2019 Podcasts

Episode 275: Clean Keto vs Dirty Keto

with Dr. Anthony Gustin

Dr. Anthony Gustin's story may start like a typical “used to be fat and sick, and is now lean and healthy” success story, but his path may be slightly different. He's here to share his journey: how he now runs 2 successful food companies dedicated to high-quality keto snacks and whole-food based supplements. His mission is to help as many people as possible achieve optimal health and well-being through movement, nutrition, stress management, and sleep.

More about Dr. Gustin:

Dr. Anthony Gustin is the CEO and Co-founder of Perfect Keto, one of the fastest growing nutrition companies known for uncompromising quality standards on keto-friendly products and credible resources that help make a low-carb lifestyle easier.
He’s also the founder of Equip, a whole food based supplement line that was voted “Best Supplement Company” by Paleo Magazine.
Previously, he served as the clinical director at SF Custom Chiropractic, which he helped grow to six locations before turning his attention towards entrepreneurial pursuits.
An industry expert on helping people succeed at the Ketogenic diet and lifestyle, Dr. Gustin is a Functional Medicine practitioner and holds a Masters of Science (MS) and Doctorate in Chiropractic (DC).

Additional Information:

Show notes:

Perfect Keto – Take 15% off with this special link
Keto Answers Podcast
Fastonic – Molecular H2 supplement

Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
All right, you want to make keto easier? Listen, I get the question all the time. “How do I do this? What do I eat? How do I do this with my daily schedule? I’m so busy.” You’re going to watch this episode because Dr. Anthony, he makes it easy, Perfect Keto, and he has some amazing products you’re going to want to hear about.

Matter of fact, I just told him, “Please ship me these bars that you talked about. I’ve tried your products, but I have not tried these.” When I go to Whole Foods or health food stores, there’s not a bar that I can eat when I’m in ketosis. These, you can.

This episode’s more than just about bars. We talk about the mistakes made in ketosis. We talk about how to make it easier. You’re going to want to watch this episode. If you’ve never heard of ketosis, you still want to watch because it’s going to be a how-to to get into ketosis and fat adapt. Stay tuned.

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith, and today we welcome Dr. Anthony Gustin who is the CEO and cofounder of Perfect Keto, which is one of the fastest-growing nutrition companies that help make low-carb lifestyles easier. He’s also the founder of Equip, a whole food-based supplement line that was voted best supplement company by Paleo Magazine. We will link to both of those in our show notes.

Dr. Gustin is an industry expert on helping people succeed at the ketogenic diet and lifestyle. He’s a functional medicine practitioner who holds a master’s of science and doctorate in chiropractic. His mission is to help as many people as possible achieve optimal health and well being through movement, nutrition, stress management, and sleep. I can honestly say we cannot wait to hear more. Let’s welcome Dr. Gustin and, of course, Dr. Pompa. Welcome, both of you.

Dr. Gustin:
Thanks for having me.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, glad to have you here on this topic because many people are doing keto wrong, so we’re going to make sure we do the Perfect Keto. That’s the name of your company. Ashley raves about your products. I’m glad we’re going to be able to link people to them. We’re always taking groups through fasts, and my new book, Beyond Fasting, is coming out.

Step one is getting people to fat adapt. This is going to be a really helpful tool to make it easier. I want you to start with your story. You, like me, you’re a retired chiropractor. How the heck did you get into this? You have to have a story, part of which is you were obese, sick and obese. I said, “Looking at you, I find it hard to believe.” You said, “I have pictures to prove it.”

Dr. Gustin:
My mom has a very large photo album to prove it. Yeah, grew up in Midwest where health is not a priority, especially in the 90s, when I did. We had the typical standard American diet. Not a lot of activity, just really poor lifestyle, super stressed out. All the pillars of health that I proclaim now, I had none of them. Not only was I super overweight when I was younger, very embarrassed by that, but health problems all over the place. I had joint pain, acne, gut problems. I was a wreck. This is when I was 10, 12, 14 years old.

It’s almost like I slowly clawed my way out of that and understood that—as I was reading through science textbooks, basically to figure out what I should do about it, that what we’re doing as—I went to doctors. I went to dermatologists. Nothing they did helped me, so I kind of had to figure out myself and realize that I didn’t want other people to have to go through that same misery. I wanted to be in healthcare when I was super-young. I also wanted to kind of set my own rules and help people before they were broken, so probably, like you, as far as getting into chiropractic, that’s one of the only places you can go where you make a difference before somebody’s already broken.

I had a family friend who was a surgeon. I asked him, “Is this something you would recommend?” He said that every patient that he saw is somebody who was already broken. They had a knee injury, hip replacement, and they just put them back together and don’t actually look at the whole picture and how they can help restore this person’s health or prevent it from getting worse. I knew I wanted to do that and slowly went through it.

I initially wanted to work with athletes, so kind of fast-tracked all the way through and opened up a clinic in San Francisco. It’s six years ago now. We were working a lot with sport med people at the time, so dealing with injuries, and rehab, and things like that. As I was very uncoordinated and unhealthy when I was younger, I aspired to be athletic.

It didn’t come naturally to me, so I wanted to work with athletes right out of the gate sort of like how NASCAR really tweaks their cars at the high end to see what works for professional athletes, and then it trickles down to everyday driving. I think the same thing happens with human performance, as well. My thought was if I could figure out how the best of the best performed, I could take that to the general population and help people kind of expand their health. One of the things that I worked with with athletes was a ketogenic diet. After a few years—

Dr. Pompa:
How did you find it? How did you find the ketogenic diet?

Dr. Gustin:
It was something that I toying around with even in undergrad, which, man, was that 10 years ago now? It makes me feel old. That’s something that I was doing for just fat loss. I was a little punk trying to look attractive, so trying to get lean, and shed off the extra body fat, and using it.

Actually, a friend of mine, him and I, we went through our textbooks and figured, okay, if we wanted to induce fat loss, what are the pathways we would tweak and all this different stuff? I was like, “Oh, if we stop eating carbohydrates, [00:05:55] start burning fat for fuel. I’m not saying we discovered ketosis, but it was one of those things that wasn’t mainstream at the time.

Obviously, it was a very effective tool for fat loss. Then we started coming out, and then it was—I think I read Steve Phinney and Jeff Volek’s book about The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance and Low Carbohydrate Living, which sort of the first ones to the scene. Now, it’s, I don’t know, five, six years ago the books came out.

Dr. Pompa:
I [00:06:16] that book, and they cited a lot of the studies in there. A lot of stuff out there was mostly Atkins-type of diets. They kind of took it to the next level. [00:06:36] dis Atkins at all, but they definitely took it to the next level. I thought they did well in citing their studies.

Dr. Gustin:
One of the things that—thinking about [00:06:45] to the quality of the ketogenic diet is that I’m a big quality proponent. I had everybody kind of on a whole foods diet at that point. Just looking at a lot of the athletes that I dealt with, I wanted to keep inflammation under control so that the recovery would be faster.

[00:06:59] of metabolic pathways, the best way to do that for athletes—usually they’re eating a massive amount of carbohydrates—is just to limit the amount of carbohydrates. If you don’t get into a state of ketosis, you’re sort of in this in-between state where you’re not fat burning enough to fuel all your activity, but also, you’re not eating enough carbs to fuel all of your activities.

That’s kind of a dead zone that I saw a lot of people—they’re trying to reduce carbohydrates but not getting fully fat adapted, so their performance just suffered. That’s when I started getting people on a very strict limit of carbohydrates, 25, 30, and then ramping it up for their specific activity. Some people could get away with 70, 80, 90, 100 grams of carbs, just depending on their activity, but [00:07:42] that all the way down. Then you kind of ramp it up for their specific activity.

Once we got that stuff dialed in, we expanded the clinic systems and started working—I started working more with the functional medicine route, so working with people who had diabetes, and inflammatory disease, and all these different things. The same principle’s held there, but instead of performance, now we started seeing this—[Inverda] Health is a company doing really great stuff in this space. You can actually start reversing Type 2 diabetes just by switching people onto a ketogenic diet.

When we get to this point, being in San Francisco and having the mentality that everything works at scale, I thought, well, why can’t we do this stuff at scale? At that point, I was telling everybody in my clinic who had sports injuries or metabolic problems, “Ketogenic diet is a really, really great tool for you if these are your goals,” but it was very, very confusing for people, so it wasn’t a lot of education. Also, it was very hard to maintain just from a—people eat food, and a lot of people want convenience foods or supplements that get them there. There wasn’t a lot of options.

The goal of Perfect Keto when we started it was just to expand that reach of, first and foremost, content and education, and then second, products that help people stay in ketosis longer. It can be difficult in the beginning. I’m sure with your group, if you’re talking about getting people fat adapted before they go to fasting, people who have been eating the standard American diet or even whole foods and a lot of carbs for their whole life, getting that switch for the first time for your body to start using machinery to start burning fat is a huge shift.

There’s a lot of cellular changes they have to go through and a lot of receptors have to change over before you start doing that. Anything that can help ease people through that transition so they can start feeling what ketosis is like—if that’s for fat loss, if that’s for mental energy, if that’s for physical performance, there’s different tools for different jobs here. That’s what I wanted to try to solve is the easiness of [00:09:34], which is, I think, still pretty confusing, honestly. That’s the path we’re on now.

Dr. Pompa:
We get new viewers, too. Let’s give the basics on how to get into ketosis. Let’s give some tips on how to make it easier because, like I said, getting people into a ketotic state or ketosis is something I like to do at least a month before they go into a fast. If they’re fat adapted going into the fast, not only is the fast easier, but the results are much better.

Like you said, this transition, some people do it in a week. Some people do it in two. The average American, three or four, and some don’t transition in. That’s a whole other subject because we have to detox those people. Anyway, give us some basics of [00:10:24] getting people keto adapted, and let’s talk about the things that are oftentimes missed to make it easier.

Dr. Gustin:
I think what people get too confused about and too strict about in the beginning is going crazy about macronutrient counting. Everyone thinks that they have some secret number that they have yet to unlock for themselves. It simply is not necessary for most people.

Number one, I think, before people start to go keto, I’m a big proponent of just making sure you’re eating real foods in general. If the bulk of your nutrition isn’t coming from foods that spoil, I say start there. A lot of people miss that step. There’s an argument to be had where people started making progress, and they’re eating a bunch of vegetable oil and processed foods but are in ketosis. That’s better than nothing. I kind of [00:11:07] and say that I like people eating real foods first. Even before that month of adaptation, for me, I like to make sure that person is on a Paleo-ish or whole foods-based diet.

