2018 Podcasts

Episode 247: A Powerful and Caring Mission

Episode 246: Fasting, Autophagy, and Glowing Skin

With Naomi Whittel

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today’s episode was recorded on location in Las Vegas where Naomi Whittel was a keynote speaker at Dr. Pompa’s Live It to Lead It seminar. Today, they’ll share with you some of the amazing highlights of her speech. They’ll dive deep on all things fasting, and autophagy, glowing skin, and aging. Naomi Whittel is widely recognized as the one to watch in the “wellness from within” space. Named by Prevention the nation’s leading female innovator in the natural products industry, Naomi is hailed as a trailblazer and an advocate of purity and potency in nutraceuticals. Naomi continues to deliver on her promise to help millions thrive with award-winning supplements they know will truly help them. Naomi is the author of the book, Glow 15: A Science-Based Plan to Lose Weight, Revitalize Your Skin, and Invigorate Your Life. She’s the creator of the docuseries, The Real Skinny on Fat.

While we’re on the topic of fasting, I want to remind you about the molecular hydrogen product called, Fastonic. Hydrogen-assisted fasting shows promise in anti-aging, encourages post-workout recovery, mitigates oxidative stress, inflammation, and many other triggers for disease and imbalance. Curious to try molecular hydrogen for yourself? Our CHTV audience can check it out at getfastonic.com; that’s, get fastonic, F-A-S-T-O-N-I-C.com. Okay, so let’s get started and welcome
Dr. Pompa and Naomi Whittel to the show. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
Naomi, welcome to Cell TV.

Naomi Whittel:
It’s so great to be here, Dr. Pompa. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and actually, folks, this is a really special occasion. You can tell I’m on location, but you’re speaking here at the seminar, the Live It to Lead It seminar. We’ve had amazing speakers and you’re one of them.

Naomi Whittel:
Unbelievable, mind-blowing. Oh well, thank you so much. Really, I’m honored and thrilled to be able to speak here today.

Dr. Pompa:
You already spoke to our platinum group of doctors. They loved it. They heard my respect and admiration of you; they did.

Naomi Whittel:
Oh, thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
I said, “You have to meet this woman. Even from a health standpoint, her knowledge.” Most of that came from pain to purpose.

Naomi Whittel:
Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I know you have a story and I’ll let you share some of that. Even from the business side of things, wait until you hear. You heard her bio; doesn’t do it justice. I have to just start with this and you can pull in your story, but you’re responsible for two major products that they’ve all heard about: Resveratrol and collagen coming into this country and becoming pop—that’s you.

Naomi Whittel:
Totally, 100%.

Dr. Pompa:
Tell them that story.

Naomi Whittel:
Okay, so I have an insatiable curiosity and I have suffered my entire—

Dr. Pompa:
We’re the same on that.

Naomi Whittel:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s like the curiosity drives me.

Dr. Pompa:
Me, too.

Naomi Whittel:
My passions have always been around health and wellbeing. It’s not because I didn’t have an advantage when I was born. I was born literally on a biodynamic farm in Switzerland. My father is a chemist.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s incredible.

Naomi Whittel:
Everything that was put into my body was natural, organic, and safe; and yet, I suffered from such high inflammation that my body—that eczema would cover my hands, cover my body. It would bleed. It would puss. I would wear things like this all the time because I never wanted anyone to see my skin because it was so really truly disgusting. It affected my sense of wellbeing.

I remember as I was a young teenager, it was the springtime. I was getting ready to go to the spring dance. I had my eyes set on this one particular boy that I thought not only would he take me to the dance, but then we would get married later on. I had this whole idea. My mother had said to me that time, “You know, you should be wearing a t-shirt and shorts. You don’t need to always be running around covered up. Your friends like you. You have more self-confidence; go for it.” She was wrong. He didn’t take me to the dance.

Dr. Pompa:
Ah, heartbreaking.

Naomi Whittel:
Yes, and it affected me so deeply in that moment.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, totally.

Naomi Whittel:
It was so huge. I made a commitment to myself at that point. I was like, I don’t care. I had only used natural organic products, homeopathy, never gone to a conventional doctor, none of that. I made a commitment. I’m like, I’m going to do whatever it takes. I’ll use those steroid creams. I’ll suppress it, whatever it is. Ultimately, over the years, I came back to the understanding that the eczema, the autoimmune disorder that I had in my body was a reflection of something that was much deeper. I needed to get to the root cause of it.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re right.

Naomi Whittel:
As a layman, I was working with incredible integrative doctors. It was ultimately a Chinese medical doctor by doing acupuncture and giving me these little Chinese herbs, he was able to take the blood stagnation out of my body. Now, you would very rarely see eczema. You’ll see it sometimes on my hands, a little bit on my face, but most of the time, you’re not seeing the bleeding and the pussing.

Dr. Pompa:
I have to ask this question because you lived such a clean life, what was it?

Naomi Whittel:
I had the opportunity to work with some incredible integrative medical doctors like Felice Gersh for example. She told me that my autoimmune health was impacted while I was inside of my mother. Then I was born by caesarian. Then I had a full blood transfusion when I was born.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah.

Naomi Whittel:
All of these things knocked my immune health. Now, I have mast cell activation, a lot of different things. This Chinese medical doctor really started me on the path of healing. Through that process, as I was peeling back the onion, I got a lot better.

If I were to fast forward to my late 20‘s, I’m married, getting ready to have a child. I go back to my integrative doctor and he does all sorts of tests: urine tests, hair analysis, everything under the sun. I come back to him and he says to me, “You have no business getting pregnant because you have such heavy metal toxicity in your body. He traced it back to those little Chinese herbs that healed me.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes, interesting.

Naomi Whittel:
That was that second defining moment where I realized, wow, I have been poisoned by what healed me. It’s really the soil when you think about these herbs that are growing in China.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes, oh yeah, the lead, the mercury, all of it.

Naomi Whittel:
It’s all there. It took me time to detoxify. I made a commitment to myself then that I wasn’t going to put something into my mouth unless I knew where it came from, how pure it was. I just didn’t have that luxury. When I built my company many years in the feature, I wanted to bring Resveratrol into the market. I went to the French vineyards in the South of France that are organic. I went through the whole supply chain. I made my own extracts, so when I could bring it to my customers, it had that same purity, that potency, and that identity. The same with collagen. Throughout Asia, there’s so much collagen. It’s found in everything.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s what got you the idea because it wasn’t here.

Naomi Whittel:
No.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so you brought it over when you were in your travels.

Naomi Whittel:
Yes; for example, in Asia, in Japan, throughout the Asian countries, women primarily are ingesting like 30 times more collagen than we do here. They’re drinking it. They’re having all their bone broths every day; all of this. I didn’t want to bring that product into the US market. I got my inspiration there and then I would manufacture it from Germany.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, cleaner product. It’s funny it started in utero; you’re right. I’ve talked about that on some of these shows. The number one cause of lead toxicity is mom because during pregnancy it’s normal to lose bone, but out comes the lead because the lead is stored in bone. There’s a study called the Jurass study, the number of silver fillings in mom’s mouth is proportional to how much they find in the baby’s brain.

Naomi Whittel:
Wow.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re right. Then after that, it’s what other stressors do you have? You end up despite the clean life, end up with an autoimmune disease. Which by the way, those toxins trigger the gene, and so the gene of susceptibility is now turned on. What you’ve been successful at, not only getting upstream to the cause but turning off the gene as well. Yeah, and that’s a lot of your travels. This book is Glow 15, a lot of this is what you’ve learned over these travels. I have to say this. You just stepped down, you were CEO of Twinlab. They’re one of the top supplement companies for a long time, right? One of the biggest?

Naomi Whittel:
Right, yes, I sold my company to them three years ago. Six months after I had sold, they asked if I would come and be their CEO. That was an honor, a 50-year-old company that had their own manufacturing process.

Dr. Pompa:
Huge, yeah.

Naomi Whittel:
Huge, legacy breaking.

Dr. Pompa:
That shows you who she is that they brought her in.

Naomi Whittel:
It was an incredible experience. Then my book became a New York Times bestseller, which I wasn’t necessarily expecting. It was very exciting. This is a plan that really incorporates—

Dr. Pompa:
Tell us, yeah.

Naomi Whittel:
I got to work with the most amazing experts. I was in Calabria, Italy about four and a half, five years ago, sourcing the citrus bergamot fruit. It’s this powerful flavonoid filled fruit. It’s been shown in clinical studies to actually help reduce the LDL and increase the HDL for cholesterol. I was over there doing that. One of the lead researchers said to me, her name is Dr. Elizabeth Janda, “You know, I make citrus bergamot tea and I drink it every day to activate my autophagy.” I’m like, “Your autopha what?”

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, some of these people know what autophagy is; maybe some of them don’t so re-explain it.

Naomi Whittel:
I had to learn from Dr. Janda, it’s a cellular self-cleansing detoxification process.

Dr. Pompa:
Happens in fasting and some natural things.

Naomi Whittel:
Correct.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s some products that can stimulate it, too.

Naomi Whittel:
Yes, there are products, there are foods, there’s types of exercise, there’s getting in touch with your natural circadian rhythm so you’re sleeping in a different way. There’s so many ways to activate it. It’s naturally what God gave us. It’s inside of all of our bodies, but as we get older—what I’ve learned from these top researchers like Dr. William Dunn at the University of Florida is as we get older, it literally starts to deactivate more and more.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly.

Naomi Whittel:
Then the pollutants, the toxins, and the environmental effects again suppress it.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s interesting you said that because it’s true. The other back side of this autophagy is the body will eventually kill a bad cell. It will eat the debris in the cell; then it will take out a bad cell. Here’s the best part. It produces a stem cell to replace it. One of the things that happens when we get older is we start losing—our stem cell bucket so to speak starts emptying.

Stem cells, folks, that’s what keeps us young. That’s why kids heal so fast; they have a lot of viable stem cells. As we age, we lose viable stem cells. That’s a big deal. If we can do things that help the autophagy, we’re also helping our stem cells, the viability of our stem cells, and therefore our healing. That’s a big deal. You actually spent time with some of the top four researchers on autophagy. That’s really what stimulated this, am I right?

Naomi Whittel:
Yes, oh yes. They wrote the chapters with me. Here I had an experience of being in Calabria, learning about autophagy activation, and having this ah-ha moment like, oh my gosh, all I really need to do for my own health is learn how to activate it so my body can do what it naturally wants to do, which is remove the debris, help the detox process, help to get rid of the cells that don’t need to be there, build more stem cells. I came back to the US and went on a global search for the world’s top experts in autophagy. I have Dr. Richard Wang who is the autophagy dermatologist. Eighty million of us here in this country go to our dermatologist every single year for skin issues.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, now you’ve got their attention.

Naomi Whittel:
Eighty million; more than to their internist, more than to anything else. If we think about this being our largest organ, we’re absorbing 60% of what we put on it. On average, we’re putting 500—I learned 513 chemicals on our skin every day. This is the fastest way to—

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, out of that 513, 200 some actually are known cancer causers. Not to mention the ones that are—mimic hormones and drive hormonal problems. That’s what’s in that 513.

Naomi Whittel:
Yeah and it’s so frightening. As a woman who wants to really support my own health, that of my mother’s, my daughter’s, and all the other women, and men of course as well, but for women, skin is such a reflection of our confidence.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s a reflection of your health; it really is. When I look at somebody, you go, healthy, not healthy.

Naomi Whittel:
Boom, like that. We’re affected by so many of these what I call accelerated agers, which are these pollutants. Autophagy really helps to fight back on the accelerated agers. It allows our body to do so many things that it couldn’t do because it was clogged up. This book is really just—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so talk about that. I’ve spoken to them about fasting as a natural way. Daily fasting, block fasting where we do extended fasting all stimulate autophagy and stem cell production. You have some other strategies. Talk about them.

Naomi Whittel:
Yes, I’ve got a handful. I’ve got about 11 different specific strategies; one of them is something that I know you love very much. Which what I do is I do protein cycling and intermittent fasting. I’ve been intermittent fasting for—I’ve been fasting for 25 years for my autoimmune health, but intermittent fasting for probably the past 6 or so years. That was really because being so connected with the University of Florida, the research started to come out about five or six years ago. I always do what the researchers are doing and what they’re testing on themselves. Intermittent fasting and protein cycling, when you intermittent fast you also reduce your caloric intake of protein to about 5% of your daily intake. That activates autophagy.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep, absolutely. My diet variation principle, we’ll do high protein days, low protein days, low-calorie days because it does, the body goes into autophagy. Actually, we recently interviewed Dr. Joseph who we were just talking to, just spoke from stage. He talks about that, just dropping the calories, dropping the protein. That’s what the fasting mimicking diet does. You can do just days like that.

Naomi Whittel:
It’s so powerful. It feels to me almost like a metabolic confusion which I really like to do. I like to always keep my body guessing.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s it because it forces adaptation. I teach them it forces what I call hormone optimization where you keep the body guessing. It’s like exercise. If you’re doing the same exercise all the time, in the beginning you get results, and then nothing, and then down. Then you go to the new gym, and you’re like, oh my gosh, or the new piece of exercise equipment you bought at 12 o’clock at night, which you should never do. You start doing that one, and go, oh my gosh, this is the best. It wasn’t the exercise piece of equipment; it was the change. It was the different. We agree on that.

Naomi Whittel:
Yes, that’s a great one and I totally love. Another one is fat first and carbs last. If you’re going to have your carbohydrates, you have them at night, and obviously, you have the complex carbs. Now, for me, I love to be—I like to do a standard keto diet for my inflammatory process. Because of you, I—literally this Sunday, I’m starting a five-day water fast. I do them consecutively if it’s once a month, once every six weeks because you told me how important that was to really affect my autoimmune health.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Naomi Whittel:
I’ll start my five-day water fast this Sunday. Fat first, good fat, carbs last, what I’ve also learned from that principle, you talk about hormones. Most women I’ve found at all different points in the life are at an imbalance of hormones.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Naomi Whittel:
I didn’t realize that signs of an imbalance of hormones are things like overwhelm, joint pain.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Naomi Whittel:
We know that a restless sleep, not getting the benefit we need from sleep, always feeling a little bit like I’m not quite on my game. I can tell you personally, being in my mid-40’s now, there’s a difference in the way that I feel every day than the way I felt in my 30’s. The energy that I need that I want that I get from the good fats and the carbs last, really—

Dr. Pompa:
I love that.

Naomi Whittel:
—helps to balance my hormones.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s great; awesome tip. Obviously, you brought up skin health. Okay, the wrinkles, they want to know more. You discuss it.

Naomi Whittel:
I think there are beauty proteins: there’s collagen, there’s elastin, and then there is, of course, the plumpness that comes from ceramides. Ceramides are found in lots of foods. They are autophagy activators. A lot of different polyphenols helps with the skin as well. I have things called power phenols: green tea, for example, Resveratrol, the citrus bergamot fruit. These are all power phenols. The reason I call them that is not only are they providing the antioxidant protection, but they’re also helping to activate autophagy which literally repairs. Protect and repair in one makes it a power phenol to me.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s awesome. Yeah, the autophagy, again, getting rid of the bad cells is key, especially because what people have to understand is when cells live too long, they create mischief. They create inflammation. Inflammation we say is the cause everything, but even bad skin. People don’t think of wrinkles as being inflammation. You see smokers, you see their skin. It’s inflammation ultimately that it damages the collagen and the elastin, but the inflammation’s first. The toxins drive it, all of it. The autophagy is a part of that, which that’s getting to the cause.

Naomi Whittel:
It really is.

Dr. Pompa:
New York Time bestseller for a reason.

Naomi Whittel:
Thank you very much.

Dr. Pompa:
Obviously, they can buy it on Amazon I’m sure?

Naomi Whittel:
Thank you, absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
Alright, let’s get to something that actually I was a big part of, The Skinny on Fat. This is huge, The Skinny on Fat.

Naomi Whittel:
It was incredible.

Dr. Pompa:
No, it is incredible. You interviewed the world's experts on this.

Naomi Whittel:
Eighty plus.

Dr. Pompa:
Eighty plus; I was part of it, blessed to be a part of it. Thank you for that, yeah.

Naomi Whittel:
Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
You just recently were on Dr. Oz. Obviously, he is excited about it. I’m excited about it.

Naomi Whittel:
Everybody’s excited about what’s in there. You said fasting is the number one Google search term right now in health. Keto is so huge.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s up there, too, yep.

Naomi Whittel:
This was all about really trying to get to the core of what’s got wrong—what has gone wrong in our country.

Dr. Pompa:
Your mother inspired you here. Tell them that, yeah.

Naomi Whittel:
Yeah, she did. I’m amazed that you remembered that. When we moved to this country—I moved to this country when I was about 11.5, 12 years old. My mother like so many Americans—when we moved, she was a size eight. I had never thought about her weight, or her health, or anything like that. Over a short period of time, she started to become heavier and heavier. She ultimately got metabolic syndrome.

Dr. Pompa:
She probably believed fat makes you fat.

Naomi Whittel:
I think she probably did. It’s different; it’s a little bit different because growing up in Europe, we eat—

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, different philosophy. Yeah, different philosophy.

Naomi Whittel:
We eat a lot of fat. Yes, but she definitely was susceptible to the toxins and the pollutants in the food. She has suffered with being overweight and the impact on her health. I’m in this industry my entire career. My brother is as well. We have this background. Her father is a very famous physicist. She has so many tools at her fingertips, and yet, we couldn’t as a family figure it out, which is why I wanted to go and really discover from the world’s top experts what’s going on, and what do we do.

Dr. Pompa:
We have to give kudos to a good friend, a mutual good friend of ours, Jeff Hays who produced. Honestly, I think it’s his best work. I know that you’re relaunching it. I’m just looking at the experts; I know so many of them. Montel Williams was even a part of this. It’s amazing. Before we even sat down, I was like, this is amazing. You’ve got to get it out to more people. You’re like, oh my gosh, we are. We’ll make it available. We’ll put a link in, tell the team here to put a link in to how to access it. We absolutely want to do more to promote it because I’m telling you, Zach Bush, Jason Fung. He’s here speaking.

Naomi Whittel:
He’s here, I know.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s like, oh my gosh. He’s here speaking, Ben Greenfield.

Naomi Whittel:
Amy’s here, yeah Dr. Amy’s here.

Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Amy is here. Dr. Joseph’s here. That’s incredible.

Naomi Whittel:
I know; that’s hysterical.

Dr. Pompa:
We have quite the seminar here actually looking at that.

Naomi Whittel:
Yes, I know; we do. We have an incredible team.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that is unbelievable. There I am actually.

Naomi Whittel:
Yes, you are.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s Joe Mercola. They’re all good friends of ours. The information honestly, it’s just—everybody, my doctors that watched it, and got it, they’re like, that is amazing. I’m like, I know. It’s got to get out to more people. Then hearing that you’re bringing it out and you’ve got some big wigs helping you get it out. Life changer right here, Skinny on Fat. Yeah, it’s great work.

Naomi Whittel:
Thank you so much.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, just thinking about that, let me ask you the question: how did it change you?

Naomi Whittel:
It changed everybody on the film crew.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, that’s true.

Naomi Whittel:
Isn’t that so cool?

Dr. Pompa:
They watched some of my pieces. I’m not bragging or boasting, but I got the emails.

