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235: The Keto Lifestyle Coach

Transcript of Episode 235: The Keto Lifestyle Coach

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Kate Jaramillo, Keto Lifestyle Coach

Would You Like to Be a Keto Lifestyle Coach?
Visit GetKetoCertified.com to sign up for Kate's course…

Ashley:
Hello everyone, welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. You may have noticed the ketogenic lifestyle, or the keto diet, has been everywhere lately. In this episode, we’re going to discuss how to achieve a sustainable ketogenic lifestyle that actually gets results. We have keto lifestyle coach, Kate Jaramillo, on today. She goes into detail about focusing your diet around healthy fats. She and Dr. Pompa share their top ten keto-friendly foods, and they also discuss how working through toxicity is imperative to find success with keto, a topic we know all too well here on CHTV.

You’ll also hear about how there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to keto, and how to break through those stubborn weight loss plateaus, even when you’re doing everything right. But before we get started, let me tell you a little bit more about Kate. Kate Jaramillo is a ketogenic living expert, wellness mentor, and host of the Straight Up Wellness podcast. Kate is leading the way in the ketogenic community as the creator of the ketogenic living coach certification program.

Kate wholeheartedly believes in the power of a ketogenic lifestyle to burn fat, clear brain fog, conquer sugar addiction, and treat, prevent, and cure chronic and life-threatening disease. Her online programs and in-person trainings help make this lifestyle and business opportunity accessible to busy people like you. You’re going to love her as much as we do, I promise. Please check out our show notes for the link to her ketogenic lifestyle program that you, too, can take part in. This is a fun, informative episode, so let’s get started. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. This is going to be an exciting one that people have been waiting for because we get questions almost every day about ketosis. If you’re a ketogenic living certified coach, what the heck is that, and how did you get involved so deeply into ketosis, which you are?

Kate:
Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Pompa. I’m so excited to be here today. The ketogenic living certified coach means that I live a fat-fueled lifestyle and I help others do the same thing. I’ve been in fitness and nutrition for about a decade teaching group fitness classes. Everyone was always asking me, what do I do for nutrition? What should I eat before my workout? What should I eat for the rest of the day? At the time, I really subscribed to what most of us did—which was six small meals a day, low in fat, low in calorie—and never really getting cut, never feeling great energy throughout the day, suffering a few years later from mom brain from dealing with being a mom to my kids.

I wanted to go deeper. I knew I could feel better; I just didn’t know how. Then I studied under Dr. Josh Ox, who I know is—you brought him up, which is so exciting. I studied under him in the Institute of Nutritional Leadership, and he introduced me to the ketogenic way of eating. It sounded so crazy because it was the opposite of how I ever was taught or thought to eat and live, but I became obsessed with studying it. The more I researched and the more I read, I just realized that this makes sense. I understood that as babies, we’re born in a state of ketosis, and that we remain that way until we’re given formula or solid foods. Breast milk is made up almost entirely of fats, so what a natural way for us to eat and live.

What really caught my attention was that Dr. Ox mentioned that this is the protocol that he uses with clients who need to lose a significant amount of weight. At the time, I was coaching some clients who, no matter how far down they cut down their calories—that’s another topic. No matter how far they cut their calories or were working out, they could not lose any more weight. I just approached them and asked if they would be willing to join me on this journey, and what that could look like for them.

Nine women said yes, and about eight weeks later, the average amount of weight that these women lost was like 20 pounds. It was amazing. For me, it was never really about weight loss, between genetics and being active, I didn’t really struggle with weight, but I was struggling with energy, with mental clarity, and a with mean sugar addiction.

Dr. Pompa:
Ketosis is one of the first places I go with clients. Number one, fat and ketones burn much cleaner. It’s a way of down-regulating cellular inflammation very quickly. I purposefully move in and out of this state. The moment I move into ketosis, the first thing that I know when I’m in is my brain clarity. Literally, I can remember sentences on pages verbatim, which I can’t do when I’m not in ketosis. This is major brain turn on that people experience. I know on the show, I really want you to give people solid advice. As a keto coach, this is how you do it. I interviewed my daughter on my radio show this morning, Health Hunters Radio. She is in college, senior year.

She’s going to be 22 years old. She battles with people all the time because they just don’t get it. they watch the amount of fat she’s eating, and they cringe, and they think she’s going to get fat, and that’s going to make you fat, and that’s bad for you. You also mentioned the calorie thing. College kids today are still buying into low calorie and low fat. It’s amazing the science we’ve broken through. How do you battle that? Are you battling that with clients still? I can’t believe that this is still out there.

Kate:
Oh, every single day. Every single day. In fact, when I’m working with my clients—

Dr. Pompa:
Six meals a day. You brought that up, too. It really fits right now. Maybe we should touch on a little bit before we move on.

Kate:
Yeah, eating constantly—we were told a while ago that you need to constantly fuel your body, otherwise it’s cannibalizing itself; it’s just eating away all your energy. If you were eating all those carbs all the time, yeah, your body’s burning through them so fast because carbs burn so fast. Of course, you’re hungry. Of course, when you’re tired, your body’s asking for fuel. It’s like, okay, if you’re going to stay awake, then you’re going to have to feed me something. Then you want to eat, so it’s natural to eat those six small meals per day.

Then when you’re eating meals that are led with healthy fats, whole-food-based healthy fats, like avocados, everything coconut, high-quality fatty cuts of protein—when your meals are led with those types of food, you are hungry much less frequently because fat burns slowly. Your body is using that for fuel, so it’s going to naturally prolong your periods of eating, which then can lead us into intermittent fasting, which is another great tool to just live by.

Dr. Pompa:
Before you -inaudible- the thing because many people are going—I just heard this, literally, a client. I told her, for right now, no snacks because she was eating probably six, seven, eight times a day. She basically was like, I don’t know if I can do that. Many people watching this right now or listening to this would say the same thing. You start it on—number one, when you start increasing your fat, you’ll make it longer. Number two, there’s a major hormone shift that goes on. Your body starts burning its own fat, so when you’re not eating, it’s utilizing its own fat, and therefore, you’re not hungry all the time. Talk about that shift a little bit. Encourage people because there is a shift that goes -inaudible-.

Kate:
When it’s not in a -inaudible-. Carbohydrates. If that’s what your body is using for fuel, we just said glucose burns so fast. Any time you consume that amount of carbohydrate or something in that form—sugar, carbohydrates—what’s going to happen to your body is it’s going to produce some hormone insulin. It’s going to produce as much as it needs to in order to balance out your -inaudible-. Your blood sugar starts to go down and your energy starts to go down. Your body is tired, so it’s asking for more fuel. You get hungry and you have to snack again.

When you’re in a state of ketosis, this means that we have switched your primary fuel source from a glucose back to—remember, we’re born in a state of ketosis—back to fat. We are eating dietary fat and then our bodies, our liver is producing these little ketone bodies for energy. That’s where you feel this sustained energy, that mental clarity that you just talked about. It stays that way because fat is burning slowly and then the ketone bodies are giving us that extra energy. Sometimes, you end up skipping a meal and you’re like, wait, I guess I should eat now. You actually become more intuitive about your body. You’ve made this metabolic shift from being a sugar burner to a fat burner, and it’s truly amazing and more intuitive.

Dr. Pompa:
As a coach, how do you help them during that time? Let’s face it, it takes two to four weeks for people to become fat-adapted or ketone-adapted, as you just said. From sugar burner to fat burner, we call that fat adaption. People are going to struggle. What do you do as a coach to get them through that?

Kate:
The first thing that I have people do is literally eat real food. Eat real food. Instead of buying all these processed products that are now marketed to the low-carb community, it’s X amount of net carbs, but it’s mostly sugar alcohols and stuff. I really just help them start with eating real food. What do we want to eat here for breakfast? Are you hungry in the morning when you wake up? Okay, then let’s figure out something that we can have for breakfast that’s fast and easy for you. I love eggs; I love avocados. Those are two great sources of fat that are easy to use, easy to go on the run. They’re both low in carbohydrates and high in healthy fats. Then I’ll have them drinking a lot of water throughout the day because that’s something else that they need to learn.

Are they hungry or are they thirsty? They’re drinking water throughout the day. When they’re hungry again or looking at another meal that is led with healthy fats, my advice to clients is eating real foods and leading with healthy fats, preferably high-quality fatty animal protein. I feel like that is just a great source of fat for us, and it helps sustain our hunger longer. When I’m designing a meal for a client, I tell them that their plate should look like a nice serving, about three to four ounces, of healthy high-quality animal-based protein, a side of low-carb vegetables, cucumbers, celery, broccoli, cauliflower, something like that.

Those vegetables should have some healthy fat on top. Maybe it’s guacamole, maybe it is some avocado and MCT oil. Maybe it’s some grass-fed butter, ghee, or coconut oil. It’s a really easy way to just lead because on that plate then, we have your proteins. We have your carbohydrates in the form of vegetables that are high in fiber, so that’s also going to help with your blood sugar levels, and we have your healthy fats. Your healthy fats bind to the nutrients that are in your foods and help carry them through the rest of your body, so you’re full and you’re absorbing nutrients. It’s really simple.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I love that. You already got into it. Let’s talk—before we’re going to get in, we are going here. We’re going to talk about people who don’t get into ketosis very easy, and people who don’t lose weight in ketosis. We’re getting there, so hang on, folks. I want to keep it keto 101 because people need this. I’ve already heard you say a few of your favorites, and mine, keto foods. I get this question all the time, and it seems so basic to me, but it’s really not.

Okay, give me your favorite keto foods. I put you on the spot here, but let’s try to name ten of our favorite keto foods. I think we know the foods to stay away from, but maybe there’s some surprises there that you could mention. Let’s give the ten foods. I think you gave them an idea of what these meals look like. I think you just did a really good job with that, but let’s talk about the ten foods.

Kate:
Sure, so my favorites are—I love eggs. I love pastured, cage-free eggs. I love eggs. They’re so good. Avocado—just an avocado or avocado oil mayonnaise. You have to really watch, though to make sure it’s just avocado oil and not canola oil.

Dr. Pompa:
People are like, what the heck do you do with that avocado? Eggs, that’s self-explanatory. By the way, my daughter this morning said one of her favorite things is eggs. She puts avocado and hot sauce on her eggs.

Kate:
Love that, I love that.

Dr. Pompa:
She uses a real grass-fed cheese in her eggs. So fat, fat, and more fat, multiple different sources. We get the egg idea. Avocados—I love putting mustard in my avocado. I got that from my son.

Kate:
Wow, I’ve never tried that. That sounds amazing.

Dr. Pompa:
I like a little bit of hot sauce in there. Sometimes, to get another fat, I’ll take some olive oil in my avocado. Any avocado ideas for you? Of course, guacamole is another one.

Kate:
Yes, I’ll mash it up sometimes with a little bit of MCT oil, so that’s another great healthy fat.

Dr. Pompa:
You can do that one.

Kate:
Love, love, love that one. Sometimes I’ll also—if I want something a little bit crunchy, I’ll add some hemp hearts over top, which are great for fat and for protein. Love that.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve got to write this down. I’ve got to take notes now. Go ahead.

Kate:
Yeah, hemp seeds are one of my favorite things, hemp hearts. They’re great for protein, so if we have some vegetarian or vegan listeners out there that are interested in upping their healthy fats, that’s a really great source of fat and protein. I really like those. I love grass-fed beef. I actually buy mine at Costco, organic grass-fed beef. It’s amazing; we do so much with it. We’re making burgers or I’m making pasta with zoodles. My kids love that, too, so that’s really great for us. I love pork shoulder. That’s a great fatty cut of meat. It’s hard to find a really high-quality pork shoulder, so that’s the only thing that you got to look out for a little bit there.

Dr. Pompa:
Things can be raised dirty, but they’re doing such a different job today. We have some really good resources around here. If you get people that do grass-fed, typically will raise their pork very clean. Again, they don’t just eat everything. They raise clean.

Kate:
Pork shoulder, I feel like is delicious. We make it in a million different ways, carnitas, all kind of things. Of course, chicken thighs. I love, love, love getting the crispy skin on my chicken thighs. Oh my gosh, that’s one of my favorite things in the world. In fact, sometimes, we’ll pull the skin off of the thigh and then we’ll just fry it up lightly to get it really crispy, drain it on some paper towels.

Dr. Pompa:
What do you fry it in?

Kate:
On a pan; it’s amazing. Then we’ll dip it in that MCT guacamole maybe with some hot sauce. So good, so good.

Dr. Pompa:
We just threw MCT out there. I promise you people are like, what? What is that? tell them what MCT oil is because that helps you burn fat and helps you become a fat burner, so tell them what that is.

Kate:
MCT oil, medium chain triglycerides. It’s the fat that you find in coconut oil, but MCT oil has the -inaudible- acid drawn out, which makes it a little bit of a healthier fat. It easily crosses that blood-brain barrier. You had just mentioned helping us get into ketosis faster. This is one of those healthy fats that crosses that blood-brain barrier quickly, increases ketone production, and just gives us lots of energy. Generally, MCT oil is tasteless, and it doesn’t harden really, like coconut oil does. If you wanted to make a cold smoothie, that’s a great fat to add there.

Dr. Pompa:
Just in review, we have cage-free eggs, one of my favorites. Avocados—we gave you tips on even how to use them. Hemp hearts, which are great; I think hemp hearts are amazing, and you mentioned putting them on the avocados, which I thought was brilliant. Grass-fed beef—I love that. lamb is one of my favorites for me. Pork shoulder, chicken thighs—okay, that’s six. You have four more.

Kate:
Okay, Coconut cream, my favorite. You can make your own coconut cream if you get a can full of full-fat coconut milk and just put it in the refrigerator overnight because the water and the cream with separate. It’s like a smooth, creamy treat. I’m dairy free; I can’t tolerate it, except for grass-fed butter, which is another one. I can’t really tolerate dairy, so if a recipe is calling for sour cream, what I’ll do is I use that coconut cream and I mix in a little bit of lemon juice. I get that little bit of a sour taste, and then I use that as my substitute in recipes that are calling for sour cream.

Dr. Pompa:
Wait, coconut cream. Can you buy coconut cream in the store?

Kate:
You can. Mm-hmm, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Lemon juice, and what else did you say? I was taking notes.

Kate:
Oh, I use that as a replacement for sour cream.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay. Oh, wow. That’s awesome. You’re right. People that have dairy allergies do not butter, and grass-fed butter, one of your favorite things, I added it to the list, so we’re almost there. Ghee is one of mine, actually.

Kate:
Yes, I was going to say that.

Dr. Pompa:
Again, they don’t have the proteins that dairy has that some people respond to, and there’s no lactose, either, if you respond to that. Okay, six, seven, eight—two more. Butter was one. I added butter.

Kate:
Yes, and Ghee is actually one of mine as well. I love the rich flavor. That is truly one of the most umptuous fats. I love frying an egg in ghee. Oh my goodness. It’s really good ground, by the way.

Dr. Pompa:
I like the grass-fed ghee. They sell them at health food stores. It has the sea salt in it. I eat it off the spoon. I do. I eat it off the spoon.

Kate:
Oh, me too.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s for big fat eaters like me. All right, nine, one more.

Kate:
Macadamia nuts—roasted, salted macadamia nuts. They are such a good food or snack for me. Luckily, my kids are not in a nuts-free school. When I’m packing their school lunches, that’s always something that I include in their lunches. They love it, and I love being able to pack that for them.

Dr. Pompa:
One of my favorite nuts. We speak of these ketones things. The -inaudible- nuts. They are the fattiest nut out there and they taste like butter.

Kate:
Butter, mm-hmm.

Dr. Pompa:
Gosh, they’re not cheap, but I’ll tell you, if you want to treat yourself. I think they carry them on -inaudible- health. I don’t know if we do anymore or not because I don’t know if people are buying them. They didn’t know how much of a fatty treat these things were, and they’re super loaded with nutrients. I like walnuts, too. I like walnuts. Pecans is another really high-fat, good nut. I’ll say the nut butters. I’m going to go down to treats now. I want you to give them the treats. I’m going to throw a few of mine in. I love nut butters.

Kate:
Me too.

Dr. Pompa:
I love walnut butter. That’s a treat for me. Almond butter, I think most people like. I go raw on those things.

Kate:
Me too. Same here, yep. Nut butters are some of my favorites. Coconut butter, which is also sold as coconut manna—that is one of my favorites, just a scoop of that. Oh my goodness. It’s so good. That’s definitely a treat for me.

Dr. Pompa:
Here’s one of mine, my treat. This is simple. I can eat dairy. I take really raw cream. You can even get the non-raw, but it’s still 100 percent grass-fed at Whole Foods and most health food stores. You whip it up, and it’s zero carbohydrates. It’s all fat. I add a little stevia and some blueberries. You can put it on anything, but I eat it off the spoon. I love that. There’s one of my favorite treats. Go ahead. Keep treating them.

Kate:
I actually really like just a square of dark chocolate. Again, I’m from Hershey, Pennsylvania. It’s kind of in my blood. I just love a square of dark chocolate, and to spread a little bit of ghee on top of that dark chocolate. I’m not sure what the company name is, but they make a vanilla-bean ghee. Oh my gosh. A little bit of that—

Dr. Pompa:
This company that makes the sea salt. They make the vanilla bean. It’s really good, yeah. I love that idea. If you took my thing, with the whipped-up fat with the stevia, you added the chocolate chunks to that, forget about it. By the way folks, these are not treats that you broke your diet. These actually are helping you. Do you understand? These are the fats that we’re talking about. They all have quality fats. These are treats that actually are good for you. The fat bombs that people make. We have recipes on our website. As a matter of fact, do you have resources that people can pick up some of these things?

Kate:
I sure do. Yes, on my website, which is ketogenicliving101.com, there are several guides there that you can download that have menus, meal plans, and recipes in there.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, cool.

Kate:
Yeah, and there’s some fat bombs in there.

Dr. Pompa:
Fat bomb—I love them. I just had them made for me. This gal who cooks—she cooked for our party. She put almond butter and peanut butter with the chocolate over them. Oh my gosh. People couldn’t believe that these were healthy, and of course, they went back. Let’s talk oils because we’ve talked a little bit about ghee, nuts. We both would use ghee to fry things in, eat off the spoon. A lot of people make good fats bad because certain fats aren’t good for heating. You talked a little bit about frying something. I personally love almond oil. Avocado oil’s another one, but almond oil’s cheaper. These fats take heat. Are there some ones that you love?

Kate:
I use macadamia nut oil when I’m roasting radishes. It’s amazing. It gets that buttery quality. I do use avocado oil over a little bit of a lower heat.
Unfortunately, I see a lot of people roasting things with olive oil. That’s a great fat that we’re making bad. It’s got a lower smoke point, and they’re roasting them at like 400 or something like that. It’s just all taking off. Tallow is actually a really good fat to cook with. A duck fat, that’s got a really high smoke point as well. Those are really great to stovetop cook with and fry in.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, almond oil takes it. It’s inexpensive. Avocado oil can take heat, a little more experience. Grapeseed oil can take some heat. As you mentioned, the tallow is great. Coconut oil, it depends on the coconut oil. I wouldn’t fry in it. Here’s a misnomer; the refined oils actually take heat better than the better oil because when they refine it, they actually filter out a lot of the things that are actually really healthy. At least you don’t make a good fat bad. When you’re in your store, if you see refined grapeseed oil, it will actually take heat better. Refined coconut oil will actually take heat better—not necessarily as good for you, but it’ll take the heat. There’s just a little tip for us.

Kate:
Yeah, and it doesn’t have as much of a coconut taste if you’re not a fan of coconut.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly. Right, and it will take the heat more. We promised them this. You’re a keto coach. I’m following the keto diet, and keto 101. If you’re measuring—as a matter of fact, folks, go to getketomojo.com, getketomojo.com. You can get a keto meter, that’s the one I have. It measures your ketones and your glucose, which I like. You want to be above .5, and then you’re in what we call nutritional ketosis. I’m not getting in ketosis. I’m doing everything you say. Here it is a month out. I’m struggling. Sometimes, I’m in .7, but most of my first morning readings are .3, .4. What do we say to a person like that?

Kate:
It’s so frustrating for me as a coach, and of course, for the client when we reach these points. Unfortunately, it happens kind of often. It’s truly due to toxicity. They’ve got a lot of things going on in their body because of what they’re exposed to on a daily basis. We’ve cleaned up their body; we’ve cleaned up their nutrition, but that’s only a part of it. They’re still dealing with a lot of things, either at work or at home, what they’re putting on their skin, in their hair.

There’s so much that goes into whole-body health, and why things work and why things don’t. What I see all the time is exposure to toxicity. It has to be—we have to work on removing the toxins from the body because that’s the only way that we’re going to—when you get healthy from the inside, when we can clean you at a cellular level, then of course, everything else is going to open up and start working. It starts there.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt. What people don’t understand is on every cell, every hormone receptor—hormones are why people struggle to burn fat as energy, lose weight, be lean, feel good, and have good energy. When these receptors are being blocked by inflammation driven by toxins, you can’t fat adapt, is what we’re talking about. Here you are going, okay, I’m not losing weight. I’m not even getting in ketosis. You actually promote true cellular detox as part of your coaching. Am I right?

Kate:
Oh my gosh, absolutely. It’s life-changing. Health is like this onion. You peel it back in layers. We can fix their nutrition, and that is definitely a big part of things. We go from the people that are either eating the standard American diet or doing what we’ve all done with those six small meals, low fat, a lot of processed stuff. We can start to work on that. As we work on that part and we’re peeling that layer back, we tend to find so many other issues that have been underlying for years. For me to implement the true cellular detox program with my clients, that’s when we see significant results, significant results from a whole-body health level.

We’re able to cleanse and heal them on a cellular level and then they’re able to get into ketosis. Then they’re able to lose weight, finally, after years and years. It feels good for them because they’re feeling so great on every single level. They’re sleeping better. They don’t feel like this is a struggle to eat this way. They’re happily drinking water. They are just living a healthier, happier life. Their depression is gone. Anxiety is lessening. It’s life-changing, life-changing.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s people that say, okay, great. My numbers are above .5. I’m in ketosis, but I’m still not losing weight. It applies to them as well. Their body is still not tapping into its fat stores the way that it should. Most of the time, it’s ketosis. I teach something called diet variation, where we’ll actually break people out of ketosis. We mentioned intermittent fasting. I talk a lot about extended fasting, and all those things help as well. You’re right; the toxicity is the number one issue that I see.

Kate:
Yeah, and it’s been years. It’s been years of buildup.

Dr. Pompa:
Any last tips that you want to give our viewers or listeners in ketosis? Something you see all the time, some mistakes people make, or just some general tips that you know will help them?

Kate:
Give this lifestyle a solid four weeks before you say either it’s not working, or you want to do a carb-up. I see that happening a lot, where someone’s like, oh, I did really well Monday through Friday, so Saturday and Sunday I’m just going to blow everything. Give this a solid effort for four weeks. Make sure that you’re staying steady on your electrolytes. Make sure you’re adding your salt, magnesium, potassium. Those things are very, very important. Don’t worry about doing everything all at once. Just lead your meals with healthy, high-quality fatty cuts of animal protein. Serve it with a side of low-carb vegetables that you like. Cover those vegetables in a beautiful, tasty, healthy fat. Drink water, and just know that you’re doing this for yourself.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, yourself for your health. For me, even if you’re not breaking through like you desire, losing the weight yet you desire, it down-regulates inflammation. Our bodies were meant to produce ketones—no doubt, they’re extremely healthy for ourselves and our brain. Kate, thank you for being on the show. I tell you, keto 101, this was a great show for people. These are the questions that they ask, by the way. I think some other shows, folks, that would be helpful—shows about diet variation, feast-famine cycles. We’ve done other shows on ketosis, more of the science. This was definitely more of what you all actually wanted. Also, we have some shows on detox, cellular detox as well. Go back and watch those. Kate, thank you. This was a great show. I took notes; look at my notes.

Kate:
Yay, thank you so much for having me. I love speaking to you today, and I hope everyone got a lot out of it today.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, thank you. Thanks, Kate.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. All CHTV listeners can go to getketocertified.com to sign up for Kate’s keto course. If you are a true cellular detox practitioner who is interested in the certification course, please email Kate at katejaramillo.com. If you are one of Kate’s certified coaches and would like to implement true cellular detox in your practice, please email andread@revelation.com for more information. You can also find the links and email addresses in our show notes. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern. You may also subscribe to us on iTunes or find us on podcast.drpompa.com. Thanks for listening.

234: GAPS DIET- Explaining the GAPS Protocol and Vegetarianism

Transcript of Episode 234: The GAPS DIET- Explaining the GAPS Protocol and Vegetarianism

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith, and today joining us all the way from the UK is the very special Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride. One of our favorite topics here at CHTV is the gut-brain connection, so today’s episode will not disappoint. Dr. Pompa and Dr. Natasha are breaking down some of the major reasons for our modern epidemics of both mental and physical degenerative diseases, and they discuss how to reverse many chronic illnesses through diet and lifestyle, most notably with Dr. Natasha’s own GAPS diet.

GAPS stands for gut and psychology syndrome, and Dr. Natasha will share what it entails and what illnesses it can target. They will also cover today’s popular plant-based lifestyle where problems may arise with that and how to address them. If you or someone you know is affected by mental and degenerative diseases, allergies, or even strict vegetarianism or veganism, you cannot miss this episode.

Before we join in, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride. Dr. Natasha graduated with honors as a medical doctor in 1984 from Bashkir Medical University in Russia. She earned a post-graduate degree in both neurology and human nutrition at Sheffield University in the UK. Dr. Campbell-McBride is known for her book, Gut and Psychology Syndrome. The book explores the GAPS nutritional protocol, which is highly successful in naturally treating patients with learning disabilities, autism, ADHD, depression, and other mental problems.

In her clinic, Dr. Campbell-McBride sees a lot of young people who have become very ill from eating a plant-based diet. Her studies and experiences have led to two more books, Put Your Heart in Your Mouth and Vegetarianism Explained. Dr. Campbell-McBride is also a board member of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Let’s welcome Dr. Pompa and Dr. Campbell-McBride and get right into it. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Hey, health practitioners, are you looking for tools to discover the deeper health issues that need to be addressed with your clients? Do you want to truly understand cellular toxicity so that you can integrate Dr. Pompa’s true cellular detox program into your practice? I’m sure you’ve heard all about true cellular detox here on CHTV, and we welcome you to learn more.

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Dr. Pompa:
I think some of my readers are familiar. At least people go, “Yeah, I’ve heard of this GAPS diet that works amazing for brain conditions.” That's the acronym, right, gut and—

Dr. Natasha:
-inaudible-

Dr. Pompa:
I almost said something different than psychological issues, but it is great for autism, even schizophrenia, depression. I could go down a list. Of course, I have many clients who have been very successful with the GAPS diet with their autistic children. That book I think you wrote in 2004. Am I correct?

Dr. Natasha:
That’s right, a long time ago. Since then, GAP became a global phenomenon, more than a million people following it. The book has been translated into 18 languages. It has become a known phenomenon all over the world. GAPS nutritional protocol works not only for mental problems; it works for many physical conditions. The whole list of both immune conditions, allergies, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and chronic cystitis, and skin conditions, and of course the whole spectrum of digestive disorders. It is a diet—a program of choice for many, many people.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s back up. What's the premise behind the diet? Then we can get into some specifics after that. Why does it work? What’s the premise behind it?

Dr. Natasha:
It works because it fixes the gut. All diseases begin in the gut. That’s what the father of modern medicine, Hippocrates, said more than 2,000 years ago. The more we learn with our modern scientific tools, the more we realize just how correct he was. Indeed, every disease, whether it’s physical or mental, begins in the digestive system. The GAPS nutritional protocol fixes the digestive system. It changes the gut flora. It heals and seals the leaky, damaged gut wall. It normalizes the whole environment in there.

The rules of pretty much every chronic illness, whether it is physical or mental, are in the digestive system no matter how far away from the digestive system the disease might manifest itself. Once you fix those rules with the GAPS nutritional protocol, the symptoms start melting away whether it's rheumatoid arthritis, or asthma, or psoriasis, or schizophrenia, or depression, or autism.

Dr. Pompa:
What’s the premises behind the diet? As quickly as you can, explain what is the GAP diet? There’s many diets out there, which we’re going to talk about, at least one of them like the vegetarian diet. Your new book, I can’t wait to talk about—2017, last year—talks about some of the pitfalls, if you will, with a vegetarian diet. We’re going to get there. What’s the premise behind the GAPS diet?

Dr. Natasha:
The GAPS diet removes all the foods that feed pathogenic microbes in the gut because people with all chronic illnesses have abnormal gut flora, abnormal balance of microbes in their digestive system. The GAPS diet feeds beneficial microbes and starves off the pathogens. At the same time, it provides concentrated nutrient-dense foods, concentrated nutrition, to rebuild the gut lining and to rebuild the joints, which rebuild many, many other tissues in the body. Human body doesn’t waste an effort on healing sick cells or sick tissues.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree.

Dr. Natasha:
It destroys them and removes them. At the same time, it gives birth to trillions of new baby cells to replace the dead ones, to replace the damaged ones, the poisoned ones, the diseased ones. It just kills the diseased ones, removes them, and replaces them with newly born cells. GAPS diet piles in huge amounts of proper building materials for the body to give birth to those trillions of cells, to make them from something.

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible-

Dr. Natasha:
At the same time, it feeds the digestive system so they—and the digestive system is the major source of toxicity in the human body. There’s a river of toxins flowing in these people from the gut, into the blood stream, and gets distributed around the body. That's what the GAPS nutritional protocol removes. It stops that river of toxicity, and it rebalances the immune system in the person. Lots of different things happen. That’s recovering.

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- people can order the book on Amazon. I think in 2010, you actually had a rewrite of the book, correct?

Dr. Natasha:
It’s a second edition.

Dr. Pompa:
People could get the specifics, obviously, in the book on Amazon. You can tell them more specifically how to do that. I don’t need a full list because they can get the specifics there in the book, but give us some ideas of the foods allowed on the GAPS diet and foods not allowed on the GAPS diet.

Dr. Natasha:
We remove all the foods which are difficult to digest, which feed pathogenic microbes in the got, and which challenge the gut lining. That is all grains and everything made out of them. All starch has to be out because starch is a huge molecule under the microscope. Very difficult to digest even for people with cast iron digestive systems. Starch has to be out for a long period of time for the gut to allow itself to heal itself. We remove all processed and refined foods, which really are unknown foods, and they should not be in the diet of anybody. We remove all chemicals, and additives, and preservatives, and other things like that.

The important thing in the GAPS nutritional protocol is not what we remove, but what we actually eat. We focus on the high-quality whole foods that are cooked at home from scratch from natural ingredients. The beauty of it is that in many people, once the gut has healed, people can come off the GAPS diet and can introduce many, many foods, which they could not eat during the GAPS diet.