After that, I would say limiting carbohydrates to pretty much just as low as you can get them—obviously, with some foods, you’re going to have some. If you don’t know, you can use an app to track, but just try to get them below 25 to 35 and start there, like I said. Having that as a limit in the beginning is a really easy step. Instead of trying to calculate a very specific one, just try to get it in that range.

Protein, I think, is the next we should focus on. One of the biggest mistakes that people make is just under-eating protein on a ketogenic diet. That can lead to a whole host of problems. A lot of the—

Dr. Pompa:
You’re actually right about that. You have the people who go—they just move to 100% protein. That’s kind of the old Atkins way. Today, I find the problem what you just said. People think of ketosis is a high-fat diet. Really, what puts you into ketosis is low-carbohydrates. People are always like, “What are my macros?” I’m like, “Look, just get your carbs down below this. Just Google things for a few days, and you’ll kind of have an idea. Don’t over-complicate it.” People do. They move to such high-fat diets that oftentimes, you’re right. They actually go lower on protein.

Dr. Gustin:
Yeah, and fatten in a very high amount, in an unlimited amount. A lot of people think they can have—just guzzling MCT and olive oil all day long can actually be pretty inflammatory. I’m not a huge fan of excessive in unnecessary fat. Truth be told, if you have a lot of body fat on you, you can use that for fuel, too, so you don’t need to be adding a lot of it on your plate.

Protein is this thing that you have to get that from the outside source, and it’s the structure you’re made of, and kind of the building blocks, but then you get your energy from either carbs or fat. In your body, you can store roughly 200 to 300 grams of carbs. That gets replenished through both protein and fats. The breakdown of fat leads to that stored carbohydrate. With your fat, a pound is 454 grams, and a lot of people have many, many pounds of body fat on them, so they can burn way more fat than they can burn stored carbohydrate.

This is one of those things where once we get fat adapted—in the beginning, limiting carbohydrates makes your proteins adequate. What I recommend for people is at least three palmful—take your palm in your hand and trace that out. Cut your fingers off. Cut your wrist off. Get three of those of some sort of animal product a day. You can talk about keto—if you want to be vegan, that’s a different story, but you’re getting roughly that amount of protein per day, probably minimum for most people.

Then after that, add in fat to satiety. Then after you’re fat adapted, then you can start actually pulling the fat back a little bit if your goal is fat loss. If your goal is performance, you probably want to keep fat a little bit higher because that’s your main fuel for energy is fat.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree. Okay, great. Some people, they’re going to be a couple weeks into this going, “I’m not adapting.” By the way, I like to use the Keto-Mojo meter. When you start crossing above .5 on beta hydroxybutyrate in your blood—that’s the ketone measurement.

I know a lot of people watching this will just try to test their urine, but of course, ketones go high, and then they disappear when your body starts using them, so it’s not a good indicator. The blood is. They’re going to be testing, going, “I’m .3. I’m .5, .2, .1. They’re not getting in—what are some of the issues that they could be having, why they’re not adapting in a typical time period, say two to three weeks?

Dr. Gustin:
Like you said, some of it is just an individual variance. One of the things you can do to speed some of that up is just get a little bit more physical activity. If your body has a higher demand for energy and your body now has a new fuel source, which you must get energy from, you’re going to start changing over your cellular machinery a little bit faster than you were before.

What I like to recommend for people [00:15:18] are at, a lot of people just go out for a walk while fasted. If you don’t eat anything, you can’t be using that as energy, so your body has to run its own stored energy. If you get up in the morning and you haven’t eaten yet, just go out for an hour-long walk, or a jog, or anything that you can manage yourself, which will speed up the adaptation period.

I’ve seen people even doing some intermittent fasting and then doing a walk or some aerobic activity midday. That seems to really start notching people towards where they want to go. That’s a big one, as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. What about electrolytes? That’s a big deal. We know that people that aren’t getting enough, you lose a lot of electrolytes. That literally can affect you moving in ketosis, and just plain old feeling bad, or just burning muscle instead of fat.

Dr. Gustin:
Yeah, electrolytes is probably the biggest thing that people don’t understand they need to add back in. When you stop eating carbohydrates, your insulin goes low. When your insulin goes low, you start basically peeing out more of your electrolytes than you normally would, especially in this adaptation period. In the beginning, drops off a curve, then starts leveling up a little bit.

In the beginning, it’s really, really important that you start adding it, especially a lot of sodium. People freak out, still, about an addition to cholesterol and eggs, which is a myth that’s been busted, but people still have that stigma. Sodium being high is one of these things where—there’s a U-shaped curve to that. If you don’t get enough sodium, that’s a huge problem. If you get way too much like in the order of 15, 20 grams a day, that’s also too much. The sweet spot is way higher than most people would assume.

That gets even higher, and that U-shape gets pushed to the right if you’re on a lower-carb diet. I haven’t seen as much with people getting troubles with their levels going up of blood ketone levels, but for sure, this is the main problem with the “keto flu,” people feeling terrible when they switch to a ketogenic diet. This is because your body doesn’t have very simple things that carry out cellular functions. You start going to basically a base-level operating system, which is not a fun place to be, and you’re not thriving as a human being.

What I recommend is people at least increase one to two grams, if not more, and more if they’re physically active, for sure. If they’re in a hot climate with humidity, for sure—of sodium and then, as well, some magnesium and potassium. One of the things, too, that—I don’t think it’s—some people promote it as a magic fat loss supplement, which it’s not, but having exogenous ketones, the salt-based form, [00:17:52] a lot of those extra salts, as well.

Exogenous ketones are when you take the ketone molecule, which is what your body should be using for energy, and you pair it with these electrolytes. In the beginning, when you’re drinking the stuff down, your body goes, oh, this is what a ketone is. This is how I should be using it. It helps ramp up that period of adaptation.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re saying that’s a good time to bio-hack with an exogenous made from the outside [00:18:18].

Dr. Gustin:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
More of these products are popping up. You know, my concern [00:18:23] with later taking them and people staying on them. They feel better when they take them, and then tend to want to stay on them. Just like in anything, though, if you take a lot from the outside in, you could slow your body’s own production of a ketone. If you think what that means, your body makes ketones when it burns your body fat. It burns fat, it makes ketones.

We could slow that down, and I think they are showing that that actually can happen. If you’re taking ketones, your body will make less of them, but in the beginning, I think you’re right. I think it can actually help you adapt to them. A lot of people, your blood levels of ketones will go up. You say, “Gosh, I still have brain fog. I still don’t feel great.” You’re not even adapted to using the ketones yet. It takes some time.

Dr. Gustin:
To be very clear, these things are called supplements for a reason. They should be added on for specific purposes and not relied on as foundations of a lifestyle or a diet. This is where I think people get confused. They think they must have this stuff every single day. For sure, they can be helpful at times. I still take them—for instance, I had some before the show just because I want to be mentally on point.

For me, when I’m in nutritional ketosis just eating food, I get to about .8 millimoles in my blood stream by using ketones efficiently. When I pop it up to kind of a super-physiological dose and add in a scoop or two of exogenous ketones, then my brain function really gets kicked into another level. I just have excess ketones running in my blood stream at that moment, and then I can start using more, and more, and more for what I like most of them, not for physical performance or weight loss, but I like it for the mental capacity boost.

Dr. Pompa:
Athletes bio-hack with them, too.

Dr. Gustin:
Totally.

Dr. Pompa:
It help that more energy if they’re going to do some type of performance. If you jump your ketones up, you’re affecting your immediate energy.

Dr. Gustin:
Again, not a magic fat-loss supplement at all, but—if you could take it, for instance, in the morning and delay eating a large meal for a couple hours because you have a little bit more energy, then it can be effective—sort of extending a fast. It gets questioned all the time of what breaks a fast? There’s many different theories out there. I guess it depends on why you’re doing a fast, but if you’re doing it to decrease inflammation and lose some body fat, this is a really effective strategy to sometimes use some beta hydroxybutyrate or ketone salts in that interim period of time.

Dr. Pompa:
One of the things that I love—your company, I don’t know if it was created for this purpose, but making ketosis easier. Talk about that. Talk about some of the products that you’ve created that make this easier because that’s obviously what people want.

Dr. Gustin:
Yeah, of course. First and foremost, like I said before, where we started is education. That’s kind of where before we had any products, we had blog posts, E-books, things like that. It’s been almost two and a half years, and we have had over 100 million page views and hundreds of articles posted. We try to do anywhere between seven and fourteen articles a week.

This is because the research of ketogenic diet and ketogenic state is—it’s coming out so rapidly that things are—things are always changing. There’s articles that we posted two, three years ago that we’ve had to update a lot because of the new science that’s come out and the more we’ve learned.

The first thing, I think, before anybody starts using any sort of products is understanding how it works for them for however tool they want to be using it for, for instance. That’s the most important thing. That’s kind of the backbone of our company is just making sure that people have the right information at the right time for them, specifically. Nutrition is such an individualized thing. If people aren’t doing it right, a tweak here or there for a certain person can go a very, very long way. That’s the first and foremost focus.

The first product we launched was an exogenous ketone because we think it’s really instrumental, like we were saying, to bridge that gap when someone goes, “Okay, I want to be in a ketogenic state or do ketosis,” to actually maintaining it. Number one, you get a feedback loop, so you get to take it and go, “Oh, this is what ketosis is like. This is how I feel, higher energy, better mental focus, better physical performance.” Then that convinces somebody, like, “Oh, ketogenic diet might be something I want to try longer term.” I just think it’s super, super helpful.

A lot of what we did after that was just basically listen to our customers that we had about what struggles they were having with the ketogenic diet. That kind of ran the gamut between different protein-based supplements and different MCT oil powders all the way now to really focusing on food products. People walk around a grocery store and they look at, for instance, a bar aisle.

We have a bar aisle, and you have people who say, “This bar is low-carb or keto-friendly.” It turns out, I’ve tested every one of these bars on myself with the continuous blood glucose monitor and so has my team. They are not keto-friendly. They all spike your blood sugar 50, 60, 70, 80 points for two to three hours.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s what makes them good, meaning taste good, right?