Naomi Whittel:
I know, well, including my own CFO, he watched your piece. Jeff Hays did, as the filmmaker, did a little piece on how everybody on the film crew was affected. The cameraman lost 40 pounds. The guy that does this [claps hands] lost tons of weight.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I remember him asking me a bunch of questions after.

Naomi Whittel:
I know and that’s what they did. It was so much fun.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s incredible.

Naomi Whittel:
For me personally, what I was able to really distill down that changed my life is the power of the ketone. This is an energy source that again, like autophagy, this is an energy source that we naturally produce.

Dr. Pompa:
Which when you break down fat and get fat adapted in a state of ketosis or fasting, you produce these ketones.

Naomi Whittel:
Then how do we not just produce more, but literally utilize the ones that we have better?

Dr. Pompa:
That’s true.

Naomi Whittel:
That’s what I became obsessed with.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and by the way, it’s funny you said that because I was teaching on that. When glucose is too high, you don’t lose—you don’t utilize the ketones. I learned that from Thomas Seyfried. He wrote the book, Cancer is a Metabolic Disease. They watched tumors grow, or shrink, or not shrink. They realized that even when ketones were up, if the glucose wasn’t dropping the body wouldn’t attack the tumor. That goes for even us healthy people; we want to see glucose dropping. I’m teaching on that this afternoon.

Naomi Whittel:
It’s a fascinating topic.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes, it is.

Naomi Whittel:
Actually, Dr. Dominic D’Agostino, who is here—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, who we’ve had here at the seminars.

Naomi Whittel:
Thomas Seyfried is also in here.

Dr. Pompa:
He’s here.

Naomi Whittel:
Dominic, he really has some new research coming out around what comes first. If you can raise your ketone levels, your glucose automatically drops. He’s got some really interesting—

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, I would say that’s healthy people. What we have found in our doctor group is neurotoxic people, that doesn’t happen. Matter of fact, we get the emails. It’s like, why isn’t my glucose going down? I have a fasting group on Facebook. They can read the posts. Neurotoxic people, they’re metabolically so challenged because toxins attack the mitochondria that they don’t get the normal response.

You’re right in the sense that should happen, but yet—when people fast, we’ll get emails saying that, my glucose is in the 30’s. Am I okay? The next question is, well, how do you feel? Fine. What are your ketones? Six. Of course, that’s why you’re fine. Because what happens is the glucose goes down, the ketones go up. It’s making up the energy difference. By the way, that’s when that max autophagy happens that we were talking about.

Naomi Whittel:
Totally,

Dr. Pompa:
The body’s just feeding off those bad cells; it’s that smart. Great stuff.

Naomi Whittel:
I think of autophagy almost as in each and every one of your cells, you have this doctor that is autophagy.

Dr. Pompa:
I love that.

Naomi Whittel:
You are autophagy for your patients so that the doctor is smart: knows, okay, the cell needs to die; okay, this cell can be recycled; these parts can be recycled. It’s like the intellectual capital of the cell is in the autophagy. It makes all the decisions.

Dr. Pompa:
We’ll take it another step further; it’s a little God intelligent doctor because here’s what else it does. It has to die; we have to do this; we can’t fix it. Okay, unfixable. Let’s kill this. Okay, make a new one.

Naomi Whittel:
That’s right.

Dr. Pompa:
It stimulates a stem cell and you make a new cell that’s healthy. Honestly, that’s why all this stuff works.

Naomi Whittel:
The Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016—so just three weeks before I meet with the publishers, the Nobel Prize in Medicine came out for autophagy.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep, the Japanese dude.

Naomi Whittel:
Yoshinori Ohsumi.

Dr. Pompa:
There we go. She obviously has spent more time in Japan than I did because she just nailed that.

Naomi Whittel:
I’m hoping to go over there in the next month or two to really sit down with him and talk with him now that the craziness has hopefully settled down a little bit.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re a superhero, Naomi. No wonder Dr. Oz had you own his show; that’s why I had her on my show. No, you are; you’re amazing.

Naomi Whittel:
Thank you so much.

Dr. Pompa:
Thank you for being here.

Naomi Whittel:
It’s an honor.

Dr. Pompa:
I know they’re going to love this.

Naomi Whitell:
It’s an honor and a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep, absolutely. Yep, appreciate you.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at podcast.drpompa.com. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing this show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

Episode 245: Post Birth Control Syndrome

with Dr. Jolene Brighten

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today we’ll be talking all about hormonal birth control and how to begin to repair the toll it takes on your hormones after years of use. Our guest today, Dr. Jolene Brighten is hosting an amazing and free online summit called Post Birth Control Syndrome Awareness Week. She is here to discuss it with us today.

You’ll hear about some of the issues the pill can cause that women often aren’t told about and if these issues can go away once a woman stops taking it. You’ll also hear what you can do right now if you’re on birth control currently or ever have been in the past. Before we get started, let me introduce our guest, Dr. Jolene.

Dr. Jolene Brighten is a functional medicine naturopathic medical doctor and the founder of Rubus Health, a women’s medical clinic that specializes in women’s hormones. She is recognized as a leading expert in post birth control syndrome and the long-term side effects associated with hormonal contraceptives. Dr. Brighten is the author of Ditch the Pill: A 30-Day Plan to Support Women on Birth Control, Help Them Transition Off, and Eliminate Symptoms of Post Birth Control Syndrome. Most of all, she is a mom, a speaker, and a women’s health advocate.

Dr. Pompa will be a guest during Dr. Brighten’s online summit. If you want to hear more about his theories on how diet, fasting, and lifestyle can be the keys to hormone repair, you’re invited to join him in a panel of amazing experts in the field of women’s health. This free event goes live this coming Monday, November 5th. Sign up now so you don’t miss a moment. If you or anyone you know has ever been or is currently on hormonal birth control, not only is this an episode you won’t want to miss, you also want to be sure to catch Dr. Jolene’s event next week. You’ll hear more details in this episode. You can also go to repairyourhormones.com for more information about this important event and to sign up.

Also, to the practitioners out there who cannot make it to our sold out Live It to Lead It event that starts today and goes through Sunday in Las Vegas, you can still join us by subscribing to our live stream and virtually attend our three-day workshop that will give you the latest in cutting edge treatments and strategies to build your practice. Please go to HCFEvents.com for live stream access, and you can use the code CHTV to take 10% off the price. That’s HCFEvents.com with the code CHTV. Hope you can join us. It’s not too late.

Let’s get started. Welcome, Dr. Pompa and Dr. Brighten to this show, dedicated to women’s health and post birth control syndrome. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
Jolene, welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m so excited for our viewers and listeners to hear this because as I said at the top of the show when we spoke, I teach a lot of seminars, but I still have a lot of clients from all over the world that I coach. I can’t tell you how many have severe hormone disregulation and/or health issues related to it because of the topic today. With that said, I’ll open the can of worms.

I wonder how many women are taking birth control, have taken birth control. Let me just start with that. Answer that question because that’s how many should be tuning in. That’s how many should be listening. If your daughter’s family members, yourselves have ever encountered birth control, pay attention and listen to this show. What’s the number on that, Jolene?

Dr. Brighten:
It’s pretty shocking, about 100 million women worldwide are using hormonal contraceptives. Within the United States alone that number is about 11 million. The estimates today are expecting about 98% of women, so 98% of all women will at some point have used a hormonal contraceptive, which is pretty staggering when you hear what we’re about to talk about. You’re going to understand why that number is so staggering.

Dr. Pompa:
Let me start out like this; how did you get so into this? You wrote a book. You can give the name of your book and where to get it and all. This is something that you’re obviously really passionate about. You must have a story here. What is it?

Dr. Brighten:
What’s funny is that I didn’t realize until I went into clinical practice that I actually had developed post birth control syndrome myself. I had clockwork periods because I dreaded them like crazy, so I knew my period came about every 28 days. Once I started hormonal birth control, I thought it was my Savior. I will admit that. I spent ten years on the pill, and my heavy painful periods went away. No one asked me about the root cause, of course.

Once a ditched the pill, which is the name of my book, and I broke up with it for good, my face exploded with cystic acne. For the first time in my life I was struggling with acne. My period was completely gone, and I went to my gynecologist who told me you have PCOS. You’ve always had PCOS, and that’s the issue. I was in my second year of medical school and I’m like hold up. I just learned how to diagnose PCOS.

A woman who has regular cycles to begin with does not suddenly develop PCOS. That’s not the way it works. I leaned on my background in nutritional biochemistry and what I was learning in medical school. I got my period back. I cleared my skin, but I thought I was a freak.

My doctor was like you’re the only person this has ever happened to. Most of the time the conversation was what you’re experiencing isn’t really real, and you need to get back on hormonal birth control. Then fast forward to when I’m in clinical practice and I start to piece together that every single woman who comes off of hormonal birth control has some kind of symptom or side effect.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, let’s talk about that. What are some of the things that women aren’t being told? What are some of the health conditions that they may have that are linked in the science and the literature, yet they’re not being told because of what you just said. I’ve never had it one time where I said something, they go back to their doctor, and the doctor says that’s blah, blah, blah. Not one time has anybody come to me and said my doctor told me this is because of my birth control or contraceptive.
Dr. Brighten:
It’s almost taboo. It’s anti women’s movement to question hormonal birth control, which I really think is a huge disservice to society as a whole. It’s not just a women’s issue. These are our mothers. They bear the future generation of the human species.

With that, most women don’t even know how hormonal birth control works or that when you use hormonal birth control, your brain and your ovaries stop talking altogether. You basically induce menopause for as long as you’re on it. When we come off, there can be a hiccup there in reestablishing brain and ovarian connection. You’ve seen this clinically. I’ve seen this clinically.

Really any doctor who is paying attention has made this observation, but it goes so much deeper than that. We now understand with the explosion of microbiome research that gut flora is disrupted. Women are at higher risk of developing autoimmune disease. It induces leaky gut. It’s inflammatory.

Some of these contraceptives are even life threatening, so we’re talking breast cancer risk, stroke, heart attack. There isn’t a system that is not affected by hormonal birth control. How many clients or patients do you see that have thyroid disease and a history of hormonal birth control? The research is there showing there’s a correlation.

Dr. Pompa:
Here’s the question; I have plenty of people who say I came off of that 20 years ago. Once they come off, do these symptoms go away? Does the brain reconnect with the ovaries, and do the problems go away?

Dr. Brighten:
In some cases, menstruation will be restored. It doesn’t always mean that you’ll be regularly ovulating again. What I’ve seen clinically is that if you haven’t undone the damage caused by hormonal birth control like replenishing all the nutrients it depletes like magnesium and B vitamins, if you don’t repair the gut, the gut is just not going to repair on its own. I wish it did, but unfortunately antibiotics, estrogens, and stress are kind of fighting against you. Then there’s the problem that hormonal birth control hits the liver big time.
What the research is showing is that it causes an elevation in sex hormone binding globulin that doesn’t just go away because you stop hormonal birth control, which is how women lose their libido for life and have a whole lot of other issues. If you’re binding testosterone, now we have bone loss. Now we have muscle atrophy. Now we’re gaining weight and we don’t know why. Our doctor is saying just eat right and exercise.

Dr. Pompa:
I was going to ask about the libido because I have found that. It’s in the history of women who end up even in their 40s let alone in their 50s without libido. There’s a history of birth control at some point, an obvious connection I found. I have to put out a warning too. Obviously, you said this affects multiple different systems indirectly and directly.

One of the things that women need to know is the birth control in the 70s, 80s, maybe before have mercury in it. It was another toxic form of mercury. There’s a lot here. We raised the concern. We raised the problem.

What’s the solution? Some women are taking it simply for birth control. Other women are taking it because it works in the beginning to balance their hormones. Start with birth control. What are some of your recommendations if you ditch the pill? That’s the name of the book.

Dr. Brighten:
It’s very important to me that women understand that I’m not anti birth control, but really that women deserve to have all the information they need to make the best decision for themselves. The consult should be individualized. All birth control should be individualized based on your family history, your genetics, and what your life currently looks like. For some women, they absolutely can’t be without hormonal birth control, and that’s what I’m so passionate about. If this is what you have to do, we need to safeguard that.

I think no matter where you’re at in that birth control conversation, investing in understanding your body through what’s called fertility awareness method, which is tracking temperature, tracking cervical positions, cervical mucus. You’re not going to see ovulation signs if your hormonal birth control is working. I don’t know how you were taught, but I was taught don’t teach women about the fertility awareness method. It’s not effective.

When you get into the research of typical use of the pill, it’s only about 91% effective whereas fertility awareness method done correctly, which most women don’t take a backseat to fertility awareness method. They’re very invested in doing this method correctly if they don’t want to become pregnant. It’s over 99% effective. That’s one thing I have women consider.

I think another avenue that women really need to be having conversations about with their doctor is using barrier protection. To pass a woman the pill or insert an IUD and not discuss things like HPV or other sexually transmitted infections, the pill, these IUDs, the patch, the ring, they’re not going to protect you against contracting what could be a serious or fatal illness. You’ve got the barrier methods as well. There’s spermicides, and there’s new technology being developed as we speak to actually alter cervical mucus to make it to where the sperm can’t travel. They’re touting it as the first side effect-free birth control. We shall see because I think all birth control comes with a side effect. Fertility awareness method, getting pregnant is the side effect of that method.

Dr. Pompa:
I like the first one, especially for a married couple. That’s what we did. Talk a little bit about that. What do you look for? You mentioned the viscosity of the mucus. We looked at those things, timing, etc., knowing where you are. Talk a little bit about that. I’m sure the whole formula is in the book. Talk a little bit about that for our viewers.

Dr. Brighten:
This is the thing, and I’m sure you’ve seen this too, that it isn’t until a woman wants to become pregnant that she’s taught what to look for and how to know she’s ovulating. Why are we not being taught this when we get our period the first time?

Dr. Pompa:
It’s like opposite.

Dr. Brighten:
When you’re using basal body temperature, what that means is that your eyes pop open and the first thing you do is you put a thermometer in your mouth. These days we have FDA approved technology, so natural cycles is the first FDA approved fertility awareness method app. It’s called Femtech, so we’ve got technology now where it is the thermometer. It does the calculation for you. Otherwise, you can chart it by hand.

Taking Charge of Your Fertility has been the number one bestselling book forever. This shows us how much women are invested in wanting to know about their body. One thing as we look for basal body temperature, when you’re going to ovulate, that’s going to spike. Estrogen and LH, which is luteinizing hormone, spike to trigger the release of an egg. Your temperature spikes and you know an egg should follow.

You can also look for changes in your cervical mucus. The viscosity, as you were talking about, is much like a raw egg white consistency. You know what’s surprising to me is that I have patients who have been on the pill 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. They’ve never seen fertile cervical mucus. They’ll actually call my office feeling very frightened that suddenly they’re seeing this thick discharge in their underwear. They’re like something’s wrong with me. I think I have an infection.

When we start to investigate, we’re like congratulations. You’re ovulating again. This is what we want. Without ovulation, we don’t have progesterone. Without progesterone, we are frazzled little beings. We do not love our life the way that we’re really designed to.

Dr. Pompa:
Great point. Now I’m the woman out there saying wait a minute. I’m on this stuff. Do I just stop? What do I do? How do I come off? What’s next? What is your recommendation?

Dr. Brighten:
Great question. The first thing is if you don’t want to have a baby, you better have a backup method. Even if you do want to have a baby, we want to give you a good six-month minimum to prep your body, if not a year or two being the ideal. There was just a study published just this fall talking about the increased risk of lymphoma if mama is on the pill and gets pregnant within six months. That’s something in increased risk in childhood cancer, but that risk was diminished if you went more than six months out.

This is very important to understand. You have to replenish your nutrients. You’ve got to build up that mitochondria. You’ve got to pass that DNA to your baby and your microbiome. Number one is have your backup method. I have a fear that keeps me up at night that everyone is going to jump off the pill and get pregnant and then that’s a generation of brain babies.

Dr. Pompa:
They’ll jump off and get pregnant is your point well taken.

Dr. Brighten:
Don’t stop mid pill pack. I don’t want to be freaking anybody out, but you hear these things and women will say I’m just not going to take it tomorrow. Then you’re going to get a double period. That’s a problem. You want to go ahead and finish that pill pack.

If you have an implant or an IUD, you need to see a doctor to have that removed. The patch, the rings, some of these other things can just be removed when it’s time. If it’s a depo shot, we’ve got to wait until that depo shot clears your body. No matter what you’re using, you can start supporting your liver right away. The liver is the main organ that’s detoxifying all of your estrogen. Support you liver, support you bowels, and that’s going to go a long way in helping your body naturally detoxify these hormones and then start to recalibrate the entire system. Just by doing that, you’re going to take stress off the adrenal glands in the thyroid, which then is going to make the ovaries want to work so much better.

Dr. Pompa:
Is there ever a time to take the pill?

Dr. Brighten:
That is a really excellent question. There are two times that I have used hormonal birth control in prescribing a patient. One is menorrhagia. I had a patient who was bleeding for 14 days straight, so 2 weeks out of the month. She lost so much blood she was at the point of needing a blood transfusion. That’s a situation where we have shut the whole system down while we work on the root cause. That could very much become life threatening. There’s always a plan.

The other time is with endometriosis when the pain is so debilitating, there’s such heavy bleeding that that woman cannot function. You and I are all about the root cause, but it takes energy and it takes you feeling to a certain level of health to be able to do that bigger work. Any time I’ve ever used the pill it is with a plan of having the woman come off and safeguarding her while she’s on it.

Dr. Pompa:
What about cancer? Women have been told that there’s no risk of cancer. Someone told them it actually helps them reduce the risk of cancer. Yet some people you hear say it actually increases the risk of certain cancers. Talk about that.

Dr. Brighten:
It certainly does lower the risk of some cancers, so endometrial cancer or ovarian cancer, which makes sense. You’re ovaries are down regulated. They’re not doing their job. They’re not getting the signal. I see doctors use it with PCOS women or women who don’t cycle regularly. They’re at higher risk for endometrial cancer.

Their doctor will then prescribe birth control because there is evidence to show it down regulates the receptors in the endometrial tissue, which is how it can lead to long-term fertility issues in women if those receptors don’t come back. You can have all the estrogen in the world but if your receptors aren’t there, the endometrium doesn’t grow, baby can’t implant. You become pregnant and have a miscarriage, which is pretty much the worst. Women who have to go through that, it is very heartbreaking.

When it comes to other cancers, there’s other cancers like breast cancer is always the big concern. We can’t say causation with so many of the birth control studies, but there is a correlation and there’s an increased risk. What troubles me about the way they reported this is they’ll say it’s very negligible. It’s such a small increased risk. As you and I know, this is one more drop in the bucket. If the bucket is already full, then what that means for the individual may very much you will develop breast cancer.

What does your environment look like? How are your genes functioning? What’s your family history? Are you eating vegetables? There’s individualized risk factors that aren’t being accounted for in a lot of these studies. I think it’s very important that women are given that information and being able to make that decision for themselves. Certainly as we know, there are better ways to prevent ovarian cancer or endometrial cancer than basically taking a hormone that is suppressing your entire system.

Dr. Pompa:
You mentioned a lot of different health conditions. What’s the number one that you see with taking birth control? Maybe it’s an answer of what happens shortly after and long term, so kind of answer it that way.