Once the gut is healed—but for some people with particularly severe conditions such as schizophrenia, for example, or Crohn’s disease, or let’s say multiple sclerosis, or fibromyalgia, once they’re on the GAPS nutritional protocol and once they've recovered, they usually have to continue staying on the GAPS diet, which is very easy, actually. Once it becomes your habit and becomes your life, it’s very easy to follow. It's very delicious and nutrient-dense.

As I was working with these patients, I started getting large numbers of anorexic girls in my clinic a few years ago. What I’ve discovered, that majority of these girls became anorexic because of misguided vegetarianism. That spurred a very intense study into the subject. The result of that study is my new book, which came out last year, called Vegetarianism Explained.

What I discovered in my study, that there isn’t any science into vegetarianism we can really rely on. Vast majority of studies that are published on this subject are skewed because they were funded by people who are interested in vegetarianism. They cannot be trusted. They’re either incorrectly designed, or incorrectly conducted, or the data has been incorrectly analyzed. I had to go look back at the basic physiology, and basic biochemistry, and clinical experience.

Based on these three major sciences, the clinical experience, the biochemistry, and the physiology, I’ve explained how animal foods work in the human body and how plant foods work in the human body. These two groups of foods coming from Mother Nature work very, very differently for us humans because of the way our digestive system has been designed. They have a very, very different effect.

Based on that, I explain to people all the science behind it. I’ve done it in an easy-to-understand form. I've put some nice pictures there for the youngsters because usually, majority of people who go into this lifestyle are usually young people, quite often teenagers because they watched a film, maybe, about industrial farming or the industrial farming keeps birds and animals, which is appalling and should not be done. Based on that emotion, then they decide to become vegetarians or even vegans. Very often, they damage their health irreparably.

It is very easy to damage your health, and it’s very difficult to regain it. It takes much, much longer to regain your health than to damage it. I have seen so many tragedies in my clinic where young people who used to be perfectly healthy before they decided to become a vegetarian ruin their lives, ruin their health, put themselves on just complete slipping slide into mental illness and physical illness. It’s very difficult to help these people.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree with your point. -inaudible- Scientific American, the July 2018, this month, they have an article in here. Basically, because of new science—they call it food prints—they’re able to look at teeth. We used to look at someone's teeth and say, “Oh, this group of people or animals should eat this.” They would look at, basically, structure affecting function, and they would make arguments—maybe some of the vegetarians would make arguments that we should be vegetable eaters.

According to this, that we actually even—all cultures they look at were varied eaters, meaning there might have been short times where they were using vegetables because they couldn't get meat. As soon as the environment changed or this changed, they would be using meat again and this. No doubt that we were forced into dietary changes. No culture, to your point, in the history of man has ever just eaten a vegetarian diet. Tell us why. Why does it lead to disease eventually?

Dr. Natasha:
Weston A. Price, one of the wonderful, very truthful scientists who, in the 1930s, traveled all over the world studying the diets of traditional, original cultures, people to whom our western civilization hasn’t arrived yet. What he found out in every case, these people were beautifully healthy and had no diseases of the western civilization, no mental illnesses, no physical illnesses. Their childbirth was easy. They lived long lives, and they were happy people.

What he found out in every environment, because he went all the way from Eskimos down to Pacific Islands and all over the place—so depending where people lived and what was available to them, people ate very different diets, and yet they were all healthy. He was specifically looking for a purely vegetarian culture all over the world. He didn’t find one. He came to the conclusion that it isn’t possible, and it isn’t something that, traditionally, people did.

Many people in the West, particularly vegans, they all point to India, saying, “Oh, well, in India, they’re vegans or vegetarians, and they’re fine.” Why do you think in India the cow is a sacred animal? She gives them something without what they cannot survive. She gives them an animal food, milk, ghee, butter, cheese, cream. They know that without this animal food, they simply would perish. They would eat lots and lots, whatever’s available.

Also, these vegetarian cultures in India, they eat a lot of eggs. They all have chickens and ducks, and they would have lots of eggs and add eggs into their rice and vegetables. They also have goats and value their milk very much. These vegetarian cultures in India are not vegetarian by choice. They’re vegetarian out of poverty because India has always been a very over-populated country. I went to India. I don’t know how many people went to India. People are everywhere. It is the most populated country in the world. It has the largest population in the world.

If they start eating their animals, they probably will eat the lot in two weeks. That is why they have to make this choice. However, it’s only in isolated areas in India that they have this choice. People who live along the coasts of the seas, and oceans, and rivers, and lakes, they have fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That is their staple. That is what they—the large bulk of the nutrition comes from this. They have the dairy, and they have the eggs. Even the vegetarian people who live inland and don’t have access to seafood or fish from lakes and rivers, even those people, when they have a chance to eat meat or fish will eat it without any questions. That is -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
I think another one that they hold onto is the China study where—it’s really a big plant-based diet. I think when you examine that closer, it’s not what people think. Talk about that because again, I think vegetarians, at least plant-based diet people, they really hold onto the China study or even the Okinawan diet.

Dr. Natasha:
The China study is a big fraud. There are books written about this study and how the data’s been collected, how it’s been analyzed, what kind of statistical analysis has been used, and so on. It is a fraud from the beginning to the end. Not a word from this study can be trusted.

Dr. Pompa:
No doubt about it. Again, when you really look at that culture, you look at—some of the hardcore meats are actually a staple even in the Okinawan diet. Talk a little bit about that because that also is held up with the plant-based people as being the perfect diet, so to speak.

Dr. Natasha:
What people don’t understand is the basic physiology of the human digestive system. If you look at how life works on our planet, all energy on our planet gets recycled, and new energy comes from the sun. In order for that energy to be captured and converted into solid matter that we can touch and we can eat, Mother Nature created plants. They have photosynthesis. They can capture the sunlight and convert it into chlorophyll, which are green -inaudible-.

In order then for something else to consume the sunlight in the form of plants, Mother Nature created herbivorous animals. In order for these animals to be able to digest plant matter, Mother Nature equipped them with a very special digestive system called rumen. A cow has four stomachs, enormous stomachs full of microbes. She has enormous microbial community in those four stomachs, bacteria, viruses, protozoa, worms, flukes, all kinds of thing living in the community together.

The clear scientific fact is that no creature on this planet can digest plants apart from microbes. Only microbes can really digest plant matter. That’s the fact that Mother Nature used in creating the rumen of herbivorous animals, cows, goats, giraffes, elephants, deer, antelope, and the rest of them.

In order then for something else to be able to consume the sunlight in the form of herbivorous animals, Mother Nature created the next group of creatures on the planet, and these are omnivores and predators. Human beings belong in that group. We don’t have a rumen. We have a small stomach, and if it is healthy, it’s virtually sterile. It virtually has no microbes in it because it produces hydrochloric acid, and pH, when we’re hungry, can go below 2, sometimes even below 1, which is an extremely hostile environment for any kind of microbe.

The only things that hydrochloric acid, and pepsin, and other substances that stomach produces, human stomach, that they can really unravel and digest, meat, fish, eggs, and milk, only these four foods, the animal foods that can really digest properly in the human stomach. Plants are indigestible for the human stomach. They sit in the stomach, and they wait for their turn to move on further down. Whatever we manage to chew and break down with amylase in the mouth, that’s what finishes up in the stomach. Then it goes through the absorptive part of the digestive system of the human beings, the three meters of the intestines where all the absorption of food happens.

Again, we can’t break the plant down to any large degree there. We only absorb a few vitamins, minerals, a bit of starch, a bit of sugar, but the bulk of the plant, the fiber and the starch, go through all of those meters undigested and unused. Then they land in the bowel, which is the -inaudible- of the rumen in the human digestive system. That’s where the bulk of our gut flora lives. All those microbes that work on the fiber, work on the starch, and do the same thing they do in the rumen of the cow, but they break down the majority of the carbohydrates. About 70% of the sugars get converted into short-chain fatty acids, which are really saturated fat. That sustains us between meals.

The problem is that in the cow, her rumen is at the beginning of her digestive system before the absorption begins. In the human being, it’s at the end. When the absorption already happened higher up, it is too late for it to happen. The truly feeding, building foods for the human body are meat, fish, eggs, and dairy because they are properly digested in the human stomach, and then they move into the intestines where all the digested mass can be absorbed. In order to absorb, we have to digest it. Plants are indigestible for the human digestive system.

Human body renews itself all the time. All cells in our body die—live a short life, and they die, and they get shed off and replaced by newly-born baby cells. In order to give birth to trillions of cells, building materials are required. If you look at the structure of the human body, we remove the 70% water—human body, about 70% is water. The rest of it is dry weight, and the dry weight is about 50/50 protein and fat.

When we analyze the structure, biochemical structure of that protein that we are made of, its amino acid composition is very similar to the amino acid composition of proteins in meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. These foods feed very well. They convert to our own protein, our own materials that we build from very easily and very quickly.

The same goes with the fats. When we analyze the structure of the human fat in our bodies, in its biochemical structure, it’s very similar to the fats of lamb, and beef, and cream, and butter, and goose, and duck, and chicken, animal foods, and fish. When we analyze the plant matter, plants have got lots of proteins in them, but the amino acid composition of those proteins is inappropriate for building our own proteins. Many amino acids are missing. Other amino acids are in excess. On top of that, the proteins from plant matter are indigestible in the human digestive system and in many cases, very damaging.

Take gluten, for example, the major protein in plants. The more we’re researching gluten, the more we are realizing that no human being on this planet can actually digest gluten, and it’s actually damaging everybody whether you get symptoms from it or not. Many people have celiac disease. Many people have non-celiac gluten intolerance. The more we’re researching it, the more we’re realizing that it’s damaging many, many people, gluten.

Then we’ll look at secalin in rye. We’ll look at avenin in oats. We’ll look at other proteins in plants. They’re all indigestible. They have inappropriate amino acid composition, and they damage many tissues in the human body, and they trigger autoimmune diseases in the human body. The same with fats in the plants. Plants have a lot of fats, and these fats are usually poorly unsaturated. When we look at their biochemical composition, it is inappropriate for the human physiology.

The best and the most appropriate fat for building our own bodies—and fat is a structural element of the human body. It’s essential for us to have fat at every meal. The only appropriate fats come from animal foods to rebuild our bodies and to feed that cell regeneration process, giving birth to trillions of new cells. As it happens, these are the very foods that digest properly in our stomach before moving into the three meters of intestines where the absorption happens, and they absorb very well, while plants are indigestible. They do not absorb. What’s the role of the plants for the human body? Animal fat builds -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right. -inaudible- you can eat some, but what is the role?

Dr. Natasha:
Exactly, yeah. It’s the animal foods that build and feed the human body. Plants cannot build our bodies and cannot feed us to any large degree. However, plants provide a huge amounts of antioxidants, phenols, salicylates, and other cleansing substances. They’re powerful cleanses. It is important for the human body to be well fed and to be clean, and they do live in toxic environments. Plants have a wonderful ability to clean us on the inside, and that is their purpose. That’s why we combine animal foods and plant foods.

If we have a very toxic person, a person whose body is really polluted—and many people in the western world have polluted bodies. When you go on a purely plant-based regimen such as veganism, in the first few weeks, you will feel well. You will feel great because having a cleaner body feels better than having a polluted body. However, at certain point, your body will finish cleansing, and it will become hungry, and it will ask for building, feeding foods. How will it ask you? It’ll give you desire for a steak, for a piece of meat, for a roasted chicken, for a pot of cream, for a piece of cheese, or something like that.

Problem is that in our western world, many young people follow veganism for emotional reasons, -inaudible- spiritual reasons. They override this signal. They don’t listen to their body. They dictate to their body, now you will continue cleansing. I’m not going to feed you. That is the moment when the body starts deteriorating. It starts cannibalizing less important tissues such as muscle and bone in order to feed and sustain more important tissues such as the brain, the liver, and the heart. The person starts losing muscle, and the person starts getting osteoporosis, and then disease sets in, mental illness, physical illness. That happens in just far too many young people who ruin their lives that way.

When I went to India—I’ll tell you a funny story. The guide told us that the Hindu pilgrims travel across India to their sacred sites, and they wear special clothes. It’s the black clothes with the golden brim. Part of their pilgrimage is a 41-day fast. Next day, as it happened, I was on the beach, and I met a group of these pilgrims. They just sat in the shade. They were looking terribly exhausted, very tired. In India, all people—majority of people speak English quite well, so I’ve spoken to these people. I’ve asked them, I said, “As I understand, part of your pilgrimage is a fast.” I said, “What kind of fast is it? Do you just drink water, or are you allowed to eat something?”

These people said, “Oh, it’s very difficult, very difficult.” You know how they bob their heads, the Indians. “Very, very difficult. Such a difficult, difficult fast.” I said, “So what is it? What are you allowed to eat?” They said, “Well, we’re only allowed to eat”—listen to this—“rice, beans, lentils, vegetables, fruit, nuts, and vegetable oil, and bread.” I thought, oh, that’s the western vegan diet.

Dr. Pompa:
It is. That’s what you were saying. That’s the western vegan diet. You got it.

Dr. Natasha:
People in India, for thousands of years, call it a fast, not a diet. I would not do it longer than 41 days.

Dr. Pompa:
I was going to say the same thing.

Dr. Natasha:
-inaudible-

Dr. Pompa:
Even a little bit shorter might even benefit them, but—just the change alone, but longer than that, they’re in trouble.

Dr. Natasha:
Exactly, it is—so veganism is not a diet. It is a form of fasting. Nobody can—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and by the way, that’s all -inaudible-.

Dr. Natasha:
Nobody can fast forever. That is why veganism must not be a permanent lifestyle. For a short period of time to cleanse your body, great, but then at a certain point, you have to start feeding it. It’s important to listen to your body because your body’s a miraculous creation. It is the pinnacle of evolution of life on our planet Earth. It has every mechanism of looking after itself, and healing itself, and rebuilding itself built into it. It’s your own body that heals itself and looks after itself, not the doctor, not the diet, not the pills, not you, not your mind. Listen to your body. It knows what it’s doing. Don’t ignore it, and don’t dictate to it.

Dr. Pompa:
No doubt. Short-term, that diet could be a benefit, but again, every culture, according to, like I said, this new article, moved in and out of these different periods. There’s a time to recycle, and there’s a time to rebuild. You’re right. You need the meats and the fats to rebuild. Otherwise, you’re going to be in this state of -inaudible- you where your body’s breaking down, which can be good short-term.

That’s the cleansing part that you mentioned. It’s part of my whole principle that I call feast/famine cycles. Every culture was forced into them. The problem today is we stay on these diets for a long time, and we end up in trouble, to your point. I see it clinically. We see it clinically, as well. We can look at cultures. We can look clinically, and go, “Yeah, this isn’t rocket science here.”

Dr. Natasha:
Physicians know this because they have seen too many tragedies.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt. How did you get into all this? What brought you to this? 2004, the first GAPS diet book you wrote, and it—I’ll tell you, it’s transformed millions of people. It really did. You were talking about these very principles here that you’re stating in the book. Then you gave people very clear direction on here’s what you should be eating. Here’s not. Here’s the diet. What started that?

Dr. Natasha:
My son, my child. I believe that children come to us as teachers. We parents teach them mundane things, how to live in this world, how to drive a car, how to dress, and the rest of it while children teach us the most profound universal truths. My son was diagnosed with autism at the age of three. Very quickly, I discovered that my own profession had absolutely nothing to offer my child, so that threw me into a very steep learning curve. The result of that curve was that my son recovered fully. Now he’s a young, healthy man who is helping with the business and leading a normal life.

As I was working with that, I started working with other families with autistic children because many parents of this kind of children communicated with each other and shared information with each other. As I started getting results with my own child, people started coming to me, and I started working with it. I discovered that siblings of these autistic children have many problems, too. They have hyperactivity, and digestive disorders, and they were clingy, and very fussy with food, and allergies, and asthma, and eczema, and other problems.

Then I started looking at the parents, and I found that the parents are not healthy, either, that they have chronic fatigue syndrome, and IBS, and multiple sclerosis, and fibromyalgia, and allergies again, and asthma, and digestive problems. I started discovering that all of these illnesses stemmed from the same place: from the digestive system, from the abnormalities in the gut flora of the person.

The protocol that I’ve designed—we’re dealing with digestive disorders. Digestive system is a long tube. What you fill that tube with has a direct affect on its well-being. Food is the medicine, without doubt. Once I started putting the whole family on the GAPS diet, people started recovering from all of these illnesses, which were completely perceived to be unconnected with each other. Fibromyalgia and autism, who would connect the two, or schizophrenia and rheumatoid arthritis, or digestive disorder and asthma? You wouldn’t connect those, necessarily, in mainstream medicine.

I’ve realized that they all stem from the same place. They all stem from the digestive system. We have an epidemic of abnormal gut flora in the western world, and with every generation, that epidemic is getting worse and worse. Recent research has discovered that 90% of all cells in the human body are in our gut flora, 90%. Your body is only 10%. It’s a shell, a habitat for these massive microbes that live inside you, and believe me, they’re in charge. The more we’re researching them, the more we’re realizing they are in charge of this 10% of what you are, basically.

Since we’ve discovered antibiotics during the second World War, and since antibiotics came onto the market in the 50s and 60s in large amounts, and started getting prescribed to people for every cough and sneeze, we started damaging our gut flora. Then the processed foods came in, and then the formula replaced the breast feeding, which is a devastating blow to the gut flora development and the digestive system altogether, and then all the other chemicals coming in, and the vaccinations, the change in the whole environment.

What’s happening that from generation to generation the gut flora’s getting worse and worse in people, more and more unbalanced, more and more damaged? Parents pass their gut flora to the child at the moment of birth. That’s where the baby gets its gut flora, from the mother and the father. If the generation of the parents got their gut flora from their parents who had a fairly good gut flora, maybe they had a couple of courses of antibiotics prior to having their children in the 50s and 60s, maybe, still their gut flora was fairly good, fairly robust, so they passed that to their kids.

Then their children grew up in a world where antibiotics were given to them for every cough and sneeze, damaging the gut flora further and further. They lived on junk food, which feeds pathogens in the gut almost exclusively, allowing them to proliferate and to thrive in your gut. Then the young girls in that generation were put on a contraceptive pill at a very young age, and they took these pills for quite a long time before they were ready to start their family. Contraceptive pill has a devastating effect on the gut flora and on the immune system of the woman.

By the time that generation of people were ready to start their family, their gut flora was seriously damaged, and that’s what they were passing to their children at the moment of birth. With every year, what I see in my clinic, the gut flora of parents—of the young parents who are starting their family is getting worse and worse. That is why we have all these epidemics of autism, and hyperactivity, and asthma, and allergies.

Diabetes type 1 has become an epidemic. We have babies, a growing proportion of babies, with this disorder. When I started practicing as medical doctor, the youngest person we ever saw with diabetes type 1 was an 18-year-old. Now, I see babies a few weeks old with diabetes type 1, and their proportion’s growing and growing. Rheumatoid arthritis in babies—

Dr. Pompa:
Here we are with these statistics. People think it just got here. It is generational. Even the amount of mercury we’re handing down to our children, lead, and then the glyphosate, and then the microbiome disruption we’re handing down—we’re handing down toxins generationally and then a faulty microbiome. We got here. We earned it, the last four generations. Let’s face it.

I have to ask this question. It’s so on my mind right now because I’ve had so many people asking me about all of the histamine reactions that they’re getting from foods, nightshades, so they’re avoiding histamine foods. They’re avoiding nightshades. These are all plants. Could this have something to do with the fact that people are—it seems to be in people who are more paying attention to their health that are reacting to these things. Could it be that people are focusing too much on the plant-based diet, and it’s creating some of these, or is it just the level of toxins creating the leaky gut?

Dr. Natasha:
It’s both. Plants are indigestible. Take it as a fact. They’re indigestible for us human beings. The more damaged your digestive system is, the less it is able to handle plants. They’re extremely difficult to digest. Original cultures knew this through experience. That is why they developed methods of processing plants to make them a little bit more digestible, a little bit more feeding, to get a little bit more nutrition of out them that the body can use.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, fermentation, etcetera.

Dr. Natasha:
Yes, fermentation, and sprouting, and molting, and cooking, and then fermenting again. If you look at traditional cultures in Africa, for example, they wouldn’t dream of having grains without fermenting them for two weeks, then cooking them, and then fermenting again. Only then they would make their bread from it or whatever else because they knew it’s indigestible.

It only will give you a tummy ache, and lots of gas, and will not really sustain you, will not feed you, really, your body. You will still be hungry and still be starving. The more damaged the digestive system of the person is, the less they’re able to digest plants, the more plants we have to remove. I have hit that point a few years ago—

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- the message is opposite of what you’re saying, you understand, meaning that everyone’s saying, “Oh, you’re sick. Eat more plants. Eat less meat and dairy.” What you’re saying is the exact opposite of that, is no. This is harder to digest. By the way, clinically, I find the same thing, so I’m in alignment with you, but it’s opposite of what most people are saying.

Dr. Natasha:
People need to understand where the nutritional information comes from in the mainstream. All information that comes to the population in the mainstream is funded by somebody because educating the population is a very expensive business, extremely expensive. There is somebody with a big wallet behind every one of these big statements that vegetarianism is good.

The push for vegetarianism, I believe, comes from the big agriculture because it is very easy for them to grow plants. We’ve got machines, we’ve got chemicals, and we’ve got all these scientifically worked out protocols. Now, you spray this on day one. You spray that on day five. You spray this on day seven, and it works. They get the green mass. They get the yield. The yield of what is a big question, but they do get their yield, and they get their profit.

However, when it comes to animal agriculture, animal production, the meat, the milk, and the eggs, it is very difficult to do in the industrial model. It’s cruel. It’s extremely expensive because all of these birds and animals have to be constantly on medication, constantly on antibiotics, on steroids, and on other medications. Otherwise they just die. They don’t survive. They don’t put weight on. It’s a cruel, cruel system, and it’s very expensive. The governments are on top of them with regulations, and the vets are on top of them with regulations. Producing animal fats, animal products, meat, fish, eggs, and dairy for the industrial agriculture is difficult, expensive, and not very profitable.

Producing plants is very profitable and easy. On top of that, governments subsidize it. Huge subsidies are given to western agricultural companies for producing plant matter. That is why it is within the interests of the big ag to make everybody into vegetarians. The more vegetarians there are in the world, the more plants are consumed, the more plants they can grow, the more profits they can make. The less animal foods people consume, the less headaches there are for them and the less losses there are for them. It is within their interests.

That is where that propaganda comes from. It’s crafted very carefully. It goes through many, many different ad organizations so it’s difficult to trace it to those companies, but that’s where it’s coming from. It’s very -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
I really think some of the confusion is in the fact that when people look at meat and make arguments that meat is bad, that it’s not sustainable, it’s bad for the planet, they’re really looking at grain-fed meat as opposed to grass-fed meat. Number one, there’s a massive difference in the health. People get confused that because the average consumer doesn’t even realize the differences. Isn’t there a lot of confusion with that?

Dr. Natasha:
Absolutely, huge amount of confusion, and huge amount of propaganda, and misinformation. You go to a proper organic farm. You visit this family, meet the farmers. You meet the animals and the birds, and you see how they’re kept. If you keep animals and birds the way Mother Nature designed these animals and birds to live, it is virtually no work. I have a farm. I’m a farmer myself. I’ve got a 28-acre farm for the last six years. I know firsthand how that goes. Animals and birds, easy-peasy.

You’ve got one hour in the morning to do something with them. You just let them out, give them some food, and one hour in the evening. That’s all. The rest of day is free for you. They have no diseases, and they have no problems, and they’re happy. They get their own food. Just make them free range, and give them space, give them pasture, give them sunlight, give them proper environment.

Plants on an organic farm are an absolute nightmare to grow. First of all, there’s a huge amount of knowledge that has to go into it, and huge amount of labor has to go into it. No matter what you do, it rains at the wrong time, it’s too hot at the wrong time, and they just don’t grow. -inaudible- happens, and the yield is completely unpredictable.

Growing plants on an organic basis in an organic farm is the hardest and the most labor-intensive thing to do and completely unpredictable. Grass grows for free, particularly in a country like Britain, or Ireland, or other places when it rains a lot. The sun shines for free. The rain falls for free. All you have to do is just pasture.

The big agriculture put out another complete nonsensical and nonscientific lie out there that animals cause global warning through belching and emitting gas. That is such a nonsense. It doesn’t even deserve -inaudible- at all.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, the problem there is feeding cows what they’re not meant to eat, and that’s grain, and that creates the bigger environmental disaster, which I -inaudible-.

Dr. Natasha:
What industrial agriculture does, it takes these animals off pasture where they’re supposed to be, locks them up in a prison, in a confined factory operation, and feeds them food inappropriate to their physiology. Cows are not supposed to eat grain. Pigs are not supposed to live entirely on grain. Chickens are not supposed to live on grain. Chickens eat a lot of insects and worms. They eat a lot of meat. In order to produce eggs, which are almost pure protein, they need to eat a lot of protein, so chickens eat a lot of meat.

They eat insects, and worms, and larva, and grubs, and things. If they’re roaming free on pasture, the chickens, they eat a lot of grass. It’s the carotenoids from grass that color the yolk yellow or orange. In a confined factory operation, chickens don’t get any grass. Where does the yellow come in for the yolks? From a dye that is added into the artificial feed that these chickens are fed. There is no carotenoids at all in -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- caution. Dr. McBride and myself are both saying, “Hey, look, we regain people’s health back by these foods, the meats, the fats, the proper dairies.” The caution is it has to be the real meat, grass-fed, chickens that are eating things, the bugs, the worms. That’s the caution. Don’t run to your regular grocery store and start loading up on conventional meat. I promise you you will get sick.

Dr. Natasha:
Absolutely, -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, grass-fed’s key. That was a quick time. The time went so fast. Remind them again where to get your new book and where to get the other book, which is still an amazing book.

Dr. Natasha:
They’re all available online. They’re all available on Amazon and other online stores, and they’re available in many bookstores. I have a website called GAPS.me, G-A-P-S.M-E, and I have a blog, Dr-Natasha.com. The new book has its own website called VegetarianismExplained.com.

Dr. Pompa:
I know many people need to read that book. You and I are very in agreement that short term on those diets, no problem. Long-term, you’re heading for disaster. What a wealth of knowledge. Thank you for your passion. Thank you for your research. Thank you for all that you do. You’re in the UK over there, correct? That’s where you’re from?

Dr. Natasha:
I am.

Dr. Pompa:
Thank you for coming across the seas. Thank God for technology. Thank you for all you do and your books. I know many people are going to get them, and I’ll be searching your site, as well. You’re a wealth of knowledge. Thank you, Doc. Appreciate you.

Dr. Natasha:
That’s a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re welcome.

Ashley:
We hope you enjoyed today’s episode of CHTV. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern. You may also subscribe to us on iTunes or find us at Podcast.DrPompa.com. Thanks for listening.

233: Practical Solutions for SIBO

Transcript of Episode 233: Practical Solutions for SIBO

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Dr. Michael Ruscio

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith, and today we welcome special guest, Dr. Michael Ruscio. We have a really popular topic for you today. Dr. Pompa and Dr. Ruscio will be talking all about gut health and, more specifically, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth otherwise known as SIBO.

From daily bloating to constant fatigue and unexplained weight gain, we’ll hear about how gut health relates to just about everything else in the body, how changes in gut health can manifest as disease, and what we can do to fix the problem, and start living a healthy, enjoyable life again no matter how long you’ve been suffering for. If you have ever struggled with your digestion, you will want to check this episode out.

Before we get started, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Ruscio. Dr. Michael Ruscio is a doctor, clinical researcher, and best-selling author whose practical ideas on healing chronic illness has made him an influential voice in functional and alternative medicine. Dr. Ruscio specializes in digestive, autoimmune, and thyroid disorders, and he consults out of his Bay Area clinic. His simple and affordable approaches to healing chronic illness could be exactly what you’ve been looking for. Dr. Ruscio’s book, Healthy Gut, Healthy You, is a game changer in teaching you strategies to transform your gut health. Let’s welcome Dr. Pompa and Dr. Ruscio and get right into it. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Hey, health practitioners, are you looking for tools to discover the deeper health issues that need to be addressed with your clients? Do you want to truly understand cellular toxicity so that you can integrate Dr. Pompa’s true cellular detox program into your practice? I’m sure you’ve heard all about true cellular detox here on CHTV, and we welcome you to learn more.

You are invited to attend one of our live training events. Our next event is in Newport Beach, California on September 8. To attend this event or to check out other future events, please visit tcdEvent.com. We will provide for you the tools to help you successfully implement true cellular detox into your practice. You don’t want to miss this or one of our future training events. Again, tcdEvent is where you can register or find out more information. We’d love to see you there.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s jump right in, Michael. I have to ask the obvious question. You’re known for the gut work that you do. How did you get into this? Typically, people have a story. What’s yours?

Dr. Ruscio:
I had a story. It’s not necessarily the coolest story of the stories you hear out there. I was in college, and I was actually quite intent on going into conventional medicine. That was really kind of the path that I was on. I was your typical kind of Type A, and had good grades, and was very driven. That just seemed like a laudable goal given all my drive, but also, perhaps, a lack of direction.

They say, “Life is the teacher,” and in my case, the teacher was an intestinal parasite that then brought me to a point of extreme insomnia. If anyone’s ever suffered with insomnia, you know how just debilitating that can be, and bouts of brain fog, which also can be debilitating. When you feel like it’s hard to carry out an intelligible conversation with someone, it’s very, very much a unpleasant impairment.

In addition to some fatigue, and some bouts of depression, and feeling cold, and given I was, months before that, feeling nearly invincible as a college athlete. Nothing here really added up. I was doing what I loved. I was getting adequate sleep. I was eating all organic. I was studying health and nutrition in addition to—

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, my God. It’ll all sound like my story.

Dr. Ruscio:
In addition to my formal academic training, I was also studying those areas. I was dialing all those knobs into optimal, yet I fairly suddenly started feeling quite ill. I went to see three conventional doctors, figuring, well, this is what they do. None of them could find anything with the different assays that they ran.

Dr. Pompa:
I ran down that same road, by the way.

Dr. Ruscio:
Right, and many people do. They commented that, “Well, you have a healthy body composition. Your triglycerides, and cholesterol, and blood sugar all look good. All the major boxes check, and there’s not really anything we can do for you.” I found my way to a alternative medicine provider who focused on digestive health. He told me that, “I think you may have a parasite.” I remember thinking to myself, this guy is off his rocker. This guy must be crazy.

I didn’t do anything, actually, at that point in time. I was kind of thinking about it, but I went out, and I did some research on the internet. I said, “Oh, it sounds like I have adrenal fatigue. Oh, it sounds like I have hypothyroid, or it sounds like I have heavy metal toxicity.”

Dr. Pompa:
I went down the same road, man.

