have two meals a day. I do agree with Joseph Mercola that I think you need to break ketosis probably once a week.

Dr. Pompa:
I taught him that. I taught him that, by the way.

Dr. Gundry:
Good, yeah. It’s funny, because I’ve been doing that for years. Joe Mercola, he’ll take things to an extreme, and good for him. Somebody needs to do this, but also good for him, he’ll say, oops, I was wrong about this, and some people just don’t get it that you can be wrong in researching. I was wrong in a lot of things I said in my first book.

Dr. Pompa:
I love that about Joe. You’re right. He’ll just be like, okay, yeah, there’s a better way he does it. We were walking on a walk in Florida when we had that conversation, and he was asking me about things. He was like, I think you’re right, I’m going to try it, and I helped write, I think it was chapter 10 of his book, based on diet variation. Even seasonal variation is huge, and people don’t do it. It has a massive impact on our microbiome, so it sounds like you’re right in line with us on that, as a matter of fact.

Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, so for instance, this weekend, I didn’t have breakfast, and I didn’t have lunch the entire weekend. I didn’t have breakfast this morning. I don’t eat breakfast. Breakfast is the stupidest meal of the day.

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible-.

Dr. Gundry:
It’s like, do you really think we crawled out of our cave and said, what’s for breakfast? We had to find breakfast. There was no storage system, and if we didn’t find breakfast until dinner, that was break fast. That was break fast. The French actually have no word for breakfast. Dejeuner was first meal, and it was lunch, and they had to invent petit dejeuner.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s an American thing, actually. The Italian culture doesn’t eat breakfast, either.

Dr. Gundry:
Have an espresso and go.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. Done.

Dr. Gundry:
For tonight, I’m actually going to go home, and we’re going to have a huge mixing bowl of salad with a couple of avocados in it, some radicchio, some Belgium endive, some arugula. I try to get cruciferous vegetables in me daily, if not eating them with supplements. Usually, during the week, we tend to eat fairly close to a vegan diet, and then, on the weekends, we will tend to have wild fish or wild shellfish. I call myself a vegaquarian. I eat mostly vegetables and throw in a few seafood.

Dr. Pompa:
Sorry about that. The dogs, you know?

Dr. Gundry:
I have four dogs, so I understand.

Dr. Pompa:
One of the things I invite—that was the last question, and we’re over time. You’re an interesting guy. You do a lot of the same things we do. When you’re eating one or two meals a day, we would agree that most disease is the abundance, right? It’s eating too much protein and too much carbohydrate, and it’s so much easier not to fall into that when you’re eating one meal. To eat too much of anything becomes much harder when you’re eating one meal, that’s for sure.

Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, that’s very true, and I agree with Jason Fung, who I’ve gotten to know. In a way, he’s right, that it’s easier not to eat at all. Once you stop eating, it frees up a whole lot of time, and so I do not disagree with him.

Dr. Pompa:
We train our doctors on fasting. We couldn’t get the different conditions as well, our docs, if we didn’t utilize fasting, that’s for sure. Thank you so much, Steven. We appreciate you being on. It’s great information.

Dr. Gundry:
Thanks for having me on. We’ll keep spreading the word.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Meredith:
Mm-hmm. Awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. Pompa. Thank you, Dr. Gundry, for all that you’re doing, for getting this information out, and one last time, if you guys want to check out his book, you can go to drgundry.com and gundrymd.com and check out more of Dr. Gundry’s work. Thanks so much, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. Have a fantastic weekend, and we’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.

Print & Reader Version...

Transcript of Episode 197: The Truth About Fish Oil Part 2

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Prof. Brian Peskin

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is episode #197. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, and today we welcome special guest, Professor Brian Peskin. Boy, do we have a show for you guys today. You are in for a treat. If you listened to episode 188, we interviewed Dr. Jeff Matheson on toxic fish oils and some of the issues with that, and now we’re going to dig in a lot deeper with Professor Peskin, who has done so much research in this area. I have to say, I threw out all my fish oils this morning after reading your book, The PEO Solution, so you guys are really going to learn a lot in this episode. There’s so much to discuss here.

Before we dig in, let me tell you a little bit about Professor Peskin, and then he is going to share all of his research. Professor Brian Peskin is a theoretical research scientist, specializing in lipids-based pharmacognosy, a class of drug derived from plant-based sources, specifically seed oils. A notable benefit with this approach is the minimization and elimination of harmful side effects. He focuses specifically on the modulation of physiologically-targeted essential fatty acids in the cell membrane, termed parent essential oils, and their eicosanoid metabolites. He is a translational science expert with a long-term interest in diabetes and its underlying pathophysiology. In 2002, he began extensive research on the relationship of PEOs and the metabolites to cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Mr. Peskin’s work is focused on pathways that maximize oxygen delivery and blood flow to the human cell and tissue functionality. This knowledge allowed him to design a novel investigational new drug to heal chronic diabetes ulcers and wounds. Peskin holds three patents with key composition of matter utility patent planted in 2014. A former MIT-trained engineer, Mr. Peskin founded the field of Life-Systems Engineering Science in 1995, bringing the cause-effect accountability of engineering into the life sciences. The focus is on supporting and optimizing our natural physiologic processes, not blocking or impeding metabolic pathways. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, the results are novel and highly effective for specific chronic diseases and disorders across diverse patient populations.

Welcome, Professor Peskin, to Cellular Healing TV. We are so excited to dig into this topic.

Brian:
Thanks so very much for having me.

Dr. Pompa:
Professor, listen, this show is going to create a lot of controversy, and I love that, because I have been blowing the lid off this for some years, and when I do – and it’s funny, because we had a conversation before coming on the show. You saw me on Back Scenes Revealed, and I talked about how wrong fish oil was and blah, blah, blah, and boy, did I get some hate mail. I got it on the Internet with people, and I sent them all these science, partly some of your stuff, and then of course I didn’t hear back. I said, I knew you before I knew you, meaning that I’ve been into this topic for some years now, and inadvertently I had pulled up much of your work. Tell them. I want our viewers, because I want them to understand, this has been a passion for no other reason for you except to expose the truth, so let’s get that clear right now. You’re not exposing this truth because you have major ties. Yeah, your science has gone into some products, but this is a passion of you because of it being – tell the story, man. I understand where you’re coming from.

Brian:
Sure, happy to. I’m an MIT-trained engineer. The only reason I’m in the field of nutritional medical science is because my wife became diabetic in her 30s, doing everything “right” that the physicians told her, and then the physician’s result made her worse. She went to a big clinic in California and came back with worse blood sugar, so it’s the failure of a lot of the medical profession is the only reason I’m here and was right, and I don’t know what to do, so I did what everybody else would do, went down to the health store. I can get a book, maybe by Atkins, that says protein is great, and fat’s great, and then there’d be an opposite one by Dr. Ornish, saying just the opposite, so it’s really that my answer is, I don’t believe anybody. I’m a scientist. I believe the science, so is there a field that tells us how we work? Yeah, there are two, physiology and biochemistry, so luckily, I live in Houston. We have one of the top 10 medical libraries in America, and it’s right over at MD Anderson Cancer Center. They were kind enough to let me spend about five years in the library, and 330,000 volumes they have in that library. I had my hands on an 1850 Lancet, which is, even today, the world’s premier medical journal, and after years looking at all the science, it was, my goodness. The science says A, and everybody is doing the opposite of A. No wonder we’re all sick.

That’s what got me into this whole thing, because somebody’s got to start publishing heavy science. Even Dr. Atkins, even though he was right in most of what he said, he had no science. It was just studies. Studies aren’t science, and the study should confirm the known biochemistry and physiology, not the opposite to it, like is the case with fish oil in many instances, so that’s what got me into the field, and this is no hobby with me. It’s all I do. I specialize in EFA and their metabolites, which are called eicosanoids. I came up with the term parent EFAs, parent essential oils, because there’s only two. There is parent omega-3 and parent omega-6, meaning we have to get them from food. We can’t make them. We can make all the other ones. EPA, DHA, the big fish oil components, we make, but everybody uses the term improperly, and EFA is not DHA or EPA. EFA stands for essential, meaning –

Dr. Pompa:
Let me stop you right there for our viewers, because right there, believe it or not, we could lose people. Okay, so the parent oils – these are the ones that are truly essential fatty acids.

Brian:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
– what you call EPA, essential fatty acids. Okay, they are, according to you, and according to me –

David:
According to everybody in the science.

Dr. Pompa:
Right. Linoleic acid and alpha-linoleic acid. Now, the reason I said according to us, because many listening are going to say, well, DHA is also essential fatty acid.

Brian:
No.

Dr. Pompa:
No, so that’s fish oil. By the way, those listening, when we talk DHA, write down, that’s fish oil, okay? Also, just categorize it. Let me just do one more little categorization. Write this down, folks. Linoleic acid is omega-6. Alpha-linoleic acid, those are the parent fats that we all need, that’s the omega-3. Okay, Professor, take it from there.

Brian:
Absolutely. It’s not essential if your body can make it, and the body makes all the long-chain – they’re called derivatives, and this is in the literature. Even parents are in the literature. Parent essential oil is my term, but parent essential fatty acids are in the literature. I didn’t make this up, but the term has become so misused, everybody thinks EFAs are DHA and EPA from fish oil. That’s absolutely not true. Even the fish don’t make those oils. They get it from eating algae. Most people don’t even know this. We’ve been highly misled, and one of the biggest things, Doc, is the parents stay in parent form 99%. They are the brick and mortar of a hundred trillion cells, and when I saw that in the literature – this is in molecular biology of the cell. This is in the medical textbooks, and that’s where I live. I live in the medical textbooks, and then I look at studies to confirm the science, so 99% of LA and ALA, parent omega-3, parent omega-6, stay in that form in the body.

Dr. Pompa:
Stop right there, because this is important, because the old -inaudible- before we had better ways of determining how much from these parent oils converts to DHA, as an example, we thought it was 15%. We thought it was a higher percent anyway, maybe 5, 15%. We’ve learned – with better equipment, with better technology, we’ve learned that very little, like you’re saying, half a percent, at best 1%, converts, meaning the body, if it needs DHA, will convert it, so all of the studies done on how much DHA we need are based on false numbers. Am I right on that?

Brian:
You’re 100% right, and what the entire medical profession thought was exactly what you just said. All of the parents will get converted to the derivatives, because they’re what’s important. They didn’t understand cell physiology, and it’s 25 to 33% of every cell membrane – the lipid component, which is half of every cell membranes, is 25 to 33% parent omega-6, parent omega-3. There is virtually no EPA/DHA in there. Now, the brain has it. We can talk about that after, but your average cell membrane doesn’t. It is nonexistent. There were superb tests with radioisotope testing by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Natural Institutes of Health in 2001, 2009, 2010, positron emission testing, where they tagged it and saw exactly how much DHA the brain uses on a daily basis, and it’s 3.6 milligrams. 3.6. That’s the average.