Dr. Brighten:
On hormonal birth control, number one side effect that I see that’s almost across the board is muted symptoms. Often a doctor is only looking for the depression correlation, which they’re also quick to dismiss, never mind that we have studies of over a million women showing that not only is there an increased risk of being prescribed an antidepressant when you start hormonal birth control. Teenage girls are actually at really high risk of suicide when they start that, which says a lot about disrupting hormones in a young woman. The other thing we can see is there’s mood swings. There’s panic attacks. They’re in anxiety. Women can develop OCD issues, and doctors are really quick to meet them with the next prescription.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s the irritating part to me. What about later in life? Let’s speed it up. Maybe they’ve even come off of it. What are we seeing later in life as the number one health condition?

Dr. Brighten:
The longer you’re on hormonal birth control, the more likely it’s going to be that you do not come back to being a regularly cycling female. There is research that’s been showing that the longer we suppress the brain and ovaries from talking and the earlier we do this, so we’re talking about putting a 14-year-old girl on hormonal birth control when her brain and ovaries just began to talk and then leaving her on it until she’s 34, 44. That’s a long time to go. We see issues with infertility. We certainly see issues with acne.

There’s something called an androgen rebound. Suddenly testosterone goes high. Now women have acne and they’re losing their hair. I actually see a lot of gastrointestinal issues come up when women come off of hormonal birth control. The way I like to say it is it’s the first time your body got an opportunity to talk to you.

You basically put a gag in your body’s mouth and said I don’t want to hear anything from you about my hormones. When you remove that, your body is going to start screaming and saying I really want to get some support here. That’s the tricky thing about post birth control syndrome. It can be the gut. It can be the mood. It can be things like inflammation, new onset autoimmune disease.

Dr. Pompa:
I see that all the time. It’s so disturbing. Why are they putting younger and younger girls on birth control? Why are we seeing that rise right now?

Dr. Brighten:
This is where it gets super scary in that estimates anywhere from 58% to 65% of women using hormonal birth control, their primary reason that prescription was written was for symptom management for something as benign as acne. Certainly if you have acne, I know it’s awful. No one wants to walk around with acne, but that’s not the kind of thing you’re going to die from. Yet you’re being put on a contraceptive that does carry the risk of death. There is the risk of mortality

I’ve had 19-year-old girls who come in post stroke because of being on the pill. Something as simple as if they had just screened her genetics before they started her on that and told her what to look for, there’s early signs that we have, but doctors aren’t expecting a 19-year-old to have a stroke. They’re not screening for it. They’re not doing their due diligence in the -inaudible- for it, which is the plan, the alternative, the recommendations and making sure the patient has all of her questions answered.

Dr. Pompa:
It absolutely is remarkable, and it irritates me. This has been probably a surge, I would say, in the last five years where I’m seeing these young girls put on birth control. What message does that send too? It’s almost like we’re putting you on it for your acne. However, now you can actually go have sex. There’s a dual problem in that just from a morality standpoint.

Dr. Brighten:
And the risk of HPV. You put a girl on the pill, and then you don’t tell her about human papillomavirus. She thinks I can’t get pregnant and that’s all I should worry about. Then she ends up with cervical cancer later in life. That is a very big problem, and we know that being on the pill actually puts you at higher risk of contracting HPV. Your defenses are down on that. The younger you are when you start to engage in sexual intercourse, the higher the probability is you will contract this. It’s the number one sexually transmitted infection that no one is talking enough about to these young girls.

Dr. Pompa:
Then they will just give them Gardasil and treat them with psychotropic drugs for the mood changes. Of course, then Gardasil, you want to talk about a controversy that’s being covered up. That’s a whole other topic for another show. I don’t want to open that can of worms because I might get really angry.

Talk about your book. Talk about Ditch the Pill. What’s in it? I think that if I were a woman listening to this, I would say I need further resources. Number one, it may be a young teenage girl that has to go to her mother, and she better have answers. I’m sure your book has them. Number two, it may be a nervous mother who’s going to her daughter who doesn’t want to get off because of acne. They need resources. Number three, someone needs a plan. Talk about the book.

Dr. Brighten:
My book really details what to do if you’re on hormonal birth control and how to transition off successfully and mitigate the symptoms of post birth control syndrome. I went a little further in my book in that I actually have an entire chapter dedicated to helping you navigate your period problems. What do those symptoms mean so that you don’t have to use hormonal birth control? I really wanted to go upstream to help women understand their body, be able to prevent them from getting on hormonal birth control.

Then once they’re on it, we have a chapter dedicated to liver health, to gut health, to getting your mood back. It has all of my protocols that I’ve been documenting in my clinical practice that my patients have been so amazing and helping me test out so we can really understand what does it take to heal your body from birth control and how can we keep you safe while you’re on it? I do address the libido issue that comes up, to get your libido back and get your body ready for baby. There’s an entire 30-day plan with meal plans, supplement guides, lifestyle, and we get really specific on helping you understand what your hormone imbalance is.

It’s not the same for everyone, as you know. Sometimes it’s cortisol driving the issue. Sometimes it’s estrogen driving the issue. I really made a choose your own adventure where there’s a quiz in there to understand which hormones do you need to address, and then this is exactly how to address it. You can customize and individualize the Brighten protocol.

Dr. Pompa:
I always say there’s a time and a place for bioidentical hormones period, leaning towards bioidentical hormones being a little bit better. I always say also it’s tough to win the hormone game. If you don’t have a tissue that creates it, it makes it a little bit easier. It’s really hard to win that game. When is there a time for some of the bioidenticals in this case?

Dr. Brighten:
I will say when we’re talking about bioidenticals to understand that thyroid hormone is nonnegotiable. I hear this from women all the time. I don’t want to take a thyroid medication. You also don’t want congestive heart failure at 40. This is a very essential hormone.
When it comes to estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA, some of our sex hormones, these are things that we may use in a woman who has post pill amenorrhea. She’s lost her period, and it’s been a long period of time. We want to preserve her bone, her brain, her heart from aging. When it comes to our perimenopausal women, this is one of the areas I get heated is when a woman over 45 is given hormonal birth control. She’s given the pill to manage hot flashes, to manage night sweats, to manage these symptoms of perimenopause.

She’s at the highest risk of having a stroke or heart attack or developing diabetes. That discussion is not being had. I certainly think it’s an individualized situation. You’ve got to talk to your doctor about this. Using bioidentical hormones, estrogen always topical, never oral because that’s when we get ourselves in trouble, I think they have great benefit for women’s health.

We have to understand that it is really a new phenomenon in human history that women are living so far beyond menopause. It’s something that we have to recognize that once those hormones drop, our heart starts aging. Our brain starts aging. Women are at the highest risk of dementia. We start seeing our bones aging, and women can feel miserable, out of control, not in their body. What we know is that the amount of estrogen it takes topically to safeguard your bone, brain, and heart is so minimal compared to what we give women orally through the hormonal birth control pill.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s great. Where can women get the book and more information about you and whatever other information you think they need?

Dr. Brighten:
The book is available for presale. It will be out January of 2019. You can find it anywhere where books are sold, including Amazon, which I think is everyone’s favorite these days. As you know, we are raising awareness. We started the first-ever Post Birth Control Syndrome Awareness Week, which you’re going to be a part of as well. I want to say thank you. I am so grateful.

We have 50 experts in the industry who are really joining together to raise awareness about this important topic to help women understand these symptoms are not in their head. They are absolutely real. Your body is not betraying you. There are better ways to manage your symptoms and to stay safe in this world. What I’m really excited about is through this event, we’re going to reach so many women. We’re going to have the ability to transform women’s medicine for the better.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s needed. Most of my clients are women who are hormonally dysregulated. Then it leads to autoimmune and unexplainable illnesses, thyroid, diabetes. We can just keep going down the list. It’s really misunderstood, and it’s being mistreated. I’m really glad to team up on this and bring the message out.

Thank you, Dr. Jolene Brighten, for being on the show. You’re doing great work. You’re a wealth of knowledge, and you stand out in what you’re doing, especially in the world you’re in. Thank you for doing that.

Dr. Brighten:
I so appreciate you. Thank you for having me here. Thank you for joining us and raising awareness and for being a fearless advocate for women’s health.

Dr. Pompa:
Look for the book and give your website if you need to there. We’ll put it in the show notes as well.

Dr. Brighten:
You can find me at DrBrighten.com. I have a tricky last name. It’s DrBrighten.com. I have a ton of free resources there and information that covers the whole gamut of hormonal birth control, going beyond the pill, and can help fast track your healing with some of the information I’m sharing there.

Dr. Pompa:
Thanks, Dr. Jolene. I appreciate you being on the show.

Dr. Brighten:
Thank you.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. To join Dr. Brighten, Dr. Pompa, and a panel of amazing experts on the topic of hormonal birth control and hormonal repair, please sign up for this free online event. Go to repairyourhormones.com.

Practitioners, just a reminder that it’s not too late to join us in Vegas today through Sunday the 4th, and you don’t even have to travel. We are offering tickets to the live stream to our Live It to Lead It event. You can go to HCFevents.com for more information, and you can use the promo code CHTV to take 10% off. We would love to have you join us.

We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10:00 am Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at podcast.DrPompa.com. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

Episode 244: Drew Manning's Life Beyond Fit2Fat2Fit

With Drew Manning

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today we welcome special guest Drew Manning, who is here to chat about the mental and emotional side of transforming your body and mind. He and Dr. Pompa will discuss Drew’s self-experiment of intentionally gaining an unhealthy amount weight as a super-fit personal trainer to then have to lose it so he could truly understand the health and fitness struggles of his clients. He will also share how fasting and the keto diet have been integral in his personal growth throughout that process.

Before we jump in, though, I’d like to tell you a bit more about Drew. Drew Manning is the New York Times bestselling author of the book, Fit2Fat2Fit and is best known for his self-experiment of the same name. Since then, Drew has become known as a leading expert of the keto diet. Because of his message of living a vulnerable and authentic life, Drew empowered thousands of people to live a healthy lifestyle and completely transform their lives. You guys are going to love to hear Drew’s story. Also, to the practitioners out there who cannot make it to our sold out Live It to Lead It event in Las Vegas, you can still join us by subscribing to our livestream and virtually attend our three-day workshop that will give you the latest in cutting-edge treatments and strategies to build your practice. Please go to hcfevents.com for livestream access, and you can use the code CHTV to take 10% off the price. That’s hcfevents.com with the code CHTV. Hope you can join us.

Let’s get started and welcome Dr. Pompa and Drew Manning to the show dedicated to self-experimentation and personal growth. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
Welcome to CellTV.

Drew:
Dr. Pompa, thank you so much for having me on. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, actually, we live in the same territory. We’ve been to several dinners together, and actually, the first time that we met was on a boat, right?

Drew:
Yes, we did meet on a boat in a very embarrassing situation for me because I couldn’t get up on the little surfboard.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, right, the wakeboarding. Actually, we both were beginners at that, so I can’t say—I might’ve gone out, but I’m sure that it wasn’t like it should’ve been. Put it that way. I remember heading exactly towards the boat. It’s got a ski. I’m a water-skier, and that’s probably the only reason I was able to get up. There was some transition from waterskiing, but other than that, it was new to me as well.

Drew:
Yeah, but that was really fun. I’m glad we connected. I had heard about you. Utah, it’s amazing. It surprised me how many people that are in this space are here in Utah.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I remember we were at a dinner once too, and it was like, I mean, oh, my gosh, we knew everyone. I think Garrett was there. Of course, Warren was there, maybe Jeff Hayes. We had a whole group. We all just know each other. This is a massive growing health mecca here.

I remember, on the boat, I was like—we met each other for the first time, and I’m sure we both heard of each other. I really didn’t know your story, right? It’s like you hear, but we have so many people that we hear about. I don’t know. My audience may or may not know your story, so let’s tell it. I mean, you got—it was just a great idea, Fit2Fat2Fit. I mean, tell the story. It’s a book. We’ll make sure that people know where to get the book. It reminds me of the whole—the thing the guy did with McDonald’s, right?

Drew:
Super Size Me.

Dr. Pompa:
He did all the tests of McDonald’s, and he realized he was dying. He had to break it and go back to stopping McDonald’s. You had a very unique idea. Tell the story, how you got the idea, and tell them actually what this book is about.

Drew:
Basically, it started back when I—I grew up my entire life in shape. I grew up in a family of 11 brothers and sisters. I played football and wrestling from a very young age, and so for me, all I knew was that, hey, it’s easy to be in shape. All you do is eat healthy and exercise, and boom, you look like this. Then that carried over into 2009 when I became a personal trainer, and I was training clients who were overweight mostly, right? I couldn’t understand why it was so hard for them just to follow the meal plans, follow the workouts. I’m like here’s exactly what you do, and you just do it, and there should be no excuses. They’d be like, oh, Drew, I had a stressful weekend, and I had cereal or soda, even though you told me not to, or I didn’t get to the gym because I was sore, or I was tired.

I would get frustrated. Why don’t you just—it’s not that hard. For me, it seems simple. All you do is you just do it, and you put down the soda. Put down the junk food. You go to the gym. I could tell there’s a disconnect. Then they would say, Drew, you don’t understand what it’s like. For you, you’ve always been in shape. You don’t understand how hard it is.

I’m like, you know what? You’re right. I don’t understand. This led me to thinking of some ideas of how can I connect better with my clients? It was the weirdest thing, Dr. Pompa. This thought came up into my head, and it was like what if you got fat on purpose? I know that sounds crazy to 99.9% of people out there, but it made sense in my mind. This felt like it was my calling. I needed to do this, and so I was calling friends and family. I’m like I have this crazy idea. What do you think?

Dr. Pompa:
It would be funny if you actually hired a trainer to actually get fat, right? I mean, it’s like I literally don’t know how to do this.

Drew:
Exactly, but everybody was onboard. They were like you should totally do it, except for my mom. She was the only wise one. She’s like I’m concerned for your health. You shouldn’t do it, but I did it anyways. The idea in that show was for six months to completely stop exercising, eat whatever I wanted to, and just totally let myself go. My goal was to gain 50 or 60 pounds. Then the next six months, I put my money where my mouth is. I walked the walk and showed people, hey, this is how you lose the weight.

This whole time I’m thinking, oh, this is going to be a big physical transformation. I’ll get fat. I’ll get fit. Boom, they’ll be this interesting thing. Maybe the local news here in Utah will pick it up or something, and that was all my expectations at the time. I didn’t have marketing strategy or media connections to get on Dr. Oz and Jay Leno and Good Morning America and all these TV shows that I had the privilege of going on. I just rolled with it, and it was fun at first, I’ll be totally honest with you, to skip the gym, skip the produce section, and go down the cereal aisle. I mean, it’s like a kid in a candy store. We have hundreds of options here in America for all of the…

Dr. Pompa:
Did you get addicted? I mean, did you get addicted when you broke it? I’m sure you’re getting there. Was it tough? Did you want the Frosted Flakes or whatever the heck you were eating?

Drew:
It was Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which is really good, by the way. Addicted, I won’t say I got addicted. One of the biggest lessons I learned was how powerful the emotional connection to food really is whereas before I didn’t understand it. I’m like, look, you just willpower your way through it, and you just put the food down. Once I did this, even though it was only for six months, I remember letting go of that food. My body was going through these withdrawal symptoms as if I was addicted to a drug. It was really powerful for me to experience that because then I could—I remember my clients telling me, Drew, I’m trying to follow meal plans. It’s hard because I can’t get this up or that up.

I finally understood how powerful that emotional connection to food can be, and I do believe some people really do get addicted. If you eat that food every single day of your life from 0 years old to 30 or 40 years old, it’s hard to change that. For me, I could empathize more and have that respect, and understand more of what people are going through when they struggle giving up these types of foods.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I have to ask. What was the transition? I mean, how long did it take you to start feeling like crap?

Drew:
Yeah, that’s a great question.

Dr. Pompa:
Then tell me some of the symptoms, aches and pains. What would you sleep like, hormonally?

Drew:
I would say it took about a month for me to notice a big difference, and I think one of the first things I noticed was walking up the stairs, being out of breath, like really out of breath. My cardio was the first thing to go. Yeah, I was gaining some fat around the midsection, but not too much. It wasn’t noticeable. People were like, oh, you look normal, but for me, I noticed it. Then I started snoring about a month in, which affected my sleep, which affected my energy levels throughout the day, which affected my mood, which affected my personality. That was one of the—the second the things that I noticed, and then I wouldn’t say I had aches and pains. I would say I would get really tired really quick, so I would have a huge bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and a glass of juice. I remember as a kid in the 80s, there were TV commercials saying, hey, this is a complete American breakfast, and it was cereal, toast, and juice. I remember that engrained in my head as a kid, these TV commercials, and so those were the types of foods that I ate.

I would eat that for breakfast. An hour later, I would just be exhausted, and I’d be starving, absolutely famished. I needed something fast, otherwise I was going to—I felt like I was going to die. Every one to two hours I was starving, eating more and more of these processed carbohydrates and refined sugars. Like I said, they did taste good, and they make you feel good for a moment. Then month one, month two, month three, it became a lot harder where I just felt miserable all the time, lethargic all the time, and just wanting to take naps throughout the day. Chaffing became an issue for me. I had no idea that would happen. That was super uncomfortable.

The biggest thing, Dr. Pompa, out of—these are all physical things that happened to me. The biggest surprise was how it affected me mentally and emotionally. If you think about it, I grew up my entire life in shape, and that was what my identity was based on was what my body looked like. Once I lost my six-pack, I freaked out. I wanted to go up to complete strangers and tell them, hey, I’m not really overweight, you guys. Here’s my before picture. Just go to this website. This is just an experiment. I had no idea how much this would affect me mentally and emotionally, my self-esteem, my confidence.

I remember I was married at the time. I would step out of the shower, and I covered up in front of my wife because I was so embarrassed. I didn’t want her to see me naked. I didn’t want to see myself naked, so it really affected me more so mentally and emotionally than physically.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I want to go there. People look at you and think you’re not a real spiritual, emotional thing about health, just physical, but you really are. I have to ask this. You’ve seen the people put the fat suit on, and they walk through public. They say that the looks are different. Meaning that they notice how people approach them is different. Did you notice that, or maybe with you—I mean, I saw pictures before and after. I mean, it was—I mean, somewhere around the four or five month mark, you definitely were noticeably physically not the same guy. How did that affect you, and did you notice any difference from what people—how they approached you?

Drew:
That’s a great question. Yeah, I mean, I gained 75 pounds. You can’t hide that no matter who you are. It was very noticeable. Here’s the thing that I learned about our society is they’re a lot more judgmental towards I think women that are overweight because no one said anything rude to me or mean to me that hurt my feelings. I will say this, though. I did feel judged more, which could’ve been in my head. I remember one time specifically. I was at a grocery store, and my shopping cart was full of soda and granola bars and chips and cookies. I was checking out, and there were these three women behind me. I could just tell that they were looking at my belly, looking at the food that I was putting on the conveyer belt, and they’re back and forth.

Dr. Pompa:
No, look. This is what I really look like.

Drew:
Yeah, I’m like, hey, ladies, I usually eat spinach and kale. It was really hard for me to go through that. I could feel the judgement, but that could’ve just been in my head. No one said anything mean or rude to me, but I do think that women are judged more harshly in public because I’ve heard stories of other women, like the looks that they get and the things that are said to them sometimes.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, it’s true. Even when they did those fat suit things, I think that was part of the outcome. Women definitely were judged differently. I think just from what you learned from an emotional—I don’t know if I could do it. I mean, I have to hand it to you, honestly. Like I said, it’s not that my physical body was ever my identity, but I still identify with myself a certain way, especially even the way I feel. It’s like I don’t—I got to hand it to you. I mean, it was not only a clever idea. Man, again, I take my hat off to you, man. It was quite the talent.

