2019 Podcasts

281: Is Your Diet Healing You or Hurting You?

Episode 281: Is Your Diet Healing You or Hurting You?

with Autumn Smith

Co-Founder of Paleovalley, Autumn Smith, joins me today to share her own wellness journey of healing from IBS and anxiety, and how it contributed to her and her husband's mission to inspire people to take care of themselves through their nutrient-dense snack and supplement company. You'll also hear about why properly grown and raised foods are integral for peak physical and mental health. Autumn is such an inspiring entrepreneur, nutritionist, and coach in the world of health and wellness. I hope you enjoy my interview with her as much as I did!

More about Autumn Smith:
Autumn Fladmo Smith is the co-founder of Paleovalley and Wild Pastures, holds a Masters in Holistic Nutrition, a Certified Eating Psychology Coach, and a Certified FDN Practitioner. Her passion for health began with her own struggles with IBS and anxiety: despite a career as a professional dancer and celebrity fitness trainer, Autumn’s own health was in shambles. Desperate for a cure, she and her husband Chas stumbled upon the paleo diet in 2011 and within a month of beginning it, her health was completely transformed. Autumn then made it her mission to share the information she had learned with as many people as possible: she is the co-founder of Paleovalley, an organic whole-food supplement and paleo snack food company that prioritizes nutrient density and food quality. In 2018, she took things a step further and launched her second business with her husband: Wild Pastures, a regenerative pasture-based meat delivery service. Wild Pastures makes supporting sustainable agriculture and local, small farms easy for consumers. She lives in Boulder, CO with her husband and their son, Maverick.

Additional Information:

Try PaleoValley Today! – Use the code RevelationHealth10 for 10% off your order

Practitioners! Open an affiliate account with Paleovalley here.

CytoDetox: total detoxification support where it matters most – at the cellular level.

HCF's Live It to Lead It event – Newport Beach – November 14-17, 2019

Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
Stay tuned for I think a show that’s going to provide you with resources that you’re going to love. I was in Wyoming and I researched organ meats in the American Indians. I learned that these were critical to their health, stamina, immune system, everything. I came across a problem: most of them are contaminated. You’re going to learn more about that on this show and even about some of these methylation questions and how to get the proper methylation into our cells all on this show.

I interview Autumn Smith who you’re going to find fascinating. She is famous in the fitness move, but I do embarrass myself a little because I didn’t know all the people she was talking about, so wait until you see my little embarrassment. I dated myself, frankly. Alright, but look, this is a great show. You’re going to see some products too that I fell in love with that she has poured her heart out into, her and her family.

Stay tuned; you’re going to love this Cell TV. You’re going to be equipped with some great resources because what I hear all the time is, it’s so hard. I need things. I need easy things. Okay, you’re going to get that in this episode and more; stay tuned.

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, you’re going to hear all about the epidemic of nutrient deficiency and why high-quality food and supplements enable you to avoid major roadblocks in your health. We’re here today with a special guest. Her name is Autumn Smith. Like so many people, she has an amazing story of her own which led her to become the co-founder of two amazing companies, Paleovalley and Wild Pastures, which both support small farms and sustainable agriculture which is so important.

Autumn is a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner and is wildly passionate about wellness. We are going to learn a lot from her today. You can read more in our show notes and we will also link to her products. Which I must say my family is completely obsessed with your meat sticks. They’re so good. Let’s get started and welcome Autumn Smith and of Course Dr. Pompa to the show, so welcome.

Dr. Pompa:
Thanks, Autumn. Thanks for being here. Gosh, I’m obsessed with those meat sticks. Eating healthy and traveling, people always say, how do you do it? Your company makes it a lot easier.

I’ll tell you what else I’m obsessed with which we’ll get into is you’ve got some incredibly dense, nutrient-rich products. I’m a big fan of desiccated liver, and organ meat, and how it’s incredible for bringing sick people back to health. Here’s the problem: you can’t get good, clean stuff. When I used your stuff, I fell in love with your whole company because of what you have, what you all do. Big fan here; that’s why you’re here. We’re going to set everyone onto you.

Autumn Smith:
Yeah, thank you so much. It’s such an honor to be here. That always makes my day hearing our products are valuable for you.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt about it. You put your heart and soul into them. There’s a reason for that because like me, pain to purpose for you. We said you have a great story. You’ll have to tell about your—I said this in the beginning, okay, great, many of us have a story; we do. That’s why we’re passionate about this stuff. I’m never going to go back, so I do everything to make sure of that. I have a fear of ever getting sick again; I’m sure you do as well.

How many of us enter the food business? There’s a reason for that you’ll tell us, too. I have to say I did say I like your lemons. That was the first thing I said. You look at me like is he being inappropriate? No, there’s lemons behind you. Anyways, so I like your lemons.

Autumn Smith:
It was a nice—it was a good opening line. I had to remind now that you said that. That’s awesome. Everyone loves my lemons.

Dr. Pompa:
Anyway, your lemons are little to do with your actual product; they just look good. Anyways, tell us your story. Tell us your whole story.

Autumn Smith:
Okay, well, yeah, like you said, pain to purpose. That’s exactly what happened with me. I was basically sick. I had irritable bowel syndrome which as you know, your listeners probably know, it’s a wastebasket diagnosis. It’s basically like we don’t really know what’s wrong. We know that I look bloated and pregnant after meals and that sometimes I wake up in pain in the middle of the night. No one had any solutions for me.

I learned to live right here. I wasn’t ever feeling great until I met my husband. I was a fitness trainer for Tracy Anderson at the time. I looked super fit, but then at night, I literally looked pregnant. He was like, “Woman, this isn’t good enough. Why are you accepting this?”

Dr. Pompa:
SIBO and gut inflammation.

Autumn Smith:
Exactly; and a lot of processed foods. I thought I had it all figured out because I looked fit, but I was definitely not well. He’s like, “Let’s try this. Let’s adopt a whole foods diet.” This was in 2009. He got on the internet and found some people using it. This was way back in the day.

I was reticent, but I did it anyway. Low and behold, 30 days after, my digestive issues were pretty much gone. I was blown away because here I was, someone who thought I was fit and well. Then working for Tracy Anderson, I went on a world tour. She sent me around the world. I had to try and maintain—

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know who Tracy Anderson is.

Autumn Smith:
Oh, let me tell you because if anyone hasn’t heard of her, you need to Google her right now. She is the most genius celebrity fitness trainer in the whole entire world responsible for the bodies of—

Dr. Pompa:
Where would I have seen her? Where do I know her from?

Autumn Smith:
She’s everywhere I feel like, popular media. She’s trained Jennifer Lopez. She trains Shakira. She trains Molly Simms, Ashley Green, all the big names. She originally started out with Madonna and that’s where she got her break.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s the only name I know so far right there, Madonna. You know what I just did, though? Autumn, I just dated myself you understand. You’re talking about all these hip people, these happening people. I’m like, huh? Okay, so anyways.

Autumn Smith:
Madonna; anyways, she’s a celebrity fitness trainer. I was working for her. I literally for seven months traveled around the world and then had to try and figure out how do I make a paleo diet work when sometimes I’m in two countries in a day.

Dr. Pompa:
You were famous too, which I knew that. I knew you were famous.

Autumn Smith:
Oh, I’m definitely famous; no.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m embarrassing you. That is true, though. Go ahead.

Autumn Smith:
I owe it all to Tracy Anderson. She’s the genius. Yeah, so I couldn’t figure out how to make it work. I was eating apples and pistachios for like seven months and I couldn’t handle it any longer. When I got home from tour, I had this moment of enlightenment like I love Tracy Anderson and what she’s doing. That’s her thing. My story was food changed my life.

I went back to school, became—got a Master’s in Holistic Nutrition. My husband and I decided people just need a way to do this, to feel vibrant, but not move to a farm, grow all their own food, not make all their own meat sticks. We decided to make them for people. That was our goal was to—

Dr. Pompa:
Who does that? I’m serious, who does that? You just don’t enter into that arena. You know that Shark Tank guy, Kevin—

Autumn Smith:
Oh yeah, Kevin O’Leary?

Dr. Pompa:
He’s so wonderful. You know what he would say to you? They’re going to crush you like the cockroach you are. Meaning big food is going to come in and crush you. Why are you getting into that business? He would criticize you for it. However, with that said, you found a niche based on a passion and you’re doing very well with this. Kevin, you’re wrong on that; you’re wrong.

Autumn Smith:
Kevin, and you will be more wrong the longer time goes on, and the more educated people became because honestly, the reason our beef sticks are great is because we ferment them rather than using these really low-quality preservatives that actually contain hydrogenated oil pretty much in every beef stick. Manufacturers don’t want to do it. We had to make 200 phone calls to find one person willing to ferment our sticks because it’s not lucrative. This is a passion project. This isn’t something we intend on selling; this is because these foods are going to feed my child for the rest of his life. We’re not here to make money. We’re not here to sell the product.

Dr. Pompa:
My son ate all mine by the way. Yeah, you’re going to have to send me other ones. I love them, though. They were so easy to travel with.

Autumn Smith:
Oh, thank you. The thing I think most people love or they tell me they love is that they have a little snap and they’re a little more moist. They’re not drying out your—making your jaw hurt because they’re not really jerky. They’re different like a sausage.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, they’re good. Okay, so here’s one of the things that people have to understand. They go into a Whole Foods; they go into a health food store. I’m not picking on any; I’m just talking generally here. The go in and most of the products still aren’t 100% grass-fed and finished. It’s very difficult because people—otherwise you wouldn’t have created a company. You know what I’m saying.

Again, your products are special in multiple ways and you can expand on it. It’s still very difficult to get quality meat. I’ll have to say; getting quality grass-fed meat is a way that I get to—can take very sick people and bring them back to health. Getting that quality meat is part of that process. If that’s not happening, we’re not going to get them to health. That’s how important this subject is.

Autumn Smith:
Yeah, that is so true. That is just the mission behind our company is basically we think grass-fed meat is important for three reasons: obviously the health benefits, higher levels of antioxidants, a better fatty acid profile, all the things. Also, animal welfare, guys. If you see these pictures, pigs in crates, cows in feedlots, it’s not pretty. The last thing is there’s new research to suggest that a certain type of grass-fed operation utilizing rotational grazing practices. That kind sequesters carbon; it builds topsoil. It is an absolute solution to the environmental degradation and the lack of minerals in our soil content.

That’ isn’t all grass-fed beef. There’s two problems. Grass-fed is not regulated. If you do see 100% grass-fed and finished, that has a little more structure behind it. That you can usually trust. If you just see grass-fed, usually it’s grass-fed for the first part of its life, which all cows are, and then it’s grain-finished which changes the fatty acid profile. Again, we have a host of environmental concerns with that type of beef.

There’s so many deceptive labels out there; grass-fed is one of them. What you want to do is make sure again, 100% grass-fed and grass-finished and that you’re using farmers and ranchers who are utilizing rotational grazing practices. There’s an Ecological Outcome Verified certification that the Savory Institute’s doing now that you can look for. There’s also third-party human treatment of animal testing. Yeah, you’ve got to get all three of those variables. Grass-fed is not necessarily always grass-fed. It’s really—

Dr. Pompa:
Finding the right product’s hard and then convenience becomes the other issue. You solved both of those. When I was in Africa, I watched everyone walking around with dried meat; not just in the [00:12:03] by the way. I was in literally in the city portion when I flew into Zimbabwe, Harare, and I saw the same thing. Even in the airport, it was a big deal. It’s the perfect snack. Here’s the problem in this country is that they all have crap ingredients in them. Even when they say organic ingredients, when you look and you dig, I don’t like the ingredients. You solved that problem, too.

Autumn Smith:
Yes, and that’s why we found out because I had my husband when I was in France on tour bring over grass-fed beef sticks. I was like, yeah, these are healthy. This is going to help me. I started to not feel well again. I couldn’t figure it out.

I found out that this—I did a little Sherlock Holmes-ing and I found this ingredient called citric acid. It just says citric acid on the label, but what it is, it’s actually made from GMO corn, then coated in hydrogenated oil which we all now absolutely toxic, and then they melt this into the beef stick. That’s how they preserve it. It drops the PH. It’s the industry standard. That’s one ingredient. Then of course in other crazy beef sticks, you’ll have things like preservatives like BHA, BHT, BVO, brominated vegetable oil, and natural flavorings which contain a host of chemicals.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, a host of them.

Autumn Smith:
Yeah, you have to be really careful. That’s why ours just contain grass-fed and finished beef from farmers who use rotational grazing practices who raise their animals humanely and organic spices.

Dr. Pompa:
I want to point out because people think like, people like us, oh, GMO, big deal; a little bit, who cares? This or that. It is a big deal because most people have leaky gut. They are reacting to food. They’re trying to solve it. They’re running expensive tests to tell them what foods to stay away from. That’s not how you fix your gut. You stay away from the things like the GMO that create the leaky gut and those like the citric acid.

It’s those hidden darn sources that will keep your gut inflamed, and open, and reacting despite your best efforts trying to stay away from every food. You stay away from these foods; a month or two later, now you’re intolerant to these foods. You don’t win the game by food avoidance. I’m not saying that there’s not a time to avoid certain foods, but the point is, you win the game by choosing the right ingredients. You have to sleuth it out. You have to find those trusted companies.

Another big deal, obviously, you have the word paleo in the name Paleovalley. When I dug into research on the American Indians, and I actually traveled out to Wyoming, I went into museums, and I was digging and doing a project on this. One of the things I found out was that the organ meat was the key part of their diet. Then I kept digging more because that struck me. I realized that organ meat was so important in their diet in the winter months that it was really attributed to their strength, their vitality, their immune strength, what got them through hard winters. Then I started digging more into organ meat. I realized this is a vital component.

Here’s the problem. I don’t like organ meat; I don’t. I love grass-fed meat, but I don’t like liver. My uncle made me eat it back in the day and I grossed out on it. Now, I’m sure if it’s prepared better—there’s ways to do it. You all are just like, if you had my liver, you’d love it; okay.

The fact is that I was started searching for desiccated liver and liver organ type of products knowing the health of them, and not just for me, but for a lot of my clients who are trying to get their lives back. I couldn’t find good product. I don’t remember; it might have been Ashley, it might have been someone else but turned me onto your products. I have fallen in love with your products. Talk about some of those.

Autumn Smith:
Oh, yes. Our Grass Fed Organ Complex is one of my favorite things in the world because when I got pregnant, I decided, I got very serious about making sure that all my nutrient bases were covered. I had liver for the first time. I chocked it down. I felt amazing. I was like wow; what is this food I’ve been missing? Then I tried soaking it in coconut milk. I tried making liver pate.

Dr. Pompa:
Ah-ha, you didn’t like it either.

Autumn Smith:
Oh, no. I tried freezing it into little balls. I would just toss it in the back trying to miss my taste buds. Then I’d have liver burps; terrible. It was when I was pregnant that my husband was like, okay, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to take our farmers. We already had these connections. We’re going to use the whole animal. We’re going to just put it into capsules, grass-fed, grass-finished, freeze-dried to preserve their fragile nutrient content, no weird fillers.

Then that’s what we did. I’ve been taking eight every day since. My hair’s never been longer. I am very high energy if you can’t tell.

Dr. Pompa:
Share with our audience why. We both learned a lot to not only maintain health: skin, hair, organs, just immune system, muscle, joints. Organs are key. The Indians and other cultures, like I said, I just happened to study the American Indian, but eating the whole animal was balanced and magic. It was very important to not just their culture but other Indian cultures. Talk about what you learned about why these organs are so vital.

Autumn Smith:
Yeah, it’s amazing. Animals in the wild, they eat them preferentially. It’s because their nature’s multivitamin. It’s when you break it down, the levels of B12 are the highest in any food source with vitamin A and Vitamin B12. Most Americans are nutrient deficient.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Autumn Smith:
All the other vitamins, riboflavin, B1, B5, B6, iron, selenium, zinc, all the minerals. All of the things that so many of us are missing out on are concentrated in huge doses, doses that are therapeutic for us because most of us are deprived. They even did this study; this is my favorite study about organ meats because athletes have actually been using them for centuries. It’s like their secret weapon.

They put little mice into this drum of water after they fed them either a normal diet, a normal diet plus B vitamins, or a normal diet plus liver. It’s so cruel, but then they see how long they can swim. With the normal diet, it was 13 minutes; with the B vitamins, it was 14 minutes; and with the liver, it was 70 minutes, 87 minutes, 90 minutes. Then they just stopped the experiment because at two hours—

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve never heard that before. That’s amazing.

Autumn Smith:
Yeah, at two hours, most of them were still swimming. That’s what liver can do for you. It literally makes me do the happy dance. It contains so many of the nutrients that we’re missing, but in a bioavailable form, in a food form. Your body recognizes it. Yeah, it’s beautiful.

Dr. Pompa:
They’re so nutrient-dense. Part of the problem is they become toxic-dense. When you eat the wrong organ tissue from a non-100% grass-fed meat, like you said pasture, like where they literally rotation is critical because they stomp down literally the grass. It creates a fertilization. The grass they’re eating is more nutrient-dense when it’s literally—they’re done the correct way. Anyways, the organs can be very toxic or very nutritious. That’s the problem and the benefit.

Autumn Smith:
Yeah, a lot of people think, oh, you don’t want to eat the liver because it’s storing everything, but as maybe your listeners are aware is actually, it can be a filter. It converts things. If you are eating a toxic animal, yeah, you’re going to have to worry about something.

Dr. Pompa:
Because a healthy liver’s not—it doesn’t hold toxins.

Autumn Smith:
Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
You already knew that. People that’s a misnomer. It converts things. An unhealthy animal, a grain-fed animal, it has fatty liver like a human, and therefore does hold toxins, and therefore is not good. A matter of fact, I would argue just like a human, unhealthy humans have fatty organs, not just fatty liver. They have a fatty pancreas, a fatty heart, a fatty—and therefore, so do the animals. It either can be this food that transforms your health or a food that is really toxic. Therefore, sourcing the right product is the key, no doubt. How many do you take a day? Do you take it every day?

Autumn Smith:
I take it eight a day. The reason for that is if you take four, that’s the recommended serving on our bottle, that’s about 1.25 ounces of organ meats. We’re looking at between three and five ounces a week is ideal or at least according to the Weston A. Price Foundation. I doubled that because I’m not going to eat them. I’m never going to develop a taste for them. I stopped trying.

Dr. Pompa:
One of the things that I would say I recently learned just clinically was people that have sensitivities to certain B vitamins, people hear that MTHFR, or they’re methylated, overmethylated, undermethylated. When you’re dealing with these organ products like that, it really doesn’t matter. They tolerate them. They seem to get the B vitamins without oh, I’m not reacting. There’s a reason for that. Scientifically, we don’t know the answer, but I’ll give you my theory. My theory is that there’s so many other factors, co-factors balanced in a natural product that creates a proper absorption, all of the vitamins, that you don’t run into these under and overmethylation issues that you would just—and there’s a time and a place for giving someone certain active ingredients. A balanced food like an organ product I think is a massive help, especially very sick and challenged people.

Autumn Smith:
Yeah, I’m so glad to hear you say that. That is the through line in our company is we believe there’s a synergy in foods that man can’t recreate in a lab. Like you said, a time and a place, but if you’re doing preventative daily maintenance, we like to stick to food. Another thing I’ve noticed it’s particularly adept at is helping people raise their iron levels. There isn’t a huge amount of iron in the product, but it has other vitamins like vitamin A. You’re going to increase its absorption. It seems to be particularly effective for women in that regard; at least that’s what we’ve heard.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more. Here’s another; my people, they’re big fasters. When you look at some of the studies on these products, organ products, they raise stem cells. They naturally help the production and the vitality of your own stem cells. Meaning post fast in an eating state, there is not much better than some of these organ products. A matter of fact, I created a product called Cell Renew which helps stem cell—you raise your own stem cells. Some of these same ingredients, you have deer antler velvet which has all these growth factors which you’re getting some of the same factors in a lot of these organ tissues; pretty interesting.

Autumn Smith:
I love that. If I can ask you, how do you use it? I’m just interested.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I always use it when I start—I intermittent fast daily. For example, I will fast through the day. Let’s say my first meal is like 3 or 4:00, which I haven’t eaten, but I like eating—starting my meal with it because it does. Here’s the thing. You’re creating autophagy when you’re fasting. Your body is getting rid of the bad cells.

The moment you start eating, you’re stimulating stem cell production. You can do that every day. You want to do it with a good quality product like that that has the ability to jumpstart your stem cell reaction. Even when I break a fast—I just completed a fast for five days. These types of products are the perfect products to break a fast with after a few days. Anyway, that’s a good way to use it. What are some of the other products that you have that you can show us?

Autumn Smith:
Okay, I want to show you. Our other one is the Essential C Complex. Vitamin C has been really helpful for me. I have a history of mood issues. For some reason, when I take a little bit more than I—not a little bit more, a few grams a day, I feel great. What I read is that most of it’s derived from GMO corn.

Again, I know people—there’s a time and a place for ascorbic acid in high dose, intravenous use, cancer, for sure, but again, when it comes to everyday use. We took acerola cherry that’s unripe, has 120 times more vitamin C than an orange, and then amla berry, and camu camu berry. Just the world’s most potent sources of natural vitamin C. Then we put it into capsules, no fillers. There’s people who want that synergy, that entire vitamin C complex.

Because ascorbic acid is just the outer antioxidant shell. Like I said, there can be benefits, but I’ve actually heard practitioners say, I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, they’ll have people who are sensitive to corn breakout from a traditional vitamin C supplement. We created this. I use a whole food vitamin C every single day.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome. You also created a—there it is.

Autumn Smith:
Apple Cider Vinegar Complex.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a huge product for the gut. People love apple cider vinegar. Why is this one different and better?

Autumn Smith:
Okay, first of all, this one’s different and better because we take apple cider vinegar and combine it with other amazing spices: turmeric, and cinnamon, and ginger. All have benefits of their own. I created this mostly because not only is it good for the gut, it’s also great for satiety. Studies show you eat about 2 to 300 less calories when you take it. It also helps you absorb nutrients. It also helps with your blood sugar levels. So many different benefits.

Some people don’t like the taste. I made this drink called Ignite Tea every morning that had apple cider vinegar, cinnamon, and ginger, and turmeric in it. That was awesome. People didn’t want to do it. I have this Facebook group of wellness warriors. They were just like, oh, I don’t have time to drag out all the spices and everything every day. I put it into capsules, so they can just take it and avoid the potentially damaging effects to your enamel when you use apple cider vinegar on the regular and not have to deal with the taste for some people. Just an easy way to make people’s lives easy.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve got to tell you; all those things are majorly anti-inflammatory for your gut: the ginger, the turmeric, the apple cider vinegar. They’re major immune boosters naturally. They’re also antipathogen in the gut. It helps create all of that balance that you need, so another great product. It seems like you guys, you focused in on some of the really main key things that people need when they’re trying to restore their health, honestly. That’s where your niche has been.

Autumn Smith:
Yeah, true. I think that comes from it was a long road for me. I did the paleo diet thing and that helped a little bit, but then I also had parasites and all these other things I had to work out. I had suppressed levels of hydrochloric acid.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that helps.

Autumn Smith:
Yeah, I wasn’t getting all the nutrients. Yeah, we designed our product line around how can we get the highest quality foods that are going to help people make this reclamation—reclaiming of their health really easy?

Dr. Pompa:
It’s funny; I did the exact same thing with the detox world. It’s like the parts I created weren’t like, oh, here’s a great idea. It was, here’s what I had to do to get my life back. Then it became not just me, thousands of others. You just create products around it. You’re not trying to compete with what’s in Whole Foods. It’s like that’s been done. Everyone’s doing a fish oil, probiotic, and a vitamin. None of that is how we got our lives back, none of it.

Autumn Smith:
No; and this is about how am I going to get and keep my son well, and my family, and everybody else? Yeah, that’s exactly what it’s about.

Dr. Pompa:
Then you created wild paleo because then it became okay, what’s on my dinner table? Then realizing it’s harder to get meats at these health food stores that’s really good. Tell us a little bit about wild paleo. Now, I know you’re expanding this concept. You’re just in small parts right now, but you’re going to expand it, correct?

Autumn Smith:
Yeah, Wild Pastures was the result of me working with people one on one and saying, okay, guys, 100% grass-fed and finished beef, so important. They were just like, yeah, Autumn, but—

Dr. Pompa:
I said wild paleo; did I dyslexia that?

Autumn Smith:
Wild Pasture; no worries.

Dr. Pompa:
Wild Pastures. That’s dyslexia. This stuff just comes out. I took a word from the other word and I went like this. It’s written down right here in front of me correctly, but my brain just does it. Anyways, Wild Pastures. Makes more sense by the way; Wild Pastures makes way more sense.

Autumn Smith:
I know; I liked what you had, but I was like, oh, I’ll stick with Wild Pastures. No, but yeah, not offended here at all. Yeah, what we did is—and then again, being in the grass-fed beef market, I learned about those flavors of grass-fed. There’s some is not grain—is grain-finished. Some farmers are using rotational grazing; some aren’t. If you continuously graze, yet grass feed, it can still ruin the environment.

When I became a mom, I was like, okay, this is cool me having vibrant health and all, but how am I going to make my little guy’s life better because we only have 60 years of topsoil left? When we don’t have topsoil, we don’t have nutrients; we don’t have food that has nutrients. Wild Pastures was that effort to not only make grass-fed and finished meat available to everyone no matter where you leave at wholesale prices because that’s our goal is this needs to be affordable in order for this to be the mass movement. It’s about 25% on average lower. We deliver it to your door because I get it; I’m a mom. We don’t have time. We want to make this super simple.

That’s what we did. We connected with American farmers. These other boxes—and they’re doing a good thing by sourcing them out of the country because it’s high-quality meat. What I think they’re missing is stimulating this movement in America because in America is where we need the soil to be regenerated. It’s like America’s microbiome. If we stick to these really strategic relationships with ranchers and farmers who are doing things the way we think is right and create a movement around it, we can create the demand that will create the change in the environment.

That’s what’s going to happen. Right now, it’s like 3 to 5% of the market is grass-fed and finished, but they’re projecting in like 20 years, it will be about 30. We just had to make it readily available and help people wade through deception in the meat industry.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow, I don’t know how you do it all. When are you going to be able to deliver to Utah is my question and everyone else has that question?

Autumn Smith:
I think you’re in our next zone because our next stop is Arizona. Then we will deliver everything in two-day shipping from there, so really soon.

Dr. Pompa:
Alright, we’ll keep an eye on that. By the way, folks, in the meantime, Ashely will put up Paleovalley. I know that Revolution Health has a 10% discount code on every product you mentioned. I appreciate you doing that for us, no doubt about it.

Look, I know you’re on a major mission. I don’t know how you have time to do it all. What else do you do? Do you do other—are you still known for your workouts? This has to be 100%. How old are your kids and how many do you have?