Dr. Pompa:
I think I read somewhere at best seven and a half percent.

Brian:
That’s average.

Dr. Pompa:
Sorry.

Brian:
I love dogs.

Dr. Pompa:
Sorry. My son’ll help with that. Sorry about that.

Brian:
So the average is 3.6, 3.2, 3.4. It’s in the 3s. When you look at the distribution, a normal distribution at the maximum, it’s 7.2, and this is for a big guy. That’s it, so if you want to say, okay, the brain is the biggest depository. It’s 14% DHA. The eyes are the next, and then it goes very little after that. Double it. That will give you 14 milligrams a day. Now, look and see what the recommendations for fish oil is. It’s 20 to 500 times that, which is called a suprapharmacologic overdose. You’re being poisoned.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt. I mean, it’s ridiculous, and look, let’s – you’re making a strong argument.

Brian:
Yeah, I have all these references.

Dr. Pompa:
It is not only good for you but actually dangerous, so let’s kind of stay there a second, because one of the things that I had read years ago, there’s an important fat, omega-6 fat, in the mitochondrial membrane. That’s where we make cell energy, called cardiolipin. It stores it, and our cells live and die based on that fat. I mean, literally, that’s how important it is, right? I read that, when people are taking these DHA or the omega-3 and become omega-3-dominant, which is very easy, according to you, that it replaces that cardiolipin, and it creates all this dysfunction in the mitochondria. Okay, that’s just one study, but talk more about some of the damaging effects by taking this fish oil.

Brian:
You’re absolutely correct. It gets displaced because the body can’t burn it up, so when there’s a supraphysiologic overdose, it displaces the critical parent omega-6, and for example, it’s 100 to one in the brain of parent omega-6 to parent omega-3. Arachidonic acid, which is a long-chain omega-6 metabolite is 10% of the brain. We’re never told this, so DHA is 14%. AA, the omega-6 side, is 10%. To an engineer science guy like me, that’s called the same order of magnitude. It’s not double. It’s not 100 times. It’s not ten times. It’s virtually the same. It’s 40% difference. It’s less than – not even double. We need to go there and look at the science instead of emotion. That’s the problem today. You’ve hit it right on the head. Because of this displacement, for example, skin cancer is through the roof, and the dermatologists don’t have a clue. Your skin is 100% parent omega-6. There’s no DHA, EPA in there, and I wrote a paper correlating the highest fish oil consuming countries to the highest rates of cancer.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, -inaudible-.

Brian:
I always have to slam down on that, because nobody wants – but fish oil goes rancid spontaneously. We can talk about that in a minute, too, but the intima, the inner lining of the artery. Any cardiologist will know this. 100% parent omega-6. If you start taking all this fish oil, guess what? It’s not all parent omega-6 anymore. The fish oil gets forcefully shoved in there, and we are in trouble. It takes 18 weeks to get rid of the supraphysiologic overdose of fish oil. This experiment was done and published, and I give you all of this in PEO Solution, so I hope people will really check that out and look at the science before they make an emotional judgment.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, so I mean, look. We know. I talk about the importance on this show of the cell membrane. It’s everything.

Brian:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s everything as far as why people still don’t feel well. We have to fix the membranes, the outer and the inner membranes. Your point is that the destruction, the problem with the membranes, is the fact that most Americans are, in fact, eating denatured omega-6, and we’re going to –

Brian:
Yes, adult omega.

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- about that. Okay, so bad omega-6, no doubt, is playing a role. However, we’re taking overdoses of fish oil, omega-3, and that is causing another problem, so we’re getting bad omega-6, we’re taking omega-3, mostly bad, and we’re creating these destabilized cell membranes, which is leading to cancer, mirrors Alzheimer’s. These are studies that I pull up. More cardiovascular disease.

Brian:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
More aches and pains. The very things that people are taking fish oil for, studies literally show it’s making worse.

Brian:
Yes. The quote solution is actually the cause of the problem. It’s that bad.

Dr. Pompa:
Talk about the problem – okay, omega –

Brian:
The -inaudible- of the omega-6, like you said, is the number one problem –

Dr. Pompa:
The omega-6 is the key. The omega-6, to your point, is the solution. We have to stabilize the omega-6 in the cell to fix the cell.

Brian:
Eleven to one is the ratio in the body, if you look at all the tissue and the fat stores. Eleven times parent omega-6 to parent omega-3 is the ratio. Muscle is six and a half to one parent omega-6, and that makes 50% of our body. The average in the brain – well, aside from the brain, but the heart, the lungs, four to one parent omega-6 to parent omega-3. When you look at the fat stores, they’re about 22 to one parent omega-6, so nature has given us a store of what we need, and the biggest problem today is the adulteration. Doc, it’s because food processors need long shelf life. You can’t have cookies and cakes and processed food smelling like fish that’s gone bad, so they shut down the oxygen transfer, and guess what? Your mitochondria die, so even if the omega-6 goes into that cardiolipin, which is 100% parent omega-6, by the way. For EFAs, there’s no DHA. There’s no EPA. It’s 100% parent omega-6. It’s nonfunctional, so just imagine you have a hundred trillion cell membranes with a big chunk of nonfunctionality, because all the frying, all the baking, all the cooking has oils that stop the oxygen transfer so they don’t go bad. Even the finest restaurants are using this. Tragedy. They should be using saturated fats, because they can’t go bad, but they’re using the omega-6 oils. They never use the omega-3 oils, because they’re too reactive anyway, so they never use – you don’t cook in flax oil. You don’t fry in fish oil. You just don’t do it. It goes bad instantly, so I –

Dr. Pompa:
There’s a point – let me say one point, though. The fish oils are 20 times – they’re polyunsaturated fats, 20 times more oxidative and fragile than the omega-6, but to your point –

Brian:
At least.

Dr. Pompa:
The key to fixing the membranes is getting the correct omega-6 undenatured, which is not happening. It’s all processed. It’s all bad, so –

Brian:
Actually, it’s up to 42 times –

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, wow.

Brian:
– the oxidation level, the ascorbic iron catalyst. 42. It’s unbelievable. The basal is about 23 times, and just normal is six times. It is horrible how these things oxidize. See, people don’t understand fish oil for the fish is its antifreeze. You can only either have alcohol or long-chain fats. Vodka won’t freeze in the freezer, right? It stays liquid. Neither will the long-chain fats, but fish is at 30, 40 degrees. We’re at 98.6, so you put the fish on us, 98.6, spontaneously oxidized, rancid. That’s called lipofuscin, and anybody with age spots, Doc, has rancid oils, and if they have it on their skin, it’s in their organs. Dr. Rowen, superb integrative medicine, used to be the owner of Second Opinion. He showed me an article looking at different temperatures of fish, from the cold water fish to the warm water, because there are fish that live in 70-degree water, compared to 30-degree. Fourteen times less EPA and DHA than the cold water fish, and what are we doing? We’re taking more in a very hot temperature. We are using all of our antioxidants on this overdose of fish oil. Nothing is left for the normal functioning. That’s why everybody is so sick.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, let’s talk about omega-6, because according to you, this is the solution to the inflamed, dysfunctional membranes.

Brian:
-inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
The right omega-6, undenatured, which obviously still can denature very easy, not 40 times like the fish oil, but a lot of the omega-6 are still polyunsaturated, still very fragile. What do we do?

Brian:
It’s not that fragile in the body. It virtually does not denature in the body, at least –

Dr. Pompa:
Out here, it does.

Brian:
The biggest problem is called oxidized cholesterol. Everybody’ll say this. That’s the cause of heart disease. It is well known and published – Dr. -inaudible- talked about this when he was a top biochemist in Germany. It’s esterified, meaty cholesterol. LDLC transports the parent omega oils. Just picture a magnet. Here’s the big cholesterol molecule. Boom. This is how they’re transported in the bloodstream. They don’t go bad when they’re magnetized to the cholesterol. They’re already bad from eating them. That’s the biggest thing we’re not told. It’s virtually impervious to oxidation in the body. Yeah, so nature’s very good. We’re eating a poison in the oxidized omega-6, and just like you said, couple that with the overdose of fish oil, I’m amazed we can live at all. As an engineer, take water. Put it in your gas tank, because you don’t want to pay three bucks a gallon for gasoline. You’ll run a mile, and the engine will seize. Put the wrong stuff in us, we get sick, but we don’t die right away, and if you do a short-term study, you may not see the bad effects. That’s typically what they do with fish oil studies, three months or less and never the long-term effects, because fish oil acts like a long-term steroid.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No, I want to talk – I do want to mention some of those studies, how are they all flawed, but before we do that, we’re close to – people want to know this right now. I know they do. How do we get – if the omega-6 is the answer – thank God they don’t go oxidized in our body like fish oil does. If that’s the answer, how do we make sure we’re getting nonoxidized ones before they –

Brian:
That’s the question. Some omega-3 is the answer, too, because you want a ratio in there. The biggest thing is the omega-6 adulteration. It has to be organic. Cold press isn’t good enough, so it has to be organically grown, because preservatives and chemicals shut down the oxygen transfer, too. You don’t want an oil that lasts forever like a transfat. It has to be organically grown. It has to be organically processed, and that is the answer on the omega-6 side. Those two things, and if you go into a commercial supermarket, you won’t find it. All that’s in the supermarket is processed.

Dr. Pompa:
What about the organic, expeller-pressed safflower oil, sunflower oil, if they’re expeller-pressed?

Brian:
Expeller-pressed, as long as they’re organic, that is okay.

Dr. Pompa:
Then, the expeller-pressed sunflower. I’m just naming omega-6s.

Brian:
Here’s a problem today. Most of the oils have been modified, not GMO. They’ve been naturally hybrid for frying, which means they have a high oleic acid, which is the omega-9, like olive oil, component. We don’t need that, so most people – if you go to a health store, you will get this safflower oil that is 90% omega-9, which is, again, a nonessential – it’ll only have 10% of the parent omega-6, so it’s not easy to find. Very difficult.