Drew:
Thank you. An interesting story, I mean, I’m not surprised by that. Dr. Oz, I went on his show at my heaviest, and he said the same thing. His producers actually challenged him to do something similar that I was doing for 30 days, and then do an episode on what he felt and experienced. He fought with them. He said I’m not going to do this. I can’t. As a doctor, I know exactly this will be hell. There’s no way I could do the show if I had to do what I was doing, and so I don’t blame you at all. It was way harder than I thought it would be, and like I said, it was more so of a mental and emotional struggle than just physical for me.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, do doubt. Did you run any bloodwork, anything like that? Tell us about that.

Drew:
Yeah, so I had a doctor monitor me once a month just to make sure I wasn’t going to die. Obviously, you mentioned Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock, who did almost die. I don’t have all of the numbers at the top of my head, but the ones that stick out to me are blood pressure, 167/113.

Dr. Pompa:
What, in that short of time? That’s incredible.

Drew:
I did develop a fatty liver. He did a sonogram on my liver. I had developed a fatty liver, and that’s the thing; he said I had nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, which I wasn’t drinking alcohol at the time. It was just soda. The amount of soda that I was drinking, the damage that it does to our bodies, we don’t realize it. Here’s the thing. I tell people this all the time. It’s not like you drink a Mountain Dew and your liver or you kidney instantly hurts, right? It builds up over time, and I was heading towards cirrhosis, Dr. Oz was saying.

All my numbers were in the red. My HDL, LDL, fasting glucose, triglycerides were all in the red. I just don’t know the exact numbers off the top of my head. Yeah, I did have a doctor monitor me throughout, luckily.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, wow! All right, so let’s talk a little about when you broke it. I want to go into some of the emotionally, spiritual stuff about what you do because I think it came out of this whole thing. Talk about breaking it, the transition. When did you feel good? How hard was it?

Drew:
Yeah, that’s a great question. This was something, like I said, that I learned really—a powerful lesson was that transition. I went cold turkey, my last meal. Then the next day, boom, I went from about 5,000 calories a day of processed foods, like I said, sugary cereals, granola bars, chips, cookies, crackers, Pop Pockets, macaroni and cheese, to the next day eating 2,000 calories of real whole food. I spread it out over five meals. The first two weeks were hell. They sucked so bad.

Here I was, a personal trainer, proponent of health, eating all these healthy foods, but I felt awful inside. I never felt that awful before. I was moody. I was grumpy. I had headaches, lack of energy. I was always starving, and I didn’t sugar coat it. I talked about this on my YouTube channel. Telling people, look, I get now while people struggle with eating a certain way for 30, 40 years, and then all of a sudden you try and put them on a meal plan of eating real whole food. They don’t instantly feel great. My body was missing the high of those foods that I was feeding it.

At first, sometimes people have those withdrawal symptoms. It’s an emotional struggle. It’s not just a physical thing. It’s an emotional attachment to those foods, and so it took about a good two weeks for those feelings to go away that the cravings became more manageable over time. I mean, I was definitely craving Cinnamon Toast Crunch and some Mountain Dew. I willpower my way through it because I knew people were following me. That’s what kept me accountable was I knew that the audience saw me on these TV shows and were like, all right, can Drew do it? I had to put myself through that no matter what. About two weeks later, it did become more manageable. I started to feel better. The energy was going up.

I didn’t do any exercise, by the way in month. I just changed my diet. I wanted to show people how powerful nutrition is when it comes to overall health and seeing results, and so I lost 19 pounds. All my bloodwork had gone back to normal levels. I remember my testosterone, which was in the low 200’s at my heaviest, had more than doubled in just 1 month of just changing my diet. No exercise yet but just changing my diet. It went from low 200’s to 450 in just 1 month, so that was good. I was feeling better. Then I still had 50 plus pounds to lose, and I had 5 months to do it in.

Dr. Pompa:
Did you worry at all? Did you worry ever like, oh, my God, what if it doesn’t come off? What if some sticks? Did it ever come to your mind?

Drew:
One hundred percent because I’ve never been this overweight and I was like what if it doesn’t work? What if I am stuck this way? That was something that I had to—that was a risk I was willing to take, and I had that conversation with myself. I’m like, if I don’t lose the weight, I’m stuck like this. I probably will regret it. What did I do? Why did I do this? I’m like you know what? I’m just going to do the best I can. I know that the process works, and I’m just going to do the best I can in six months.

Six months of gaining weight. Six months of losing weight. To make a long story short, yes, I did get back to fit, everybody. That’s why my book is called Fit2Fat2Fit and not fit to fat and stuck or something. I did get back to fit, but it was so humbling. It was way harder than I thought it would be. My whole life, I’ve always been in shape. When you’ve always been in shape, it’s easy to maintain that. I wouldn’t say easy, but you know what I mean. To lose all your strength and endurance and stamina and start from the bottom again was really humbling. I think every personal trainer and coach should experience that to some extent or not as far as knowing what it’s like to start from the bottom because it helps you relate to those that struggle that are making that transition.

Dr. Pompa:
Drew, my audience is different than yours in that I have a bunch of health seekers, right? It’s like I would never be able to relate to them if I didn’t get sick. Unlike you, I didn’t go, okay, I’m going to ingest some mercury here -inaudible-. I guess I could say I was blessed enough to get sick. I was blessed enough to be healed. Bottom line is I hear it from a different perspective, as you know. I would never know what I know today. I could never relate to the people, my clients that I take on if I didn’t go through it, honestly, what it’s like not to sleep, what it’s like—I got skinny fat. I lost muscle and gained fat eating the right diet. It’s so frustrating. Anyway, how long did it take you to where you were like, okay, I’m back?

Drew:
Yeah, it was about six months. I set a date.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s amazing, six months.

Drew:
I set a date and said, okay, here’s my ending date, and then I did get back to my original weight, which was 193 pounds. Yeah, on the outside I looked the same, but on the inside I was a changed man. My perspective of how I viewed transformation was totally different. The way I viewed it before—and everyone asked me this. How did it change you? I used to focus so much on the physical. When someone was struggling with weight loss and transformation, I’d be like, all right, let’s change up your macros; change up your calories. Let’s work out harder, the intensity. All that’s cool and, yeah, it’s an important piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the biggest piece. I think people are missing the mental and emotional part.

For me, I try and help out on the mental and emotional side first. The physical stuff, we’ll figure that out over time, finding some tweaks, but it’s the mental and emotional piece, especially that emotional attachment to food. How do we get people off of that? I think that’s where the true transformation happens. I could give someone the best meal plans and best workouts and the best science for them. I think that’s not what people struggle with the most. It’s not a lack of knowledge. It’s how to make it a lifestyle change and not just, okay, I’m going to do this diet for 30 days.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, exactly and that’s what transformed you. Like I said, I would say most people, like yourself, it’s all about the physical because that’s where their interest is. You said it definitely opened you up to the emotional and the spiritual side of things. What does that look like today now, and what do you do? I mean, do you still have clients? How did it transform the way you approach somebody?

Drew:
Yeah, so that’s a great question. Like I said, I focus a lot more on the mental and emotional side. Yes, I do give people meal plans and workouts, which I said is the piece of the puzzle , but with that, give them tools on the mental and emotional side. I think accountability is one of the most important things when it comes to transforming your life, change your lifestyle. Whether it’s physical goals, or financial goals, or spiritual goals, having some type of accountability is essential no matter who you are and a support system to provide a safe space to share your struggles, your failures, your successes where people can build you up, and you can actually pay it forward by helping other people during their journey and their transformation. What I do is I have—the way my business works, I don’t really train clients one-on-one anymore but I have digital content that I sell, and then from there, we put people in a private Facebook group, for example, where people can post their meals, their weigh-ins, their successes. We have little competitions, and we have people who pay it forward and will help other—help answer each other’s questions.

It’s a safe space for people, and I think that’s essential. All of my programs include that so that people have help on the mental and emotional side. It’s not just a simple—like I said, as far as here’s meal plans, you do it, and your life is transformed. If that was the case, we would all be skinny and fit by now.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, there’s doubt. Go ahead and give your website and where to get the book. I’m sure people want to get the book.

Drew:
Yeah, so it’s super simple. My brand, by podcast, my book, my website, my social media handle is all Fit-number 2-Fat-number 2-Fit, so Fit2Fat2Fit is my brand. Now, there is a TV show called Fit-T-O-Fat-T-O-Fit. I created that with the help of a production team, and it was on A&E.
That’s a different brand, but that’s still my story but Fit-number 2-Fat-number 2-Fit.

Dr. Pompa:
Got it, yeah. Oh, I didn’t know about the A&E show. Can you watch it?

Drew:
Yeah, so it’s online. Basically, instead of me doing this over and over again—I can only do it once. What we did is we took the concept of Fit2Fat2Fit, and we brought other trainers through this from across the country. For four months, they have to do what I did. I coach them through that process. Like you mentioned, you should have someone coach you through that process of getting fat, right? I coached them through that process, and for four months, they have to gain weight. Then the next four months, they have to lose the weight with their client. Now, as a fat trainer, they have to go through what their clients are going through, and together as a team they lose the weight.

It’s so powerful because you see the trainers come out of it more empathetic, more respect, and a better understanding, and that’s what my brand really is about. It’s not just about physical transformations. It’s about bringing empathy to the health and fitness industry. I see this divide sometimes between people who are overweight and people who are really skinny and fit, and sometimes there’s a lot of judgement and misunderstanding on both sides. People think, oh, this is all you do, and it’s simple. You’re just being lazy. People over here are like you don’t understand.

I feel like if we can bring empathy to the health and fitness industry, it can really change people’s lives. I think people don’t really care what you know or how much you know until they know how much you care. I think that’s a powerful component that I’m trying to bring to the health and fitness industry, which is mostly just about, hey, you’re only cool or you only have value if you have a six-pack or you’re skinny.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow! Both of our stories, that’s what I got out of it too. Meaning that it was the empathy that I have for somebody that’s sick that I could never—you can’t study it.

Drew:
Yeah, you can’t.

Dr. Pompa:
You can’t learn. You can’t just wake up one morning and be like I’m going to be more empathetic, no, man, going through it. It doesn’t surprise me that you gained empathy, and that’s part of your brand. It’s like you would never—one of my questions was what do you think the number one thing you gained from it? You just answered the question.

Drew:
Yeah, seriously, empathy and I think empathy is a powerful tool. Whether it’s in the health and fitness industry or not, just being able to try and get down on someone’s level to understand where they’re coming from first before judging them and just putting them into a category or a box of—whether it’s religion or politics, we do that as humans, and I think it’s unfair. We’re so individual. Rather than just categorizing people and, oh, you’re in this category over here; you’re in that category over here and constant division, I think empathy is something that can really, honestly, change the world. I’m just trying to do it with a health and fitness approach.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s so true. When people are sick, with a lot of people that suffered the way I did, you’re looked at as crazy. It’s like I know what that was like. I know. I hid it from people. I always said I wanted to have cancer just because people would at least feel sorry for me, and I knew what I was fighting against. That’s no way belittling cancer or somebody with cancer by any means. That was just my thought process at the time. How I would understand that unless I went through it?

All right, talk a little bit about some of your solutions, right? You’re a big keto guy. Matter of fact, your next book you could talk about is coming out, and it’s all about ketosis. Then some of even the exercise stuff. You touched on some of the emotional stuff, but touch on some of those subjects.

Drew:
Yeah, so I first got into keto after listening to Tim Ferriss’s podcast with Dr. Dom D’Agostino because I didn’t realize how much…

Dr. Pompa:
We’ve had him on the show a couple times.

Drew:
Yeah, he’s awesome, and what I took from that episode was I had no idea there was so much scientific research being done on the ketogenic diet. Especially in the health and fitness industry, we just hear about, oh, this diet’s working for weight loss, but I had no idea there was so much research being done. For me, I’m like, okay, here I am, a self-experimenter. Why not experiment on my body and try the keto diet? This is about three or four years ago. I did it, and I absolutely loved it.

The thing that I loved wasn’t what people think. I didn’t lose fat. I didn’t gain all this muscle or my performance increase significantly in the gym. I was already really lean to begin with. For me, I saw it more so as nutrition for my brain and the mental clarity, the improvement cognitive function, the focus that—and not being a slave to food. I was your typical six to seven meals a day, Tupperware container. You have each meal. I set my alarm for every three hours.

For me, this was awesome because I could get the performance in the gym that I wanted. I could maintain the body mass, the lean body mass that I had, and I had the mental clarity with only eating once or twice a day. I’m like, man, I could get so much more done throughout the day. For me, that’s why I fell in love with it. From there, had the opportunity to go on The Dr. Oz Show to talk about the benefits of the ketogenic diet and got propped up as a keto coach now. For me, I’m a huge proponent of it, but it’s evolved over the years. Probably like for you, the way I do keto now is not the same way I did keto the first time I tried it.

Dr. Pompa:
Me too, matter of fact, I purposely even move in and out of it. I intermittent fast. I do other fasts. When you’re in that fat adapted state, it’s really a cool place to be.

Drew:
Yeah, my whole goal to keto is to—here’s the problem that I see is people take it. They do it. They feel awesome, and they become almost dogmatic about it. This is going to save everyone else’s lives, and this is the only way because this is what worked for me. It almost becomes their religion where they start preaching about it, and they start looking down on other people.

Dr. Pompa:
I would say that about the vegetarians, the vegans, the paleo. I would say that about every darn diet. My principal is diet variation. There’s beauty in all of them. Moving in and out is actually where the magic is, but anyways, that’s my philosophy. Go ahead.

Drew:
I agree with that 100%. It’s hard because people get so attached to it, and they think what works for them today will work for them five, ten years from now. Then they develop an unhealthy relationship with food where they look at certain food as a sin or feel guilty or ashamed if they eat a carbohydrate.

Dr. Pompa:
So true.

Drew:
Yeah, so that’s where I’ve evolved to with the ketogenic diet is helping people have a healthier relationship with what it is and when to use it and how to use it rather than, hey, this is the end-all-be-all, you guys. This is the last diet you need to do. I think if you look at—just from an ancestral point of view, there was moments of feast and famine, and so there was probably periods of time where we were in and out of ketosis.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m smiling because that’s my principle. My diet variation, it’s “feast-famine cycling.” We do that with our clients. My doctors, we literally get it to shut off autoimmune. Every ancient culture was forced in and out of these states on different diets, and the feat-famine cycle, actually, there’s where the magic is. It basically drives hormone optimization, so Drew, you said it. I have two books coming out on the principle.

Drew:
I love it, man, and I’ll probably take that book and spread the message to help people understand exactly how it works. Obviously, you have the knowledge of how to do that, and so I’m excited. I’m excited for that.

Dr. Pompa:
When’s the keto book come out?

Drew:
Yeah, it’s called Complete Keto. It’ll come out in February of 2019. Basically, what I did is take all the things I’ve learned from Fit2Fat2Fit on the mental, emotional, and spiritual side, and plug that into a ketogenic approach, a 30-day ketogenic approach to really complete transformation. Not just a physical transformation but adding in those mental, emotional, and spiritual components. The things that I’ve learned over the years through personal development and self-help books and interviewing other authors that have really transformed my life and helped me see health and fitness from a different perspective. I think my issue even though I’m in the health and fitness industry is that a perception is, hey, I need to look like the Instagram models. I need to be skinny to be healthy. When in reality, your version of healthy looks different on your body than my version of healthy. That’s what Complete Keto does, obviously, with a ketogenic approach but also with steps to how to have a health balance with carbohydrates afterwards, when to use them, how to use them so that it’s not just keto for the rest of your life and that’s it.

Dr. Pompa:
I love it. It goes really well with what I do and what I teach, Drew. We have to get together on some energy on promotion on that. One of my books will be coming out around the same time.

Drew:
Perfect.

Dr. Pompa:
A guy looks like you. People are going to ask the question. Okay, so what do I do with exercise? I believe in exercise variation too. What about exercise would you say is really different about your approach?

Drew:
Yeah, that’s a great question. This is very similar to how nutrition has evolved over the years. Where before, coming from a football, wrestling background, I was so focused on exercise is punishment, right? You exercise. You punish your body. You’re sore for days afterwards. Then you’re like, yeah, high five, man. We killed that workout. That was my mentality for years and years until, now that I’m 37 years old, I’m getting older now.

I used to do—so here’s a little bit about my background, my story. I used to do CrossFit for, literally, five to six days a week for about two years straight, and I got so burnt out on it. My testosterone dropped significantly. I was experiencing some things.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m not a believer in it as well.

Drew:
Yeah, I was experiencing adrenal fatigue, symptoms of that, and I knew something had to change. I looked great on the outside. That’s the problem is people are like, oh, Drew, you look great. What’s wrong? You shouldn’t be complaining about anything. I knew something was going on, and so I started to shift my approach to exercise as far as, instead of a place of punishment, it’s a place of self-love. How do we exercise coming from a place of self-love? I think it comes from asking your body what you want to do that’s functional, that’s not a punishment. It doesn’t have to be three sets of ten of bench press or three sets of ten of squats or deadlifts. I think, for me, it’s adding in exercise variation, like what you mentioned, and just being open to new things.

For me now, my exercise does not look like what you would think it does. People are like, oh, yeah, Drew probably works out five, six days a week, two hours at a time. That’s how you get jacked. That’s how you get ripped. In reality, that’s not true. I will exercise maybe hardcore high-intensity interval training two days a week. I’ll go hiking two days a week, and then I’ll add in maybe every once in a while yoga or just a walk. For me, I used to—I think exercise had to be this hardcore thing, but for me, just walking for an hour, yes, there’s a little bit of physical benefits. Does it give me a six pack, (probably not)? The mental and emotional benefits and spiritual benefits I get from just walking and opening up my mind far surpasses doing a CrossFit workout, in my opinion.

Dr. Pompa:
Man, I’ll tell you, my week looks the same. I mean, honestly, I do such different things different days. I really mix it up. Just like you said, for me, emotionally it just makes a big difference. It’s like, if I had to wake up every day and know I had to slave in the gym and if people look like—would look at us and say, oh, yeah, you slave in the gym, absolutely not. I hear people tell my wife the same thing. It’s like, no, not really. It’s putting it all together, man, I mean, honestly.

If I had to say one thing, we do vary our exercise, which gives you a hormone optimization just like the diet. It’s with the diet, with everything that we do, our spiritual beliefs, and we start our day in prayer. Put it all together; that’s the package, honestly. You nailed it, man. You nailed it. Yeah, no, listen, I can’t wait to read your book.

Drew:
Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
You really have a really balanced approach, man. People would look at you, and they would think that you don’t have a balanced approach. Most people that look like you don’t have a balanced approach, and their life’s not balanced. Drew, I definitely congratulate you on that.

Drew:
Thank you, Dr. Pompa. We’ll have to grab dinner or go wakeboarding sometimes soon.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely, if there’s one piece of advice that you would give our listeners and our viewers, what would it be for success? I mean, there’s different struggles out there but one.

Drew:
One piece of advice for success, well, here’s a…

Dr. Pompa:
I nailed you on that.