Autumn Smith:
Oh, yeah, no; Tracy Anderson, love her, but I had to say goodbye because yeah, we have several businesses. I only have one boy and then I just got my baby girl, but she’s a dog, yesterday. Her name is Charlie. I have a fur baby and a little boy.

Dr. Pompa:
[00:33:02].

Autumn Smith:
Yeah, I love—

Dr. Pompa:
I have two. They’re like babies, too.

Autumn Smith:
Oh yeah, that’s what we do. We keep a nice balance around the lifestyle. We’ve got a great team, so I can’t take credit for all this. I’m not the man behind the curtain. There’s a lot of us working at this effort.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, that’s like me. Thank God, it’s an amazing team. Otherwise, we’re not getting anything out. You are on a mission. I thank you and your team for being on a mission, honestly. You’re doing it the right way. We, as my team and myself, try to source the best of the best. That’s all we bring on. You made the cut by a long shot actually. Thank you, Autumn, for being on Cellular Healing TV. We appreciate it.

Autumn Smith:
Yeah, it was such a pleasure and an honor. I love your endorsement. It makes my day because we really respect everything that you’re doing and your company. Thank you very much.

Dr. Pompa:
I appreciate that, thank you.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you buy CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com.

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

280: Mimicking Calorie Restriction with Oxaleoacetate with Alan Cash

Episode 280: Mimicking Calorie Restriction with Oxaleoacetate

with Alan Cash

Today I welcome Alan Cash, a physicist who has studied the energy pathways associated with calorie restriction.

Alan is here to discuss the latest research on optimal cognitive functioning, steps you can take to produce more mitochondrial mass, the benefits of oxaloacetate supplementation, and what you can do to lessen brain damaging inflammation.

More about Alan Cash:

Alan Cash is the founder and CEO Terra Biological LLC. He's a Physicist who has extensively researched the use of oxaloacetate as a calorie restriction mimetic. He's also an Inc 500 company Founder & CEO, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist, Deloitte and Touche Technology Fast 50, and awarded Top 100 Hot Firm.

Additional Information:

Use the code benagene5 for $5.00 BenaGene on Revelation Health

Fastonic Cellular Molecular Hydrogen – Support all forms of fasting with molecular H2!

HCF's Live It to Lead It event – Newport Beach – November 14-17, 2019

Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
Have you ever heard of the word oxaloacetate? I’m sure most of you haven’t, but you need to. This molecule has been stabilized, and it’s a molecule that works in our cells, in the mitochondria. It can transform your cellular function and your health. As a matter of fact, we’re going to talk about some of the clinical trials for Alzheimer’s, for aging, for some other conditions, and I’m telling you, this one compound has transformed many people’s lives. You’re going to hear all about it and why I believe it’s something you should add to your supplement regiment, so stay tuned. I’m interviewing the physicist who discovered how to stabilize this important molecule, oxaloacetate, on this episode of Cell TV.

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith, and today we welcome Alan Cash, a physicist who has studied the energy pathways associated with calorie restriction. Alan is joining Dr. Pompa today to discuss the latest research on optimal cognitive functioning, steps you can take to produce more mitochondrial mass, the benefits of oxaloacetate supplementation, and what you can do to lessen brain-damaging inflammation. Enjoy the show. Welcome both of you.

Alan:
Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, Alan, I told you before we got on I’ve been waiting for this interview. I couldn’t wait to do it because it’s a subject that I really love and I know a lot about. I’m sure most of my listeners don’t know a lot about it, and actually, in my new book, Beyond Fasting, I talked about oxaloacetate. Beyond Fasting, right, I mean, fasting, we’re able—what you were able to do as the developer of this, I don’t know, I guess call it a molecule that mimics fasting, so oxaloacetate can mimic this. Let’s just start where you think we should start as far as what is important for people to know. Actually, let’s start here. How the heck did you get into this, discovering this oxaloacetate that here on Cell TV is a big deal because this changes our cell function?

Alan:
Yeah, it’s a pretty weird story. I was out sailing with my wife. I came off the boat, and I fell to the ground. I had this just enormous pain. On a scale of zero to ten, it was a solid ten. It was on my knees, and then it was gone. Being a guy, I just ignored it, but then it came back two days later just for a short time. Then it was gone again, and then it came back in one day, and then it came back in 12 hours. It was getting worse and worse.

My wife booked me a variety of doctors by just saying I’ll take the first cancellation. I’ll take the first cancellation, and I ended up seeing ten doctors in nine days. I saw a neurologist. I saw a gastroenterologist. I saw a heart specialist. I saw a family physician. I saw an acupuncturist. Finally, a neurologist thought that it might where a nerve crosses over with an artery. The artery, as your heart beats, it starts cutting through the nerve bundle. They said, well, it’s either that, or you have multiple sclerosis, or a brain tumor.

I had an MRI. They didn’t see anything, and that was the criteria they used to say it might be this artery impinging on a nerve. My wife, again, called up. Where can I find some help for this? There were two places, the University of Pittsburgh, which aren’t you from Pittsburgh?

Dr. Pompa:
Originally, I live in Park City, Utah now, but yes, I originally grew up and born and raised in Pittsburgh.

Alan:
Yeah, it turns out there’s two places in the United States that specializes. Pittsburgh is one of them. The other she called up is two miles away from my house. It’s at UCSD, University of California San Diego. When she called up, the head of neurology answered the phone and said, “Oh, you have what? Oh, well, come in tomorrow morning.”

Dr. Pompa:
That’s not what you want to hear, by the way.

Alan:
It was very surprising, a little scary, so I went in the next day. I showed him my MRIs. At this point in time, I couldn’t even talk. When I talked, it would fire off all my nerves. It was like turning on an electrical appliance in your throat. Imagine Frankenstein with the two bolts coming out and putting a car charger to it. It was just horrible.

He looked at my medical file, and he said, “Okay, let’s—I’ll rearrange the hospital’s operating schedule for tomorrow. Take these drugs. Just get through the night, and we’ll take care of you,” so did that. They did a six-hour brain surgery where they went into the back of my head. They followed the nerve ‘til they found where it crossed over. They pulled it apart, and they put in a piece of Teflon and sewed me back up. I’ve been pain-free for about 12, 13 years now.

Getting to the reason we’re ill, in this case, it was a mechanical problem, and fixing that solves the problem. How often in medicine do we not do that? I mean, do we just look at the symptoms, and try to patch the symptoms? Oh, you’ve got high blood glucose. Here, let’s put a patch over here. If we could find out what’s really wrong and fix it, you get a long-term solution that makes you a lot happier.

I had a lot of things happen to me very favorably as a result of this. As a physicist, I tried to figure out why did this happen? It appears that, in aging, normal aging, our arteries get longer as we age. They have to have somewhere to go, so they just fold over. It’s not a big deal, unless they fold over next to a nerve bundle and start cutting it in two like a little saw. I thought, well, why don’t—as a physicist, why don’t I look at aging? What we do in physics is we take a lot of data, and we try to find that little kernel that makes sense, that describes all the data. When I looked at it in regards to aging, what I saw is not very much changes how we age. One thing that stood out, though, was calorie restriction.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, by the way, I always say that that’s really the only thing. There are solid studies showing that, if you want to age slower, caloric restriction is about it.

Alan:
That’s all I could find. When I was looking at this, there was a lot of work going on at MIT and Harvard looking at some of the mechanisms of calorie restriction, particularly increasing NAD+ levels and decreasing the NADH levels, which they’re a currency to switch electrons back and forth so NAD+ and NADH. Changing that ratio seemed to be the way to affect calorie restriction, to get the ball rolling, to get the molecular cascade that occurs so that we have gene expression changes, so that we see increases in the lifespan in animals, so that we see decreases in cancer incidents and neurodegeneration and many other long-term diseases in animal models. Now, will we see these in human beings? I don’t know. The calorie study that was a clinical trial looking at calorie restriction in people, some of the things we did see was a decrease in fasting glucose levels. We did see a decrease in atherosclerosis. High blood pressure just drop down to where these people were teenagers again almost. Seeing how heart disease is the number one killer in America, it may extend human lifespan just by being calorie restricted, but it’s hard.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Alan:
I did it for 30 days because I study this, and my wife was so happy when I stopped.

Dr. Pompa:
Long-term caloric restriction is really impossible, I mean, without affecting other metabolic states, mechanisms in the cell, meaning that the body will think it’s starving eventually and start lowering its metabolism further and further. That’s why it doesn’t work for weight loss long term, right? When I studied all the stuff on caloric restriction, I realized, okay, this is—there’s truth here. However, they’re looking at animal studies. When we look at human populations, they don’t do it by eating half their dinner and move it aside. That doesn’t last, as you and I both found out the hard way. In humans, I find out that what does work is eat less by eating less often.

At the end of the day—when I started squishing how many times I eat a day down into a window, at the end of the day, I always eat less, but I eat to full every time I eat. Therefore, my body never thinks it’s starving, and I don’t get this metabolic thing. However, with that said, I have a lot of clients; my doctors have a lot of clients and patients that this is very difficult. Now, we use oxaloacetate as this leverage to really help them in this process of learning this style of eating, to eat less, really, and to live longer.

Alan:
Yeah, let me talk a little bit about how we found that. In going through the literature, we saw that increasing the NAD+ to NADH ratio really starts off the calorie restriction metabolic cascade. Where they were going with this in Harvard and MIT, these guys were very smart, and they were doing genetic engineering to get there. I thought that’s really clever, but it’s not something we’re going to do anytime in the near future. I started looking for compounds that could increase NAD levels while decreasing NADH and, preferably, a natural compound, so I didn’t have to go through as much hoops with the FDA. Preferably, a human compound so that toxicity would be less of an issue.

In going through the energy pathways, the molecular pathways, I found oxaloacetate, which is part of the Krebs cycle. I’m not a biologist, so I sought out some help from a very, very smart guy at UCLA. He’ll probably win a Nobel Prize at some point in time. I went into his office, and I told him what I was thinking and why I was thinking this and how it related to the NAD and NADH ratio. He just looked at me and got up, didn’t say a word, walked out of his office. I thought I had really offended him. All of a sudden, he looks back behind him and says, “Well, come on.” He took me downstairs. He opens up this door, couldn’t see anything behind it, big fire door. He pulls it open, and there’s a huge lab there. We’re in CMME in UCSD in San Diego.

He goes over to a bench, and he takes his arm, and he goes k-r-r-r-r-r. He just pushes everything aside, and he goes, “This is your spot.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” He goes, “Oh, well, we’ll just get some oxaloacetate. We’ll get some fruit flies, and we’ll see if they longer. Let’s try it.” I said, “You know I’m not a biologist.” He goes, “How tough can this be? They’re either alive or they’re dead.”

We ended up actually getting worms, little C. elegans worms because they’re a little bit simpler on the evolutionary scale. We tested it, and the first time we tried it we saw an increase in lifespan of 35%. I started to cry. My wife thought I had lost my mind. I’m crying over worms, but it was very interesting. We then started ordering special worms that had part of their genes deactivated so that we could follow along the molecular pathway of how all this was working, how it was turning on metabolism, how it was turning on genes, how it was interacting environment with the genes. What we saw is the increase in the NAD to NADH ratio activates something called AMPK, which is the same thing that Metformin does, which is a diabetic drug.

Dr. Pompa:
Basically, that stimulates a pathway called autophagy, which, basically, your body gets rid of bad cells, and then it stimulates a new stem cell to replace the bad cells, pretty magical.

Alan:
Yeah, and we’ve done some work. A lot of work has been done at the University of Kansas in preclinical work to some diseases that we’re looking at. One of the things we saw is it increases mitochondrial biogenesis so the mitochondria, the little power plants of your cell. Giving oxaloacetate and turning on this calorie restriction metabolic cascade not only gets rid of the old cells, the autophagy that we’re talking about…

Dr. Pompa:
It upregulates the new mitochondria.

Alan:
Yeah, so we’re getting higher mitochondrial densities in the brain. I don’t know about you, but I can always use higher mitochondria densities in the brain because that just helps with the energy to do what the cells need to do.

Dr. Pompa:
I mean, when we look at people who are challenged, they’re sick. They’re not functioning well at the cellular level. Brain fog, it’s the top five symptoms that people have, and we know it’s a drop of brain energy, cellular energy in the brain, glucose or ketones. There’s something affected metabolically, so upregulating that, one of the things that I noticed using oxaloacetate with these people is, hey, it helps my brain fog.

Alan:
I hear that a lot from people. They say I’m now aware. I’m like it sounds a little mystical to me, but okay, I’m glad you’re aware.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so I mean, this pathway you’re describing, people watching and listening to this show have heard me talk a lot about fasting. Just to pull them back into this conversation a little bit, I’ve talked about how fasting upregulates through this AMPK pathway, autophagy. Then the body will utilize these bad cells, but it doesn’t stop there. It stimulates a stem cell and replaces new, and that happens with cells. It happens with the mitochondria that we’re—we make energy, the powerhouses in the cells. Your body’s creating new ones, to your point, and we see this happen.

In this ratio, folks, when we fast, we see this ratio of NAD+ and NADH. We see this ratio get bigger, meaning you get more NAD+. That’s a positive thing. We just know that happens when people fast or in restricted calorie states, and so what you’re saying is that we see this when we take this oxaloacetate. We see this NADH ratio go up. We see it kick in some type of autophagy via AMPK. We see some type of biogenesis of mitochondria, which is obviously happening from stem cell creation somehow, so it’s mimicking what’s happening in a fasting state.

Alan:
Yeah, and when we looked at the gene expression, we did this in mice. You have to pick which pieces of the mouse that you look at, and we looked at liver function. One of the things we saw is there was almost 100% correlation between the genes that we were upregulating and downregulating compared to calorie restriction. I mean, it was pretty amazing.

Dr. Pompa:
We have the same pathways that we see in a fasting state, NADH rising— or NAD+ rising, NADH lowering. That increases the ratio. We see the AMPK pathway stimulated, which stimulates autophagy. We see, obviously, the production, the biogenesis of mitochondria, so we know there’s a stem cell direction. So far we’re mimicking this fasting state, which is the only thing that we know really is linked to living longer healthy, right? Now, you said that even this other pathway is also being stimulated as well, which mimics fasting.

Alan:
Yeah, interestingly, when we take animals and damage their liver and then feed them oxaloacetate, we’re able to turn on the biogenesis of their liver tissue and allow them to heal faster in the liver.

Dr. Pompa:
Are those some of the clinical trials you’re actually doing?

Alan:
Some of the clinical trials we’re actually doing, we just finished a Phase II trial in Alzheimer’s disease. One of the things we’re seeing in the animal models is we’re increasing glucose uptake into the brain, which a lot of people refer to Alzheimer’s as stage 3 diabetes instead of stage1, stage 2, stage 3. That’s because in Alzheimer’s patients, in the hippocampus, an area where we generate new cells that help us with retained memories and things like that, you see a drop off of glucose uptake into the cells. It’s like the glucose is there, but they can’t pull it up into their cells. Oxaloacetate’s been able to help that in animal models. We just finished a Phase II trial, and the interim data I can talk about. The full data has not been published yet, so I can’t talk about that. The interim data showed an increase in glucose uptake into the hippocampus and an increase in glutathione levels in the brain so very, very exciting information and very hopeful information. We’ll see how that develops further.

Dr. Pompa:
That makes sense on how it works in the brain. I’ve seen it help these people as well clinically. How does it affect the liver like that when you say help regenerate the liver cells?

Alan:
There are a couple of things. I mean, first it turns on the calorie restriction metabolic cascade, which increase PGC-1 alpha, which turns on mitochondrial biogenesis. It turns on DNA synthesis, and interestingly, we were a little bit concerned by that. What if it just continues to do that? That doesn’t sound good. When the cells get to a certain density, they stop. They turn off. It’s just like a faster repair kit, which is really neat.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s interesting.

Alan:
In liver management, there have been a couple of papers now showing that oxaloacetate protects the liver from a variety of environmental toxins, like chlorinated pesticides, hydrogen peroxide. A lot of free radical damage can be ameliorated with oxaloacetate, so that’s very exciting too.

Dr. Pompa:
Some of the methods are—we talked about neurodegenerative conditions. I mean, anything from Alzheimer’s you already mentioned, obviously dementia. What about Parkinson’s and some of these other neurodegenerative conditions?

Alan:
I sell a nutritional supplement, and the supplement is not intended to prevent, treat, cure any disease.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m asking if they’re doing any trials on that, so I’m not asking you that. I’m asking the more safe question. Are they doing any clinical trials with those conditions?

Alan:
Yes, they are. Some of the interesting things, one of the other functions of oxaloacetate that is very unusual is that it can lower glutamate levels in the brain, and we see that. It’s called glutamate scavenging. It happens because the oxaloacetate goes through the lower circulatory system, and as it does that, if there is excess glutamate in the presence of a liver enzyme that’s pretty much always available—it’s called SGOT, or now it’s called AST. It binds up that oxaloacetate and makes alpha ketoglutarate, and in doing that, it can lower excess glutamate levels by 60% in the lower circulatory system and 40% in the brain. That turns out to be a really big deal.

To give you an example, I was walking through the park in Barcelona. My middle daughter is a volleyball player, professional volleyball player, and I was waiting for a game to start and just walking through the park looking at the architecture. I trip over a sprinkler head. I go flying forward, and so I try to run out of my trip.

Dr. Pompa:
We’ve all done that, embarrassingly.

Alan:
Instead of just falling down going, oh, aren’t I stupid, I instead accelerate to top speed and then stopped by a granite wall, by ramming my head into a granite wall. My wife comes around the corner. She sees this big group of people standing around this guy who’s lying on the ground in a pool of blood. They called the ambulance. They didn’t know how to get me out of there because this was not at street level. It was one floor down and in a sunken pit. I’m a big guy, and these Spanish people were not as large as I am. I was just rolling on the ground.

My wife took to two benaGene lozenges and just stuck them under my tongue, and in one minute—I had been going into shock. Came out of it like that. I sat up. I said, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” and I directed my evacuation to the hospital. Bringing down glutamate levels quickly can be very advantageous in certain circumstances, and unfortunately, I had to experience that. In animal models, when we do closed head injury tests, you can reduce ischemia by 80% if you get oxaloacetate to them within two hours.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow! Somehow your wife knew that. I mean, obviously, you must educate her about this.

Alan:
We have daughters in sports, and so we always have a bag of [00:27:19].

Dr. Pompa:
benaGene, by the way, is the product that Revelation Health carries that contains oxaloacetate for those watching.

Alan:
Yeah, it’s a little pill. Each capsule is 100 mg of oxaloacetate and 150 mg of Vitamin C. The Vitamin C helps to stabilize the oxaloacetate. Oxaloacetate wasn’t available until relatively recently. It is such an energetic molecule that it would break down spontaneously in a couple of weeks at room temperature into pyruvate and carbon dioxide, neither of which are all that bad, but they’re not oxaloacetate. We had to figure out how to stabilize this and keep it. We can now keep it for up to two years at room temperature. It’s just a product that we can get out to the public to help them.

Dr. Pompa:
No, it’s a tremendous discovery. I don’t know if Ashley—Ashley, we’ll put a link to the product that we utilize with oxaloacetate in it, benaGene, below. Revelation Heath will have a special on it. I don’t know. I should’ve checked coming into the show, but I’m sure they will because now that I mentioned it. No, I love the product. I think it was an amazing discovery, stabilizing the—and everybody should be using it. I mean, I could just tell you clinically. I can only speak clinically. We’ve had great success with diabetics. We’ve had great success with athletes; they love it.

Obviously, we talked about some of the neurodegenerative conditions. I know my docs use it for autism patients with great success as well. Head trauma, I think you mentioned. I may be leaving some on the plate there, but you can see, if it has to do with metabolism of the energy and glucose and fats and all that, it works. It works very well.

Alan:
Yeah, it’s amazing how many things relate back to that. I mean, that’s basic.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, that’s why I think it’s an important player as far as—it does. It works into that pathway into the cell that so many people have broken now. They’re having trouble utilizing glucose in the cell. They’re having trouble with mitochondrial function. They’re having trouble getting glucose into the brain, being utilized. I mean, the list goes on.

Alan:
Yeah, it’s interesting. We’re still finding new uses for oxaloacetate, and a lot of what we do comes from the field where our doctors will come to us. In one case, we had a series of doctors come to us and say you know what? I’ve had some women. I’ve given this to them because they were a little—their glucose was a little bit off, so I thought this might help them. They came back, and they said, doc, my PMS didn’t come this week or this month. They were like, oh, fine, just like I would be. Oh, okay, good, that’s good. No, you don’t understand!

Some of these women have had serious problems, and some of them just have mild irritation or a little bit of mild feeling gloomy or anxiety. This seemed to reduce that considerably, and I kept hearing this again and again and again. I was like hmmm. I have three daughters, so I know the importance of this and just everything, dealing with your boyfriend, dealing with your wife, dealing with your children, dealing with your coworkers. I mean, it’s so important to be able to have a smooth ride emotionally. We decide to try it clinically. We ended up doing two clinical trials. We measured for anxiety, for gloomy mood, for perceived stress, and for irritation. What we saw is we were able to reduce those levels, especially anxiety and gloomy mood by over 50% in these women. I mean, it was life changing for them, life changing.

I mean, it’s funny. During the trial, we’d get these long emails, oh, my symptoms and, oh, my boyfriend, and, oh I’m going to lose my job. Then a couple of months later, they’d say, okay, well, things are a lot better, and the emails would be one-third the size. Then a couple of months after that, they’d just be one line. Send more. That’s what it should be. I mean, it shouldn’t be that their whole life revolves around their emotional state during that time of the month. They should be able to just blow through that and be themselves all the time.

After the clinical trials came out, we thought we should have the same product, except it should be for women, so we renamed it Jubilance. We have both benaGene on the market and Jubilance on the market for women. We are just getting a lot of thank you notes.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, exactly. Gosh, I hope we carry the Jubilance. I think Revelation Health does. Anyways, yeah, that’s fantastic. I know, my doctors, they utilize this product as well, and we see similar results. What’s the dosing? I mean, if someone’s watching this, I don’t want to have to answer a zillion emails. Where should they start? Is it different? Do you need higher doses with, say, dementia, Alzheimer’s people versus say [00:33:38]?

Alan:
As a nutritional supplement, I can’t really go into that. I mean, I know, in the Alzheimer’s trials, we’re looking at very high dosage.

Dr. Pompa:
Just speak what is being used in the trial.

Alan:
Again, that’s not what benaGene or Jubilance is looking to do. benaGene is around 100 mg. We’re treating in these trials at 2,000 mg, so it’d be the equivalent of 20 capsules a day, which is quite a bit, but if you’ve got a serious neurological condition, you may be willing to do something like that. It’s interesting with the emotional PMS, and we’ve tracked that down to it seems to be a lack of glucose in the cerebellum, in the back of the brain. If we give women who have emotional issues during that time PET scans and look at normal controls, you see a statistical difference whereas the women who have these emotional issues have huge glucose utilization. This is probably also why they’re reaching for chocolate bars, or ice cream, or other carbohydrates to try to get that glucose into their brain. They’re angry.

Dr. Pompa:
What’s funny is I have a principle, my diet variation principle, and the monthly principle, we up the carbohydrates the week before their period, healthy carbohydrates. We know that hormone convergence are actually needed, so women do need for multiple reasons. You’re giving us even another one why women will crave carbohydrates around their period. Especially, we have a lot of women who are on very low-carb diets, and they seem to mess up their whole month hormonally unless they run the healthy higher carbs the week before their period. It’s hormonal and brain.

Alan:
Yeah, so what the oxaloacetate appears to be doing is, in the liver, it’s the first step in a process called gluconeogenesis where your body will take your fats, your fatty acids, your triglycerides, and turn them into energy so that you can utilize it in your brain. If you don’t have enough oxaloacetate, you’re going to be deficit in that, so just a small amount seems to be very effective in these women.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, typically, we’re dosing, I mean, 300 mg, 100 to 300 mg. I mean, we see a positive result, but maybe a good strategy too is dosing high during that time for women, I mean, dosing a little a higher that week before.

Alan:
They seem to be okay at 100 to 200, 1 to 2 capsules a day. I mean, we asked [00:36:55]. I mean, the p-values which look at how certain your statistics look, how sure you are of your answer, I mean, the p-values were 10 to the minus 5. I mean, it was just phenomenal the response that we had with this. Now, with other conditions, you may want to increase the oxaloacetate higher if you’re trying to do something for someone’s neurology. Maybe trying to do some liver repair or trying to do some detoxification. Oxaloacetate works amazingly well to take on these environmental toxins like chlorinated pesticides.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, when you said that, interesting.

Alan:
For the most of us, one capsule a day is just great, and that’s initially what we looked at it for was anti-aging. I mean, we recently came out with one capsule a day was because a clinical trial that was done in Japan. Way back in 1968, they were looking at diabetics. One of the things we’d see with calorie restriction or fasting is it virtually eliminates type II diabetes, at least in primates, in animal models, and in giving them oxaloacetate, they were seeing the same thing. They were seeing reductions in fasting glucose levels, and now we know pretty much why. It’s because we’re turning on that AMPK pathway, very similar to what some other compounds do. That’s not our real focus, but that was our test to see are we getting that molecular cascade to have calorie restrictions? Maybe see an increase in our ability to stay younger for longer, stay healthier for longer, and so that’s why we developed this product and got it out onto the market.

Dr. Pompa:
We appreciate you doing that, honestly, and I’m so glad I finally got you on the show. There’s a lot of people now who are going to know about something that I’ve been looking at for some years now and even put this pathway in the book. I mentioned oxaloacetate so yeah.

Alan:
Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, well, great stuff, Alan. Thank you for what you’re doing and your contribution to this area. It’s been a big one.

Alan:
Oh, and vice versa, I think your work on the fasting is extremely important. Between doing periodic fasting and some of these calorie restrictions, the [00:39:55] that people like myself are researching, I think we’re really going to help a lot of people.

Dr. Pompa:
There is no doubt. This is the real science here. This is the real deal. It really is. I say that because there’s so many gimmicks out there, and you wouldn’t be on the show if this was one of them. Obviously, this is a real deal, and there are studies to prove it. Thank you, Alan. Appreciate you.

Alan:
Thank you, and appreciate you giving me the opportunity to share some of our research.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, and folks, we’ll put the links below for the benaGene and also the other product that he mentions. Thank you, Alan.

Alan:
Take care.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here, and as always, thanks for listening.

279: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body: The Airway Connection with Dr. Rebecca Taylor

Episode 279: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body: The Airway Connection

with Dr. Rebecca Taylor

Today I welcome Dr. Rebecca Taylor, who is an airway focused, biological dentist and certified naturopath. Dr. Rebecca looks to address the whole body as it relates to the mouth. You will discover why improperly developed airways may be why people have crooked teeth, sleep apnea, clenching and grinding issues, excessive snoring, and even why children struggle with cognitive and behavioral issues. Dr. Rebecca will explain how to look at facial development and proper airway function as the solution to these common issues.