Dr. Pompa:
I ran off. I ran off, because I was like, aha. I want to talk – because you’re exactly right on what you’re saying. This is a safflower oil that is very good with heat, but because it’s the expeller-pressed, I’m certain – and then, but here’s the thing, though. The polyunsaturateds are 2 grams, the monosaturateds are 11, because –

Brian:
They’re ten to one. It’s wrong. It doesn’t give you enough of what you need, so even getting it organic isn’t the answer. You typically have to go to supplements and find one where it’s properly done.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, so at least this won’t denature. All right, it’s good to cook with, but I’m not getting the nutrition, and that’s –

Brian:
Not at all. It’s not a negative, so there’s two things. How much of a negative is it, and how much of a positive is it? For example, a transfat’s a negative 20. Olive oil is a 0. It won’t hurt you, but it won’t help you at all. There’s 7% parent omega-6 in olive oil. That’s not enough to do anything, so you need a lot. Typically, the oil supplement, you need 60 to 70% active parent omega-6 and parent omega-3, and that’s hard to find.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, there’s one that we talked about on a past show. I’ll let Meredith reference it, but it was its pure form, and that was based on your science, that particular product, from –

Brian:
I believe it is.

Dr. Pompa:
– this concept, and one of the things that I like about it is the nitrogen they even put in each capsule to protect the omega-6 that’s in it, and it’s a two to one ratio, so there’s three. It’s omega-6 to omega-3.

Brian:
We do need the parent omega-3, because remember, the average, it’s 11 to one. Now, we get omega-3 by eating food, too. It’s in meat. I mean, we get this, so you’re taking a supplement, but it’s still in the food. I like organic, but it’s not all bad. A lot of it’s bad. 50% can be bad, but if 50% is bad, we’re still getting 50% good. The key is, you don’t want 50% bad. That’s why you take a supplement. You can live with 20% bad, no problem, and that’s good today, believe it or not, with all the food processing. That’s no problem. The problem is when you start hitting 35% or a third. Otto Warburg comes in, where if there’s 35% oxygen deficiency in the cell over a long period of time, cancer.

Dr. Pompa:
Cancer, baby. Yeah. By the way, it comes from the mitochondrial membrane. Otto Warburg. I know his work very well. Turn of the century, talked about cardiolipin. That’s that omega-6 fat that we said the cell never dies from. That is key for the mitochondria. When that gets disrupted, now the mitochondria starts to make energy in an odd way. We’ll just keep it simple for our listener in a very primitive –

Brian:
Glycolysis, yes.

Dr. Pompa:
Glycolysis in the presence of oxygen.

Brian:
Very inefficient.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, very inefficient, right. Anyway, okay, so –

Brian:
With the mitochondria, Doc, a cell can have a hundred mitochondria, so we have a regular cell with one cell membrane that needs more parent omega-6 and omega-3 in the parent form, but you can have a hundred mitochondria in there that’s 100% parent omega-6 in the cardiolipin, so it is really, really important to get the organic parent omega-6, along with the parent omega-3. You also want some GLA. We’ll talk about that, with the impaired delta-6 enzyme that everybody talks about.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s talk diet. Where can we get these from our diet? You say buying oils in store. You can buy oils very easily that are organic, at least on a negative, but to get the amounts that we need, either a product, but what about some foods? I know Meredith would ask that.

Brian:
They’re in seeds and nuts, so flaxseed is very good for the omega-3 component. There’s some omega-6, but it’s about three and a half to one reverse of what we need, so years ago, they used to just eat flax oil. This was Budwig. Now, with Budwig, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, we didn’t have the adulteration of the omega-6 part, so people always ask me, well, what about her? I said, in her time, she was absolutely correct, but today the fundamental problem is adulteration of the parent omega-6, so the seeds. Sunflower seeds, excellent for parent omega-6. Safflower. Most of the seeds are parent omega-6. Even the nuts, all omega-6. Walnuts are five times the parent omega-6 to the one part omega-3, and everybody’ll say, oh, the reason Seventh Day Adventists eat a lot of walnuts is because of the omega-3, and I keep shaking my head. My goodness, don’t they even look at a composition of -inaudible-. What is in there? It’s not the omega-3. It’s the omega-6 component, but they’re in food, even eating meat.

Grass-fed beef is 21 parent omega-6 to parent omega-3, so we’re getting this, as long as you’re eating unadulterated, unprocessed food in a good amount, but most people aren’t. Most people are going to restaurants, even the fine dining ones. They’re cooking in adulterated oils. They don’t know. They’re not using coconut oil. It’s too much money. They’re not using ghee, clarified butter, organic. It’s too much money. I advise everybody, take a supplement. It may be a buck and a quarter a day, and if you don’t want to spend a buck and a quarter a day on your health, there’s nothing I can do for you.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree 100%. You know, one of the – we have a group of doctors. This is what we’re doing. We’re changing all of those things you said, grass-fed meat, getting them to eat these foods, and then, because they’re already – their membranes are destroying, giving them – we’re supplementing with these ratios of omega-6 to omega-3 with these oils that you’re talking about, so it works. I’m telling you that from a clinical perspective. It works. You know, let me just –

Brian:
This is why I wrote PEO Solution, and I hope people will really –

Dr. Pompa:
Buy the book. Buy the book. There it is, behind you. Meredith can hold it up. Go ahead.

Meredith:
Here it is.

Brian:
That’s it. Yeah. It is –

Dr. Pompa:
Your website right now, before we forget. It’s brianpeskin.com.

Brian:
Yeah, B as in boy, R, I, A, N, P as in parent, E, S, K, I, N.com. There’s lots of science there. It won’t cost you a nickel. You can check out the book, see the accolades, and there’s scientific support on the internet that won’t cost you anything, either, but I write for physicians that are busy, and my charter is giving physicians the medical science they haven’t seen before.

Dr. Pompa:
We appreciate that.

Brian:
Once they read it, they’re amazed, and for your group, this is required reading.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree. I was just going to say that. Every one of my doctors, and I know you’re listening – so this is. It’s required reading, absolutely, and we’re going to get you to my next seminar, because our group – we’re probably the largest doctor group that really understands this, Professor, honestly. Okay, I have two questions that I have to ask. Number one – I know Meredith’s thinking this, so I’m just going to say it. Okay, what about roasted nuts? What does that do to those fragile omegas?

Brian:
It’s very good. It does impact them but not a heck of a lot. Remember, nice margin, so when you’re -inaudible- 15%, no issue compared to the goodness you get. As long as it’s organic to start – it better be organic, and then you’re okay. Excellent question.

Dr. Pompa:
Raw’s better, but –

Brian:
Absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
– even roasted is still not heating it to the point of really killing it.

Brian:
No.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, good. All right.

Meredith:
As long as they’re not roasted in canola oil. That’s what I wrote.

Brian:
Yeah, if it’s roasted in good oil, yes.

Dr. Pompa:
Right. All the vegetable oils and canola oils inflame the membrane beyond belief, so that’s –

Brian:
Dry-roasted, obviously, is best.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, so here’s another question I know our viewers, or at least some of our doctors, are thinking. Okay, look. There’s over 15,000 studies showing the benefits of fish oil, so what you’re telling me – I’m stuck on it, they’re thinking –

Brian:
They’re not all showing the benefits. There’s 15,000 -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
How do you go against that? How do we answer to 15,000 studies? I know some of them are bad studies, but couldn’t there at least be a few?

Brian:
I take the first two chapters of my book, how to sufficiently analyze the study with probability and statistics. The first thing you need to know is, there’s a 95% confidence interval. When studies are done, you go, okay, I want to be 95% confident if I say it works, it works. That means there’s a 5% inherent error rate. I do 15,000 studies. Supposedly, that’s the number. It sounds insane to me, but supposedly that’s the number. What’s 5% of 15,000? 750. What that means is, you will see 750 studies saying fish oil works when it doesn’t. That is the price you pay for a 5% error, and that is standard. I like 99% or 99.5%, but almost nobody does it, so there’s a huge – the more studies you do, the higher the chance for error. It’s called a false positive. Most of the studies are not worth the paper they’re printed on. I know what people are thinking, what?

When I went to MIT and did my thesis – we had to do an undergraduate thesis. My thesis advisor said, “Brian, most of what’s published is wrong,” because I was reading a theoretical result on a vibration. Reeds, it’s what I wanted to do it on. Clarinet reed, and I said, this doesn’t make sense to me. It’s wrong. I’m wrong somewhere, because this thing is published. He started laughing. He goes, don’t you understand? 95% of what’s published is wrong. I never forgot that, and in the medical field, it’s even worse. I just looked at something and analyzed a thousand fish oil studies that could only take 14 that met a criteria of double blind placebo control. Out of a thousand, 14 could even be used. Most of them failed. They weren’t positive studies, but only 14 could be used.

Let me say this with fish oil. There’s four pharmaceutical companies, drug companies, that have drug-based fish oil. Pharmaceutical companies do clinical trials. They can only get one indication for pharmaceutical, drug-grade fish oil, which is lowering hypertriglycerides above 500. They’ve failed on any cardiovascular benefit. They’ve failed on any Alzheimer’s benefit, on any macular degeneration benefit, on any cancer benefit. Fail, and this is the end of the story. All you have to ask is, are there pharmaceutical companies with drug indications for fish oil, and the answer is no. I don’t know what else to say, because if it worked, there would be, and there’s four companies. They can’t get it, because it doesn’t work, and the science – if you get PEO Solution, you will see how it can’t possibly work. It’s not in the cell. When I hear things like, oh, fish oil gives you softer skin, how?

Dr. Pompa:
It’s not in the skin.

Brian:
How can it help cardiology if it’s not in the intima, it’s not in the artery at all? How does it do it? I always ask, Doc, show me the metabolic pathway. First, I go, if this was true, could it be true? What is the metabolic pathway? Typically, that ends it right there. They just look at me, and their eyes glaze over. How does it work? We don’t know is not sufficient. Now, I know there’s drugs that have that. The FDA will let you do that. As an engineer, how do I design the bridge so it doesn’t fall down? I don’t know.

Dr. Pompa:
I think when we – I know people would say this. How do you answer the question of the people who get on some fish oils, and I think the one thing that people would say is, well, I thought my joints felt a little better. I had less pain. Now, I know that, when you talk about it, the omega-6 actually has more direct avenues into the pain pathways than omega-3 in a positive way. Explain that, and how could they have gotten a positive result by –

Brian:
I’ll tell you exactly how, because it’s something wild to think about this, because I would teach this when I’d lecture. It’s actually in the skin. If you’re deficient in parent omega-3, unadulterated parent omega-3 – most people aren’t getting enough of that – you will be deficient in the derivatives, because your body can’t make it, so having the fish oil short-term, under three months, you can get a positive effect, and people do. Longer than three months, you are getting the effect of a long-term steroid, and you know as well as any physician how you don’t want a long-term steroid if you can avoid it whatsoever, and that is the problem today. Most of the studies with fish oil are very short-term, and they know what they’re doing, because if you go out a couple of years, you are ruining the brain. You are ruining the skin. You are ruining the cardiovascular system. I’m terrified what’s going to happen in another 10 years, and I feel very sorry for the fish oil proponents, because they actually believe it works.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Brian:
They really do, but the problem is, a true scientist is obligated to look at the science and tell people every time it doesn’t work, and they won’t do that, which is sad.