Drew:
That’s a hard one. Here’s a quote that sticks in my mind when I hear the word success, and that’s from Tony Robbins. That’s “success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure.” You could have all the success in the world, but if you’re not fulfilled, then what is that, and what does that matter? You could have the perfect body, the perfect health. You could have the perfect house, the right amount of money. If you can’t find fulfillment in this life, then, in my opinion, none of that success is really success, right? For me, find what brings you fulfillment, and then let that be your focus. Then let the success be a byproduct of following that dream of yours that brings that fulfillment rather than focusing on success and hoping that you’re fulfilled after you make a lot of money, or after you have this job, or after you get the body that you want. Learn to love yourself now versus one day, when I get this, then I’ll learn to love myself.

Dr. Pompa:
That was a great answer because it’s so true. I heard an interview of guy. His whole thing was—it was a money thing. He thought that was going to be it, and then it was this level, right? It was his first million, and then I’ll be a success. Then it was like that did nothing. It must be ten million. Then it must be—well, I must be a multimillionaire. Then that would be hundred. It’s like then there he was realizing that his life was absolutely empty, and then he realized that his relationships, his health, all of these other things literally completely fell apart. It’s such a balance, man.

You know what? You’re right. If you can love yourself where you’re at, imagine. Your identity is not in any of that stuff, is it?

Drew:
Yeah, it’s true. I loved it, man.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well said. Listen, we’ll put all your stuff that you mentioned in the show notes, folks, great resources, Drew.

Drew:
Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
I mean, really good stuff so thank you for what you’re doing to humanity. Thanks for being on CellTV. It was great, great show.

Drew:
Appreciate it.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Practitioners, just a reminder that it’s not too late to join us in Vegas from November 2 to the 4th, and you don’t even have to travel. We are offering tickets to the livestream of our Live It to Lead It event. You can go to hcfevents.com for more information, and you can use the promo code CHTV to take 10% off. We would love to have you join us.

We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at podcast.drpompa.com, and please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

Episode 243: Fastonic: Optimize Healing and Longevity with Molecular Hydrogen

With Alex Tarnava

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. This is Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, Dr. Pompa will be talking all about the benefits of molecular hydrogen with his guest, Alex Tarnava, the developer of the first oral stable hydrogen supplement that you can add directly to your drinking water. Alex learned, through many trials, how to trap hydrogen in an open cup, which allows us as consumers to reap the benefits of supplemental H2. They will discuss how hydrogen assists in fasting, shows promise in anti-aging, encourages post-workout recovery, and mitigates oxidative stress, inflammation, and many other triggers for disease and imbalance.

First, I’d like to share a bit more about Alex Tarnava. Alex has a passion for health and fitness, learning, and self-improvement, and was shocked to find he developed osteoarthritis while still in his physical prime. Searching for alternatives to pharmaceuticals, Alex happened upon the potential of molecular hydrogen. Finding no products with the hydrogen saturation he knew was necessary for results, Alex began to experiment with ways of replicating the dosage levels being successfully used across the scientific community. After much trial and error, his oral stable hydrogen was born. Curious to try molecular hydrogen for yourself? Dr. Pompa recommends supplementing with Fastonic, which is aligned with the research and development discussed in this show.

We are offering ten percent off for our CHTV audience at GetFastonic.com. Also, to the practitioners out there who cannot make it to our November Live It to Lead It event in Las Vegas, you can still join us by subscribing to our livestream and virtually attend our three-day workshop that will give you the latest in cutting edge treatments and strategies to build your practice. Please go to hcfevents for livestream access, and you can use the code CHTV to take ten percent off the price. That’s hcfevents.com, with the code CHTV. Hope you can join us. Let’s get started and welcome Dr. Pompa and Alex Tarnava to the show dedicated to molecular hydrogen. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
Welcome to Cell TV. This is a really exciting episode because you all love these episodes where I bring you these new, exciting technologies and products that I take myself and I feel you all need to know about. Hydrogen’s this topic today, and I’ll tell you—I just got off a mindset. It was 12 of some of the most brilliant people in our industry. It was me, Dr. McCullough, Tyler LeBaron, who I actually interviewed on the show about hydrogen, and several other doctors, my friend, Ben Greenfield. We had PhDs, some scientists, and we had clinicians that I feel are leading the way in some of the exciting things that are happening in healthcare right now.

I’ll tell you—we had two days of this mindshare, as we call it, and hydrogen was one of the big topics that we were all sharing ideas about. We were all sharing our clinical experience about hydrogen, and we were all talking about the different effects on the biochemistry and perhaps why we’re seeing the results that we’re seeing. Dr. McCullough shared some great stuff, some of his thoughts, and a lot of the practitioners in the room shared their thoughts. We even had a guy that I know my guest, Alex over there, who I’ll introduce you to in a second, knows very well, Bob Slovak. He talked a lot about hydrogen. He’s been dealing with this for many years. We had a lot of incredible feedback on this topic, and I’m excited to bring Alex.

You are least one of the developers, and the developer of this new hydrogen, this oral stable hydrogen that We’re able to just put in a cup of water and drink. I have to admit, in the old days, we were trapping hydrogen, sealing it in bottles and all these complicated things. Alex, you made it simple, of course. First of all, thank you, and thanks for being on the show.

Alex:
No problem. I just want to say, first and foremost, that’s how I started with hydrogen, too. Everything in our R and D was how to trap it, get more hydrogen quicker, and trap it. The open-cup design was actually an accident.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow, I didn’t know that. As a matter of fact, I asked that this weekend, and nobody actually knew how you ended up coming with that.

Alex:
Yeah, it was a complete accident. As we were trying to get higher levels of hydrogen saturation quicker, we started realizing as we went higher, we’re actually getting lower hydrogen. We’re seeing this whiteout because basically, the reaction, once we’d opened the sealed container, would react so much extra hydrogen—something called Le Chatlier’s principle—and it would -inaudible- up the hydrogen we just saturated.

It was kind of a weird phenomenon happening that led us to months and months of R and D, and replication and figuring out what was going on, to realize, if we’re doing this like this, we can make it in an open cup, as long as we basically maximize the reaction and dissolution kinetics, which is how we led to our discovery. It reminds me of a quote I quite like by Isaac Asimov that said, in science, so often, findings that herald in new revelations and discoveries aren’t met with eureka, I found it, but huh, well, that’s funny. It’s things that you don’t understand at first.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s so true. Honestly, I can look back at some of my own discoveries clinically and go, oh, that’s funny—wonder why that happened? Then out of it came some incredible thing, so it shouldn’t surprise me. Let’s back up a second because maybe some of our viewers, listeners, didn’t see the shows I’ve done on hydrogen. As a matter of fact, I’ll make sure Ashley, my team member here, gives us what episodes those are because you should go back and watch. I interviewed Tyler LeBaron on the hydrogen and he gave some great studies. I want to expand upon it today because I think it’s a topic that we know all about.

You put 12 clinicians and scientists, who I believe are top in the world, in a room together, and hydrogen was a big topic of that. We’re onto something really exciting. Okay, hydrogen, the smallest molecule on the periodic table, smallest element, so we know it can cross into membranes—but who cares? When I’m watching a show, I want to know how does this benefit me? How can this help me? I know we don’t want to make claims or things like that; we want to be careful, but what is the hydrogen rage about?

Alex:
Hydrogen—what really strikes me, and what originally interested me in hydrogen probably isn’t as true now, but actually what we found out about it is even cooler, which is surprising. It’s really neat for me to see how many people are talking about hydrogen now because when I first heard about it about a decade ago, about a year after that first major med article came out showing it was selective pre-radical scavenger for the hydroxyl radical—I thought that was awesome because I had just been following -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
Let me just bring that to logic for people, what that means. There’s a nasty free radical called a hydroxyl free radical. It’s considered to be the most damaging, dangerous free radical that we know of. Hydrogen really gets rid of this, to put it in the simplest terms that I can, and it makes people feel better. Okay, go ahead.

Alex:
Exactly, right. For so long, we thought the answer was antioxidants, antioxidants, antioxidants because it’s all these reactive oxygen species that are wreaking so much havoc on our bodies, but antioxidant therapy just wasn’t going anywhere. It doesn’t get to the mitochondria. It doesn’t take out the bad guys; it takes out the good guys. It causes imbalances. It was really a dead end. When I saw that about hydrogen, I got really interested, but there was nowhere to get it. Years went by. I was young; I was healthy. I forgot about it until I got pretty injured and sick.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s always the way it is.

Alex:
Yeah, I was desperately just searching PubMed all the time to look for anything to help with my afflictions, and hydrogen kept on popping up, and I’d remembered it, so I was following along. I still couldn’t get any commercial products, and I decided, if no one’s going to make this stuff, I’m going to figure out how to make it. Now we’re figuring out more and more.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, when your name came up this weekend, that was what people said. Look, this guy just figured it out. He was dead set; he was resolve in that he’s going to figure this hydrogen thing out, and he did. Two people in the room said, man, that guy impressed me with that, and we take our hat off to him. They hold you high.

Alex:
That’s good to hear. If I would say anything, it’s more obsession, and there was a lot of minds. A lot of minds working on this. I’m not some genius that sat here and figured out everything on my own. When I started, I realized there’s only so much knowledge one person can have. I partnered with my founding partner Dr. Holland. He’s a medicinal PhD chemist. I hired a physicist; I hired an engineer. I started working with a biochemist. I started working with manufacturers because we figured out the chemistry in a month, but then it was 15 failed scaleup attempts and 1,000 iterations before we got our first production-ready tablet. It’s very different to make one in a mortar and pestle than to make a million.

There’s so many issues with scaling up with this kind of thing. I quickly started realizing, and I actually became the formulator for the excipients and everything myself because that was actually the trickiest part. I read every publication there is on pharmaceutical formulation science to figure out what’s going on, how to do this, how to do that—kept pieces of paper in the middle of the night on my table so that if something came to me, as I woke up I walked and wrote it down. I just acted like the quarterback of everything.

I’d speak to the chemist and figure out what was going on with chemistry, but not bring any of the manufacturing or the engineering or the physics or anything or the excipients. Then I’d go and talk to each individual person, and get, in layman’s terms, their thoughts on what was going on with their specific issue. I just started putting it together like a puzzle.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, that’s awesome.

Alex:
It’s impossible that I could have done it alone. I just learned that strategy from a book of -inaudible-, if you know who that is. He basically talked about how we’re so desperately in need of PhDs in general science that can sit in these summits, listen to everyone from every specialty, and figure out what’s going on because nobody can talk to each other. Nobody knows what the other person’s working on because the way knowledge is going, everything is so specialized.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, that was the point of this weekend. We do this a couple times a year where we bring all of us together who are doing amazing things clinically from a scientific perspective, and we share it. We literally just share everything that each other are doing for the reason you just said. I’m telling you, Alex, every time we do it, amazing transformation things happen. We come out with things that make a difference in the world and peoples’ health. That’s the way it works; you’re right on the money with that. It’s a strategy that really because of the way medicine works today and science, nobody’s sharing ideas, and when we do, magic happens.

Alex:
It’s so hard for most of them, too because when you’re talking to people who are only talking about your thing—even you explaining about the hydroxyl radical—you forget about what other people don’t know. When you talk about something all day every day, it’s so hard to put yourself in someone else’s shoes to know well, I’ve been talking about this for years every day, so of course everyone else knows. That’s just not the case. You see it so often when you try and share with someone, educate someone. Their eyes just glaze over, and it’s because of my issue or someone else’s issue communicating because we’re not putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes.

That’s not just true with the general population; that’s true with other people working in science, with medical doctors, with all sorts of doctors. If you don’t explain things in laymen’s terms to give someone a chance to understand, they’re not going to have input, and now they can’t combine it with what they know.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt. Hopefully, we do that today, man because believe me, there’s people watching this that will hear this, and they will apply it. They’ll apply it to a whole new level; it happens all the time, actually, on the show. Okay, you had said something really profound. You basically made a comment that we know that all these diseases today are caused by inflammation, but hydrogen’s not an anti-inflammatory. It doesn’t work that way. As a matter of fact, I like to call it a redox molecule, where it doesn’t push antioxidant and it doesn’t push oxidation. It brings homeostasis or balance to the body. Explain that because that’s a really important part here.

Alex:
Absolutely. What a lot of people don’t realize is we need inflammation. Inflammation isn't bad; inflammation is how we protect ourselves from injury. Our immune system—it all runs on inflammation. We need it, but what we need is a balance. Hydrogen isn’t an anti-inflammatory. In fact, in some senses, it can increase inflammation. What hydrogen does is it regulates production of our proinflammatory cytokines. They’re these tiny little proteins that lead to the development of inflammation. Hydrogen goes around, playing around with dials in our body and just up and down regulating—turning up the dial, down the dial to find this balance, which is what we need.

I know in talking to some researchers, they say one of the amazing things about hydrogen—if you take a healthy cell and you put a hydrogen-rich medium on it, nothing happens. Nothing goes up, nothing goes down; the cell is healthy. If you then take that cell and artificially damage it, now you see all these gene expressions changing, these up and down and all sorts of markers. Hydrogen is trying to desperately balance everything to make sure everything’s working properly.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, one of the things we had noted, using hydrogen during a fast—we do a lot of fasting in our protocols. A lot of people because they’re sick, they build a lot of hydroxyl radicals that we said in the very beginning, that hydrogen has a positive effect on. There’s a lot of other things that happen during a fast. We don’t like giving thing during a fast because we don’t want to push the body left or right. We don’t want to push the body in a direction; we want to rely on the innate intelligence. That’s where we came to the conclusion that hydrogen is perfect during a fast because it doesn’t force the body; it relies on innate intelligence. If it needs oxidation, it brings it. If it needs inflammation, it brings it. If it needs reduction, it brings that.

It becomes the perfect fasting thing, and clinically, it’s been a savior for us, Alex. When I contacted you about putting it in a product, that’s how we came up with Fastonic. There it is, Fastonic—hence the word because all of these doctors now, we’re using it in our protocols in this way. I have to ask you this question. When I started doing research on fasting—you probably know the answer to this. How many studies have been done on hydrogen? What’s a round number, at least close?

Alex:
Human?

Dr. Pompa:
Both animal and human.

Alex:
There’s just under 40 human studies right now, with I think about as many underway. There’s over 1,000 publications on hydrogen, but that includes hypothesis articles, opinion papers that have been published, everything like that. I think there’s around 700 in animal, invitro, and human combined, but there’s well over 1,000 total publications.

Dr. Pompa:
If I just look down a list here that I have—and by the way, some of these were done with medications, but these are positive outcome studies. No doubt, many of them were done with medications, so we can’t make claims exactly, but these are positive outcome studies.

Alex:
The thing about hydrogen is in a lot of these studies, they are using the traditional medication to help with disease or recovery, and they’re using hydrogen to either lower the dosage or ameliorate the negative consequences of the dosage. Like radiotherapy—they use hydrogen in conjunction to reduce the oxidative stress and the damages from radiotherapy in cancer patients. It wasn’t actually to deal with the cancer; it was to deal with the side effect of the treatment.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s one of the studies. There’s one on rheumatoid arthritis, Parkinson’s. There’s one on body composition. There’s tons of studies here on metabolism, meaning obviously, it has a potential effect on weight loss or weight loss resistance. Tissue injury, mitochondrial, inflammatory myopathies—I’m just going down a list here, folks. Literally, that’s how many studies are here. Wrinkles, psoriasis—again, there’s a long list, but you get the point. Alex, how can one molecule affect—again, I’m reading down a list of studies. How can one molecule affect so many different conditions positively?

Alex:
It all comes down to gene expression. We’ve probably all heard that saying, it’s in your genes. What matters is in your genes. That’s only partly true; what matter is how your genes express themselves. As we accumulate all these damages over time, our genes start expressing themselves differently. As our inflammatory bodies are dysregulated, we have too much, too little. Our redox is dysregulated; we have too much oxidative stress or too little.

As we accumulate the -inaudible- end products, as our -inaudible- start shortening, our gene expression changes. All of this happens, and they all go around in a circle. Any of these can cause the other, and then we just start falling apart. I like to think of hydrogen as taking care of a car that’s falling apart, and the timing’s always off. Every bump you go over, the timing is off. Your car starts sputtering; your gas mileage is bad.

Dr. Pompa:
The older we get, the more the dang timing keeps going off, by the way.

Alex:
Say this car—you can’t get the part. You can get the bolt, the timing. Maybe the casing’s broken, so every time you go to drive, hydrogen is popping your hood and adjusting the timing to hear it purr just right. You’re still going to go over bumps. Your timing’s still going to get knocked off, but it’s periodically adjusting that to hear that purr, so you’re purring just right for a little while longer. Hydrogen goes around and it just moderates things. It adjusts this here; it adjusts that there. It can have a lot of benefit for a lot of different things, but that’s why it’s so neat as being as adjunct therapy in a lot of these trials on top of the proven medication because hydrogen’s coming along on the side. It’s helping with this, helping with that, helping along the way.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, as more alternative practitioners, we find the same with our supplement protocols because I’m asked that question a lot. Can I use it with this? Can I use it with this protocol? I’m like, you have to understand. Hydrogen brings the body to homeostasis. It makes everything you’re doing work actually better because of the reason you’re saying.

Alex:
Absolutely, and a lot of people forget this about some supplements sometimes. There’s been talks about studying omega-3s in people who eat lots of fish. It’s about balancing your omega 3s to 6s, so if you’re already eating a good balance, an omega-3 supplement might not help. The people who need an omega 3 are the people who aren’t eating fish, aren’t eating seeds, aren’t getting enough of it because it’s about balancing your levels.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and the other cool part about this not being an antioxidant, an anti-inflammatory, or an oxidant, in a sense—-inaudible- in oxygen has amazing capabilities and helps many people with many conditions. The cool thing about hydrogen is you can’t—I’m always asking, can you take too much? Your body just won’t use it if it doesn’t need it.

Alex:
Hydrogen doesn’t last long. I think when you take in hydrogen, it’s gone out of your system with 5 minutes to 30 minutes. We look at the amount of hydrogen that’s used in something like deep sea diving and -inaudible-, I think it’s called. They use a lot hydrogen instead of nitrogen for deep sea diving. They’ll use 1,000 times the level of times that we’re delivering. The safety of hydrogen is so well-established. We can produce up to ten liters of hydrogen a day from bacterial production in our stomach and intestines. That’s one of the neat things about hydrogen, how delivering such a small dose can have such a huge impact. It could really come down to—where all the benefits is in adjusting gene expression is we need that high-dose intermittent blast.

We’re producing hydrogen all day long, slowly in our stomach. Every time we eat fiber, every time we eat carbohydrates, we’re producing hydrogen. Getting that blast of hydrogen water or blast of hydrogen—it’s that big blast that knocks everything right because our body tolerates that daily production.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s like getting stem cells. People produce stem cells all the time. When we fast, we even produce more of them. In fact, part of the magic of fasting—

Alex:
-inaudible- not long ago, actually.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you produce a lot of stem cells during a fast. However, when you get an injection of stem cells, it’s even this bigger blast, and boom. It strikes up healing, so it’s similar. Yeah, I’ll tell you—I read a study. I know we have a lot of athletes that watch the show as well, and how it obviously helps recovery, which therefore helps performance. Why is it? How can that be?