More about Dr. Rebecca Taylor DDS, AIOMT:

Dr. Taylor has a BS in molecular and cellular biology from UC Santa Barbara and her DDS from the University of the Pacific Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry in San Francisco. After dental school she studied with the International Academy of Oral and Medical Toxicology, becoming an accredited member (AIOMT) and certified in safe mercury removal. She also attended the American College of Integrative Medicine and Dentistry, making her a board-certified naturopath and obtained her degree in Integrative Biologic Dental Medicine. She also has completed additional coursework though the Institute of Functional medicine and is certified in ozone and myofunctional therapy. This comprehensive background allows her to communicate with physicians in their own language and create collaborative, individualized treatment plans for their shared patients. It also allows her to quarterback patient care and direct patients to help them achieve total mouth and body health.

Believing that continuing education is critical to both professional development, patient care, and personal development, Dr. Taylor dedicates hundreds of hours each year to further her education in dentistry, medicine, and nutrition to ensure she is up to date with the latest techniques and research in biological dental medicine.

Based in Washington state, she has become one of the top Myobrace, DNA/ Vivos system providers on the west coast. Drawing from her driverse training, Dr. Taylor has developed an interdisciplinary treatment protocol that merges her knowledge across biological dentistry, laser techniques, naturopathic/functional medicine, cranial sacral/physical therapy, and functional TMJ and orthodontics to treat jaw development issues and sleep apnea/snoring.

Dr. Taylor is a member of the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, the International Academy of Biological Dentistry and Medicine, the Holistic Dental Association, and the International Association for Orthodontics.

Additional Information:

Show notes:

The Story of Headgear
Face Focused
Vivos – Breathing Wellness Centers
The Healthy Start
Green City Dental
Alf Therapy
Breathe Freely
The Magic of Myofunctional Therapy
Airway and TMJ

Book recommendations:
Jaws: The Story a Hidden Epidemic
The Oxygen Advantage
6′ tiger 3′ cage
Early Sirens

Fastonic Cellular Molecular Hydrogen – Support all forms of fasting with molecular H2!
HCF's Live It to Lead It Event – Newport Beach – November 14-17, 2019

Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
Watching this, you’ve heard me say this a lot. The inability to lose weight today has more to do with hormones than even what we’re eating. On this episode of Cell TV, you’re going to get some simple answers. You’re going to get the reason why that is as well. This guest, I think, brings some really simple answers, even as simple as essential oils and how that affects our primitive brain. It can be a simple bio-hack to things like cravings, or even anxiety, stress, and sleep. I think this is just a great episode to give you some of those really simple answers that we all need while we’re detoxing, while we’re waiting for our hormones to be better. We’re going to get some great answers, so stay tuned to this show for the hormone answer.

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today we are welcoming Dr. Mariza Snyder, who is a functional practitioner and the author of seven books. Her newest book focuses on balancing hormones with the power of essential oils, and it’s called The Essential Oil Hormone Solution. She’s here today to discuss ways to reset your hormones to lose weight naturally and boost energy. It’s such a great topic. Dr. Mariza is the host of the Essentially You podcast, designed to empower women to become the CEO of their health. You can check out her website at drmariza.com for women’s hormone tips, including recipes and remedies. Okay, I’m excited you’re here, so let’s welcome Dr. Mariza, and of course, Dr. Pompa. Welcome.

Dr. Snyder:
Thank you. Thank you for having me, you guys. It’s so great to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
You and I were just on a panel together at PaleoFX about the topic, female hormones—packed room. We had so many great questions, and you did a great job, by the way.

Dr. Snyder:
So did you—being the only man on the panel, you did a phenomenal job.

Dr. Pompa:
It was funny because we couldn’t find the room. In fact, it was Ashley who was taking me around. We couldn’t find the room, so I was five minutes late for the beginning of the panel. My joke was, when I found out that I was the only male on the topic of female hormones out of this whole panel of women, I decided I’m not going to do it. I can’t do it. Then Ashley convinced me to do it, here I am late, which wasn’t the case. I was just walking around the building lost. It’s even worse than that because truth be told, if she didn’t find me and drag me up, I thought it was at 2:30—anyways, long story. It was a great panel, and you brought a lot of great insight, I thought some of the best insight, as far as usable information.

When you have a panel like that and you have six people, you think you’re going to have a lot of disagreement. No, we really didn’t within the panel. I think there was a lot of agreement on the panel. One of the things that came out is we had a roomful of low-carb people, and we had a roomful of people with a lot of the same struggles. I would say that most people today are having a lot of these struggles, a lot with weight loss. I always say, look, weight loss today has less to do with your diet. It has more to do with your hormones than anything. The real reason why people struggle to lose weight, gain weight, or whatever they want to do is hormones. This is that topic. You’re going to cover that today, right?

Dr. Snyder:
Yes, I am. It very much is. You and I both meet so many women who are doing all the things, cutting as many calories as possible, restricting a lot if possible, working out as hard as possible, and yet the weight just won’t go anywhere. We know that there’s a lot more to it. It’s not a calories in versus calories out idea or understanding. We know that’s not true today.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, if it were only so simple.

Dr. Snyder:
If the body was that simple, right?

Dr. Pompa:
The media makes it seem that simple. We’re gluttons. You need to move your butt more. You’re lazy. You’re a glutton. You just plain old eat too much. If it were only so simple. It’s not that way. Most women watching this, I would say, they would say, I’m eating better than all my friends and family, and yet I’m stuck here. that is the sentiment.

Dr. Snyder:
Absolutely, or they do the same program that their husband does. He loses 15 pounds and she loses 2. I can attest to that. Alex and I, my husband and I, will do the same thing. My gosh, I can drop 15 pounds on that man like that.

Dr. Pompa:
Men, we’re not going to just to throw you off to the side this episode. We have hormone tips for you today, too. I loved a lot of things you had to say, so I couldn’t wait to do the show. Let’s start here. You wrote seven books. I think you were on Oz. I think you were on Fox. You’ve been out there. What got you into this? Everyone has their story. I have a story. We become an expert by our battles that we go to from pain to purpose, so tell us.

Dr. Snyder:
My story started when I was a little girl. I was involved in some head trauma, and I had chronic migraines for 15 years. In that 15 years, I was told by numerous doctors, neurologists, all different types of diagnostics that I was going to always have this chronic migraine pain, that my life was going to be punctuated with headaches and migraines, and I was just going to have to figure out a way to deal with it with medication. Growing up with that paradigm in the 80s and the 90s, that is what I thought was true. I didn’t know anything different. I became a biochemist because I wanted to go to medicine.

When I was in the lab at 23, 24 years old, I met a fellow scientist who told me that she thought she had a doctor who could cure my migraines. I thought if she wasn’t such a reputable scientist that she was crazy. Luckily, that office, that practice was on my way home from the lab every single day. I decided to give it a go because I couldn’t imagine my life consistently on pain meds for another many dozens of decades, or several decades. I went to this practice. It was a functional practice. This was in 2003, 2004, and 3 months later, I was migraine-free. It completely blew my mind. It just changed everything that I believed about medicine, everything that I believed about the body.

It just shifted the way that I wanted to be able to treat people and take care of people. Fast forward another several years—I’m 30 years old, and I’ll be honest with you. As a woman, and as a woman growing up in my family, I was taught from a very young age that my worth was very much predicated on how much I did for other people. I was never allowed to put myself on that list. I remember my grandma always saying, you’re selfish if you do this. You’re selfish if you do this. You always need to put other people first. That is what I did, and I was very productive.

Dr. Pompa:
What nationality are you? I have to ask that.

Dr. Snyder:
I’m Latina, so I’m Mexican.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, see, that’s an Italian thing, too. The women serve, and they did the best at it. Oh my gosh, it was good in some ways. It was good for us men.

Dr. Snyder:
For sure. You guys were winning. Yeah, my grandma’s house—the boys, they’re not in the kitchen, still to this day, and that’s just the way it is. I basically burned myself right into the ground. I just worked myself into the ground. I was in practice about a year. I had a lot of women who were showing up with symptoms that I hadn’t really learned a lot about in school. They were having chronic fatigue. They were having mood swings, anxiousness, weight resistance, and weren’t sure what was happening. Labs weren’t showing up to show a lot of—indicating markers. At the same time that they were dealing with it, I was also in it.

I remember one day finally waking up because it had just been building up and building up for several years. I literally just could not even get out of bed. I was in the throes of massive chronic fatigue. At that point, I remember going to the doctor, being recommended birth control and Xanax for this, and knowing, knowing what I had learned at 23, knowing what I had learned in all of my education and focusing on functional medicine, I knew that those prescriptions were not the key.

I have spent the last ten years of my life devoting all of my efforts, my time, and my research on women’s hormone health or women’s healthcare because I had felt so isolated and alone at that time ten years ago without a real clear direction and answer. As I looked around at so many women, including my mom and my sister, a lot of us were in the same boat.

Dr. Pompa:
Mm-hmm—yeah, it’s unbelievable. Look, before we got on the air, this is this month’s Scientific American. Look at the title. It is Inconceivable: The Science of Women’s Reproductive Health Has Huge Gaps. What we don’t know is hurting all of us. Unfortunately, I told you that the article frustrated me beyond belief. However, their point is well taken.

Dr. Snyder:
It’s true. We do have so many gaps, and not even women’s reproductive health, but women’s healthcare in general. Our health far beyond spans our reproductive healthcare, our reproductive function. There’s a lot of differences between men that we really haven’t been able to look at and dig into. So much has happened, so much has shifted even in the last ten years. Ten years ago, we weren’t talking about hormones. People just didn’t know what was really going on. We definitely had birth control and we had hormone replacement, but there wasn’t an understanding. Women didn’t understand how their bodies worked. I still believe that a lot of women are not very clear on what is happening with their bodies.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s true. The article made that point, I think, very well. It also made the point that birth control can be this—the pill, for example, helps so many women, etcetera. Backhandedly, it talks about all the other problems that it may be causing. It had a picture of an IUD. It really made it seem like IUDs are the greatest thing ever. That is copper around there. They talked about why most women end up stopping it because of the symptoms. They also went on to talk about, hey, stop your period at all costs because you’ll just simply feel better.

Dr. Snyder:
It has been awful. Don’t even get me started on hormonal birth control. The fact that we’re using it as a way of treating women’s hormone issues—it doesn’t treat any of our hormone issues. It doesn’t treat anything. We just throw birth control at women for all these problems. You know this is what you and I found everything on—is the why. Why is it that we’re struggling with our menstrual cycle? Why is it that we have a luteal defect? Why is it that perimenopause feels like such a train wreck for many women, and all we have to offer is birth control? It just completely masks the symptoms.

Dr. Pompa:
I think that’s part of the problem right there, though. See, the article did point this out. The answer is, take this birth control pill. Most often in the beginning, people feel better. It might solve that temporary problem, but they’re never going upstream to the problem of why they had these issues in the first place. Then ten years later, they end up with a new diagnosis. Nobody really puts it together that the problem was never actually looked at of what was actually throwing the hormones off balance.

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, it just got worse. The problem was still happening behind the scenes. The inflammation was still happening. All of that was still going on. Now we just fast forward ten years later, and we have much bigger problems.

Dr. Pompa:
What are some of the early symptoms of hormones being dysregulated?

Dr. Snyder:
That’s such a great question. A big thing that I see—honestly, almost 90 percent of the time, a big part of what I see is going to be stress. It’s having a major play in how our hormones are functioning. I talked a lot about in that panel about perceived stress and trauma being one of the root causes of disease. I felt like today, in today’s modern world with social media, more isolation than ever before, toxins, which is again, another major root cause—again, our body perceives toxins. It’s stress. We man an assault against that as well. It’s still a stressor into the system. Stressors come in physical, chemical, emotional, or even perceived.

Dr. Pompa:
It doesn’t know the difference.

Dr. Snyder:
When we have it all of tack, we leverage cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, most importantly cortisol over long term, we know that we then begin to deregulate a lot of other hormones, our thyroid hormones, reproductive hormones like progesterone, estrogen, DHEA, and also our metabolic hormones. The thing about when we start to increase the amount of cortisol, we also know that we’re creating insulin resistance. When we look at even in the standpoint of rushing form one thing to the next, call it people syndrome, rushing woman syndrome, superwoman syndrome, whatever you want to call it, that’s one of the biggest pieces. We have a lot of chronic stress.

Tie in things like hidden infections. Tie in heavy metals and toxins. Then we’re also talking about another layer of inflammation that is throwing off that endocrine system, throwing of progesterone and estrogen, and also creating issues there. I find it’s usually oftentimes a compounding effect of multiple root causes at once that’s leveraging hormonal imbalance. What women begin to experience is their menstrual cycle. They have horrible PMS. Maybe their menstrual cycle is being disrupted. It’s significantly shorter. We’ll also see women dealing with hormonal weight resistance.

They can’t seem to lose weight. They’re storing weight at visceral, abdominal, around that visceral abdominal area, brain flog, low energy, the inability to sleep at night. All those things tend to be the biggest heavy hitters. They’re the first red flags I see.

Dr. Pompa:
Then 10 years later, 20 years later, then it’s endometriosis, PCOS. Then they get the diagnosis, but what you just hit on right there is most of the women that I talk to, the brain fog, all of those types of symptoms, and the weight. Let’s talk about that because people want to know that. I know what people want. What is, in your opinion, the number one hormone disruption that leads to the weight? I would even say the brain fog because those are the ones that drive people the most crazy.

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, I think it’s HPA axis de-regulation. I think that’s exactly what’s going on. When we are consistently triggering that perceived stress—

Dr. Pompa:
HPA—we have new people. Hypothalamus, pituitary, which runs your thyroid and your adrenals—how that axis works together is run basically run by the center of your brain. That’s what you’re referencing.

Dr. Snyder:
Yes, and the reason or that is, at the end of the day, what I’ve discovered, and we know to be true is, very single cell, every fiber in your body is hardwired for one thing and one thing only, and that’s survival, number one. It’s so interesting to me. As new research is coming out, we know that the body can sense perceived stress. We talk about your spidey senses are tingling or you can smell fear. There’s so many receptor sites all over the body that are constantly in stranger danger mode. Making sure that our environment is safe—where it’s really happening or that master control center is going on is the limbic system.

We just have not developed well inside of our brain to realize that a lot of these modern-day stressors, like running late for a meeting, or not being able to find a panel, or getting a text message from your best friend. I got a text message from my best friend yesterday in the middle of an interview. It said, I need you to call me as soon as possible. I don’t know why my phone was not on airplane mode. I did not need to see that message in the middle of that interview because the first thing—I literally went into a clutch the pearls moment. What is happening with my best friend? What does she need? What happened to her? That was a major perceived stressor. I felt like my heartrate went up.

I felt really alert. I was ready to fight something because I got this text messages. I think those types of compounding moments happen to people multiple times throughout the day. We have a biochemical process that gets the body ready for our sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight. I think consistently firing off that particular system in the body lends to a deregulation of so many other, the digestive—

Dr. Pompa:
In that system, you have your adrenals, cortisol. We know increased cortisol levels drives weight gain. It does.

Dr. Snyder:
Sugar cravings—it drives us to not even be able to think right. What is it? Our IQ drops by 50 points when we’re in a stressed state. Have you ever seen the videos where people are lost in the woods and they run right through a highway?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah because they have no clue.

Dr. Snyder:
They ran right by the rescue. We downregulate that prefrontal cortex. What people don’t realize also is we completely sabotage our ability to have willpower. Women ask me all the time. I don’t understand why I’m having all these cravings. I don’t get it. Why am I not winning the stare down contest with that cupcake? When we have shut that part down, cortisol has a way of hijacking our will power.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so that’s one hormone, right?

Dr. Snyder:
There’s other ones involved.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a major part of that system. Then the thyroid becomes involved because technically that’s really part of the system as well.

Dr. Snyder:
I think of the thyroid as just getting whipped, go, go. I’m here to—not that it’s a confession, but I have Hashimoto’s. I know for a fact that my stress did not help me in landing there. As we all know, the thyroid is the gas pedal of our metabolism. It’s managing how we burn calories. As you can imagine, if we’re constantly working our thyroid because we’re always in that state of sympathetic dominance, survival, or running from one thing to the next—I grew up with a mom who literally was running from one thing. That woman never stopped. She was just checking off hundreds of boxes. I just assumed that’s how I was supposed to operate. We know that if the thyroid becomes sluggish, whether it’s a hidden infection, it’s trauma, it’s stress, or it’s toxicity, we then start dealing with weight gain, food retention, a sluggish digestive system, constipation, and a slew of other issues.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and people don’t realize that low thyroid, the thyroid can actually affect your gut motility, meaning constipation. It affects your constipation. It affects brain fog. A lot of the symptoms we’re talking about, thyroid and adrenals, this whole axis that you’re referring to, is this overly stressed physically, chemically, emotionally, is really the big issue.

Dr. Snyder:
Then we co-elevate insulin, and that becomes a major problem. As we know, insulin ultimately becomes a fat storage hormone in insulin resistance or a block with our cells absorbing that extra glucose. We know that if it’s not able to do that, we then convert that glucose over to fat. Then that leads to weight gain. That leads to sugar addiction. That leads to cravings. Cortisol and insulin—they run in a pack as far as I’m concerned. If you’ve got one that’s firing, you’re constantly firing off cortisol, your insulin levels are having to constantly manage that moment because we’re needing to draw reserves for energy.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s very frustrating for you and I because what we see is now a world, even in functional medicine, a world downstream trying to give everyone all these little solutions for all these little things. We just described a very complicated system in the body hormonally that is driven by stressors, physical, chemical, emotional. For me, logically, the answer is okay, you have to deal with these stressors. There’s a time to hormones. We would both recognize that, but it’s not the solution. The solution is dealing upstream. My life’s work is about this cellular detox and my component to this. Your book—hold up your book because you give a lot of other solutions even beyond that, and I want to discuss them.

Essential oils, you have been a big proponent of, and how to use some essential oils—way better solution than obviously just throwing hormones, gasoline on a fire. Talk about some of the other solutions. I think we meant to understand. Here’s the problem. This is why you’re stressed. This is why you’re not adapting to stress, even normal stress. This is why you can’t lose weight. This is why you’re not sleeping, brain fog. What do I do about it? We know detox. My audience knows detox. However, talk about some other things here.

Dr. Snyder:
Absolutely, and detox is such a big part of this conversation, and so is food. Food’s a major part of this conversation. One of the things I learned—I’ve done a lot of detoxes and I’ve studied detoxification. It’s one of my favorite areas to dive into. When I was beginning to heal my body, I kept crescendo-ing back down. I’m an overachiever, and I’d like to believe I’m an overachiever at healing, too. I think when you think you’re an overachiever at one thing, you should just be an overachiever at all of them. I kept crescendo-ing back down to square one. I was like, what is going on? How can I not beat this?

I realized that the first step for me was changing my mode of operation. I hadn’t changed the way I thought. I hadn’t changed the way I was doing life. That was a big part of it, that core belief system, that core mode of operation. I learned very quickly that you can’t green juice or green smoothie your way out of chronic stress.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I wish it were so simple.

Dr. Snyder:
No, and you can’t detox your way out of chronic stress either. It should be a combination. You can’t mindset shift your way to healing. You’ve got to do the work. I realized that there was a combination there. One of the most difficult conversations I’ve had with women I was just having with this amazing woman named Diane the other day. I have a full-on program, hormone detox program inside the book. It’s mostly food-driven because I believe in ease and grace. This woman Diane reached out to me. She was on day six of the program. The biggest thing that she had taken away—mind you she had broken up with sugar, dairy, grains, and inflammatory foods. She did all that good work.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s a hard breakup.

Dr. Snyder:
Oh my Gosh. How many people are like, you’re taking away my Chick-fil-A—wait, what? You’ve been there. You know. People just go crazy when they find out you’re about to take away their favorite food, but that wasn’t her biggest issue. She was committed to that piece. She had a poignant moment when her husband was cleaning something in the house. She was sitting there reading actually that book, my book. She felt so much guilt that she was not cleaning because he was cleaning. She didn’t know how to let it go. There was that moment where she realized that that was what was getting her in so much trouble.

She reached out to me, and she’s like, not only is the program—I’ve got more energy. I’m sleeping better at night, but I finally realized that I deserve healing. I deserve self-care. I deserve to take a moment in my day even if someone else in my family is doing something around the house. She’s like, that is what keeps getting me in trouble. That was a big moment. I know that that’s not the biochemical, but we know that the emotional piece and mindset piece play such a big role. When we don’t think that we deserve to be well, you’re setting yourself up for failure, unfortunately because you’re not putting in all those practices. You’re not taking that moment to really make sure that you’re taking care of you first.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I agree. How does someone watching this with hormone issues use essential oils to help this?

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, absolutely—I will say, I love meditation. I love breathing exercises, but I also know what it feels like to be overwhelmed. I also know what it feels like when it’s just one more thing on my plate and I just feel like I’m about to explode. I had too much going on. What I love about oils is they are literally stress disruptors. How I like to imagine it—have you ever been on a merry-go-round, one of those in a little park, that goes really, really fast if you spin it?

Dr. Pompa:
Oh yeah, you mean the one you self-spin?

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, you self-spin. You’re holding on as a little go kid. Think of that merry-go-round as that moment of overwhelm. What oils do is, they’re literally the mechanism that just has you jump off, that has you jump off the merry-go-round like that. Oils, whether you like it or not, their chemical properties, very specific ones, not all of them do this—jasmine, lavender, roman chamomile, cedarwood, frankincense, the common oils actually disrupt the stress response system. They can go into the limbic system because it’s a [28:48] communication. Aroma, our sense of smell is the most powerful sense that we have because it’s directly connected to our survival.

By breathing in an aroma—I’ve got my Stress Be Gone Blend is right in this beautiful bottle right here. It’s just lavender and bergamot. I roll it over my palm. The chemical constituents in this blend, the [29:11] they are stress disruptors, whether you like it or not. You could sabotage somebody with this blend. You could have it underneath a desk diffusing it. There could be some grouchy person in your office who’s always stressed out, and you could literally reset their stress chemistry.

Dr. Pompa:
Let me bring the science to it. I’m the science guy. Some people—that’s all they needed to hear, and those are probably the smarter people. Then there’s people like me that got to go, okay, so why is this actually working? It’s what you said earlier. The limbic system of the brain that we were describing, that whole system that comes out of it, all the hormonal system, that is the primitive brain. Smell is actually the most powerful component to that limbic system. If that system, as you described, is causing so much of our inability to adapt to the stresses, and drive this sympathetic reaction, and affect our hormones, then how can we biohack straight into the system? It is, in fact, smell, by the way.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
Yes, it is. We know that oils come into the body. There are basically dozen to hundreds of these unique, chemical, organic compounds from plants. What's so beautiful about plants—we look at nutrition, we look at supplements, we look at herbs, and adaptogenic herbs out there, and homeopathies.

We know that plants were always designed to heal our bodies. The same thing with essential oils is that they really work with our own chemistry. Something like linalyl acetate we know binds to certain receptor sites. We know it binds to—it helps to regulate serotonin levels. It helps to bind together. It has this really powerful way of just calming the mind and relaxing it.

I have really bad flight anxiety, which stinks because I'm on a plane a lot. I have oils on me at all times. I have a certain oil blend that will take me from 100 to 0 in less than 60 seconds upon smelling it. I'm so grateful because there's people all over that plane, who are taking Xanax to get over their flight anxiety, and here I've got my oils.

Dr. Pompa:
People want to know. What's the blend? Come on.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
Yes, the blend is a combination of vetiver. Vetiver is high in sesquiterpenes, which is a powerful neurotonic and a powerful sedative. If you want to shut your brain off at night, I call it the mental chatter begone blend, or just eradicate mental chatter. It's just lavender and vetiver in a diffuser. Diffuse it over your bed.

If I want my husband—my husband's a night owl. He stays up way late, I think two or three o'clock last night. Let's say there are nights where I'm like, “You are going to bed.” I will put a diffuser by him around 10:00 at night, or 11, with that blend in it, and he maybe makes it 30 minutes where he just knocks out. You can do this for your family all over the house.

Dr. Pompa:
People are loving that too. What are some of your other hormone combinations you have?

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
Yeah, so the anxiety is vetiver. It's a combination of vetiver, frankincense, lavender, and Roman chamomile, and bergamot. That's usually the five I usually have. Even if you just have vetiver, and lavender, and Roman chamomile, those three oils oftentimes do the trick for anxiety.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that's awesome.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
How about cravings? I think cravings are a big one.

Dr. Pompa:
That's huge.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
A study out of the—I want to say it was The Journal of Neurology by Dr. Alan Hirsch, who was looking at appetite and craving suppressants, and was looking at aromatherapy, and discovered that peppermint, I think it was 85 to 90% of the time, completely, successfully got rid of cravings. I know cravings are an unmet need, and so do you. It's usually brain fog, it's fatigue, it's stress, it's emotions, it's boredom. It's never your liver saying, “Oh my gosh, I have to have that cupcake right now.” Your liver's like, “Please don't eat that. Please don't make me have to work so hard.”

Cravings are something else. They strike whenever they do. It's always important to know your trigger times, 3:00 in the afternoon, 10 p.m. at night when you're watching Game of Thrones, whatever it is that you're doing. Just taking a drop of peppermint on your palms, breathing it in, will literally shut down that craving. It will buy you time. A craving lasts about three minutes total. You can do a lot of damage in three minutes.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, that actually—that's typically the damage time. If you can bypass that time, good for you, absolutely. Frankincense is one of my favorites. Why do I love frankincense so much? What does that benefit you?

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
Research for frankincense, not only is it great for anti-aging, so it's a great cellular support oil. It's a great detoxifying oil as well. It helps to support Phase 2 detoxification inside of the liver. Also, frankincense is great for mental alertness. Frankincense, rosemary, and peppermint is my go-to blend for brain fog. Those three oils not only help to oxygenate the brain, they help to—frankincense allows for proper neural connectivity. Rosemary boosts acetylcholine levels and boosts alertness and working memory by up to 70%. Brain fog be gone.

My blend, I have thousands, tens of thousands of people making that all over the world because it works so well. I actually have my “Brain Fog Be Gone” blend right here. That's a good one. I love frankincense for meditation, for, again, for focus and concentration. Frankincense has been shown very well to reduce depression in people who are dealing with that. Those are some big ones. Then there's a lot of really incredible research on Frankincense for cellular apoptosis and also for cancer. We're seeing more and more research there.

Dr. Pompa:
You have a cheat sheet that you are giving as a gift, right?

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
Yes, I do.

Dr. Pompa:
Some people are going, “What did she say?”