Dr. Ruscio:
Right, and so I did the herbs for thyroid conversion and didn’t really feel much better. I did the adrenal support herbs; got a little boost that later faded. I peed in a cup for my testing of heavy metals, and I came back high in lead and—I believe it was lead and mercury. I did detox work and didn’t feel any better after doing that.

I was kind of brought to my knees by this whole process. I said, “Geez, even though I’m a college student and $350 feels like a million dollars to pay for this stool test that the doctor wanted me to do”—I figured, at this point, I don’t feel like I have much left to lose, so did the stool test. It came back with an amoeba. Treating that amoeba was the only thing that led to lasting improvement in all these symptoms that were not digestive, ironically. That’s actually an important tenet for us to establish here early in the conversation is that you can have things like brain fog, and fatigue, and even skin problems, or joint pain as a byproduct of a silent digestive problem. I learned that the hard way.

I diverted my path into alternative medicine. I loved the field, but there were also some aspects of the field that I didn’t love. I felt there were some aspects that were overzealous and some treatment plans that were totally not guided by science or even reason, but rather dogma and, really, overzealousness. I started challenging some of the things that I’d learned, and trying to find what really worked, and what may have been well intentioned, but misguided. That’s led me to form one retrospective chart review that we’re now drawing up a publication.

We have IRB approval for a placebo-controlled trial we’ll be performing starting, hopefully, in January, looking at a herbal remedy that can help prevent SIBO recurrence, or at least we think it can. We’re trying to see if that actually will be able to perform or live up to its proclaimed ability to aid. I’m trying to strike that balance of giving people well thought out, conservative, but progressive information.

The double edge of the sword here is yes, we want to help people, but if we’re not tempered in our recommendations, then we can lead people into thinking that they’re more ill than they are, that their life has to be more difficult with supplement popping and dietary restrictions than it needed to be. That creates harm in and of itself. Sometimes in attempts to help people, if we’re not careful, we actually harm them. I’m trying to now strike a reasonable and well informed, cautious balance of all those factors.

Dr. Pompa:
I love it. Healthy Gut, Healthy You is the title of your book. Matter of fact, where can you find it just right off the bat?

Dr. Ruscio:
Healthy Gut, Healthy You you can find on Amazon. It’s available both in print and as a Kindle or a NOOK version. You can get it mainly through Amazon, but also through Barnes & Noble.

Dr. Pompa:
People watching this, don’t tune out because if you have a thyroid condition—we both had thought, no doubt, my thyroid’s playing a role, and mine was, but I went down that road like you did. Addressed my adrenals, the whole thing, but there was definitely something more upstream. Today we know the microbiome—the gut plays a role in how our brain works, our immune system. Really, it can tie into our hormones, everything.

Dr. Ruscio:
True.

Dr. Pompa:
I think most of our viewers and listeners get that fact, but many of them right now listening and watching this are still saying, “Okay, but I have done it all. I’m still trying to fix my gut.” Yours was a parasite, and I do want to talk a little bit about that. I, too, when I was sick had parasites. I killed my parasite, but yet, I still had symptoms. I still had insomnia. Things got better a little bit, but it wasn’t until I got the mercury out of my brain that I actually was able to even get rid of a lot of my Candida and parasites permanently because my giardia and other things kept coming back.

All right, so let’s talk about some of these conditions. We talked about SIBO at the top of the show, and I loved what you said. People struggle with this. Maybe it’s not SIBO. How do they know? Maybe it is. How do they fix it? Give us some advice. It sounds like you’re really versed in this because you’re developing a product even to knock SIBO back. Let’s start at the top right there.

Dr. Ruscio:
I actually clarify, we’re not actually developing a product. We’re studying a product that’s often used in the SIBO community as a preventative measure, but there hasn’t been any study done to know if that actually works for the measure it’s purporting to help with.

Dr. Pompa:
What is it? Can you talk about it?

Dr. Ruscio:
It’s just a natural prokinetic agent. There’s a handful of them out there, but prokinetics help to essentially ensure adequate movement of food through the intestines. When there’s inadequate or slowed movement of food through the intestines, that’s one of the underlying causes of SIBO. However, we don’t have any studies on the natural treatments. We do have one drug model study using tegaserod, which is no longer available in the US, and also low-dosage erythromycin, which have shown benefit. They haven’t shown the ability to prevent SIBO from coming back ever, but they delay the time in remission, so that’s nice.

The counterpoint, natural agents claim to do the same thing and support the same underlying mechanism, but there hasn’t been any data showing it can actually help with that. I have some suspicions that the importance of motility in SIBO is clearly there, yes, but I think it’s been overstated. Sometimes people end up pursuing motility at the expense of perhaps not just making a dietary modification or using the appropriate probiotics.

That kind of ties in with your earlier point, which I had to do some additional steps also. I think if I had my book now, I would have gotten healthier so much faster. Yes, I probably got about 70, 80 percent better right after treating the parasite or in the course of a few months, but I had some histamine sensitivity that lingered. Sometimes, for people on the diet, that can be a major problem because as people gravitate toward healthier foods, they’re oftentimes gravitating toward more histamine-rich foods. This also accompanies, and this histamine intolerance can be a byproduct of a damaged intestinal lining.

For some people, that can be game-changing, cathartic, improving experience when they reduce dietary histamine, even though they are these foods that are harped on as being so health promoting, kombucha, sauerkraut, kimchi, any other fermented food, really, and things like spinach and avocado can all be problematic if consumed too frequently for people with histamine sensitivity.

I did have some lingering brain fog, and the real missing piece that needed to slide into place was not eliminating completely—again, not going to these dichotomist extremes of being unreasonable about my level of histamine avoidance, but just realizing that I can’t have, or I shouldn’t have a high histamine food with every meal for days and weeks on end.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s virtually impossible to eliminate them completely, right? It’s like a contamination -inaudible-. There are histamines in so many things. The reduction of it allowed you to get a whole—to make other treatments more effective, or at least work. I liked your point. You don’t eliminate histamines as the solution to your problem. You have a histamine reaction because you have an inflamed gut. It’s this balance.

Let’s back up, though, because you made so many great points. Let’s back all the way up and explain what SIBO is, what symptoms. Many people, they’re struggling with gut. At some time during their gut issue, they deal with SIBO. I dealt with it. I didn’t even know what it was when I was dealing with it. I look back, I’m like, “Oh, I had SIBO.” I fixed it without even knowing what it was. What is it, and let’s talk about some of the symptoms. Then we’ll talk about some of the fixes that will lead us into the whole gut conversation.

Dr. Ruscio:
Sure, so SIBO stands for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. This is essentially where you have too much bacteria in the small intestine. Now, you should have bacteria—

Dr. Pompa:
It could be good or bad, right? The good guys -inaudible-

Dr. Ruscio:
Right, yeah, exactly. You should have bacteria in your small intestine. It’s not necessarily an issue of them being bad bacteria. There are different theories and observations showing that sometimes it’s bacteria that comes from further down the intestinal tract, grows up. Sometimes it’s bacteria that comes from up the line and makes its way down. There’s debate there. I don’t think it makes a huge difference in terms of—in most cases in terms of how you have to treat this. Essentially, you end up with too much bacteria in your small intestine.

We also know a similar phenomenon can happen with fungus or yeast known as small intestinal fungal overgrowth. You can see this general trend of overgrowth in the small intestine. Why that is so important for a multitude of reasons is because the small intestine is responsible for 90% of caloric absorption, it represents over 56% of your digestive tract, and it is where you have the largest density of immune cells in your entire body. There’s a profound inflammation/immune system connection hinged into the small intestines.

Some of the healthy gut advice, which is centered around feeding gut bacteria with fiber, and prebiotics, and vegetables, and fruits, which can be health-promoting, but in the context of those with SIBO and also with IBS, these may actually be the maneuvers that are worse—the worst possible maneuvers for one’s gut health, which comes back to your earlier point of people being confused and really not knowing what to do.

Oftentimes, people think they’ve done everything, but they really have not. They’ve done everything that they know about, which is great, but it’s me saying I had a legal issue. I went in there as a self-defendant, and I went with every defense I could think of. I’m not a lawyer, so it’s everything that I can see, but it’s not everything that’s available out there.

Just real quick, and I think this is important to establish, your gut—anyone’s gut—is really an ecosystem. It’s not about just what’s the one thing, the SIBO, and just killing the SIBO, or combating the SIBO, or the Candida, or the yeast, or the yeast pylori, or whatever, or the inflammation. It’s really a garden, and we want to find the combination of factors that will create the healthiest soil.

When you have healthy soil or a healthy host, you harbor the growth, and you encourage the growth of healthy bacteria, and fungus, and other like life. Sometimes you get caught in this mono-therapeutic focus. Even in someone who has a fairly high level of specialty in SIBO, I always remember to look at the gut broadly in the context of the whole individual just so we make sure that we’re addressing it as holistically as we really should.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s talk about it now. Bloating is one of the number one symptoms that people get. Two hours, even six hours after a meal, boom. It feels like you’re pregnant. It feels like you just ate, frankly. Okay, so that’s the number one. Gas both ways, this way and that way, constipation, diarrhea, all of it—what do we do? What’s the first step? How would you walk someone through this?

Dr. Ruscio:
-inaudible- build upon that, that those are your most classically defined SIBO symptoms. We’re now seeing an association with SIBO to hypothyroidism as one, and even thyroid autoimmunity according to a recent Polish study that showed that those with SIBO had a higher level of thyroid antibodies than those healthy controls. Even to skin, we’re seeing SIBO correlated with rosacea and metabolism. We see some evidence showing a—I should mention that the SIBO data there also shows that after treatment of the SIBO, the rosacea, the skin condition, improved. It’s good to have both observational and also treatment outcome data.

Also, we see that metabolism can improve by measure of cholesterol and blood sugar after treatment of SIBO. Just coming back to—I’m trying to reinforce that principle that you often have non-digestive symptoms as a byproduct of a digestive problem. I’m sorry. Was your question where do we start with SIBO?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, where do we start? That was a great point because, again, we’re talking beyond the gut here. Your health is your gut here, or your gut is your health. What do we do? What’s the first step?

Dr. Ruscio:
This is all outlined in Healthy Gut, Healthy You. In case people feel a little bit like this is all coming at them kind of fast during this conversation, -inaudible- and we go through it one step at a time just to make it easy. We want to start with diet and lifestyle. That is really the foundation. Now, you’ll hear disparate things about what the best diet for SIBO is. What happens sometimes is people believe X, and so they find research that reinforces X, and they ignore all the research showing that that is not the case for everyone.

What I’ve tried to do is look at what the entire body of literature shows. When you do that, you don’t have to worry about defending a certain diet. You can just say, “Well, there’s a certain population for which this diet works, and it does not work for others.” Let’s look to what the key indicators are—

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, clinically I have found that it is a little bit different for everybody.

Dr. Ruscio:
Right, exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- to your point. Go ahead.

Dr. Ruscio:
If we look at the body of literature on diets, you see that different diets can work well for different people and fail for others. We get into these arguments about what diet is the best, vegetarian, paleo, Mediterranean—

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, I have a whole principle I talk about called diet variation. I believe the magic is in switching diets, and I believe one of the greatest mistakes we make as a modern-day population is staying on the same diet. It typically worked for us at one point, but I believe humans are genetically—DNA is set up to change diet, force adaptation. Therein lies the actual—the key. That’s why everybody’s technically right. With SIBO, I do find, though, that some people, if they take certain products and killers while they’re on things that beat SIBO, that can work, but other people have to get rid of them. It is very different.

Dr. Ruscio:
Exactly, and I completely agree. Now, with SIBO, there’s a couple places that are logical to start, meaning they seem to work for at least a majority of people. Now, a paleo-type diet is one great place to start. A paleo diet does not mean you have to be high protein, high fat, high meat. It can be a lower protein and fat, and higher carbohydrate type of diet. I’ll come back to that in more detail in just a moment.

Essentially, the main tenet is a non-processed, whole foods-based diet where you focus on meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds. It’s a very unprocessed diet, and you can skew the -inaudible- balance of carbs, proteins, and fats to your individual desires. That can be a very good starting point. There is data showing that the paleo diet can help with IBS.

Now, I choose my words very carefully because I try not to conflate different things together. That, I think, only propagates confusion. Now, IBS studies, we have much more of those. We know that anywhere from 4 to 84 percent of IBS may have the underlying cause of SIBO. IBS is just essentially the same symptoms that often manifest as SIBO. They’re definitely kind of a proxy for one another.

We see great research showing—or I shouldn’t say great research. We see some research showing that the paleo diet can help with IBS amongst a litany of other conditions. You can start there. Here’s one of the nice things. You don’t need to be on that diet for months and months to evaluate if that is a appropriate or inappropriate maneuver for yourself. Two to three weeks is ample time to at least be able to say, “Yes, I’m feeling better.” Will you be 100% healed? No, but you’ll be able to clearly say, “Yes, I’m feeling better,” or, “Eh, I don’t really notice anything,” or, “I may even feel a little bit worse.” For those people, they can progress to another two- to three-week dietary trial. I’m happy to expand upon that one if you’d like.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep, absolutely.

Dr. Ruscio:
The next one would be a low FODMAP diet. People have probably heard about low FODMAP diets. Essentially, one of the main principles of a low FODMAP diet is it restricts foods that are rich in prebiotics, which feed bacteria. Some of these foods are stereotyped as being very healthy. Again, it’s not to say that they’re always healthy or always unhealthy, but it’s learning, to your earlier point, what person will benefit from what maneuver dietarily.

In people with IBS and with SIBO, some evidence is showing that—definitely those with SIBO have too much bacteria, and so eating foods that are very rich at feeding bacteria would logically not be a good idea. Other people who don’t have abnormally high levels of bacteria may be abnormally sensitive to the gas pressure that’s caused when bacteria essentially eat and then release gasses.

Even for those without SIBO, a low FODMAP diet can be helpful due to some people being hypersensitive to gas pressure. We do have a number—over 10 randomized clinical trials showing quite impressive effectiveness of a low FODMAP diet. I should also mention that the low FODMAP diet, in addition to helping to starve some of these bacterial overgrowths—and I say this in the context of sometimes the low FODMAP diet is depicted as being unhealthy for your gut because it starves bacteria, but that is a—it’s a very narrow way of looking at this issue, again, coming back to some of our earlier points.

We know that a low FODMAP diet can reduce leaky gut, inflammation, immune activation in the gut by decreasing histamine and may actually enable the increased growth of serotonin and PYY cells in the intestines to make, essentially, the cells in the intestines more like that of healthy controls. It’s important not to take one observation that people who go on a low FODMAP diet see a decrease of Bifidobacterium populations, which is true, but if that occurs in a healthier host and looked at along with all these other contextual factors, then I am hard pressed to make a argument that a low FODMAP diet is an untenable recommendation.

Dr. Pompa:
Again, we’re not saying to stay on that diet forever. I believe, again, it’s the variation. Periods of diet change are actually good regardless of the temporary changes it does in the microbiome. Explain to people because that may be the first time they’ve ever heard of FODMAP, and they’re going, “What? What is this? What is it?” Give a little bit more explanation of what—paleo, I think, people understand. You’re right. You can change how much protein. Explain this.

Dr. Ruscio:
Sure, and I should just mention that I absolutely agree with your point in terms of broadening the diet or changing the diet. As people become healthier, they will be able to thrive on a broader array of foods. It’s very important that we establish that. Then regarding the low FODMAP diet, this is a diet low in mainly carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables, specifically, that feed or are rich in prebiotics and are powerful at feeding bacteria.

The foods are—they don’t seem to have a huge rhyme or reason. There are many stereotypically healthy vegetables, many in the Brassica family, that are actually high in FODMAPS and to be avoided on a low FODMAP diet. It’s fairly easy to find a good food list on the internet. Not every food list agrees, so don’t let that freak you out. It’s not about looking at the small amount of disagreement that you want to focus on. It’s the large amount of foods that are agreed upon. The book also gives you a well-researched low FODMAP diet food list.

Things like broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, avocado are all high FODMAP. Some people go paleo, and they cut out—maybe they were eating some grains, and they cut out some of those grains and eat a lot more vegetables. All of a sudden, they feel worse. That does happen to some people. I know it’s very defeating when you’re taking actions to improve your health, yet you’re feeling worse, but for these people, it may be a simple adjustment of going to a lower FODMAP diet. Then they may feel better within, again, two to three weeks.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s truth to that, as well. Okay, let’s go on. Let’s call it step three, if you will.

Dr. Ruscio:
Within that diet and lifestyle—I’m sorry. It’s lifestyle, and I think you’ve probably addressed that fairly amply up until now, so I think people understand sleep, exercise, manage stress, pursue purpose, what have you, but worth, at least, just ticking those very briefly. The next step would then be some non-dietary interventions. This is what some people get stuck in sometimes. They get stuck in the quicksand of diets, and they don’t know when it’s time to leave the dietary trial camp and then go into some non-dietary interventions.

This is important because some people will try to force a dietary solution to a non-dietary problem. We want to make sure we don’t keep beating them over the head with the dietary stick. Now, one of the next things that someone can do that can be very helpful is a course of probiotics. There’s quite a bit of confusion regarding probiotics because there are hundreds, if not more, products out there.

What I did in the book was help the reader realize that there are really three to four categories that almost any probiotic product can be organized into. Now, category one of probiotics consists of a mainly Lactobacillus- and Bifidobacterium-predominated blend. When you look on the label, you’ll see Lactobacillus acidophilus, Bifidobacterium infantis, and you’ll see mostly—those probiotics will be either a Lactobacillus or a Bifidobacterium species probiotic. That’s category one. You want to definitely try one of those because they’re—that is the most well-studied category, and they have been shown to have the ability to combat SIBO, fungus, parasites, and to improve IBS. I’m talking very high-level scientific data.

Now, category two is a Saccharomyces probiotic—a Saccharomyces boulardii-containing probiotic. This is actually a healthy fungus. When you look on the label there, you will see Saccharomyces boulardii. Then category three is your spore-forming, also sometimes described as a soil-based probiotic. Here you will see predominately Bacillus strains, Bacillus licheniformus, Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus clausii. These strains have also been shown, up along with the Saccharomyces boulardii, to have a multitude of benefit for someone’s gut.

There’s another important aspect to this, which is most people—by far, the majority of people will either be neutral or benefit from the use of probiotics. However, there’s a smaller subset that may notice some kind of negative reaction. Why the category system can be helpful, amongst other things, is if you try product after product after product and you don’t understand, and you keep having this bloating reaction because you keep taking a Lactobacillus/Bifidobacterium category one blend, the answer there will allude you for a very long time.

If you can understand that, okay, I’m going to try each one of these categories of probiotics, see how each one feels relative to my gut health, and then use what works, and discard what doesn’t, now you can, in a very short period of time, personalize a probiotic protocol for your individual gut. One of the next most powerful steps can be a high-quality probiotic, taking into consideration the different categories to help personalize the mixture to an individual.

Dr. Pompa:
I want to make people aware of this potential pitfall, as well. You find one that works, and then stay on it for many months, a year, and then you end up monoculturing. One of the things I love to teach is rotate these bacteria—very important—or even go on and off of them. I find that the soil organisms, people with severe SIBO, it’s a very safe place to start. They seem not to react, the people especially who react to probiotics. That seems like the place to start. I don’t know what you’ve found there, but—

Dr. Ruscio:
I’ve heard that. I haven’t found that, clinically. I was swept into that thinking—I think I was maybe placeboing myself for just—because it’s very hard when you hear many people saying one thing, not to create that placebo effect in your own head. I mean, it’s difficult. We know that in IBS trials that are placebo controlled, meaning that all of the placebo effect is attempted to be designed out of the study, the average placebo effect is 45%. Placebo, even for the most brilliant mind, is a powerful fact to guard against.

There are some people who clearly do better on soil-based, but there—I’ve also noticed there are clearly some people who do better on the Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium blend. Then some people do well on neither, and only well on the Saccharomyces boulardii. I think they all have a case that can be made for them.

I do think that in the general scientific literature, the utility or just the recognition and identification of the soil-based organisms is not where it should be. There should be more data on those. We only have, I believe, about 14 clinical trials with soil-based probiotics whereas we have maybe a few hundred with the Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium blend. Unfortunately, the category one does kind of predominate the conversation right now, but I do think that’s shifting in a positive way.

Dr. Pompa:
Then what? What’s step four for—do we go killers at this point?

Dr. Ruscio:
One of the next—and there’s some nuance in here, also. Of course, we can’t go through every aspect of the steps in detail. Along with that second step, there’s also the consideration of adrenal support and enzymes. Especially with enzymes, even more so with hydrochloric acid, I think there’s a lot of confusion about that, and I tried to really dispel some of that confusion in the book. I’ve seen some cases where their non-responsive GI symptoms were a byproduct of taking acid when they didn’t need to or taking bile when they didn’t need to. Those can both be helpful, but we want to make sure that we’re not having someone go on something just because, oh, I heard it was good for your gut health. We want to make sure to qualify that per individual.

After we get through that confection of different treatment options, then we can escalate to antimicrobial herbal therapy, so things like oregano, and [Allicillin], and berbamine. People have probably heard of many of these. If someone is not able to resolve dysbiosis or imbalances—dysbiosis is a umbrella term for SIBO, and H. pylori, and Candida. It kind of encompasses everything. Then herbal antimicrobial agents can be one of the next things to consider to administer. We do have data showing that these herbs can work well for a number of conditions.

The nice thing about these is many of these herbs have broad action where they will act against bacteria, fungus, and parasites all at the same time. This is nice because as helpful as testing can be, there are probably more things that we cannot test for or cannot routinely test for. Another mistake people make is they want to try to test their way to better gut health. I can tell you that, yes, testing does have a time and a place, but I am doing far less testing now than I was several years ago. The book protocol is—

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible-

Dr. Ruscio:
Yeah, and the book protocol can be done without any testing because, again, it’s not about knowing what the one thing is. We’re trying to create a healthier milieu in the gut soil globally. We can perform some pushes and pulls to the gut milieu and read someone’s response to figure out what’s working well for them. The herbals are nice because instead of having to worry about is it SIBO and Candida, or is it one or the other, the herbs can help to give a gentle push to the microbiota and thus, hopefully, if it works, after that push, the microbiota will rebalance to a healthier equilibrium.

Dr. Pompa:
Most of the herbs, they don’t wipe out the good bacteria. They kind of bring things in control. It’s definitely a better way to go. Is there another step? I do have a question about hydrogen-producing bacteria. People are going to ask—you and I just mentioned testing. Can I test for SIBO? Of course, there’s breath tests, but talk a little bit about that if there’s not a step five.

Dr. Ruscio:
Yeah, there are more steps. There’s actually a -inaudible-

Dr. Pompa:
That’s why I didn’t want to cut you off, but I had to -inaudible-

Dr. Ruscio:
I get it. We’ll help keep each other in check here because there’s a lot of different ways we can go. We’re going to have to anchor each other. There’s the ability within the book protocol to escalate the antimicrobial therapy. People may have performed the antimicrobial therapy in the past and seen a small response or only a short-lived response. There is definitely something that can be done to help make that response greater or more long lasting.

Sometimes it’s a simple adjustment to the dose and the duration. Sometimes we have to add in the addition of anti-biofilm agents to help with the stubborn colonies and/or along with that, anti-inflammatory and specific antiprotozoal agents. The nice thing here is you have one agent that can act as both of those. Then the furthest or the highest escalation of antimicrobial therapy can be a liquid-only meal replacement known as an elemental diet.

This is where we do have one formula that I think is a bit novel that I mention in the book, which is a palatable version of an elemental diet. Just in brief here, an elemental diet is essentially if you were to picture a meal replacement shake, that devoid of any artificial sweeteners, bad colorings, fillers, excipients, super hypoallergenic and gut friendly, and devoid of really any prebiotics and—that’s been researched in a number of studies to help reduce both SIBO and gut inflammation.

We use a formula known as Elemental Heal, which is a semi-elemental diet, which is palatable. That’s the big thing. The older generation of elemental formulas were very, very hard to stomach. They just tasted horrid. There’s a newer generation coming out that are palatable. For people who have not responded to anything else, sometimes knowing how to use and using a good elemental diet formula can be a real game changer. Those are a few of the things—a few of the maneuvers that we can perform within the antimicrobial therapy. Then you were also asking—sorry. Remind me what the other question was.

Dr. Pompa:
I know there’s different ways of testing for SIBO, the breath test, which, again, I went down that road. I stopped doing it. What’s your thoughts on it? That’s the breath test.

Dr. Ruscio:
There’s a breath test that can be performed for SIBO, and that’s likely the most validated. There is a gold standard, which is essentially with an endoscopy tube, taking a sample out of the small intestine, and culturing that sample. Some of the validity of that measure has actually been questioned, and it’s obviously not able to be done in routine clinical practice.

Now, that can be helpful, but—and you will see disparate recommendations. Some people will vehemently recommend testing every time they go in to treat SIBO and perform serial retests. I think that that contingent is slowly becoming a bit less testing prone as we’re learning more about this. You will see others who recommend no testing at all. I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle, probably a little bit closer to the no testing at all.

The North American Expert Consensus concluded fairly liberal use of SIBO breath testing. The [Rome] Consensus, which is probably the most highly regarded body in gastroenterology in the entire world recommended reserving it for select cases where you had evidence of malabsorption. One systematic review suggested treat to get a base line to see if that’s one of the chess pieces on the board, and then from there, treat empirically, which is what we do in the book. Treat empirically, meaning treat someone, observe the response, and then use their response to adjust the treatment. That’s essentially what I do in the clinic, and that’s what I recommend in the book, also.

There are also other tests that can be done. There are other breath tests that can be done for H. pylori. There are stool tests, of course, that can be done for other types of dysbiosis. There are even blood tests that can be performed and other urine tests. It’s tempting. I understand. In theory, it’s tempting to say, “Well, I want to test to know what’s there.” Some people say, “If we’re not assessing, we’re guessing.”

There’s another aspect of this, which is very important, which is if you’re only able to assess 30% of what we know could be a problem, then how helpful is your testing, especially if you stop listening or your don’t listen as closely to the patient’s changes because you’re only looking at what the labs show? This is one of the ultimate travesties of a testing-heavy method of practice is you don’t get those absolutely valuable pearls from the patient’s response to steer how you’re moving things forward.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree 100%. Then you have your certain bacteria that are hydrogen producers, certain bacteria that are methane producers. I interviewed Dr. Brown on—he has -inaudible- product called Atrantil, which, by the way, my doctors absolutely get fantastic results. It has a tendency to treat both. People argue, well, if you test, you could then target the hydrogen producers, which are different to kill than the methane producers. What’s your thoughts on that?

Dr. Ruscio:
I think that question brings us to what I think is another incredibly important fundamental pillar for us to establish, which is—how do I say this most diplomatically here? If you’re looking to make practice more difficult, you will certainly be able to make that a reality, but if you’re looking to make practice more simplified, then you will be able to make that a reality. The challenge is that some people—

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- well.

Dr. Ruscio:
Some people really enjoy the complexity, which is all fine and good, but you must always look for how do we bring this back to the simplest core set of recommendations, or treatments, or tests?

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, Doc, I train doctors, so that, what you just said, is very, very true. I have a group that absolutely loves to make it more complicated, and that’s the way they’re going to function. Then I have a group that absolutely wants it simple. You’re right about that.

Dr. Ruscio:
It’s not to say that what you do would be any less effective or any less scientific. In fact, I would argue—and I believe it was Einstein that first said, “If you cannot explain something simply, then you do not understand the problem well enough.” We should not conflate being remedial with being simple. A good clinical algorithm is one that—

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve been doing this for many years. I’ve been teaching for well over 15 years going on 20. The longer I go into it, the more I’m making things more simple. It’s like you said, the less I test, the more that I—you just really end up at a more simple view the more you learn.

Dr. Ruscio:
Precisely, right. The more we learn—and this is happening as a field—the less we have to do. A cell phone now can do 10 times, arbitrarily, what it used to be able to do five years ago, and it’s half the size. As we get better, we should be able to do more with less. I can say, for some patients and certainly for some doctors, the piece that eludes them is they’re making things unnecessarily complicated.

Here’s a great point. By the way, there’s a lot that we know works. Sometimes what I find happens is people are chasing down the exotic, and the new, and the complicated, but they haven’t even mastered the therapies that we know work. If that’s happening to you, then you are doing your patients a disservice. It’s not intentional. Obviously, we’re all trying to help people as much as we can. It’s just important to realize that sometimes these new and novel things, if they’re distracting you from having a mastery of what we already know works, then you’re really committing a dice roll.

To your point, I see the validity in testing to identify what type of organisms, hydrogen or methane, if you’re using pharmaceuticals because then you would want the one certain pharmaceutical, or potentially two different pharmaceuticals if it was methane, or a different pharmaceutical altogether if it was a fungus. Again, with the herbal medicines, it appears that most of these herbal medicines have broad-acting effect.

Again, do we need to make it more complicated like that? I really don’t think so. I would rather have someone undergo antimicrobial therapy, look at their response, and then we can say that either cause a reaction, so we have to change to a different formula because it was likely some kind of allergic or intolerance reaction—they improved somewhat, meaning we can either go longer, or a higher dose, or use biofilms, or they didn’t respond at all, meaning maybe the stimulus that the microbiome needs is not antimicrobial stimulus. If you get so caught up in all the details of these tests, you may miss some of those simple directing cues at the expense of trying to analyze all of this complicated lab data that you’re pouring over.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree. Without pulling you into a new topic, a new direction, which I tend to do, what are—what’s the next steps with this that are absolutely imperative that people listening need to hear?

Dr. Ruscio:
After someone performs antimicrobial therapy, I do recommend they use a prokinetic, but again, my recommendation there may change in light of the placebo-controlled trial that—it’s been actually a few years long to actually run this trial.

Dr. Pompa:
Back up. Prokinetic, people aren’t going to understand.

Dr. Ruscio:
I’m sorry. Prokinetic is an agent that helps to keep food moving through the intestines at an appropriate pace. That is one of the recommendations I make at the moment. That may change in light of new findings depending on some of the research that we’re going to be performing. To take a broad spectrum natural prokinetic—many of the ingredients in these are very novel and, arguably, maybe even health promoting like ginger. We don’t have to make, necessarily, a hard case for safety. It’s cost that I also try to be very sensitive to, and that’s why I try to minimize the amount of things that people take so that they’re not incurring more cost than they need to.

A prokinetic may be helpful. The other thing that I think is probably more important and maybe something that’s more of a tripping point for people is we wait until this point until the experiment with either increasing the prebiotic and fiber content of the diet or utilizing a fiber and/or prebiotic supplement in their supplement regimen.

There’s a very important directing principle that—if you look at all the literature, you can kind of tease it out. People who are the most symptomatic have the highest chance of negatively reacting to prebiotic and/or fiber supplements. There are data showing that they can be helpful. They have shown the ability to reduce blood sugar, and leaky gut, and help with essentially healing the gut, and feeding bacteria that feed short-chain fatty acids. There have been some mechanistic and held outcome data points showing that the prebiotics and the fiber can help, but they can also flare people. How do you know which way someone’s going to go?