Dr. Gustin:
Right. This is the problem, though. We can just say on packaging, this thing is low-carb or keto-friendly by doing some tricks of the nutritional facts panel, but it turns out they’re using really refined starches and fibers that act just like a corn syrup in your blood stream. We’re trying to go after these segments now and provide people opportunities to have products that taste good that are convenient that are tested to not raise your blood sugar 80 points for three hours. That’s kind of the route we’re going now.

Recently, we just launched a big bars line. We surveyed people over and over and asking them where they had problems. People wanted high-protein, moderate-fat bars that were actually keto-compliant. We had to do the hard work. It took us almost two years to launch it because [00:24:20] actually do the ingredient sourcing and make an ingredient from a fiber that doesn’t spike your blood sugar that can hold the bar together. That was a nightmare. People love them because we’ve actually done the work and tested.

Dr. Pompa:
What’s the name of the bar? I’m sure we’re going to provide some links here to lead people to the products from here directly to your site. We have a affiliate, and we have a discount code you can use. What’s the name of them?

Dr. Gustin:
They’re just Perfect Keto Bar, so pretty easy to remember.

Dr. Pompa:
They’re not out there, yet, in Whole Foods.

Dr. Gustin:
No, just online right now, on our own website and Amazon. To get into retail, our bars are very expensive to make because we have this [00:25:08] ingredient that—it’s really, really expensive. If we were to go into Whole Foods, we’d have to charge $5 a bar right now. As we grow and we go that route, I think that we’ll have some economies that scale working that can bring the price down. To go indirect consumer, we don’t have to pay Whole Foods its giant margin, and distributers, and brokers, and all that type of stuff. It’s challenging to get distribution on products that are of very high quality and low margin.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. When you go to Whole Foods and you look at the bars—I’ve been there, reading every ingredient, going, “No, tsh, tsh,” and I can tell you, there’s none that I’d eat.

Dr. Gustin:
[00:25:46]. I have the opposite problem now where the bars are so good, my girlfriend and I have conversations about keeping them out of the house or in the freezer so we can’t eat them as fast as possible. It’s a big challenge, a good one.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a good product. I’d have to say the bar is the key. People always want a keto bar, keto-friendly bar. To date, I’ve always said, “There is none.”

Dr. Gustin:
Until now.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re changing my mind. What are some of the other—I agree with you, though. The food products are really critical because it has to be easy for people, and it has to be healthy for you and I, meeting our standard. There’s easy products out there, but they’re not necessarily healthy, but easy and quality is the challenge. That’s where you’re kind of filling the gap with your company.

Dr. Gustin:
I think the ideal thing is that people eat meat and vegetables and eat whole foods, but the reality is that’s not the most sustainable thing for most people.

Dr. Pompa:
For me, I always go—it’s so easy for me. I eat meat and vegetables [00:26:54].

Dr. Gustin:
Totally.

Dr. Pompa:
With this conversation is what people want because they want those quick and easy things. That’s what they’re used to. The problem is making them healthy. You’re kind of filling the gap, not for someone like myself, but you’re filling the gap for the average person. That’s for sure.

Dr. Gustin:
Yeah, totally. This is where you need to create a bridge from where people are at and where they go. People are eating a lot of packaged foods that are terrible for you, so I want to make alternative options that are actually healthy for you, and then show them over time that you should probably be eating—not to put ourselves out of business for any reason, but you should probably be eating more real foods and less packaged things. That’s my ultimate goal here.

Dr. Pompa:
What are some of the other products you created in this?

Dr. Gustin:
One is a macadamia nut butter that has MCT oil in it, and so instead of having hydrogenated oils in really low-quality nuts, we use raw macadamia nuts and blend that up with raw vanilla bean and MCT oil, which is probably the most delicious thing ever. It’s seriously like liquid crack. It’s incredible. That’s another food product.

Another one would be keto coffee. We had a lot of people who are saying, “I make this bullet-proof stuff in the morning. It’s such a mess. I hate having to do it. I have to prepare all the time and bring a blender with me, also, and stuff.” We have super high-grade organic instant coffee with MCT oil powder in a to-go packet. People can take it when they’re traveling and have kind of intermittent fasting extension in the mornings without having to make a mess and carry some of the ingredients around with them.

Dr. Pompa:
Those are great products, man. I can see why your company’s taking off.

Dr. Gustin:
Yeah, I think it fuels—about 80% of our work at the office is Perfect Keto products.

Dr. Pompa:
I would imagine those are big, big sellers. We’re going to sell a lot of them. I mean, it’s like those are the products people want, and they want it to be easy. You did it, man. You made it easy. That’s for sure.

Dr. Gustin:
Yeah, and again, we just listened to people and what they’ve wanted. We haven’t tried to trick people into buying certain products. We’ve just asked people what they want, and we just start—tried to make a keto-compliant version of it. We have R&D going on, I think, 15 active products right now to extend more into food. That’s been certainly a challenge, but it’s one that’s—we love taking on.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s awesome. It’s going to be a resource. I’ll give it to my fasting group, as well, as I’m moving them into this ketotic state, fat adapting them to benefit from their fast. Your products are going to be a blessing. There’s no doubt about it. What’s your day look like? You get up. Do you do the coffee in the morning? Do you not? Do you intermittent fast? How many meals do you eat?

Dr. Gustin:
I get up, and I try to keep the morning slow. That doesn’t always go as planned. What that looks like for me is a little bit of journaling, meditation, and then I have a matcha. I don’t do much caffeine—as much caffeine as I have or decaf coffee. Just [00:30:13] I try to keep stressful food compounds out of my body for now.

I do that and then get some movement in. I try to do some gymnastics work or some strength training in the morning. If I have some time, then I’ll also hit an infrared sauna after that. I will usually never eat before this type of stuff. Then after that, if I’m really hungry, then I’ll eat. If I’m not, then I won’t. That’s kind of how I approach fasting.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s what I do.

Dr. Gustin:
Pretty intuitive. I know a lot of people are very, very strict and say, “I don’t eat every day until this time or that time,” but I just tend to listen to my body. I think that especially fasting through periods where you’re actually really hungry is really stressful for your body. I think that can be good at certain times. For me for right now, I have enough stress in my life that I don’t need to be adding on [00:31:01].

Dr. Pompa:
You’re right. Certain times, getting fat adapt, you might have to do it, but [00:31:05] all the time, chronically, it’s not good.

Dr. Gustin:
Yeah, totally. For me, I’m taking a lot on right now as far as work goes. I’m not trying to push through [00:31:16] stressful times, and so I want all that stuff reduced. If I’m hungry, I’m going to eat. If my goal, though, was to fat loss, then I would just push through that and kind of cater things towards that.

I think the most important thing when people, especially when they hear other people’s ways they approach their days, is just to understand that my goals may differ wildly from yours. Mine are primarily to just feel good and have high energy so I can work throughout the day and have high amount of mental focus. Those are my two main goals. I don’t have, really, a performance goal. I don’t have a fat loss goal. I don’t have a—I’m not treating a disease state. These are things that are not on top of my bucket list. They’re not things that I prioritize or set up my day for.

After that and after the movement stuff, I may or may not eat. Other than that, it’s usually straight into work, so hit some sort of MCT oil or powder or ketones and just crank for a while and try to prep for the day, which is usually a very long one.

Dr. Pompa:
A day of a business owner, what you just described, a healthy one. That’s great.

Dr. Gustin:
Yeah, I try.

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, we thank you for the products you’ve created and the ones you’re creating. It will make a lot of lives easier. You managed to do it having them healthy, which is a testament to your company. That’s why you’re here. We seek out the best, man. That’s why you are here.

Dr. Gustin:
Appreciate it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. We’ll provide those links that link you to the products that we mentioned—that Dr. Anthony mentioned. Dr. Anthony, thank you. You made it simple, and that’s really good. Thank you for being on the show. We appreciate what you’re doing.

Dr. Gustin:
Thanks for having me.

Dr. Pompa:
Yup.

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, and please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

Episode #274: The Proper Way to Address Cavitations, Hidden Infections, and Root Canals with Dr. Gerry Curatola

with Dr. Gerry Curatola

Today's episode welcomes back my great friend, biologic dentist Dr. Gerry Curatola.
We are diving deep into the top reasons why you still don't feel well or why you got that dreaded diagnosis.

This is a very important discussion about how root canals, cavitations, and hidden infections are driving auto-immunity, cancer, disease, and disrupting hormones. You will also learn the proper way to get cavitations and root canals fixed, as well as what you need to do to discover these hidden infections in the first place.

This is an important episode you don't want to miss!

More about Dr. Gerry Curatola:
Dr. Gerry Curatola is a renowned biologic restorative dentist with more than 35 years of clinical practice experience. He studied neuroscience at Colgate University and attended dental school at the New York University (NYU) College of Dentistry where he now serves as Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Cariology and Comprehensive Care. As a pioneer in the biologic approach to Restorative & Cosmetic Dentistry in the mid-1980’s, Dr. Curatola consulted in the research and development of many biocompatible restorative materials used today.

Additional Information:

Show notes:

Dr. Gerry Cutatola
CHTV Episode 210
CHTV Episode 189
Root Cause Movie
CytoDetox

Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
This episode of Cell TV, this could be why you still don’t feel well or even why you got the dreaded diagnosis. This is a very important episode because—I don’t know if you saw the movie, Root Cause, but it was taken off of Netflix. That’s how much controversy is around this topic of root canals, cavitations, hidden infections, and how it’s driving autoimmune, cancer, and diseases, and again, even just hormone disruption. You’re going to get the answers on this episode when I interview Dr. Gerry Curatola.

As a matter of fact, you’re going to see something shocking that happened to my wife and why this doctor saved and changed her life. Also, we’re going to talk about the proper way to get cavitations and root canals fixed, what you need to discover, or I should say do to discover these hidden infections. All of that is going to be discussed in this episode. This is going to be one you’re going to want to share, and definitely, you’re not going to want to miss. I’ll see you in the episode.

Here with Dr. Gerry Curatola, one of my favorites. We’re good buds, so you’re going to get a lot of fun in this episode, but this is a serious topic. It’ll be hard for us to pull back, but if we keep it fun, then we’re going to keep people learning. That’s for sure. I titled this This May Be Why You Don’t Feel Well, Still, and this may be why you’re sick or got a diagnosis. This is a topic—we did a show—gosh, I don’t know. It was a while ago.