Alex:
There’s about as much study for humans on hydrogen in sports performance as anything. There is a lot of study on hydrogen for athletic performance. In fact, we just had a clinical study that was just presented at ACSM, American College of Sports Medicine, back beginning of June. It showed in middle-aged overweight women, a pretty dramatic increase, I think about eight 8 percent increase in VO2 max, but then about a 50 percent increase in time to exhaustion and work completed at the end of a 28-day—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’m looking at the study. 28-day hydrogen-rich water study capacity on middle-aged overweight women.

Alex:
Yeah, so they had pretty dramatic improvements. In talking with that research team, I had some thoughts on it, and they agreed completely. They don’t think hydrogen was actually increasing VO2 max, which I’d agree with. It was helping people workout harder and longer, and then recover quicker. These women were improving their own VO2 max by the end of the study from being able to train longer and harder, and then recover quicker.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I would agree with that. I brought that up because know that some of those are not athletes watching this, if you’re not feeling well or sick—I always say, if it works for athletes recovering, it works for the sick as well. As a matter of the fact, it’s the opposite. Typically, athletes have trouble healing things because they’re functioning at a much higher level than would a sick person. It’s really cool when you have something, and it really dramatically affects the athlete. You know darn well it’s going to affect the sick person struggling, especially because they’re not making; they’re not recovering. They’re not healing the same way as an athlete.

Alex:
Exactly, and I can talk a bit anecdotally about myself. This ties into our second clinical trial, that’s also a single-use athletic performance. I can’t fully discuss the results because it’s still going through peer review, but it was a pretty big improvement in submaximal heartrate. I notice that when I take a massive dose of hydrogen before a cardio workout—

Dr. Pompa:
How much is that? What do you call massive dose?

Alex:
I drop five tablets in a half later.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s what I was just going to say. You’re looking at about one tablet, okay.

Alex:
When I do this workout, with usually, the timeframe, intensity, everything, I’m usually at about 155 to 160 heartrate. I stay at 120 after taking the hydrogen, and my muscles don’t get as sore. I don’t get as tired. I’m still sweating buckets, but my heart -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
My son, who works out at a high rate—he said, “Dad, when I take the hydrogen, I don’t get sore. I can crush it. I can take time off. That’s how much it clears lactic acid.”

Alex:
That was one of the first things. When I started taking hydrogen, I was still recreationally doing small competitions and CrossFit and everything. I found it wouldn’t help me on round one. My performance wouldn’t be better on the first workout, but I was doing a lot more reps in workout two, three, four, five in a day than I was without hydrogen. After that, I didn’t get that deep—especially in your legs—that deep feeling of pain where you can’t sleep. You’re so sore; you’re stiff. My legs were still tired.

If I tried to go do a workout the next day, they were tired. They were weak, but they weren’t that stiff, sore, your legs were going to fall off pain. It just so dramatically reduced my pain. Any athlete knows what I’m talking about. You stare at the toilet and you’re like I don’t know how I’m going to do this. You stare at stairs and you’re like, I don’t know how I’m going to get up. Hydrogen got rid of that. You’re still weak; you still needed a recovery, but you weren’t incapacitated.

Dr. Pompa:
The study that I read looked at hydrogen—as a matter of fact, I think it was after I heard Tyler LeBaron speak at one of my seminars on hydrogen. He talked about how this particular study, it mimicked caloric restriction, etcetera. I’m thinking, gosh, if it does that, this may be good for weight loss. I’m sorry, it is good for weight loss, but it may be good for fasting. It was something else that he said, and that’s what made our doctor group say, I bet this is magic for fasting, and that’s where it all started. That study—do you know that study where it talked about that?

Alex:
I’m trying to remember. I know there’s a few that I thought would be pertinent to fasting. I get jumbled sometimes because I’ve read every study that’s published now. I forget which one is which sometimes, but there’s definitely some. There was one on a growth factor that could have been pertinent. There was one on PGC-1alpha, shown balancing blood sugar, which I know would be really important in fasting. I was speaking to one researcher that thinks a lot of this stuff, especially the heartrate and everything, probably comes back to what it does to the brain.

When we look at a lot of these studies on hydrogen for cognitive function in the elderly, and then we look at, how is it changing our heartrate so dramatically? How is it doing all these things? That could just come back to the brain and how we’re processing energy. There’s going to be people who can speak to that a lot better than I can, so I’m relaying of this stuff.

Dr. Pompa:
We’ve noticed it clinically.

Alex:
I can tell you—the burst in energy I get from hydrogen—I don’t always intermittently fast, and sometimes when I do, it’s by accident because I’m working a 16-hour day. I take a hydrogen and I’m just perked right up. My energy is higher, especially traveling, jet lag. Drinking hydrogen when I get off the plane, it is better than coffee for sure. It’s different, a lot different. You’re just alert, focused, and that’s one of the things I find when I intermittently fast. Until you get your calories right, and what you’re eating right to go through the day and get used to it, your brain is clouded. It clears my brain.

Dr. Pompa:
I know one of the studies, maybe even more than that, has to do with ghrelin. Ghrelin, leptin—ghrelin communicates directly to your hypothalamus, right to your brain, to your practitioner’s point. It has a very close relationship with leptin. Both control hunger; both control fat burning. It most likely has something to do with that hormonal cascade that actually starts in the gut. I just don’t know that we’ve figured it out yet, honestly, but we know that it affects ghrelin, which we know that affects leptin, and that affects the brain.

Alex:
That’s actually an older study. We’ve known that one for a while longer. I think they’ve replicated that one, too.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s something magical happening there for sure. It’s pretty remarkable. I guess, again, all these studies done on weight loss, metabolism—it’s playing a role in that ghrelin pathway, metabolism pathway, hormonal pathway somehow.

Alex:
Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
I watched a video on YouTube, and there was two mice. It was basically, I believe that they were—I’m going to say Parkinson’s. I think it was Parkinson’s; maybe you can recall. They were basically running in circles, and they were Parkinson’s mice. They gave the one hydrogen, and it immediately, literally immediately stopped and was like normal. I doubt it lasted, but it showed that effect immediately on the brain. Have you seen that? Did you see that video?

Alex:
I haven’t. No, but that’s interesting.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. Where did I see that? I think Tyler showed it at my seminar and then I looked it up after that. Darn, it just popped up into my mind, or I would have pulled it up before the show.

Alex:
No, I want to see that. it’s interesting—so many things about hydrogen. It just speaks again to that analogy of that old car, that every time you drive it, you need to find the timing right.

Dr. Pompa:
Many of our viewers—you’re aging yourself because they have no idea that cars can go out of timing. I’ve heard you give a different example that perhaps the younger generation might relate to. This example’s important because this hydrogen thing is hard to grip. I think you need examples. It was about the lighted path.

Alex:
Okay, yeah. Basically, this is an analogy about how hydrogen balances our inflammation. If you imagine inflammation like a flame, and think of this path through an icy, snowy park in the middle of the wintertime. The flames keep the path clear, keeps it warm, lit, so you can walk safely and get from point A to point B. When inflammation goes out of control, what happens is—those fires are covering the pathway. Now you can’t walk through. The fire’s back. The extent of it being your protector is a bad thing. So often, the response for a lot of drugs is to shut down the fire. What happens if you shut down the fire is the ice freezes over. Now you can’t pass. Let’s cover the fire with a bunch of water and foam.

Now it’s slippery; it’s a mess. You still can’t pass. Hydrogen’s like going over to the dial and just turning down the flame. Now the flame is a nice, pleasant warming fire that gives you light and clears the snow and the ice on the path. Hydrogen does this for a lot of things, not just inflammation. Hydrogen isn’t an anti-inflammatory; it just balances the production of what leads to our inflammation. It’s the same thing with the antioxidants. Hydrogen isn’t like an -inaudible- antioxidant like Vitamin C that you just take, and it goes in and indiscriminately reacts with the good and the bad guys because we have good oxidative species.

Nitric oxide is a free radical; we need it. A lot of drugs rely on controlling nitric oxide. Viagra, and not just Viagra for common uses, but we’re looking at it for the heart and all these things. Hydrogen basically just goes in there and it adjusts production of or endogenous—so those are ones we create internally—of our antioxidants. It only does this to a balance. It’s just, again, tweaking with it so we’re producing the right amount of -inaudible- superoxide dismutase catalase to deal with our own body.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we’ve learned so much, I’d say, from a clinical perspective as well as a scientific perspective. The world was antioxidant crazy for a while. We realize that people that take more antioxidants could actually lead to cancer and other problems—lack of energy, for example because we need inflammation, as you pointed out. Yet, if you take too many things that create oxidation, you can drive inflammation. Too much of that, to your point, is the fire burning around the path, and that’s not good, either.

That is the cool thing. I think the new science is redox, meaning the balance between oxidation and reduction—inflammation and driving the right amount of inflammation that tour bodies need for good immune system, good energy production, etcetera. That is it. you said in the beginning that you got into this because of your own battle. What did you go through, and how did hydrogen help you?

Alex:
Basically, I was that guy that was always doing something. To give you context, my common law spouse right now—she talks about how we first started dating, she was talking to her friend saying, it might not work out. I’m too fit and athletic for her. She won three CIS golds at nationals for cross country in Canada, Canadian Intramural Sports, and just qualified for the Boston marathon on her first marathon attempt. She is crazy fit and athletic, but I was training six, seven times a week, sometime six hours a day. I was doing martial arts, Muay Thai, Jiu Jitsu. I was doing CrossFit. I was doing workout competitions for fun that were different than CrossFit. I was then going on hikes.

I was doing all this crazy stuff. All of a sudden, I got really sick. We’re talking, I woke up one day and I had no explosive movement in my body. I went from having a 54-inch plyometric jump onto a box, to I couldn’t jump onto a plate. It was bizarre because my slow movement lifts, a dead-lift, a squat, a bench press—they were unaffected. I was lifting the same amount of weight, had no explosive movement. I had no lower coordination; I couldn’t catch a ball properly. I was sleeping close to 16, 18 hours a day, and had developed almost narcolepsy. I was falling asleep sitting on a couch if I wasn’t doing anything just for a couple minutes. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me; it must have been some sort of virus. My best friend at the time, he was training for a triathlon—again, a very high-end athlete, finishing top five in Spartan races, if you know what those are. They’re obstacle course races.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, my friend Ben Greenfield does them all the time.

Alex:
He was top five in the sprints and the beasts locally. He mixed three weeks of work and was hospitalized twice from pneumonia as a 29-year-old competing for a triathlon. It hit me different. I couldn’t move. I was tired; I was out of it, and they were doing blood tests twice a week on me. At first, my C-reactive protein was at 34, which it shouldn’t really be about 3. I forget what the units are, of milligrams per milliliter or something like that, but the number was 34, it shouldn’t have been 3. I was also seriously anemic, and all these issues were going on. They didn’t know why; everything was coming back clear.

It lasted about three weeks, and all of a sudden, I dropped below one on my CRP. Whatever it was cleared, but when it cleared, my joints stiffened. I developed osteoarthritis in my right shoulder. I had moderate osteoarthritis in the matter of a month. My shoulder was throbbing and aching. I went from being super flexible to I couldn’t get into a butterfly position on the ground. I couldn’t touch my feet and put my knees to the ground. For someone that had been doing Jiu Jitsu for years, couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t move my hip. I couldn’t throw a kick. My hips wouldn’t turn over. Everything seized up, and that’s when I got really desperate.

That’s when I was searching for things, and hydrogen kept on cropping up. I wasn’t getting better. The doctors had me on 1,000 milligrams on Naproxen a day, and then I gave myself an ulcer. I was still trying to train, and I fainted three times in a week because I had ulcers. I bought an ionizer. I won’t say the brand, but I spent $4,500 on this ionizer to make hydrogen. It wasn’t working, and then I just thought to myself, how do I even know there’s hydrogen in this?

Dr. Pompa:
At that point, you had actually started researching hydrogen. You were already sniffing down this road.

Alex:
Yeah, I was. I knew Naproxen wasn’t a long-term solution. Right when they said, here’s 1,000 milligrams a day, I started looking. Okay, what’s going to be a long-term solution for me? I can’t take 1,000 milligrams of Naproxen every day for the rest of my life. I’m not really a candidate for surgery or joint replacement. At the time, I was 29 years old. They won’t let you until you’re 65, and I’d never be training properly again anyways. I was sniffing down hydrogen. It wasn’t working; I wasn’t getting better, and that’s when I found out about the H2 glue, the -inaudible- agent. I’m going to test this ionizer.

Dr. Pompa:
What he’s talking about, folks, is you can literally—in the water, when you put Fastonic in water, I can use this, test it, and go, there’s hydrogen. This is real. This isn’t mythical because you put it in there, and it’s like, is it really in there? It is.

Alex:
With the Fastonic, with what we’re doing to get the quality saturated nanobubbles of hydrogen that stay relatively stable in suspension—you might drop 90 drops in half a liter of water, between 80 to 100 drops. That’s how much hydrogen you’re getting delivered to people, whereas with this ionizer, I had to triple the volume of water to get one drop. It just didn’t have hydrogen. To me, instead of feeling ripped off, I felt great because I’m like, well, hydrogen’s not a dead end. I’m not getting it. That’s when I started actually buying the full articles from research teams. I’m like, well, the scientists are making hydrogen. How are they doing it?

I started looking at the methods, looking at all the ways to get the hydrogen in the water, and basically turned into a kitchen chemist and started doing it on my own. After a while of doing that, I had a bit of a sober second thought. I said, I’m pretty adept at learning new skills, following instructions, and being creative, but I said nothing really beats expertise. I want to make sure that I’m not doing anything dangerous to myself. That’s when I found my partner, Dr. Holland. I basically showed him all the chemistry I’d done, showed him the formulation, showed him what I was trying to do. At first, he thought it was the worst pseudoscience he’d ever heard in his life. He’s from England, so think an English accent saying, this is hocus-pocus magic. I won’t talk to you.

I gave him a dozen of the better studies that existed on hydrogen four years ago at the time, and rebutted his points, saying, I understand what you’re saying here. This is what we’re doing on this thing. He got back to me and said, “Well, there certainly seems to be some evidence on this. Okay, I’ll take a look at what you’re doing.” He took a look. I kept on sending him one study every day, one study after a day, one study after a day, as he was looking at my work. It was a little bit serendipitous. I didn’t know he’d taken a new role on a company that was looking for a cure on Hep B. I sent him a study with hydrogen and Hep B. He pulls me for lunch and he basically said, “Listen, I had to trust the scientists on all these other studies because it really isn’t my specialty, but unless this data is frauded, this works. We need to get this out to the population. Are you looking for a partner?”

Dr. Pompa:
Wow, that’s how it happened, man. Yeah, it transformed your life, and now millions of others. It wasn’t but, I would say two years ago that I was—I got onto the hydrogen thing. I looked at it, but I was trying the products and they just weren’t working. The product that did work was the one that you’d trap it in the bottles, but it was just arduous. It didn’t work nearly as good as this one does, but it still got the ball rolling.

Alex:
Yeah, same idea. Another guy had invented that tablet. You need to trap it under pressure, time and pressure to get it. Like I was mentioning, that’s how we originally started our development, to make a better version of that. The phenomenon that we kept on witnessing, which is what our patent revolves around, of seeing this whiteout, and these high levels of hydrogen when the water’s turning white because we know that if the water’s white, the means that hydrogen isn’t actually dissolved. How is it where we’re still testing it? When we figured it out, that the molecule’s around 120 pico, which For Americans—with metric scale, if you think a micron. There’s a nano, which is 1,000 times smaller than a micron, and then a pic is 1,000 times smaller than the nano, so hydrogen’s super small.

We’re creating one molecule of hydrogen at a time, which is the beauty of these tablets. Then we’re finding this literature on how nano bubbles of gases will stay—not dissolve, but don’t dissipate, and just stay relatively stable in suspension. We started figuring this stuff out and then testing, trying to falsify in every possible way to say, are we missing something? Everything kept on pointing to what we’re doing. We’re looking with lasers at the bubble size, seeing that we’re hitting a first peak of 80 nanometers on the average size of the bubble. We’re seeing all this stuff. Then we said, okay, what we need to do is figure out how to make the perfect flow of these bubbles, so the bubbles are as small as possible, so we can get as many of them dense packed into this cup of water. People can just drop a tablet in a cup, and a minute later, drink it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s extraordinary. How many tablets of the Fastonic would someone have to take to get a benefit a day?

Alex:
One.

Dr. Pompa:
One, yeah. I take two a day. Like you, if I do a really hard effort workout, I may take up to four.

Alex:
Yeah, I take more, a lot more. What I can say—say, for my shoulder pain, I find that taking four a day gets rid of pain. I can sleep on my left shoulder, just a little bit slow. On top of the arthritis, I got into a car accident not longer after, and it tore up my labrum. I have partial tears throughout my rotator cuff and a labral tear, so my shoulder is all messed up. Hydrogen gets rid of the pain. I don’t take anything else other than HQ.

Dr. Pompa:
Can you take all four at once?

Alex:
I do, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
I like to get it done. I like that shock because like you, I notice an immediate impact.

Alex:
It gives me a boost of energy when I take all four. I’d recommend people try one. I’ve been drinking hydrogen for four years. I’m a big guy; I’m 250 pounds, so I want a bigger dose. My girlfriend, who runs marathons—she’s 115 pounds, give or take. She finds that one tablet every other day gets rid of her hip -inaudible-, which is common in female runners. She doesn’t need nearly as much as I do. That’s what I was going to say. One a day should be good for most people. Some people might need two; I need four. It really depends on the person and the body.

Dr. Pompa:
This is mostly anecdotal, but I’ve had two people who have high uric acid levels, -inaudible-, etcetera. One of them, when they go on a fast, it flares up. When they do the Fastonic, zero. As a matter of a fact, it’s taken the -inaudible- completely away. It’s just remarkable. I think that was at two, two a day. I can just speak clinically. It helps so much of the pain conditions, autoimmune. Obviously, it has such a regulatory effect on the immune system, and it’s pretty remarkable. It’s one of those things that I love giving to people because I know there’s always this reaction at some dose, anyway.

Alex:
Yeah, for sure. I get anecdotals all day long. Every day, I get new ones. It always surprises me. It’s one of the things that we’re donating and funding to a lot of public research. I believe it’s really important to donate to public teams, especially because they’re the ones—it’s one thing to pay a team a few hundred thousand dollars to find the result that you want them to find. To find public researchers who are truly interested in hydrogen, want to study their subject—what I do is, I usually donate them money to do extra tests, so that I get a better understanding of what’s going on.

We have all sorts of these things. Every team who comes to me wants to study something different. I say, yeah, absolutely because you hear all these anecdotals, but we also want to know what it does, how it does it, and how it’s going to benefit us, so that we know better how to use hydrogen in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years down the road.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s one of the things I love about it. You do get a lot of anecdotal evidence with the product, but there’s science around it. It’s not being driven by one company. You said it best; once you learn how to read studies, you realize that you can push a study in a direction you want to push. With this, so many people are doing so many different studies for different reasons and coming up with at least one unified answer. This stuff works, man. Listen, your creation’s in Fastonic, man. We appreciate it, no doubt about it. As a matter of fact, I’m going to take more a day after this. I get excited after I hear all these studies. I’m going to take more of it.

Alex, thanks for being on the show. Honestly, like I said, I know these people love these shows because they love the next thing. I’m very cautious about products that I do shows on because I don’t want to watch a show two years later and be like, oh my God, I missed it on that. I can tell you, in our mastermind group this weekend—some of the brightest minds of our industry, we all agree that this is here to stay. It’s the real deal.