It seems that the more symptomatic someone is, the higher the probability that they’ll have a negative reaction to fiber or prebiotic supplementation or high levels in the diet. We wait until we’ve gotten a little bit down the road of the gut-healing protocol to then cautiously introduce these to see if someone will benefit or if they will have a negative reaction. Then if they do, we go into that with our eyes wide open, and we pull them out of that very quickly in case they’re reacting negatively.

Dr. Pompa:
Every fiber’s not created equal, you know. You have more soluble fibers, which the bacteria love to eat, and then you have the more insoluble fibers like psyllium, which is more of a prokinetic. It moves through. Talk about some of the prokinetics that you’re studying. Talk about what they are, the things that our viewers can be like, “Oh, okay. I could try this to help speed things through the gut a little bit better.”

Dr. Ruscio:
Again, I would only recommend someone uses those after they’ve gone through all the other steps in the protocol because you want to make sure you use this at the appropriate point in the sequence. Iberogast is probably the most well-studied compound. That was what we were going to study originally, and we had approval to study that.

Then Iberogast changed hands in terms of who owned the formula, and they took that product off the market in the US. You can still buy it—for no safety reasons to my knowledge. It’s probably just a business decision that dictated that maneuver. You can buy it still through some online outlets if you live in the US. It’s just we couldn’t study it if it wasn’t allowed for distribution in the US.

MotilPro is another good agent that can be helpful, which has some similar but different ingredients, ginger as one, and then there’s a few other compounds. The challenge that we get into here is we have predominately mechanism studies and very few outcome studies with these natural prokinetics. Why that’s detrimental—and this is another, I think, fundamental point I talk about in the book. If you look at mechanisms, and then from the mechanism and for what the treatment should be, there’s a fairly high probability that you could be wrong.

To your earlier point about soluble and insoluble fiber, one would think because soluble fiber feeds bacteria, for the people with IBS, the soluble fiber would be the most prone to causing reactions. It’s actually the complete opposite. The people who have IBS do the best with soluble fiber and have the highest incidence of adverse reactions with insoluble fiber, which it totally doesn’t make sense.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah. -inaudible- more irritable. The bile is irritable, and it tends to make them—drive them nuts.

Dr. Ruscio:
Right, or even as another example, we would think that people with gut inflammation or leaky gut would do better on a high FODMAP diet because prebiotics and FODMAPS feed bacteria; bacteria secretes short-chain fatty acids; short-chain fatty acids -inaudible- inflammatory and repairative to the gut lining, yet we see, for some reason, for those people, when they do that, they actually can feel worse.

The point I’m driving at is with the prokinetics, theoretically, they should work, but until we really can substantiate that, I do recommend using them, but I don’t put all my eggs in that basket in terms of prevention. Those are probably the two better-known prokinetics that are on the market. There are some different ones in Canada that are essentially some of the—some similar ingredients, but that’s an area where I still think we have a decent amount to learn.

There are medications that can useful. Low-dose naltrexone is one, and that may have other -inaudible- amino modulatory benefits. Low-dose erythromycin is another in addition to a third compound known as Resolor. These drugs, you’ll have side effects. It’s not to say that they have severe side effect profiles, but I think people like -inaudible- starting with the natural compound, and so that’s where we recommend people start in the book.

Dr. Pompa:
Real quick on the drug thing, the [Xican], what about the one that they advertise on TV? Am I saying that right?

Dr. Ruscio:
Xifaxan?

Dr. Pompa:
Xifaxan, thank you. That seems to help with the—it helps more with the methanes and not the hydrogens, so it only works for about half the people. What’s your thoughts on it?

Dr. Ruscio:
The Xifaxan, or rifaximin as it’s also called, that helps with—I think you inverted those—with the hydrogen—yeah—

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- I invert everything.

Dr. Ruscio:
Yeah, I do this. It’s hard sometimes to keep all the details straight. That helps with the hydrogen SIBO. It likely needs to be combined with neomycin, which probably has a little bit more—not probably, appears to have a higher side effect profile than the rifaximin. There’s two different pharmaceutical antibiotics that be used, and they can be helpful.

Now, especially the rifaximin is criticized sometimes, and I actually think that we should defend the antibiotic in this case. I really do try to be objective. Even though I like the natural medicines, there are—we want to be fair. With rifaximin or Xifaxan, the studies that are criticized are studies that are only using one intervention of an antibiotic. They’re not combining the intervention with diet, lifestyle, probiotics, preventative treatments.

Would we expect to see a remarkable level of improvement with just one mono-therapeutic approach? No, but those studies showing benefit, even though some of those studies are short-term benefit with rifaximin, do substantiate the idea that antibacterial therapy can be helpful in IBS and SIBO. I think as natural providers, we have a nice, robust toolkit of other therapies that can work along with the antimicrobial treatments to extend and hopefully prolong indefinitely the improvement that can be garnered -inaudible-

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, I’ve had people helped by it, honestly, and again, whether it’s—I’m making up a number—50% of them, it still was helpful in some of the cases, for sure. Oh, gosh, where were we going with that, though? We had something else. We were going down—I knew me asking that question was going to throw me off because we were really going down a road there.

Oh, I know what it was. People utilize, gosh, even Vitamin C flushes to just push out bacteria. Sometimes it works. People utilize—we kind of talked about fiber. Sometimes that can help move things along. Magnesium is another. These are basic things that people use that sometimes help. Is it in that same category that we were discussing?

Dr. Ruscio:
Great question. Technically, these are not known as prokinetics. They’re known more as laxatives. There’s a difference there. It doesn’t make a huge difference for our audience.

Dr. Pompa:
They -inaudible- peristalsis, but they have a flushing effect.

Dr. Ruscio:
Right, now for constipation, yes, magnesium, Vitamin C can both work very well as can a predominantly soluble fiber. Now, the constipation can also be a byproduct of bacterial overgrowth or a food choice. We also have data showing that probiotics can be an effective treatment for constipation.

Now, one nuance here—and we also talk about this in the book—is that when people go on a low FODMAP diet, sometimes they’ll become less bloated but more constipated because the low FODMAP diet is reducing some of these fibers and prebiotics. If you know that going in and if you tell people that going in, they have a better ability to kind of wrestle with that mentally, and they understand, okay, this is helping with the bloating, some of the gas, maybe some of the abdominal pain, but I’m a little bit more backed up, so now I’m going to do one serving of magnesium citrate at night, and my bowels are now moving fine.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, right, then it’s helping.

Dr. Ruscio:
For the majority of cases, by optimizing their diet, finding the right probiotics, using a little bit of natural laxation support, which for some people, it’s totally normal if they need that. A little bit of fiber, or magnesium, or Vitamin C, or a mixture of those, totally reasonable. There’s a small subset of people who may have constipation induced via non-IBS mechanisms, so to speak. If someone has all their other digestive symptoms ameliorate, go away, yet they’re still left with constipation, then that may be a different type of constipation.

In some of these cases, it could be known as dyssynergic constipation where there may be tightness in the muscles, especially in the pelvic floor. We’ve interviewed a gastroenterologist motility specialist who has pioneered something known as biofeedback therapy, which can retrain some of those muscles, and so essentially the colon to contract and the anus should open up to expel feces. In some people, that signal gets skewed, and they have to retrain those muscles. The solution is essentially this retraining.

Then in other people, they may have slow transit constipation of which there are a number of treatments. We have discussed this with gastroenterologists on our podcast, and we’ve referred for some patients to use these. A small number of patients seem to like them, but I’ve found that many patients would rather be on fiber, and high-dose magnesium, and maybe even an occasional enema than use some of the medications like linaclotide, or Linzess, or what have you. I do think there’s a time and a place for those. It’s just a very small subset. For some people, they do help. We should remain open, but try to really utilize the most noninvasive therapies first for a specific condition.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve seen this little food for thought here that PEMF devices can help that, what you’re talking about and even get the peristalsis moving because part of it’s neurological. I’ve seen people with laser devices and light therapy actually help, as well. There’s some other thoughts. Here’s a big one: We both have seen this where something as simple as the ileocecal valve can be open. Now, we can argue how did it get open in the first place? You have to go upstream even further. Closing it makes a significant change in people. Talk a little bit about that.

Dr. Ruscio:
I wish there was more data looking at some of these ileocecal valve therapies. Manual therapies are often used, and the—

Dr. Pompa:
Pretty much going in and finding the tender point, and basically massaging it. That’s pretty much as simple as it gets.

Dr. Ruscio:
I think the group that’s really done the best to advance visceral massage or visceral manual therapy has really been Gary and Belinda Wurn who are at Clear Passage and have pioneered a therapy known as Wurn therapy, where they’ve documented reduced infertility, reduced SIBO relapse after doing an assessment and then breaking down, with fairly intensive manual therapy, these scar tissues and these adhesions.

I think if there’s a structural component to this, it may not be as specific as the ileocecal valve, per se, but maybe there’s points at which there’s adhesions or scar tissue that need to be manually broken down. By doing that, definitely, there have been some—again, a small percentage of cases, but certainly some cases that have seen very, very impressive results from some type of visceral therapy to the abdomen.

Especially if someone has any history of abdominal trauma or surgery, that indicates that you may be someone who wants to consider this. Then if you also have a history of any kind of inflammatory issue in the gut or the bowel, inflammatory bowel disease, endometriosis, or any kind of tubal obstruction, or ligation, or issue—and I’m regarding some of the female parts—then you may want to consider this.

It’d be something at end phase, and I do recommend some of these therapies as considerations at the end of the book for a section—what do you do if you’ve done everything in the book and you still haven’t optimally responded? That will really only be the minority of people because the book protocol is quite robust. There are some things, like this visceral therapy, you’re going to have to go see someone in person to really have that sorted out.

Dr. Pompa:
Folks listening and watching, if you take your belly button and the prominent place on your hip, there’s a diagonal line—I don’t know—six inches, maybe less, five inches. Go about halfway, push in. If you find a tender spot, maybe you need some of this work. Again, to Dr. Michael’s point, it could be even more complicated than that, but at least it’s a place to start. I’ve watched enough people make a significant difference just finding that tender spot and having someone or even yourself work that spot out.

Okay, let me give you the final word here as we come to a conclusion. Great stuff, Dr. Michael, and again, find the book, absolutely. I think this book will be a really good seller. It sounds like you’re really well researched, which I appreciate. Healthy Gut, Healthy You, Amazon, find it. I’ll give you the last word, Michael, on this topic that—something that these people need to hear.

Dr. Ruscio:
I think there’s really two things in one that are the most important for people to keep in mind. One is to be careful with where you get your information. I say that because I’ve seen enough patients read on the internet why they should avoid low FODMAP, or carbs, or lectins, or oxalates, or fiber, or gluten, and they’re not given the context and the carefulness with the crafting of the message. They end up making themselves sick or making their lives more difficult because they have this fearful relationship with food.

If that’s happening to you, it’s really detracting from your health rather than contributing to your health. I tried to write into the book a very hopeful and a very empowering message regarding diet and not one that’s doom, and gloom, and fearful. That, I think, is the one because it’s very important that people don’t make themselves sick because they feel they have to encumber themselves with this daunting level of dietary avoidance. It’s very, very important.

Then kind of along with that in terms of mindset is—and I always share this Nietzsche quote, which is “He who has a why to live can overcome almost any how.” It’s important that you maintain a foot in what you want to do with your life. What happens sometimes is these come together, and people start withdrawing from their work, or from their purpose, or from even their social interactions because they’re trying to diet harder, and harder, and harder. It’s very important to have a healthy outlook on your diet and good educators to help you achieve that healthy outlook.

Then make sure, if you want to be the best mom in the word or if you’re trying to lead a non-profit, or whatever you’re trying to do, keep that purpose in your life because that purpose will help pull you through some of the challenging times we all go through.

Dr. Pompa:
Well said, Doc. Love it. Well said. Great job. Great interview, and thank you for being on Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Ruscio:
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- the book. Thank you.

Dr. Ruscio:
Thank you.

Ashley:
We hope you enjoyed today’s episode of CHTV. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern. You may also subscribe to us on iTunes or find us at Podcast.DrPompa.com. Thanks for listening.

232: Save Your Brain With Root Cause

Transcript of Episode 232: Save Your Brain With Root Cause

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Dr. Titus Chiu

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith, and today we welcome special guest, Dr. Titus Chiu. We have a really important topic for you today. Dr. Pompa and Dr. Chiu will be talking all about brain health. We’ll learn how to utilize a root-cause approach to heal your brain after a concussion, how it’s possible to get well and stay well after a traumatic brain injury, and we’ll hear simple ways to gather information at home about the wellness of your brain as well as some easy brain exercises you can utilize at home. This is an episode you won’t want to miss.

Before we get started, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Chiu. Dr. Titus Chiu is a best-selling author, award-winning international speaker, and functional neurologist who is on a mission to transform the face of healthcare for the 1.1 billion people around the world struggling with brain and mental disorders. He is the cofounder and clinical director of KOBA Family Wellness, a functional medicine center located in Berkley, California that specializes in post-concussion syndrome and other neurological conditions.

Dr. Chiu is the number one best-selling author of Brain SAVE: The Six-Week Plan to Heal Your Brain from Concussions, Brain Injuries, and Trauma that was just released on Amazon. Let’s welcome Dr. Pompa and Dr. Chiu and get right into it. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
Welcome, Dr. Titus. I appreciate you coming on. What a big topic, 1.1 billion people around the world with brain disorders, all types of neurodegenerative conditions we’ve talked about on this show. That’s a big number. This has been a passion and a mission of yours to bring some of the things that you’re doing to the world and even enlighten people about this growing problem.

I live here in Park City, Utah. We have major concussion programs, brain injury programs here with skiing, snow boarding. This is a massive reality, and thank God, a growing reality. Torah Bright was one of my clients. I don’t know if you know who she is. She’s a famous, double gold medallist snow boarder. She was on Dancing with the Stars. That’s why most people know her. She’s a sweetheart. She came to me with seven concussions. I mean, imagine. Obviously, she was taken out of the sport.

With a lot of the work that I’m passionate about, I got her back in the sport. Unfortunately, she got two more concussions, so maybe that wasn’t a good thing. I guess what I’m saying is I’ve seen this in person. My daughter had two concussions. Because I’m around skiing here, I’m seeing a lot more of this problem. This goes even beyond that, brain trauma. You’ve written a number-one bestseller, which actually, we should promote. It’s called Brain SAVE, and we should make sure people can find that on Amazon. How did you get into this, Doc, honestly? Not many people are just focusing on this like you are.

Dr. Chiu:
That’s a great question, Dr. Dan. It really is my mission to help transform the face of healthcare for the millions of people suffering with post-concussion syndrome. The way I got into it is actually a pretty interesting story because I never set out to be a post-concussion syndrome specialist. Actually, years ago, I was living overseas, and I was hit by a car on my way to work. I was on a scooter, and I got smashed by a car, flew through the air, landed, broke my ribs, dislocated my shoulder. Thank God I was actually wearing a helmet or I really wouldn’t be here today.

Through that, though, I ended up—they brought me to the emergency room, and they did all the tests. Everything was “normal,” but I ended up with chronic neck and shoulder pain. I tried everything in conventional medicine. I tried physical therapy, painkillers, you name it, rest, and nothing worked. It was just so frustrating, and I was giving up hope. Thank God, at the time, though, my brother, he was a chiropractor. I went home one winter vacation, and within three sessions, he treated me, and that neck and shoulder pain was gone.

I was blown away, and I wanted to learn, how did he do that? What is this stuff, this magical stuff, and how can I do that for other people? I finished up my job, and I came back to the United States, and I just started school. I dove deep into this natural medicine, and chiropractic, and all of that. Along the way, I actually discovered neurology, and I really fell in love with it, the model of neurology, because it was a great way for me to understand the why. Why do people have the symptoms that they do? Why aren’t they getting better if they’re doing the normal -inaudible-?

Through that, I started—I dove deep into that, really learned as much as I could. I actually started teaching for a neurology institute. I was flown all over the world to teach neurology to doctors after I graduated. I’d get a lot of referrals from other doctors as well as a lot of patients that I would care for. At that time, though, I wasn’t even really specializing, like I said, in concussion, but I was seeing a lot of patients with more chronic issues, chronic neurological symptoms or even things like autoimmunity.

When I would do the normal protocols that I learned in school or that I learned in seminars, it would help a lot of people, but then there was a certain population of patients—not a huge one, but significant enough that when I would do the normal protocols like dietary changes, maybe some basic manual therapy, acupuncture, things like that—when I’d do those things, they wouldn’t get better. Again, I’m just wondering to myself, why? I was scratching my head. Why aren’t they getting better? I’d do a deeper analysis into their history, and guess what?

They all had a history of a concussion, and not like a massive concussion where necessarily they were blacked out like they got in a huge car accident, and they woke up in the emergency room. No, even simple things like if they played sports when they were younger, maybe hitting a soccer ball multiple times, never getting knocked out, but enough to kind of shake and jar their brain. I found this pattern, a lot of people with these chronic symptoms like brain fog, and memory issues, or chronic fatigue, or even things like autoimmunity. They had this root cause in the head injury. From there, I just dove deeper. That’s just my personality.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, me, too.

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah, I know. That’s why I really loved your stuff, too. It’s just about learning. I’m an eternal student. I’m also very passionate about teaching, but it all comes from my thirst for knowledge. I always see that in your work, too, and I admire it. I always want to understand why. Why are they not healing? I did this root cause analysis, and wow, a lot of them had this history of a concussion or multiple concussions.

I’m like, okay, what do I need to do to dive into that world? I went to seminars, and conferences, and I read research article. I cracked open books, and I started to learn more and more about this really—just kind of underneath the surface, this world of concussions and how I firmly believe it’s a silent epidemic. The brain controls everything. I really love your cellular detox work, and just like you, I think your—you have rooted in chiropractic, right, which is all about changing the nervous system, and that’s the thing. The brain controls everything. It controls every single cell in your body.

Even in patients who didn’t have “classical” neurological symptoms, but they might have had fatigue, or autoimmunity, or Hashimoto’s, I found a lot of them that weren’t responding to the typical protocols had a history of concussion. After I learned all that stuff and I started applying it to their lives, that’s when they started getting better. I’m like, wow, this is a huge—it’s an epidemic that really needs care. That’s actually one of the main reasons why I wrote my book is because so many people out there, number one, who suffer from these chronic neurological symptoms or other types of chronic symptoms, they don’t get the care they need, as you know.

I know that’s part of your mission is education. That’s why I wrote this book, number one, to educate other doctors, too. Other doctors out there, even though they might not specialize in neurology or concussions, I think, for a lot of their patients that aren’t responding to their protocols, it could be because they have this neurological root cause because of the concussions. That’s one reason why I wrote the book.

Number two, I wrote the book, not as a technical piece to dive deep and impress people with my knowledge of neurology or science. It’s really a straightforward, practical book for a person who’s had a concussion and is still struggling with symptoms months or years after. The way I wrote it is really a conversation because I actually have a history of multiple concussions. I write it from this perspective almost like, hey—like if you were a good friend of mine who’s had a concussion. Man, here are some things that you can do immediately, and they give you hope.

A lot of patients who’ve had concussions and they’ve been to doctor after doctor, they’re frustrated because the doctors, either they don’t know what to do and they give them some generic advice like, “Oh, get some rest or take some aspirin,” or I’ve seen this a lot with my patients, and it really brakes my heart. They get written off like they’re crazy. That’s one of the main reasons why I wrote the book is because you’re not crazy. It’s actually a physical, neurological problem rooted in the neural networks of your brain—of your nervous system.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s peel this back a little bit. The book’s Brain SAVE. I’m sure you can get it on Amazon, but I’m sure we’ll get your website here at one point, as well. I’m sure they can get it there. You have a six-week program in the book that we’re going to get to and we’re going to talk about. I can’t wait for my viewers to hear this.

I want to pull back a little bit because we said 1.1 billion mental disorders, so you’re connecting head trauma to many mental disorders, right, and I would say many brain problems. You even said brain fog, which many of our viewers and listeners suffer from brain fog, anxiety, sleep problems, hormone dysregulation. You’re connecting this to many of these different conditions. I can tell you, personally, I see a perfect storm. I see people who get a trauma and it’s the thing that sets them over the edge because they already have multiple stressors going on. Talk about this connection a little bit more and perhaps maybe what happens after a brain trauma that could lead to these things.

Dr. Chiu:
The major connection, like I said, between brain traumas and any number of chronic symptoms is the fact, number one—it’s several things, actually, but number one, the brain controls every single cell in your body, but very specifically, number two, the brain controls and regulates the digestive system, what we call the brain-gut axis. There’s a very specific neurological pathway from areas within the brain, the cortex, with what we call the brain stem, which sits in between your brain and your spinal cord.

Within your brain stem, you have this region called the nucleus tractus solitarius as well as other different type of nuclei, also what we call the dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus nerve. I’m sure you’re aware of the vagus nerve and how powerful—not only does it control digestive function, but also heart rate, and cardiovascular function, reproductive function, all the life-giving, essential functions. The brain controls the vagus nerve, which then can control the gut.

As you know, with this functional medicine model, a lot of people are starting to understand the gut is kind of like the key. It’s the gateway to health. If there’s imbalances in your digestive system, that could lead to chronic fatigue. That could lead to autoimmunity. That could lead to a whole host of different symptoms.

The thing is that the research has shown if someone suffers a traumatic brain injury, even if their digestive system is totally fine, they have a good balance of good bacteria, they have healthy gut motility, movement, they don’t have constipation or bloating, immediately after a traumatic brain injury, they can trigger what’s known as leaky gut.

Leaky gut opens the doors to a host of a million different degenerative health conditions. That’s one of the root causes for what I find for a lot of people who’ve tried just dietary interventions, supplement interventions, and lifestyle, and even running functional medicine tests looking at blood, looking at stool, looking at urine to look at all the different systems. When they do those protocols, if they don’t get better, and especially if they have a history of a concussion, sometimes it’s the concussion that’s the root cause.

Dr. Pompa:
I want to say something there because I’m finding that. Of course, you know, I’m lecturing everywhere, and right now, there is, no doubt, an excitement about the microbiome and its relationship to the brain. Matter of fact, we’ve been working on a product for four years. It’s a bacteria that—-inaudible- bacteria back the way the brain is. It’s called Neurobiotic. We get that axis.

However, with that said, what’s being forgotten is what you’re saying, meaning that oftentimes—I can talk clinically about this—is that until we get the brain here fixed, we can’t fix the gut. We’re almost forgetting about the other way around. Of course, you brought up the point that it affects the vagus nerve, the vagus nerve affects the gut, and it’s even more complicated than that. What you’re saying is we have to pay attention to this brain and this brain because there’s an interrelationship with both.

Dr. Chiu:
Exactly, yeah. You’re talking about what we call the gut-brain axis. As you know, it’s the intimate relationship between the gut and the brain. Everyone calls the gut the second brain, the enteric nervous system. Why I’m so excited about that—that already is just revolutionary, looking at how the gut influences the nervous system as well as the endocrine system, all the different systems of the body. There are so many exciting avenues of therapy through that understanding.

Now, exactly what I’m talking about, it’s not a one-way street. -inaudible- not only influences the brain, but just as importantly, the nervous system has these very specific pathways that control gut function.

Dr. Pompa:
Couldn’t agree more.

Dr. Chiu:
That’s the thing. I find that a lot of times, that’s the missing link. Treatments, if it’s a gut-brain issue like diet, supplements, lifestyle, it can totally handle that, and running lab tests and medications, if necessary. When it comes to the brain, the brain’s unique. Not only does it respond to nutrition in the form of food, and supplements, and things like that, and probiotics, it also responds to activation, meaning exercise. We can actually use specific sensory modalities like sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch to target specific neurological pathways.

For example, if someone’s had a head injury and is starting to suffer from lack of concentration, or poor focus, or just feeling kind of brain foggy, many times it’s because their prefrontal lobe has been damaged. The prefrontal lobe’s very important for helping us focus. In addition, the prefrontal lobe’s very important for helping us control and coordinate our movements. If someone has a concussion—I see this all the time. They’re like, “Oh, yeah, I have brain fog. I have all these cognitive symptoms. I’ve been to the doctor. They ran their MRIs, their CT scans, and everything’s normal.”

Then when I see them and I do a neurological evaluation, I might find that when they move their fingers quickly on one side versus the other, one side is slower than the other. The reason why that’s really important—because that’s not only a window into how well they move their fingers. It’s a window into the prefrontal lobe. With that information, it’s—I just love it because they just have this sense of relief. They’re just like, “Oh, my God. I feel so validated because I’ve been to doctor after doctor, and everyone says, ‘There’s nothing wrong. Just rest,’ or, ‘It’s all in your head. You’re crazy. You should see a psychiatrist or take these psychotropic medications.’” I find that so sad.

-inaudible- is once I figure out, hey, they have a problem with their, let’s say, their right prefrontal cortex, which deals with maybe emotional regulation as well as organizing their thoughts, then what I can do, in addition to giving nutrients that feed the brain, like fish oils, and probiotics, and things of that nature, I can also give them very specific brain-based therapies to actually target their right frontal lobe over the left because specificity is so important.

For example, for someone who has got as issue with their right prefrontal lobe—the way they might know that is if they have problems with focus, and concentration, and maybe controlling their emotions. What I can do is very specific movement therapies on the left side of their body, which targets the right prefrontal lobe, or I could give them very specific eye exercises that triggers these neural pathways, literally creating what’s known as neuroplasticity, where you can actually strengthen the neurons in the right prefrontal lobe. That’s the thing. When it comes to the brain, the brain is unique, and not only it needs nutrition, it also needs specific activation.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s back up because—I know you have five ways to heal a brain after a concussion, and you’re probably -inaudible- into that a little bit. You have a six-week program in your book.

Dr. Chiu:
I just got a little bit excited. I jumped ahead a bit.

Dr. Pompa:
I get excited about it, too, because I get this. You and I are completely on the same page with this. We’re forgetting about the brain as controlling everything in the body. I have gotten amazing results. What I have noted is when people get concussions, a lot of the neurotoxic patients that have inorganic mercury in the brain, it jars it forward. It literally drives it deeper. There’re studies showing that. When you hit your head, the inflammation breaks down other barriers, other protective measures, and then we have a complicating issue.

I know, clinically—I’ve seen that that’s part of it. I know my viewers and listeners are wanting to know this. I’ve hit my head a few times. There’s that saying. Myself, I can remember skiing once where I hit the back of my head. I wasn’t right for a week. How will we know? What kind of test can we do right now, even—like you did the finger thing. What other things can we test right now to see could this be a problem, or do I have to go to a clinic, specifically?

Dr. Chiu:
First off, if someone’s had a head injury and they’re concerned, I think the first thing they should do is go to the emergency room and get checked.

Dr. Pompa:
Of course.

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah because you want to make sure that there’s no bleeds, there’s no emergency situations, which conventional medicine excels at. When it comes to the more chronic degenerative—or neurological conditions like post-concussion syndrome or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, really, the standard of care is just not good enough. Some things that you can do if the viewers out there have had head injuries and even ones that you haven’t blacked out, after you make sure that there’s nothing life threatening going on, simple tests of your own balance.

For example, if you just stand up—if any of your viewers are sitting, you just stand up. If you put your feet close together, you might find that already doing that, you might feel a little unsteady. Especially if you’ve had a head injury, you might feel a little unsteady, but some of you might not. The next thing you can do if you’re watching out there, make sure that you have the ability to—if you just start losing your balance, just open your eyes so you don’t fall over, okay? We don’t want anyone getting injured. The next thing you can do after putting your feet together is just try doing that and then closing your eyes. If you close your eyes, some of -inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- on one foot.

Dr. Chiu:
You might find that all of a sudden, whoa, I feel a little unsteady. That’s the thing. When that happens, then we know—there’s three major systems in your nervous system that control balance. It’s vision; it’s what we call the inner ear; then it’s all the muscles. They send information to your brain, telling you, okay, right now, I’m standing here, and I’m getting this information, so I’m not feeling unsteady. If you remove vision by closing your eyes, if there’s an imbalance in your inner ear or if there’s an imbalance in your muscle signals, that means that—and you start to wobble—that one of those systems, it’s a bit off.

It’s functional. It’s not like you can’t walk around the world, and you’re falling over, but you might find that—a lot of patients who I worked with with concussion, they just say, “Yeah, something’s just not off. I just feel like sometimes I’m either floating, or I just don’t feel very grounded.” Usually, that’s because of the inner ear or the muscles. This is a great objective test to find out that maybe something’s a little bit out of balance that needs to be addressed.

Dr. Pompa:
When I close it and do one foot and then close my eyes, it’s harder. Can you -inaudible-

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, exactly, I can see you’re a little bit more unsteady.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s one foot.

Dr. Chiu:
-inaudible- do. I’m glad you brought that up because let’s say the viewers out there, if they try that, put their feet together, close their eyes, and they still feel pretty balanced, maybe a little off, you could then try with your one foot versus the other. We can actually then—for example, if you’re balancing on your right foot and it’s harder than your left, that’s a clue that maybe what we call the cerebellum on your right side or the parietal lobe or frontal lobe on the left, there’s some imbalance there. That’s very subtle, but that’s the thing, Dr. Dan.

Many times, that’s the key that cracks the case for my patients with concussions. It’s these subtleties that—because a lot of times, they’re not incapacitated where they can’t get out of bed, but they might feel dizzy when they’re driving in a car or when they’re in a grocery store walking down the aisle. They might feel overwhelmed. Their light and sounds are just a little bit too much. It’s these subtleties because they’re subtle imbalances in what I call the neural networks, the different brain regions, that allow for us to balance, to focus, to not be irritated by light or sound.

Dr. Pompa:
When you said light, that was one of my questions. What about light sensitivity, sound sensitivity? Those are symptoms that I see in neurotoxic people in general, even chemical sensitivities. Is that made worse by the brain being out of balance?

Dr. Chiu:
Absolutely, and very specifically, there’s key neural networks that create that light or sound sensitivity. One of them is what we call the mesencephalon. I talked about the brain stem earlier. The brain stem’s just this really important part of your nervous system between your brain and your spinal cord that controls vital functions like we talked about, like heart rate, digestive function, reproduction, all that stuff.

At the top of the brain stem, it’s this area we call the midbrain. It’s the top of the brain stem. That controls what we call the ascending reticular activating system. That allows us to have arousal. One of the ways we get arousal is through what? Light and sound. If the midbrain is out of balance—and many times, people with, like you said, neurotoxicity, or what I call immunoexcitotoxicity, which is what happens in a concussion—that area becomes overactive. Any little light coming in, any little sound coming in just arouses the person too much, and they just feel overwhelmed, or irritable, or sometimes even angry, I find.