Dr. Gerry:
It was a while ago.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, Episode 210. I’ll tell you what. That episode has brought a lot of people to a big understanding. It’s brought a lot of people here, fortunately. As a matter of fact, I was brought to tears yesterday in your office because sometimes I get beat down, man. It’s like, gosh, is this making a difference? Am I making a difference? I walked in your waiting room, and there was a woman. She said, “Oh, I’m here because I watched a podcast of yours.”

Dr. Gerry:
That’s exactly right.

Dr. Pompa:
Most likely, it was that one. Anyway, she went on to tell her story. Then there was another woman who was here that—matter of fact, we could put up the Facebook link on this, Ashley. One of my patients who you helped that I sent here sent her here. This poor girl was sick her whole life, unexplainable stuff, gut problems, diagnosed with Lyme, diagnosed with low immunity. Of course, low immunity, but yet not one person looked here.

She had a massive, massive infection. She had a crown with metal over top of metal, which was an amalgam that you said you pulled out about three thermometers full of mercury out of. I literally teared up a couple times. He brought me in to this surgery, fortunately, and that’s when we did the Facebook Live, and you can watch that. I teared up a few times because I realized she was literally, right before my very eyes, getting her life back. Seeing the other woman getting her life back on my other patient here, it was an emotional day for me, honestly.

Here we are, an emotional subject. I truly mean it. I told you I have a stack of folders of testimonies from just people. Many of them came here, but people who got infection—hidden infection taken out of their mouth either in a root canal or a cavitation. Literally, I’ve gotten texts or emails before they even left the office, saying, “Oh, my gosh. My life’s different.”

Dr. Gerry:
One patient, in particular—you know, we never know. I always look at—I always knew and aspired to the philosophy of Weston Price, who in the early 1900s, he actually founded the research on the American Dental Association. He spoke about focal infections in the mouth and the systemic complications in 1912 or 1913.

Dr. Pompa:
Didn’t he do the experiments with the rabbit, where he literally took tissue and put it in the rabbit?

Dr. Gerry:
That’s exactly right. I always knew that there is this very intimate connection between the mouth and the body. It’s why I wrote the book, The Mouth-Body Connection.

Dr. Pompa:
We’re looking her up.

Dr. Gerry:
You can get it on tape. [00:04:48] tape. That tells how old we are.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes, that’s true.

Dr. Gerry:
You could get in on Mp3. You can download it on Kindle.

Dr. Pompa:
Do you have it on 8-track? Is it on 8-track? Okay because that’s what I have in my car.

Dr. Gerry:
Exactly. It’s interesting. What I love that you’re doing, Dan, is—and this is the most profound thing. I thought about this this morning. The wall between medicine and dentistry is coming down. A 150-year divide that separated this from the rest of the body—150 years ago, there were medical schools and dental schools, and it began. It never used to be that way. As a matter of fact, it never separated in Europe.

In dental school, we were told, though, “Yes, infections in the mouth could be a problem. Gum disease, you can lose your teeth.” No, gum disease, you can lose your life, and you have upwards of 10 times greater chance of a heart attack, 7 times greater chance of adult onset diabetes, 67 higher percent incidence of pancreatic cancer in men. The number one bacteria—

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, there was just a new study out, February, 2018. The CDC stated that seven out of ten chronic degenerative diseases, they believe, is coming from oral microbes, to your point.

Dr. Gerry:
Absolutely. A study out of Harvard finding that the number one bacteria found in colorectal tumors, colon cancer, is Fusobacterium nucleatum, one of the most common bacteria in the mouth. This amazing oral systemic link and understanding this is one factor, but what you are digging into when you say you have these testimonials of people, I can tell you that—and I’ve been practicing for over 35 years. It’ll be 36 years in June.

I want to tell you that I am so excited about the work that I’m doing right now because I see people getting better because they are—we are able to identify stealth infections in the mouth and the very profound effects they have on the body. So many people are suffering with all kinds of illness. I believe that 90% of the body’s toxicity outside of the environment around us is what’s going on in your mouth.

Dr. Pompa:
I couldn’t agree more. Let’s talk about a case. I can use this gentleman’s name because he did a Facebook Live for me, and he gave his story. Matter of fact, he’s so excited because he has his life back, he’s coming to the seminar that you and I are both teaching at next week.

Dr. Gerry:
That’s great.

Dr. Pompa:
Tommy, if you’re watching this, yeah, I’m talking about you. He literally was sending me a text on the way out of this office. He said, “Dan, is it possible that my 20 years of pain could be gone already?” I said, “Yeah, Tommy, it could.” You know what? It is. That was getting one cavitation—and we’ll talk more about what we’re talking about. We’ll actually show you. These are infections in the jaw that typically don’t have pain. Tommy didn’t. Anyways, you couldn’t—

Dr. Gerry:
It’s also very important to point out that these types of defects in the jaw, what we call cavitational osteonecrosis, before the advance of technology that we’re using now like 3D cone beam, we—most dentists would ignore them. They didn’t even know they were there.

Dr. Pompa:
No, I know. We’ll show these because we’re going to show you how to detect these. Advancements in this area have come a long way. Tommy literally—20 years of pain. Liver pain for 20 years went away before he—that was just getting the infection out. By the way, there was still one more infection, which, I don’t know if you know this, but you just worked on Tommy a few weeks ago.

Dr. Gerry:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
He had the exact—so what was basically still there after the first one, another miracle. It lifted again. Some of the other conditions he had were lifted after that infection was basically taken out. That doesn’t happen all the time.

Dr. Gerry:
No, it doesn’t, and that’s a good thing to point out. We’re not here to say that if I do this, you’re going to get up and walk. That’s not what this is about.

Dr. Pompa:
That happened to Tommy, and it’s happen to others.

Dr. Gerry:
What it’s about is eliminating these potential sources of stealth infection. It’s an opportunistic area. A cavitation is a colloquial term we use for a hole in the jaw. A hole in a tooth, we call a cavity. A cavitation is a hole in the jaw. The technical term is cavitational osteonecrosis. There are areas, especially around extracted wisdom teeth, where the tooth is removed, and the area doesn’t adequately heal.

The bone doesn’t [00:09:53]. What you’re left with is a perfect hiding place for all kinds of pathogens. They have biopsied and taken Lyme spirochetes, Candida, mold, all kinds of pathogens that can harbor in these areas. Why? They’re like little dark caves.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly how I’d describe it.

Dr. Gerry:
They’re warm. They’re dark. They’re moist. Prior to actively engaging in getting these areas to regenerate and close, and we’ll talk about that. This has been treated for years and years, especially in Europe, and biologic dentists in Europe recognized these also form around teeth that are failing and dental infections, which we had a technical term called [periapical] area.

In actuality, it could be a cyst, but it is generally creating this resorption of bone in this area, this dead area, that is often—I often like to say that you really—these are super-charged pathogens. It makes them able to kind of come to critical mass there and do what we never used to believe, but really affect the body in ways—very interesting ways that your teeth connect to your body.

Dr. Pompa:
We’re going to talk about that. Let’s talk about why these create disease. Just to bring it to them because they’re saying, “Could this be me?” and I’m right on the statistic here. If you had a wisdom tooth out 25 years ago, you have an 88% chance of having a cavitation. Each tooth forward, it gets a little less.

Dr. Gerry:
It’s in the 80s. It’s like 86 to [00:11:45]. They’re finding now, through the use of cone beam and screening patients, anyone who had their wisdom teeth out should really have a CBCT, a 3D, which—called a cone beam. It’s cone beam computerized tomography. It gives us a 3D representation.

When you take a regular dental x-ray, you could have a lesion in the middle here, but because the bone is superimposed, the two sides on the lower jaw, the cortical bone on each side—it’s superimposed. It’s very difficult to see what’s here. Now, with the use of 3D computerized tomography, cone beam technology, we’re able to get this 3D image of your jaw where we can see lesions that were never visible before.

Dr. Pompa:
Two mistakes: Number one, people go to their dentist. They take a plain film, as he’s describing, and they say, “Oh, you look fine.” Can’t see it on plain film. Here’s the other mistake: They get a cone beam 3D x-ray that he’s describing done. They end up sending the disk to the dentist. The dentist puts it in and reads it. He doesn’t have the correct software. He reads it as a plain film. Gerry, that’s happened many times.

Dr. Gerry:
So many times.

Dr. Pompa:
The guy says, “No, no, no. You’re going to send it to Gerry,” and Gerry actually does—you do Skype with people from all—

Dr. Gerry:
I do Skype consults all the time. I’m able to get this digital—people can get them taken anywhere in the world, and I’m able to get this digital image and read it correctly and let them know whether or not, indeed, they have these potential areas that could be problematic for their systemic health.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s talk about why this would make someone sick. I made the comment in the beginning, I was blessed to be in the surgery and see that surgery going down with that young lady. She had all of these health issues. How is this connected to why someone may not be feeling well, have a hormone problem, or whatever they’re dealing with?

Dr. Gerry:
There’s three different ways that a bacterial infection in the mouth can communicate with the rest of their body. One is the direct—in other words, you have a cesspool of bacteria, and these pathogens enter the blood stream, and can go to different places, and cause issues.

Dr. Pompa:
Direct [00:14:08].

Dr. Gerry:
Right. Another way is by really creating a chronic inflammation. That’s a big thing, is that chronic, low-grade inflammation. G.V. Black, by the way, the father of modern dentistry, in the early 1900s spoke about cavitations. He said they were these unique areas where there wasn’t a fever, there wasn’t swelling, and there wasn’t pain.

Dr. Pompa:
I had none of that.

Dr. Gerry:
No fever, no swelling, no pain, yet it’s an area of infection. It’s very interesting that that is a source of chronic, low-grade inflammation. What people need to realize, one of the largest sources of chronic, low-grade inflammation is gum disease. These areas where—in the jaw become areas of chronic inflammation. That’s the second way. This chronic, low-grade inflammation has a huge cascade of events systemically.

Dr. Pompa:
Your immune system, your microbiome.

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah, everything from the liver releasing C-reactive proteins, which has inflammatory effects on the entire circulatory system—there’s all kinds of ways that chronic, low-grade inflammation puts your body on alert. It’s like a silent alarm bell going off that’s not being answered. It has devastating effects, the body, organs, everywhere.

The third way is another very, very interesting way that I’ve become so fascinated with. That is that there is a tooth-organ relationship that has been spoken about in the literature for years and Chinese medicine, especially, that there are meridian pathways, energetic pathways, from teeth to organs.