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
I know. It's a lot. It's a lot of goodies. That cheat sheet, I believe it's my cravings cheat sheet. When I surveyed 50,000 women last year, I asked them what was the number one health concern that was affecting their life. Brain fog, stress, fatigue, and weight resistance, those were the big ones. That cheat sheet are my best blends, and how to use them, for those big concerns, so sleep, brain fog, stress, fatigue, and cravings.

Dr. Pompa:
Perfect. That will help people, and that's the goal here. Hold up your book again because I'm sure that people will want to get it. You talk about these things at length in your book.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
All those things I mentioned, there's a chapter for every one of those conditions. I think it's really important, too, in the book, not only for women to have a solution to what's going on, but also to understand the mechanism. If they're dealing with brain fog, what hormones are involved? What's going on with the body when we're dealing with brain fog? Is the thyroid a possibility? I wanted women to feel very empowered and educated, so when they came to you and I, or their doctors, that they could ask those types of educated questions and hopefully get the answers that they're looking for.

Dr. Pompa:
That's awesome. People need some solutions today outside of it. I think people are so hormonally off. It's going to take them a while to get to the point of detox, or even lifestyle changes. In the meantime, the question I always get is what do I do in the meantime, while I'm getting there? I think the tips you're giving are in that meantime.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
I think a lot of people—we were talking about this earlier. A lot of people—everyone's at a different phase in their healing journey. One of the things I love about oils—because I was such a nutrition nerd. I was so digging the biology. I learned that I could get someone to use an oil before I could get someone to drink a green smoothie. I was like, how do I get someone to really begin to understand this beautiful [00:37:49]? How do I get someone to start down that path? I love essential oils. I think they're the gateway drug into wellness, part of it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, it's true because people use it and they go, “oh, that worked.”

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
That worked. They're like, “Oh my gosh, my headache's gone. Oh my gosh, I can think more clearly. My brain fog is gone at least for the next couple hours. Oh my gosh, I just beat that craving.” Having those types of tools, especially an emergency tool that you can grab, that you feel confident in using, it just opens the door for what's possible.

Dr. Pompa:
Here we have teens, today, that are hormonally disregulated. It didn't happen to you until later.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
Not till my 30s.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is—it's a big deal. The question—this is one of the things that they ask in the article. Why are girls getting their periods so young?

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
You and I both know why.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but they didn't give that reason in here. That's unfortunate. They did admit to the fact that the earlier a girl gets her period, her cancer risk goes much—through the roof, basically, more hormone disruption.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
That's the reason she got her period early. We’ve got hormone [00:39:10] obviously have hormone disruption really early in life because of toxicity, because of parabens, and phthalates, and [00:39:19], and –

Dr. Pompa:
They did fortunately quote one scientist in here that alluded to the fact of some of the chemicals could be the cause. It was such a “could be the cause” that you would just read right over it. Isn't that the shame, the hormones being driven by commercial meats, the hormones in the meats, the plastics, the toxins, the pesticides, the list goes on.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
[00:39:51] all of it.

Dr. Pompa:
The thing is is that it's a problem. [00:39:54] recognizes it's a problem. We know it's increasing cancer rates. Who's to see what's coming? My gosh.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
I'll be honest with you. I don't think I've met a woman who hasn't had a hormone issue one way or the other They may not know it, but it's quite obvious. It's so rare to meet anyone who—and I’ve met with so many other good friends of mine, practitioners who've ran hundreds and thousands of labs and have yet to find a woman who isn't struggling to some capacity. I mean, living in this modern world, how do we manage it if we're not really proactive every day?

Dr. Pompa:
I think the problem is is that then you're right on what you're saying. They go to their doctor, and they run certain tests, typically bloodwork. Typically, when the symptoms start, the hormones are still in-line, so the blood tests are normal. It takes another ten years for them to be abnormal. Then when they become abnormal, then they land themselves on dangerous medications, more dangerous hormones that we'll find out ten years from now were actually causing cancer, but the doctor's telling you it's safe now. You start the hormones. Certain things get better for a period.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
For a period of time.

Dr. Pompa:
I'm telling a story that's all very common to most women. The problem is growing. The solutions are arguably getting worse because long-term, I think we're creating more problems. This is a big deal. This is a really big deal. I think that we need more people bringing it to light. An article like this—

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
That article is shameful. It is an embarrassment to our profession. I'm not giving up this fight. I'm not going anywhere. The more and more of these conversations we can have—and one of the things I tell women, too, is have these conversations with each other. Let's start having more of these conversations and demanding something different so that we shift the way that we [00:42:10] management of women's healthcare inside of the system.

Dr. Pompa:
I think we need to have them with our teenagers because this is obviously where it's starting. We have to educate them on, I believe, the causative problems. Again, they're teenagers. They're not going to start changing their make-up.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
Do you remember the conversation that your dad had with you as a teenager?

Dr. Pompa:
I don't think I had one.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
You didn't even have the conversation.

Dr. Pompa:
[00:42:36]

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
I definitely, as a Catholic Latina, there was no conversation. Any of that was the devil's work. I remember when I got my period, and we didn't—no one talked about it. No one said anything. Here I'm at the roller-skating ring, and I'm in these little jean shorts. Not to throw my mom under the bus, but she just threw some pads into the bathroom, and that was it.

Dr. Pompa:
She threw the pads into the bathroom.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
That's how my grandma did it. It is a lot. I have a dear friend of mine who has a book. She talks about a call to arms to—not just for the girls, for the boys too, but definitely for the girls. Who's responsibility is it to ensure that our girls are educated about their menstrual health, their reproductive health? It's every single one of our responsibilities.

Dr. Pompa:
It is. Here's the thing. Again, I go back to the—okay, moms and dads, they're not—your teenager's just all of a sudden not going to change their make-up. That shouldn't even be the goal. The goal is is that you and I [00:43:52]. We didn’t even have a conversation. The goal is just to have the conversation. My teenagers are now in their twenties. They all have went back to the fact that we did talk to them about these things. Oh, they didn't want to hear it. Now, they go, “Gosh, I'm so glad.” They're all education. My teenagers all make good—my 20-somes, they all make good decisions now based on their diet, and their lifestyle choices, the deodorants that they use. All of these things.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
Dad, it worked. It worked.

Dr. Pompa:
Plant the seeds is what I'm saying. Plant the seeds.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
It's so true. My husband's mom was an energy healer. He grew up with essential oils. I had never heard of this. I grew up on Pop-Tarts and Tylenol. My husband had grown up that way. He definitely went to the wayside for a little bit. It was the things that he was brought up with, and that he grew up on, all the hippie-to-be non-toxic everything, broccoli, sprouts, and all that. It was really great. When we started dating, all of it was just—so many women tell me their husbands are just not on the same train. They won't do things. They're not willing to partner up with them on this healing journey. I'm like, thank goodness my husband's mom did the good work already.

Dr. Pompa:
It doesn't matter, ladies. You just do it anyway because women—

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
I tell them all the time, yes. Do it anyway.

Dr. Pompa:
They come along. They'll come along. Just ignore them and just move on.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
Just take care of you. For the first time, ever, take care of you.

Dr. Pompa:
Take care of you and watch what happens. They'll come along. Men look for things that are real. If your life changes, they'll see it. They'll follow. Then they'll start asking questions. Just live the life and watch what happens to your kids. Live it to lead it, that's the name of my seminars.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
We have a responsibility. I believe that we have a legacy that we are leaving to our kids and our families. Not even just a legacy to our kids, but I have a legacy to my sister, and my aunt, and my [00:46:06] that I want to leave for them. I live this lifestyle, and I spend time with my family. My mom and my sister always tell me that my house is not the fun house. They know that this is—that I'm always educating, and healing, and working with them. That's the legacy I want. I want that legacy for my family.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It will happen. My 22-year-old daughter just—she's like, “I just want to raise my kids just like you did, Merily,” my wife. She fought her when she was younger. She fought her. Now it's like, “I'm going to do the same thing—”

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
It was like Bed Bath and Body Works Spritzer.

Dr. Pompa:
I'm doing the same thing. She's all about it now. Hang in there. That's the message of hope that we have for teenagers. Listen, if you don't have the conversation, they're going to end up thinking Gardasil's the answer. They're going to end up thinking that birth control pills are their answer. They're going to do this. If you plant the seeds and educate them, when they hear that message, when the doctor says, “Take these,” they're going to go, hmm. They're going to question it.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
They're going to question it. When the doctor gives them birth control and Xanax, they're going to question it. They're not going to fulfill those scripts. They're going to get a second opinion.

Dr. Pompa:
Where can they get your book? Hold it up again.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
All the places. All the places all over the world. It is [00:47:32] clearly it's always on sale at Amazon. Thank you, Amazon. It's in bookstores everywhere. Again, if women want to know their hormones, they want non-toxic options, they want non-toxic solutions for their biggest hormone issues, it's such a great book to get started. Again, the big premise for me is ease and grace because I know that so often we feel horrible, we feel like our bodies are sabotaging us, the last thing we want is a ton of more things to bring on. I tried my best to make it as easy as possible.

Dr. Pompa:
We appreciate that. Thank you for being on the show. Thank you for joining me on the panel.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
Yeah, thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
I joined the panel. Like I said, I was the only male.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
You were late to the panel.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, Dr. Mariza, thank you again. We'll have you on, I'm sure, again.

Dr. Mariza Snyder:
Thank you so much for having me.

Ashley Smith:
That's it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at BuyCytoNow.com. We'll be back next week and every Friday at 10am Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at CellularHealing.tv, and please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

278: Brain Optimization and Neurofeedback, Part 2 with Dr. Andrew Hill

Episode 278: Brain Optimization and Neurofeedback, Part 2

with Dr. Andrew Hill

Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Hill is back, and this time we're bringing you on-location as my son Simon gets his brain mapped at the Peak Brain Institute. Dr. Hill will walk us through this neurofeedback technique, and we will be going into greater detail about Quantitative Electroencephalography (or QEEG), which Dr. Hill introduced to us on episode #249. Neurofeedback can identify neurological issues like ADD, Depression, Autism, Anxiety, PTSD, addiction and more. You'll be amazed when you watch this process!

More about Dr. Andrew Hill:
Dr. Andrew Hill is one of the top peak performance coaches in the country. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA's department of Psychology and continues to do research on attention and cognitive performance. Dr. Hill is the founder of Peak Brain Institute, host of the Head First Podcast with Dr. Hill, and lectures at UCLA, teaching courses in psychology, neuroscience, and gerontology.

Additional Information:

Show notes:
http://peakbraininstitute.com/chtv – 50% off Brain Mapping with our link

CytoDetox: total detoxification support where it matters most – at the cellular level.

HCF's Live it to Lead it event – Newport Beach – November 14-17, 2019

Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
Episode 249, we interviewed a neuroscience about something that is a craze right now, and that is this neurotherapy of the brain, biohacking the brain. Look, in this episode, you’re going to want to see this. I literally took my son, Simon, to one of their brain mapping locations, and we mapped his brain. You’re going to get to see that. What’s really cool is they hook him up, his brain up to a computer, and you’re going to get to see the training that, basically, all of you can get at home once you get your brain map. Literally, when I was in there, I expected to see all these ADHD kids and seizure and autistic children because it’s amazing for that, but I saw CEOs and salespeople biohacking their brains with neurofeedback to, basically, perform better.

Wow! Wait ‘til you see this episode. It’s going to bring this neurofeedback to a whole other level for most of you. If it’s ADHD, if it’s OCD, if it’s a brain condition, if it’s seizures, and if it’s just performance, you’re going to want to stay tuned to this episode.

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith, and today we are welcoming back one of the top peak performance brain coaches in the country, Dr. Andrew Hill. Dr. Hill holds a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA’s Department of Psychology and continues to do research on attention and cognitive performance. Dr. Hill is the founder of Peak Brain Institute. He’s host of the Head First podcast with Dr. Hill and lectures at UCLA teaching courses in psychology, neuroscience, and gerontology. You can revisit Dr. Hill’s previous interview with Dr. Pompa on Episode 249. I’ll turn this over to you both. Welcome, Dr. Pompa and Dr. Hill.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Dr. Hill:
Thanks for having me back.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, we had to have you back. We had so many questions about it that I was out there doing another interview. I said, okay, we have to do a Part 2, and I’m going to bring my son, Simon, who’s ADD, ADHD, some OCD qualities in there, all of which I believe are part of his gifting. However, I wanted to bring him in for a brain mapping. Therefore, film that that we could actually share that video, which we’re going to in this episode, and then, also, the unique treatment, how that actually works and looks at it. In the first episode—you all should watch Episode 249 because we’ll probably talk about some different things there than we will here. I feel like it was hard to bring out exactly what we were talking about, and that’s why I did those videos. Then you could see exactly what we mean, how you train the brain. There’s Simon training the brain in one of the videos that we’re going to share with you today, so stay tuned, great episode.

Let’s remind them, doc. This is becoming a more popular topic, neurofeedback and how we do this. As a matter of fact, when I was at the clinic, I mean, I expected a room full of ADD kids, and I got a couple CEOs that were just biohacking their brain for better performance and another guy in sales who was biohacking his brain for better performance. I was a little shocked about that, so let’s recap. What is neurofeedback, and who’s it for? Obviously, it’s more than I thought.

Dr. Hill:
Sure, so neurofeedback broadly is biofeedback on your brain. Biofeedback is this process of measuring physiological processes and training them or exercising them in some way. When we use the word biofeedback, we think of people relaxing and using meditative type things, and there is a lot of biofeedback that is very relaxing. When we think of that style of biofeedback, including things like hand warming and heart rate variability and stuff like that, we’re training to some extent, the peripheral nervous system, to a large extent, and what we’re talking about in neurofeedback is central or central nervous system biofeedback. That’s why we call it neurofeedback. That includes training the EEG or brainwaves, as well as the HEG or the blood flow, the hemoencephalography, the dynamics of blood flow.

By training, I mean we measure what the systems are doing on their own moment to the moment. Whenever the brain happens to shift a little more in the right direction that we think it should exercise in, we go good job, brain, with an audio/visual stream, and when the brain does the wrong thing or moves away from the resource shifting in that direction, we withhold the input. Since the brain likes input, it starts to trend itself, if you will, towards whatever produces more information. Then we move the goalposts, so it can’t ever learn. We gently shape it or exercise it up in a certain direction or down in a certain direction for about half an hour. It’s involuntary. As people will see, it’s also effortless, which is—it’s a fun process. Usually, people will sit in front of a computer screen and watch some sort of video game or animation change. After a few sessions, the brain has started to figure out, oh, whenever I change a brainwave or a resource in a certain direction, the world changes, so it starts to exercise itself more and more over time until the resource becomes a little more permanent.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, yeah, so I mean, obviously, like I said, I mean we focused on ADD. I mean, I know you do this for seizures. Here we saw people who just wanted better outcomes from their own brain, better performance. Obviously, this is for anybody but I mean—I guess, review. I mean, what other types of conditions do you see great results?

Dr. Hill:
The field started 52 years ago on seizure because we discovered serendipitously that it raises the seizure threshold. It makes the brain seizure resistant. This special frequency called SMR, which is a very calm body and alert mind. Predators use it to physically relax their body. Humans use it to keep us deeply asleep and for some learning things. It’s called sigma by neurologists or sleep spindles. If you train up the sleep spindles, you produce a stabilization of the brain, which is an interesting finding in the late 60s, and that meant that from there we were working on seizure. It really dramatically reduced seizure. I think the average metadata study recently showed that it was more than 50% reduction in seizures average, and 5% of people have complete control. It’s a very large effect size.

Then, from there, because the EEG world largely is bound by sleep studies and sleep literature and sleep science, most of what we have been doing for 80 years in EEG is really in that space. For instance, in brain—in neurofeedback, we use a sleep style EEG cap to do the assessment. We record 19 channels of the head, and the database that we compare you to to see how unusual your brain is is a population level comparison. The reason we use that style of cap and those number of channels in the head and the reason the databases are all constructed that way is because of sleep literature for years. We found we could change seizure conditions really quickly, and from there, the sleep literature seems to really unfold. Anxiety and ADHD become very tractable. The low-hanging fruit are sleep, stress, and attention seizures. Those change for almost everyone reliably and over time.

Then the things that we found since then in the past 30, 40, 50 years include pretty much everything else your brain does to be broad, which is unfortunate from a business development perspective but great for anyone’s goals. We can work on—I mean, you saw in my office a lot of CEOs and peak performers, and that’s I think probably more true of peak brain than other neurofeedback places. We have about a third peak performers. I also have about a third what I would call neurological clients who’s—it’s a brain problem. Injuries, concussions, seizures, migraines, even ADHD is a brain bound problem, not a psychology problem. Then you have a psychology class of people, and I’m not a psychologist. I’m a neuroscientist, so I work on the resources, not your experience of them, largely. That includes things like anxiety, sleep issues, PTSD, OCD, developmental trauma, often very significant things.

Now, when it’s a psychological thing, I often work alongside someone who’s—other team members, but it works on the regulatory things, sleep, stress, mode, attention. That can be a symptom. Oh, attention needs to be improved because you have ADHD, or it can be a performance goal. I want to have more vigilance and be a little more on because I’m not on as much as I might want to be, and so that’s probably the big difference in how peak brain works is we frame this as fitness. Like a coach asks an athlete what their goals are and then architects a program for them, the coaches aren’t really trying to fit what they’re doing to the goals, not selecting those goals, and sometimes, in medicine and psychology, there’s a bit of a top down. Here’s what’s wrong. Here’s what you need. We really want to flip that and give people access and agency, so we do the brain mapping and say here’s what your resources look like. What do you want to do with them? Then the neurofeedback process is the exercise on those resources.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we have video on both of those. Let’s talk about the mapping because that’s where it starts. You map the brain, and then we’re able to look at, okay, here’s what we’re dealing with. When you went over with us Simon’s mapping, you saw some classic ADHD.

Dr. Hill:
Sure.

Dr. Pompa:
You also said things like do you have any head trauma, which I answered I don’t think so. He says, well, actually, one time I did hit my head. You were able to sense that there might’ve been some head trauma and other things just by looking at that, so explain that. We’ll actually break away and look at the video after you’re done explaining that. Show him getting his brain map.

Dr. Hill:
Sure, so the process of gathering data is pretty low key for brain mapping. You just sit still for about 15 minutes, so it takes a few minutes to put a cap on your head. We use a cap with gel. We squirt it full of gel. It’s little messy. Then you sit still for five minutes or so eyes closed, five minutes or so eyes opened. The brain’s very, very different in eyes open versus eyes closed modes, and so we want to do a reference database check essentially against both states. We pick up all the gross activity, the baselines your brain is doing, compare that to a normative database in a few thousand people, and age match the comparison.

We’re looking at your son relative to other people his age, and age is the biggest thing that changes the EEG. It changes with early development. It speeds up. Then late in development, it slows down in aging. Between ages 20 and 60 roughly, there’s no change in the EEG across age, and so by using age as our comparison, we really get this almost rock solid comparison of one person compared to the average population at their rough age. The brain maps because of this are stable year after year. That’s what’s nice about them. You change a little bit day to day based on your variability, but not so much compared to the population’s mean or average. The brain maps are really rock solid stable. They give us this nice 10,000 foot view.

The unfortunate part is they aren’t necessarily diagnostically valid. I mean, there’s certain patterns that show up, for instance, high theta relative to beta, high theta/beta ratio. That pattern when it shows up is diagnostic for ADHD. Ninety-four percent accurate to sort people into ADHD and non-ADHD buckets. That’s by far the best statistic we have in this kind of data. The injury marker, for instance, is a population comparison, injury versus non-injured activity changes. That’s a very weak statistic. It doesn’t pick up injuries all the time. For instance, for you son, it was negative, didn’t show an injury. Yet, I saw little hotspots of slow brainwaves, so I guessed their might be an injury in spite of the statistic not finding one.

We looked through a dozen pages of his data for his brain and some of the attention testing results, and his attention tests showed he has some executive function difficulties, probably ADHD like performance. The brain maps didn’t look classically ADHD. They looked a lot more like rumination, some perseveration, getting stuck on things. I mean, what you mentioned about being a little ruminative or obsessive, that tracks perfectly with my guesses, but it’s that direction I’m hypothesizing. Is it possible that he ruminates? Is it possible he perseverates? He gets a little obsessive or songs are stuck in his head.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah.

Dr. Hill:
You were like, oh, yeah. Then I believe my data. If you were like, no, that isn’t true for him, then I wouldn’t believe my data. That little marker, the little hotspot of [beta] on the front midline or sometimes it’s a little bit further back is the rumination marker. This is the switching system. The cingulates switch your attention; decide what’s important to pay attention to. If they get a little bit overactive, it might mean that you have a song stuck in your head, or you’re a bit ruminative, or bite your nails. It also might mean you’re Steve Jobs and very particular and really organized. Maybe you’re kind of a jerk and it doesn’t work for people around you but maybe works really, really well for you to be hyper-focused, a little bit rigid and really organized.

Again, to frame this, my job isn’t necessarily here is what’s wrong because it’s unusual. I say here’s what’s unusual. Let’s talk about what that might mean, how that might operate for you. Let’s figure out if this is a bottleneck for you, if it’s a gift, if it’s a quirk, if it’s nothing we should pay attention to, etc.

Dr. Pompa:
Then more importantly, say okay, let’s take this data, and then let’s accomplish the goal that you desire.

Dr. Hill:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
You have my son’s information there.

Dr. Hill:
I do, yeah. I can pop it up if you want.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so we can do that. We’ll do that, but let’s actually show the piece of video. Your technician, who was great, by the way, explains what this looks like, so our viewers can have a really good explanation or visually see what this actually looks like getting your brain map. Then we’ll talk more about what we could actually do with the data. Here, we’ll watch that here in one second.

[Video Starts]

Dr. Pompa:
…Brain Institute and here with Andre.

Andre:
Nice to meet you all.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, one of Dr. Andrew Hill’s technicians and Simon. How do you feel Simon? Don’t move. Okay, so anyways, Simon, why did you want to get this done?

Simon:
I struggle with focus, ADD, everything.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, actually, I’m going to be honest with you. He saw Part 1 of my interview with Dr. Hill. He watched it, and he said, dad, I want this done. When he knew I was coming to California, we made it happen for him, and I knew this would be a great Part 2. Andre, tell us what’s going on here. What are we doing?

Andre:
We have this. Essentially, it looks like a swimmer’s cap, and it’s full of a bunch of different electrodes, all of different places. What we’re doing is we’re measuring all the electricity that his brain produces that goes to the scalp, and essentially, brings that signal [00:15:59] right here. What you’re seeing on the screen over here is his live brainwaves, and so each trace line is representative of each location on the actual scalp. Again, we’re going to do two recordings. One will be with his eyes closed. One will be with his eyes open. Essentially, when he closes his eyes, your brain tends to shift a little bit in regards to the type of brainwaves it’s producing, typically. Whenever you close your eyes, typically, a lot of slower brainwaves come in as your occipital lobe shuts down a little bit.

Typically, on a normal brain, that comes in when we find—where we find issues is when you close your eyes. Typically, with anxiety or OCD, you close your eyes, and the signal stayed the same, or there’s very little slow brainwaves. That’s typically a red flag. It gives us an idea as to what’s going on. Right now, when I’m recording this, though, what I’m looking for is things like this too. During the editing process, I want to edit stuff like this out. This is all noise that it’s going to get liberated.

Dr. Pompa:
With this information, it’ll take you how long to edit this and just clear out all of the noise?

Andre:
A day or so, typically.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow! That’s impressive, so from this information—now, when we were filling out the forms, Simon and I, he literally was able to put down what he wanted out of this, meaning that he wanted more focus so he could—school was easier. Reading was easier. He wanted this anxiety and OCD thing to chill out, right? You were able to actually dial in what we want to train the brain on.

Andre:
Correct, yeah, based on what we find in overall goals. The overall goals give us, okay, this is where we want to go and a starting point, but the brain map is the overall roadmap here. These are things we should work on. As we fix this, this will come in line. Typically, with focus, a lot of times sleep is an issue. They may not perceive it as an issue. They’re like I sleep fine. I sleep five hours. Recommended sleep is 7 to 8, or maybe they’re sleeping eight hours, but they’re getting 30 minutes of deep sleep, which is…

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, totally, we’re big on sleep. That’s why sleep is a big deal here as well as focus and attention. I know people that just want stronger brain in specific areas do this too, and obviously, we’re talking about that. Okay, so with this information then, you’ll clean up the information, the data. Then Dr. Hill will take it, and basically, design a program for Simon as he’s able to increase those parts of the brain.

Andre:
Correct.

Dr. Pompa:
This gives us the roadmap on how to exactly do that.

Andre:
Exactly, once this data gets processed, I send that out to him, and then he’ll go over that with you guys, whatever you guys [00:18:44]. He’ll tell you this is what we found. This is what this looks like. We got to submit the anxiety stuff. Although if it popped up, this is where it’s at, and give you an idea as to where his brain’s at relative to people his age. It’s what I call—we generate those images. It is averaging the statistics, so it’s comparing his brain to other people relative to his age range. I can’t compare him to an elderly person because those two brains would vastly differ. Typically, with age as well, there’s more—even if it’s not traumatic brain injury, there’s more just wear and tear damage.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, oh, no, that’s unfortunate. With this data and then with the goals that Simon desire, then Dr. Hill produces the program.

Andre:
Correct.

Dr. Pompa:
Then we’re going to show in a moment is then what he is able to do at home with this other device called a [00:19:41] , right?

Andre:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
Then that’s going to be him training it, and then he’ll create that and, in a month, considerable results.

Andre:
Typically so, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome. In a moment, we’ll be able to show what that looks like.

Andre:
Correct, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
We’ll actually be able to train once this data is all brought together.

Andre:
Correct, and I’ll explain what’s going on there because it’s a lot of—it’d be just like—it’s got a lot of beeps saying, okay, what’s going on?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, awesome. All right, Simon, what do you feel?

Simon:
Nothing.

Dr. Pompa:
Good, that’s what we want, nothing. One of the things is I scared Simon. I said, okay, so we’re going to be injecting this into your neck, but it won’t hurt, honestly. The needles aren’t that big. All right, so in a minute, you’ll share that. Okay, so hang on a second.

[Video Ends]

Dr. Pompa:
All right, cool. Okay, so what does that mean? You got to see it, and like I said, your technician, you could see he was great. Okay, so from that, what you just saw with the—we were making fun of him because he had that little cap on there. I was sending pictures to his brothers and sisters. By the way, the hardest thing for him was sitting still. He kept having to correct him. Okay, so from that, you gathered this data. You can show some of the data. I mean, our viewers, just extrapolate from it the most important points but some of the significant points. One of which you said, gosh, sleeping deeper I recall is a big—and eating before bed. He already made some of those changes, which I know affect him greatly.