Dr. Pompa:
When I looked at the literature, I came across – and this has been something that I’ve been through for many years. When I had to do a lecture on this to a group of doctors, I knew I had to make recommendations with fish oil. After reviewing all the literature, I said, okay, maybe short-term – because that’s where the studies were, any benefit. Any benefit I could find – I didn’t review as many as you, but I did a lot, and I found the short-term, higher-dose – short-term, and then it went negative, right? I thought -inaudible- okay, maybe there’s an argument for that. After reading your stuff even deeper, I said, okay, I’m even changing my recommendation on that, and you answered my question as far as why you might – there’s a safer way to get the same result. Let’s talk about that, because the omega-6 actually has an amazing anti-inflammatory effect, so –

Brian:
Each one. I’ve even had people with dry eye say, Brian, I’ve been on massive fish oil, and it works, but I’m petrified of the negatives. I read your PEO Solution, and we did some experiments. I said, look, I’ll talk to some supplement companies, and I’m sure it’ll give you some of the oils free. Start taking it, and within three months, superior to the fish oil, so the omega-6/3 combo with GLA does work. PGE1 is the body’s number one anti-inflammatory. You mentioned it. That really needs to be talked about. That is on the omega-6 side, and what everybody alludes to is, oh, we don’t convert much, because this is a delta-6 desaturase, and this is what you mentioned earlier, where you don’t make much of this. It’s a quarter of a percent, a half percent, nothing more than that for all the derivatives, never mind just the PGE1, but that is your body’s number one anti-inflammatory, number one vasodilator, so blood flow to the brain. Alzheimer’s dementia, bye-bye. Blood flow to the organs with the cardiovascular system. It makes your arteries open. It makes your artery flexible so your artery isn’t like a straw and cracking.

That’s what happens on the inside, and it stops adhesion of the platelets. It is critical, and I never here anybody talk about PGE1. It’s 1 for a reason. It is the most important, most powerful natural anti-inflammatory. You have arthritis problems? 80% chance within 90 days, it will be down by half to 75% or eliminated. Twenty times more powerful than any of the omega-3 series side. See, the omega-6 series is infinitely more powerful than the 3, because all of our food is omega-6-based. In animals, even the animals that live on grass, the cows, what is the ratio of grass-fed beef? It’s two to one.

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- two to one -inaudible-.

Brian:
6 to 3, even though the 3 is hugely predominant in grass, it burns it up and doesn’t allow it. Now, we can’t burn all of it up the way a cow can, but even nature knows very little omega-3-based foods, and even if the animals eating that, outside of humans, which we shouldn’t be, because it’s in virtually nothing – we don’t live on grass. The cow burns it up. Omega-6 is critical for the omega-6 pathway. PGE1, I talk about it extensively in the book. It will also dissolve a blood clot in the artery.

Dr. Pompa:
The undenatured omega-6 is the key to fixing the epidemic of inflamed cells, cellular dysfunction, and I 100% agree.

Brian:
The inflamed cell you just mentioned is now known as the cause of cancer.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Brian:
Weinberg reversed it. He’s an MIT guy. He came up with the oncogene. He reversed it and said there’s not enough genetic mutations for cancer to be caused from that. You need at least six. There’s only two or three. He reversed it. Now, it is known, and all of the inflammation – remember, I told you before? The inflammation comes from the adulterated omega-6 we’re eating. It’s already a poison, too, ready-made. That’s why we have an inflammatory diet, and that’s why, six or eight years out of eating processed food, everybody gets cancer, and here’s the statistics. 70% of men get cancer. Prostate’s through the roof. The average man will get cancer, 70%. 53% of women. The average person, you will have cancer, because how could you not? You’re eating this stuff, and there’s no reason for it. In the 1920s, 5%. Brian, they didn’t track it back then. They sure as heck did. It was known in every medical journal in 1900 what cancer was, so that’s wrong. It did not exist. Pre-1940, there were zero type 2 diabetics, and I was one of the first to say diabetes is an unknowingly created disease. Now, when you get your cell membrane fixed, guess what? Insulin works better.

Dr. Pompa:
Boom, and that’s it. The receptors are on the membrane, so folks, whether we’re talking hormone conditions, thyroid, diabetes, if you don’t fix the membrane, you won’t fix the receptor, and you’re not going to fix the problem, so this topic goes into all these things, the epidemic of diabetes, hormone conditions, that’s what we’re talking about here. What about brain conditions? What about dementia and Alzheimer’s, because this is an exploding epidemic –

Brian:
Oh, yes.

Dr. Pompa:
We have to take fish oil to fix this. Correct them, Doc.

Brian:
Fish oil fails every time they do it. You can read them yourself. Just pull up on the internet. Is there any fish oil trial reversing it?

Dr. Pompa:
No.

Brian:
The answer’s no. There’s no drug to reverse it, either, and again, we have four fish oil drug companies. It took me a long time looking at this. I knew it had to be cardiovascular, and then, after more research, there’s at least a hundred million capillaries in the brain. What do capillaries do? That is where the nutrient transfer, the oxygen transfer is taking place. What are they made of? 100% parent omega-6. There is no DHA, no EPA, no parent omega-3 in any capillary, so you have a hundred million that are deficient, defective, with no nutrient transfer and no oxygen transfer.

Dr. Pompa:
Right. By the way –

Brian:
-inaudible- for dementia.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s one of the reasons, when we put these patients and clients into ketosis, they go, oh, my gosh, my brain’s working better, because we bypass the oxygen, the glucose that’s not getting in there. Sorry, we had someone come in. My dog’s going to bark, but yeah, it’s so true.

Brian:
They’re all looking in the wrong place. It’s beta amyloid. Why do you think the protein is spilling out? I didn’t say this before, but half of the cell membrane is protein, half of it’s lipid. What’s happening is, when you have the defective cell membrane, it’s opening up. What flows out? The protein. So you have the protein, the beta amyloid, spilling out, and do you actually think just scraping it off is going to solve anything? All that they look at is, we need to get rid of this beta amyloid, and it keeps failing. They just spent another 800 million, I think this year, on another Alzheimer’s dementia failure. It’s all in the capillaries and the cell membrane structure.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, man. I’ve got goosebumps. I’m coming out of my skin, because it’s something I’ve been talking about for years.

Brian:
We’ve had people – Dr. Jeff Matheson, who you mentioned before, has had people take the memory test and gotten better, which is unprecedented. Typically, with dementia, they try and minimize the worsening. They were less worse today. That’s great. I don’t want less worsening. I want reversal. I don’t have any interest in making you less than tomorrow and less sick. I want to reverse to get healthy. -inaudible- had that, and he was shocked, because no drug can do that.

Dr. Pompa:
Look, I wouldn’t have gotten my life back if I didn’t fix the membranes and the efforts in the fats, and it wasn’t fish oil. That was not part of any of my protocols, never.

Brian:
You’re not part fish.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. Meredith, I know you’re – Meredith’s trying to ask some questions, because she is probably thinking of many questions our viewers and listeners have.

Meredith:
Oh, my gosh, I have so many questions, which I know we don’t have a ton of time, but just to kind of review and get started, too – so we’re taking out the fish oils, removing all of the unadulterated, toxic fats, and cleaning up our diet, putting those healthy fats in –

Brian:
As much as you can clean up the diet.

Meredith:
Right, as much as possible.

Brian:
Nobody can do it all, but make a dent, and that’s enough, so instead of two fast food burgers, you have one, or instead of one, you have a half.

Dr. Pompa:
Have zero, and -inaudible- zero.

Brian:
Zero is ideal, but most people won’t do it. See, I’m an engineer. I’m a practical guy. You don’t have to be a monk. You don’t have to be like Dr. Rowen, who’s 100% raw foods vegan. He’ll even tell you, do 80%, I’m over the moon. They don’t have to be that strict, as long as you get the good stuff. Good point, Meredith.

Meredith:
Right, so yeah, so doing our best. I’m just curious, specifically, too, because I eat a lot of canned sardines and wild salmon and oysters, and are those good to eat?

Brian:
Canned sardines are pretty good. If you’re going to eat any fish at all, a sardine is probably your best one. I hope you get them from a good place in Portugal or something. You don’t need a lot of them. You need very few, but if you want to eat a can a week of those, not bad, and there is, in the fish itself, parent omega-6 and parent omega-3, so if you cook a fish, most of that fish oil is gone. Remember, fish oil is a highly processed –

Dr. Pompa:
You’re not at the -inaudible-.

Brian:
Regardless of what they say, we’re not ingesting all the fish oil.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re not getting the overdose, because you’re cooking the fish.

Brian:
No. You can eat fish. That’s not the issue. I’m not anti-fish. Of course, I don’t want farm fish. I’d much rather eat wild fish, but you don’t need to be anti-fish, but it’s not the be all, the end all. The Japanese eat a pile of fish. They’re not as healthy as you would think.

Dr. Pompa:
No. Yeah. No doubt.

Meredith:
How about eating algae, too? We have some amazing algae products that we use where you’re literally just kind of eating the raw algae. How would that come into play?

Brian:
It’s hard to get enough of it, just because of the density. You need a fair amount of this. You need about 3 grams a day of the oils, which is still very little. The algae may have the parent omega-6 and parent omega-3. I’m not sure what the ratios are. Probably going to still have a lot of the DHA/EPA in it, probably, because it’s marine-based, so anything that’s marine-based is going to be predominantly DHA/EPA, because it can’t freeze, and that’s not what a human being needs. Now, it is in the brain, but it stays in the brain an average of two and a half years. It doesn’t go bad. That’s where the antioxidants stay. That’s where you get the 3.6 milligrams. It has a half-life of two and a half years. This is all in my book. It’s incredible, and if you don’t know that, you go, of course you need tons of DHA and EPA every day to support the brain. The brain’s pretty heavy. No, you don’t. It lasts, unless you’re overdosing it on fish oil, in which case you’re using all your natural antioxidants, and you have a severe problem. I got off the play a little, Meredith. Let me answer the next one. It’s just hard to get the amount you need.

Meredith:
Right. It’s amazing how the body adapts, though, and I was kind of curious, too, if you could explain a little bit more. I was looking through your book, and it stood out to me. As a woman, the issue with PEOs and deficiency and cellulite. If you can talk about that a little bit.