I’m going to share a story this summer that was so compelling that brought tears to me by a patient who had a very specific infection related on an energetic meridian to a particular part of her body. This is documented and fascinating that your teeth—and what I explain to patients now, Dan, is that your teeth are like circuit breakers.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I heard you describe it yesterday. I was like, “That’s a perfect explanation.”

Dr. Gerry:
What people have to understand is that you don’t just—you don’t catch cancer. You don’t just wake up one day, oh, I caught cancer like you caught a cold or you got a virus.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s just your genetics. You got cancer. You were doomed.

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah, or you got genetics, yeah, like my mother had breast cancer. I got breast cancer, and dah, dah, dah. There is something very, very—our bodies are fighting cancer every day. We are fighting cancer every day. Why? We have this shield of an immune system. We have a shield. It’s like the Starship Enterprise. I tell patients about the Starship Enterprise. When the shield is up and the Klingons fire, those missiles or those torpedoes, the Klingon torpedoes don’t get through the shield. The shield is there. When that shield is down, the torpedo gets in.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re in trouble.

Dr. Gerry:
For example, the energetic meridian on the upper first molars is connected energetically to the breast, the right breast and the left breast. Does it mean that an infection in your upper first molar is going to give you breast cancer? No. What it means is you have an infection, this failing root canal in your upper first molar. That’s like flipping the breaker off energetically. The shield is down over that part of your body.

As a matter of fact, there was a correlative study done by a good friend of mine, a brilliant doctor and dentist, Stuart Nunnally, who was actually on that movie, The Root Cause. He did a study on, I think, 300 women and found 90% of them had a root canal on—300 women with breast cancer, 90% of them had a root canal on one or the other. There was a huge [00:18:20] about it.

The fact of the matter is that root canals in molars are very difficult. They don’t sterilize the tooth. They [00:18:28] talk about that. Why do root canals fail? Why are root canals a source of chronic inflammation? What is the new advances in root canal therapy that might show promise in this area?

Dr. Pompa:
We’ll talk about all that.

Dr. Gerry:
The conventional techniques in my experience of 35 years, they often do not work. This woman came to me—and I’ll just share this story quickly. She was from Houston and referred to me by, actually, a functional practitioner who was actually a friend of yours. She was down there—Deb Lance. [Debra] referred this patient to me. [Debra] said, “Gerry, I just had a patient come in who’s a friend of mine, and she was diagnosed with lung cancer. It’s her left lung.” The first thing I said is, “Does she have any root canals?”

Dr. Pompa:
It’s the first thing I ask, too.

Dr. Gerry:
“Does she have any root canals?” She had one root canal. Where was the root canal? On the lower left first molar. What is the lower left first molar the circuit breaker for? Left lung, lower mandibular first molar. She comes up, and I said, “Look, Deb, this is—I’m happy to look at it. Let’s see if there’s infection around it. Let’s get a cone beam.” We did a cone beam, and sure enough, there was a massive infection around this tooth. We removed the tooth. I use a laser that actually—

Dr. Pompa:
You’re going to see that in a piece here, too.

Dr. Gerry:
Biolase Waterlase, the iPlus actually has the ability to remove diseased tissue, disinfect the area, and then actually stimulate the bone to heal. Remember, with the tooth out now, she has a space there. We don’t want that to remain unresolved and have [00:20:25] form another cavitation.

Dr. Pompa:
[00:20:25] form another cavitation.

Dr. Gerry:
We treated it. We used PRF from her arm, which we’ll speak about a little bit.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re going to see that.

Dr. Gerry:
Platelet rich fibrin, treated it. Five weeks later, she had her pre-surgical evaluation with her oncologist down in Houston. I got a call from [Debra], who reported to me that the tumor had shrunk to 1/3 of its side, and that she didn’t need surgery, and they biopsied it, and it was completely benign.

Now, did I save that woman’s life? I would like to say that I played a part. By the grace of God, I played a part in helping that woman recover because God gives us this amazing ability to self-regulate and heal. We have this amazing ability by the Divine to self-regulate and heal. When we remove what’s offending, I think all we did was flip the circuit breaker back on for her immune system to begin working again.

All of the big advances in cancer therapy is all surrounding our immune response, boosting our immune response. They’re using chemotherapeutic drugs in this regard. They’re actually even planting viruses to trigger immune response. Everything is about getting our immune system working. I call that the shield that goes back up.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep, you know, you could go full circle on Weston Price. I mentioned the rabbits. He took these root canal teeth that had these anaerobic, nasty, nasty pathogens, bacteria, viruses. He put those in rabbits. Describe that. Describe what happened.

Dr. Gerry:
Those rabbits developed tumors and cancers, the very disease that was in the person.

Dr. Pompa:
The very disease that was in the person.

Dr. Gerry:
There you have this. The thing is that—the problem I have, I’m a adjunct clinical associate professor of cariology and comprehensive care at New York University. I have a constant thirst for knowledge and understanding and the ability for us to help people get better. You sent me a text that was beautiful. You said, “I love helping people get better.” You know what? There’s no greater feeling than to help somebody on their path to live a longer, healthier life. That is what this is about. Unfortunately, behind these—

Dr. Pompa:
You said, “Dan, don’t ever change that.” I’m like, “[00:23:07] somehow?”

Dr. Gerry:
I texted back, “Don’t ever stop.”

Dr. Pompa:
“Don’t ever stop feeling that way.”

Dr. Gerry:
“Don’t ever stop feeling that way.” It is a great feeling.

Dr. Pompa:
It is.

Dr. Gerry:
The disappointing part is when orthodox medicine, which is often unduly influenced by other economic forces and organizations that produce products that they make a lot of money on, pharmaceuticals and things, often these approaches to help people heal themselves is cast as voodoo, and, oh, no. Don’t do that. There’s a fear-based mentality that’s propagated—fear-based propaganda. People, we live in an information world now. Do your research. It’s podcasts like this that hopefully will stimulate something in your own journey to find the knowledge and take the steps to help your body heal itself.

Dr. Pompa:
Share this episode for that very reason. Let me tell you something. I want you to talk about Root Cause, the movie. I thought it was a great documentary. I thought there was an entertainment factor that just kept people’s interest. It was a story. It was the producer’s story. The guy who produced it, actually, his story about how his root canal, unknowing to him, is why he was sick. It took him how many years? I love the way it started because I would describe it as my story. Matter of fact, I watched it with Tommy, who I mentioned, because he was like, “You have to see it, Dan. This is our story.” He did everything. He did this. He goes through everything. He did acupuncture. He [00:24:51]

Dr. Gerry:
[00:24:49].

Dr. Pompa:
He goes through this whole big—because he was the doer. He was me, man.

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah, that [00:24:57] started?

Dr. Pompa:
I was going to do everything, yeah.

Dr. Gerry:
He broke up a fight between a guy and his girlfriend.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, gets punched.

Dr. Gerry:
Then the guy punches him in the face. He breaks a tooth. He goes to the dentist. Dentist says, “I got to do a root canal.” Now, unfortunately, in 36 years, I’ve seen a lot of bad root canals. I would say that—or something happened. They worked on the tooth. They did it afterward so it—it leads me to believe that he probably wasn’t a sterile dude that got busted. It probably got infected, and then they did a root canal. The root canal basically sealed the infection there and actually—and there was that classic oral systemic thing. This guy couldn’t get out of bed. This guy—

Dr. Pompa:
Pain, [00:25:45], everything.

Dr. Gerry:
Even like sexual dysfunction with his girlfriend.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I know, you hear about—

Dr. Gerry:
It’s like [00:25:50].

Dr. Pompa:
You know what? See, that story, I hear that story all the time. You know I work with clients all around the world, man. I hear that story, and that story was me, man. I did everything, and then I got to the cause of why I got sick. That’s the [00:26:04].

Dr. Gerry:
I want to tell you that I have so many colleagues of mine who said, “Oh, that’s BS,” and this and that. “I have a buddy” —

Dr. Pompa:
They took it down, man.

Dr. Gerry:
I think the American Association of Endodontists, you know—some of it was a little sensationalized. The message was true, though. The message was true. They took it down. They actually filed a lawsuit because they didn’t want everyone to think that everyone who has a—oh, I’m sorry—everyone who has a root canal should run to their dentist and get their teeth ripped out.

Dr. Pompa:
Of course. I knew that’s why they took it out.

Dr. Gerry:
That’s why they did that, but the reality is—

Dr. Pompa:
I will say this: If you have a root canal, get a cone beam. Get a cone beam.

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah, that’s the right answer. The right answer is this: A dental x-ray—and I had a woman yesterday who was here at the end of the day. Literally, she came with her dental x-rays from her previous dentist. Her previous dentist said—she had a root canal on an upper bicuspid, and the root canal was failing. The dentist said, “Oh, I don’t want to take that out. You don’t have enough bone for a dental implant. Get the root canal redone.”

She said, intuitively, “I don’t think I want that, doctor. I think this tooth has been bothering me ever since this root canal was done. I want that tooth out.” The dentist said, “No, no, no. If you were my wife, I would tell you to get a root canal. It’s crazy. They’ll re-treat it. It’ll be fine.” She went and spent thousands of dollars to re-treat the root canal. It is far from fine. I had her get a cone beam. Even looking at her regular x-rays, you could see a little inflammation around it. The cone beam showed a massive infection. That tooth needs to come out immediately.

Dr. Pompa:
That one yesterday, you pulled a root canal out. It looked massively infected to me. When I saw the cone beam, I could see it [00:28:02].

Dr. Gerry:
What you’ll see is you’ll see black areas around the tooth on there. If you want us—we can talk about that now about root canal and why they work and why they don’t work. Most don’t work. I have to say—I went into practice 35 years ago. I took over a practice from a dentist who had passed away of a heart attack. He was mercury-toxic. I could tell you that because the whole office—

Dr. Pompa:
Of course you could.

Dr. Gerry:
I opened the drawers and there was mercury rolling around the—I literally had to get hazmat suits [00:28:38].

Dr. Pompa:
Sickest profession on the planet, by the way.

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah, if you think about it. A lot of dentists don’t stop to think about it. The dentist had the highest rate of suicide when I graduated, the highest rates of depression, the highest rates of neurological diseases, many, like Parkinsonism. I know dentists who had MS, but I know dentists who committed suicide, too. Yes, was it the mercury? I would say that the mercury predisposed them to going into a neurological depression and that neurological depression is fueled by this—a lot of psychological transference and counter-transference of behavior between doctor and patient. They’re sensitized.