Dr. Hill:
Great, that’s wonderful. Yeah, so here’s some of his brain map data on the right. These colored circles are his brainwaves, delta, theta, alpha, beta, high beta, slow through fast brainwaves. Essentially, we’re looking how unusual he is compared to the average guy his age. What we’re seeing is in the back of his head he’s got these little orange spots, and those are about two to three standard deviations, about two, two and a half, actually. This little marker is that posterior cingulate. I mentioned the cingulates a minute ago. The cingulate’s job at the posterior is to evaluate the environment and make sure that what we’re doing is going to stay safe. If you’re driving a car and you don’t look at the road, there’s a sense of watch the road by the cingulate. If you learn the world isn’t always predictable or if you learn to be a little fear driven, the evaluator ramps itself up a little bit, and you typically see this. That’s why I was guessing some sort of rumination, worry, or chewing on things for him.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, he’s a worrier. That was something was very, very accurate. He’s worried about his health all the time. He’s extra worried.

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, so he’s evaluating. He’s constantly evaluating. That’s that contact back midline guy. In this little visualization here, this is actually eyes closed data, and so usually, when you close your eyes, the back of the head will relax. The visual system drops in activity, so with your eyes closed, if the back is really lit up and it’s lit up on the cingulate right there but also broadly against the back of the head in beta, that means that the visual system is staying lit up just in case. It’s this hypervigilant and ruminative combination I’m seeing for him in this one map, one page we’re seeing.

Then we also saw—you mentioned sleep, so here’s some frequencies of his brain. Some of these alpha waves, which are his processing speed, his resting speed, are running a little slow at a standard deviation some places. Usually, people’s alpha runs slow when they’re having trouble focusing, having some afternoon short-term memory and some word finding. That can drag down the beta frequencies, the thinking frequencies here, and it can affect the delta, which is a deeply rested frequency. For him, his delta is a little fast. It’s half to almost a full standard deviation above average some places. It’s not dramatically fast, but it’s right in the edge of what I was guessing. If you don’t get enough deep sleep at night, dreamless sleep, then when you’re awake your brain pushes back a little bit. It micro sleeps or browns out, and often, that produces fatigue and almost always poor performance and things like short-term memory and maintaining focus.

Dr. Pompa:
One of the things is that you asked him and it was right on was do you get a little fatigued in school? He says, oh, yeah, I can only do an hour at a time, and after that, I’m fatigued. He’s done. I mean, he just [00:24:03] down.

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, the cognitive fatigue is really a big deal. I was guessing that from the delta, and then when he opened his eyes—here’s the eyes open maps. The slow brainwaves went up when you open your eyes. That’s the opposite of what should happen. This, basically, literally means is brain his browning out in energy. It’s just going a little bit of a sleep when he opened his eyes. The slow brainwaves faded when they’re excessive, meaning the brakes are off. Squirrel, it’s hard to focus.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s it, man.

Dr. Hill:
He’s got a really hard hit to the left side of his head, so his vigilance or sustained focus is a big deal too. You see coherence or connectivity here at the bottom, the red cluster. Delta waves are stuck together. They aren’t changing moment to moment, and the delta’s at sleepiness. He’s foggy, fatigued, irritable, anxious, impulsive. It looks like he’s struggling a little bit. However, I mentioned that the most valid marker in the data is these data/beta ratios. In spite of performing very ADHD like on the test here which I’ll mention in a minute, he doesn’t show the classic ADHD markers, which means it’s more driven—atypical ADHD, this is more driven by stress and sleep or reactivity. Those markers are pretty clear, the rumination, fear driven stuff, the hypervigilance. The brain fog markers are very clear, and so I can guess about those. I wouldn’t guess ADHD purely on the maps because he doesn’t have high theta/beta ratios here.

Now, if you look at his performance—I always do these things together because they’re useful this way. His attention, which is not missing things, is soft. This test is scored where 100 is the middle of a bell curve and 15 points off either side is roughly typical and beyond that isn’t. For him, he’s scoring very low in what’s called vigilance and focus or being alert and staying on when things aren’t changing for both auditory and visual. These scores are getting in his way, and these are suggesting ADHD-like performance. On this side, it’s impulsivity, same thing as prudence. He’s not being very careful. We can’t monitor what he’s doing very well, and that does trip positive for population level checks for inattention and impulsivity.

On the behavior, he looks impulsive and inattentive and looks like he’s performing an ADHD way. Then when you dig into his brain, he looks burnt out and brain foggy, and he’s not focusing very well. He’s ruminating a little bit, and he’s perseverating, stuck on things and anxious. I’m not surprised he’s impulsive, but I wonder if some of it isn’t being reactive, not impulsive. It’s more about an anxiety and less of a disinhibition. ADHD is often the brakes are off with high theta, or you can’t shift into gear with high alpha. He’s got too much accelerator in the extreme, and he’s got too much of the really very slow brainwaves, the delta. It’s the extremes for him that are more—and infrequencies that are more excessive, and that suggests something that isn’t exactly ADHD from my perspective.

Again, as you said earlier, my goal isn’t just get to the right label. It’s to help make a change. I’m often dropping one level below the label people are using anyway. You came in with some sense, attention problems, some stress problems, and I look at his brain and go whoa. Look at these rumination and perseveration markers. Look at this poor deep sleep marker. Wow! This guy’s probably struggling and foggy. I was able to describe his experience looking at his physiology, but not necessarily talking about capital letters of OCD and ADHD.

Dr. Pompa:
I mean, we didn’t have any major head traumas that I knew about. He had mentioned skiing once, hitting his head. What about emotional traumas? Could emotional traumas have put him into this state in his brain because that we had a lot of?

Dr. Hill:
The fast frequencies.

Dr. Pompa:
We had a lot go on.

Dr. Hill:
Did you? Yeah, possibly, as a short answer. I can never tell when things developed in a brain map. I can tell they’re stable traits at this point, not a snapshot state. They won’t change year after year at this point unless you do something significant to the brain. The switchers, the anterior cingulate and posterior cingulate being a little hot in betas is a very common thing to show up when there’s trauma. When the back one’s active, people are very threat sensitive, evaluative, PTSD things. When the front is active, it’s OCD type things, or being a high-powered CEO, that can be very similar. It’s those switching systems get really ramped up when the brain figures out it better darn well keep its attention on what is important and threatening.

Yes, a lot of the things I’m seeing on the right-hand side of a document, if you will, the faster frequencies that are really blown up could be from emotional, psychological trauma, wear and tear in that way. The really slow brainwaves, the delta brainwaves being excessive are usually either a quirky brain. He just happens to show up in the world with this brain, or they’re an impact. Usually, you have an impact. If the brain gets pushed on, all the connections into that area aren’t informing the area anymore. It’s smushed. That’s the technical term. It tends to default back to the brain stem frequency, which is delta, like the heartbeat of the brain. If you see the little hotspot of delta that goes up when you open your eyes, it usually means it already has low circulation. You open your eyes to metabolically activate it, and it actually shuts down further, which we can see here. I’ll show you again.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s why you thought he might’ve head a head blow on that.

Dr. Hill:
I wondered. Yeah, I’m not sure. I can never tell for sure, and I shouldn’t tell for sure. This isn’t medicine. I can go is this brain fog? That sounds valid.

Here’s his delta. Let’s look at it, actually, in different visualizations. Barely there in this visualization, linked ears, and then when he opens his eyes, here’s the same delta. It goes up by three standard deviations over the left ear, and the back of the head, it was up by two. There’s almost this line of force showing up in some of the maps left to right, front to back, and so I wondered about a line of force at some point. Hitting his head either back there or hitting the front and causing a coup contrecoup, the rocking a little bit.

It doesn’t make sense to me the delta wouldn’t show up with eyes closed where delta’s actually higher in amplitude. It’s there a little bit but not dramatic, and when he opens his eyes, it blows way, way up. That was a little concerning to me in terms of, okay, this is unusual. The coherent, the connectivity being stuck in the high delta amplitude, I know those two things likely mean that he is brain fog. That’s a phenomenon. He’s experiencing the phenomenon of brain fog, lack of stamina, short term. Hits the afternoon, oh, leave me alone. No more decision making. No more homework.

It’s a resource. He’s running out of gas. It’s not a willful thing. I see the brain fog. Yes, the brain fog, that makes sense, and my response is to get excited because now we have things to go after for him. I don’t know why it’s there. I don’t know if he had a head injury from skiing five years ago. I don’t know if he happened to show up in the world with a quirky brain that has a tendency to sleep poorly and get anxious. I don’t know if an old injury caused a disruption in his sleep, and he’s ramped his stress response up in compensation for that or if old trauma produced stress response. Things were a big dysregulated and then threw off his sleep. It’s all chicken and egg from my perspective at this point.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, yeah, well, one of the things that you had mentioned is monitoring his sleep, and I gave him my aura ring a few times. He definitely wasn’t very good deep sleep, which you predicted that. You gave him some suggestions to not eat before bed, which I keep reminding him not to do that, but he is developing new habits. We’re working on that. Just from looking at that data, you made some recommendations.

Then the second part was right there on the spot and we’ll show the video is now you’re able to take that, and you’re able to develop a protocol for him. Your technician then said, okay, well—he was obviously asking the question that many people who watched the first episode asked. What does that mean? We can train the brain. What does that look like? He sat him down at the computer, hooked his brain up differently to a new device, and there he sat in front of the computer. He was able to, basically, look at the computer screen and, basically, adjust things based on his brain, his own thinking.

Let’s just show the video so people can watch him do this, and then I’m going to have you explain it. Let them get the visual first because it’s very confusing otherwise. Hang on here, and we’ll take a look at what that looks like.

[Video Starts]

Dr. Pompa:
Here we are in the training portion. This can be done, obviously, here or at home, actually, which is really cool. That’s that little device. Where is it? Oh, it’s back here. It’s right here in this little device here that he’s connected—his brain’s connected to this. Okay, this is cool, man. I’m telling you, this is really—his brain is actually running this video game. Explain it from there.

Andre:
With that little device you mentioned, we actually have electrode—one electrode on his head and one on each ear, and we’re recording signals into his brainwave from that location. On the computer here, this is his raw brainwave. I mean, there’s some noise right there. That’s just a little bit. We’re recording his raw brainwave, and then we’re filtering out three different bands from that brain, from essentially this raw data. Every two minutes it’s being sent to this [00:33:35], slow brainwaves, medium brainwaves, fast brainwaves. Typically, muscle tension, noise, things like that. Will you clench your jaw for me, Simon?

Dr. Pompa:
Clench your jaw.

Andre:
There you go. That’s on the next. Then you let go of that. You can look at it. Now it’s going back, so give him a second to breathe. All right, so these bands that we separated essentially from the raw data are represented over here.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, yeah, so these are like fast brainwaves.

Andre:
Yeah, make one little adjustment here like this. Yeah, so this is the brainwave we’re rewarding and the two we’re inhibiting. We’re asking his brain to produce more of a particular brainwave. In this case, it’s that medium-fast brainwave we call [AS-1]. The other two brainwaves are—essentially, this pink one is associated—essentially, you can write it to data now, but it’s just the end of data and then [00:34:41]. Essentially, what we call high beta is released. He’s clenching up, and with that, we’re clicking that data out. You could technically train someone to transmit anything, so we’re clipping it out.

Dr. Pompa:
Basically, his brain, this is what we want.

Andre:
Actually, we want a few things. One, you want this green bar to be extended like this. You want these two bars on the side to go down, minimize. Just because this green bar’s expanded doesn’t necessarily mean [00:35:12]. It’s more of this particular brainwave can be reduced less than these other two.

Dr. Pompa:
Explain why we’re doing this. In other words, why do we want this—more of this particular brainwave and less of these?

Andre:
With the [mock test] order that we have right now it’s geared more towards focusing.

Dr. Pompa:
This is like an ADD thing so more towards focus.

Andre:
Typically, the smaller brainwaves tend to be associated more with either tiredness, distractibility, spacing out, daydreaming, things like that, so we want to limit that. We want to limit any anxiety or [00:35:53]. Then by doing that along with the actual brain rewarding, essentially, we train it long enough to get more focus. The longer his brain is in that state, so whether his brain’s producing more of that particular brainwave or less of the other two, his performance meter will be up like that. As that performance meter goes up, it should show up. The car would perform better.

Dr. Pompa:
[00:36:18].

Andre:
It will go.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s rewarding the brain.

Andre:
Exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
His brain knows it’s going better.

Andre:
A, the car will go faster. B, you’ll hear those beeps, ding, ding, ding.

Dr. Pompa:
Those are all rewards.

Andre:
They’re rewards.

Dr. Pompa:
He’s staying in that focus.

Andre:
Exactly, so as his brain is in that range a lot of the time, giving the rewards as it keeps up. Every about 2 minutes, 30 seconds, it takes several 10 second breaks.

Dr. Pompa:
It pauses to rest.

Andre:
Exactly, it rests, so once it resumes—one thing to note too and I mentioned this a little earlier is it may never feel like it’s getting easier. That’s because we have, essentially, a sliding window or adjustment. We want to push the brain as much as we can but not too hard, essentially. If it’s getting too difficult, we’ll be making it a little easier.

Dr. Pompa:
You said that people could literally leave exhausted. They pushed it too hard.

Andre:
Exactly, yeah. That means you [00:37:12]. It’s hard to go to the gym for the first time. I want to do everything.

Dr. Pompa:
Do too much, yeah.

Andre:
Exactly, the next day you can feel that. Essentially, all he needs to do is sit back and watch. His brain does all the work.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s amazing.

Andre:
As long as he’s not on YouTube or something else that’s more engaging. The training still works, but it’s not as effective as him just sitting there and watching that.

Dr. Pompa:
You said, literally, instead of doing this, you could also be connected while he’s reading.

Andre:
Reading, homework.

Dr. Pompa:
As long as it’s something he doesn’t actually like, it works.

Andre:
Exactly, well, it works [00:37:48], but it’s more effective if…

Dr. Pompa:
Homework, doing his homework.

Andre:
Yeah, we [00:37:54]. We use these to simply auditory stimulus, so it’d just be [00:38:00].

Dr. Pompa:
It rewards it. When he’s in that focus, it rewards it, and his brain knows it’s being rewarded.

Andre:
Over time, it gets a little—right now, it’s like weird patterns going on in here, like big beeps in the pattern. His brain begins to figure it out, what it needs to so that it will work.

Dr. Pompa:
The bottom line is it’s working on the basic way we train a dog, a human.

Andre:
To a certain extent, yes.

Dr. Pompa:
I mean, meaning that we’re rewarding the brain for—rewarding a certain wavelength. Then we’ll create focus, calm.

Andre:
Exactly, yes.

Dr. Pompa:
It was interesting because there was a gentleman just here. He didn’t have ADD, ADHD, OCD, or a sleep problem. He did say it improved his sleep a lot. He was doing it for what? He was doing it for performance, literally, just to be better or worse.

Andre:
Yes, absolutely. We get all sorts of people in here. It ranges from just kids with this type of ADD, focus. CEO types just want performance [00:39:00]. Also, traumatic brain injury, it’s a big one that we usually get. Every client I’ve at least worked personally has had great benefit from the training in regards to the symptoms from traumatic brain injury.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you’ve been here six years doing this.

Andre:
I’ve been working here about six years, yeah, so it’s been a long time but, yeah, all sorts of ailments, even if it’s just sleep issues. Typically, when you have sleep issues, it’s always tied to something else, whether it’s a [00:39:27]. They usually go hand in hand. Yeah, so all he needs to do is sit back and watch. His brain does all the work.

Dr. Pompa:
Simon, his brain is being trained, rewarded to get—and then, eventually, his brain knows how to stay in…

Andre:
Exactly, and that’s probably with difficulty. We’re going to keep pushing the brain a little harder and harder and harder. Then if it gets—we get a little too far, then we can dial it back.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, cool. All right, Simon.

Simon:
How do I know when I’m training [00:39:58]?

Andre:
Like I mentioned before…

Dr. Pompa:
He asked what is his brain training on? What’s his brain working on?

Andre:
Calm focus, essentially. We want you to be able to focus, but not to the point where you’re anxious. There is where you can train someone to actually be more anxious.

Simon:
Yeah, it happened a lot.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, one of the things you said too is his feedback is important. If he’s anxious doing this, you literally can train his brain to be anxious, and so him communicating saying, no, I’m feeling better, or if he says…

Andre:
I’m not feeling anything right now.

Dr. Pompa:
If he says I’m not—if he doesn’t communicate that he’s not sleeping as well, that could be an issue. We could actually be training the brain. It’s important that you communicate with us how you’re feeling.

Andre:
In the brain map we did earlier, like I mentioned, it’s a good roadmap, and it’s statistic based. It gives us our starting point of where we want our goals and what we want to work on. It also [00:40:53]. Unfortunately and fortunately, the brain’s—everyone’s brain is different. Just because we train it a specific way based on what his brain shows, it may not necessarily be the best [00:41:05].

Dr. Pompa:
It’s a combination of the map that we get. It gives feedback, and eventually, we train his brain.

Andre:
Yes, exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s so cool, isn’t it? All right, let’s go back and hear from Dr. Andrew so awesome stuff. I appreciate it.

Andre:
No problem.

Dr. Pompa:
Thank you for helping.

Andre:
No problem.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, you got it.

Andre:
Take care.

[Video Ends]

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, so there’s him doing—you could see him, basically, thinking and the technician saying, basically, just watch the screen. Your brain will do the rest. Explain that to people. What the heck is going on?

Dr. Hill:
The hardest part of neurofeedback from the client point of view is, often, what do you mean it’s involuntary? They don’t understand how they could be exercising their brain without trying. They don’t understand how a bunch of animations could be changing their brain. What’s often missed in the explanation is that there’s a loop created between the brain and the computer. Just like you picked up a tool and hit some buttons, you have to learn to use the tool or even before you pick up a tool. When you’re a baby and you’re flopping around and the random firings happen to move your left arm up and you go whoa. Hey, that was cool. [00:42:17] anything I want to do. We really do more of that. The brain’s always watching the variable signals and the input, the output and always wants to take control of them.

Your son was sitting there watching a game, an animation, and we had two ear clips on his ears and one wire in his head. It’s not very involved in terms of the training days. It’s pretty quick to set it up, and we just simply measured what his brain was doing moment to moment. We measured his calm focus beta so the low beta, and we also measured his distractible theta brainwaves, impulsivity and things. Whenever the impulsivity brainwaves dipped down a little bit for half a second on their own and the beta climb for half a second on its own, the software would go good job, brain, by making the trolley car run faster and steer better and go ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Stimuli will always increase in these games when the brain happens to do a little more of the right thing and will decrease when the brain does more of the wrong thing.

The only trick that’s not obvious sometimes is that every few seconds I move the goalposts. We say, brain, do that. Yeah, good job, brain. Then do that, and just gradually shape it up or down. The person’s experience is having the game stop and start. That’s it. There’s really not much of a voluntary experience to the process. You can get in the way of it by moving too much and tightening your jaw and things, but you can’t really make it work any better. I mean, it’s really an involuntary process. This is, of course, illustrated by the fact that many teenagers don’t want to be in my office, and they still have great results after they start getting their brain changed.

Also, it works on nonverbal people. It was discovered 52 years ago on cats. I usually tell the joke now that cats are very bad instruction followers. This is not a voluntary process. Dr. Sterman trained cats by squirting chicken broth into their mouth whenever a certain brainwave increased. Months later, these cats had brains that had a change, as a seizure resistant brain from their signal increase.

It’s a gentle process of exercise. You don’t’ feel too much. I’m guessing your son didn’t notice much at all right afterwards, maybe a touch of fatigue if he’s very sensitive or a touch of maybe better sleep that night if he’s very sensitive. Usually, it’s about a few sessions in, three, four, or five half hour sessions of training, and then your brain starts to go, hey, wait a minute. Oh, when I drop my theta and raise my calm beta or my alpha, stuff happens in the world, and it starts to build that resource. Then you get about a day effect after ever training session.

The voluntary part of the process from Simon’s perspective isn’t what he’s doing in the chair. It’s to say upfront here’s what I want to work on, and then the next day, ooh, here’s what I noticed. My sleep changed this way, my alertness, my stamina. I’m noticing this stuff. If he’s a teen and can’t record it, we rely on the parent sometimes a little bit more to report what’s changing. Three or four weeks in with ADHD we hear things like I asked him to take the trash out, and he did it with one request. That was weird or things like that. The executive function starts to shift or sleep shifts, and you start to see things show up. Based on what shows up we iterate. It’s like a personal trainer that has to build a plan for you because your muscles are so unique that no one’s had them before, so you have to build up a workout and try things.

Dr. Pompa:
In that plan, I mean, you build the protocol based on what you see, obviously, in the brain mapping, what the person wants. The guy that was there doing—he was doing the same thing. He was there in front of the same game Simon was. Maybe that was a little different game. There was men running around. No, he sat there the whole time doing it, doing it, and I asked him questions afterwards.

He’s like, oh, yeah, I mean, I notice a major difference. Again, he was doing it, basically, to basically perform better at work. I mean, that’s why he was doing it, this particular gentleman. I said, well, how’s it working? He said it’s working amazing well, actually. I said, well, how did you notice the game? Is the game getting easier? He said, oh, yeah, it is.

I mean, obviously, I was asking him some hard questions. I’m like really? I was pushing him. I didn’t want to film him. I should’ve, but it was telling that, obviously, it works. It works step by step. Matter of fact, you’re sending us—the cool thing about it is we had our brain map that we could—that you have different places around the country to do that. You’re sending us, actually, the stuff to hook him up, so we can do it at home.

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, about a third of my clients are more trained themselves at home. Once I have your brain in the can, I can talk to you about your goals and get some starting places. Then I can really teach you to stick wires to your head and run software pretty easily. The hard part is learning what to do next. My home trainers will do an intensive one in the office, and then a three month period of supervision where they get support, fine-tuning, and adjusting and building out—building this workout planning for them. Then they’re given complimentary brain maps in the future without charge as long as they want, and they’re given the equipment that they get trained up on. It doesn’t ever expire.

A lot of my home trainers want to do it because they have long-term goals, these biohacker types, as you mentioned, or maybe they have a problem to work on that doesn’t get fixed rapidly. Some things take longer. Concussions and brain injuries, autism, you have to train for at least six months. ADHD, anxiety, and sleep issues, usually three months is good to get a really big chunk. I usually do 40 sessions in 3 months of training, Dr. Pompa, and I often get about two standard deviations or close to it in that amount of time. In terms of objective change in the brain maps and subjective change or, if you will, performance change on the attention tests, they converge. They change together, and they change with the person’s experience, which is obviously the most important thing.

We can almost mathematically say, oh, okay, 25 sessions or so. That’s about a standard deviation change in performance. For instance, if you look at Simon’s attention test, you see that, his performance metrics here, his overall attention’s a 55 roughly. That’ three standard deviations off of where he wants to be. I would guess that he will need something like 40, 50, 60 sessions to really get these up. It may not take as many because it’s a couple specific bottlenecks for him. It’s vigilance and focus that are really low but speed’s great. He’s using his quickness because he can’t stay alert enough, essentially. If the focus and vigilance come up, we might see them change a lot faster. We might not.

I can look at this and go, okay, that’s the sort of degree of magnitude of bottleneck he has. If he identifies or you identify this is a necessary thing to work on, we then target the specific resources, and it’s not really about getting the effects. It works for pretty much everyone. It’s like dialing in the exact effects you’re looking for.

Dr. Pompa:
I ask the question, well, can you do it without the game? He said, actually, you can almost do it even when you sleep, but it works better or—did he say it works better if it’s a game that they don’t love too much?

Dr. Hill:
It can, actually. Yeah, it works better if it’s immersive and a lot of stimuli is coming back. A lot of the video games we use we’ll have several streams of information coming back. I did my dissertation work on a simple audio beep with a picture, filling in a picture square and doing a puzzle piece thing, very simple, and I do a lot of training with my clients with audio only. Sleeping, you can train when people are sleeping. It does work, but you’re right, not quite as well. I generally don’t train people who are sleeping unless they have problems staying awake and have developmental issues and falling asleep all the time. It happens sometimes. Just auditory only training works great. You can sit and work on things, your licensing exam, your taxes, your Great American Novel, and just work on it. Whenever that your brain’s in the zone, the audio swells in volume and continues, and then when it drops…

Dr. Pompa:
Your brain picks up these rewards no matter what. When theta goes up or whatever you’re trying to accomplish based on the mapping, you reward the brain. That’s why it’s a very specific protocol that you develop, right? You’re rewarding the brain where you want, and that could be many different activities. Okay, we got the brain to do what we want in that particular focus, and then it’s rewarded. Eventually, without you knowing it, your brain is picking up on the rewards. Go back to that because this was discovered—there is a story with the cats, right?

Dr. Hill:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Was it you or their technician that told me that story? Retell that because it’s compelling how this works.

Dr. Hill:
In 1967, NASA went to a scientist at UCLA who was learning scientist and said, hey, could you please figure out how dangerous rocket fuel is because our astronauts are getting sick breathing in vapors? They’re hallucinating, getting nauseated. Dr. Barry Sterman, at the time, his test subject was cats. He did a lot of work with cats. He had big rooms full of cats everywhere at UCLA. He took the 32 cats or so that were in his current subject pool, and he did an experiment on them. He built Plexiglas cages that were airtight. He put a beaker of rocket fuel in the cage. Put a cat in the cage and started a timer. Rocket fuel, methylhydrazine is very destabilizing to the brain.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, there you are.

Dr. Hill:
Within moments, the cats would show irritation, if you will, from the methylhydrazine, some crying and then, after a view minutes, some drooling, stumbling, and then seizures, then coma, and then death, a perfect dose-dependent curve for most of the cats. Of the 32 cats or so he had, 24 I think had perfect dose-dependent curves, and around 40 minutes in were showing instability events, pre-seizure events. At 60 minutes, were having major, major brain, life threatening seizures and things. A handful of the cats, about 8 of them did not have seizures and needed a 160 minutes of exposure before they showed these instability events to the brain. He couldn’t figure out why one group got into like this and one group was like that in terms of time exposure until he remembered he had done another experiment on the other group six months before to train up a certain brainwave. Whenever they made more SMR, this relaxing brainwave that I mentioned earlier, he squirted chicken broth into their mouths just to see if he could—and train it using operant conditioning because he’s a learning scientist, and he could, wonderful. It looks like this is a proof of concept. Put the cats back in the subject pool, and months later, they were seizure resistant.

His lab [00:52:53] and uncontrolled on meds, so they built her a machine and trained her. Over the next couple of years, she went off all of her meds and remained seizure free. This was 1967, 8, 9 and ‘70. That was the start of the field, and from there, we discovered the same frequency that stabilizes the brain also eliminates ADHD, this SMR, sensorimotor rhythm. There’s a strip of tissue that runs ear to ear. Just in front of central divide is the descending control, the motor control. Just posterior to the divide is the ascending control to sensory information. If you train a relaxing rhythm kind of like an alpha rhythm but not really on that strip, it’s the equivalent of—if you produce the rhythm, rather, it’s relaxation. It’s a calming. It’s inhibition of the body.