Brian:
Yeah, I discovered this actually with my wife. She was getting the age where that was in the mirror. It is strictly a cell membrane issue. Nothing special. Guys can have it, too. You put these oils back in. Within 90 days, it will be down by about half. You give it a year, it will be like a young girl again, because now it’s getting younger and younger. I was in South Beach a few years ago with Dr. Cavallino from Italy. He’s a judge in the most beautiful women in the world in Italy contest, and he couldn’t believe what America’s come to. Even the rest of the world, because they follow America’s diets. 20-year-old, 25-year-old women, massive cellulite problem, but if you solve the cell membrane issue, it’s gone. It is so easy. All you got to do is take it. It’s so easy to fix this, but you don’t need a lot of the lasers. You don’t need a lot of the other stuff. That’s not long-lasting. I deal in physiology, so this fixes it at the tissue level.

Excellent question, and your skin, Meredith, becomes like butter. My wife, of course, takes the oils. Every woman looks at her. How is your skin like this? How is your skin – and the fingernails become like glass. You can’t break them. Most women have very weak fingernails. You take this. A surgeon I just talked to said, Brian, I used my thumbnail in surgery. Not sure why, but he’s a top surgeon. He goes, after taking these oils for about three or four months, my thumbnail is so strong, it makes my surgery better, and he goes, my attention span is up. He’s a top surgeon to begin with. I think I’m operating 10 to 15% better. Can you imagine this? A world-class surgeon going up 10 to 15% because of the oils. Better eye-hand coordination and focus. This is your brain with the Alzheimer’s dementia thing you were talking about. The concentration goes through the roof, so your kids, phenomenal improvement. What an advantage your child will have, whether they’re in high school, elementary school, kindergarten, college, than someone not taking these oils, but yeah, back to the cellulite. Look, I like beautiful women as much as the next guy, and you can be gorgeous with excellent skin into your 70s. You really can be.

Meredith:
Hmm, wow, well, I think you sold a lot of people and a lot of viewers on that right there, and just kind of curious, too, if you can explain – so we can really key in on our diet, but if we do feel like we need a supplement, if there’s maybe some areas in our diet that are lacking, and we don’t feel confident that we can fully just kind of balance all of our deficiencies with just diet alone, what would your requirements be for a supplement for PEO?

Brian:
For a supplement, you absolutely have to have more parent omega-6 than parent omega-3, anywhere about one to one. Two to one, two and a half to one. It has to be above. It has to be organically grown, no pesticides, no chemicals. It has to be organically processed. You need to check the oxidation levels, especially p-Anisidine. That is a secondary aldehyde that nobody checks. If you check fish oil, it will be 19. Toxic is 20, so fish oil in the capsule – this doesn’t get published – is on the edge of horrific damage. Secondary aldehydes ruin your DNA, ruin everything, so parent omega-6, parent omega-3, p-Anisidine is 4. They don’t even have close to any issue. You need to have GLA in there to bypass the delta-6 desaturase enzyme, because all we hear about is, oh, the impairment is slow, everybody’s impaired, there’s no conversion, and this makes the DHA, EPA, GLA, everything goes through it.

If you give the GLA – and evening primrose is great for that GLA portion – bypass it, so you with your – diabetics, alcoholics, anybody that has any kind of impairment, and these diseases will have an impairment. It’s not what they tell you, where it’s 80% or 50%, but even a 20% impairment, the PGE1 is enormous. We need all the PGE1 we can get, so more parent omega-6 than omega-3, has to be organic, has to contain GLA. Evening primrose is the ideal place. It has to have a nitrogen bubble in it so you don’t have the oxygen in there. I like a hard capsule, because they’re closer to glass, so I like a hard gelatin capsule, and I advise any of the companies I consult for to use that, to not use a soft gel-cap in this particular product. It could be used elsewhere but not in these oils, because they are reactive. Those sort of things, but those are the top five.

Dr. Pompa:
I know companies pay you to consult, and I know, Meredith, give them the show that we did, because that’s one of the companies that is based on his science, so we did a show, so give that episode number. That’ll help.

Meredith:
Yep, so it was with Dr. Jeff Matheson, and it’s episode #188. It’s called, Is Fish Oil Toxic?, and you can learn more about a product that kind of falls underneath these requirements that Professor Peskin has for a product, so it’s 188. What about dosing? I’m curious about that.

Brian:
Excellent question. This is all I do. Over 20 years, for prophylactic use, meaning you have no disorder or disease, one 725 milligram capsule for every 40 pounds, a teaspoon or a half a teaspoon for 160-pound person is perfect. It’s that powerful. If you use my recommended formulation criteria, that is all you need, a half-teaspoon for a 160-pound person. Now, it’s proportional to body weight, because remember, this gets incorporated to every one of your hundred trillion cells, and it makes the long-chains, too. If you have any kind of ailment, arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, you could take up to triple short-term. Triple can be three, four months. Double, you can live on day and night. I typically run on double the normal amount, because I’m working – I could be up at 4:30 in the morning and go to bed at midnight. If you’re under mental duress, physical duress, an athlete, and you take two 725 milligram capsules before you work out. You won’t have the lactic acid burn if you’re a bodybuilder, if you’re a pro sports athlete person. It’s incredible. You don’t need a lot, but about 3 grams of this formulation for a 160-pound person. It’s incredible how little you need, how powerful it is.

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, we’re out of time. We could keep going, but Professor, thank you.

Brian:
Check out my website, and there’s a lot of info on there.

Dr. Pompa:
Get to his website. It’s your name, brianpeskin.com, and get the book. It’s required reading for my docs, no doubt. Listen, we’re going to blow it up with this. No doubt, we’re going to do an article with this. We’re going to get this out there. Why, because people need this message. Doc, thanks for putting it out there, no doubt.

Brian:
Thank you so much.

Dr. Pompa:
Our group, we’re going to get you to the seminar. Meredith?

Meredith:
Yep. All right, thank you, Dr. Pompa. Thank you so much, Professor Peskin, for what you’re doing, too, for getting this information out. It’s so, so important. So much of this just blew my mind. This book is absolutely incredible. Brianpeskin.com or peo-solution.com as well. You can learn more and get some of the chapters for free as well, so thank you so much. Thanks, everybody, for watching, and I will see you next time. Bye-bye.

Brian:
The pleasure was mine. Thank you.

Print & Reader Version...

Transcript of Episode 196: Cancer: Surviving and Thriving

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Annie Brandt

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode Number 196. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, and today we welcome special guest Annie Brandt. We have a fascinating topic that we’re going to be digging into today, and Annie has an incredible story that she’s going to share, her own healing testimony, and I think so many topics that we’re going to include in this conversation are so relevant to all of you who are listening and want to include more useful cellular healing tools in your toolbox in your healing journey.

Before we dig in with Annie, and she shares her incredible healing story, let me tell you a little bit about her. Annie Brandt came to be the President Emeritus of Best Answer For Cancer Foundation and the International Organization of Integrative Cancer Physicians from the ground up as a survivor of advanced-stage metastatic breast cancer. After being diagnosed in July of 2001 with breast cancer and metastases to the lymph, brain, and lungs, Ms. Brandt was told to get your affairs in order and given three months to live. She decided to take a journey on the road less traveled and refused the standard of care. No surgery. No high-dose chemotherapy or radiation. Instead, she created her own healing platform of holistic modalities that addressed the diseases in her body, mind, and spirit and topped it off with targeted cancer therapies.

Ms. Brandt believed other patients should have the option of experiencing thriving while surviving, so after being found cancer-clear, she founded the Best Answer For Cancer Foundation in 2006. BAFC is a hybrid nonprofit compromised of the physicians’ group and a general public patient group. Ms. Brandt’s book, The Healing Platform, helps cancer patients discover their own best answer for cancer. She has co-authored two books, A Kinder, Gentler Cancer Treatment and Celebrating 365 Days of Gratitude. She is also featured in the book, Cool Careers For Girls as Environmentalists. For more information, you can go to bestanswerforcancer.org or write Annie’s email, annie@bestanswerforcancer.org.

Annie, welcome to Cellular Healing TV. We’re so excited to have this discussion with you.

Annie:
Thank you, and I’m thrilled to be here. I love what you guys do.

Dr. Pompa:
Well, I tell you what. We just had a brief conversation before this, and I already want to come through the screen and hug you. You and I have much in common spiritually, emotionally, physically, you name it. We have so much in common, but obviously, for you, a place to start is, my gosh, your story. It was 15 years ago now. Tell us the story. You’re a survivor. You’ve got a story to tell. Tell it.

Annie:
It was really a surprise. I was taking a shower one day, and I found a lump under my left arm. It was the Fourth of July, believe it or not. I thought it was just a swollen lymph node, and I went to the doctor. After more investigation and some scans, they did a biopsy of the lymph node and found that it was cancer, and it was at least stage 2, because it was in the lymph. It was a real shock, because I was on a healthy diet, and I didn’t have a whole lot of stress to speak of, but I also did have a dysfunctional immune syndrome, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been that surprised.

After more scans, they found out that it was further spread than that. It was also in my brain and my lungs, so the diagnosis went from stage 2 to you might have three to five months, get your affairs in order, but if you do surgery, chemo, and radiation, it could be the five months. I was like most people. It really is a deer in the headlights, and I went home, and I was very upset. I was crying, and I heard a voice. It was so real I thought someone had broken in the house, and the voice said, “I love you, and I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you.”

At that point, when it started talking, I realized it wasn’t someone in the house. It was actually resonating from within me, and it was that real. It was God. I wasn’t all that firm a believer at the time, so when I heard that voice, I thought, oh, wow. It really shocked me and startled me and set me down, and when I thought about the words, it was like, oh, yeah, okay, He’s saying the truth, because if I die, there’s nothing bad about that. I’m going to Heaven. I’m going to Him, and if I live, I’ll have something to help others with, so at that point the fear just completely left me. I really knew that, either way, it was going to be just fine, and it sounds very Pollyanna, but I’ve never changed that feeling. That feeling’s never changed. The fear has never come back, and at that point it turned into a journey of discovery, and it’s really been cool.

Dr. Pompa:
I guess that’s part of your decision, because most people—I can tell you, for me, if I was given six months to live if I did chemo, three months if I don’t, I would never, ever make that decision. However, that’s not most people. Most people would make that decision, right? Just to get three months, just to get six months. I wouldn’t do it if you gave me another year, two years. I wouldn’t make that decision, so why do you think you made that decision? Talk about it.

Annie:
Okay, so my health story actually started in ’92 with the first death diagnosis that I had a dysfunctional immune syndrome.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I asked about that. I wanted to know more about that.