Alex:
It’s great for me seeing how this is going down because when I was first interested in hydrogen years ago, nobody had ever heard of it. When all the studies are coming out Japan and China and Korea, you really wonder. You’re like, okay, nobody in North America, nobody who speaks my language is talking about this or has heard of this. Now that more and more studies are coming out, more researchers in Europe, North America are studying hydrogen, more clinicians are advising with hydrogen, all these things—it really makes me feel happy about these four years of work that I’ve been putting in in the past. I’m like, for all the evidence here, I didn’t get it wrong. We’re learning more; this stuff is amazing, and it really puts a smile on my face.

Dr. Pompa:
Good job, man. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Hey, if you have a breaking study and you want to bring it, let’s bring it on Cell TV, man.

Alex:
Absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
Thanks, Alex. Thanks for being on.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Don’t forget to check out GetFastonic.com to take ten percent off this groundbreaking molecular hydrogen supplement. Practitioners, just a reminder that it’s not too late to join us in Vegas from November 2nd to the 4th, and you don’t even have to travel. We are offering tickets to the livestream of our Live It to Lead It event. You can go to hcfevents.com for more information, and you can use the promo code CHTV to take ten percent off. We’d love to have you join us. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern.

We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us a podcast.drpompa.com, and please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

Episode 242: Are Your Household Products Impacting Your Health and Hormones?

With Lara Adler

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, we welcome Environmental Toxins Expert and Educator, Lara Adler. She and Dr. Pompa will be discussing environmental toxins, but more specifically, the obesogenic chemicals that are found in our home and personal care products. We will learn what they are, where they are found, and most importantly, how we can reduce exposures. There are surprising ways that toxins affect us from weight gain and diabetes to thyroid disease and infertility. Many of these chemicals are hiding in plain sight. Avoiding all toxic exposures can be really overwhelming. Lara is here to help you navigate this.

I’d love to tell you a bit more about our guest. Lara Adler is an Environmental Toxins Expert and Educator and a Certified Holistic Health Coach who teaches health professionals as well as the public about the links between environmental chemicals and chronic health issues. She takes a practical, real-world approach to dealing with toxins that is informative, accessible, and actionable. She’s taught thousands of allied health practitioners like health coaches, nutritionists, acupuncturists, chiropractors, and women’s health experts, as well as health enthusiasts like you in her online courses. Our CHTV audience can go to homedetoxcourse.com to take Lara’s Tools for Teaching Toxicity course which is great for those of you that want to take your health to the next level by systematically reducing exposure to toxins in your environment. Again, that link is homedetoxcourse.com.

Practitioners, Dr. Pompa’s seminar is coming up. Please join us in Las Vegas on November 2nd to the 4th for our Live It to Lead It event. It’s not too late to register. Please go to hcfevents.com and use promo code CHTV to take $200 off the ticket price. Alright, let’s get into this episode. It’s not one to be missed. Let’s welcome Dr. Pompa and Lara Adler to the show. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
Lara, thank you for being here on Cell TV; welcome.

Lara Adler:
You are so welcome. I’m thrilled to be here and to talk with you and maybe nerd out with your audience a little.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, absolutely. On this subject, it’s a good one to nerd out because it’s a nerdy subject. It’s one that I’ve been talking about for years. I’ve said this on every platform that I’ve spoken from that the big reason why people can’t lose weight today is toxicity.

Lara Adler:
A hundred percent, 100%.

Dr. Pompa:
Obesogens, as we were laughing before the show, I’m like are they still called that? We used to call them obesogens, meaning chemicals that actually cause weight gain or at least interfere with weight loss even. I have to ask this because like I said, this has been a message of mine for so long. How did you get into this? Who’s into these specific chemicals and how to get them out of your life, we’re going to talk about all of that on the show. How did you get into this?

Lara Adler:
In a round-about way with a little bit of an asterisk in that story. I have this funny thing that happened last year that adds a little bit of an interesting twist. As I jokingly say, no one grows up as a little girl being like, oh, one day I want to talk about toxins as my dream job. That’s not real, but I was always interested in health and nutrition from my early teen days because I became interested in being a vegetarian, and then vegan, which I’m neither at this point in my life. At the time, I was really fascinated by the health aspects of that way of eating. I dove into all of the books that were around in early ‘90s around that topic. It was just what I nerded out on privately in my life, but I didn’t really think about it professionally in any way. I had a whole other career; I spent nine years in the stock photography industry completely unrelated. I still always had this burning nerdy passion about health and wellness and nutrition.

I had a couple of people talk to me about holistic health coaching. They said, well, you could do that. I said, “Okay, let me check that opportunity out as maybe it’s a way that I can flex this muscle professionally.” I found it fascinating. I said, “This is it.” I went back to school; got certified as a health coach; started seeing clients. Like a lot of beginner health coaches, my clients were coming to me for weight loss. Some of my clients, they did all of the things that I recommended. They cut out all of the bad foods: the glutens, and the sugars, and the dairy. They exercised. They slept well. They lost weight and they kept it off. It was this great success.

Then I had this handful of other clients where they did all of those things and nothing happened for them; nothing happened. They were frustrated. I was frustrated. I said, “Let me see what I’m missing.” because I just finished school. They taught us x, y, and z, but I’m guessing that I’m missing something. It was through that investigative process that I landed into this world of chemicals that can trigger weight gain and other metabolic issues. I was like, wow, holy crap; I’ve been reading and researching and immersing myself in this world for 15 years now at the time, and this was the first I’d heard about it. It really struck me as being not okay; not okay that these chemicals that were being manufactured and used in consumer products were there in the first place. Then not okay that people didn’t know about it and not okay that practitioners weren’t talking about it. It was outrage, to be honest, that fueled me into this space.

What was interesting, and this is the little twist, is in 2017, last year I went to where I grew up for my father’s 80th birthday. Went back to my old house, was poking around my old bedroom from high school. I found a box of index cards from a report that I was writing in 1993—I think it was ‘93—on being vegan. The first index card that I pulled up said—was a quote from some book saying that people were moving to a more plant-based diet because of all the toxic chemicals in the environment. I was like, wow, that was 25, now 26 years ago. In a way, I guess I was at least a little bit aware of this stuff for a lot longer than I’ve been in this space professionally.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I find that most doctors still aren’t talking about it; definitely, don’t understand it. That’s why on this cellular detox, it’s like, look, this is what saved my life. I never thought I would be in the weight loss arena. How did I end up there? It’s because of what you said. People were coming to me with unexplainable illnesses. One of the things that I realized is they can’t lose weight either, or they suddenly gain weight, or they lose muscle and gain fat. They become skinny fat which happened to me. It was all toxin driven. Then when you look at, which I know you talk about thyroid conditions, most of its toxin driven.

Lara Adler:
Yes, any autoimmune condition.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, diabetes. I read a study once. It was like 35% of diabetes is toxin related. I think it’s 80% because when you add in the autoimmune component, this is a global happenstance.

Lara Adler:
It’s a global issue. What I think is mind boggling, especially considering how few medical professionals are actively engaging with their patients around this, is that environmental chemicals have their fingers in every single chronic health issue. Every autoimmune issue; every neurodegenerative issues, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s; we’ve got low IQ, behavior problems; autism; ADHD; you’ve got even gut issues; skin issues; fatigue, any kind of energy issues; any kind of chronic disease, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer, testicular cancer; all of these things; PCOS, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, all of these have an environmental chemical component. It totally boggles my mind that this is still considered this fringe topic, this fringe concept, and it’s not. GQ Magazine actually just published an article called, “Sperm Count Zero” which is talking about the meta-analysis that was just done looking at the levels of sperm is dropped by 50 to 60% over the last 30 or 40 years. It’s a problem. They’re pointing the finger at these synthetic chemicals that we’re being exposed to that mess with our hormones and mess with testosterone. Again, it boggles my mind that not everyone’s talking about this.

Dr. Pompa:
That research is, like with all these conditions, is that toxins are the cause, right?

Lara Adler:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
Yet, practitioners, doctors, they’re not even talking about it or addressing it even in functional medicine. Let’s face it; they’re running more genetic tests. They’re doing all these great things, supplements, but really, very few are going upstream to the cause. Look, I became an expert in cellular detoxification because people are doing it wrong. You’re an expert in how people—and I love this about you because how people can actually avoid these things. You can do all the detox you want; if you don’t get rid of the things in your life, forget it. Matter of fact, it’s my R number one of my cellular detox.

Lara Adler:
Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
Remove the source.

Lara Adler:
You have to. The analogy that I use to explain this to people is this. Pretend that you’re on a rowboat. You’re just rowing along and enjoying the scene. All of a sudden, there’s a little hole in the bottom of your boat and it starts filling with water. Now, a little bit of water is okay because our body can handle that. Every boat comes with a little bucket that you can empty out any of that water. To quote industry, “a little water never hurt anyone,” right? At a certain point and time, that boat starts filling up and you start dealing with symptoms. Boat starts filling up. You start panicking. You start chucking bucket fulls of water over the side of the boat.

At a certain point and time, you are going to get fatigued. Your arms are going to get tired and you are going to give up. Then what happens? Your boat fills with water; it sinks; you drown. That means you get an autoimmune condition. You get diabetes. You get cancer. You have some kind of health crisis. In that situation in real life, instead of spending our effort and energy bailing out that boat, which is important, the first thing that we do is plug the damn hole. That’s what you would do in that situation. That’s really what I’m striving to teach people to do. Let’s plug the hole first so that every bucket full that we do throw over actually has an impact.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s plug the holes because I think there inlays part of the problem though because when we look at people’s lives, these things are hidden. They don’t realize. They’re saying, okay, yeah, it makes sense. Let’s talk about how to plug the hole. Let’s talk about where these hidden obesogens are.

Lara Adler:
Yeah, I’m sure that you’ve talked about obesogens to your audience in other topics.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but this is a new show, so let’s talk about it. There are specific chemicals that cause weight gain and weight loss resistance more than others.

Lara Adler:
Yes, and they can do that in a couple of different ways. One of the ways is just through endocrine disruption. If chemicals interfere with our hormone system—our hormone system is what regulates our metabolism, our energy, our hunger, and satiety. That’s the major thermostat that regulates everything in the body. A lot of the chemicals that we’re exposed to can actually lead to metabolic distress through this process of endocrine disruption. They can mess with our signals of when we’re hungry and when we’re full. They can mess with the hormones leptin and ghrelin that really screws with our signaling of should I stop eating or not. On that pathway, it’s an indirect pathway. It’s causing x to happen. When x happens, we consume more calories or we do some other process. Our metabolism slows down.

One of the other ways which I think is really powerful to understand is through the activation of something called the PPAR gamma receptor. This receptor is our master regulator of fat cell development. When it gets activated, it causes one or two things to happen. If this PPAR gamma is activated and a cell is in predevelopment, it’s a stem cell, that cell will now become a fat cell as opposed to something else.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, it turns our stem cells into fat cells.

Lara Adler:
It’s turning stem cells into fat cells.

Dr. Pompa:
The repair of your knee joint, or your -inaudible-, or whatever.

Lara Adler:
What’s interesting is the research seems to indicate that it’s doing it at the expense of bone—what cells that would have become bone cells. I’m not really sure how that factors into things like osteoporosis or something with issues with bone density or not, but that seems to be what the literature is suggesting that it’s doing it at the expense of bone cells. We have this increase in the number of actual fat cells in the body. PPAR gamma activation to a stem cell means more fat cells. For cells that are already our cells, our fat cells, when PPAR gamma is activated, it actually starts increasing the size and capacity to hold fat in that cell.

Now, we’ve got this double whammy. We’ve got more fat cells and the fat cells that we have are larger. Those larger fat cells are just receptacles for lipophilic toxins. They’re just containers for more toxins. The body has this defense mechanism that says, hey, if there’s not—we’re going to store all those toxins in our fat because then it saves it from circulating around into our other vulnerable tissues, our other organs circulating through the body. If you don’t have enough body fat to store those circulating toxins, the body’s going to go, hey, let’s kick it up here. We need to start packing on some fat, some adipose tissue so that we can expand our storage capacity for these toxins. That’s really what we’re looking at here.

The example that I like to give that we all know about are the people that go on some kind of anti-depressant and they have side effect of weight gain. They start putting on 10, 20, 30 pounds. That’s because those pharmaceuticals activate PPAR gamma. They’re doing the same thing that we now know that a lot of these chemicals in our environment are able to do. Unfortunately, we’re exposed to not just one or two of these obesogenic chemicals but dozens and dozens of them probably in a single day, every day. I think right now there’s about 50 chemicals or compounds that have been identified as obesogens. My hunch is that as the research continues in this space, that number’s going to get way bigger.

Dr. Pompa:
Think about it this way, too. If I could add even to some other ways these come in. They go to the cell membrane because it’s fatty. They blunt hormone receptors. That’s one of the links to diabetes which is obviously going to increase insulin which is a fat storing hormone; again, indirect. Obviously, can block thyroid receptors. Now, you can’t get your T3. Then, of course, that’s going to lead to weight gain. Then another way is that it gets—mercury is an example. It gets in the pituitary, hypothalamus. That controls your whole hormone system. In me—

Lara Adler:
A whole cascade of health effects.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I got skinny fat. I was catabolic in my muscle in that I was getting fat around the waist. Skinny fat is not attractive, but yet, a big sign of neurotoxicity. Then lastly, certain chemicals turn on genes of obesity, epigenetics. My gosh, we just went through five ways, maybe six, seven. I don’t know.

Lara Adler:
A lot of ways.

Dr. Pompa:
Talk about, okay—

Lara Adler:
I think what’s scary, to be honest, is the epigenetic factor that you just mentioned because that’s predisposing future generations to have a harder time. They’re going have predisposed to weight gain and they’re going to have a harder time losing it.

Dr. Pompa:
I talk about the Duke study. They gave two different identical twin mice a toxin, same toxin. They had the exact same food, exact same exercise.

Lara Adler:
Everything.

Dr. Pompa:
Identical twins. The one exposed to the toxin got obese.

Lara Adler:
Yep, and it changed his fur color.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly; then the problem was the next generation of mice. They became obese despite their diet and how much exercise. Sound familiar, folks? This is what we’re talking about. This is what epidemic toxins are creating. Okay, let’s talk about some of the hidden ones because people are home going right now, oh my God, I want to avoid these things the best way that I can. Where are the hidden stuff?

Lara Adler:
People always ask me like, what are the most important ones to address? Where do we address? I always say we address the ones that are easiest to change first because otherwise, we start swimming around in this panic that is anxiety producing. We all know that stress is also toxic on the body. It’s a different type of toxin, but it’s real. I like to start with the things that are easiest to change. The very first thing that I recommend people do is to really emphasize the consumption of organic produce in our fruits and vegetables, period, across the board, as much as is feasibly possible within budget.

The reason for this is the pesticide residues that are on conventional fruits and vegetables are obesogens. They’re also cancer causing. They’re also hormonal disrupting. They’re also reproductive toxins. Let’s knock a few of these exposures out of the park at once and look towards consuming organic foods. Now, there’s been a couple of studies that are super interesting that have looked at both adults and children to see what happens to their circulating pesticide levels in the body when people stop eating conventional and eat a mostly organic diet; not even 100% because it’s really hard to do that. What both of these studies found, one was in adults, one was in children, was that switching from conventional to mostly organic led to an 80 to 90% drop in circulating pesticide levels in three to five days.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow.

Lara Adler:
It’s super-fast.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s incredible.

Lara Adler:
Super-fast; and what that tells us is that our body is wicked smart; not for every chemical, not for every toxin, but—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, heavy metals and things, they burrow in deep.

Lara Adler:
Yeah, they burrow in. It doesn’t apply to all chemicals, but for certain chemicals like the organophosphate pesticides, if we plug the hole, the boat will not sink. The bucket will not overflow. We can really have a dramatic impact on our circulating pesticide levels immediately, less than a week. I tell that to people, especially to parents who are like, raising kids, it’s hard to spend the money on organic, as much as you can prioritize, go to the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen, Clean Fifteen list to help with budgeting if you have to do that. For me, it’s a non-negotiable. It’s just what we do as much as possible.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and by the way, just to expand what you said there. The Dirty Dozen, folks, is basically these are the 12 things that you must always buy organic. They’re loaded. Typically, it’s more porous things like strawberries are always on it.

Lara Adler:
Yep, spinach

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, spinach is loaded.

Lara Adler:
Spinach is always on there. What’s interesting is that the Environmental Working Group is pulling those numbers—because they do this every year. They’re pulling it from USDA data. What’s even more interesting is when—the methodology that the USDA is using to test for these residues is trying to mimic consumer behavior. They actually are washing produce with water before they do the test. People are like, oh, I’ll just wash it, and I’ll wash the pesticide off. It doesn’t work. A lot of times, the pesticides are systemic which means that they’re not on the food; they’re inside the tissues of the food.

Dr. Pompa:
I remember years ago, it was a Penn State University study where they were spraying the corn, but the problem was the glyphosate and the chemicals were going up right into the plant. That’s what you mean by systemic. Then there’s the Clean Fifteen, which means that these are—typically, they don’t spray a lot on these things. Avocadoes is one of them that you really don’t have to buy an avocado organic. They don’t use a lot of spray on that. I don’t know. There’s some other ones on there.

Lara Adler:
Yeah, I think it’s a great way to budget. To me, like I said, food is my number one expense because it should be.

Dr. Pompa:
You have no idea what my food budget is. Put it this way. Amazon owns Whole Foods now. When I walk in there, they should be serving me champagne, okay. You have no idea.

Lara Adler:
Yeah, no kidding.

Dr. Pompa:
You have no idea what I spent there last year. I’m not even going to tell you.

Lara Adler:
No, trust me. I live across the street from a health food store. I’m there at least once a day, so I know.

Dr. Pompa:
You know what it is though? By the way, when I didn’t have money, my food bill was still the most expensive because it’s of value. Always, no matter where it was, my food has always been my greater expense because that was my value. Whether I was on college income or now, it’s still the same.

Lara Adler:
That’s the way it is around the rest of the world. People’s food expenditure in countries around the world is higher than it is in the United States because we artificially suppress our food costs through government spending in that area. It’s an artificially low number here in the United States. Anyway, that’s the number one thing I tell people to do is push organic as much as possible. The number two thing is—and there’s two parts to this. The first, this has to do with home fragrances, so fragrances in your home. The first part is if you have scented candles, air fresheners, plugins, any kind of Febreze, any of those type of home fragrance products, just throw them out.

Dr. Pompa:
Gone.

Lara Adler:
Don’t buy them again. That’s a free tip.

Dr. Pompa:
When I walk into a house with those things, in an hour, I’m brain fogged. They’re living their lives this way. Those air fresheners are some of the most toxic things on the planet. I think we looked at one, we were counting neurotoxins in them.

Lara Adler:
They’re terrible.

Dr. Pompa:
Every one of them had at least three neurotoxins in them.