If you’ve seen a cat lying on a windowsill with a liquid body and laser like focus, what you’re looking at is the opposite of ADHD, a high SMR state. The body’s physically inhibited and the mind is not. The mind’s ready to go. It’s poised. In ADHD, the body’s often physically disinhibited and so is the attention system and mind. SMR literally is the opposite of ADHD, so
SMR training in neurofeedback works even better on ADHD than it does on seizure. It’s the term dramatic—it’s among the most reliable things we do. It works for almost everyone.

It works on improving executive function, that inhibitory tone of not reacting too much, of not having—you control your working memory, what you’re thinking about, what you’re focusing on, what you’re doing. It gives you that inhibitory tone, and most of our executive function is about saying no to the other modules. The CEO has to say no to the mailroom so they don’t decide what to process for the CEO. Inhibitory tone gives the ability to stay on task.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s why people biohack their brains. They become better at work, or brighter CEOs, or salespeople, whatever it is, so what about an—or I’m sorry. We know it works for that. What about an autistic child where it’s [00:55:07]? Do you have good results with that?

Dr. Hill:
I do. I was actually trained initially working with autism in a place in Providence, Rhode Island. A lovely neurofeedback center called The NeuroDevelopment Center. It’s probably one of the best in the world for autism. It’s a very specific population, and it’s a very heterogeneous population. There’s many, many things we call autism so a couple things to say about neurofeedback analysis of autism. One, we don’t usually treat or train the autism. We usually train the sensory integration, the perseveration, the sleep issues, the eye contact, the language production, etc., etc., etc., and those things are all tractable. Now, the autistic brain is often quite a bit different than a typical brain, and so it takes a little longer to make change. Almost every person I’ve worked with in the spectrum has an irritability to their nervous system, have a hard time settling and inhibiting, and again, SMR works magic for most people to settle, voluntary settling.

You get somebody who’s got sensory integration issues and high pitch whining and is rocking, that’s really a flooding of the sensory system, and they can’t inhibit. You get a little bit of training, and they’re able to settle and sit. They have eye contact. A little more training, you might get lucky and get some language with the profound. I’ve seen some of the most amazing results in high-functioning autistic people and Asperger’s where I had one guy come into the Providence Center every few months. Every six months or so he’d come and say—this is a high functioning autistic guy who’s obsessive interest was in jokes. He would memorize thousands of jokes, and his entire life was walking around Providence, up to people in bus stops, and telling jokes. It was favorite thing in the whole world to do was find some stranger and see if he could make him laugh.

He actually liked the social contact but wasn’t necessarily good at it. He would train up, using infrared blood flow training, HEG training, which makes your frontal very, very crisp, and gets your sense of humor, actually, many people, to be very on and helps with eye contact and social cuing. We were doing a lot of this with him, and his humor got really, really on. He would come back every few months, every six months or so and say, “People are not laughing at my jokes anymore. I need some more HEG, please.” He would use it as, oh, I’m not funny, huh. Not everything lasts in autistic spectrum people always, but it’s also one of the few things you can do to make a change that is like, wow. In a week, things are changing. In two weeks, things are changing. Often, people in the spectrum have comorbidities. They have seizures or other developmental issues, and it works on those too.

I mean, I often find that we work globally on a brain, and lots of things change, and I don’t necessarily know how or why they change. A personal trainer gets your whole body to change. They don’t necessarily know—they’re working the whole body out sometimes. Oh, that pain you had, oh, that resolved? That’s great. Sometimes I’m doing that. Oh, great, I’m so happy that thing that you care about changed. I don’t know how it changed. Usually, I can target the big things, the regulatory features, the sleep, stress, mood, and attention.

Autism, we can find the face recognition area and the obsessions and some sensory issues and go after them, but in terms of the autism, there’s another great scientist doing some work on this, Rob Coben, who’s a practitioner as well, a neurofeedback doctor. Rob has found a way to train some of the connectivity issues in autism and how profound effects rapidly. I use some of his techniques in our centers as well. The field is always at this cutting edge, unfortunately, of science where we’ve outstripped the research literature by decades now and the clinical—so even the research understanding, the science understanding sometimes is not caught up to the effects that we can get. I’m a neuroscientist primarily. My training is a cognitive neuroscience. I’m an EEG scientist, and I have a really pretty good neuroscience and neurophysiology background.

I feel that brings the level of neurofeedback with your peak brain up a lot because the—it’s all bounded in science, the science then doing something that’s very different than everyone else in the field, just also typically a therapist. We’re doubling down on the science side of it and almost making this about access to the technology for the client and not about a relationship of treatment, which we try to work a way—which is why it works so well for home trainers who can learn and take agency and get the benefits.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s talk about that. I mean, where can they go to get mapped? I don’t know, Ashley, if we have a link here to put in. Then let’s talk about that. Right now, people are like, okay, I want to get this. What can we do?

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, sure. You can go to a few locations currently that are permanent locations. We have big offices in Los Angeles and in St. Louis. Those are our two big flagships. We also have some satellite offices, one in Orange County, which is Costa Mesa. We have one in Malmö, Sweden, so if you’re in Copenhagen or southern Sweden, you can head over and get a map done in Malmö. Then we’re opening up mapping stations in London, probably a full office in London later this summer.

I also tend to do workshops, these biohacking conferences, and typically bring assessment gear with me so if folks want to see us at one of these big conferences like The Health Optimisation Summit in London in the fall I’ll be at, doing a big workshop on brain mapping. People can just come into one of our big offices just for a day or two and get an assessment done, and everything else can be done fully remotely. Come see us in St. Louis. It’s a lovely city. It’s low-key. It’s a cheap airport. It’s ten minutes away from the airport, no traffic, great barbecue, lovely people.

Dr. Pompa:
Ashley will put up some type of link to make it easier for you all. We’ll do something special for our viewers to get them there. That’s for sure. Also, I have my seminar coming up here in November, and it’s right there in Newport Beach. Maybe we can get you there doing mapping.

Dr. Hill:
We should do that. Yeah, Andre’s right there in Costa Mesa, right there. We can send him over for the day or two, and just churn through maps to acquire data. I think it’d be wonderful.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’m going to put Ashley on that here. Actually, Saturday we’re even opening up our seminar to the public, so we can be doing some mapping. Yeah, I mean, this is fascinating. I mean, this goes right with what people need today. We don’t have time in this show to talk about the things that are destabilizing the very thing we’re talking about, from over medication just to overstimulation. I mean, what kids are exposed to today, it’s amazing, but there’s a greater need for this, I mean, honestly. I think that’s why the average people are reaching out to this and biohacking the brain just for better performance. Even the overstimulation of electromagnetic frequencies and toxins, all of this plays in to why I think we need this today.

Dr. Hill:
You’ll appreciate this. I’m coming up on hour 72 right now of a fast.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, man, that’s good for you. That’s right. I haven’t eaten today yet. I’m approaching hour 24 is all.

Dr. Hill:
Oh, wow! That’s great. Yeah, I’ve been in three months of alternately fasting with a longer fast once a week. I do a lot of autophagy and re-hacking. I knew you would appreciate that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, my book’s coming out. You have to get it, Beyond Fasting.

Dr. Hill:
I can’t wait.

Dr. Pompa:
How to maximize the results doing a lot of those little tricks like that.

Dr. Hill:
Awesome.

Dr. Pompa:
Andrew, thank you for being on and doing a second show and what you’re doing with Simon.

Dr. Hill:
Of course.

Dr. Pompa:
This is needed. Like I said, I think it’s more greater today than ever. Anyways, we’ll put some links down below for everyone watching. Absolutely, get your brain mapped, and you’re making it easier for people, that’s for sure, to get this technology. Thank you.

Dr. Hill:
I appreciate it, and thanks so much for having me back.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

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

277: Wholistic Wisdom with Elena Bensonoff

Episode 277: Wholistic Wisdom

with Elena Bensonoff

Today I will be discussing the mind, body, and soul connection with my guest, Elena Bensonoff. You will learn how you can tap into your body's own innate intelligence to identify food allergies and other stressors, as well as allow your body to heal on its own. When it comes to health issues, Elena believes there are no isolated incidents and the whole person must be addressed. She's here to share her wisdom on the topic.

More about Elena Bensonoff:

Elena is a pioneer in the field of functional and energy medicine who has been sharing her gift of healing for over 20 years. She is the founder of Wholistic.com and helps people all over the world find balance and vitality.

Elena is a clinical pharmacist, and has an award-winning natural skincare line, She’s also an American Board of Anti-Aging Health Practitioners diplomat.

Additional Information:

Show notes:

Elena Bensonoff

CytoDetox

HCF's Live it to Lead it Event – Newport Beach – November 14-17, 2019

Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
Episode of Cell TV—look, I’m not a big fan of doing nutritional testing for allergies, food allergies, food sensitivities. Why? So many of them are inaccurate. I think there’s some truth to the severe allergies, but what if there’s a way to test yourself? It’s definitely cheaper, maybe more accurate—but anyways, this guest on Cell TV is going to tell you how you can do that, how you can test yourself. I think it’s pretty interesting, the method. Obviously, she’s been doing this for quite some time. Also, we’re going to go upstream. Her and I both believe that the body has an ability to heal itself.

We’re going to talk about some of these things that you may not have heard of that could be interfering with your body healing itself, one of which we dive in deeply to some of the emotional stuff. What’s in your subconscious? Could some of your early childhood traumas that you don’t even remember be stopping you from healing, or even causing your symptoms or disease? The answer is yes, but wait until you see her take on it, and even her method of what to do about it. You’re going to have to stay tuned to this episode of Cell TV.

Ashley:
—hearing about the mind, body, soul connection. Our guest today is Elena Bensenoff, who’s a pioneer in the field of functional and energy medicine who’s been sharing her gift of healing for over 20 years. She founded wholistic.com and is the author of the book Wholistic Wisdom. Elena is a clinical pharmacist and has an award-winning natural skincare line as well. You can read more about her in our show notes. Let’s get started, and welcome Dr. Pompa and Elena Bensenoff to the show. Welcome, both of you.

Dr. Pompa:
Awesome—thanks for being here, Elena. Actually, I’m looking forward to this topic because you and I resonate on something together. That’s the fact that our bodies are ultimately the physician. They have the ability to heal themselves. My wife and I live our lives this way—remove the interference, the body can heal. That’s how I got myself well. I think you have some unique strategy here that I want to hear about., that you’ve written in a book and you’ve dedicated your life to. Before we get into all that, you’ve got to tell me your story. How did you get into all this?

Elena:
Thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of your show and share my story. How did I begin? Of course, as a little girl growing up in Soviet Union, I always had a vision and a dream that I wanted to heal and all of the people that I loved around me. I wanted my loved ones to live forever. That was a dream that began when I was four years old. Then I moved to United States and I decided to pursue medical career, not really knowing that that was probably not what I wanted to do. I began as a pharmacist. We moved to Florida about 20 years ago, and I actually became sick. I lived in a house. At that time, I didn’t realize it was infested with mold.

Also, I did not have the realization at that moment that also diet played a huge role and stress sin what was happening to me. What was happening is, I could not breathe. I actually ended up having to find a pulmonologist because I could not only not inhale; I couldn’t exhale. I remember going to a pulmonologist. He said, “We have to check you into the hospital. Your lung function is less than 25 percent capacity.” At that time, I had my oldest son. I have four children. He also was suffering from severe eczema and allergies.

Dr. Pompa:
Same house—he was in the same house. Yeah, how old was he, did you say, in that mold house?

Elena:
He was a baby, infant. He was covered in eczema from head to toe. I remember he was on prednisone. Anyway, the pulmonologist told me that I would have to be—I said I didn’t want to go to the hospital. He said, “Okay, you’ll get injections and all kinds of nebulizer treatments. You have to be on six medications for the rest of your life.” I was in my early 20s. I remember thinking, this is definitely not the life I want to live. That was the beginning of my journey in understanding how our environment, what I ate, and how I felt actually influenced what was happening to me and my son. Of course, I got myself off of all of the medications. I’ve been asthma-free for just over 17 years now.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’ve seen mold ruin a lot of lives. It’s an evil thing. I hate mold. I hate mold illness. I’m going to be honest with you. Mold illness—even when people get out of the exposure, and even do my cellular detox and get it out of the body, they’re still left with damage, neurologically, immune, their immune systems. You’ve obviously tapped into some really amazing things because you look very healthy. It sounds like you’re very healthy now, and your son is, too. I always want to know. I want to know everything anybody did, so it might be of use to listeners. We want to know everything you did.

Elena:
I changed my diet. I cut down the gluten. I never really ate sugar, but I did eat a lot of fruit. I always thought fruit was important. I was consuming a lot of fruit. Definitely, I still eat fruit. I would eat berries, but not in the amounts that I used to eat. Sugar, dairy, all the baked goods are definitely contributing to an imbalance in our gut and overall health. Then over the years, what I found working with many people is, a lot of people who are vegans—I find this is a huge issue— is a lot of vegans have gut imbalances, have overgrowth of candida and fungus in their system. There’s so many correlations that I began to put together. The other thing that happened is I began to study functional medicine 12 years ago.

At the same time, I worked in a diabetes clinic. I remember having patients that were on 17 medications a day. Even at that point, I thought, how can you take 17 medications a day? I remember having to make calls to some of these people and ask them if there’s anything that they’re doing to change their lifestyle, their diet. They said that their doctor told them it was not correlated in any way, so they didn’t think it was important. That was a huge light bulb for me that something had to be done. That was the beginning of my greater journey, which brought me to where I am today.

Dr. Pompa:
What are some of the other things that you did that are most likely in your book? Admittedly, I didn’t read your book. I knew you sent it to me and I didn’t get it yet. Yes, I did not get it yet. I saw the cover because it was shown to me. I’m looking around like, okay, I said that, but I’ve been gone for two weeks, so it could have shown up in my two-week travels. Don’t worry, we will find it. I just want to be honest, but I am actually curious. In your book—hold your book up, just so everyone can see it. There it is.

Elena:
My book—I break it down into three parts. The first part is the body. I felt it’s really important for people to understand and have the right tools to really heal themselves and not just rely on a lab test, which are not always accurate, and then what other people are telling you. There’s ways that I teach to tap into your own innate intelligence, which every human being has.

Dr. Pompa:
We’re going to talk about that. Go ahead. What’s the next section.

Elena:
The first part is the body. I teach people how to heal themselves with food insensitivities. In less than one minute from reading this, you’ll be able to tell if you have food sensitivity to something or not.

Dr. Pompa:
We want to know that. What else?

Elena:
That’s important because it causes inflammation in the body. I talk about adrenal fatigue and the importance of supporting adrenals. I talk about detoxification on a physical level, cellular level, and then diet. What foods are important to integrate as organic, and which ones are not so important? Which ingredients are toxic to our system? Our skin is our largest organ, so it’s important what we also apply on our skin topically. Part two of the book is the mind and emotions, being emotionally clear.

I teach people how to find out what emotions are out of balance. Also, in less than a minute, you can find out what emotion is locked for you. Emotional imbalance is the root cause of every disease. This is covered later on, and how to clear yourself from toxic people in your life—that’s also important for your boundaries.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s huge.

Elena:
Part three of the book is all about the soul, the different energetic doorways, as I call them, the soul doorways that you can tap into and see what is out of balance. All of those have correlations to our physical existence, to our emotions. It’s important to become, I would say, an investigator in your own life, in your own house, in your own well-being, and recognize that our higher self, or our bigger self, has way of communicating to us in such powerful ways, of course, through emotions. A lot of times, we can block them and not listen. Then the messages become louder in the form of physical symptoms.

Dr. Pompa:
Mm-hmm, I love teaching people practical things. Your book will go into much greater detail. In fact, where can they get the book? Is it on Amazon?

Elena:
Amazon is Kindle version, and wholistic.com has the hard copy.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, great. What’s your website, so they can get it there?

Elena:
Yes, wholistic.com, w-h-o.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you said it. Let’s give them something practical here. Let’s start with the first part. How can people test themselves for food allergies tapping into that inner wisdom? Walk us through that.

Elena:
There’s definitely something that I teach. It has to do with—there’s a difference between food allergies and food sensitivities. An allergic response is something that can happen 24 to 48 hours later, and sometimes even longer. [11:25] protein, for example, in [11:27], people will have a response a week later a lot of times. I break it down into 12 different food groups, food sensitivities. I teach people how to muscle test themselves.

Dr. Pompa:
Show me.

Elena:
Okay, here we go. There’s different techniques. First, it’s about centering yourself—inhale, exhale.

Dr. Pompa:
Be descriptive because many people don’t’ watch this. They listen. They download the podcast, so be descriptive.

Elena:
Definitely, so first, it’s very important to be centered because we don’t want to have chaos in our mind. In the book, there’s a chart. It looks like a wheel. I’m going to show it to you. It’s a wheel. When you look at it, it’s important to not look at the second page of the book. In this wheel, there is a way that you can test and find out what foods your sensitive to. One of the things you can do first is you need to figure out what your yes and your no is. Have you ever before?

Dr. Pompa:
I have, not particularly the way you’re going to do it, but my audience perhaps hasn’t.

Elena:
Yes, first thing to do is to get centered. Number two is not put any judgments of what you’re doing. First, we’re going to create two O shapes with our fingers. We’re going to loop them together and create an infinity sign, a figure eight. Now you’re going to say, my name is – and I’m going to say my name. My name is Elena. Try to pull your fingers apart. My fingers stay strong, so that’s a yes. I’m going to say someone else’s name. Let’s say my name is Susan, which is not my name. My name is Susan, and my fingers come apart, so that’s a no.

That’s a weakness. It’s showing a weakness in the body. Here’s the thing. We’re actually testing our subconscious mind. We’re bypassing all the filters that we’ve created, all the judgments, and we’re going directly into what our body has to say.

Dr. Pompa:
Do you find that people that have trouble with it, like myself, we’re too stuck in our conscious minds?

Elena:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
I know that to be true. Okay, go ahead.

Elena:
The thing with this kind of testing—it’s important to also practice it, clear yourself before you do it, and not judge yourself. It’s incredible how accurate it is. This is something I’ve come up with over the last few years teaching it to other people because I feel that it’s important that people know what’s happening in their body. Then there’s this pie, and it shows 12 numbers. The thing to remember is we’re going to ask a question. We’re going to ask a question and say, I’m weak on. Then looking at the pie, you can say, I’m weak on one. For me, number one, my fingers are locked together. It say yes, I’m actually weak on number two.

Then I’ll say, I’m weak on number two, and my fingers fall apart, so that’s no. Going through this entire pie, entire wheel, then I refer to a chart next to it. For me, number one came up, and it says number one is albumin, which is a protein in eggs. It’s interesting because years ago, I was sensitive to eggs, but now it’s something that needs to be avoided for me as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Can you go in and out of some of these sensitivities, meaning you may have tested months ago and it didn’t test? Now for whatever reason—it could be a stress, a chemical stress, or just changing your microbiome, or a seasonal change, now you are.

Elena:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s one of the benefits of being able to do this because you can’t afford to run an expensive test. As the point is, I’m not a big fan of food allergy testing because it’s so inaccurate. This may be a better way.

Elena:
Yes, absolutely. Our gut microbiome changes, depending on, of course, our stress level, rapidly. Even probiotics that people take—what I’ve noticed over the years— a certain probiotic might be working for someone for a few months, and then it doesn’t anymore. This is a way to tap into your own knowing, and create a lifestyle that is supporting your overall wellbeing.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s interesting. We both agree. I just got back from filming somethings at Hope for Cancer, an amazing cancer clinic. They have some of the most amazing around the world, some of these clinics, and they’re doing great work. I have to say, a big theme when you talk to these people is, they’ve all had a lot of emotional traumas, these cancer patients. To your point earlier, we know that the emotional stuff—it’s a hidden stressor. The body doesn’t know the difference of physical, chemical, or emotional stressors. On this show, we talk a lot about chemical stressors. We don’t talk a lot about emotional traumas.

You and I would agree—the body doesn’t know the difference. Arguably, it could be the bigger hidden cause of just about anything. Talk about that. What do you talk about in your book? Then talk about some of the tests that they can do for themselves to look. How do we analyze ourselves? It’s more hidden than anything. I can see, yeah, I eat eggs. I get a stomach ache. Gosh, I don’t know. Do I have emotional stuff?

Elena:
At first, diving into the world of what I do now, I always thought it is physical and chemical things. Only later on, it was revealed to me because some people were not healing, even though I was providing the services, and I was giving them all these different things to take, changing their lifestyle, their diet, they were still sick. The viruses, let’s say Epstein-Barr, would come back. I would be like, okay, why is it coming back? What I realized is, we have to approach every human being from a holistic whole approach because our body is not separate from our mind, from our emotion, from our soul. Everything is interconnected. The way that I see this is, our higher self is communicating to our physical body through very powerful messages, that are called emotions or feelings.

When choose to ignore them, or I call it park them in a short-term parking garage, let’s just say, what happens is the symptoms or the communication signals are becoming stronger in a way of physical symptoms. Then if we choose to ignore that, for example, anxiety could be one of the things that people could experience. What would happen if we choose to ignore that over time? People will get an illness or some kind of massive physical imbalance. A lot of times, this is when people are seeking help. I usually say that your illness is your greatest gift because you can create a massive shift by recognizing really what you have been doing up until that point.

My vision and my mission is to help people not get to that point, to really become friends with your emotions, allow them to flow through you. Usually, the way it happens—over the years, what I’ve noticed is there is an event or situation that happens. It gets stored in our cellular memory as a very specific emotional block. Over the years, we get triggers with different events, situations, and people in our life. It’s really meant for us to awaken us to a realization that there’s something in that that needs healing within ourselves. I’ll give you an example. For example, I have a patient that I’ve been working for a while. She has Epstein-Barr virus.

I have actually a few Epstein-Barr viruses which are part of chronic fatigue viruses. She has not been able to clear it over the last five, six months. I wanted to know why, so we had to go deep into her emotion. For her, it had to do actually with abandonment. I said, “Okay, what does abandonment mean to you?” Actually, what was interesting—she was left at the hospital when she was born for a month in a half. Her mom didn’t see her. Then her grandparents were the ones that raised her, so she was never close to her biological mother and father. That imprint in her field left that emotion of abandonment which was such a strong trigger in her life because every relationship since then that she had, it would bring out the Epstein-Barr.

Dr. Pompa:
Makes sense—I know that you’ve been endorsed, by Bruce Lipton, who I love. He wrote the book Biology of Belief. Basically, the book is, our thoughts, rather for good and for bad, really control our DNA. It can literally turn on bad genes. It can turn off good genes. Good thoughts are very powerful and healing. This is science. It sounds oftentimes hokey to people. No, Bruce Lipton is an amazing stem cell biologist. He’s an amazing cellular biologist. He talks about why our physiology is controlled by our thoughts. It can be controlled by chemicals as well, but our thoughts drive it. To your point, this has been programmed in, this abandonment. Here we have an anchor in our subconscious.

Typically, we wouldn’t go, man I’m just so upset I was abandoned for a month and a half in the hospital. It’s not even in our conscious mind. In our subconscious, it’s communicating that, right? Then that can manifest in our DNA, and then our DNA starts to tell our cells to make certain proteins. Those proteins become who we are. Here we are 40, 30, 40 years old, whenever you start manifesting systems. You’re like, gosh, I’m sick. This is happening. This is happening. Could it be the fact—it’s this trauma that changed our DNA that changes who we are? How do we reprogram?

Elena:
The way that I teach people—first of all, I cannot heal their emotions. It’s important to embrace that emotion within yourself. Try to view it as your navigation system into healing yourself. I would say to people, journal as much as you can. Let’s go into this very particular emotion, see how it makes you feel. If you have a memory. A lot of times, people can be regressed. I don’t do regressions, but there are people that do regressions into your infancy, into your one to three-year-old stage where perhaps we don’t have the memory, the conscious memory.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah because it’s recorded—that was my point. A one-year-old, it’s recorded in your subconscious, and it’s still affecting your cell. How do we change the recording? That’s the question.

Elena:
To change the recording is to really face that emotion. How does it make you feel? Embrace it, become friends with it, and recognize. Then perhaps go through your life and see, what other people in your life have possibly triggered you? Sometimes we see people. Oh, this person is not good for me, but what they’re doing is actually mirroring to you what needs to be healed within. Embrace and become friends with everything that has ever happened to you in your life.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s funny because I deal a lot with people who are very chemically sensitive. Once we empty their stress bucket, I’m the expert in the chemical stuff that we accumulate over the years. Obviously, the stress bucket we [24:02], right, so we have to empty that. That’s what we’re getting at. What we find is, okay, great. Once we empty that bucket, but we still have these memories of it, and people still react to the chemical or the mold as if they were still living in it, so to speak, we literally have to change the way they think about that exposure. Oh, that sniff of gasoline—yeah, I used to go through anxiety, brain fog, symptoms.

Okay, this can’t hurt me. As a matter of fact, it’s helping me and strengthening me. That literally works, especially once we take away the stress. That literally change the way they think about that exposure. Eventually, we reprogram it. Is that the same thing that you’re talking about with the emotion—if we can just change the way they think about whatever it is?

Elena:
Instead of reacting, it’s more embracing, absolutely. Actually, what you said is perfect because I talk in my book about break down mind, body, and soul into your mind is CEO of a company. In order to run the company, the employees are the body parts, the organ system. when the system is inflamed, the only thing the mind or the CEO can think about or do is focus on managing the employees. It cannot think about the purpose or the soul of the company. In order for us to become clear, even to connect our emotions, we have to clear the stressors in our life, and those are physical things.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, especially the ones we can control, we can at least control those. My cellular work helps empty the bucket from that perspective. Again, we can change the way we think about a toxin. We can eventually reprogram that that toxin doesn’t give us that response anymore. It works. I had to do it, too. When I was sick, all of a sudden, I would get in and I would have this massive reaction to things. I had to tell myself, I’m healthy now. This is actually helping me. Eventually, I reprogrammed this physiological reaction.

Here’s the problem with emotions. I can smell the chemical and go, oh, there it is. Oftentimes with emotions, we don’t smell it, meaning we think it’s everybody else. It’s like, this person says something. We think it’s them. Meanwhile, all they were is a chemical hitting that part of my subconscious that was triggering that emotion, and I didn’t realize. How do you deal with that? Emotions are hard.

Elena:
Yes, that’s an amazing question. Here’s the thing. This is the problem with our day and age. We’re so busy being busy that we don’t take the time to center and be by ourselves, even if it’s for ten minutes a day, that means to silence and tune in. Most people tune out. They’re tuning out. They’re on social media. They’re going to distracting themselves with noise. It’s the noise that we create in our daily life. The key is to turn off the noise and to go within because our body has an ability to reveal to us where the blocks are, including emotional blocks.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re talking about meditation, which is a word that I always say I hate because for most people, we go, yeah, we have to mediate. We have to mediate. Most people go, what does that actually mean?