Annie:
Oh, yeah, it was a—they didn’t really know what it was. They gave it a label, and they said it was an immune dysfunction syndrome. They didn’t know what to do about it. They had no therapies for it. All they could do was give me drugs for the side effects, and all they knew was that it killed most people, so that was ’92. That was my first realization that modern medicine couldn’t always help, that there wasn’t a pill for—

Dr. Pompa:
How did they measure that? Did they just look at white blood cells? How did they measure and say you had a dysfunctional immune syndrome?

Annie:
No, it was really strange. They did immune tests, and they saw that my immune system wasn’t quite functioning, but it was dysfunctional and that some days it was fine. Some days things were out of whack. They watched it for six months. They did all kinds of blood work. We did scans. They did everything, and then it became a diagnosis of exclusion, so they excluded a list of diseases, and what they were left with was this immune dysfunction syndrome, so it was really just really strange, but like I said, the biggest thing I got out of that was that I could do something for myself. When you can’t rely on conventional medicine, you can look at other things. You can find other things. That was a whole new world, and most people aren’t like that.

Dr. Pompa:
That changed your thinking. Okay, I have to do something for myself. Now, did they say what the outcome of that would have been? What was the prognosis then, even for that?

Annie:
Yeah, the prognosis was that I would—because it was dysfunctional, I would probably have other diseases, but most people got cancer. Most people died. That was 1992, and in ’94, I had just kind of gotten back on my feet a little bit. I mean, I was functional. I would say I was just functional, which was really good, because I had been bedridden, so I was functional by ’94, and then I had another very debilitating episode. I ended up in the hospital, vomiting for 13 days. It took them 13 days to stabilize me, and I had neurological symptoms from that time. I was blind in one eye and was numb down most of one side of my body, so after a number of hospital tests, they diagnosed me with multiple sclerosis. I went and got a second opinion, thinking I’d been misdiagnosed the first time, with the first disease, but no, I was told I got both of them. I was that lucky, and so they said I would be in a wheelchair in six months and dead in two years.

Dr. Pompa:
You got every diagnosis, honestly. It’s remarkable.

Annie:
That was my second example of, okay, what could modern medicine do for progressive, aggressive multiple sclerosis? Not much. They could do drugs to alleviate some of the symptoms.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s it.

Annie:
Again, I was kind of on my own, so within six months, I went on a diet. I got on supplements. Within six months, I had no other symptoms, I’d regained all my functionality, and I never had another episode.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, so what are some of the things you did right there, just to keep to that part?

Annie:
Okay, well, the biggest thing with MS was the diet. I adopted the Swank MS Diet, which is basically a very clean, organic, no red meat, no dairy, no yeast, no nothing pretty much. It was just clean fruits and—no, not even fruit. Clean vegetables and light meats, and then I added a supplement program to that, and I found the supplement program in a little pamphlet a lady brought home from my mom and dad’s church. It was called New Hope, Real Help For Those with Multiple Sclerosis, and it was written by a guy who had multiple sclerosis, John Pageler. He happened to own a health food store, so he took the Swank Diet and added supplements to it to repair the brain, repair and renourish the brain. I did that, and like I said—but the symptoms disappeared, and I regained everything. Everything. I’ve never had another episode.

One thing I also learned about the MS and the first diagnosis was detoxification of the body, and more with the MS, because at that point I thought, my blood’s got to be really thick with all of this stuff to cause all the platelets and damage the brain, so that’s when I started doing a physical detox. The first time was ’94, and I found an herbal mixture called Essiac tea, which is now very well known. It wasn’t then. The four herbs I got organically, and I weighed them and mixed them and brewed them and steeped them and measured it out and the whole bit, so that also helped, too. I did another sort of detox, cellular detox, which is why I love your show. It was wild blue-green algae, which also digests at the cellular level and pushes out toxins, so yeah, those two diagnoses really got me to the point where I think I didn’t just want to kill myself faster than the cancer could when I got the cancer diagnosis.

You say the three months, and why did I make that decision? I really think at that point I knew that there could be other options, and when I thought about having only three months or five months, and I thought about the picture of someone going through surgery, chemo, and radiation, I said, okay, how do I want to live, and how do I want to die? Okay, and I knew I didn’t want to live that way, and I didn’t want to die that way, so that’s how I made my decision.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, sometimes the family pressure is why people end up making that decision, oddly enough, where they don’t want to, but they feel like, I’m going to die, and I don’t want to disappoint them. Here’s the thing that everyone uses. It’s, we did all we can. She did everything she can. Now, when you do chemo, radiation, and surgeries, that’s all. Now you’ve done everything, right? If you don’t do those things, then you can’t make that statement, in people’s mind, right? It’s like, as long as you did everything you can, chemo, radiation, then our conscience are clear, but unfortunately those are bad words.

Annie:
Yeah, and don’t you think we need a paradigm shift, because if you’re looking at surgery, chemo, and radiation and the damages that they do to the body and the immune system and the vital body organs, and then you think of the Hippocratic Oath, “first do no harm,” why would you do those things first? Why wouldn’t you do “first do no harm” things first, and then, if they didn’t work, try the really super-powered, high-dose chemo and radiation? That’s my thinking.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Me, too. That’s obviously my thinking as well. All right, I’m going to ask a question that we—I already know the answer, but they’re thinking. All right, so I’m going to ask you, because there’s been a few -inaudible-. You beat cancer. What was the one thing? What was the most important thing that you did in order to beat cancer?

Annie:
Oh, my gosh, and I love you for asking that question. Yeah, people ask me all the time, what do you think? What did you do? I said, well, first of all, I did everything. I did everything that made sense, that had science behind it, that had anecdotal history, and I really investigated. I researched. I didn’t just jump, but I did a lot of things. The thing that I consider to be my kicker was really the spiritual connection, having a God and knowing that really—God is large and in charge is one of my favorite phrases, because He’s the only one, or She’s the only one who knows when, where, how I’m going to go. Everyone else just has an opinion, including me, so knowing that, believing that, took all the pressure off. There was nothing for me to do except try and be healthy and vibrant, and His job was when I was going to go and how I was going to go, so yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s -inaudible-, and I want to go in that direction, because we here on Cellular TV really played a lot into that, the mental aspect, the emotional aspect of healing, and even God beliefs, right? You can go one way or another. Then, we’re going to get into some of the other things that you did, because we agree. As far as therapies go, you’re doing it all, right? There’s so many things, you can’t focus on one thing, but I agree with you on this emotional topic, so tell us about that. Tell us about the mindset. You did partly already, but keep it ongoing. What did you do to make that better? What can they do, watching, for their mindset, because we have many challenged people who watch the show. How should they think?

Annie:
Okay, so if you are—you’ve heard that phrase, “You are what you eat.” I take it higher up. You are what you think. You are what you believe. There is a cancer personality. I talk about it in my book. It’s decades old. It was a theory put out by several different physicians, and it talks about the similarity in patients of cancer and chronic disease, and a lot of them have what I call stinking thinking. There’s a belief in you’re not worth it, of course it’s going to happen to me, I’m surprised it took this long. Oh, it will never work for me. I’ll never be able to heal. Oh, sure, I’m going to be fine. Yeah, I’ll never do it.

It’s really important to get a strength and purity of mind, and if you start with God, I don’t care—really, I think God is large enough for all religions, so I think it is all one God, but if you start with whatever your god is, knowing that or believing that you are made in His image, that He created you, that you are a perfect being in His eyes, then how can there be anything wrong with you? Yes, we make mistakes. We’re human. Yes, we have things we could do better or feel better about, but you have to start with loving yourself, and for most patients who have cancer and chronic disease, that’s really, really hard, but there’s examples all through our life.

If you look at the flight attendants, they say put the oxygen mask on yourself first and then worry about everyone around you. Cancer patients don’t do that. They put everybody else first, but the theory is, if you pass out from lack of oxygen, or if you die from cancer, who’s going to take care of your family? Who’s going to take care of your loved ones? Who’s going to do it? We have to love ourselves. We have to put ourselves first, and that’s really hard, so having a God and knowing that you’re loved.

I have five affirmations still to this day up on my mirror. I used to have them everywhere, the front door, in the car, on my purse. Everywhere, I’d have an affirmation. It said God loves you, or God is large and in charge, or this was one of my favorites. Thank you, tumors. I’ve got the message. You can go now. I really think they’re just little messengers, and then I have all over, you are loved, you are beautiful, you are forgiven. We’ve got to believe it, but because we’ve had a whole life of not believing it, it’s a daily effort. It’s like you put on your shoes, you put on your underwear, you put on your belief.

Dr. Pompa:
Looking at your life, looking back, you would say there was a time that you didn’t perhaps believe that. There were some wounds and things that happened in your life that you didn’t believe it. Your major premise shifted. That’s what that called, meaning that, okay, if I’m created in the image of God, then I must be perfect, and therefore and therefore and therefore. You changed your major premise, so what made that shift, and what happened in your life to get you to the wrong major premise?

Annie:
I think that one of the things I read and one of the—in doing research about the psyche and our personality profiles, our personalities are basically established, they say, by the time we’re five, so little, innocent children. A lot of what happens to us probably isn’t meant the way it’s said, but we hear it differently. We hear it as children. You can’t do anything right, Annie. I asked you for this tool, and you got me that tool, and so that stays with you. You really have to go back, and there are a lot of mind/body tools and therapies that you can do to reprogram your thinking, to reprogram your brain. They’re all really gentle. They take work, because we tend to cover those up like the dog that messes in the—the cat that messes in the corner and covers it up with the rug and some dirt.

We don’t like to uncover that stuff, and it is painful, but I have patients all the time who call me and say, the cancer is back, what did I do wrong? My answer is always, it doesn’t have to be something you did wrong. It can just be something you overlooked, or it can be something you did longer than you should have. You’ve got to look at every aspect of your life, and I find that most patients don’t ever go from here up. They don’t ever go into the psychoemotional and the spirituality part of things. They’re down in the physical all the time, which is good, but you’ve got to look at what makes us tick.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep. Yeah, no doubt about it. You need both. Yeah, so, okay, it seems so trite to say we have to have that thinking, but how does the average person change their stinking thinking? You know what I’m saying. Again, it sounds like such an easy thing. You seemed to make the tradition, because you immediately attached to God. You heard that voice. You could anchor to that, but what about people listening? How do they get—

Annie:
Yeah, it’s a process. I can promise you that I was definitely flying 15 feet above the ground, looking straight ahead, when I got sick. I never examined myself. I don’t think I knew who I was. I certainly didn’t know I had a spiritual friend. I didn’t know I had a God. I didn’t have a God, and so it was a process, and it’s a growth opportunity, so this is a personal belief system of mine, but I think this world is our purgatory. I think this is where we learn and grow our souls, and then, when we die, we actually—or that’s when we go to Heaven, and everything’s good. Our souls have learned and grown enough in this life, and we’re on to the next, so how do you learn and grow your soul if you don’t have growth opportunities? I look at this whole thing, ever since 1992, but really it didn’t come home to me until the cancer diagnosis, till then.