I’m embarrassed to say that dental amalgam came out in Civil War days. Actually, they were putting lead in teeth, so I guess the mercury was the next evolution of the lead. There were pro-mercury dentists and anti-mercury dentists. The pro-mercury dentists formed what we know of as the American Dental Association, which actually held the patent on dental amalgam.

Dr. Pompa:
ADA.

Dr. Gerry:
Dental amalgam is 52% mercury, 26% silver. To call it a silver filling is really a misrepresentation. Any dentist doing that can actually—I think has a problem with a violation and fraudulent misrepresentation. If they say, “Hey, Dan, I’m going to put a silver filling in,” you’re like, “Oh, it’s in the back. It’s not going to show.” But if the dentist said, “Hey, Dan, I’m going to put a mercury filling in” —

Dr. Pompa:
I don’t want that.

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah, so 52% mercury, it should be called a mercury filling, not a silver filling.

Dr. Pompa:
It leaches, mercury, the life of the filling.

Dr. Gerry:
It off-gasses. When I was in dental school—that’s another very interesting point. In dental school, I was told that the mercury was magically locked in. I remember that. I’m like, “How is it”—

Dr. Pompa:
People are still being told that.

Dr. Gerry:
How is it locked in? Oh, when you mix it together, the mercury stays in. Now we have mercury vapor analyzers.

Dr. Pompa:
We can read it. It’s leaching [00:30:47].

Dr. Gerry:
In the wet environment with saliva because—

Dr. Pompa:
Hot, cold, acid.

Dr. Gerry:
If you clench your teeth, or grind your teeth, or you drink hot liquids, it off-gasses, and it continues to off-gas. For that percentage of the population that is deficient in the ability to eliminate and excrete, these people get very sick.

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, it vaporizes mercury constantly. It gets worse with hot, cold. Obviously even the acid in your mouth creates it. That mercury vapor crosses the blood-brain barrier and turns to inorganic mercury, and there it’s trapped for life unless you do the right process.

Dr. Gerry:
Exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
Here’s the other frustrating thing for me. People have these things in their mouth, and they’re doing all this detox. Meanwhile, it’s pouring into the filling. That’s another subject.

Dr. Gerry:
I had breakfast this morning with a brilliant physician, a brilliant osteopath who understands brain, and gut, and this, and that. Over here, he was talking to me about xylitol and it’s good because it lowers—doesn’t understand that it’s disturbing [00:31:56] so there’s—here’s a brilliant doctor—

Dr. Pompa:
I wish I were in [00:31:59]. You should have invited me.

Dr. Gerry:
Here’s a brilliant doctor who’s completely at a loss because of this wall that’s existing between medicine and dentistry. That wall needs to come down. One of the things that I—I spent the breakfast educating him about the oral microbiome, about cavitation. He knew that there were diseases in the mouth that have profound effects on the body.

Dr. Pompa:
Just to finish off the root canal conversation, these root canals—I think it was Boyd Haley who did—he had all of the dentists sending root canals, even non-painful root canals. They were sending root canals in the study. They found anaerobes, anaerobic bacteria, nasty bacteria, the ones that make you sick in every root canal. They all had it. It’s because there’s always—

Dr. Gerry:
It’s a perfect anaerobic environment.

Dr. Pompa:
It is. There’s all these tubules that they get in, not to overcomplicate it.

Dr. Gerry:
If you kind of educate those who are watching this podcast about root canal—the concept itself of saving the tooth was something that dentists always want to do. We always want to save teeth.

Dr. Pompa:
Rightfully so.

Dr. Gerry:
I know some endodontists that are artists at getting the canal instrumented and sealed at the apex. Here’s the problem: The problem is there are thousands of lateral—a tooth is basically like a sponge. There are thousands of dentinal tubules. As a matter of fact, you can [00:33:33] —

Dr. Pompa:
Miles.

Dr. Gerry:
Even though these are microscopic tubules, bacteria can be stacked two and three across one of these tubules. There are thousands of them in the tooth. You can’t really sterilize a tooth and put this inorganic filling material in, we call [gutta-percha] and allow this to remain without some sort of—any bacteria in those lateral tubules, they don’t often die off. In fact, they set up a little party. Now, anaerobes don’t want to be anywhere near oxygen or blood supply. You’re really sealed off from oxygen and blood supply. What happens is you get a powerhouse of anaerobic activity.

Second thing is that very often, what happens in these situations is most dentists can’t sterilize even the central canal. Most dentists hit obstructions in this canal, and they fill it short or they overfill, so you have all these areas of chronic inflammation. As a matter of fact, I was on the phone with the head of oral pathology at New York University just a few weeks ago.

She was saying to me—I often biopsy what I find inside cavitations and try and get a picture. There was a foreign material that was in a cavitation that I was treating around a former root canal area. There was just a giant void in the jaw. It was actually a packing material that was still in the jaw.

Then the topic of root canal came up, and she said, “Dr. Curatola, I had never seen a biopsy of tissue around a root canal that didn’t show signs of chronic inflammation.” She said, “We joke around our pathology office. We call root canal the voodoo that you do.” I laughed. I said, “What is that, the voodoo that you do?” The reality is I have changed my position on root canal therapy as an optimal treatment.

As a matter of fact, the dental literature and the dental research is now showing that dental implants—and we could talk about that because I see the move into ceramic dental implants an important one, especially metal implants, peri-implantitis, all kinds of problems. A new study from Germany showing that the new 5G cell [00:36:08] actually eats the implants. [00:36:11] —

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, from your cell phone.

Dr. Gerry:
Cell phone 5G network is a—do your research on 5G, everyone. It has a lot of major health problems. There’s been no biologic studies on the effects of 5G, but they are coming out now, and it is not good of what we’re finding out about 5G. Anyway, getting back, the problems of chronic inflammation, whether it’s from around a root canal, whether it’s from the cavitation, whether it’s from gum disease, these are all areas of chronic, low-grade inflammation that has very potent effects systemically.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s talk about solution here. We’re talking about cavitations where teeth were extracted, heals over, creates a hidden infection. Twenty-five years later, it creates a problem. Saw it yesterday in the chair. I just have to show this picture because there was a few problems, obviously. That hole that you’re looking at right there, that’s where the root canal came out, Gerry. That’s what they’re seeing, okay? Let me show them—

Dr. Gerry:
I want to come back to that.

Dr. Pompa:
Go ahead. Show them.

Dr. Gerry:
This is what the bone looks like. I don’t know if you could see that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, they can.

Dr. Gerry:
That’s what the bone looks like. When I removed this tooth yesterday, the bone wasn’t a healthy color. The bone around that root canal that had infection around both of the apices, and there was a fracture in one of the roots, the bone was brown. Often, I’ll remove a root canal when not only does the root look a horrific color because of necrosis, it’s the only area of the body—and believe me, I’m in the business of saving teeth, but if I see something that could be a source of infection, not just for the mouth, but for the entire body, that needs to be eliminated.

Root canal is the only procedure done in medicine and dentistry where you leave something dead in the human body because there is a natural process of necrosis that does go on. A lot of endodontists—I’ve had a lot of heated debates with friends of mine who are endodontists who claim that, “Well, there is a peripheral circulation to the roots from the tiny ligaments that are attached to the bone.” That’s not nearly enough to keep that root from necrosing.

Dr. Pompa:
This was her cavitation. That was a root canal. This is—

Dr. Gerry:
That’s behind [00:38:53].

Dr. Pompa:
That broke through with lasers. What you’re looking at is the top of the bone, and then right through it is where he broke through into that dark hole that’s the cavitation right there.

Dr. Gerry:
That’s not even the size of it.

Dr. Pompa:
No, no, it’s [00:39:08].

Dr. Gerry:
What I do is I access it. The lesion is actually this large. I access from here. I just need access with the laser to disinfect and clean it out and then use PRF and some grafting material to basically get this lesion to heal.

Dr. Pompa:
Which we’re going to show you. It was interesting because you said this girl had gut problems her whole life. Diagnosed with Lyme, as I said, low immunity, etcetera. No wonder she wasn’t healing. No one got to the cause. That was also on the meridian of her small intestine, her colon—

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah, gut and heart. Your wisdom teeth, everyone, energetically on a meridian chart are connected to your gut, small intestine, and heart. I’ve had people with irregular—they were having conductivity issues. Actually, I had a patient who was scheduled for a cardiac ablation.

That’s where they go in and burn these fibers that are causing fibrillation to the heart, so you actually—they burn, ablate, and cauterize this tissue to stop the irregular heartbeat. Patient was scheduled for that. Had a huge, similar to that one, a huge cavitation. Treated the cavitation, and he began to have the abnormal—the arrhythmia reversed itself. The body can heal. Our bodies can heal.

Dr. Pompa:
No doubt, no doubt. All right, let’s talk solution because a lot of changes have been made. I’m going to show you a video here in a moment of my wife. I tell people now, “Look, laser, to me, is taking this to a whole other level.”

The old days, even done properly, they were using just some injected ozone, which is fine, but 50, 60 percent of these things would, a year later, two years later, would still go bad. There’s been some changes. Laser’s one of them. Something called PRF, using bone graft—we’re going to show some of these things. All of that has made this much, much better.

Dr. Gerry:
Absolutely. Cavitation surgery, a lot of it originated in Europe. Here, we were never taught this in dental school. Some oral surgeons used to go in. They’d be looking at—and really, this whole, seemingly epidemic of cavitations is only because we’ve become aware of it. We were sort of in the dark with 2-dimensional.

Dr. Pompa:
Now with cone beam, we’re actually seeing it.

Dr. Gerry:
We have panoramic x-rays. Cone beam, 10 years ago, wasn’t really very commonplace. A lot of times, oral surgeons would be looking to put an implant in. We used to actually classify the bone. That classification came around actually later, also, when implants starting becoming popular. We had Type 1 bone is like plywood. Type 2 bone was like pine. Type 3 was like balsa wood, and Type 4 was like wispy nothing, like this void. They would say, “Oh, that’s Type 4 bone.” Isn’t it interesting that the Type 4 bone is in the shape of a wisdom tooth that was extracted?

Dr. Pompa:
Cavitation where the Type 4 bone was.

Dr. Gerry:
It was like that just happened to form like the wisdom tooth did. Then we started realizing, hey, wait a minute. Then G.V. Black spoke about this, and there’s a lot of literature about this. This is not something that’s new. It’s not something that we just discovered. It’s just something that we’re better able to diagnose now. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is the way they used to do this is they would take a dental drill and take a [00:42:52] —because often there’s like an eggshell of cortical bone that grows really tough.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we kind of saw that in the picture I showed you.