Lara Adler:
Yeah, and they contribute to our indoor air pollution. We don’t think of our homes as being polluted in the inside. EPA has found that the air quality inside our homes can be 5 to 100 times worse than what’s outside. It’s partly because of all of these synthetic fragrances. I think of it as a nasal detox. When we eat junky food, and Roy Rogers, and Fritos, and soda, and all that stuff, our palette is completely inundated with these hyperpalatable flavors: salt, fat, sugar. Healthy food tastes bland until we start eating that way and then our palate shifts. Those foods that we used to find delicious are now so hyper-sweet or so hyper-salty. The same thing is true when we ditch the fragrances. We swim in it, so we don’t realize how bad they are until we take a break from it and then re-expose somebody to those fragrances. They’re going to go, oh my God. How did I ever live like this? Our nasal palette will adjust.

Dr. Pompa:
I don’t know where this fits in. So far, I’m right on top. Those are the biggies. Here’s my third most irritating. This might be your two for six. Fabric softener.

Lara Adler:
Oh yeah, they’re bad.

Dr. Pompa:
I go drive by people’s homes and I get sick. I smell people coming. Again, six neurotoxins on average in fabric softeners. Oh, not only are you breathing it, but you’re absorbing it transdermally into your skin.

Lara Adler:
Through your skin, absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
A hormone, if you give someone a hormone, you put it on their skin, you’re giving them these obesogens right into their skin.

Lara Adler:
I think a lot of people sometimes are resistant to start making changes because they think it’s going to cost them a lot of money. This is one that’s free and it saves you money. Don’t buy them; just don’t buy them. Do an indoor air detox. Open all your windows, take this garbage out. Then just don’t buy them again. For people that really do like having fragrance in their house, they can use essential oil diffusers. They can bring in flowers. They can do it simply.

Dr. Pompa:
Healthy, yeah.

Lara Adler:
They can do that. That’s part one of that. I’m going to circle back around to part two of that fragrance section. Step number three is to move into the kitchen and to really start looking at the plastics that you have in your kitchen where they come in contact with food. Now, I’m not a Luddite. I don’t want people to think that they have to go back to using wood everything to give their—

Dr. Pompa:
Did you say a Luddite?

Lara Adler:
A Luddite like they’re—

Dr. Pompa:
What are those people called?

Lara Adler:
The Luddite is just somebody who doesn’t want to be around any advancement in technologies.

Dr. Pompa:
Mennonite, that’s what -inaudible-.

Lara Adler:
Oh yes, well, speaking of Mennonites, that’s great that you brought that up. There was an article in a magazine about five or six years ago titled, “Want to Avoid Toxic Chemicals? Drop Out of Modern Society.” The article was about this one population in the United States that had really low levels of BPA and phthalates in their blood; both endocrine disruptors, both obesogens. It was in Old Order Mennonites sect that they studied. No, not a Mennonite; a Luddite.

I say that because I don’t want people to be plastic phobic. There are plenty of things in our lives that are plastic. I’m sure part of the chair that you’re sitting on is plastic. My computer is plastic. There’s plastic that are great, that make our lives better, easier, safer, faster, etc. The plastics where they come in contact with food are a problem because they leach these obesogenic compounds. They do it 24/7 whether or not—yes, it’s worse if you put them in the microwave, but they do it regardless. There was a couple of studies, one primary study in 2012 that looked at all of—2011 that looked at all of the different types of plastics. All types of plastics even the bioplastics and corn plastics leached some kind of estrogenic compounds. That’s a synthetic estrogen. Those estrogens are part of what contribute to that hormonal disruption that can lead to some of these weight problems, really any other estrogen problem.

Dr. Pompa:
BPA free now has become like the new fat-free or the non-GMO. These are great marketing tools, but I’m like, okay, BPA is just one of the chemicals. It’s about popularity. They act like that’s the only chemical. There’s five hundred.

Lara Adler:
It’s marketing. It was moms actually in the ‘90s that got really—or early 2000s that got really upset when they found out that BPA was in plastic baby bottles. They put up a stink. That started this BPA bad boy storyline that we have which is true; it’s a bad boy. Companies started taking it out and they just swapped it with sister—

Dr. Pompa:
Maybe even a worse one

Lara Adler:
—chemicals in the same family. They’re worse. It’s a switcheroo. What that tells us is that the chemical industry and these manufacturers are just banking on consumer ignorance. They’re banking on the fact that we don’t really know that stuff means anyway. Now, we see BPA free labels—I see it on plastics that never once contained BPA in the first place. Ziploc bags, they never had BPA because BPA is a type of compound that’s used to make plastics rigid and hard. It was never in Ziploc bags, but every Ziploc bag now says BPA free.

Dr. Pompa:
They’re going to sell more bags if they—

Lara Adler:
It was about 15 years ago, Tropicana came out with an orange juice that was “cholesterol free.” I should hope that there’s no cholesterol in my orange juice.

Dr. Pompa:
They had fat-free on orange juice, too. I didn’t know oranges had fat. It never did.

Lara Adler:
It never did, but for the person who’s like, I don’t know. My cardiologist said I’m supposed to be watching my cholesterol. They’re going to buy that orange juice over any other orange juice. It’s just marketing.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it works.

Lara Adler:
It works. I think what people need to recognize is BPA is the poster boy, but it’s not the only compound that’s in plastics. Phthalates are in plastics. Phthalates are in plastics that are soft and flexible, so our drinking water bottles can leach compounds that mimic estrogen that are in the phthalate family. PET plastic, which is what are pull and spring bottles are made of, is Polyethylene Terephthalate. That’s what PET stands for. There’s been research that indicates these plastics all leach compounds.

There’s four things that increase the rate at which these things leach. This is why people say don’t put plastics in the microwave: heat, oil, acidity, and abrasion. I’ll add a fifth one which is time. If we’re putting our hot, oily, acidic tomato sauce or tomato soup in a plastic Tupperware container and then afterward the container’s forever stained orange, it’s because the physical barrier between where the plastic stops and the sauce starts gets blurred. You actually have molecules of your sauce physically embedded into the plastic matrix of the container. The inverse is we now have plastic molecules in our sauce.

Dr. Pompa:
I always say that tomato sauce might be the worst offender. It’s acid.

Lara Adler:
Yes, it’s acid, yep, and it’s oily. It’s the one, two, three punch.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s oily. It’s full of it, yeah.

Lara Adler:
That’s just an example of where we start. Start with the plastic food storage containers. Go for glass instead. It’s super inexpensive. I use mason jars for everything; not just for drinking, but for storage. They’re inexpensive. They’re hard to break.

Dr. Pompa:
Folks, if you have a bowl, a glass bowl, you can put your sauce or whatever in that. If you put plastic wrap on top of it and it never touches the food, could the vapor hit it and drop down? Yes.

Lara Adler:
Yes, but it’s still way less.

Dr. Pompa:
Minimal; yeah, exactly.

Lara Adler:
Yeah, totally minimal. Now, actually, they have these really great silicone bowl lids that are essentially, they serve as a replacement for things like Saran Wrap on top of bowls. It creates a perfect airtight seal. Those are great and fairly inexpensive. People don’t have to break the bank to start making changes. I think we have to prioritize our health and that’s what this is. Some investment I think is required, but you can do it over time. When I first started, I would just take the pickle jars, or the sauerkraut jars, or the nut butter jars. I would run them through the dishwasher and reuse them. If they’re glass jars, they’re okay to do that.

Dr. Pompa:
With your Tupperware, folks, you can put things like pretzels in them. It’s not going to go into the pretzel. Use it for other things like that.

Lara Adler:
Yeah, or use it for crayons, or use it in the garage for nuts and bolts. You can start phasing. You don’t have to throw all this stuff out; you can repurpose it. Start with the storage containers. Here’s the challenge that I give people is to open up their cabinets and just look. Don’t do anything, but just take a look at all the plastic. Little kids with all their plastic drinking cups, and plastic plates, and plastic utensils, the plastic pasta strainer, the plastic mixing spoons, mixing bowls, those black plastic spatulas that everyone has.

Dr. Pompa:
There is common spatulas that are better.

Lara Adler:
Yeah, there’s so many things that are better to use than plastic. I tell people it’s a systematic phase-out. Don’t feel like they have to do it overnight or in a weekend. If it takes six months to start to do that, great; that’s still amazing progress. Don’t let the time be a discouraging factor for people that don’t want to dump everything out and rebuild their kitchen from the ground up. Those are the first three.

From there, I would really encourage people—at this point, it forks. There’s the next couple are all equivalent in importance: cleaning up household cleaners, cleaning up personal care products, and filtering your drinking water. People don’t recognize. They don’t realize how many toxins you’re being exposed to through their drinking water. The Environmental Protection Agency through the Safe Water Drinking Act only regulates 91 contaminates and regulates them poorly. There’s hundreds of chemicals in our drinking water that are unregulated.

Dr. Pompa:
Even hormones now.

Lara Adler:
Even hormones, or pharmaceuticals, or medications. We have narcotics. In fact, cities will use the amount of narcotics in the wastewater to extrapolate out how many drug users are there in the community.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s scary.

Lara Adler:
It’s pretty scary. Then we have industrial chemicals that a lot of the chemicals that are in our drinking water. Atrazine is the largest, most widely used herbicide. It’s in 94% of drinking water tested by the USDA. It’s an obesogen. We’ve got perfluorinated compounds, PFCs compounds, which are found in non-stick cookware. They’re found in firefighting foam. If you live anywhere near a military base, they use these foams. It gets into the groundwater. It doesn’t get filtered out by your city water.

These directly attack the thyroid. They are obesogens. We’re not being exposed to giant quantities of these compounds at any given point, but guess what? If they’re hormonally active, if they’re capable of being bioactive at low levels, our bodies are designed to respond to these parts per billion, parts per trillion levels of natural hormone antibody. It makes perfect sense that these parts per million, parts per billion, parts per trillion that we’re getting in our drinking water could also have an effect. It’s the frequency language that our body already operates on.

Unfortunately, toxicology as a field of science really operates under this outdated concept that the dose makes the poison. That in order for a chemical to have a negative effect, you have to be exposed to a high dose. If you’re exposed to a small dose, then the effect is going to be smaller. While that’s true for some things like radiation, it’s not true for these hormonally activate compounds. In fact, the opposite is true with that these very small levels can actually be more impactful than a high dose exposure. It is important. I think water filtration is super important to address for people. It’s a little bit lower down on the list only because the investment is usually higher, so people sometimes feel a little resistance. What I really want is people to start taking action right away on the simple things that they can do today, this weekend, this week. Once they have that under their belt and they feel good, then let’s tackle some of these bigger issues.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely; you mentioned it. Ladies, I hate to bring it up, but she did mention your personal care products. On average, 518 chemicals you use every day; 200 and some of those are known cancer causers or obesogens. Okay, now we’ve hit the sore spot. It’s like, yeah, because I’m not giving up my eyeliner. This is the one that hurts.

Lara Adler:
You don’t have to. If we were having this conversation 10 years ago, I would be like, it’s pretty hard to find good stuff. The landscape around personal care products has changed dramatically in the last few years. In fact, the natural and organic sector of the personal care product industry is the fastest growing in the industry period. In a sector that has pretty static growth year over year, the natural and organic is one of the fastest growing.

It’s because people really are starting to—a, it’s because people are sicker than ever. They’re going, what is going on here. They’re starting to look around at their environment. They started and are continuing to demand safer products. You’ve got all of these small independent companies that have just sprung up from nowhere that are serving to fill this gap in the marketplace. Even maybe seven or eight years ago, there was only a handful of companies that I could find. They were really expensive. I had to order them online. They weren’t in stores. Now, there’s so many companies out there that are making safe, clean skincare, I can’t even keep up. People ask me all the time.

Dr. Pompa:
What are your favorite lines?

Lara Adler:
Let’s see, great question. Beautycounter is a really great line. Beautycounter is a direct sales company, but you can also just order directly from their website. They’re a very mission-driven, education-focused company that’s really seeking to overturn the current legislation that we have around chemicals in personal care products. The last time we had federal policy update in this area was 1938 was the last time personal care product legislation was updated.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s ridiculous.

Lara Adler:
It’s a real problem. Beautycounter’s a great line. Evan Healy is a great line. Juice Beauty is a great line. Vapour Beauty is a great line. I have a collection on my website at laraadler.com/beauty which is just some of the products that I use every day. There’s so many great products. People can go to places like The Detox Market which is a curated online collection. They have stores in LA. That’s a super well curated, clean products for makeup and skincare that’s excellent. There’s hundreds and hundreds of lines now that are available.

They don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Sometimes they’re just as affordable as what you’d see in the grocery store. What’s great is that Target sells some of these lines. Target sells a makeup by a company called W3LL PEOPLE. For people that are shopping at Target because it’s just what’s around, or it’s what they can afford, it’s amazing to have these low toxin, non-toxic skincare products that are just on the shelves with all the others. That people can buy it just because it’s there and have the benefit of not being exposed to chemicals through their personal care products. I think that’s a giant win for everyone.

Dr. Pompa:
Here’s a big one everyone can switch today is the darn deodorant you’re using.

Lara Adler:
Oh, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s going right into these pores absorbed. These things are so toxic.

Lara Adler:
Yeah, so toxic and what happens is—there’s a difference between the antiperspirant and the deodorant. People like the antiperspirant because it stops the little pit-sweaty stains. If you’re in a business meeting, whatever, and you don’t want to have that, fine, but the antiperspirants contain compounds that are intended to block the sweat glands. They create these little gel plugs that literally block your sweat glands.

Dr. Pompa:
Not good.

Lara Adler:
It’s not good. Sweating is one of our detox pathways.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a double whammy on you.

Lara Adler:
It’s a double whammy. These ingredients also have fragrances which means they have these synthetic chemicals like phthalates in them. They have parabens which is another one of these endocrine disruptors. They have aluminum-based compounds which are not—they’re neurotoxic. We don’t want to be exposing ourselves to aluminum. I think there’s this—we have to weigh vanity and health.

Dr. Pompa:
Always.

Lara Adler:
We just have to do that. For a long time, there was not a lot that we could choose from to make the decision easier. Now, there’s so many products that we can choose from. At the very list, switch from an antiperspirant to a deodorant. Then the next step is to move away from deodorant that have these synthetic compounds. There’s so many non-toxic deodorants on the market, Primal Pit Paste. My favorite is Pure Pits. I’ve been using that for eight or nine years and I love it. There’s dozens and dozens of options available for people.

Dr. Pompa:
Pure Pits, I’ve never heard of it.

Lara Adler:
Pure Pits is great.

Dr. Pompa:
Another one is again, I mentioned fabric softener, but what you’re washing your clothes in every day. Again, a pet peeve of mine because I know the amount of endocrine disruptors that are in there, neurotoxins. You’re absorbing it in your skin. It’s on you all day long. That’s the issue I have.

Lara Adler:
Yes, if we think about our bed sheets. Most of us sleep in some depending on the season.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you’re right; all day and night because your bed sheets. Seventh Generation, Meyer’s, you can go down. There’s so many now.

Lara Adler:
There’s so many that are better, absolutely 100%. There’s a great company called MyGreenFills that has some really great non-toxic laundry detergents. They send you refills every month in a little—

Dr. Pompa:
I know the owner of that company.

Lara Adler:
Yeah, Steven.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, Steven. I’m going to switch. I have it sitting in there right now.

Lara Adler:
Oh, good, awesome. This stuff is great. I think there’s so many options available for people. It’s so exciting to see the marketplace shift. What that tells me is that our consumers are fed up with being sick. They want cleaner, safer options. The marketplace is responding. You’ve got these big multinational companies that are really working hard to maintain their market share and to keep the consumer uneducated. They work really hard to do that. The chemical policy in the European Union is a lot stricter than it is here. We’ve got companies, multinational companies that have to reformulate the product for the European market, but they won’t reformulate them for the US market.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s sad.

Lara Adler:
I think this is where as consumers, we start demanding transparency and buying safer products. It’s already happening. It’s shifting the landscape. It’s why Target, and Costco, and Walmart, and CVS, and Walgreens all have written policies around, or plans, or programs to start phasing out some of these chemicals in their store brand products. That will ultimately shift the entire marketplace. We’re moving in the right direction; it’s just happening slowly.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s just irritating just because people are—they’re going for more and more medications.

Lara Adler:
Oh, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Nobody’s willing to step back and say, well, why are my hormones disrupted. Why is this going on? Why is my thyroid not working? This show, we discuss the causes, everything you’ve got there. Yet, I promise you, people just still can’t connect the dots in realizing it’s the accumulation, the effect over years is how you got there. Folks, your body has an ability to heal; remove the interference. That’s why this show’s important. Look, we didn’t have time to get to every one of them, but they can go to your website. You also have an online course that you take people through this: how it affects your life and home, getting rid of these things, the source. Tell them how to find that.

Lara Adler:
Yeah, I have actually a whole series of courses, some more advanced than others. They can just go to laraadler.com. It’s L-A-R-A-A-D-L-E-R.com and check those out. I have a whole master class on obesogens that really explores this topic further. I have a whole course on water filtration and how to find the right water filter for you because everyone’s water is different. People don’t recognize, and they think, oh, I have a Brita. A Brita is good enough. It’s not good enough. Yeah, people can just check me out there or I also share a ton of stuff on Instagram. You can find me @envirnomentaltoxinsnerd on Instagram. Yeah, it’s a big topic. As you can tell I hope, I love talking and teaching about this stuff.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re talking to the right audience here. We have a lot of practitioners, doctors who watch this show. I know your courses, you’ve helped a lot of those get this integrated into their practices.

Lara Adler:
It really is a two-fold thing. It’s learning about it for ourselves, so we can take care of our own homes, but then learning about it to the degree that we can feel comfortable talking to our clients and patients in a way that doesn’t overwhelm them, scare the crap out of them, but instead is really educating and empowering them to make better choices. I think that in this age, where not enough—just like we started by saying, not enough practitioners are talking about it. When practitioners do start talking about it, they’re starting to get an audience of people that are like, oh, please tell me more. I don’t know anything about this. It’s a great avenue for professionals to explore.

Dr. Pompa:
We need it because obviously one of my passions is educating professionals -inaudible- the proper detox. I would love to invite you to my next—not my next seminar because we’re filled, but the one in April. Ashley, my team member here, we’re going to get you there because the focus on that seminar in Spring is cancer.

Lara Adler:
I love it.

Dr. Pompa:
We really need to address these chemicals as well. We’re talking about obesogens here, but believe me, they lead to cancer as well; well hormones are cancerous.

Lara Adler:
They all play double duty. These obesogens are carcinogens; they’re neurotoxins. That’s the problem with these chemicals is it’s not just causing one thing to happen. It can cause a whole bunch of things to happen. How the disease manifests depends on the genetic weak link of the individual.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep, well, we’re going to get you to that seminar as a speaker.

Lara Adler:
Excellent.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so hopefully those dates work out. Ashley will get with you on that. Listen, Lara, thank you so much for being on the show.

Lara Adler:
You’re so welcome. This is so much fun, Dan.

Dr. Pompa:
This is my wheelhouse, my passion. I love this conversation. Gosh, share the show with your friends and family, folks, because this is the key here. You have to get upstream to the cause. Lara, you’re doing it better than anybody, so thank you.

Lara Adler:
Thank you.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Don’t forget to check out Lara’s toxicity tools course by going to homedetoxcourse.com. You can also check out her other amazing courses there as well. Practitioners, you are invited to join us at Dr. Pompa’s Live it to Lead It seminar in Las Vegas from November 2nd to the 4th. You can go to hcfevents.com for more information. You can use the promo code CHTV to take $200 off the ticket price. We’d love to see you there.

We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern. We are deeply grateful for your support. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.