It’s been a growth opportunity, and I try and look at, how do you have growth opportunities if you don’t have challenges like cancer, like a car accident, like losing your home? Whatever it is, if you can take it off of here and hold it out at arms-length and say, oh, you’re just a growth opportunity, it puts a whole new spin on things. We should try not to fear death, because what’s the point? Here’s a newsflash. We all die. It’s like, what are you afraid of? It’s going to happen, and it’s none of your business when it does. You just do the best you can, right?

Dr. Pompa:
I think that’s a big thing, though, that you didn’t fear death, because your major premise was, all right, look, it’s better over there anyway, so I don’t have anything to lose. That changed the way you thought completely, but again, it’s from the top down. I think that, when people get the diagnosis, they’re trying so hard to hang on that it becomes more of an emotional disaster, honestly. I’ll tell you something I’ve learned in all of my from pain to purpose, and that’s—every one of my purposes, unfortunately, I learned in the pain, but the faster I let go and let God, the sooner I learned the lesson, the sooner I end up on the other side.

It’s always a reframing. Now, I can reframe faster about the adversity that I’m in. Okay, God, what are You teaching me in it? What can I learn? How is this going to make me better? Again, I think it’s reframing how we’re thinking about the cancer or the diagnosis or the sickness, whatever. We have to switch the way we’re thinking about it as a first step, and then, now, all of a sudden—then, all of a sudden, the answers come. Now, all of a sudden, the peace comes. Now, all of a sudden, our bodies are able to change. Our minds are able to change. That’s my thinking.

Annie:
I think that’s beautiful, and when you said the first step, I remember thinking, when I was trying to do this, when I was trying to change my attitude, every day I would get up, and I’d think, okay, now pretend you’re like that little kid that you just saw learning how to walk. The first steps are hard. The next time he takes a step, it’s like, oh, yeah, I remember how to do this, and the third time, he’s like, oh, yeah, this is getting easier. I think that’s how it was for me. It was like, every day I had to just remind myself, it’s all right, this is a growth opportunity, you are doing this, it’s fine, you can’t do anything about it by fussing about it, so just relax into it, enjoy it, find some joy, and that’s what I’d say to people. Find joy in everything you do. Try—

Dr. Pompa:
Then, you have to let go to find that joy, because—or like this, in the controlling, right? You said there’s those personalities that—really, they bring on the cancer, if you will, and it’s true. You have to let go. I had to let go in my life, and then it became easier, but now it’s like I’m learning it through my children. As my children are 21 and 19, it’s like, whew. Now I’ve got to let go. It’s even harder, and it’s like, I’ve got to let go of them now. It’s always something.

Annie:
Yeah, but isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it wonderful that it’s always something? Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
We’re all in the same battle. All right, let’s talk about some of the other things that I know our viewers want to learn and we haven’t talked a lot about on this show, things like PEMF, which I’m very familiar with this, have units myself, and IV therapy, BioMats. You’ve done a lot of things that I think our viewers want to hear, so let’s talk about some of those real exciting things that you want to talk about. I know it would benefit not just some of our viewers with cancer but other conditions as well.

Annie:
Okay, great. If you think—and this has helped me throughout the years. One of the things I didn’t find out until I got the cancer diagnosis but that I unconsciously used for the other diseases—I found out that cancer loves fungus, bacteria, virus, and inflammation.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Annie:
Actually, all diseases love fungus, bacteria, virus, and inflammation, so if you just look at those four components, and then you start looking at therapies that are anti-inflammatory like pulsed electromagnetic frequency and that realign the electrical body, and there’s the other thing. There’s an electrical body. There’s a spiritual body. There’s a psychological body. We’ve got so many options. You’ve got so many options that we can play with for optimum health, and I say play, because, again, remember, this is your journey of discovery. Yeah, so I do a lot still. I do anti-inflammatories, antifungals, antibacterials, and antivirals. I try and live that way, too, so I try not to put anything in the body that -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that—when I was sick, I kept trying to go after my fungus and different bacterias and even parasites, and so I brought my heavy metals down, because I was so loaded with heavy metals. It was keeping them -inaudible-. They were able to hide from the immune system in and around the heavy metals that polluted my body, and I would argue that for a lot of other toxins as well. To our point, it’s a matter of doing all of it, right? That’s the thing. PEMF, it’s pulsed electromagnetic frequency. What did you notice from it? There’s many of those devices out there. Y’all, Google PMF, and you’ll see these frequencies. I tell you, people have sworn by them for pain and, no doubt, anti-inflammatory, obviously, so tell us a little bit about that, and then we’ll talk about some of the IV therapies that you did.

Annie:
Yeah, I really got into PEMF after studying the electrical, electromagnetic body, so there were a mix of positive and negative ions. Everything we walk on, everything we touch, everything that’s manmade, is south pole magnetics, which can be disease-making. They can be energy-making, but they can be disease-making, and north pole magnetics are the healing and also the nourishing and the restorative.

I was getting into that kind of thing when I found the PEMF, and I just so happened to have thrown my back out. I was supposed to go to Australia, and the electricity went off, and I was multitasking, so I was on the phone, trying to open the garage door, forgot I had a double-insulated garage door, and I heard this most awful pop. Yeah, I was in bed for about three days, missed my plane, and then a friend said, hey, why aren’t you doing PEMF? I was like, oh. It was one of those blood moments. I was like, oh, my gosh, why wasn’t I right on the PEMF machine?

Really, a good way to look at it, in my take, is that it realigns the electromagnetic frequencies of the body, and if they’re aligned properly, then pain goes away, and also there’s a big theory, and I believe it, that illness results in an electromagnetic imbalance or electrical magnetic imbalance causes illness, so that’s kind of hand-in-hand.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, especially when we look at the electromagnetic frequencies that we’re surrounded by that—they’re throwing off a lot of what you’re saying, so it becomes even more important. I know I saw on one of the things—you talk about the BioMat is helping that process, too. What are some other things that you helped line up the electric?

Annie:
The Beamer.

Dr. Pompa:
The Beamer. I’m a big Beamer fan. I laid on my Beamer this morning.

Annie:
Oh, did you? I have not been able to afford one yet, so I’m very envious. Color me green. Yeah, I love all the electromagnetic stuff, and of course I do a lot of EMF blocking here in the house and wherever I go. I try and minimize driving or talking in the car, wifi in the car, because you’re already in a car, you’re already surrounded by huge—you’re sitting in an electromagnetic envelope, and you’ve got little envelopes on either side of you, driving down the hallway—I mean, highway, so yeah, I try and minimize as much as I can, and then of course sleeping, taking a nap on the BioMat or your Beamer just to kind of detox, again detox the body. By the way, I just want to commend you on detox education that you’re doing. Detox is so important, and I love it that you’re helping people understand that and all the tools available. Y’all, those watching, it’s really important, and I detox every day, because every day we’re taking toxins in. You can’t get away from it, so detox, detox, detox, but don’t forget the emotional, psychological, and spiritual detoxes, too.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow, and I definitely hope they hear that message. That’s for sure, but it wasn’t—I asked the question facetiously. It wasn’t one thing, but people want it to be one thing, right? That’s why I asked the question for them, but really, you did it all. The mindset, all the way down, and I would, too. I would, too. I did. I did for my illness, right? Mine wasn’t cancer, but it could’ve been. I would’ve done the same thing, by the way.

Annie:
If you think about the fact that, if you really—when you start doing your research, what you really find out with cancer personality, all this other stuff, your old life was the path that brought you to illness, so you have to find what fed the disease. No matter what the disease is, you have to find the source, so the doctor treats the end result. The doctor treats the tumor, your little messengers, your blood, whatever it is. You’ve got to find what caused it and what’s feeding it, and that’s your journey, and so, Dr. Pompa, I actually changed—decided that this was an opportunity for me to change my life, and I literally changed my life, and I’ve had a ball. How many times do you get an opportunity to remake your life?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s so true, but see, everything you say is because this is where you’re coming from, right? I call them three-percenters. When we look at statistics and the people who survive cancer, 3% -inaudible- drugs, 3%, so people that change the world, three-percenters, right? People who took up arms to fight for their life. It was 3%. That’s where the term three-percenters came from. You have to understand this. What you just said, though, 97% of people live their life in effect, so therefore, by giving a drug, treating the end result, the symptom, it’s very normal for their mindset, because their mindset is, we have a symptom, we take something. Oh, and by the way, it works, because when they were little, they had a headache, and they were given an aspirin. That fixed it. When they had this, they were given that. For this—so therefore, they learn that effect mentality instead of going, wait a minute, why did I have a headache? I raise my kids differently. What do you mean? Why do you have a headache? What’d you do? Were you stressed out? Did you eat something you shouldn’t have? Cause, cause, cause, but unfortunately that’s only 3%, so it’s like, please, our viewers, our listeners, it’s a mindset shift that we all made, that we look for cause in our life. By the way, isn’t that one of the first mindset shifts that we have to survive cancer? You have to have that shift.

Annie:
Yeah. Yeah, and it is—if you think about it, it is shifting the paradigm of your whole life.

Dr. Pompa:
It changes everything. It shifts everything.

Annie:
Everybody changes. It’s kind of funny. Have you noticed that? Everybody changes when you change.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Annie:
You start changing things for the better, you start getting more positive, and it’s like magic. Everybody around you starts getting more positive and starts looking at, maybe they should change that bad habit of theirs, and yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Even from an emotional standpoint, in other words, if you don’t—if you find yourself saying, gosh, I just—these people in my life. What could you be causing to bring those people in your life? Like you said, our whole life—immediately, when you start living your life from cause as a 3%, you seem to identify. We all do. I still do. I identify things in my life that I’m causing, whether it’s a bad mindset or this or that, so examine your life. Be a 3% and live life in cause, no doubt.

Annie:
I know, and I caught myself laughing at myself so many times, like the one I learned where, if you point your finger at somebody, you’ve got three pointing back at you. I was like, oh, the things you learn. It’s really fun.

Dr. Pompa:
Thank God we can choose a life of happiness, or we can choose a life of misery, making excuses, living our life in effect.