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah, in that picture, and even in the pictures you’ll show of Merily here. She had a little, thin, thin thing of bone and then just hollow like a hollow cave.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we’ll show you that.

Dr. Gerry:
What they used to do is they’d take a dental drill to the jaw, drill out this whole thing with a dental drill, which is terribly traumatic. Any time you stick a dental drill on jaw bone, on living tissue like that, there’s a huge inflammatory response.

Dr. Pompa:
Now you’re doing that with laser, which is—

Dr. Gerry:
The laser is ingenious because the laser—and there’s only certain lasers that do work that are—that you can use on hard tissue and soft tissue. This laser, the Waterlase iPlus by Biolase, was being used. I was using it to regenerate bone around periodontally-involved teeth. It’s a wave length of light that stimulates what we call mitotic division of the osteoblasts.

In English that means it stimulates the cells that make new bone to divide. When you get mitotic division, you get cell division. We grow the bone back. I use my hands a lot because I’m Italian. Anyway, getting the bone to grow back—but here’s the great thing about using the laser: Much less trauma.

Dr. Pompa:
You know, when I got mine done, I don’t even know that I had feeling in it.

Dr. Gerry:
I have patients come to me, and the next day, they are not swollen. I think it’s a combination of that and using the platelet rich fibrin from their blood.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re going to see that, but we take the blood—it’s like basically putting stem cells in there, to make it simple.

Dr. Gerry:
I draw a couple of vials of blood from your arm, and then we spin it down on a special centrifuge that separates the plasma and red blood cells. Then there is something in the middle, like a yellow jelly that’s in your blood, that’s called platelet rich fibrin, or PRF, platelet rich fibrin. It’s got platelets, but it is loaded with—we found that it’s a rich source of mesenchymal stem cells.

Stem cells are wonderful, as you know. You’ve done a lot of research in the stem cell area. It’s got some growth factors, everything good, and, hey, it’s a biologic tissue from your body that’s going into another part of your body to help it heal. That’s wonderful.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s brilliant. I say if they’re not doing that, don’t get it done. Make sure you go to a dentist that’s doing that procedure. A video is worth 10,000 words, so let’s cut away to—this is my wife, Merily. You’re going to get to see the bone graft. You’re going to get to see the PRF. You’re going to get to see the laser, and you’re going to see all that. Then we’ll come back, and then you can make some comments. We’ll actually show you the before and after of my wife, Merily.

Dr. Gerry:
Let’s do that.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s cut away.

[Video Begins]

Dr. Pompa:
Gerry, we went in because we were—we saw a little area here on the cone beam, and we could point it out right back there. We will go back and remind you of what the first one looked like. As you can see, there’s a lot of—

Dr. Gerry:
The reason why we like more support here is because this is the sinus. When you’re this close to the sinus, there is something called an oroantral communication, so communication from the mouth to the sinus. Infection in the mouth; infection in the sinus. Very often, we see these—sometimes you’ll have a sinus infection, and it’ll feel like a toothache. Sometimes you’ll have a toothache, but it’s really a sinus infection.

Dr. Pompa:
Again, what we took from this—we’re going to show you these side by side. This is the new one, and you can see the sinus. You’ll see on the other one had a centimeter of inflammation. Now you don’t. This is all bone except for this area we were concerned about.

Dr. Gerry:
[00:47:07] where that blue line is. I don’t know if you can see that on there. Where the blue line is is the area that we really want to kind of clean out and fill in with the platelet rich fibrin, which we took [00:47:21].

Dr. Pompa:
We’ll show you that in a second.

Dr. Gerry:
Also with bone grafting material that we use to place in there. We’re going to be doing that right now. I can show you the material right here. This is actually what platelet rich fibrin looks like.

Dr. Pompa:
We spun down her blood.

Dr. Gerry:
We spun down her blood. We get this material, which comes most likely yellow jelly. There’s a little bit of blood with it, but a yellow jelly. It’s loaded with mesenchymal stem cells, and it’s loaded with growth factors. What we find is that this is an excellent biologic wrapping material that is readily accepted by the body. It comes from the body. This is an excellent way of stimulating regeneration. We’re using it in bone. We’re using it in gum tissue. We’re using it even in teeth, we can use platelet rich fibrin.

Here’s another batch of platelet rich fibrin mixed with a little bit of allographic bone. Allographic bone is human bone. We use it. The bone grafting material is strictly a scaffold for your body to make bone cells to grow for us. That scaffolding helps fill in and support this area. As your body makes bone, the grafting material resorbs and disappears. What people have to understand is we’re not sticking bone in there, and that’s the bone. We’re actually assisting the body to heal itself. That’s what this is about.

Dr. Pompa:
The old way of doing it was, hey, we would open up these cavitations, and we would inject some ozone in there. Hit it with some ozone. A year later, which is where we are on her—a year later, 50% of them go bad.

Dr. Gerry:
That’s right. I like to say that the old way of treating jaw osteonecrosis or jaw cavitations was sort of like a right church, wrong pew. It was the right church because, yes, it can be a problem. It leads to lesions, left alone. We have found Lyme spirochetes in there, mold, Candida. All kinds of different pathogens have been identified in these areas in the bone. When these areas, though, are opened up, and cleaned out, and used ozone [00:49:54], all that is good. Using ozone, cleaning it out is good. The problem is there wasn’t an effective regeneration of the [00:50:04] that was there.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, which this gives.

Dr. Gerry:
What we want to do is we want to regenerate. How do we regenerate? We use this laser.

Dr. Pompa:
Which you just did on her.

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
[00:50:13] the laser. Yep, [00:50:15].

Dr. Gerry:
We just use this laser. This laser light debrides the area, and then it does something called bone decortication. Bone decortication is a way of stimulating the cells to make new bone to grow back. It stimulates mitotic division of the osteoblast to grow new bone.

Dr. Pompa:
I always say that this new method, number one, is the laser. Number two is using the PRF with some of the grafting material. Now, we’re at about a 90%—or 98% success rate a year later without reinfection.

Dr. Gerry:
I’d say well over 90%. Remember, the key with any lesion in the jaw is to get it to heal, get it to grow back. You could kill everything that’s in there, but what you really want to do is promote regeneration. Regenerative dentistry, regenerative medicine, that’s the most exciting thing. The advances in laser and stem cells, as you know, even generate killer cells like you were talking about in some other programs. All of this, I think, is the future of medicine, regeneration.

Dr. Pompa:
No doubt. Look, we did a Facebook Live, and we had a gal kind enough in this chair right here literally an hour ago that was so sick. No one ever found—diagnosed with Lyme disease, gut problems for most of her life. In all these years, nobody went upstream. What we found was horrific. What we found—what you found—I just happened to be in the surgery here.

Dr. Gerry:
One of the largest cavitations.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it was horrible, and—

Dr. Gerry:
One of the largest cavitations I’ve seen [00:51:56].

Dr. Pompa:
Spirochetes in there, black stuff, these things that just were unidentifiable came out.

Dr. Gerry:
[00:52:02].

Dr. Pompa:
It was a sad case because she also had a metal crown over amalgam that you said you pulled out about three thermometers full of mercury out of.

Dr. Gerry:
Two thirds of the tooth was an amalgam, which is 52% mercury, underneath another metal crown of a dissimilar metal. It creates galvanism. Galvanism causes—it actually [00:52:30] mercury out of the amalgam.

Dr. Pompa:
We’ll talk more about that on this show, as a matter of fact. This was a year ago, about a year ago, and we just wanted to do a re-cone beam just to make sure she was healing. Obviously, we want to be—better safe than sorry. You saw that little lucency and said, “Let’s just go in and take a look at it.” You stimulated the healing again. We’ll put PRF in there again. At least there was no infection, but this will speed up the healing.

Dr. Gerry:
Three things: Her sinus looked so much better.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, we’re showing before and after up here on the show.

Dr. Gerry:
Sinus looks so much better. She had a lot of healthy bone there. In the area where she didn’t have—the only reason why I wanted to put some additional—clean it out, disinfect again, and put more PRF and graft is because we want to support the sinus membrane. We don’t want there to be a lack of bony support under the membrane.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, which last time, there was—it was a mess.

Dr. Gerry:
[00:53:33].

Dr. Pompa:
All right, Ger, [00:53:34].

Dr. Gerry:
All right.

Dr. Pompa:
We’re going to learn more. Stay tuned.

[Video Ends]

Dr. Pompa:
All right, Gerry, any comments on that, what we just saw?

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah, what I wanted to say—and I want to talk about bone grafting for a minute because people have a misunderstanding about bone grafting. All bone grafts—we have four different types. We have human bone from your own body, which is a painful thing to take bone from the body. Sometimes we’ve actually done hip grafts and all kinds of things. You have bone from your own body. You have human bone, which people are like, “Oh, it’s some cadaver.”

Dr. Pompa:
No, no, [00:54:11].

Dr. Gerry:
I’m like, “Well, you take the kidneys. You take the lung. You take the heart.”

Dr. Pompa:
If you take blood, right—you get a blood transfusion or blood from somebody else.

Dr. Gerry:
There is human bone, which actually tends to work best, either your own or human bone. Then we have synthetic bone, and then we have animal bone, often pig or cow, so there’s porcine and bovine.

Dr. Pompa:
Which one do you like?

Dr. Gerry:
I like the human bone. Now, so here’s the thing about the graft. There are cells in our bodies that make bone called osteoblasts. There are cells that remodel or take bone away called osteoclasts. Any imbalance in that osteoblast and osteoclastic activity, you end up with things like osteoporosis. You end up with osteopenia. There’s all kinds of problems. The bone that’s grafted is actually a scaffold. It does not stay. It’s a scaffold for the osteoblast to kind of grow and make bone.

Dr. Pompa:
Now, you’re putting the stem cells in there around this scaffolding.

Dr. Gerry:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
Now we’re able to fill in the hole, the void, so to speak.

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah. In one of those dishes with Merily, we had pure PRF, and then we had PRF mixed with some human bone.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we saw that.

Dr. Gerry:
That is the bone that acts as a scaffold for Merily’s body to make new bone and grow over.

Dr. Pompa:
You packed it in that deep hole.

Dr. Gerry:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
You saw these deep holes. I showed you on the video. Packing it in there now, and then you stitched it over, and now that forms.