That’s the thing. Another test that people can do to see if their mesencephalon’s out of balance is if they take a light, maybe a light from their phone or a flashlight—if they shine it in their eye from their right hand field of view versus the left, you might find that one side, you might feel a little more irritated or a little more light-sensitive than the other, or maybe both sides, meaning that both sides of your brain stem is just overactive. That’s a really good objective way to see, maybe I need to do things to calm down my brain stem. In doing so, it can help with the light and sound sensitivity.

I really like the fact that you brought that up, Dr. Dan, about a lot of patients you see with neurotoxicity, they get the light and sound sensitivity. Guess what? The mesencephalon, that top part of your brain stem, it actually has receptors for inflammatory molecules, what we call interleukin 6. Interleukin 6 is a pro-inflammatory cytokine. It’s a messenger that causes inflammation in the body and in the brain. The midbrain, the mesencephalon, actually has a huge density of receptors for them, meaning—let’s say, for example, someone has a gut imbalance.

Maybe they have constipation, or they have some type of gut infection. That can cause inflammation not only in their body, but that can also cause inflammation in their brain. If chemicals from the gut, the interleukin 6, goes to the brain stem in the mesencephalon, that neurotoxicity from the gut can lead to guess what? Light and sound sensitivity. When I work with patients, we do things that help lower inflammation, many of the similar things you do, detoxification, supplements, running lab tests to identify other root causes of inflammation.

At the same time, physical things you can do to help calm an overactive mesencephalon or brain stem is to plug your ears or to wear sunglasses. Like I said, the midbrain, it processes lights and sounds. One way to calm an overactive mesencephalon is to either wear sunglasses or to plug your ears. A lot of times, there’ll be a -inaudible-. That’s why I said, you listeners out there, you might want to shine a light from the right side versus the left and see if one of them creates a little bit more irritation or light sensitivity, one side versus the other.

Let’s say it’s the right field of view. What you can do is we can wear sunglasses, but in addition, you can take an earplug and plug your right ear. That’ll help calm down that overactive mesencephalon. That was what I was saying earlier. The brain and the nervous system’s unique. Not only does it respond to things like fish oils, probiotics, all those wonderful things; it also responds to your senses. If you have an area that’s too active, all you need to do is calm it down. If you have an area that’s underactive, you need to do things to activate and stimulate it.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s peel back your six-week program and -inaudible- five things you can do to heal your brain after a trauma. Let’s give our viewers and listeners some real concrete things here. What does that look like? Okay, great. Some of you are doing the tests right now watching this and going, “Oh-oh. I can’t even stand on two feet close let alone one foot. If I close my eyes, forget it. That light thing? Yeah, that really irritates me.” They’re identifying that they have a problem. Now what?

Dr. Chiu:
Sure, so in my book, I actually walk people through an entire six-week program. It’s cool because in my book, I even talk about before that, making it personalized. More important, as you know, Dr. Dan, than the treatment is identifying the root cause. In my book, I talk about the root cause of post-concussion syndrome and its what I call these imbalances in the different neural networks that make up your nervous system.

One of the top neural networks that gets injured in a concussion, as we already talked about, the prefrontal lobe. Check it out. In my book, I actually have a little quiz where a person, if they have a head injury, they can be like, “Do I suffer from brain fog? If I do, is it mild, moderate, or severe?” You can actually grade it, and then you figure out, “Oh, wow, at the end of it, I have a score of 50. That means, wow, there’s an issue in my prefrontal lobe, so I’ll need to do something about that.” That’s in part one of the book.

Part three of the book is the actual six-week plan. Let’s say you found that you had issues with the prefrontal lobe. There is a very specific exercise in my book that you can do to exercise your prefrontal lobe. That’s actually a meditation procedure—a meditation from Kundalini yoga.

Let’s say, for example, you do the quiz. You have brain fog. You have issues with concentration. You might have issues organizing your thoughts or controlling your emotions. That’s a big yellow—red flag that you have an issue in the neural network made up of your prefrontal lobe. One thing you can do is this meditation where you just go like this with your fingers. With your thumb and index finger, you do one, and then you do two, and you do three, and four just in that order, so index, middle, ring, pinky. You just do that.

Then what you want to do, you want to add these words, Sa, Ta, Na, Ma. You coordinate the index with Sa. Then when you say Ta, you do the middle finger. When you say Sa, Ta, Na, the ring finger, and Ma for the pinky, so Sa, Ta, Na, Ma, Sa, Ta, Na, Ma. You can do that seated. I like to do that walking, actually, while I’m listening to music so I can get a lot of blood flow and oxygen to my brain. The cool thing—

Dr. Pompa:
What’s the point of—you’re stimulating one part of the brain by making it do a verbal connection, and then you’re stimulating the other—frontal cortex by making it do an actual -inaudible-

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah, you got it. When you speak, what allows you to actually express language is this area we call Broca’s area in your frontal lobe. Then when you do fine movements with your fingers, guess what area lights up, as well? The frontal lobe, as well. When we do these two together, we’re really powerfully activating the prefrontal cortex, so Sa, Ta, Na, Ma, Sa, Ta, Na, Ma. If you have a lot of high scores in your prefrontal lobe, that means there’s probably a real big issue there. I don’t recommend people doing that for too long because although it seems very small, it is a very powerful way of activating the prefrontal lobe.

There is an actual research study—I actually reference it in my book—where they look at people doing this and literally lighting up the frontal lobe. It’s a very powerful thing. A lot of the exercises that I talk about in my book, they might seem trivial, but if your brain is already neurotoxic from your concussion and there’s a lot of inflammation, many times, less is more. In my book, I also talk about this really important concept of guess what? Slowing down. That’s the thing. Even for the viewers out there who haven’t had concussions, this one tip that I talk about in my book, which I call mini breaks, can literally transform your life.

I know, for me, and I would imagine maybe you, we sometimes get really focused. We get really excited about our projects and making an impact in the world. I could sit down and just work for 8, 10 hours straight. Not after I had my head injury. I had to do a lot to heal my own brain. Now, I could sit down for hours without even taking a break, but that’s not good. We all go through these cycles, which we call ultradian rhythms, where we have about—we have a lot of energy. If our brains are healthy, we have a lot of energy for about 90 minutes. When it comes to about two hours, we start to go down. We start to go down in terms of our energy levels, our brain capacity.

Many of us, myself included before I started doing this practice, I would blaze through that, 30 minutes where I actually needed to step back from whatever I was doing and take a mini break. We all can do that, but it’s at the expense of creating more toxicity in our brains because we drive what’s known as the fight or flight response, we release cortisol, adrenaline, all those things.

In addition, another thing that people can do who’ve had head injuries or even people who haven’t but kind of can relate to what I’m saying—it’s like getting really focused on something and not taking a break are what I call mini breaks. The point of that is to really unplug and kind of clear the synaptic clutter that’s collected between your brain cells within that 90 minutes of focused attention. For every 90 minutes, what I encourage you guys to do first is, if you haven’t done this before—actually, if you’re sitting down at your desk to start working or focusing on something, set your alarm for 90 minutes.

When it goes off, finish that sentence you’re writing or reading, or if you’re having a conversation with someone, just kind of wrap that up, and just step away from that. The point of these mini breaks is it can’t involve any type of focused attention. It could be something as simple as—what I do a lot is just close my eyes and rub my eyeballs because that can actually trigger the parasympathetic nervous system to calm the fight or flight -inaudible-. I just close my eyes. You’ll see a lot of kids doing that. Sometimes when I get really tired, I’ll just—I’ll catch myself rubbing my eyeballs because I need that mini break. My brain, it’s over-saturated.

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible-

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah, but what it actually does, it triggers a neurological reflex that calms the fight or flight response down.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re right, though. Innate intelligence makes us do -inaudible-. When I’ve been doing stuff for a while, I automatically start doing that. It’s incredible. We just -inaudible-

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah, beautiful. That’s the thing, Dr. Dan. The key is it’s about awareness. After a while, if you set it in your clock for 90 minutes, you’re going to start becoming aware. I don’t set it in my clock anymore, but I might find that if I’m in a conversation, even though it’s an interesting conversation, I start getting a little distracted. That means it’s time for me to have a mini break. I might excuse myself, be like, “Hey, I just need a second. I’m going to stretch.”

People out there, they might find if they’re focusing on something and they start getting fidgety, just stretching a little bit or just stretching their arms and yawning, that’s their brain—that’s your brain telling you, okay, it’s time for a mini break. Believe it or not, that’s one of the most powerful things I’ve shared with my patients who’ve had head injuries; not even patients with head injuries, but more like neurological symptoms. That’s been a lifesaver.

Dr. Pompa:
What about ADD, the opposite, where people are like, “Are you kidding me? Ninety minutes? I can’t focus for 10.” I have a lot of neurotoxic lead patients here in the house. We won’t mention any names. I have to break myself up. Like you, I can focus for hours at a time, and purposely, I have to break it up, but them, it’s 10 minute, 5 minute, 1 minute. What about that? Is there anything we can do for that?

Dr. Chiu:
It’s the same concept, Dr. Dan. When I said 90 minutes, I meant for people who have had—who haven’t had concussions or have healed from their concussions like I have. A lot of my patients with head injuries or patients who have neural inflammation, they might only be able to go for five, ten minutes without -inaudible-. What they need to do is also honor that.

I find a lot of my patients who’ve had head injuries, they get frustrated because they might have been able to focus for hours on end, but all of a sudden, they go five minutes, and they have a headache. The key, again, is just self-awareness, number one, becoming aware of that. When is that sweet spot for you? Is it 90 minutes? Is it 10 minutes? Number two, just honoring that. If you’ve had a head injury and you can’t focus very long anymore, that’s okay because your brain is inflamed, and it’s really—it makes sense that you can’t.

For people who have never been able to do that, the other thing is—what would be really helpful for them is actually doing the frontal lobe finger tap because then it trains the frontal lobe to actually start allowing them to have better focus and attention. It’s really fascinating. I’m going to geek out just for a second here. There’s two key neural networks that are involved in what I’m talking about. One is called the central executive network. That allows us to really have great focus and concentration.

People with ADD or ADHD, guess what, those neural networks are a bit weak. What they need are exercises and therapies to strengthen those. The central executive network is—one major hub is the prefrontal cortex. Exercises like the Sa, Ta, Na, Ma meditation works fantastic for people with issues with ADD, or inattention, things like that.

Dr. Pompa:
I’d like to get my wife in here. We’re going to do some Sa, Ta, Na, Ma. Anyway—

Dr. Chiu:
Then the other neural network, which is really important, that I’m talking about here is called the default mode network. That’s kind of like the standby mode of our brains. In the past, scientists used to think when we’d space out or not do anything that required a lot of focus, our brains would just shut off. That couldn’t be further from the truth. What actually happens, the central executive network that’s tied up with the frontal lobe, that shuts off, but guess what? The default mode network powers up. It’s beautiful, though.

The default mode network is the neural network that’s related to healing, integration, to creativity, and insight. You might find that a lot of people with “ADD,” their gift is to be able to see the bigger picture and tie into all these different things related to insight and creativity. What I find, it’s all about balance. I’m really good at the central executive network, focusing in. I used to try to—like if I had a problem where I was trying to be creative or come up with a solution, I thought, oh, the more I work at it harder and harder, I’d finally get that insight.

Isaac Newton, when did he discover the law of gravity or whatever? It was when he was chilling out under the tree and the apple fell on his head—is because the default mode network was activating, allowing all those—the energy put in, all the ideas that was percolating to start to come together and integrate.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s so true. I often notice when I’m doing something that slightly distracts my conscious mind, meaning driving, showering, -inaudible- things start firing. You know what I mean? I’m being slightly distracted. When you’re driving, of course, a lot of visual stuff, showering, just physical as touch, and then boom. Ideas come.

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah, they start to come. It’s because your default mode network related more to that right hemisphere of the brain starts to come to life. It’s just magic. It’s so important, again, not only for creativity, but for healing, and that’s what I’m talking about. People who might have had really good ability to focus and concentrate before their head injury or before some neurotoxic event, they might not be able to do that as much because they’re still trying to tax their attention networks. What they actually need to do is allow their default mode network, the healing network, to start to come to life more.

The way to do that, again, is to start becoming aware of the need for mini breaks. Is it every 90 minutes that you start to get a little kind of brain foggy, or is it every 15 minutes? When you start to become aware of that, you need to honor that. Just step back. Exactly, close your eyes, rub them, stretch. Take a break, and if you have the luxury, take a nap. I’ve started to chunk out days outside of patients when I’m writing or working on videos and education materials where I’ll literally allow myself, if I’ve done—work really hard, I’ll find a nice patch of grass if it’s nice out, lie down in that patch of grass, close my eyes, and do this yoga pose where I just let everything go and let my mind wander.

A lot of times, if I’m in this—if I have a lot of ideas that I’m trying to capture and I don’t want to lose them, that’s the attention network going. The point is even if you’re lying down and you’re closing your eyes, if you have a lot of great ideas, don’t try to hold on to any of them. The more you do that, the more the attention networks become tired, and then you actually become less productive and less creative.

One other way to allow the default mode network, besides these mini breaks like closing your eyes and rubbing them, is in those times, let your mind wander. If you’re just kind of done, and you’re tired, you’re yawning, you’re fidgety, just sit there, and just let your mind wander. Look out the window. If ideas come to your head, just let them come in, and just like if they were a cloud passing by, let them pass by. Then you allow the healing—you allow the integration and the insight to happen.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s funny hearing you speak about this because you understand the neurology so well and have obviously—

Dr. Chiu:
I’m a neurology nerd. I’ll -inaudible-

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, which is so cool. All right, give us more. There’s a six-week program. There’s obviously five things to do after a concussion. You’re hitting on some of them. Keep going. What next?

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah, absolutely. Just to kind of recap, there’s things that are very important to exercise your brain and to rebuild the neural networks that might have been injured, number one, like the Sa, Ta, Na, Ma. There’s things that you can do to help healing, and integration, and wholeness happen, and that’s by slowing down and doing something like taking a brain save mini break. Number three, there’s things that you can do in terms of what we kind of talked about before, lower any type of inflammation or what we call excitotoxicity -inaudible-

Dr. Pompa:
This is where my brain detox would come in because you can’t stop the inflammation if you don’t remove the toxins.

Dr. Chiu:
Absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- detox incorrectly, especially when it comes to the brain. Honestly, we have thousands of people watching this right now who got their lives back by getting rid of the neurotoxins in the brain the right way.

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah, exactly, with the programs through the cellular detox. That is essential because when I’m talking about building neural networks and doing these exercises, if we’re doing that and the systems—if the person’s brain is inflamed or toxic, it’s like we’re building bridges, but overnight, nighttime, they get burned down.

Dr. Pompa:
You know what? This excites me because this needs to be done while they’re doing brain detox, right? It’s like, yeah, you put those things together because you still have to fire and rewire. We can get rid of toxins, but if we don’t rewire the bridges—we still need to make new bridges. That’s what I’m talking about. We’d have to fire and rewire.

Dr. Chiu:
Both are so essential to brain healing. I like to use the analogy, it’s like I’m doing personal training for a person’s brain. For example, the viewers out there, if they had a goal of wanting to lose weight, they might go to a personal trainer who understands exercise and also understands nutrition. If a personal trainer gives them a diet and supplements to lower inflammation, guess what? They’ll probably lose weight, but are they going to build muscles just by changing their diet?

No, you actually have to do the exercise. You have to do push-ups, and pull-ups, and squats. Same thing with the brain. That’s what I was talking about. The brain is unique in that not only do we need to do things to lower inflammation and toxins, we actually need to do things that actually target neural networks through therapies and/or exercises.

Like you said, Dr. Dan, if a person’s inflamed, if they’re toxic, and we’re trying to build with exercises, you’re going to build that, but then overnight, it’s going to burn down. Another really important thing to do as you’re going through the six-week plan to heal your brain—I talk about in my book more specifics—is lower neural inflammation. We can do that through diet and supplements.

As all the viewers know out there, very important nutrient for brain health to help actually grow the connections, but also lower their inflammation is what we can docosahexaenoic acid. That’s DHA, which is found in very high levels in fish oils. Unfortunately, though, a lot of the world’s sources of fish, not only are they -inaudible-

Dr. Pompa:
I’m going to be honest with you. I’m more a fan of fish than fish oil. There’s a lot of reasons for that we won’t discuss.

Dr. Chiu:
Exactly, but yeah, it’s very saddening. The good news is there’s things we can do. There’s high-quality supplements out there that, really, the companies pay attention to purity, quality, and safety. If you can’t find a really good source of clean fish, my next recommendation is upping your dosage of fish oils, more specifically, docosahexaenoic acid. There’s vegan sources out there, things like algae and whatnot, as well, that vegans can use.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s a counter-thought to it. I pay attention to the ratio of omega 3 to omega 6.

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
We purposely target a 4:1 ratio for the brain. There’s a couple of shows I’ve done on the dangers of fish oil, talking about some of those issues, but I don’t want to get side-tracked on that right now. I do want to say this: What about some of the other things? There’s a product I’m experimenting with. It’s the lion’s mane mushroom. There’s one that’s sulphoraphanes that we’re running some tests on. Both of those are nootropics, if you will. They have a dramatic effect on the brain. There’s some other ones that you love.

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah, I’m glad you brought those up because, yeah, I just love nutrition and supplements because I think food as medicine is not only powerful, but also very yummy. Lion’s mane has been shown to activate nerve growth factors and [BDNF], and then the sulphoraphanes, there’s actually studies for—it was an animal study, but still, it can translate into human studies. After there was a head injury, by taking sulphoraphane, it actually helped rebuild the blood-brain barrier.

Other polyphenols, very important, like curcumin, found in turmeric, like the curry spice, so you can get it through food. You can also get it through high-quality supplements. What happens, very briefly, in a head injury—it’s an answer to a question you had earlier. What happens in a head injury? Not only is there a physical trauma, but there’s also a chemical trauma, that immunoexcitotoxicity. Toxins are released in the brain that you actually—your own brain cells holds them, but if they’re released in too high amounts, we call them excitotoxicities, glutamate.

Dr. Pompa:
Glutamate’s -inaudible-

Dr. Chiu:
Anything you can do to help calm down an excitotoxic brain—and people watching out there, they’re like, “What does that mean?” If you have light or sound sensitivity or you get irritable after your head injury, most likely, you might have excitotoxicity happening in your brain. One thing you can do to help calm that down is taking magnesium. It’s one of the master minerals, especially what we call magnesium threonate, which allows the magnesium—

Dr. Pompa:
That’s what we use.

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah, perfect. We’re totally on the same page. I love it. Those are really important things. You can get magnesium from a lot of leafy green vegetables, but if your brain is immunotoxic, you’ll want to do that in conjunction with taking magnesium threonate.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s what we do, yeah, because it crosses the blood-brain barrier. I know GABA has—and taurine have a play on that pathway, as well.

Dr. Chiu:
Absolutely, yeah. GABA helps to calm down any over-activity of brain cells, which—it’s kind of paradoxical. You think, oh, if your brain is injured, it should start shutting down. It doesn’t. It actually first becomes overactive, and that’s why you have the light/sound sensitivity and the irritability. You want to do things to help calm it down, just like you’re saying.

GABA can work really well, anything that helps support the GABAergic pathways, magnesium threonate, and things that lower inflammation, like DHA, fish oils, and again, making sure that the omega 3 to 6 ratio’s in -inaudible- balance, as well as looking at EPA versus DHA. That’s where, Dr. Dan, it’s really about also personalization.

Dr. Pompa:
I don’t want to put you on the spot, but do you know anything about NMDA receptors, N-methyl-D-aspartate? There are -inaudible- in the spinal cord, as you mentioned, the upper spine—in the brain stem, I should say. They fire that pathway, and there’s basically a negative feedback that drives inflammation continually unless you downregulate it. What do you know about that pathway?

Dr. Chiu:
NMDA, that’s so important. It’s kind of like when, in health, it’s crucial for neuroplasticity. What ends up happening, neuroplasticity is a beautiful, amazing ability for our brains to change structure, and when you change its structure, you change the function. When you change the function of the brain, you change your experience with the world. We can do that through our different experiences.

In order for neuroplasticity to actually happen at the cellular level, though, the nerves signal our experience. For example, remember when I was talking about lowering the level of light or sound coming in? That’s going to help deactivate the NMDA receptor in the mesencephalon. Like you said, if a person is already overactive and there’s too much feedback, you need to calm that down.

On the flipside of that, if a person has—their prefrontal lobe isn’t working very well, and they have attention issues, they have ADD, or they feel distracted in their brain fog, you want to actually activate the NMDA receptors. What ends up happening when you do the Sa, Ta, Na, Ma, guess what? You’re firing a very powerful pathway from your nerve receptors in your fingers, runs up your spinal cord, synapses or makes a stop in your cerebellum, then crosses over into your right prefrontal lobe.

When you do your left finger movements, you activate NMD receptors in your right prefrontal cortex. If the stimulus is strong enough, the NMDA receptor—this is where magnesium comes in. Normally, the NMDA receptor is blocked by magnesium. If you activate it powerfully enough by doing the Sa, Ta, Na, Ma with focused attention, you remove the magnesium block, and then you allow calcium to come in, which leads to neuroplasticity. I can geek out in all the cellular mechanisms. That’s the thing. It’s about finding that balance.

For some people—and I said this earlier—if their prefrontal lobe is not strong enough, you need to do things that activate the NMDA receptor. For example, if they have problems with focus, attention, you want to do things that actually exercise the frontal lobe. On the flipside, if someone’s had a concussion or they’re neurotoxic and they have light and sound sensitivity, those NMDA receptors are already overactive because the magnesium is released. Guess what we use? Magnesium threonate to plug that, calm that down. Put on the sunglasses. Put in the earplug. That calms things down.

While we’re driving the frontal lobe pathway, there’s actually a very specific pathway that connects the frontal lobe with the mesencephalon, the brain stem. When we create and strengthen the frontal lobe, that calms down the fight or flight response in the mesencephalon. All this has to work together in conjunction just like what you said, just what I lay out in my six-week plan. We have to do things that activate the brain by activating NMDA receptors. We have to do things that rest the brain by calming down NMDA receptors. We have to do things to remove toxins by plugging up the NMDA receptors and magnesium. We have to do things that lower inflammation, things like fish oil, DHA, and other clean sources.

Then finally, the fifth thing that we can do, in addition, just like you said, is really removing the toxins. In my book, one of the chapters actually—in the six-week plan is—week five is take out the trash—I think you’ll like that one—where we remove toxins, not only when me immobilize toxins. We actually need to sweat them out. We need to poop them out. We need to make sure that all of the routes for toxins to get out of the body are optimized, so gut health is optimized and using sweat.

In our practice, we use an infrared sauna. If people don’t have that at home, they can go to their local gym, sit in the sauna, and sweat. If you haven’t done this before and you’ve had a head injury, I don’t recommend doing it for more than five minutes at a time. You know how that is. If you don’t have access to the sauna, even doing something as simple as taking an Epsom salt bath, that helps -inaudible-

Dr. Pompa:
I recommend all these things. All -inaudible-

Dr. Chiu:
We’re totally on the same page. I love it. Those are the top five things I can recommend for people out there. Again, like I said before, the key is personalization. What might work for one person might not work for another, or it might work, but maybe not at the same dosage. Maybe you need a lot more fish oils. Maybe you need to spend less time doing mini breaks and more time sweating, things like that. They key is personalization.

That’s why I’m really excited about the book because in the book, there are quizzes that help people get to the root cause of why they’re struggling with their head injuries and figure out what are the specific regions of the brain that might need more activation, need more rest. In addition, at the end of the book is this six-week plan with exercises to target those areas, as well as things to do to help lower inflammation, help to clear out toxicity, and programs like yours, as well, go into deep depth with detoxification, which is so important.

Dr. Pompa:
We have a preparatory phase. Then we have a body phase. Then we build them to the brain phase, and that’s where we’re using things like—

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah, exactly. You got to do it in the right order.

Dr. Pompa:
CytoDetox, actually, some of the particles cross into the blood-brain barrier; some do not, purposely. Then we also match it with alpha-lipoic acid in the brain phase because we want to bring in fat solubles—chelators to actually move the stuff out of the brain. Then we have—we’ve prepared the downstream. We grab it in the gut so you don’t reabsorb.

Admittedly, I haven’t read the book yet, but you better send it to me because I really want to read it. I’ve read your stuff, obviously, but I haven’t read the book. I can’t wait because I think that I’ll get a lot of really amazing ideas on things that we need to be doing to really help with the [neuroplasty] a lot. Putting the detox together with this, I think there’s a lot of magic there. I have a question for you.

Dr. Chiu:
-inaudible- right?

Dr. Pompa:
This question, it’s maybe off topic. I can’t wait to hear your response. How do you think that EMF plays into this? EMF, we know, has an effect on the NMDA receptors, the calcium channels, and what it’s doing. This is another form of toxin today that’s—at least the levels that we’re exposed to is new to humans. What do you think about that?

Dr. Chiu:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Really, at the end of the day, we’re all energy. Even when we talk about all of these physical receptors, it’s because they’re vibrating. It’s not so much like this physical -inaudible- happens, the vibration interactions. EMFs can be really, really a huge obstacle to people healing from brain injuries. The interesting thing is I think EMFs, they do—they have really subtle, yet powerful impacts on human physiology. What I see almost all the time is after a head injury, a lot of people become a lot more sensitive to the EMFs.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s basically why I asked, and I was going to make that comment, that clinically, that’s what I see. What’s going on there?

Dr. Chiu:
A lot of it—again, it goes back to what’s actually happening at the NMDA receptors. If I had a white board—I used to teach neurology, like I said before. There’s what’s known as this action potential that happens where a neuron, before it becomes excited, has to cross a certain threshold. Normally, our brain cells shouldn’t be so reactive. They should be like a chill, kind of like—we have a Rhodesian Ridgeback. She’s a very sweet and calm dog. She doesn’t really react to much unless there’s a danger or something.

Imagine normally when our brain cells and our NMDA receptors are healthy, it’s like a nice, cool, relaxed dog that only responds when it needs to, whereas after a head injury, the cells sit a lot closer to threshold, meaning the Rhodesian Ridgeback becomes more like Chihuahua with an AK-47. Any little stimuli, whether it’s light, sound, which is a form of energy just like EMFs are—a lot of patients after a concussion, because their neurons are sitting what we call a lot closer to threshold, meaning any little stimulus will trigger them. Have you seen at the carnivals—in the past, they used to have these games called The Strong Man.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, of course.

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah, where you hit the bell. If you hit the thing strong enough, it rings the bell. Normally, it’s like when you hit that bell, only if it’s really strong and it really should bring our attention like if it’s some danger thing or something that really is exciting to us, we bring our attention to—our brain gets activated.

What ends up happening is that bell then, rather than being all the way down here, it sits here so any—if you breathe on the trigger, it rings the bell, and over, and over, and over, people get exhausted. Again, it really boils down to it’s just energy, whether that could be light, that could be sound, that could be these EMFs. I think one of the solutions is, yeah, absolutely, we need to—because who knows what it’s doing in the long run to our physiology. This is a massive science experiment, which is a bit frightening.

What we can do to protect ourselves is everything that you talk about through cellular detoxification, everything that I’m talking about through brain exercise. When we do that, we then bring ourselves further away from threshold. If we want to talk about it at the cellular level, we bring those NMDA receptors further from threshold by plugging the magnesium, by lower inflammation, and through exercise so we become more resilient. Absolutely, I think, especially for people who’ve had head injuries, you want to avoid EMFs as much as possible, which is pretty hard these days.

What you can do is what I do because I’ve had head injuries, and I’m somewhat sensitive to this stuff, I always turn my phone off if I’m not using it. I keep it far away from my brain, far away from my family jewels, the most important organs, my heart. Then if I do use it, I’ll use a speakerphone.

Dr. Pompa:
I always do.

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah, exactly. The way I look at it is it’s just kind of a necessary evil these days, but then what I do is I try to spend as much time as I can in nature lying in a patch of grass because that helps lower the threshold of -inaudible-

Dr. Pompa:
That’s what I’ve found. It is all about the threshold because it’s all about adaptation, isn’t it, meaning that people do what they can to survive. If it’s near that threshold, you’re going to be reactive to everything because it’s trying to survive. If we can lower the threshold, physical, chemical, emotional, electromagnetic, -inaudible- the threshold. We have to hit all of it to lower that threshold -inaudible- not as reactive, number one, but number two, then once you get near that threshold, I always say you’re creating more damage. Your pocket’s overflowing, so you drive the inflammation. We have to empty the stress bucket, the -inaudible- threshold bucket, and really, paying attention to all of these things is the key.

Dr. Chiu:
They’re all so important because it all adds up. What I shared with you guys earlier with the brain save mini break, that’s one way of lowering that mental threshold.

Dr. Pompa:
I was just going to say that. You’re lowering the threshold.

Dr. Chiu:
It clears that, and especially if you take a mini break. Then what I try to do is we try to—because we live really close to this gorgeous regional park, Tilden Park. We try to get out there at least once a week and go for a hike where we don’t have any goals in mind. We’re just meandering, or just soaking up nature, and just clearing all the excessive energetic gunk that’s collected over the week.

People who don’t have that luxury where they live really close to a national park, they can just start filling their homes with plants. Aloe vera has been shown to actually increase oxygenation at night, so get an aloe vera plant. Put it in your bedroom, and you help to bring oxygenation to your brain and help to clear out a lot of that gunk that you’re talking about.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m sure you have a zillion more little tips in your book. Where do you get the book? What’s your website, and where do they find it?

Dr. Chiu:
Yeah, great. My book is called Brain SAVE: A Six-Week Plan to Heal Your Brain from Concussion, Brain Injuries, and Head Traumas Without Drugs or Surgery. The viewers out there, they can actually just go on Amazon, and the paperback was just released. Oh, my God, I’m so happy. It’s just a whole other thing that—like in April, the digital copy released. That was exciting, but when I actually got the physical proof, it was like, oh, man. It’s a whole other thing.

Yeah, I encourage you guys, share in this joy with me. Get a physical copy and just feel it, and share it with people who you think would benefit from it. Even if you’ve never had a head injury, I’m sure you know someone out there -inaudible- been in a car accident or even been on a roller coaster, and gotten shaken up a bit, and aren’t the same after that. This book can change their life. They can get that on Amazon, and they can learn more about me and my unique approach to root-cause neurology on my website, www.DrTitusChiu.com.

Dr. Pompa:
Thanks, Dr. Chiu. Wow, great stuff. Like you said, this is a show people are going to want to share because there’re so many people—1.1 billion suffering. It’ll lead to mental disease, honestly, and that’s what you have to understand.

Dr. Chiu:
I hope we have another conversation in the future. This has been such a pleasure where we can dive into that, the link between—because you kind of asked me earlier and I didn’t get a chance to answer that, the link between head injuries and psychological symptoms.