Annie:
I’m so glad you said that, because that’s what I tell people. Look, you’ve got two choices, positive or negative, good or bad, happy, sad. What do you want to do?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but you don’t have cancer. If you had cancer, how could you—you did, and you still chose a life of happiness, which is part of your healing. I hope people are feeling that, and believe me, when I was sick, I didn’t go through it like Mr. Faithful, either, at times. My wife was saying, God’s going to take a message to the world through you, you’re going to be healed, and I was like, I don’t want to hear that, but I learned in it, and I came around. Dang it, she was right. Anyway, so talk about some of the IVs that you did. What were some of those things?

Annie:
Okay, well, so back in 2001, the only things I could find that were effective against diet were things that I’d already found—I mean, effective against disease were things that I’d already found, like diet. I discovered mind/body medicine. I discovered God, did detox, and of course diet can be detox. I found supplements. I found herbs. I think my first IV was 2002, and the cancer was still there. It had shrunk a little bit. A few tumors had left already, but it was still in my brain and my lungs and my breast and my lymph, and I read about this therapy called IPT, insulin potentiation therapy. To me, it’s a trojan horse therapy. By delivering insulin to the body, it stimulates the disease cells, not just cancer but disease cells, and puts healthy cells to sleep, and that’s when you sneak in, trojan horse in the doses of whatever drug you’re using. In cancer’s case, it was 10% of the chemo, and so that was my first experience with an IV for health, and I was amazed by it. You sit in a recliner for 45 minutes to an hour. You go through the treatment. I read a book until I got to the hypoglycemic moment, which means your healthy cells are asleep, and your disease cells are highly stimulated, waiting for the drug. I called it my cancer cocktail, because I felt a little high at that point and a little buzz, but it was so easy. The chemo came down the pipe. They gave anti-inflammatory, antifungal, antibacterial, antiviral right after it, and I was done. I remember, Dr. Dan, thinking, do I really have cancer? This is so easy, so that was my first IV that I experienced.

Then, I think in 2006 or 2007, I can’t remember which, was about the time that high-dose vitamin C, I first had one of those. Nowadays, there’s so many IVs. There’s a new combination out that we’ve actually got a study going on. It’s artesunate combined with high-dose vitamin C, and artesunate is a derivative of artemisinin. Artemisinin is a Chinese herb that acts like chemo but has none of the side effects. You can take it orally as artemisinin, or you can do it IV as artesunate, and the therapy was actually tested at Bastyr University, a naturopathic university, and it says artesunate IV followed immediately by high-dose vitamin C. They’re getting clear scans in stage 4 breast cancer. It’s really cool.

I’ve done ozone blood irradiation, ultraviolet blood irradiation using ozone and UV light. I’ve done percumin, IV percumin. That’s pretty neat, because, again, the percumin is an anti-cancer herb, and the idea being, if you’re delivering it IV, you’re delivering it to a much larger percentage of your body more effectively through the blood.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, exactly. I want people to understand that these things are available. So much is being done with ozone today. They can pull a certain amount of your blood—I’ve had this done myself just for health. It’s like where they pull the blood out, put ozone in, push it right back into the body. There’s a machine that’s called UVLrx where they pull your blood, run it through different light frequencies, green, red, blue, or ultraviolet, and run it right back into your body. We know that these things are out there, because they kill infections. They obviously bring oxygen into the cells, which is very difficult for cancer to function under that, so there’s so many things. Of course, even ozone—I’m sorry, hydrogen peroxide IVs. So many options out there today.

Annie:
Yes, and I think that’s the thing, too. I get a lot of calls from cancer patients. There are seemingly almost too many options out there. They don’t know how to make sense of them, and how do you choose which one to do, and how does one choose? I would say, and I say this to everybody, first of all, do your research. I’ve heard, oh, it’s the latest and greatest. Okay, fine, let me ask you a question. Do you like the look of lab rats? Do you think they look good? Do you think they have a happy life? Basically, if you’re doing something brand new, you are a lab rat. You’re a guinea pig for somebody, so I say look for the history. Look for the anecdotal history. Look for any science behind it, and then check and make sure that it won’t interfere with anything else you’re doing. If you have a partnership with a doctor, which I encourage everybody to have a partnership with a doctor, ask them. Say, can you help me with this? I think I might want to try this new thing.

I actually had—you’re going to love this. I actually had someone call me the other day and ask if the Beamer would upset anything they were doing, and then I said, no, I don’t think so, but thank you for asking, but why don’t you call the representative who sold it to you right at the company? You can’t be too careful about things you do to yourself. You can’t undo a lot of things. You can—

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- caution. You have to understand that many of the people listening to this are on chemo. Chemo is killing. It’s a killer in the cell, so when you’re taking certain things, even like antioxidants, percumin, turmeric, we can go down the list, even vitamin C, I think potentially now it can interfere with that chemo, because it takes away—or even on a detox, taking out chemo, then the chemo’s not going to kill. You do have to consult your doctor, because there are things that can really disrupt the chemo, so I always bring caution to that.

Annie:
Yeah, and—go ahead.

Dr. Pompa:
No, no, go ahead.

Annie:
I was going to say that, since you brought up chemo, when you are doing high-dose chemo, basically your doctor is filling your body with chemo based on your body weight. They’re putting a percentage of chemo in based on your body weight. They don’t have a way of targeting just the cancer cells, so they are literally filling your body. Like Dr. Dan says, if you are doing chemo, high-dose chemo, you will want to do a lot of detox and a lot of body repair, a lot of vital body organ repair, and while you’re doing chemo, ask, see if you can find out if you can protect your vital body organs without interfering with the chemo.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s the key.

Annie:
Yeah, so for instance, if you’re going to do something like Essiac tea, it’s got three blood purifiers in it. You don’t want to do that on chemo days. If you’re going to do high-dose chemo, do your high-dose chemo, and don’t interfere with it. Essiac tea, the three blood purifiers can actually weaken the effect of the chemo, and my attitude is, if you’re going to do it, do it, don’t interfere with it, just like Dr. Dan said. The IPT is a targeted chemo, so in that case, again, I didn’t do Essiac tea on the days I did the targeted chemo, because I wanted it to stay in those cancer cells, but at the same time, I had no fear that I was harming—that my vital body organs were being harmed or my healthy cells, so when I wasn’t doing that therapy that day, I did all my other supplements.

Dr. Pompa:
I was just going to ask the question—okay, so where can our viewers go to see—you made some roadmaps for people to follow, because it is hard, right? There is too many things, so tell them where they can go.

Annie:
Okay, well, the book that Dr. Dan’s talking about is a book I wrote to help cancer patients figure things out for themselves and build their own healing platform, and again, this book is interactive. It’s a reference guide, so it’s got all the science. It’s got all the therapies behind each aspect of healing, so you literally not only delve into your own life, you can use all the information in the book to build your own healing platform as you go along, and the healing platform can work for you while you’re going through therapy. You can it again after you’re through, and you want to build a separate healing platform for, okay, now let’s see what I can do with my life. I want to rebuild my life differently, and I want to go back to the other one. I want to do a new one. It’s a good book. There’s also our website, bestanswerforcancer.org, and we have Find a Physician on there. Dr. Dan has been invited to be in our directory.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’m honored to do that.

Annie:
Get a partner. Get a physician partner. Really, I am so impressed with Dr. Dan’s show, and this is the kind of thinking—just listening to him today and other days, this is the kind of thinking you need in your partnership. You need somebody who’s going to not just tell you things but challenge you to look into yourself, encourage you to feel good about what your choices are. That’s the thing. Feel good about your choices. There are no wrong answers. There might have been something you could have done different, but when you make up your mind, you embrace it, and you deliberately step into it and go forward, keeping an eye on what happens. If something doesn’t feel right as you’re going along, or all of a sudden you don’t feel as good, then you look at things.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, great advice, and Meredith, hold up the book there. Meredith may have some lasting questions in her final questions for you.

Meredith:
Yeah, hello, Ms. Annie. The healing platform, I thought it was just so well put-together, and I love the journal reference guide format as well, where you can just really, as you’re reading through, take notes and answer the really thought-provoking questions that you have there. I think it’s excellent, and I’m just kind of curious now, too. You’ve done so much over the years to heal. What are you doing now? What’s a day in the life look like with what you’re eating, the supplements you’re taking? How are you maintaining?

Annie:
Oh, thank you for asking that question. I change things up all the time, because cancer can build immunities to things, so I like to keep it on its toes, and that keeps me on my toes, too. It keeps my life exciting, so right now I’ve added some new supplements to my program. I found a Beljanski Foundation. I actually had the honor of reviewing a book for Sylvia Beljanski that she had written, and in the book she describes two herbs that her father discovered in the late ‘70s, Pao pereira and rauwolfia, and both of them have been proven anti-cancer. You can take them on an empty stomach or with meals. It doesn’t matter, but I’m taking them twice a day, so that’s something new I added. I switch out Essiac tea with red clover stillingia every once in a while, and then sometimes I’m just off all blood purifiers. I’m doing anti-inflammatories right now. I’m doing a -inaudible- enzyme. I do two twice a day on an empty stomach.

Let’s see. I always do liver support. I don’t care. I never change that. I might change the supplement itself, but the liver’s so important, so I always do liver, and I’m on a ketogenic diet, so I’m high-fat, very little protein, and almost no carbs. The carbs that I have are veggies, and then, let’s see. I’m walking every day. It’s beautiful weather here today. I don’t know about y’all, but we’re in fall here in Texas, so it’s just gorgeous, and I do that. Of course, I spend time with God every day, and I told Meredith before the interview that Jesus was my boyfriend, so that’s how I spend time with God. I date Jesus.

Dr. Pompa:
Awesome.

Annie:
A lot of fun.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s awesome. That’s such—my gosh, such great advice, and I—Meredith, write down those herbs. Send me that in an email.

Annie:
I know.

Dr. Pompa:
Obviously, I didn’t have anything to write it down on today. I did in my office, but I’m having internet issues, so I’m out here, but yeah, that’s fantastic. Yeah, just such great advice, and we’ll never stop, will we? I’ll never go back. I’m always in the discovery mode, that’s for sure. So are you. Thank you, Annie, for being on the show. You were a blessing to our viewers, I can tell you that.

Annie:
Thank you, Dr. Dan. I love what you do, and thank you, Meredith. It’s great to see y’all.

Meredith:
You, too, and thank you, Annie. This is just proof-positive, too, that it’s a multitherapeutic approach, right? It’s never just one thing that gets us well. It’s the synergy, so thank you for sharing your story and sharing your tactics. Guys, definitely check out her book, The Healing Platform, and thank you so much for watching. Have an awesome weekend, and we’ll see you next time. All right, bye-bye.

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