Elena:
It’s actually perfect, what you’re saying because most people actually are doing it the wrong way. Meditation is not necessarily turning off to escape, and this is what I’m finding most people are doing wrong. It’s actually tuning in to listen, tuning in to listen, and allow your body. Use your body as a guide to allow you to feel. Where in your body do you have a block? This is something I also teach in my book. It can come up—if you ask your body, you silence, and you relax your muscles, you can be sitting down laying down, and you ask, how do I feel? We always ask other people, how do you feel? How often do we ask ourselves, how am I doing? How am I feeling? The body will reveal where there is tension. It’s really about releasing the tension, whether it’s in our chest, our throat, wherever it is. There is a way to connect to it and let it go.

Dr. Pompa:
What if you had an event that day, like an emotional event with your child, spouse, random person? You sit down. Okay, I’m going to meditate, if you will, on that event. Is it good to do that? Is it good to think about the event and ask yourself—instead of asking yourself, how do I feel, why did I react the way I did in that moment? Then just wait and just hear. Is that a good thing to do?

Elena:
Yes, first, it’s very important to ground yourself, to feel your body, your system because a lot of times, we’re so disconnected. We’re on autopilot of constantly reacting to things. It’s important to give yourself time and space to feel you first, to know this is me and this is not me. Then ask yourself a question, absolutely, and be honest.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, I’m the person listening to this going, all right, I know I have some emotional stuff. Why? I have some physical things I don’t like. I have some emotional responses I don’t like. Okay, where do I search first? I know they’re recorded in my subconscious, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe there’s something that’s hidden. How do I find it?

Elena:
Perhaps recognize, for example, most of us have been programmed to react, think, and have belief systems from the time we were little children. Am I reacting like my dad? Maybe I sound like my dad. Maybe I sound like my mother, who sounds very angry and judgmental. Try to understand what rules and belief systems are truly yours, and perhaps those that are not you. Those are the things that, really, we’re here to learn to unlearn, to let go.

Dr. Pompa:
Areas in our life that are emotional for any reason—I think often times, the starting place is examining our premises around those areas, meaning our beliefs. You often find—if I’m very emotional about something, dig for the belief. Typically, it goes back to childhood, before age five sometimes. It’s like, oh my gosh. I believed that, and that belief—some weird belief, that we really believe is true, is creating that problem. Typically, we develop bad premises around the areas of our life we’re trying to protect, which is typically around the areas we need [31:11] look at these areas. Is there any more advice in that area?

Elena:
Yeah, the first step is to become aware. I think that is the awakening that happens, to become aware, honest with yourself. and not judge yourself.

Dr. Pompa:
What’s a day of Elena look like? You get up.

Elena:
Gosh, I have four kids, but they’re getting older now. My day in the morning—I always begin in my day with gratitude. I go absolutely in my heart, in love. I go into appreciation of this planet, for myself and what I do, for my family, my loved ones. This is the most important step for me, number one in the morning, and then drinking glass of water and going to the gym.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow, sounds like you intermittent fast because you didn’t eat anything so far.

Elena:
Yeah, I got to the gym, and then I’ll have my breakfast with my kids, and then I begin my day.

Dr. Pompa:
How old are your kids?

Elena:
Yeah, they’re older. My oldest is 20. I have 3 boys and a girl—an 18-year-old, a 15, and a 14.

Dr. Pompa:
We’re about the same ages because I have 4 boys and a girl—22, 22, 20, 18, 15, very similar. Life’s getting easier. Some of them are moving on now. It never gets easier. You just enter different phases. Obviously, we know your diet. We know your exercise. Do you do any fasting? You follow my work.

Elena:
Normally, I try not to eat after 5 o’clock, between 5 and then the next day. I usually have breakfast around 9:30.

Dr. Pompa:
Do you do any longer, extended fasts, whether it be partial, water, whatever because that’s another way that I have found I tap in. It really forces you to focus because when you take eating away, magic happens.

Elena:
I’ve tried so many different things, and I feel that it’s always—we have to always trust and listen to our body. My body guides me to what I feel is the best. I don’t usually have same things every day. I try to see, what does my body feel like today? I trust the messages that it’s giving me.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s smart. Okay, you mentioned something earlier in your book. It’s probably the hardest thing and one of the most destructive things. You said detoxing people out of your life. One of my areas—I would say one of my biggest areas, when people ask me what’s led to success, is really surrounding myself with people that yes, positive, but world changers. I love changing lives, I do. My wife will tell you. If I’m not changing a life, think I’m changing someone’s life, or make a difference, I get absolutely beside myself. I want to fix everybody and everything, which was a problem earlier in my life because I thought I could fix everybody and everything, but now I know I can’t.

The point is, though, I’ve learned to put myself around other people who just have a desire to make a difference, change the world, people who are doing things that I love to do. It’s led to success. I teach my children the same thing. If you want to be successful, hang around successful people. If you want to be miserable, hang around miserable people. You will not lead them to happiness. They will pull you down in misery. Anyways, how do we get rid of these people, is the point?

Elena:
For me, this is something I also had to learn over the years because I’m a giver and a rescuer. I just, over the years, wanted to rescue everybody all the time. I recognized that if I keep rescuing everybody, I’m going down. I’m crashing and collapsing, and that was not working. For me, my number one rule is I connect and surround myself with people who are authentic, who are inspiring me. I get up and I just cannot wait to hear their voice, and sometimes it’s across the globe. I have friends who are in Germany, who are in Switzerland, wherever they are.

They inspire me to be my best. Also, it’s really a love connection. I feel absolute love for these people. We’re so respectful of each other’s space, and we’re so supportive of each other. To me, the most inspiring thing is the authenticity of being unapologetically in their hearts, in my heart and their hearts.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a beautiful thing. I think we found the same thing in our life, both being very similar, thought we could help everyone, wanted to help everyone—didn’t work out. I almost have to have rules around these things to protect myself, meaning that you just can’t let those people too close. You want to help certain people, but there’s a certain distance. You have to have roles to where they’re going to be in your life. Your inner circle you have to be really careful with because they’re the ones—

Elena:
For me, it’s also priorities. For me, my children are number one. My family is the most important thing. Then the people that are part of that circle—I would say they’re like my family, too. There’s very few that I would say that are these beautiful, amazing human beings that are just radiating love. That’s really all that I seek and I want in my life. Anything that is not love definitely is not for me.

Dr. Pompa:
We started this whole conversation talking about the body’s innate ability, inborne ability to health itself. If we remove the interferences, the body finds that healing. It’s called homeostasis. Very healthy people have this balance. What are some of the other areas that perhaps we didn’t hit on that really throw the body out of homeostasis? If you’re out of that homeostasis, you’re developing disease. To get healthy again, we have to bring homeostasis. The only thing that can really do that is the body. There’s no drug that does that. There’s a time and a place for anything, but ultimately, the body has to find that balance. What are some of the things that help do that, and what are some things that we haven’t talked about that interfere with that?

Elena:
Gosh, there’s so many things. Over the years, I also began a new practice where I transitioned from working with people on-on-one in my private practice into long-distance work. This is, I would say, new and emerging field. I feel this is the field of the future, where medicine is going, and it’s really working on human energy field. There’s several ways to create an imbalance. There’s ways to interfere with it on a physical level we know, chemicals, toxins, viruses, bacteria. Then there’s a second way of entry, and that is on a soul gate level. What’s interesting is, over the years, I’ve had people pose a question to me about how can something interfere from a soul gate level? It might seem a little out there, but I want to bring it to people’s attention.

Dr. Pompa:
Just so people know, energy is how every bit of things in our body, every cell. We’re understanding energy a lot more today. Without sounding too hokey, energy really is critical. That’s what you’re talking about here. Go ahead.

Elena:
We’re talking about morphogenetic field, or morphic field, something that Rupert Sheldrake has done tremendous amount of research. Dysmorphic field contains of every human being, contains information of events, situations, viruses, bacteria. Think of a Cloud. If we’re a computer, there’s a Cloud that’s connected to it that that stores all of its information. At some point, there are going to be an accumulation and imbalances in that Cloud. We need to really, over time, recognize and clear it out of that Cloud so everything begins to sink in and flow. For example, today I have a client. She is an anesthesiologist. She was just recently diagnosed with breast cancer. She wanted to see me, somebody that I’ve known over the years.

I said, I no longer do the work that I did in person, but you’re welcome to work with me through distance. Anyway, she said, “I don’t feel myself.” I thought that was interesting because she said, “It’s not physical. It’s something else. I feel like I’m surrounded by darkness.” I found it fascinating that she was able to pinpoint it. What I do is, I read human energy field. I went into her field and she actually had dark energy that is ruling more than 50 percent of her being. That’s the gate of interference that I’m talking about on a soul level. I told her we have to cut it out of her field. This is a whole other topic that we could talk about, but it’s also important to know. There are interferences that can enter your field without you knowing it and without you recognizing it.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m a Christian, so I come from that. I get it. There are dark and evil forces out there that are always trying to affect us in certain ways. I think where—and I think most people watching this would agree with that, not everybody, but we love them anyway. I think where more of the confusion where people would go, okay, now you [41:24]. How do you sense this? In other words, how to read this? You said you have clients that are distant. You’re reading their energy force. Describe that. What does that mean, how do you do it, and how does it help the person?

Elena:
There’s several steps to it. First of all, I want to briefly say, how do we acquire? How does something negative enter a field? There’s many different ways. Number one, if you lower your vibration from something else. What does that mean? If you’re stuck in negative emotions, in constant negative thoughts, you’re lowering your vibration. When you’re lowering your vibration, of course drinking, overindulging in drugs such as alcohol—there’s so many different things you can do, it lowers your vibration. It creates holes in your own field of information. Things can enter you, and then you don’t know if it’s you or not you.

Dr. Pompa:
How do you pick that up, though? I get that. It’s all of those things you mentioned. Look, if you’re in someone’s presence, you can tell those people. You can tell that they’re more stuck in a negative state with the look on their face. They wear it. You have a distant client. You’re sensing something else.

Elena:
Yeah, I’ll go into—I’ll need a photo. It’s the same thing that radio signals work, the same way that cell phones work, or the way we’re speaking at the moment. How are we tapping into each other instantaneously? We’re seeing each other, and the sound travels so quickly. It’s the same way. I just need a photo and a name, and it takes me about five hours to read their field. It reveals everything about them, including if the meridians are flowing, miracle meridians, other meridians, the biofield of the person, what emotions are blocked on a physical level all the way to their cellular level, to DNA level. There’s a lot of information that we have that we store. I believe it’s the future of where things are going. I also believe that in the future, we’ll be able to tap into those things ourselves.

Dr. Pompa:
They’ve developed machines. We can look at people’s auras, and look for physical problems based on these things and emotional things. We can see that energy better with devices. You’re saying you’ve learned to tap into that. I can’t even imagine what that is because it’s maybe a gift, and I don’t have it. I can’t spell very well, either.

Elena:
We all have it. That’s the thing. We all have it.

Dr. Pompa:
Anyways, I have to ask this question. You get somebody, and you read that, and it doesn’t look good. How do you say that to the person? Then what do you do with that?

Elena:
First of all, I don’t ever deliver negative things. If I see dark things, I usually say—they get a report, and I’ll say, these are the things that I’m responsible for. I can cut it out of your field. Then your emotional state, your diet, everything else that you do, you’re responsible for. Look, there’s research that has been done. I don’t know if you’ve read books by Dr. Bruce Lipton. Joe Dispenza talks about this placebo effect. It’s actually much greater. It’s not a placebo. There’s something much greater.

Dr. Pompa:
I love both of those books, yeah.

Elena:
Exactly, so it’s where they perform surgeries. Have you read the study where they did the surgery for the—

Dr. Pompa:
[45:10] our viewers we’re talking about.

Elena:
Okay, excellent, so it’s the same kind of thing. As a person, let’s say you had an injury, massive injury. Let’s say you had a massive accident in your spine, like Joe Dispenza had an accident. What did he do? He actually went online and he printed, or he was envisioning his spine healing for three months until he healed himself. There’s actually a way that you can realign the healed with the person. Information begins to flow so the person can begin the healing. It’s a two-part, I would say, process, where a practitioner—I can send the energy to the person and be very specific where I’m sending it to. The other part is the person has to do the work also. I can actually give you an example.

My son, my 18-year-old, who’s extremely physical and active, had an accident on February 24th. I recorded a video with him interviewing him about it. He tore his meniscus. He went to see an orthopedic. He needed surgery because that’s the only way you can fix it. I said, “You know what? Let’s try something else.” He went, and we did one treatment of stem cells and my sessions, and he’s running now.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, that’s how I fixed my meniscus. I didn’t have surgery. I did stem cells.

Elena:
How many treatments did you have?

Dr. Pompa:
On my medial meniscus, one treatment fixed it. Then I had another one on the posterior lateral because it was a different injury.

Elena:
Yeah, I would say that there’s so many different ways of working and healing each person. It’s recognizing that everything works as a whole; it’s not separate. Yes, we do need medicine. It’s amazing for a few things, but chronic conditions—there’s things that have to—we have to re-shape the way we’re thinking about chronic illness and mystery illness.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, there’s no doubt. By the way, Joe Dispensa’z book, You are the Placebo, and what was his other one? There’s the second one.

Elena:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m drawing a blank, too. I was looking to you to tell me. Anyway, it’s a great book. His first one, You are the Placebo, tells that story that you were telling, how he healed himself with that. That is the power.

Elena:
Yes, what he did is he actually healed his own field. To heal that, you have to really be extremely specific.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s science all over it. Joe talks about the science, as well as Bruce Lipton. Bruce Lipton’s book, who endorsed you, the Biology of Belief, and then Joe Dispenza, You are the Placebo. Read both books. It sounds hokey, but what we’re saying—there is an absolute science around how our brain has the ability to change literally your DNA, and therefore the proteins your cells make, and that’s changing who you are. Literally, you are protein that your DNA makes, and our thoughts can control that. Today, you sit here or listen to this. The person who you are is who you thought yourself to be. I tell my children that all the time. It’s a remarkable thought.

Elena:
Yeah, we’re the manifestation of everything we imagine, everything we think, and feel.

Dr. Pompa:
Therefore, you’d better be careful who you let in your life because when we look at who influences who we are, it’s the people, the five people around you. I teach that to my kids. There’s the saying, you show me the five closest people in your life; I’ll show you your life.

Elena:
That’s right.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt about it because people go, okay, how do I change my thoughts? We just gave it to you, folks. Change those five closest people around you. As those people change, so too will your DNA, so too you will your protein, so too will your hormones, so too will who you become. You are what you believe. I hate to say it. I know my kids think I’m a nutcase when I say that because they know me as this very scientific—when I say those things, they look at me. They respect and love me enough where they don’t say it. I know they look at me and go, uh huh, uh huh. Let’s talk about the other thing.

Elena:
You know what’s amazing? This is what I’m finding. We are actually on the verge of having a different type of humanity. I’m noticing that with my children. They’re born knowing, feeling in a way that I don’t ever remember feeling that way until I was much older, or recognizing and being aware. They’re born aware and conscious.

Dr. Pompa:
Gosh, my 15-year-old is so aware. He’s so conscious. He’s so intuitive in a way that I could never imagine. Listen, the brain is amazing. What social media and all these things are doing—the brain’s compensating, figuring this out, doing stuff. Kids today, I tell you—they’re a really different generation. We have to be careful because we do not understand the way their brains work.

Elena:
No, but they’re so beautiful. Also, what I’m finding—my older three are the boys. They’re so aware and awakened and so heart connected, recognizing that it is important to have the human connection, versus fighting behind the phone, behind the social media post. We are in the day and age where we can instantly connect to people across the globe, but at the same time be so disconnected.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you’re right. What I hear you say—it’s a disconnected generation because of social media, but what’s happening is their brains are maybe compensating and developing in this ability to connect much quicker.

Elena:
I just feel there’s a new type of humans that are being born, perhaps not all, but new in a way that they are feeling, sensing. They’re more sensitive. I don’t know if you’ve noticed. More and more kids are also suffering from food sensitivities, from all kinds of issues. We have our kids with ADD, ADHD, which I never look like as a disorder. I actually look at them as a gift.

Dr. Pompa:
My son, that son, the 15-year-old—he’s ADD, dyslexic. He’s got all my gifts. I’m not ADD, but I am dyslexic. My wife’s ADD. He got the dyslexia and the ADD, and it’s come together.

Elena:
Guess what? He’s actually more sensitive, and he can tell you if he enters a room is something is awry, or if something is good or not.

Dr. Pompa:
He reads it. He reads people. I look to him. He’ll be like, mm-mm.

Elena:
Those kids are a gift. They’re our gifts, and they are guiding our humanity to a whole other level of awareness.

Dr. Pompa:
Interesting—let’s end on that positive note. Hold up your book again. I want you to promote it. There you go. It’s funny, folks. I joked in the beginning because I said, “Oh my gosh.” You look at people’s book covers. It’s thought up, it’s made up, it’s photoshopped, the whole thing. I said, “You look exactly like your book.” I realize that sounds stupid. Of course, she does. She looks exactly, today—look at her face, her hair—that’s her. That is you. It’s beautiful, and you look exactly like your book, so that’s awesome—very good. Get it, and I’m sure you expand greatly on every principle that we just talked about in your book. Thanks for being on Cellular TV, Elena. It was a great message, and ended on a really positive note, so thank you.

Elena:
Thank you so much.

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

276: Your Hormones Are A Vital Sign

Episode 276: Your Hormones Are A Vital Sign

with Dr. Mariza Snyder

Your menstrual cycle really is a vital sign that is often ignored, and Dr. Mariza Snyder has learned from her own personal journey that hormonal imbalances are what cause stubborn weight gain, mood swings, poor sleep, and low energy, and she is here to offer solutions!

More about Dr. Mariza Snyder:

Dr. Mariza Snyder is a functional practitioner and the author of seven books: the bestselling The Smart Mom’s Guide to Essential Oils and The DASH Diet Cookbook. Dr. Mariza's newest book focuses on balancing hormones with the power of essential oils, it's called: The Essential Oils Hormone Solution.
For the past ten years, she has lectured at wellness centers, conferences, and corporations on hormone health, essential oils, nutrition, and detoxification. She has been featured on Dr. Oz, Fox News Health, MindBodyGreen and many publications. Dr. Mariza is also the host of the Essentially You Podcast, designed to empower women to become the CEO of their health.

Additional Information:

Show notes:

Check out Dr. Mariza's website for women's hormone tips, including recipes and remedies.

CytoDetox: total detoxification support where it matters most – at the cellular level.

HCF's Live it to Lead it event – Newport Beach – November 14-17, 2019

Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
If you’re watching this have heard me say this a lot that the inability to lose weight today has more to do with hormones than even what we’re eating. On this episode of Cell TV, you’re going to get some simple answers. You’re going to get the reason why that is as well. This guest I think brings some really simple answers even as simple as essential oils and how that affects our primitive brain. It can be a simple biohack to things like cravings, or even anxiety, and stress, and sleep. I think this is just a great episode to give you some of those really simple answers that we all need while we’re detoxing, while we’re waiting for our hormones to be better. We’re going to get some great answers. Stay tuned to this show for the hormone answer.

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, we are welcoming Dr. Mariza Snyder, who is a functional practitioner and the author of seven books. Her newest book focuses on balancing hormones with the power of essential oils. It’s called The Essential Oils Hormone Solution. She is here today to discuss ways to reset your hormones to lose weight naturally and boost energy. It’s such a great topic.

Dr. Mariza is the host of the Essentially You podcast designed to empower women to become the CEO of their health. You can check out her website at drmariza.com for women’s hormone tips, including recipes and remedies. Okay, I’m excited you’re here, so let’s welcome Dr. Mariza and of course, Dr. Pompa; welcome.

Dr. Snyder:
Thank you for having me, you guys. It’s so great to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
You and I were just on a panel together at Paleo f(x) about the topic of female hormones; packed room. We had so many great questions. You did a great job by the way.

Dr. Snyder:
So did you; being the only man on the panel, you did a phenomenal job.

Dr. Pompa:
It was funny because I was—we couldn’t find the room. A matter of fact, it was Ashley who was taking me around. We couldn’t find the room, so I was five minutes late for the beginning of the panel. My joke was when I found out that I was the only male on a topic of female hormones out of this whole panel of women, I decided I’m not going to do it. I can’t do it. Then Ashely convinced me to do it, and here I am late, which wasn’t the case. I was just walking around the building lost. It’s even worse than that because truth be told, if she didn’t find me and drag me up, I thought, oh, I have—I thought it was at 2:30.

Anyways, long story, but it was a great panel. You brought a lot of great insight; I thought some of the best insight as far as just usable information. When you have a panel like that and you have six people, you think you’re going to have a lot of disagreement; no, we really didn’t within the panel. I think there was a lot of agreement in the panel.

One of the things that came out is we had a room full of low-carb people and we had a room full of people with a lot of the same struggles. I would say that most people today are having a lot of these struggles, a lot with weight loss. Because I always say, look, weight loss today has less to do with your diet; it has more to do with your hormones than anything. The real reason why people struggle to lose weight, or gain weight, or whatever they want to do, it’s hormones. This is that topic, so you’re going to cover that today.

Dr. Snyder:
Yes, I am. It very much is. I know you and I both meet so many women who are doing all the things: cutting as many calories as possible, restricting a lot as possible, working as hard as possible; and yet, the weight just won’t go anywhere. We know that there’s a lot more to it. It’s not a calories in versus calories out idea or understanding. We know that’s not true today.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, if it were only so simple.

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, wouldn’t it; if the body were that simple.

Dr. Pompa:
The media makes it seem that simple. Just we’re gluttons; you need to move your butt more. You’re lazy. You’re a glutton. You just plain old eat too much. If it were only so simple. It’s not that way. Most women watching this I would say they would say, I’m eating better than all of my friends and family and yet I’m stuck here. That is the sentiment.

Dr. Snyder:
Absolutely, or they do the same program that their husband does. He loses 15 pounds and she loses 2. It’s so off. I can attest to that. Alex and I, my husband and I will do the same thing. My gosh, I can take him for—I could drop 15 pounds on that man like that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and men, we’re not going to just through you off to the side during this episode; we have hormone tips for you today, too. Yeah, but no, I loved a lot of the things that you had to say. I couldn’t wait to do this show.

Let’s start here because you wrote seven books. I think you were on Oz. I think you were on FOX. You’ve been out there, but what got you into this. Everyone has their story. I have a story. You become an expert by our battles that we go through from pain to purpose, so tell us.

Dr. Snyder:
Yes, well, my story started when I was a little girl. I was involved in some head trauma and I had chronic migraines for 15 years. In that 15 years, I was told by numerous doctors, neurologists, all different types of diagnostics that I was going to always have this chronic migraine pain and that my life was going to be punctuated with headaches and migraines. I was just going to have to figure out a way to deal with it with medication. Growing up in that paradigm in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, that is what I thought was true. I didn’t know anything different.

I became a biochemist because I wanted to go into medicine. When I was in the lab at 23, 24 years old, I meet a fellow scientist who told me that she thought she had a doctor who could cure my migraines. I thought if she wasn’t such a reputable scientist that she was crazy. Luckily, that office, that practice was on my way home from the lab every single day. I decided to give it a go because I couldn’t imagine my life consistently on pain meds for another many dozens of decades or several decades.

I went to this practice. It was a functional practice. This was in 2003, 2004. Three months later, I was migraine free. It completely blew my mind. It just changed everything that I believed about medicine, everything that I believed about the body. It just shifted the way that I wanted to be able to treat people and take care of people.

I’ll fast forward another several years; I’m 30 years old. I’ll be honest with you; as a woman, and as a woman growing up in my family, I was taught from a very young age that my worth was very much predicated on how much I did for other people. I was never allowed to put myself on that list. I remember gran-grandma always saying, you’re selfish if you do this; you’re selfish if you do this. You always need to put other people first. That is what I did. I was very productive.

Dr. Pompa:
What nationality are you? I have to ask that.

Dr. Snyder:
I’m Latina, so Mexican.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, see that’s an Italian thing, too. The women served and they did the best at it. Oh my gosh; it was good in some ways. It was good for us men.

Dr. Snyder:
Oh, for sure; you guys are winning. Yeah, my grandma’s house, the boys, they’re not in the kitchen still to this day. That’s just the way it is.

I basically, I burned myself right into the ground. I just worked myself into the ground. I was in practice about a year. I had a lot of women who were showing up with symptoms that I hadn’t really learned a lot about in school. They were having chronic fatigue. They were having mood swings, anxiousness, weight resistance, and weren’t sure what was happening. Labs weren’t showing up to show a lot of indicating markers.

At the same time that they were dealing with that, I was also in it. I remember one day finally waking up because it had just been building up and building up for several years. I literally just could not even get out of bed. I was in the throws of massive chronic fatigue.

At that point, I remember going to the doctor, being recommended birth control and Xanax for this. Knowing what I had learned at 23, knowing what I had learned in all of my education and focusing on functional medicine, I knew that those prescriptions were not the key. I have spent the last 10 years of my life devoting all of my efforts, and my time, and my research on women’s hormone health or women’s health care because I had felt so isolated and alone at that time 10 years ago without a real clear direction or answer. As I looked around at so many women, including my mom and my sister, a lot of us were in the same boat.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s unbelievable. Look, before we got on the air, this is this month’s Scientific American. If you look at the title, it is, “Inconceivable: The Science of Women’s Reproductive Health” has huge gaps. What we don’t know is hurting all of us. Unfortunately, I told you that the article frustrated me beyond belief; however, their point is well taken.

Dr. Snyder:
It’s true; we do have so many gaps in not even just women’s reproductive health, but women’s health care in general. Our health far beyond spans our reproductive health care—our reproductive function. There’s a lot of differences between men and women that we really haven’t been able to look at and dig into. So much has happened; so much has shifted even in the last 10 years because 10 years ago, we weren’t talking about hormones. People just didn’t know what was really going on. We definitely had birth control. We had hormone replacement, but there wasn’t an understanding. Women didn’t understand how their bodies worked. I still believe that a lot of women are not very clear on what is happening with their bodies.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s true. The article made that point I think very well. It also made the point that birth control can be this—well, the pill, for example, has helped so many women, etc. Then backhandedly, it talked about all the other problems that it may be causing.

Then it had a picture of an IUD. It really made it seem like IUDs were the greatest thing ever. By the way, that’s a blown up, huge IUD, but that is copper around there. They talked about why most women end up stopping it because of the symptoms. They also went onto talk about, hey, stop your periods at all costs because you’ll just simply feel better; anyways.