Dr. Pompa:
I almost brought it back there, but for the sake—let me make you a promise. I’m going to read the book, and I’m going to have you back on the show. How’s that?

Dr. Chiu:
I would be honored, yeah. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Dr. Pompa:
Sometimes it’s almost good because if I would have read it, I’d jump into details because I remember practically everything I read, so -inaudible- nuances. Invariably, I ask everything that I’m interested in, and I—when I kind of go in a little more naked, I ask what the viewers would ask, I hope, so it’s good. Part two, I’m going to ask the in-depth questions, and I’m going to be really down into it. This is an important subject. It’s definitely about the brain, period—is a fascination of mine. Thank you for being on, Dr. Chiu. I appreciate you, and we’re going to have you on again.

Dr. Chiu:
You’re welcome. I appreciate you, too. Thank you.

Ashley:
We hope you enjoyed today’s episode of CHTV. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. You may also subscribe to us on iTunes or find us at Podcast.DrPompa.com. Thanks for listening.

231: The Paleo Cardiologist

Transcript of Episode 231: The Paleo Cardiologist

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Dr. Jack Wolfson

Dr. Pompa:
Cellular Healing TV fans, exciting few weeks. You are on location with me at SocMed, the Society of Progressive Medicine. Do you know why we’re here? Because we are bringing together MDs, NDs, DCs, all types of practitioners to mastermind, bring the best of what we believe people need to get well today, and as a matter of fact, even this very evening, tonight, we have the leaders coming together in this profession to meet on the future of alternative medicine.

You’re on location, so I’m going to be bringing you some exciting interviews with some of the leading practitioners in the area that you’re going to want to hear from, cancer researchers, doctors, stem cells, you name it. You’re going to hear some exciting interviews right here, so the next few weeks, stay tuned to Cell TV for these exciting interviews that I know that you’re going to love, and it’s going to definitely affect and change your life.

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. This is the last of our series of special episodes recorded on location at the SocMed Conference in Colorado Springs, and in this episode, we are joined by our friend, a paleo cardiologist, Dr. Jack Wolfson. Dr. Pompa and Dr. Wolfson talk about focusing their practices on treating the root cause of disease and not the symptoms. Many conventional doctors are not talking about diet and lifestyle, and the public is suffering as a result.

Dr. Wolfson, a conventionally trained cardiologist, shares his journey of becoming a doctor who turned on the prescription medication model of treatment and began to focus on prevention and causation. Once his eyes were opened to the powerful world of holistic medicine, he dove in and became passionate about teaching his patients how to change their lifestyle so they can address the root cause, heal, and get off pharmaceutical drugs safely.

The doctors share valuable information about diet, important supplements, and lifestyle to help improve heart-related issues, from stress management to grounding to sleep and nutrition. You will also learn about the downside of statins and other pharmaceuticals and gain a better understanding of which tests to ask for to assess markers which contribute to cardiovascular events. Such a great episode.

Before we jump in, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Jack Wolfson. Dr. Jack Wolfson is a board-certified cardiologist and a member of the American College of Cardiology and has emerged as one of the world’s leading holistic, natural cardiologists. A trusted leader in natural heart health, Dr. Jack owns Wolfson Integrative Cardiology in Arizona and wrote the bestselling book, The Paleo Cardiologist: The Natural Way to Heart Health. He is an in-demand lecturer about natural, healthy living without Big Pharma pills and invasive procedures. Let’s join Dr. Pompa and Dr. Wolfson. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, welcome to another episode of Cell TV, man, on location here at the—you’re part of the SocMed series, man, but actually you and I are friends. We’ve had many dinners, so welcome. Welcome, and I love your information, man. You’re a cardiologist who is bringing a very unique message. How many cardiologists talk about diet anyway? I don’t know. Did you get banned yet?

Dr. Jack:
Well, you know, I’m definitely banned from a lot of societies. I’m still a member of the American College of Cardiology, which is the governing body, but it’s just—you go to their meetings, and it’s all about the next pill. It’s all about the next procedure, and you’re right, they’re not talking about diet. They’re not talking about causation. They’re not talking about why people have heart attacks, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, so it makes me definitely a black sheep in that community when I talk about it, but it’s unfortunate, because we just don’t get the training in causation, and therefore, they don’t talk about it. It’s the public that suffers.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I think this show’s important, because we look at a lot of different conditions, diseases, and we talk about causes. I really don’t know that I’ve done a show specifically on heart disease, the risks, and meanwhile, it’s the number one killer. I do a lot of shows on diet, and of course, we’ll talk about that here, but let’s start there. We’re talking about the number one killer in people, so they may have concerns. They’re concerned about this, that, and the other thing, but the number one killer is the one we don’t think is going to get us, and unless you pay attention to this show, chances are, it will, unless we do something about it.

Before you go there, I’ve got to ask the obvious question. How in the world did you go from that world to this? You have to have a story. We’re friends. I kind of know your story, but tell them.

Dr. Jack:
You know my story. I’m a conventionally trained cardiologist, went through four years of medical school, three years of internal medicine, three years of cardiology, and then I’m on the job for a couple of years. There’s so much sickness all around me, and I meet this woman who changes my life, and she starts saying all this stuff to me, like—

Dr. Pompa:
It’s always that way.

Dr. Jack:
—the pharmaceuticals are worthless, and the procedures are killing people, and you’re not going after the cause. Everything you’ve learned is wrong, and you’ve got to change your entire paradigm. Dan, she’s telling me this on our first date, and of course this is my now beautiful wife, Dr. Heather, who’s a doctor of chiropractic, as she says, a doctor of cause. She said, Jack, you have to become a doctor of cause, so that’s what I did.

I think the reason why maybe I’m—some of your shows, maybe you don’t put as much emphasis on heart disease is because you are a doctor of cause as well, and you’re talking about why people have all these different labels, all these diagnoses, what doctors like me are trained at. Let’s call this person heart disease. This person has a stroke. This person has cancer. This person has diabetes, but they’re all labels that stem back from the causes, and you’re just going after the cause, which is really—

Dr. Pompa:
I focus on the cause, right, so I don’t talk about heart disease. Yeah.

Dr. Jack:
Which is what matters. It doesn’t matter what type of autoimmune condition you have. Something is attacking your body, and it’s up to the person with the help of a natural healthcare provider to figure out why.

Dr. Pompa:
My goal is to live longer healthy, but when I look at the stats on just sudden cardiac arrest, I realize, oh, my gosh, statistically, this is something we should be really concerned about, and again, I look at cause myself, and I avoid those causes. Talk to them, because the average person out there, if they want to live long healthy and be around for their loved ones, you have to know what’s going on here. What are the stats on just having a heart attack?

Dr. Jack:
Obviously, as Dr. Dan said, it’s the most common cause of death, heart attack. Stroke is right up there, along with cancer, and then, after that, a lot of people are suffering from atrial fibrillation. Obviously, millions are diagnosed with hypertension, and the only remedy that the medical doctor has is the pharmaceuticals, so when I learned how to go into the natural space, you talk about nutrition. You talk about lifestyle. You talk about the importance of sunshine. You talk about the importance of sleep, about walking and standing barefoot, grounding, getting stress out of your life.

Stress is horrible, horrible. We heard speakers today talking about how important it is, as us clinicians—because I still see patients on a daily basis—for me to address those emotional issues with people, and when I take a history from someone that’s had a heart attack, that’s had a stroke, if we go back in that history, we’re going to find some level of stress that the person was under. It was a divorce. It was a surgery. It was some loss of life or just finding out bad news, finding out that somebody was adopted.

There’s major stressors in people’s lives that are tremendously affecting it, and we know there is a fancy diagnosis for women under stress that develop a heart attack. Then, we go in there with a catheter, and we take a look around. We look for blockages, and they don’t have a blockage. It’s an artery spasm called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, and it’s becoming more and more common in these women that have a sudden stressor. That vessel clamps down, and they’re done.

Dr. Pompa:
What are the symptoms?

Dr. Jack:
It looks like a heart attack, because it is.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, okay, so they get pain in the chest maybe.

Dr. Jack:
It’s the exact same story, but the difference is that, the average heart attack, you go in there, and you see evidence of blockage, and you see plaque and a fractured plaque. These women, you go in there, and the artery is clean, because whatever that stressor was, it was some kind of spasm. Invariably, when I do nitric oxide testing on those women, and we do salivary test strips in the office, those women do not have any nitric oxide. I think, if we be proactive, because stress is always there—

Dr. Pompa:
If we ask the question—oh, yeah.

Dr. Jack:
You’ve got to do your techniques to crank up nitric oxide, and when you crank up nitric oxide, I think women will be—and men, for that matter—will be a lot safer.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s a product on my site called Eventa. It’s all about pumping up the nitric oxide. We also talked a little bit about hydrogen and molecular hydrogen, which we are learning a lot about at the conference here. That’s another big one for that as well. Okay, other prevention, because I know what they’re thinking. They’re saying, I can’t avoid the stressors. If you have teenagers, you have stress, right? If you have a spouse, you have stress.

Dr. Jack:
If you have a newborn baby, you have stress, right? It never ends.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so besides the classic answer of meditation, do you have any other suggestions?

Dr. Jack:
I think very clearly is that it is important to get the—just like the chemical situation, just like EMF, you want to get it out of your life if you can, so if there are stressful things in your life, I think you really need to get it out of your life, and that may include family members. That may include longtime friends.

Dr. Pompa:
You said it.

Dr. Jack:
I said it, and it’s true, but that being said, just the importance of all the different things that we’re doing, trying yoga meditation, tai chi, deep breathing, parasympathetic maneuvers, a lot of different things that can help with stress, a million and one different supplements to help with stress. We deal with stress better when our omega-3, DHA, EPA levels are high, when our certain D vitamins are high, when our levels of antioxidants, whatever it may be, but certainly giving the body what it needs to deal with the stressors is very important, because most people have a junk food diet, and they’re trying to deal with the stressors. Of course, you’re under more stress, you want more junk food.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I call it the stress bucket. You can’t do anything about a lot of them, but you have to do something about the ones you can do something about. That’s why cellular detox—but if we—physical, chemical, emotional stress will fill that bucket. You’ve got to dump the ones you can, folks, and your teenagers, can’t do anything about that half the time.

Dr. Jack:
No, you can’t do anything about that.

Dr. Pompa:
You better dump the other stressors. I mean, it sounds trite, but it’s so true. When your bucket is literally filled with stressors, physical, chemical, and emotional, it’s going to get you. Now, it’s the next stressor that gets you. Then, it’s the phone call of whatever it is, the stressful event, and if your bucket’s filled, there’s a good chance you’re going to end up in the cardiac unit.

Dr. Jack:
That’s what’s scary is that the medical doctors aren’t talking about this. I have a chapter in my book called “One Nation Under Prozac,” because that’s the medical doctor’s response to this. You’re under stress? Here’s your pharmaceutical. Then, when that doesn’t work, you try another one and another one, and it’s just sad for these millions of people.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s talk about it, the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and it’s a 9-billion-dollar industry, statins. Is that what it is, or am I just making that up? Did I just read that somewhere? I don’t know.

Dr. Jack:
No, I mean, clearly, it is, over the lifetime of that. There’s a new class of pharmaceuticals called PCSK9 inhibitors—

Dr. Pompa:
K9?

Dr. Jack:
—which dramatically lower down LDL numbers, and that is estimated per year as a 250-billion-dollar industry from Amgen that was the first company that came out with that. Whether it’s statins or that pharmaceutical, first, obviously, it’s not addressing the cause of why people have cardiovascular disease. They’re not deficient in statin drugs, but those drugs are so damaging because of the downstream effects from using statin. You’re losing your hormones. You’re losing your squalene. You’re losing your prenylated proteins. You’re losing, of course, Co-Q10, dolichol. My father died of a rare neurologic disease called PSP, which is similar to Parkinson’s, and that is linked with dolichol destruction in the substantia nigra, similar to Parkinson’s, and my father took that poison drug, statins, and I wish he was around to save him, but I’m here to save some other dads.

Dr. Pompa:
Right. I’ll say this for the show’s sake. We’re not telling anybody to come off their medication. He might be. I’m not saying anything. No, I’m kidding. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, but let’s talk about these dangers, because you just mentioned a few of them. Statins are linked to type 2 diabetes, for goodness sake. Statins are linked to dementia, Alzheimer’s. Come on, people need to know this.

Dr. Jack:
Statin drugs obviously—even if we took the word for it from the pharmaceutical companies who did the actual research on it, statin drugs can lower the risk of heart attack and stroke in certain populations from here to here. What you and I are talking about and what we talk about with our patients and in avenues like this, we don’t talk about here to here. We talk about lowering your risk down to zero, because you’re—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. They rely on that small percentage.

Dr. Jack:
They rely on it dramatically, and their pharmaceutical reps come into the doctor’s office, and the doctors are so inundated with so many patients. The reps come in with these big, different graphs, and it’s all marketing. All of those pharmaceutical dollars where they spend—where the pharmaceutical companies spend their money is not on research. They are marketing companies, and this is horrific, because young dads like you and I are thinking, I’m taking this statin drug, and the reality is that the benefit is so small. Yeah, you mentioned, we’re not telling anyone to stop their drugs. I certainly tell people in my office when they’re my patients, because we come up with a plan to replace the statin drug and find the optimal level for each people.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, well, you know, when you look at the studies, the big studies—and I’ve looked at them—that little bit of percent, if you take away the percent that could go either way, we know how these studies work, right? You kind of can get the data going in one direction and pop out four percent better. You take that away. I don’t know. It’s almost a wash, but let’s give it to them. Let’s say that there is a percentage better, but I’ve heard and read that you can really hit the same numbers with just some things as simple as vitamin C.

Dr. Jack:
Oh, no doubt.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so it’s the risk. Let’s talk about the risks, because people are going to say, yeah, but does it work? Okay, we’ve handled that, but what are the risks? It is showing that it causes brain problems and potentially receptor problems, diabetes.

Dr. Jack:
I did a video, which was basically saying statin drugs are killing millions of people.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, good for you.

Dr. Jack:
People looked at that, and they were like, where would you come up with that from? I say they’re killing millions because it’s the false sense of security. If all we’re doing is taking the risk from seven percent down to six percent, six percent of people are still dying. We’ve failed those people. We’ve failed those moms and dads and that entire population, so yes, that six percent amounts of millions of people that, if they were under the care of doctors like you and I, they would literally be as close to zero percent as you’re ever going to get. We know their side is a failure. Six percent is a failure. We were not born to have heart attacks, strokes, or die. We were born to live until we’re 150 and then not wake up one day.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, significant. I think that’s bold of you, to come out with that, because in your profession, you’re one of its enemies, and I know it did. You went through some hard stuff, like most people that stand up for truth, so applaud him please, because honestly, even people that believe what you believe, they’re not coming out and doing videos about it, and that’s the truth.

Dr. Jack:
The book, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, early 1900s—it’s hard to get a man to understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it. The cardiologists are not going to listen to this interview and say, wow, I want to go read Wolfson’s book. Oh, I want to learn about Dr. Pompa’s cellular detox. They’re not going to want to—they don’t want to do that, because the money train is where they’re at.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Jack:
They’ve got bills to pay. They’ve got school loans. They’ve got the houses and the cars, but I’m here to tell you, as the ultimate insider of the cardiology industry, it is a money factory, and I sat in on these meetings where it was basically, you’re going to order a nuclear stress test, injecting nuclear material into every patient possible, because every time someone says yes to a nuclear scan, it is essentially two grand, 2,000 dollars, into the pocket of the cardiology practice. That’s a lot of dollars to sway opinions, so those guys, those men and women that are making that kind of money, they’re not going to listen to our conversation.

Dr. Pompa:
No. They don’t want to listen, obviously. What’s your—the cholesterol myth, there’s books written about it. What’s your view on cholesterol as a causative factor with heart disease?

Dr. Jack:
I think that clearly cholesterol is very important. It was so important, I made it chapter one in my book, and cholesterol, of course, is important for every function in the body, every cell in the body, the cell fence, the cell membrane. It’s a fence. It’s made up a lot of cholesterol and of course the hormones and digestion.

Dr. Pompa:
Support.

Dr. Jack:
Then, the sunshine hits. Cholesterol turns it into vitamin D.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, cholesterol sulfate.

Dr. Jack:
This is a critical, critical molecule. I think a lot of people that have quote, unquote high cholesterol, it is the sunshine deficiency syndrome, and the answer to that, of course, is to move to a sunny climate, so if you’re interested, I live in Arizona. It’s sunny in Arizona 400 days a year. It’s sunny at night in Arizona.

Dr. Pompa:
I was bragging about Park City, 267 average sunny days.

Dr. Jack:
It’s sunny at night in Phoenix, and for people that come from all over the world to see me in the office, and they come from—they’re coming from cold weather climates. They’re coming from Canada, Minnesota, my hometown of Chicago, a lot of people from Seattle, Portland. I’m like, move. You live in a non-sunny climate. You’re in trouble when you do so, and that’s very, very, very clear in the medical literature. To answer your question, Dan, there is that sweet spot of total cholesterol, which is 160 to 260, based on 40-year-old Framingham data, so below 160 total cholesterol likely means you have cancer or something autoimmune. Then, those super high levels of total cholesterol are a sign of a problem as well, whether or not—

Dr. Pompa:
It could be a liver issue, for goodness sake’s.

Dr. Jack:
No doubt, and whether or not that it’s actually causative in a million species as far as having high levels or it’s just kind of—it’s an association, so the total cholesterol’s really high, but the problem is all these other factors that are causing that, which like we said, sunshine deficiency, dietary deficiency. The body’s making the cholesterol. The liver’s making all this cholesterol to boost the immune system, to get the job done around the body, and the other factor may be if they’ve got liver dysfunction, they’re not able to get that excess cholesterol out of the body, which then circulates around as damaged LDLs.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s bad.

Dr. Jack:
Then, you’re done.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s bad. What’s your feeling on the particle theory, meaning cholesterol just doesn’t float around our body? It needs a particle to actually make its way where it needs to go, so it’s been said that the number of particles are more important than the total cholesterol and also the size of the particles.

Dr. Jack:
Totally true. Total cholesterol, that’s what I—when my father was a practicing cardiologist, 1970s, that’s what he was doing, but state of the art testing when it comes to lipids is what’s called the Apo B to Apo A ratio, so Apo B is the stitching if we call the LDL a baseball. The Apo B is the stitching on the LDL baseball and other particles that are like that, but the HDL particle has the Apo A, so you want that ratio, Apo B to Apo A—you want that ratio as low as possible. Probably around 0.3, 0.4 is that magic number, and that is the single most predictive lipid marker that we know of, much more important than total cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL numbers. It’s really about that ratio, which is key, and then, of course, you measure all those markers of inflammation. If your ratio looks good, and your inflammation levels are low, you’re in pretty good shape. You’re unlikely—

Dr. Pompa:
The Apo B, think bad, right?

Dr. Jack:
Apo B, bad. Apo B, bad.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s easy.

Dr. Jack:
That, as you know, though—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s not bad.

Dr. Jack:
There is no—no, but I agree, and there’s definitely a need for it, but we probably want those levels lower, because some people may have high Apo Bs, but their Apo As are really high, and they’re just as protected, so that’s good news.

Dr. Pompa:
The Apo As are more protective, like you said HDL can have a protective anti-inflammatory effect. All right, but no—listen, all cholesterol is not bad, so I don’t like the term bad ADL. That’s the bad cholesterol. That’s the one that actually you need to make hormones, right?

Dr. Jack:
That’s pharmaceutical speak. The pharmaceutical companies, even myself sometimes, I’m a victim if I ever watch TV, which I don’t. If I turn on the TV, it’s always some kid show, because my kids see me trying to watch anything, and boom. You know how that is, but yeah, it’s just brainwashing, this whole bad cholesterol, like evolution or God or the creator or whatever made us gave us this bad killer particle to cause us to have a heart attack, stroke, and die. You and I both agree, all disease is manmade. We are built—it’s like the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks, he works for FedEx, he’s in the plane crash, he gets on that remote island. If all we did on that remote island was eat coconuts, fish, and vegetables and get the sunshine and the sleep and the fresh air and the grounding, we would live forever. We would.

Dr. Pompa:
At least to our genetic ripe age, right? Okay, so the test I tell people to take—because that’s what they’re ask is, what do I tell my doctor? I tell them it’s called an NMR test, and you can get them from Lab Corp, but there’s other ones. That measures those particles that we were talking about, but what other tests can they get?

Dr. Jack:
Yeah, so you know—

Dr. Pompa:
Plus CRP. Name all the tests.

Dr. Jack:
Yeah, so obviously you want to get that advanced lipid particle analysis, and whether it’s a company like Vibrant America or Boston Cleveland, or yeah, like you said, some of the major players. You want to—really what you need is that Apo B to Apo A ratio, so look at that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and they can ask their doctor for such a test.

Dr. Jack:
They need to ask their doctor about that test, because conventional cardiology right now, Dan, is like, just take your statin drug, I don’t even care what your numbers are.

Dr. Pompa:
I know.

Dr. Jack:
They literally believe that the statins should be in the drinking water.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I know. Everyone should take them.

Dr. Jack:
They don’t care what the numbers—

Dr. Pompa:
Right, and they think it prevents brain problems, which now we’re finding out the opposite is true, so anyway.

Dr. Jack:
Most certainly, but yeah, those markers of inflammation, hsCRP, myeloperoxidase. Oxidized LDL is a fantastic particle measurement. Phospholipase A2.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, PLA2.

Dr. Jack:
You can go down that whole—as far as looking at the inflammation. The most studied one, of course, is the hsCRP, so that may serve as just—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, CRP. We’ve talked a lot about it.

Dr. Jack:
—that 30-dollar, 10-dollar marker you can check. What else?

Dr. Pompa:
What number do you like them to be with the CRP? I know the standard’s under three.

Dr. Jack:
Yeah, and there’s different scales on that, so some, it’s—depending on what the scale is. Definitely the lower the better would be ideal for the CRP. You want to look at your marker of homocysteine. Homocysteine is basically a surrogate marker for your B vitamin level, so you want to drive that homocysteine level down to a sweet spot. You want to definitely check your omega-3 levels and make sure that you’ve got high levels of omega-3. The highest levels of omega-3, the lowest risk of everything, so you want to crank them up, and you’ve got to eat seafood, people. You’ve got to eat wild salmon, sardine, anchovy.

Dr. Pompa:
I prefer my omegas not from fish oil but from food, like you said.

Dr. Jack:
Listen, if you’re—and one of my favorite recipes is making your own salad dressing and dumping the anchovies into that blender, so you hide the look. Hide it, but—

Dr. Pompa:
I just like anchovies.

Dr. Jack:
I like anchovies in the fresh—

Dr. Pompa:
They might not.

Dr. Jack:
Whole Foods recently by us, they had fresh sardines. I just threw them in a pan with some ghee and fried those up. They were delicious. Omegas, too, and of course, vitamin D levels, not because you need to be taking your vitamin D supplement. It’s because you need to be in the sun and getting the sunshine.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes, I agree.

Dr. Jack:
Then, another one of my favorite test, and truth be told, I am on the speaker’s bureau and a paid consultant from Vibrant America. They run a test called micronutrient, and it’s the intracellular nutrients. One of the things intracellular they test for is vitamin K1 and intracellular K2.

Dr. Pompa:
Love it.

Dr. Jack:
I think that intracellular K2, from a cardiovascular standpoint, could be one of those holy grail moments.

Dr. Pompa:
Vibrant America—my doctors run tests from Vibrant America. We run some of their other profiles. In the past, we’ve used the SpectraCell micronutrient. How is it better than SpectraCell? I should switch over maybe.

Dr. Jack:
I do like the people at SpectraCell. Nice people, nice company, and they were one of the first people that came out, but I think Vibrant has taken it to a totally new level, totally high-end technology. I’ve been to the factory, I’ve met the owner, and the principles over there—and they’re just testing for a lot more, and I think they’re giving you a lot more actionable data as far as—SpectraCell was kind of like, is it an area of need, is it borderline? This is really telling you to the number where you’re at with that K1, with that K2, with Co-Q10, with glutathione, so they’re really giving you some more actionable steps.

Me, as a cardiologist—and I see patients with cardiomyopathy or congestive heart failure, and we know that thiamine deficiency in alcoholics that was called and is called beriberi, which is also a brain-based disease—well, all these people that I’m seeing with cardiomyopathy, I’m testing their intracellular levels of things like thiamine, and they’re coming back low, like nondetectable. Some really cool tests when you’re doing advanced things.

Speaking of Vibrant and the other offerings that you said—and there’s other companies that are doing this, so due diligence, that’s fine. I’m just telling you in all candidness what we use. The Wheat Zoomer analysis.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, yeah, we use it.

Dr. Jack:
That’s the leaky gut, and when I met my wife in 2005, and she starts talking about this leaky gut, I’m like, where’d you come up with that bogus diagnosis? Stream of consciousness here. Please make your primary care doctor a doctor of chiropractic. I just said it. I just said it. Not because Dan makes me say it or because my wife makes me say it. It’s because it’s totally true. She mentions this diagnosis of leaky gut, and I said, where—I went through all these years of training and never heard of it, and she said, that’s your problem. Go read about it. I went to the medical literature, and I don’t really find much there.

Over the last ten years, the medical literature on leaky gut or intestinal hyperpermeability has exploded, and now you can test for it. There’s some easy treatments for it. I’m going to be talking about that actually in my cardiology presentation tomorrow here at SocMed, and it’s really phenomenal stuff to kind of march it back now where you say, why does someone have coronary artery disease? It’s from inflammation. We all agree on that. The cardiologists know that, but what’s causing the inflammation is it’s starting from that leaky gut. The number of cardiologists that talk about leaky gut is just about zero.

One of the things on that leaky gut panel is anti-actin antibodies. Actin is part of the muscle tissue in the skeletal tissue, in the smooth muscle of the intestines, and in the smooth muscle of the coronary arteries. Coronary artery disease is autoimmune. Your immune system is attacking the coronary artery, and you better figure out why, and it’s not a deficiency of statin drugs.

Dr. Pompa:
That test shows that actin antibody, which is huge, right? It’s affecting obviously anywhere there’s actin in the body. Just so that y’all know what we’re talking about, when you look at micronutrients in the blood, it’s very up and down, in and out, but this is what we’re looking at in the cell, intracellular nutrient deficiencies. That’s a big deal, so this testing, it’s really unique, because looking at the blood, not so big of a deal. Maybe sometimes it is, but this is more accurate.

Dr. Jack:
Like you said, listen, all the action is happening inside of the cell, and this is really where your specialty is, because you can measure extracellular, what’s floating around in the bloodstream, all day long, but if it’s not getting in the cell, it doesn’t work. If you need cellular detox because you are loaded with toxins and metals, that’s why it’s not driving it into the cells, so that’s certainly part of the picture is that from a standpoint of—if you’re taking all these nutrients especially, you need to get tested, because how do you know what you’re doing? How do you know how the levels are being affected? If you’re taking all this vitamin K or the B vitamins or C, and they’re not getting into the cells, you better figure out why.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, exactly, and oftentimes, it’s not because you actually aren’t eating the vitamin. You could have a cellular inflammation issue and receptors being affected to the nutrient. Let’s talk about some of the possible nutrient deficiencies that drive heart disease that we’re trying to avoid. You mentioned K1 and K2. These are big ones that aren’t really talked about. I think vitamin D is starting to get talked about more, but what about K1 and K2?

Dr. Jack:
K1 and K2 are tremendous. K1, of course, has to do with the coagulation with the blood or making sure blood clots normally, and you can’t overdose on K1 or K2. You can go home and take that whole bottle and say, look at me, I’m going crazy. You’ll be totally—you’ll be healthier, probably, because of it. The only people that have to watch out for vitamin K are those people that are on Coumadin. For anybody else, vitamin K, especially when it comes in food, is fantastic.

Dr. Pompa:
K1 in particular.

Dr. Jack:
K1 in particular, but K2 really, the evidence is quite clear. The people that have the highest intake of K2 have the lowest risk of cardiovascular disease. It inhibits vascular calcification, so it’s very, very important, through certain proteins that vitamin K activates, to do that, but yeah, intracellular levels of vitamin C and how that affects as an antioxidant as far as the health structure of collagen in the cellular and extracellular matrix.

What else? Vitamin A. Vitamin A is part of the immune system, and here we’re talking about cardiology as an autoimmune disease, which it is. Vitamin A is part of the immune system. Vitamin A, actually—when you upgrade levels of vitamin A, it increases reverse cholesterol transport from the HDL particle as it’s traveling around the body, and it’s pulling out excess cholesterol from plaque or wherever it’s no longer needed. Vitamin A as retinoic acid and retinyl palmitate, not beta carotene, helps to upgrade that system as well, so that’s why we do the testing, because all those different things are all important. Co-Q10 levels.

Dr. Pompa:
Huge.

Dr. Jack:
If your Co-Q10 levels are down here, your risk of heart failure is here.

Dr. Pompa:
Statins deplete the crap out of it.

Dr. Jack:
Forty percent. Forty percent reduction on average from statin drugs, and the average cardiologist, like I said, just doesn’t care. We mentioned the B vitamin is so important. Control of homocysteine is so important, on and on and on.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s talk about having K1 and K2. I think that it’s—I always talk about these five big deficiencies that people have, magnesium, vitamin D. A lot of these are related to the heart here. K2, because people aren’t eating grass-fed anything, and maybe we enter into the diet conversation here.

Dr. Jack:
Yeah. The only time I’ve had soy in the last ten years is when I eat natto, and I was—

Dr. Pompa:
How many of you eat natto?

Dr. Jack:
Yeah, or even know what natto is, right? It’s a fermented soybean. You want to make sure you find a high-quality one. There’s a company that I found called Nyture, like Nyture. They’re from New York, and I was at a business that I would love for any of you to patronize, because it’s so fantastic. It’s in Costa Mesa, California, and it’s called Fermentation Farm.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve had their yogurt. They used to do it from raw, grass-fed cream.

Dr. Jack:
They still do.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, now they went to the coconut one, which it’s pretty unique, but oh, my gosh. You open it, and sometimes they pop.

Dr. Jack:
A husband and wife, doctors of chiropractic, opened up this place. They’ve got 20 different kombuchas on tap, tremendous source of probiotics. They’ve got the free-range, grass-fed meats. They’ve got the fermented veggies. They’ve got—

Dr. Pompa:
The broth.

Dr. Jack:
They’ve got the bone broth. They do it correctly. They’ve got a pickled egg and a turmeric, like turmeric pickling juice. It’s insane.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m fasting today. You’re ruining my fast.

Dr. Jack:
Sorry. Sorry. Your attitude’s actually good for fasting. When I fast, I get totally cranky, and my wife’s like—

Dr. Pompa:
I’m used to this.

Dr. Jack:
—is your fast starting? I tell my wife, I don’t—

Dr. Pompa:
I just finished a six-day fast. I took 10,000 people on Facebook through a six-day fast.

Dr. Jack:
Oh, wow.

Dr. Pompa:
I got more done in one week than I typically do in two.

Dr. Jack:
Oh, I love it.

Dr. Pompa:
Today, I’m not eating today. I’m lecturing. I’m doing all this. I’m too busy, so there’s just days where I eat a lot, and I have days when I don’t. I call it feast/famine. You’re going to learn about that at SocMed. Just come to my talk at SocMed.

Dr. Jack:
I’m coming to the talk. Yeah, definitely, and by the way, obviously, cardiac data on fasting, on intermittent fasting, is tremendous.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s huge.

Dr. Jack:
I absolutely love it, love it, love it, tell it to all my patients, but finally, so I’m going through the Fermentation Farm, and I’m looking at some of their refrigerated section, and I find this jar of natto. I’m like, oh, I’ll give it a try. Why not? It’s a bean, but it’s bean in this sticky kind of paste that almost looks like it’s wrapped in honey, but it’s not sweet. It may be one of the secrets or the secret to the Japanese longevity, why they live seven years longer than we do on average, and natto is very high in K2. It’s also very high in nattokinase, which is an enzyme that is a little Pacman that dissolves clots in the body, helps people with a condition called L-p-little-a, which is a nasty marker that you need to get tested for as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Part of the heart, yeah.

Dr. Jack:
L-p-little-a, get tested for that. It’s a genetic marker, hard to move, so you want to definitely make sure you’re on some kind of a natural blood thinner. There’s a million of those, but we’re talking about nattokinase. Oh, where’d you come up with nattokinase? First of all, the Japanese have studied it, and back in the 80s, if you were in the midst of a heart attack—I was just a young pup back then, but if you were in the midst of a heart attack in 1985, they gave you—there was no angioplasty, stents—bypass surgery, yes, but as far as angioplasty and stents—they gave you a clot buster, and that clot buster is called streptokinase. We’re taking nattokinase in the food—of course, it’s available by supplementation as well.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s an enzyme.

Dr. Jack:
It’s an enzyme that’s a little Pacman that does its magic, and it’s a tasty food.

Dr. Pompa:
Add that, if you’re worried about heart disease. Add it. Nattokinase.

Dr. Jack:
Add it, yes. You add nattokinase—

Dr. Pompa:
Where can you buy it? Can you buy it at Whole Foods now?

Dr. Jack:
I’ve never seen natto there.

Dr. Pompa:
No? Okay.

Dr. Jack:
You can also go to the Japanese or the Asian markets and get it. I think you can order this online as well, so yeah, Fermentation Farm for all those reasons. There you go. You also mentioned magnesium and potassium, and the ability to measure those intracellular is so key, because I’ve seen so many patients over the years. They’ve had a heart rhythm problem, atrial fibrillation but hypertensive, and they’re told their magnesium levels are normal.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s not what’s going on in the cell.

Dr. Jack:
It’s not even close to normal in the serum, let alone they’re markedly deficient in the cell, so get the intracellular testing.

Dr. Pompa:
Awesome, and then the nattokinase is one of the only vegetable sources that I know of—there might be another slight—in another seaweed type source, but you have to get the vitamin K1 and K2—well, the K2—from fat in a grass-fed animal, so if you’re eating conventional meat, you’re not going to get the levels, or conventional butter, because it’s in the fat of grass-fed meat, so explain that, because that’s a big deal.

Dr. Jack:
Yes. Obviously, whenever—I am the paleo cardiologist, and whatever I talk about, I’m talking about—

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah. By the way, I didn’t even give his—that is—he is the paleo cardiologist.

Dr. Jack:
I throw it out there.

Dr. Pompa:
They throw it out there. I think they named you.

Dr. Jack:
Yeah, no, my patients obviously gave me that moniker, and I accept it. Sometimes I get accused of going to the keto cardiology side after I talk with you, and you teach me about keto, so it’s funny, because I was interviewed for a couple of these keto summits, as you know, and people are like, oh, now you’re switching over to keto. What happened to paleo? It’s like, listen, they’re pretty synonymous. You profess, obviously, cycling of the two and stuff like that, but back to K2. You want to eat organ meats, and the organ meats, of course, are high in K2, and liver. Our ancestors ate organ meats.

Dr. Pompa:
They did.

Dr. Jack:
Free-range, grass-fed is always the key, but I found an article from a couple months ago that said they discovered for the first time ever that K2 is in Manuka honey and in buckwheat honey. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell us how much, but it’s just another excuse to use one of those type of honeys.

Dr. Pompa:
I love Manuka honey. You can use that stuff for a sore throat. It’s got antibacterial properties, good for the microbiome.

Dr. Jack:
I do think it is a good situation, though, that I think that this is where we can use the supplements industry and say, you know what, this is an opportunity to really crank up levels of K2, because they’re doing randomized trials now, and they’re looking at 360 micrograms of K2. That’s pretty difficult to get from food unless it’s from natto, because if it’s from natto, you’re sky-high levels, and you’re awesome.

Dr. Pompa:
What about another thing that people miss from not eating grass-fed anything? It’s conjugated linoleic acid. Does that play a role that you see?

Dr. Jack:
I think all these healthy fats, and especially when you test people’s levels of fats, and you want to find those great ratios of omega-3s and your 6s and your 9s and making sure you’re in the right place.

Dr. Pompa:
In grass-fed meat, those ratios are perfect, by the way.

Dr. Jack:
They’re perfect. That’s just how nature intended for us to eat those meats, eat those organ meats. Of course, you want to get your B vitamins, but specifically B12 are notoriously low in people that do not eat animal products. Every society in the history of the world has been a meat and/or a seafood eater. If you don’t eat seafood, please do. Please, please, please. Why can’t a vegan eat an oyster?

Dr. Pompa:
I don’t know.

Dr. Jack:
Why can’t a vegan eat a scallop? A scallop. What even is a scallop? It’s a mussel.

Dr. Pompa:
What about an egg? We could talk about an egg.

Dr. Jack:
It’s just—

Dr. Pompa:
I guess an egg’s a—I could see, okay.

Dr. Jack:
No, but it’s just a—

Dr. Pompa:
A nonfertilized egg.

Dr. Jack:
We’re talking about the best way to eat, but it’s just—how do we know that an oyster has any more feelings than a head of cabbage? We have no clue, but what we’re talking about is the best way to live, and why mess with mother nature? What if one of these food gurus or natural health gurus came out with the helium diet? It’s like, you no longer breathe air. We’re going to breathe helium. You’d laugh in that person’s face, and sometimes that’s how I feel about veganism.

Dr. Pompa:
There are airatarians, actually.

Dr. Jack:
Are there?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I swear. I hear these things. You think I’m kidding. I guess they’re just breathing and eating air. How long does that take? Yeah, I don’t know. I dry-fasted for a couple of days, so I guess I was an airatarian for two days, but—

Dr. Jack:
You tell me, what do you think? I grew up of the Jewish faith, and because of circumcision, I’ve kind of excommunicated myself from the Jewish religion, and maybe a few other things, because eating bread and gluten, and I think gluten is an absolute poisonous toxin to the body, but for the day of fasting—and Yom Kippur, as you know, that’s the day of atonement, and you have no food, and you have no water. I hear people talk about the benefits of it, but I personally—I like the water fast. I like the greens juice fast. That’s where I go with it, but that’s me.

Dr. Pompa:
Fasting. Feast/famine. Our DNA is set up with it, right? It’s set up for it, and there’s a benefit via adaptation, so I call it hormone optimization via—meaning from—the adaptation, because through the adaptation process, just like starting an exercise routine, the body adapts via hormones, raises up growth hormone. Norepinephrine has all these anti-inflammatory effects. Actually, we should talk a little bit about exercise. Before we do that, though, when we look at—we talked about cholesterol. We talked about risk factors, right? What about blood pressure? I would say, opposite of statins, blood pressure meds, they do—they can lower risk more. However, we’re not getting upstream, but what’s your feeling on blood pressure and the meds for that?

Dr. Jack:
Blood pressure, once again, is another sign that you’re unhealthy. If your blood pressure’s high, it’s an indication to figure out why, not here’s a pharmaceutical. When blood pressure’s high, it’s going to be from either an excess of something or a deficiency of another, and there’s so many different natural strategies to lower blood pressure down.

Dr. Pompa:
To lower blood pressure, yeah.

Dr. Jack:
Chiropractic care. Upper cervical adjustment lowers blood pressure 17/10. It’s better than any pharmaceutical could ever imagine.

Dr. Pompa:
This -inaudible- controls.

Dr. Jack:
See your doctor of chiropractic, and I know sometimes, when I speak at chiropractic events, and there’s always a couple DCs in the audience, and they’re like, chiropractic care doesn’t treat hypertension. It’s doesn’t—you know, all this stuff, and I’m like, in my mind, it does. I’m sorry. I’ve heard your philosophy. I’ve got my philosophy. My philosophy’s real simple, because I think this is what the public needs to hear. You walk into your chiropractor’s office, and they’re like, why are you here? You’re like, because I’ve got high blood pressure, and my cardiologist, Jack Wolfson, said for me to get adjusted. That’s why you’re there. Chiropractic for cholesterol, on and on and on, but for blood pressure, magnesium, potassium. Eat tons of avocados. Avocados are loaded with magnesium and potassium, C, E, fiber, you name it.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, it’s okay if he says it, but if the chiropractor says, I’m treating blood pressure because of the—oh, the board’s going to be knocking on their door.

Dr. Jack:
You tell your board that Wolfson said—

Dr. Pompa:
He said it.

Dr. Jack:
—chiropractic for hypertension, for diabetes, for thyroid.

Dr. Pompa:
The public gets that, but that’s why they don’t want you to say that. All right. Jack said it.

Dr. Jack:
Don’t get in trouble, but magnesium, potassium, omega-3s, Co-Q10, cranking up nitric oxide levels. That’s fundamental for blood pressure.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we’re hitting—we hit them all. Co-Q10, though. We both said that’s a major risk factor, right? Statins deplete it. I could mention some supplements for them, but why’s it so important, number one, and number two, why do so many people have deficiency here?

Dr. Jack:
Co-Q10, once again, it’s a matter of giving your body the tools it takes to make Co-Q10, and the best source of Co-Q10 is eating heart, animal heart tissue.

Dr. Pompa:
I had three hearts today. Kidding, obviously. I’m fasting.

Dr. Jack:
Yeah, right, but that’s a different fast, right? The all-heart diet, says the cardiologist. That’s where we get the organ meats. When’s the last time you ate heart tissue, which is so high in Co-Q10?

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, that’s a trigger to them of why Co-Q10’s so important. Why is it so in the heart? You’re eating the heart. There’s a relationship.

Dr. Jack:
The heart, obviously, is a highly, highly, highly aerobic organ, and it takes tons of ATP, as you have billions of heartbeats in your life, 35 million heartbeats a year. Your heart is really cranking, and if you’re not fueling that heart, if you don’t have that Co-Q10, which is just that shovel that takes the coal and throws it in the surface—you’ve got to have plenty of Co-Q10 that’s there, and you take statin drugs and other pharmaceuticals that can deplete Co-Q10 levels, and frankly, how many drugs have been studied in their effects of Co-Q10? The list will be very long if it was all looked at, but statins are notorious for that. Bisphosphonates, which are drugs for osteoporosis, also help to destroy your Co-Q10 levels, so wow, and then you trigger back to K2, and you talk about building strong bones. That’s all through K2. K2 keeps the calcium in the bones and out of the arteries.

Dr. Pompa:
Two products, HQ from Systemic Formulas and ENRG. Both are loaded up with the Co-Q10. Oh, man, I tell you what. This is like—when we’re talking about prevention, and we’re talking about heart attacks, now we have to talk about one more thing. Stroke is another big one. Happened to my mother, so this one hits really home to me. She had post-stroke dementia, and there’s a little regret in my life, because I didn’t know what I know now then. I felt like I could’ve prevented it, and she’d be around today, so a little emotional for me, but how do they avoid strokes?

Dr. Jack:
I know when you and I first got together, and we first had that meal together, and you were sharing the stories of your mom, and I’m sharing the story of my father, who died at 63, and it’s just like, as we get older and start getting closer to those ages, wow, how scary is that? That’s what we’re here for, but as far as stroke, once again, it’s about making sure you’re giving the body the tools it needs and taking away what it doesn’t. You want that blood flow to be nice and slick.

I personally think maybe the greatest thing to stroke prevention is sunshine. Once again, I keep hitting that thing over and over and over. We’re both familiar to Gerald Pollock and the work of The Fourth Phase of Water and his work that’s going to—he’s going to win the Nobel Prize eventually, professor, PhD, University of Washington, and what he comes up with is the exclusion zone, how the sun hits that structure in the body like a blood vessel and creates that layer called the exclusion zone. That’s the buffer between blood flow and the wall, and if you have a nice, large buffer that’s energized by the sun, you will not have a stroke. The sun will make everything flow better, all the energy, do all that.

Then, of course, you have natural blood-thinning strategies. Listen, if you’re eating McDonald’s, cookies, and cupcakes, your blood is going to be stickier, and when you’re intermittent fasting, and you’re eating all organic, paleo foods, and cycling with keto and all the things that we’re talking about, you’re getting the sleep, you’re getting grounded, you’re getting chiropractic care, you’re taking evidence-based supplements, garlic, vitamin C, vitamin E, and then the aforementioned natto and nattokinase, those are all the strategies. Not smoking, not drinking to any excess, on and on and on.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Is there any studies on aerobic versus high intensity, which one’s better, or is it a combination of both? What’s your feeling on that exercise?

Dr. Jack:
I think, first of all, whatever exercise you do, please do it outside. Do it away from the artificial lights, outside in the sun, hopefully in the fresh air. It’s not about sitting in some kind of EMF bomb treadmill while you’re in the artificial lights, and they’re spraying chemicals all over you inside of there. Get outside and do it in that fashion, and then I think hiking, biking, walking, gardening, outdoor yoga. I do agree with more of the high-intensity stuff.

Dr. Pompa:
I think they all have their place. There’s studies on both. I think high intensity works better for weight loss. I do, but I think that there’s the aerobics stuff, not too much. There’s absolute benefit.

Dr. Jack:
The literature shows that people that run marathons, for example, have a higher risk of coronary artery calcification.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s why I said not too much.

Dr. Jack:
I think, to your point, if Dan Pompa was going to be running marathons, you would be doing so and giving your body the appropriate fuel as opposed to the average marathon runner that runs—

Dr. Pompa:
And appropriate rest.

Dr. Jack:
—and then they have a power bar and then a Gatorade, and they’re just—I remember when I used to do century rides, one of the century rides that I did, at the 30-mile mark, they were offering Krispy Kreme donuts. As far as I know, people may have been dropping dead during that ride.

Dr. Pompa:
We lost three.

Dr. Jack:
Yeah, right, exactly, so eat the right foods if you’re going to do it, but our paleo ancestors, it was much more likely, of course, to be that burst activity. They weren’t running marathons. They weren’t doing century rides. I understand all of it’s fun. I get it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I love it.

Dr. Jack:
Just make sure you do it the right way.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I love it, too, but I agree. I think the bursts, we’re set up, again, genetically to definitely do more of that, but if the endurance is done right and the recovery, those people, they go out again and again and again. Most of the endurance freaks—and believe me, I kind of was one—they abuse themselves completely. With the food, of course, I didn’t do bad, but without recovery, and that could be really damaging and part of the reason why the statistics are not good.

Dr. Jack:
The other thing, obviously, is that not only are they at higher risk for coronary artery calcification, they’re also at much higher risk of atrial fibrillation. In that athletic heart, the irregular heartbeats—

Dr. Pompa:
I wanted to talk about that, because I feel like that’s something I should get checked. Tell them what you’re talking about, because this is another—this is a big hidden cause, so tell them that. Athletes, healthy people, get this, and it’s partly genetic.

Dr. Jack:
There is certain genetic predisposition, but I certainly believe we’re built pretty darn perfect.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree.

Dr. Jack:
I know you feel the same way. We are built absolutely perfect until we screw it up with all these unhealthy lifestyle choices, but I think also atrial fibrillation is autoimmune, because as we mentioned, if you are attacking actin when you have leaky gut that’s sitting in the coronary artery smooth muscle, the heart, as we said, is a muscle organ loaded with actin, and now your immune system is attacking it. The literature is—clearly, inflammation is linked to A-fib. What caused the inflammation? Reverse that, and you help to get rid of the A-fib. A-fib is probably the number one reason why people come to see me in my office. People are scared. They’re frustrated. They are highly symptomatic with palpitations, skip, flip-flops, and then they go to the regular cardiologist, and the cardiologist either offers a shocking procedure called a cardioversion, they offer an ablation procedure where they’re burning cardiac tissue—a hundred years from now, we’re going to look back at that and say, how barbaric, the stuff that we were doing back then. Then, of course, the blood thinner story, and these people that are on blood thinners, it’s catastrophic, so find out why, and then are there natural strategies you can use? Let me say one more thing, too, about blood thinners before you get bullied. Doctors like me are bullies, right? We’re total fantastic bullies, okay? This is my way or the highway. I did it for so many years, but look up a website called chadsvasc.org, and there it tells you your stroke risk if you do have atrial fibrillation. Share this with a loved one so you can find out your numbers. We’re all about what the numbers are. We were talking about this earlier today as far as cancer therapies. We’re not saying, hey, don’t take drugs, or don’t do chemotherapy, or don’t do whatever it is. It’s find out the data, and if the data says one therapy works a hundred percent of the time versus ten percent of the time in something else, then take that one that works, but when it comes to atrial fibrillation and stroke risk, know your numbers, because if your risk is two, three percent a year, maybe there’s a better strategy for you.

Dr. Pompa:
What about the heart becoming oversized, if you will? I can’t recall right now what that’s called. Athletes get it.

Dr. Jack:
The athletic heart, there is a remodeling that happens, because the athlete is in such a high cardiac output state that, in order for the heart to compensate with cardiac output and trying to push as much blood out as it can, well, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Then, as it does so, it can start to cause structural changes, remodeling changes also in the atrium, and that can lead to atrial fibrillation as well, so it’s something to watch, but I think there probably is some happy medium.

Dr. Pompa:
Is there a test you can take?

Dr. Jack:
The test would be a cardiac ultrasound, an echocardiogram, non-radiation, non-ionizing radiation test, so that’s a totally safe test, to get an ultrasound of your heart to tell you where you’re at. If your heart’s starting to enlarge, it would be best probably for you to find out why and start changing some of your exercise activities.

Dr. Pompa:
One more question for you. Does fat cause high cholesterol, and does fat lead to—I know what you’re going to answer, I just want them to hear—increased risk of heart disease? Eating fat?

Dr. Jack:
No. Obviously, we’re talking about the quality fats, and with quality fats, the answer is definitely no. Fat is not the problem.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s talk about the saturated fat I’m getting in my grass-fed steak, the butter that I’m eating. What about it?

Dr. Jack:
How about this? How about if you—we were talking about atrial fibrillation before. If you take saturated fat out of the diet and substitute it in with mono- and polyunsaturated fat, A-fib risk goes up.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, those fats are in just about everything. Even in Whole Foods—I mean, even in health food stores, the polys are everywhere, canola oil, plant, vegetable oil. Those are all the ones you’re talking about.

Dr. Jack:
Yeah, most certainly. Saturated fat is not the problem. It never was the problem. Clearly, I think that sugar and obviously all the artificials, those are all the problems, and then, of course, any kind of processed or packaged food is an issue, but fat is certainly fat for fuel. Fat’s your friend, whatever you want to entitle your next podcast or blog post. I love eating fat, but then again, I think that, first of all, the person is so individual genetically, so get tested, right? Don’t take our word for it. Just see where you’re at, and if you’re on a higher-fat, lower-carb diet, get tested, see where your numbers are. There are people genetically—those Apo E, which is another stitching on the LDL baseball—those Apo E people, certain people that have a 3, 4 or 4,4 gene. You can get tested for that gene, but they have difficulty processing excess fat, so I don’t mind them getting fat from avocados and from free-range, grass-fed meats, but the question is oils, added oils, yet new data just came out more so about the Mediterranean diet, and the Mediterranean people are amongst the longest-lived people in the world, and they’re sucking down olive oil like it’s going out of style, so get tested. Just get tested.

Dr. Pompa:
Great advice, man. Dude, thank you for being on the show.

Dr. Jack:
Absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re saving lives, man. You’re saving lives.

Dr. Jack:
You, too.

Dr. Pompa:
Once again, give him an applaud, because he’s not afraid to stand up, so thanks for the truth.

Dr. Jack:
Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
See you on the next show.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode of CHTV with the paleo cardiologist, Dr. Jack Wolfson. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. You may also subscribe to us on iTunes or find us at podcast.drpompa.com. Thanks for listening.

230: The Hidden Epidemic of Oral Toxicity and Disease

Transcript of Episode 230: The Hidden Epidemic of Oral Toxicity and Disease

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Dr. Thomas Levy

Dr. Pompa:
Cellular Healing TV fans, exciting few weeks. You are on location with me at SOPMed, the Society of Progressive Medicine. You know why we’re here? -inaudible- bringing together MDs, NDs, DCs, all types of practitioners to mastermind, bring the best of what we believe people need to get well today. As a matter of fact, even this very evening tonight, we have the leaders coming together in this profession to meet on the future of alternative medicine.

You’re on location. I’m going to be bringing you some exciting interviews with some of the leading practitioners in the area that you’re going to want to hear from, cancer researchers, doctors, stem cells, you name it. You’re going to hear some exciting interviews right here. The next few weeks, stay tuned to Cell TV for these exciting interviews that I know that you’re going to love. It’s going to definitely affect and change your life.

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith, and in this episode, we are joined by Dr. Thomas Levy. One of the topics here at CHTV which really ignites our passion is oral health, so today’s episode will not disappoint. Dr. Pompa and Dr. Levy break down how infections in the mouth cause a vast majority of disease.

Dr. Levy, a renowned cardiologist, has spent much of his career researching the effect that oral pathogens have on the body and how they are the primary cause of heart disease. The doctors discuss therapeutic Vitamin C and its powerful effect on dental toxicity as well as the important role that nutrition has when healing from the resulting diseases.

You will also learn how to take control of your own oral care, hear about alternatives to root canals. You’ll gather some information to equip yourself with before your next dental appointment, and you’ll hear Dr. Levy’s take on whether or not there is ever a scenario for which a root canal is the only option. If you or someone you know is affected by a degenerative disease with a cause unknown to you, have mercury fillings, or have had or are planning to have a root canal, please listen to this important episode. Sometimes the answers are right there in such obvious yet unsuspecting places.

Before we jump in, though, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Thomas Levy. Dr. Levy is a board-certified cardiologist who, after practicing adult cardiology for 15 years, began to research the enormous toxicity associated with dental work as well as the pronounced ability of properly administered Vitamin C to neutralize this toxicity. He has now written 11 books with several addressing the wide-ranging properties of Vitamin C, its ability to neutralize toxins and resolve most infections, as well as its vital role in the effective treatment of heart disease and cancer.

Recently inducted into the Orthomolecular Medicine Hall of Fame, his ongoing research involves documenting that all diseases arise from increased oxidative stress and that they all benefit from protocols that optimize the antioxidant levels in the body. Dr. Levy has assembled multiple protocols built around optimizing Vitamin C administration along with other agents such as ozone in order to bolster the immune system and facilitate recovery from a wide array of infections and chronic diseases. Let’s join Dr. Pompa and Dr. Levy on this special episode of Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
Welcome, Dr. Tom Levy. Thank you for being here. This is a special series that we’re doing from the SOPMed conference. You were part of the mastermind last night, as well, where we’re looking at the future of medicine. The topic that we’re going to discuss here, I felt came up. I sure hammered it home, and you did, too. You’ll have to wait to see what that topic is. Man, you changed my life, and my viewers have heard me talk about my experience and my story. I don’t know. Was it your first book? Probably not, but it was one of your original books.

Dr. Levy:
It was my 10th book.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, 10th book. Gosh, that was a long time ago. That was back in 2000. His book, called The Roots of Disease—I read his book, and it convinced me to get my root canal out. I had no pain. On plain films, it looked perfectly normal. We’re going to emphasize that, but yet, when I read your information in The Roots of Disease—and you co-authored it with Hal Huggins.

Dr. Levy:
No, with Robert Kulacz.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, that’s right, correct. It was my searching through Hal Huggins that led me to that book. That’s when I said, “It may not have been why I got sick; however, it could have been a part of how I got sick because it’s the perfect storm.” I was convinced that I wasn’t going to get well, possibly, with that root canal in my mouth. Thank you right off the top, and I thanked you yesterday.

Dr. Levy:
You’re welcome. Always glad to hear a story with a happy ending.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt about it. Back then, I just went with this Maryland bridge, and we can talk more about options there, as well. Not that he’s a dentist; you’re actually a medical doctor. Let’s start there. Tell your story. How does a cardiologist end up writing books about dentistry? By the way, I’m going to promote your new book right now. It’s The Hidden Epidemic, and I see a lot of teeth on the front. Once again, this is another dental book written by a medical doctor/cardiologist.

Dr. Levy:
I would say fate, or destiny, or whatever you want to term it is what led me into this. Even though it looks like I’m too much concentrated on the teeth, we show you by evidence of the data in there and the articles from the literature that it is, in fact, infections in the mouth—the gums, the teeth, the tonsils, and the sinuses—that cause a vast majority of disease and make worse all disease. As the title of the book says, it’s the primary cause, and by primary cause, I mean greater than 95% of all heart attacks are caused by pathogens coming from one of those four sources or more than one of those sources in the mouth.

Dr. Pompa:
You said last night, the only reason it may not 100 is because nothing’s 100 in biology.

Dr. Levy:
That’s right. There’s a good chance it’s 100%, but you just immediately get branded a lunatic if you say that.

Dr. Pompa:
Ninety-five, we’ll stick with that.

Dr. Levy:
Ninety-five is comfortable. Some 25 years ago, I was actually living in Colorado Springs here. Dr. Hal Huggins, probably the most significant renegade, maverick, anti-mercury, and as I later found out, anti-root canal dentist, I got associated with him. Met him at a conference here in town. He invited me to come by and look at his clinic.

Quite honestly, I was getting tired of cardiology. I really didn’t get any satisfaction there. The synergy of the timing, I ended up seeing what Hal did, and I started working with him. What I saw the first few days I was there is I saw patients with Lou Gehrig’s, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, sick, sick, sick people; people that I was informed in my training really weren’t supposed to get better.

Nothing’s 100%. I’m not going to say this always happened, but Hal had a program. Put them through a total dental revision, extracted root canals, took out the mercury, cleaned up infected implants, took care of cavitational disease, and started an extensive nutritional and supplemental program. For example, I saw patients, some, who had been wheelchair bound for over a year take their first few steps after a couple weeks.

Part of it—and this is what really triggered where I am now—was when I saw many of these very sick patients—they looked so miserable. Then they went and got four hours worth of the most horrible advanced dental work, extractions, and they come out of it, and they were looking bright and alert and feeling better. They wanted to go out to a restaurant in town. Hal, if you knew him, had a very wry sense of humor. I said, “Hal, what’s going on? How can these people be so animated and feel so good?” He sort of pointed at the IV bag.

I said, “Well, thank you, Hal, but that doesn’t help me a whole lot. I’ve given a lot of IVs in my life. They haven’t had this effect.” He said, “Well, it’s what’s in it.” I said, “What’s in it?” He said, “Fifty grams of Vitamin C.” I had never heard of Vitamin C being used in a therapeutic capacity before in my life, but for whatever reason—I’m not trying to give myself credit for anything other than to say that I don’t routinely deny what my eyes have witnessed. What I witnessed was to me, at the time, nothing short of a miracle. I said, “It’s about time.” I jump in with both feet and figure out what the heck Vitamin C is doing. That sort of began the story.

Dr. Pompa:
We can talk even more about that because it is significant. Hal started the Vitamin C after any of these dental surgeries or procedures. He described it as many ways. Obviously, there’s an anti-inflammatory effect; upregulates glutathione; even has a neutralizing effect on mercury. He said back then—that was some of his way of describing why people felt so darn good afterwards, but there’s probably other reasons.

Dr. Levy:
I don’t even know at this point in time because we’ve seen a lot more things develop, a lot more literature of everything that Hal knew about Vitamin C at the time, but he knew a lot. He knew that it had a powerful effect on infections. He knew that it had a powerful effect on toxins, which are invariably part of any infection, and it had a primary stimulating effect on healing.

One thing that Hal would do that no other dentist had ever seen before him was when he had a particularly bad area that was extracted, he would inject two to three units of long-acting insulin, PZI insulin. When you look at the literature today, you now see that insulin is an agent that—guess what—pulls Vitamin C into the cells. Hal was using an agent that pulled the Vitamin C into the cell and accelerated the healing. He was a man way ahead of his time.

Dr. Pompa:
He was a nice guy. Let’s go back to 95% of all disease. Look, oral microbes, I think, the last 20 years, have been associated with heart attacks. That’s why dentists want to give an antibiotic after certain procedures in the mouth. Now, are you familiar with the new study that just came out this year in February? The study states that 7 out of 10 chronic inflammatory diseases are from oral microbes. That’s in line with what you’re saying is perhaps—

Dr. Levy:
I’m not familiar with that particular study.

Dr. Pompa:
It just came out.

Dr. Levy:
I can tell you, if anything, that’s a low ball, especially depending on the disease that you look at. We now know from studies from 2013 to the present that—in one study, 100%, 34 out of 34 plaque specimens that were pulled out of coronary arteries at atherectomy—that’s where you sort of do a Roto-Rooter and pull the plaque out. They sent those off for analysis, and they found an array of over 50 different pathogens of oral origin. Each particular plaque had at least between two and nine different pathogens in it.

Now, plaques should be sterile, or at the very least, they shouldn’t have any significant microbial contamination. In this case and in other cases, the concentration was substantial, not incidental, and it was always from the mouth. The evidence is now very clear that pathogens from the mouth are not associated or linked to heart disease; they are the direct cause.

In another study in 2013, they pulled the blood clots out of patients who had acute MIs, examined them, and not only did they have these pathogens most of the time, they had them in a concentration of sixteenfold, 1,600% higher than the surrounding plasma. Now, you didn’t have a sterile blood clot that suddenly got colonized. You got a blood clot that formed because of all the pathogens that were there. We got to stop trying to gloss over and minimize the impact of this by saying, “Oh, it’s associated. It’s linked.” Yeah, it is, but we now have the evidence to show that the association and that link is cause and effect.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ll share that study with you because it’s your point. It’s showing causative factor. Seven out of ten, like you said, that’s probably an underestimation. There was a study years ago—one of the things that actually convinced me was they took a root canal, and they put it in rabbits. Talk about that because people don’t probably know about that. That was years ago. The rabbits took on the same diseases of the person that had the root canal.