Dr. Snyder:
It’s been awful. Don’t even get me started on hormone birth control. The fact that we’re using it as a way of treating women’s hormone issues, it doesn’t treat any of our hormone issues. It doesn’t treat anything. We just throw birth control at women for all of these problems and we never—you know this is what you and I found everything on is the why: why is it that we’re struggling with our menstrual cycle? Why is it that we have a luteal defect? Why is it that perimenopause feels like such a train wreck for so many women and all we have to offer is birth control? It just completely masks the symptoms.

Dr. Pompa:
I think that’s part of the problem right there though. Because see, and the article did point this out, the answer is oh, take this birth control pill. Most often, in the beginning, people feel better. It might solve that temporary problem, but they’re never going upstream to the problem of why they had these issues in the first place. Then 10 years later, they end up with a new diagnosis. Nobody really puts it together that oh well, the problem was never actually looked at of what was actually throwing the hormones off balance.

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, it just got worse. The problem was still happening behind the scenes. The inflammation was still happening. All of that was still going on. Now, we just fast forward 10 years later and we have some pretty bigger—we have much bigger problems.

Dr. Pompa:
What are some of the early symptoms of hormones being dysregulated?

Dr. Snyder:
That’s such a great question. A big thing that I see, I honestly almost 90% of the time, a big part of what I see is going to be stress is having a major play on how our hormones are functioning. I talked a lot about in that panel about perceived stress and trauma and being one of the root causes of disease. I felt like in today’s modern world with social media, more isolation than ever before, toxins, which again, another major root cause. Again, our body perceives toxins and we—and it’s stress. We man an assault against that as well. It’s still a stressor into the system. Stressors come in physical, chemical, emotional, or even perceived.

Dr. Pompa:
It doesn’t know the difference.

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, and when we have an all-out attack, when we leverage cortisol or epinephrine and norepinephrine, most importantly, cortisol over long term, we know that we then begin to deregulate a lot of other hormones: our thyroid hormones, our reproductive hormones like progesterone, and estrogen, and DHEA, and then also our metabolic hormones. The thing about when we start to increase the amount of cortisol, we also know that we’re creating insulin resistance. We look at just even in a standpoint of rushing from one thing to the next, call it rushing people syndrome, rushing woman syndrome, superwoman syndrome, whatever you want to call it. That’s one of the biggest underlying pieces that we have a lot of chronic stress. Now, tie in things like hidden infections, tie in heavy metals and toxins, and then we’re also talking about another layer of inflammation that is throwing off those—that endocrine system, throwing off progesterone and estrogen, and also creating issues there. I find that it’s usually oftentimes a compounding effect of multiple root causes at once that’s leveraging hormonal imbalance.

What women begin to experience is their menstrual cycle, they have horrible PMS. Maybe their menstrual cycle is—it’s being disrupted; it’s significantly shorter. We’ll also see women dealing with hormonal weight resistance. They can’t seem to lose weight and they’re storing weight at visceral abdominal, around that visceral abdominal area. Brain fog, low energy, the inability to sleep at night. All of those things tend to be some of the biggest heavy hitters or the first red flags that I see for women.

Dr. Pompa:
Then 10 years later, 20 years later, then it’s endometriosis, PCOS. Then they get the diagnosis. What you just hit on right there is most of the women that I talk to, thinking fog, which all of those types of symptoms, and the weight. Let’s talk about that because people want to know about it. I know what people want. What is in your opinion the Number One hormone disruption that leads to the weight and I would even say the brain fog because those are the ones that drive people the most crazy?

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, I think it’s HPA axis deregulation. I think that’s exactly what’s going on when we are constantly triggering that perceived stress.

Dr. Pompa:
The HPA, we have new people, hypothalamus-pituitary which runs your thyroid and your adrenals. How that whole axis works together is basically run by the center of your brain. That’s what your referencing.

Dr. Snyder:
Yes, and the reason for that is at the end of the day, what I’ve discovered or we know to be true is every single cell, every fiber in your body is hardwired for one thing and one thing only. That’s survival Number One. It’s so interesting to me as new research is coming out; we know that the body can sense perceived stress. I talk about your spidey senses are tingling or you can smell fear. There’s so many receptor sites all over the body that are concomitantly in stranger danger mode making sure that our environment is safe, but where it’s really happening, where that master control center is going on is the limbic system.

We just have not developed well inside of our brain to realize that a lot of these modern-day stressors like running late for a meeting, or not being able to find the panel, or getting a text message from your best friend—I got a text message from my best friend yesterday in the middle of an interview. It said, “I need you to call me as soon as possible.” I don’t know why my phone was not on airplane mode. I did not need to see that message in the middle of that interview because the first thing, I literally when into a clutch the pearls moment where I was like, what is happening with my best friend? What does she need? What happened to her?

That’s was a major perceived stressor. I felt like my heart rate when up. I felt really alert. I was ready to fight something because I got this text message. I think about those types of compounding moments happen to people multiple times throughout the day. We have a biochemical process that gets the body ready for our sympathetic nervous system: fight or flight. I think constantly firing off that particular system in the body lends to a deregulation of so many other—the digestive system—

Dr. Pompa:
In that system, you have your—it’s cortisol. We know increased cortisol levels drive weight gain, drives—it does.

Dr. Snyder:
Sugar cravings. It drives us to not even be able to think right. What is it, we drop—our IQ drops by 50 points when we’re in a stressed state? Have you ever seen the videos where people are lost in the woods and they run right through a highway?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but they have no clue.

Dr. Snyder:
Because they just couldn’t—they ran right by their rescue just whoop. We downregulate that prefrontal cortex. People don’t realize also is we completely sabotage our ability to have willpower. Women ask me all the time, I don’t understand why I’m having all these cravings? I don’t get it. Why am I not winning the stare down contest with that cupcake? When we have shut that part down, cortisol has a way have hi-jacking our willpower.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s one hormone.

Dr. Snyder:
That’s one hormone. There’s other ones involved.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. That is; that’s a major part of that system. Then the thyroid becomes involved because technically that’s really part of the system as well.

Dr. Snyder:
I think that the thyroid is just getting whipped: just go, go. Not that it’s a confession, but I have Hashimoto’s. I know for a fact that my stress did not help me in landing there. Thyroid, as well all know, the thyroid is the gas pedal of our metabolism. It’s managing how we burn calories.

As you can imagine, if we’re constantly working our thyroid because we’re always in that state of sympathetic dominance, or survival, or running from one thing to the next—I grew up with a mom who literally was running from one thing—that woman never stopped. She was just checking of hundreds of boxes. I just assumed that’s how I was supposed to operate. We know that if they thyroid becomes sluggish, whether it’s a hidden infection, it’s trauma, it’s stress, or it’s toxicity, we then start dealing with weight gain, fluid retention, a sluggish digestive system, constipation, and a slew of other issues.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and people don’t realize that low thyroid, the thyroid actually can affect your gut motility, meaning constipation. It affects your constipation. It affects brain fog. It affects so many of these symptoms we’re talking about. Thyroid and adrenals, this whole axis that you’re referring to is overly stressed physically, chemically, and emotionally is really the big issue.

Dr. Snyder:
Then we co-elevate insulin and that becomes a major problem. As we know, insulin ultimately becomes a fat storage hormone in insulin resistance or a block with those—our cells absorbing that extra glucose. We know that if it’s not able to do that, we then convert that glucose over to fat. Then that leads to weight gain; that leads to sugar addictions; that leads to cravings. Cortisol and insulin, they run in a pack as far as I’m concerned. If you’ve got one that’s firing, you’re constantly firing off cortisol, you’re definitely constantly—your insulin levels are having to constantly manage that moment because we’re needing to draw reserves for energy.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s very frustrating for you and I because what we see is now a world even in functional medicine, a world downstream trying to give everyone all these little solutions for all these little things. We just described a very complicated system in the body hormonally that is driven by stressors: physical, chemical, emotional. For me logically, the answer is okay, you have to deal with these stressors. There’s a time to hormone, hormones. We would both recognize that, but it’s not the solution. The solution is dealing upstream.

My life’s work is about this cellular detox and my component to this. Hold up your book because you give a lot of other solutions even beyond that and I want to discuss them. Essential oils you have been a big proponent of and how to use some essential oils. Way better solution than obviously just throwing hormones, gasoline on a fire.

Talk about some of the other solutions because I think we’ve got women to understand, here’s the problem. This is why you’re stressed. This is why you’re not adapting to stress, even normal stress. This is why you can’t lose weight. This is why you’re not sleeping, brain fog. What do I do about it? We know detox; my audience knows detox. However, talk about some other things here.

Dr. Snyder:
Absolutely, and it’s important. Detox is such a big part of this conversation and so is food. Food’s a major part of this conversation. One of the things I learned—I’ve done a lot of detoxes and I’ve studied detoxification. It’s one of my favorite areas to dive into.

When I was beginning to heal my body, I keep crescendoing back down. I’m an overachiever. I’d like to believe I’m an overachiever at healing, too. I think when you think you’re an overachiever at one thing, you should just be an overachiever at all of them. I keep crescendoing back down to Square One. I was like, what is going on? How can I not beat this?

I realized that the first step for me was changing my mode of operation. I hadn’t changed the way I thought. I hadn’t changed the way I was doing life and that was a big part of it, that core belief system, that core mode of operation. I learned very quickly that you can’t green juice or green smoothie your way out of chronic stress.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I wish it were so simple.

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, I know. You can’t detox yourself out chronic stress either. It should be a combination. You can’t just mindset shift your way into healing. You’ve got to do the work. I realized that there was a combination there.

One of the things I—one of the most difficult conversations I’ve had with women, I was just having with this amazing woman named Diane the other. I have a full-on program, a hormone detox hormone program inside of the book. It’s mostly food driven because I believe in ease and grace. This woman Diane reached out to me. She was on Day Six of the program. The biggest thing that she had taken away—mind you she had broken up with sugar, and dairy, and grains, and inflammatory foods, and she did all that good work—

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a hard breakup.

Dr. Snyder:
It’s a major; oh my gosh. How many people are like, wait, you’re taking away my Chick-fil-A? Wait, what? You’ve been there. You know people just go crazy when they find out you’re about to take away their favorite foods.

That wasn’t her biggest issue. She was committed to that piece. She had a poignant moment where her husband was cleaning something in the house. She was sitting there reading actually that book, my book. She felt so much guilt that she was not cleaning because he was cleaning. She didn’t know how to let it go and there was that moment where she realized that was what was getting her in so much trouble.

She reached out to me and she’s like, not only is the program—I’ve got more energy. I’m sleeping better at night, but I finally realized that I deserve healing. I deserve self-care. I deserve to take a moment in my day even if someone else in my family is doing something around the house because she was like, that is what keeps getting me in trouble.

That was a big moment. I know that’s not the biochemical, but we know that the emotional piece and the mindset piece plays such a big role. When we don’t think that we deserve to be well, you’re setting yourself up for failure, unfortunately, because you don’t—you’re not putting in all those practices. You’re not taking that moment to really make sure that you’re taking care of you first.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I agree. How does somebody watching this with hormone issues use essential oils to help this?

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, absolutely. I will say, I love meditation. I love breathing exercises, but I also know what it feels like to be overwhelmed. I also know what it feels like when it’s just one more thing on my plate and I just feel like I’m about to explode. I have too much going on. What I love about oils is they are literally stress disruptors. How I like to imagine, have you ever been on a merry-go-round, one of those in a little park that goes really fast if you spin it?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, oh yeah. You mean the one you self-spin and you—

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, you self-spin. You’re holding on as a little kid. Think of that merry-go-round as that moment of overwhelm. What oils do is they’re literally the mechanism that just has you jump off, that has you jump off the merry-go-round like that. Oils whether you like it or not, their chemical properties, very specific ones, not all of them do this, but like jasmine, lavender, roman chamomile, cedarwood, frankincense, the calming oils actually disrupt the stress response system. They can go into the limbic system because it’s a no-holds-bar communication.

Aroma, our sense of smell is the most powerful sense that we have because it’s directly connected to our survival. By breathing in an aroma, I’ve got a little—my stress be gone blend is right in this beautiful little bottle here. It’s just lavender and bergamot. I roll it over my palms. The chemical constituents in the blend, the monoterpenes, the laminin, the linalyl acetate, they are stress disruptors. Whether you like it or not, they—you can sabotage somebody with this blend. You could have it underneath the desk diffusing it, and there could be some grouchy person in your office who’s always stressed out, and you could literally reset their stress chemistry.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, let me bring the science to it. I’m the science guy. Because some people, that’s all they needed to hear. Then there’s probably the smarter people. Then there’s people like me who that have to go, okay, so why is this actually working?

It’s what you said earlier; the limbic system of the brain that we were describing, that whole system that comes out of it, all the hormonal system, that is the primitive brain. Smell is actually the most powerful component to that limbic system. If that system as you described is causing so much of our inability to adapt to the stresses and drive this sympathetic reaction and affect our hormones, then how can we biohack straight into this system? It is, in fact, smell by the way.

Dr. Snyder:
Yes, it is. We know that oils come into the body. They’re basically dozens or hundreds of these unique chemical organic compounds, some plants. What’s so beautiful about plants—we look at nutrition. We look at supplements. We look at herbs and apoptogenic herbs out there and homeopathies. We know that plants were always designed to heal our bodies.

The same thing with essential oils is that they really work with our own chemistry. Something like linalyl acetate we know binds to certain receptor sites. We know it binds to—it helps to regulate serotonin levels. It helps to bind to GABA. It has this really powerful way of just calming the mind and relaxing it.

I have really bad flight anxiety, which stinks because I’m on a plane a lot. I have oils on me at all times because I have a certain oil blend that will take me from 100 to 0 in less than [00:31:22] upon smelling it. I’m so grateful because there’s people all over that plane who are taking Xanax to get over their flight anxiety and here I’ve got my oils.

Dr. Pompa:
People want to know, what’s the blend; come on?

Dr. Snyder:
Yes, the blend is a combination of vetiver. Vetiver is high in sesquiterpenes, which is a powerful neuro-tonic and powerful sedative. If you want to shut your brain off at night, I call it the mental chatter be gone blend, or just eradicate mental chatter, it’s just lavender and vetiver in a diffuser, a diffuser over your bed.

If I want my husband—my husband’s a night owl. He stays up way late; I think like 2 or 3:00 last night. Let’s say there are nights where I’m like, you know what, you are going to bed. I will put a diffuser by him around 10:00 at night or 11 with that blend in it. He maybe makes it 30 minutes and he just knocks out. You can do this to your family all over the house.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, people are loving that tip. What are some of your other hormone combinations you like?

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, so the anxiety is vetiver. It’s a combination of vetiver, frankincense, lavender, and roman chamomile, and bergamot. That’s usually the five I usually have. Even if you just have vetiver, and lavender, and roman chamomile, those three oils oftentimes do the trick for anxiety.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome.

Dr. Snyder:
How about cravings? I think cravings are a big one.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s huge.

Dr. Snyder:
A study out of the I want to say it was the Journal of Neurology by Dr. Alan Hirsch who was looking at appetite and craving suppressants and was looking at aromatherapy and discovered that peppermint, I think it was 85 to 90% of the time completely successfully got rid of cravings. Now, I know that cravings are an unmet need and so do you. It’s usually brain fog. It’s fatigue. It’s stress. It’s emotions. It’s boredom.

It’s never your liver saying, oh my gosh, I have to have that cupcake right now. Your liver is like, please don’t eat that. Please don’t make me have to work so hard. Cravings are something else. They strike whenever they do. It’s always important to know your trigger times: 3:00 in the afternoon, 10:00 pm at night when you’re watching Game of Thrones, whatever it is that you’re doing.

Peppermint, just taking a drop of peppermint on your palms, breathing it in will literally shut down that craving. It’ll buy you time. A craving lasts about three minutes total. You can do a lot of damage in three minutes.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, actually, that’s typically the damage time. If you can bypass that time, good for you; absolutely. Frankincense is one of my favorites. Why do I love frankincense so much? What does that benefit me?

Dr. Snyder:
Frankincense, research for Frankincense, not only is it great for anti-aging, so it’s a great cellular support oil. It’s a great detoxifying oil as well known to support [00:34:18] to detoxification inside of the liver. Also, frankincense, it’s great for mental alertness. Frankincense, rosemary, and peppermint is my go-to blend for brain fog. Those three oils not only help to oxygenate the brain, they help to—frankincense allows for proper connectivity.

Rosemary boosts acetylcholine levels and boosts alertness and working memory by up to 70%. Brain fog be gone, my blend, I have tens of thousands of people making that all over the world because it works so well. I actually have my brain fog be gone blend right here. That’s a good one.

I love the frankincense for meditation, for again, for focus and concentration. Then frankincense has been shown very well to reduce depression in people who are dealing with that. Those are some big ones. Then there’s a lot of really incredible research on frankincense for cellular apoptosis and also for cancer. We’re seeing more and more research there.

Dr. Pompa:
You have a cheat sheet that you are giving as a gift, right?

Dr. Snyder:
Yes, I do.

Dr. Pompa:
Because people are going, what? What did she say?

Dr. Snyder:
I know; it’s a lot. It’s a lot of goodies. That cheat sheet, I believe it’s my cravings cheat sheet. When I surveyed 50,000 women last year, I asked them what was the Number One health concern that was affecting their life. Brain fog, stress, fatigue, and weight resistance, those are the big ones. That cheat sheet are my best blends and how to use them for those big concerns: sleep, brain fog, stress, fatigue, and cravings.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, perfect. That will help people. That’s the goal here. Hold up your book again because I’m sure that people will want to get it. You talk about these things at length in your book.

Dr. Snyder:
All those things I mentioned, there’s a chapter for every one of those conditions. I think it’s really important too in the book, not only for women to have a solution to what’s going on but also to understand the mechanism. If they’re dealing with brain fog, what hormones are involved? What’s going on with the body when we’re dealing with brain fog? It’s a thyroid of possibility. I wanted women to feel very empowered and educated, so when they came to you and I or their doctors that they could ask those types of educated questions and hopefully get the answers that they’re looking for.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, that’s awesome. People need some solutions today outside of it because I think people are so hormonally off. It’s going to take them a while to get to the point of detox or just even lifestyle changes. In the meantime, the question I always get is, what do I do in the meantime while I’m getting there? I think the tips you’re giving are in that meantime.

Dr. Snyder:
I think a lot of people, we were talking about this earlier, a lot of people—everyone’s at a different phase in their healing journey. One of the things that I love about oils because I was such a nutrition nerd, I was so just digging the biology, and I learned that I could get someone to use an oil before I could get someone to drink a green smoothie. I was like how do I get someone to really begin to understand this beautiful healing? How do I get someone to start down that path? I love essential oils because I think they’re like the gateway drug into wellness; part of it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, it’s true because people use it and they go, oh, that worked.

Dr. Snyder:
That worked. They’re like, oh my gosh, my headache’s gone. Oh my gosh, I can think more clearly. My brain fog is gone at least for the next couple hours. Oh my gosh, I just beat that craving. Having those types of tools, especially an emergency tool that you can grab, that you feel confident in using, it just opens the door for what’s possible.

Dr. Pompa:
Here we have teens today that are hormonally dysregulated. It didn’t happen to you until later.

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, not until my 30’s.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. It’s a big deal. The question, this is one of the things that they asked in the article, is why are girls getting their periods so young?

Dr. Snyder:
You and I both know why.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but they never—they didn’t give that reason in here. That’s unfortunate. They did admit to the fact that the earlier a girl gets her period, her cancer risk goes much—through the roof; basically, more hormone disruption.

Dr. Snyder:
That’s the reason why she got her period early. That hormone just means obviously we have hormone disruption really early in life because of toxicity, because of parabens, and thiolates, and makeup.

Dr. Pompa:
They did, fortunately, quote one scientist in here that alluded to the fact of some of the chemicals could be the cause, but it was such a “could be the cause” that you’ll just read right over it. Yeah, isn’t that the shame? The hormones being driven by commercial meats, the hormones in the meats, the plastics, the toxins, the pesticides, the list goes on.

Dr. Snyder:
By having those, all of it.

Dr. Pompa:
I think the importance is that it’s a problem.

Dr. Snyder:
It is a major problem.

Dr. Pompa:
The world recognizes it’s a problem. We know it’s increasing cancer rates and who’s to see what’s coming? My gosh.

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, I’ll be honest with you; I don’t think I’ve met a woman who hasn’t had a hormone issue one way or the other. They may not know it, but it’s very—it’s quite obvious. It’s so rare to meet anyone who—and I’ve met with so many other good friends of mine, practitioners who’ve ran hundreds and thousands of labs and have yet to find a woman who isn’t struggling to some capacity. Living in this modern world, how do we manage it if we’re not really proactive every day?

Dr. Pompa:
I think the problem is that then you’re right on what you’re saying, but they go to their doctor and they run certain tests, typically bloodwork. Typically, when the symptoms start, the hormones are still in line, so their blood tests are normal. It takes another 10 years for them to be abnormal. Then when they become abnormal, then they land themselves on dangerous medications, more dangerous hormones that we’ll find out 10 years from now are actually causing cancer, but the doctor is telling you it’s safe now. You start the hormones and certain things get better for a period.

Dr. Snyder:
For a period of time.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m telling a story that’s all very common to most women. The problem is growing. The solutions are arguably getting worse because long-term, I think we’re creating more problems. This is a big deal. This is a really big deal. I think that we need more people bringing it to light. An article like this, [non-verbal].

Dr. Snyder:
That is; that article is shameful. It is an embarrassment to our profession. That’s how I feel about that. I’m not giving up this fight. I’m not going anywhere. The more and more of these conversations we can have—and one of the things I tell women too is to have these conversations with each other. Let’ start having more of these conversations and demanding something different so that we shift the way that we aren’t the mismanagement of women’s health care inside of this [00:42:11].

Dr. Pompa:
I think we need to have them with our teenagers because this is obviously where it’s starting. We have to educate them on I believe the causative problems. Again, they’re teenagers. They’re not going to start changing their makeup.

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, do you remember the conversation that your dad had with you as a teenager?

Dr. Pompa:
I don’t think I had one.

Dr. Snyder:
You didn’t even have the conversation. I definitely as a Catholic Latina, there was no conversation. Any of that was the Devil’s work. I remember it when I got my period. No one talked about it; no one said anything. Here I am; I’m at the roller-skating rink. I’m in these little jean shorts. Not to throw my mom under the bus, but she just threw some pads into the bathroom and that was it.

Dr. Pompa:
Threw them in.

Dr. Snyder:
That’s because that’s how my grandma did it. I have a dear friend of mine who has a book and she talks about a call to arms to—not just for the girls but for the boys too, but definitely for the girl. Whose responsibility is it to ensure that our girls are educated about their menstrual health, their reproductive health? It’s every single one of our responsibilities.

Dr. Pompa:
It is. Here’s the thing. Again, I go back to the, okay, moms and dads, they’re not going to—your teenager’s just all of a sudden not going to change their makeup. That shouldn’t even be the goal. The goal is that—you and I, we didn’t even have a conversation. The goal is just to have the conversation.

Because what I’ve noticed, my teenagers are now in their 20s. They all have went back to the fact that we did talk to them about these things. Oh, they didn’t want to hear it, but now they go, gosh, I’m so glad. They’re all educated. My teenagers all make good—or my 20-somes, they all make good decisions now based on their diet, and their lifestyle choices, the deodorants that they use, all these things.

Dr. Snyder:
Dad, it worked.

Dr. Pompa:
Plant the seeds is what I’m saying, plant the seeds.

Dr. Snyder:
It’s so true. My husband’s mom was an energy healer. He grew up with essential oils. I had never heard of this. I grew up on Pop-Tarts and Tylenol. My husband had grown up that way. He definitely went to the waste side for a little bit, but it was the things that he was brought up with. He grew up on all the hippy-dippy, non-toxic everything, and broccoli sprouts, and all that.

It was really great when we started dating. All of it was just—so many women tell me their husbands are just not on the same train. They won’t do things. They’re not willing to partner up with them on this healing journey. I’m like, thank goodness my husband’s mom did the good work already.

Dr. Pompa:
It doesn’t even matter ladies; you just do it anyway because women control.

Dr. Snyder:
I tell them all the time, yes. Do it anyway.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah because they come along. They’ll come along. Just ignore them and just move on.

Dr. Snyder:
Just take care of you. For the first time ever, take care of you.

Dr. Pompa:
Take care of you and watch what happens. They’ll come along because men look for things that are real. If your life changes, they’ll see it and they’ll follow. Then they’ll start asking questions. Just live the life and watch what happens to your kids. Live it to Lead It, that’s the name of my seminars.

Dr. Snyder:
We have a responsibility. I believe that we have a legacy that we’re leaving to our kids and our families. Not even just a legacy to our kids, but I have a legacy to my sister, and my aunts, and my [00:46:06] that I want to leave for them. I live this lifestyle and I spend time with my family. My mom and my sister always tell me that my house is not the funhouse, but they know that this is—that I’m always educating, and healing, and working with them. That’s the legacy I want. I want that legacy for my family.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it will happen. My 22-year-old daughter, just she’s like, I just want to raise my kids just like did you did, Merily, my wife. It’s like, but she fought her when she was younger.

Dr. Snyder:
I bet.

Dr. Pompa:
She fought her, but now it’s like, I’m going to do the same thing.

Dr. Snyder:
She’s like Bath & Body Works spritzer.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m doing the same thing. She’s all about it now, so hang in there. That’s the message of hope if you have teenagers.

Dr. Snyder:
I love it.

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, if you don’t have the conversation, they’re going to end up thinking Gardasil’s the answer. They’re going to end up thinking that birth control pills are their answer. They’re going to do this, but if you plant the seeds and educate them, when they hear that message when the doctor says, take these, they’re going to go, hum; they’re going to question it.

Dr. Snyder:
They’re going to question it. When the doctor gives them birth control and Xanax, they’re going to question it and they’re not going to fulfill those scripts. They’re going to get a second opinion.

Dr. Pompa:
Alright, well, where can they get your book? Hold it up again.

Dr. Snyder:
All the places all over the world. Clearly, it’s always on sale on Amazon. Thank you, Amazon. It’s in bookstores everywhere. Again, if women want to know their hormones, they want non-toxic options, they want non-toxic solutions for their biggest hormone issues, this is—it’s such a great book to get started. Again, the big premise for me is ease and grace because I know that so often when we feel horrible or we feel like our bodies are sabotaging us, the last thing we want is a ton of more things to bring on. I tried my best to make it as easy as possible.

Dr. Pompa:
We appreciate that. Thank you for being on this show. Thank you for joining me on the panel.

Dr. Snyder:
Yeah, thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
I joined the panel. Like I said, I was the only man.

Dr. Snyder:
You were late to the panel.

Dr. Pompa:
Alright, Dr. Mariza, thank you again. We’ll have you on I’m sure again.

Dr. Snyder:
Thank you so much for having me.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com.

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