Dr. Levy:
Probably one of the greatest scientific minds, in my opinion, of the previous century was of Dr. Weston Price. He was a dentist who did a lot of primary research. In this particular case, although he did many, many, many other things, he would take—extract root canals from individuals that had a neurologic disease, a heart disease, an arthritic disease, and without any further contamination, just taking it out, he would, for lack of a better word, he put it subcutaneous. He took it into a subcutaneous flap underneath the rabbit. Within a few days, the rabbit would get the identical syndrome that that patient had and then die.

This might not be—this might be cruelty to rabbits. I don’t know if you want to say that. He would then take that tooth, and he would show that same tooth in 40 consecutive rabbits would cause the same syndrome and death within a few days. Different diseases, different scenarios, but there was no question that not only were these teeth infected, they had powerful toxins. These were mostly, by using logical reasoning, toxins that were eluting off of the root canal tooth rather then—I mean, it didn’t really cause this huge, big infection, but it invariably caused the disease syndrome the human being had and ultimate death.

Dr. Pompa:
What camp are you in? In the alternative dental world and even in the alternative world, there’s two camps. There’s one that, amongst the biological dentists, that believe you can do a root canal safe, and there’s one that believes that you can never do a root canal safe.

Dr. Levy:
I have to be -inaudible- there. Now, all the time I was working with Hal, it was like root canals, never, always toxic, etcetera. What I’ve discovered since might have my former mentor flipping in his grave a little bit, but we’ve had some—in the context of writing this new book, Hidden Epidemic, root canals are 100% infected, all of them.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes, that’s important.

Dr. Levy:
We also have a subset of teeth that are asymptomatically infected. They’ve never been worked on, but we see on x-ray a big abscess. It turns out they’ve done studies where they’ve compared systemic effects of these infected teeth that had never been worked on and a root canal tooth. The root canalled tooth shows substantially less toxicity than this tooth that is infected but has never been taken out or operated on.

What does this translate into? I’ve still maintained, and I would side with Dr. Huggins, that if the patient comes in to you and has one of these asymptomatic teeth, which is detectable on the 3-D cone-beam imaging, that it should be extracted.

Dr. Pompa:
We’ll talk about that, uh-huh.

Dr. Levy:
I mean, if the patient says, “Doctor, dentist, do what’s best for my health,” no question. The tooth should come out, and you follow it with an implant or leave it alone, depends. The patient plays a role in their dental and their healthcare. What do you do when the patient says, “No, you can’t extract that tooth. It feels fine. You don’t have my permission to do that. Do whatever else you think is best for it, but without extracting the tooth.” Under those circumstances, based on the literature that we have, a root canal procedure on that tooth will make it less toxic than if you left it alone.

Dr. Pompa:
True, I would agree with that.

Dr. Levy:
Then you can counsel the patient. “Now, we’re going to periodically repeat this test. If there’s a big, huge abscess growing back on this tooth or if your blood work, your C-reactive protein is getting bad, or other metabolic syndrome, blood work’s getting bad, I’m going to encourage you very strongly to get it extracted. If none of that happens and all your blood work stays good, we’ll leave it as it is.” We don’t have further data on this, and the books suggest that these studies should be done. We know for sure some people get a root canal, and they get a heart attack six months later.

Dr. Pompa:
They’ve mobilized -inaudible-.

Dr. Levy:
We also know some people get root canals, and they do fine for decades, and they live normal life spans. How do you figure out what group you’re in? Right now, you can’t predict which group you’re going to be in, and that’s the Russian roulette of it all, but an expertly-done—this is the other thing, too.

If a root canal is to be done, it has to be done by a high-volume endodontist because if it’s done poorly it will have much more problems than if you have an endodontist that really excavates well, seals all the areas, and not much, for lack of a better word, leakage takes place in the apical area that the immune system can’t counteract. You have all those provisos, but if the patient says, “Do what’s best for me,” the infected tooth needs to come out.

Dr. Pompa:
If the patient says, “Do what’s best for me,” would you take the root canal out?

Dr. Levy:
Absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
Explain to them why every root canal, actually, even with the best methods, has anaerobic bacteria, which are these bacteria that really cause a lot of these problems that we’re talking about.

Dr. Levy:
Even though most of the time the tooth that you’re going to do a root canal on is already infected, sometimes that’s not the case. It might be pain from another origin, or you might not really know what’s going on with the tooth, and the dentist just says, “Well, you need a root canal,” and you end up getting it. Invariably, always, what they do with the root canal tooth, is they go in through the top, and they core out the pulp, the root, the nerve, and the blood supply, and the connective tissues. They core out the middle of the tooth, and there’s nothing but a tooth that’s a hole there.

Even though you might have nerve endings in the jawbone, where the bone inserts, above there, the tooth is dead. The tooth has been embalmed in situ. Once you do that, there’s no way the immune system can ever reach the infection that’s present there. Your immune system is not magic. It needs a physical matrix to move from one area to the other in these connective tissue fibers, blood vessels, nerves, you name it. If you don’t have a physical matrix, the immune system can’t do anything for you. As a result of this—and this has been corroborated by the work of Dr. Huggins and Dr. Boyd Haley at the University of Kentucky.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep, we know Boyd.

Dr. Levy:
They analyzed over 5,000 consecutive extracted root canal teeth from around the country. They just sent them all in—

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, most of which would say had no symptoms.

Dr. Levy:
That’s right, most of which have no symptoms. They analyzed them, and in 100% of those 5,000 teeth, Dr. Haley found extremely potent toxins that, in his particular laboratory setup, potently inhibited critical enzymes in the body that are used to regulate energy. That was found 100% of the time.

Just to make sure it wasn’t a artifact from when you got to pull the tooth out through this infected, toxic mouth, they also analyzed a few teeth removed for orthodontic purposes, which are usually normal teeth. They don’t want the teeth to be crowded and let braces come and pull it in. Those teeth were completely sterile and had none of these toxins at all.

The root canal—and they can call me crazy if they want. You can put the 100% label on this. One hundred percent of root canals, whether they hurt or not, and whether they show an abscess on this x-ray or not, are infected, and they’re dead, the upper part.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s the concern of many people watching this. They have health challenges, and their immune system’s already compromised. That’s why I got my root canal out. Wasn’t bothering me. Wasn’t considered infected, I would say, but knowing those bacteria are in there, I knew what could happen and maybe what was already happening. I got it removed, regardless. Let’s give them some options. I know people that watch this will say, “Well, what do we do?” That’s always the question. I take my root canal—I can tell you what I did, but what are some options today? Things got better since I have had mine done, but what are some options once you remove a root canal?

Dr. Levy:
Really, the options are fairly small. One is if it’s in a non-critical spot, you leave a space there.

Dr. Pompa:
I did that for about four years, by the way. I didn’t have the money.

Dr. Levy:
Number two is if the anatomy permits, you can put a removable bridge or a permanent bridge, so you need two teeth. The downside with the bridge—and I have a couple bridges myself. They were done a long time ago. The downside with a bridge is you have to really shave down two healthy teeth on either side of the gap in order to put the bridge in. At least for me, so far, thank goodness, they’ve worked out. That’s an option, too.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s called a Maryland bridge, and I have something called zircon. It’s really strong so it’s lasted years. It’s really done well. There it is right there. See that? Okay, camera guy, you really want to see my teeth? There you go. All right, that’s good.

Dr. Levy:
If you really want to—if you already have a large number of other teeth missing, a partial plate or sometimes it’s a full plate, is the answer. Then finally, and very significantly, are implants. Implants, I think, have gotten a little bit of a bad reputation undeservedly because the literature now shows that, believe it or not—this really stunned me, and it’s in the book here—that when you have an infected tooth taken out and you do all the appropriate things, you clean out the socket, you give them ozone, maybe give them antibiotics, IV Vitamin C, platelet-rich plasma, everything to promote good healing—

Dr. Pompa:
We talk about all those things on other shows, by the way.

Dr. Levy:
You can put an implant or start the implant process the same day. Used to be, intuitively, I just felt you got to let it—bone fill in for four, five, six months.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it was three to six months.

Dr. Levy:
The thing is—and this is what I did not realize that I have since learned—is that when you just have a hole there that you leave alone over the next few months, you are going to grow in far less bone than if you have something sticking in it. It will stimulate, and the bone will go around it. There’s been an increasing problem with the old titanium implants, but we’re finding the zirconia implants are doing very well.

Dr. Pompa:
That was one of my questions.

Dr. Levy:
On the order of—almost 95% of the time you end up with a good outcome with an implant done in this fashion. Ninety-five percent is a pretty good percentage for just about any type of procedure you could look at, especially when you see the diversity and the variable illnesses in situations that patients are in.

Dr. Pompa:
I didn’t opt for that. It was only titanium at the time. I did a little homework there, immunosuppressive, things I didn’t like, so I went with the bridge. Today, we do have the zircon or zirconium oxide implants. With the PRF, stem cell, really, basically activating your own stem cells, I think they can be done safely now.

Dr. Levy:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
I would have opted for an implant, a zircon implant, today.

Dr. Levy:
It’s important that the patient gets education because if the procedure is done well at the outset and the patient understands the care that they need to place, these things really never become infected unless you neglect the gum lines around it.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s big.

Dr. Levy:
If you let the gums become inflamed, you have a new portal of entry for brand new bacteria to come in, work their way down, and you develop an infection.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, they will.

Dr. Levy:
Sometimes that can be resolved because you’re not dealing with an infection inside the implant, just in the surrounding bone, but most of the time, once an infection sets up in an implant, it’s got to come out.

Dr. Pompa:
Just popped into my mind, before we exit this conversation of root canals and move onto other things, the fact is—and someone brought it up last night—I think it was Dr. Zach Bush—that just a dead tooth in the mouth, what does that do to the immune system? What is your feelings on that, meaning that you said, and I agree, that there could be a need for a root canal or someone has it in, but it’s a dead tooth. Is that a problem?

Dr. Levy:
Yeah, I think we were playing a little bit with semantics last night. A dead tooth is an infected tooth. You can’t have a dead tooth for any period of time without it being chronically infected. It’s going to be even worse if you see a huge abscess, but all of these infected teeth have some degree of abscess around them. I didn’t completely understand everything Dr. Bush was saying last night, but I know when you have this type—and it’s not a colonization. I think there was a little play over semantics, colonization versus infection.

Colonization is when you have a few bacteria, no systemic impact is taking place, and you’re certainly not having secondary phenomenon like pus and abscess formation. Once you start forming pus and abscess, you’ve got not a minimally, but a severely infected tooth, and guess what? Everywhere else in medicine, if you have an abscess or an infection, it’s got to come out.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s surgery.

Dr. Levy:
It’s got to be debrided and taken out as best and completely as possible because they all produce nonstop torrents of pro-oxidated or toxic debris that brings down your immune status everywhere in your body, not just in your mouth.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s been said that 88% of wisdom teeth removed end up in something known as a cavitation, which is—it’s like a cavity in the jaw. It’s an infection in the jaw, which I see ruin people’s lives, drive autoimmune, unexplainable illnesses. Talk about that.

Dr. Levy:
Actually, that came from a paper that Dr. Huggins and I put together. I reviewed a whole series of his patients that had come in to his clinic. What they did at the time was if you had four wisdom teeth extracted, after you’re numbed up, of course, they just took the drill bit, and they just pressed on the top. Usually, after two or three seconds of bzz, boom.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s like going into—missing the stud in drywall.

Dr. Levy:
It falls into a hole. I’m going to be a little off on my numbers, but some 75 to 80 percent of people that had four wisdom teeth extracted had at least three cavitations by falling in, and very high in the 90s, people that had those extracted had one or more. It’s not rare. That’s the point to make. It’s not rare. It’s expected. When you do an extraction—a typical extraction does not involve a routing out of the extraction site. The tooth sits in a strong, ligamentous almost like hammock. It’s like a shock absorber for the tooth.

Dr. Pompa:
The odontoid ligament, it’s called.

Dr. Levy:
Periodontal ligament, okay? When you don’t extract that ligament, guess what? You have a hole here, you have ligament, and you have normal bone cells here. The normal bone cells don’t know the tooth is gone because it still sees the ligaments, so you’ve lost the natural stimulus for bone to come in. Instead, the bone senses where the ligament ends at the top of the extraction site, and then fills in a little, thin cap of bone over top.

Dr. Pompa:
Then this is the infection, and here are the cavitations.

Dr. Levy:
Correct.

Dr. Pompa:
It even happens with people who’ve got the ligament removed, which I would have said is a better job just because even the anesthetics they use perhaps were vasoconstrictors, lack of blood flow in the area; therefore infection still formed.

Dr. Levy:
A lot of these are older people. They have osteoporosis. Guess what? You’re not going to have the bone of a 21-year-old in your mouth if your femur’s getting ready to fracture from osteoporosis. You’re dealing with older people, depressed and suppressed immune systems, coagulation disorders. It’s actually the exception rather than the rule to clean out one of these cavitations and just expect it to fill in completely with bone.

What you hope for is to get a good cleanout and turn a cavitation this big into a much smaller residual cavitation. As they get smaller, and smaller, and smaller, they become by all observations, and the blood work, and clinical status, clinically inconsequential. When they get massive and they start spreading along the nerves inside the tooth, they can be as toxic as anything else that you encounter. It’s the whole range of clinically inconsequential to being the primary reason for your chronic degenerative disease.

Dr. Pompa:
I see it all the time. I just recently, literally last week before I came here, I had a client. They went, they got their cavitation out, and a root canal. It may have been a month or two in between since I had talked to the person. Their autoimmune already shut down. Blood work, Hashimoto’s, normal. Other autoimmune markers, normal. That was in that short period of time. That’s the impact that these infections have on the immune system.

Dr. Levy:
Dr. Huggins, many years ago, had his clinic. He had the two-week period where he did everything in the mouth, gave them nutrition, gave them supplements. I don’t know if it was routinely or just frequently, but often enough he would have patients that had hugely elevated anti-nuclear antibodies, 64, 128 and highter to 1 come back and go down to zero in two to three weeks.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it happen. The mystery illness when someone’s not getting well and they’re doing all these amazing things, we look here, and oftentimes it’s these cavitations.

Dr. Levy:
It would have been very interesting—because this work was with Dr. Huggins some 25 years ago. It would have been very interesting to see if we were able to add to Dr. Huggins’s magic already, platelet-rich plasma and ozone. We now have evidence, and there’s a chapter on this in the new book, with Dr. Phil Mollica and Dr. Robert Harris in Pennsylvania—they give lectures on ozone in dentistry around the world.

Dr. Mollica’s been able to show that when you’re persistent with ozone injections directly in the cavitation, no surgical intervention, which is almost crazy to us old-timers, you can start to see the growth of new bones start to fill in the cavitation.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m going to show a video this evening in my lecture. Dr. Robert Rowen, he’s speaking at one of my future seminars. He has many YouTube videos of, literally, people not even being able to walk. I’m thinking of the one that I’m showing this afternoon. He injects number 215, and next scene she’s walking without her walker without pain. She’s crying because she’s—the first time.

Now, he did point out that he believed that tooth that he injected would need basically further care in the future, but he was proving to her the connection of that in her knees and her hip not working. That connection’s real. What about the meridians, those nerve connections between these teeth and certain places of the body, as well?

Dr. Levy:
My take on meridians is there are multiplicative factors. If you have an infected tooth, whatever problems you’re having are going to be multiplied many-fold and more concentrated on a certain organ system if they’re in a particular location. That said, even if they’re not in a meridian of note, they’re still going to cause you significant problems if you don’t get them taken care of. I guess the current terminology would say that meridians massively upregulate the toxicity and the pathology of these infected teeth.

Dr. Pompa:
In the past, you had brought something up. You said we had to—and this happened to me. I had a wisdom tooth removed years ago. When I was getting all of my dental work done, he drilled in, and he found a little hole, and he just kind of hollowed it out. That was the old way of detecting—and then there was these Cavitat machines, these ultrasounds. They’re still around, but today we have a different tool that I’m a big fan of. You and I both believe that everybody watching this should get this done just like any other test. Talk about it.

Dr. Levy:
Just as much as if you went in to see the doctor for the first time. Should you get a fasting blood sugar? Absolutely, that’s the only way you’re going to know whether or not you’re already diabetic, you’re pre-diabetic, you’re not in danger of diabetes, or you got a blood sugar at 300, and you need insulin right away. Similarly, a lot of the pathology we talk about in the book—that’s why it’s called Hidden Epidemic—is because it’s talking about not only root canal teeth, which you see the infection on with this new machine.

Dr. Pompa:
Cone beam—

Dr. Levy:
A very large number—this is revealed in the literature when I looked at the studies from around the world in different patient populations. A very large number—by large number, I mean between 5 and 15 percent of all adult teeth show up as being infected on this study, and these are asymptomatic. They don’t hurt the patient. The patient feels fine, at least with regard to their mouth. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that just nearly all of our chronic degenerative diseases, which are already clearly shown to be linked to and often have a cause-and-effect relationship with periodontal or gum disease—guess what?

The pathogens inside these infected teeth are the same array of pathogens that were present in the gums, except they represent a more concentrated presence of these pathogens, and they have a greater and more efficient delivery system because you can chew and not really squeeze on your gums. When you chew on a tooth that has an apical infection, you push pathogens and toxins into the blood stream and in the lymphatics as, or more effectively, than if you took a syringe and pressed them IV. These need to be found out about and addressed to give a patient their best chance at disease resolution, especially with breast disease, as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, we didn’t talk about that.

Dr. Levy:
I said we already have the evidence to show over 95% of heart attacks directly come from these oral cavity infections. Guess what? We have thermograms that show the red hot lines coming from these affected teeth coming right on down into the breasts. When you get the breast lumps even before you get the breast cancer, they light up like Christmas trees. When you biopsy them, you find these typical, or at least one of these typical periodontal pathogens in there.

You also see GI cancers, and they have the same pathogens down there because you swallow them. You pass them through the lymphatics into your breasts, through your blood stream around to your heart, or you swallow them. Wherever they end up, they increase oxidative stress and are often the primary provoking reason for developing a cancer.

Dr. Pompa:
I said this last night. It’s frustrating to me because I get a lot of clients from these very prestigious doctors around the country. Invariably, these people still have root canals, cavitations. They hadn’t had even a cone beam, which they should have had, and believe it or not, even some still have silver fillings, and yet they were going to the best of the best, if you will, and yet those causes were not even considered. That’s very frustrating to me, and it should be to you, as well. The link between breast cancer—and we just, the prior weeks, interviewed some of the leading cancer doctors, and they all went here is a big causative factor. It’s underlooked.

Dr. Levy:
They just came out in the last six months with this ClearChoice implant commercial, where they’re trying to promote it—

Dr. Pompa:
Yep, I’ve seen it.

Dr. Levy:
In one of them, they have this old guy sitting there walking along, saying, “Well, my cardiologist told me that all heart disease starts in the mouth, and I better get these teeth taken care of first before I go see him.” You could have knocked me out of my chair when I saw that. I mean, this is a nationwide commercial, so the barriers are slowly coming down.

One of the things—I also work a lot with Vitamin C, I said, and we now have what Dr. Marik did with sepsis and hydrocortisone and Vitamin C completely blocking mortality from sepsis, and then a whole bunch of institutions in the States and around the world are now doing this work. That’s a good sign, especially for one reason that nobody appreciates. Our esteemed institutions like Johns Hopkins, Harvard, etcetera, they’re never—take my paranoia for it. They’re never going to recognize a country doctor for doing something that they haven’t done or haven’t discovered.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s true.

Dr. Levy:
If they pick it up and then do a series with 10,000 patients and show it, they’ll take the credit for it, and they’ll get the Nobel Prize, and they’ll get—but that’s okay.

Dr. Pompa:
We know those people.

Dr. Levy:
Then at least the people will have what they most deserve and what’s going to give them their best chance of long-term health.

Dr. Pompa:
I had a cone beam done. First of all, I don’t know if the camera guy there can focus in on the book. I want to point this out. Tell me when you’re in. Are you in? Okay, so if you see right around here, you’ll see a massive cavitation. This is the same film. This is a plain x-ray that you get from your dentist. This is a cone beam that we’re discussing that everybody should have. You can see the massive cavitation on the cone beam, but you cannot see it. This looks completely normal on the plain x-ray. That’s the point. You want to make another point on this?

Dr. Levy:
Not only do you see this huge abscess, when you come up close, you can see that the bony border of the sinus is completely eaten away so that the abscess on the tooth is directly communicating with the sinus cavity. All of this, number one, asymptomatic, and number two, completely undetectable on the regular x-ray.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, everyone needs this. You actually brought something up that nobody really talks about. You talked about normal teeth that aren’t root canals that—not post-extraction sites possibly having cavitation. Why would they have cavitation, and does the cone beam pick that up, as well?

Dr. Levy:
That’s a little semantics there. You don’t really have classical cavitational disease without an extraction, but in a very advanced patient, you will have cavitations that develop at an extraction site and literally burrow their way in the bone to involve the apex of another tooth.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s what happened. That’s what happened to me, so I didn’t know. We got this cavitation out, and then it—what had happened is the cone beam showed that it went under the tooth in front all the way out. I had to lose that tooth.

Dr. Levy:
You’d have never found that on a regular x-ray and just stayed sick the rest of your life.

Dr. Pompa:
My plain film looked normal. Despite my best efforts of taking care of myself, that cone beam saved my life, no doubt. I would have been sick 10 years, 5—who knows, whatever it was?

Dr. Levy:
For whatever miserable period of time you had left to live.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, yeah. The cone beam can show other teeth that may have been affected by other infections is your point.

Dr. Levy:
Sure, absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
What about kids? Should a kid get a cone-beam x-ray? Could they have cavitation?

Dr. Levy:
I would say routinely, no, you don’t need to do a 3-D on a kid. What you do need to do is let’s say, for example, you have—your teenager’s going to play high school football. I definitely feel their initial physical examination—just like the blood work—should have one of these tests. When, hopefully, it comes back completely normal and he or she develops a problem when they’re 30, 35, 40, diabetes, arthritis, you name it, they redo the test, and see if a brand new infected tooth has popped up.

Now, on the other hand, with regard to kids, kids obviously develop catastrophic and fatal diseases. Let’s talk about leukemia. If you have a five-year-old kid that has leukemia, you doggone better do one of these tests because if there’s an infected tooth there—and kids get infected teeth, too. They have cavities. They dig in there. They get infected. If you have an infected tooth there, and a kid with leukemia, and you don’t address that tooth, you have completely missed his one chance, her one chance, at a long-term permanent cure.

Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Tom, I’ve had people get cone-beam x-rays and take them to their regular dentist. The dentist looks at them and says, “It looks fine to me.” I go, “Hmm,” and I send it to a dentist that looks more at these. He goes, “Fine to them,” and they see this massive cavitation. I can see them on the cone beam. What’s going on there?

Dr. Levy:
You bring up a great point. I was going to try to mention this, and then turns out the question you ask leads me right into it. As a cardiologist, we have a test called an echocardiogram. Now, I can read that echocardiogram without any information. I’m systematic, do all the measurements, look at the contractility, look at the valves, and reach my interpretation.

I will not get as much information out of that test as if the person ordering it says, “Look for vegetations on the mitral valve.” Then I can look at it. I focus in. I can see something subtle. Same thing with this examination. This examination has an enormous amount of information on it. You see the head, the brain. Unless you’re specific—you need to say, “I want the apexes of all the teeth examined in all dimensions.” When you got the controls here—

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a 3-D x-ray.

Dr. Levy:
You can just sit there and rotate it around. You can see every possible angle. I want each tooth examined in its entirety from all dimensions to rule out apical infections.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah because they’re looking at it like a plain x-ray.

Dr. Levy:
Sure, exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
“Oh, yeah, it looks fine to me.” Then when you do this—I’ve done it with my own. I’m like, “Oh, my gosh. There it is.”

Dr. Levy:
There you go.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a really important question because that’s happening more and more now.

Dr. Levy:
I’m sorry to say that that one particular one I just said is not in the book. I should have put in there make sure your interpreting radiologist, physician, or dentist knows that this is what you’re looking for. Just don’t say, “Here’s my test. Interpret it,” or you’ll lose a lot of information.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s happened to me dozens of times to the point now where I ask the question. Where can they get the book? Is it on Amazon? Where do they get it?

Dr. Levy:
Amazon and on my website.

Dr. Pompa:
Tell them your website.

Dr. Levy:
PeakEnergy.com, P-E-A-K Energy.com.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you won’t have peak energy if you have these infections, that’s for sure.

Dr. Levy:
Yeah, it was a pretty good name for a website.

Dr. Pompa:
That was really good, and the heart, too. I get it. See, now they’re going to remember it. You’ve mentioned a few other things. I had amalgams. I really cleaned up my act, obviously. Did it the right way. My protocols are how to get this stuff out of the brain safely. By the way, that’s where—big problem, too. On the post side of this is the fact that most doctors, even alternative, they really don’t go after it in the brain correctly. It turns to inorganic mercury. There, it’s locked. I got it out of my brain, but the problem was I was left with pockets, infection, periodontal disease even though I was healthy and got my life back, which would have led to bigger problems.

Dr. Levy:
The other thing with, for example, mercury is most of the docs, unfortunately, are not that experienced in different protocols for detoxification.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s what I teach.

Dr. Levy:
Everything that you mobilize is not excreted. A certain portion of it gets redeposited into new tissues. I use the expression detoxification is also retoxification.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Dr. Levy:
Especially when you’re dealing with a type of detox that you know to be highly efficient, you need to give the patient coverage, not only with Vitamin C, but with other antioxidants so that—we talked about this in my previous talk. All toxins are pro-oxidant. Vitamin C is your prototypical antioxidant. When you meet these toxins in the blood, you give them the electrons they’re seeking and trying to get a hold of, and you’ve taken away their ability to poison the body. Then you’ve just left for that the ability for them to be excreted in urine, feces, enteropathic circulation.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, the retox, gosh, I totally agree. Most of my process is dealing with the potential of redisribution and retox. In the gut, we put a binder—four different binders that don’t leave the gut. We also use one even right before the dental appointment and right after that minimizes what’s happening in and around the cell to make sure this doesn’t redistribute. Otherwise, it’s going into the brain. That’s how I lost my life. I just had two fillings randomly taken out. Eight days later, I was fatigued. Didn’t understand. Months later, years later, I finally—my life trickled down over months, and years later, I figured out what happened.

Dr. Levy:
They have, for example, a very potent detoxation called DMPS. That is one of the most effective agents.

Dr. Pompa:
I use it, but most people use it incorrectly.

Dr. Levy:
You take it, you better be buffering yourself because it pulls out toxins. I’ve seen it take patients with minimal neurologic conditions and cause them to have advanced neurologic conditions because it hammers their immune system.

Dr. Pompa:
Me, too, yep.

Dr. Levy:
I’ve also seen or had related to me—it sounds incredible, but patients that have gone blind with mercury toxicity, and they start getting DMPS injections. I don’t know what the timeframe was, a month or two. They start getting their vision back. It should be part of your armamentarium, but you’ve got to protect the rest of the body against the detox effects. It’s like I call burning down the house to get rid of the roaches.

Dr. Pompa:
I wrote three articles, When Detox is Dangerous. I talk about those real chelators because there’s mistakes made with them, as you’re pointing out and other mistakes, and as well as the other side of the coin. Many people are using these herbal things, calling them real chelators and binders. They’re really not, and they just cause more redistribution. Read When Detox is Dangerous. Anything else that is in here that you feel they need to know to avoid this epidemic right here, The Hidden Epidemic?

Dr. Levy:
We talk minimally about supplementation. That’s covered more extensively in my other books. We talk a lot about the ozone applications. For example, one thing—

Dr. Pompa:
That’s great. I was going to ask you that.

Dr. Levy:
One thing that we haven’t talked a lot about here, but it’s really important because when you have root canals or when you have other chronically infected teeth that we’re talking about, guess what tissue is detoxifying as best it can and draining those infections. Your tonsils. Your tonsils are what I call affectionately wimp lymphoid glands. They can deal with a minimal normal challenge in the mouth and protect your body. When you hit them with a root canal that’s just pouring toxins and pathogens nonstop, almost across the board, they become chronically infected.

This is important. Not chronically infected like tonsillitis in a kid where they’re big, and swollen, and puffy. Typically, they’re not swollen, and they look perfectly normal. This was the work of Dr. Issels back in the 1950s. He had metastatic cancer patients. Ninety-eight percent of them had infected teeth and root canals. Initially, he started his protocol, extracted these teeth. They did better as a group, but there was still a substantial percentage getting heart attacks.

Somewhere along the line, he figured it out. He started routinely—and it’s a major operation. Don’t get me wrong. He started routinely extracting the tonsils, and he had no more heart attacks. In Dr. Issels’s words, not mine, 100% of the tonsils, even though they looked morphologically normal, were grossly abscessed, and pitted, and scarred on the inside.

Dr. Pompa:
After my cavitation surgery, I had my tonsils injected with ozone. Do you recommend that?

Dr. Levy:
Absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
I hope so.

Dr. Levy:
You led into my next point, which is, quite honestly, I just about had a heart attack some, oh, eight or nine years ago. My CRP was elevated. I was getting chest pain. I’d done everything else, and I remembered Dr. Issels’s work. I didn’t know anything about ozone back then.

Dr. Pompa:
Your tonsils were holding infection.

Dr. Levy:
My CRP was elevated, so I got my tonsils taken out. Worst experience of my life, but my CRP came back into normal, and my chest pain subsided. I got an angiogram six months later, and they were perfectly normal. I have no doubt I had a critical stenosis back then. Then later on, I find out that, hey, you could do ozone injections and it might and frequently does clear up this infection or at least suppress it. How would you know if you suppressed it or not? CRP. If your CRP is five, which is quite elevated—

Dr. Pompa:
That’s high. I don’t like it above one.

Dr. Levy:
Right, and you do a series of ozone injections and it comes down to 2.5, 2, 1.8, well, you’re in a much safer category, ideal if it goes below 1. At least you have something where you can track it. There’re also a few more esoteric tests that I talk about in this book for looking at tonsillar anatomy that you could possibly do to look for occult abscesses.

Dr. Pompa:
If you have a dentist or a doc that’s doing ozone injections, have your tonsils injected. How many, typically, would you recommend if you—let’s assume that you have some infection there. How many?

Dr. Levy:
Oh, from the positive results we’ve seen in the series and the literature, probably three to five over a couple-month period. It’s very simple. A tiny, tiny, tiny needle, I think 27-gauge, something like that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it was painless.

Dr. Levy:
Two CCs of a low concentration of ozone. You just poke directly into it. Even if they’re tucked behind the faucial pillars, you just go right through the pillar directly into the tonsil if you can’t get a good angle.

Dr. Pompa:
There you have it. Great book, get it. This is a life changer. You changed my life years ago, and you didn’t even know it. Meeting you is a absolute pleasure. Thanks for being on Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Levy:
Thank you, Dan.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ll see you all on the next episode right here from SOPMed.