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah, but what we do is we’ll use—

Dr. Pompa:
He packs it in those deep holes there that you’re seeing there as well as that big hole.

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah, so there are times where we don’t need to use the bone grafting when it’s a smaller—like in some single root extractions, we can just put PRF, and that’s enough to stimulate the bone and for the osteoblasts to use that. Then there are times where we will use the grafting material. What I want people to understand is we’re helping the body heal itself, so that graft material becomes a scaffold. The osteoclasts eat away—and that old one. That resorbs, and what you’re left with is new bone that your body made. That’s about three months—

Dr. Pompa:
I get this a lot: “I went to my biological dentist, and he injected that with ozone, and it killed all the infection. Now, I’m okay. Hey, the pain’s gone. Hey, that does feel better. Actually, even I feel better.” What’s the problem with that?

Dr. Gerry:
The problem with that is ozone is wonderful as a very—what I love about ozone, it has so many wonderful properties for the human body.

Dr. Pompa:
Your laser produces ozone, by the way.

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah, the laser produces—it generates ozonated water, and we use ozone gas, and we use separate ozone water, too. The key to think about here is ozone is not magic. Ozone converts to peroxide. It has a wonderful effect. Another good thing about ozone is it brings blood supply back. It helps to open the blood supply. So does the laser do that.

When we see blood, we’re very happy. Blood is a life force. It’s an important part of the healing process. We want to bring blood back to this dead, necrotic area that didn’t really have a blood supply. Ozone has its place. The problem about using ozone alone is using ozone alone, you just basically nuke everything. You bring a little circulation, but you don’t regenerate that [00:58:02].

Dr. Pompa:
Here’s the example I love to give. It’s like okay, you can chase the bears out of the cave, but as long as there’s a cave, more bears are going to end up in the cave.

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s the bottom line. You have to get rid of the caves, and then the bears don’t come back.

Dr. Gerry:
The name of the game here, Dan, is regeneration. We want regeneration.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely, and that’s [00:58:21].

Dr. Gerry:
Does ozone have a place? Absolutely, but I’ve seen people—and this is an interesting point. I’ve had many patients come to me who’ve had several cavitational surgeries in areas where the bone looks like Swiss cheese, and the bone has not healed. They’ve gone back, and the biologic dentist is saying, “Oh, let me do another ozone injection. Let me do another ozone here and ozone there.”

Ozone also nukes the biofilm. You need a balance. Now, I do believe in ozone. I do use ozone, but I use it responsibly. A lot of biologic dentists are taught use ozone everywhere. They’re ozonating all the gums every time the patient comes in because they have a little gingivitis. Gingivitis is a biofilm imbalance. You don’t want to use Napalm and scorched earth policy. What you really want to do is promote rebalancing. That’s why I developed this.

Dr. Pompa:
There you go. I use it every day, by the way. It’s on our website. It’s on my website.

Dr. Gerry:
This toothpaste is prebiotic. We have Vitamin K2 and D3. We have CoQ10 and Vitamin C, and Vitamin E was the first component.

Dr. Pompa:
Here’s what I love about it. You can actually eat it. It’s that healthy.

Dr. Gerry:
It’s a dietary supplement.

Dr. Pompa:
It actually really [00:59:46].

Dr. Gerry:
The reason why we found—gums stop bleeding in a matter of days. The reason why we found that you get a—close to a 70% reduction of ginginal inflammation in two weeks with double blind clinical research we did in Europe and the United States is because we are fostering microbial homeostasis. We’re not nuking all the bacteria.

The same bacteria—this was the biggest breakthrough understanding that I had in my research in developing this. By the way, I can’t put—the toothpaste is regulated as cosmetic, so you can’t make these claims, but we can show lots of pictures, unless we want to go through the—an IND and—

Dr. Pompa:
Forget about it.

Dr. Gerry:
You have to file a new drug application. It’s called an NDA. I’m eating the toothpaste. By the way, if you eat this much of commercial toothpaste, you have to call poison control.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s true, fluoride alone.

Dr. Gerry:
When you understand the science of the microbiome, you realize that products—commercial products like Listerine, Colgate, all these other products kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. The natural companies came around and said, “Oh, why don’t we use tea tree oil instead of triclosan?” Tea tree oil is just as toxic to the microbiome as triclosan is.

Dr. Pompa:
Meaning most of the natural toothpastes out there, they have these nasty killers in that wipe out the microbiome, which also affects the gut. Let’s tell Merily’s story here very briefly. If you saw the last show, it was whatever, a year ago. My wife had this sinus drainage coming down. She started getting abnormal cells in her nose that weren’t healing. Started worrying me.

I said, “Hon, which side do—you had your wisdom teeth out on?” The right. Okay, if you know my wife, if I tell her right, she goes left. If she goes left, she goes right. I tell you, that’s true. I’m the dumb one here. By the way, I’m the dumb one here. I believed her. For the first time, I believed her. Okay, it was the right. No, it was the left, exactly where her drainage was.

Dr. Gerry:
Whenever my wife corrects me, and she says, “Honey, make a right,” I’m like, “Okay, it’s left.”

Dr. Pompa:
When she tells me it’s on the right, I should have said left. Oh, gosh, what was I thinking? Anyway, bottom line was we ended up getting a cone beam. Let me just show you what we found.

Dr. Gerry:
Actually, we could show it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’ll have you explain it. Let me see if we could see this. I want to bring it down to this one

Dr. Gerry:
Let’s see this area.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. I think we can see that. Yeah, go ahead. That’s her sinus that you’re looking at.

Dr. Gerry:
Here’s the area where her wisdom tooth was. All of this black here—

Dr. Pompa:
That is voids.

Dr. Gerry:
It’s empty. This whole area about the size of the end of my finger is all cavitation. There’s a whole area of cavitational osteonecrosis right there where that was. What’s interesting in addition to that is whatever the heck is going on in there, she sure has a lot of schmutz in her sinus.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a centimeter of schmutz.

Dr. Gerry:
Go to the other side.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s the other side.

Dr. Gerry:
Can you see the other sinus here?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You can see there’s no inflammation around there.

Dr. Gerry:
There’s nothing. Then you go here, and her sinus is a bit of a mess. Actually, this is a good shot. Another angle of her sinus—actually, we could show it up here, Dan. Let me just show you right here. She has areas where the congestion in her sinus is almost [01:03:34].

Dr. Pompa:
You’re looking at a cone beam.

Dr. Gerry:
That’s a cross section. Yeah, that’s a good point.

Dr. Pompa:
This is all cone beam, yeah.

Dr. Gerry:
The good thing about a cone beam is that we can look at this from many different angles. For example—

Dr. Pompa:
Where do you want me to go, down here?

Dr. Gerry:
You can go down here. Now I’ll show you a cross section of up on the top. Where this blue line is, if we go up here, you’ll actually see black, black, black, which is all void in this area between the dotted line, the solid line, and the dotted line. That area is all just empty. Right above it, look at all the congestion in her sinus here.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, massive. That’s what was happening to her.

Dr. Gerry:
She had to have a constant post-nasal drip, what we call PND.

Dr. Pompa:
Now let’s show the one we did yesterday. We did another cone beam a year later, approximately.

Dr. Gerry:
I actually talk about this. This is a really important one. Now, this area has healed. If I bring this over here—

Dr. Pompa:
What we were doing—there was a little void, so he went in yesterday just to check it.

Dr. Gerry:
Now [01:04:38] see this is not black; this is filled, but if you remember, Merily flew shortly after, and we took a cone beam. Most of it’s filled in. She has a little area here that still has not filled in.

Dr. Pompa:
Hold on. Let me make sure I got it. Eric, do you got to show it again?

Dr. Gerry:
Can you see this little area here?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, right there, uh-huh.

Dr. Gerry:
Look at her sinus.

Dr. Pompa:
Perfect.

Dr. Gerry:
Clean, sinus clean, and even up here, if we look here—let’s see if I can bring her sinuses back. Sinus is pretty clean, especially there.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Dr. Gerry:
[01:05:19] in the sinus, she had a little something there, but nothing down where that third molar was. I want to make a point about this because there is an area here, this bothered me.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s when you went in yesterday, which you saw. You saw the video.

Dr. Gerry:
We could talk about that right now. This is very interesting because the success of the healing response—what I’ve come to learn is I have a lot of patients who travel in to me to have these procedures done. The most important thing is I have to ground you for a little while. You can’t jump on an airplane because they found a major contraindication to healing, especially in these delicate areas where bone is healing. You’re up near the sinuses. You really can’t be in a pressurized cabin.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, by the way—

Dr. Gerry:
I don’t want you flying or doing scuba diving.

Dr. Pompa:
I was stubborn. I had to go do a seminar, blah, blah, blah, the whole thing, and it went—on the flight, I got this massive headache that was coming from my neck. This was two days after I got cavitation surgery.

Dr. Gerry:
Yeah, way too soon.

Dr. Pompa:
It ended up literally going into my neck. You guys know that story because that’s how I got the stem cells.

Dr. Gerry:
That’s a good story. Anyone who’s going to or traveling to a biologic doctor who is doing cavitation surgery, you cannot fly. You cannot fly. Of course, I grounded Merily right then. Let’s talk about that. Yesterday I went in to that little area, and I was intrigued because I was like, “Well, this is—that should have been all—that should have been solid. It should have been healed perfectly.”

Anyway, I went in there, and there was a small amount of bone. What I did is I put PRF and I packed some more grafting material to give her a nice, solid base of bone in what’s called that tuberosity area, in that third molar tuberosity area because her sinus is right above that. I wanted to give her some protection and some support for her sinus. The important thing, again, is no flying, no scuba diving, and really, it’s important to understand that the healing process after the procedure is done is very, very important.

Dr. Pompa:
If it’s a big cavitation, how long would you keep them here if they flew in [01:07:42]?

Dr. Gerry:
If it’s not near the sinus, generally patients can come in midweek and leave by the Monday after.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, okay, so I’ve had people from all over the world come and see you. Matter of fact, every time I’m here, I love it because I get to actually meet them. My clients—

Dr. Gerry:
Everybody who flew in over Christmas got to see the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes. I had tickets for everybody for the shows. I was like, “Go to a show. Have a nice time. Go to some restaurants. Make it a—what’d they call it when you go to Mexico for something, a destination medical surgery, medical treatment? It’s a great thing if you can relax, enjoy, and take a peaceful trip home.

I like to see patients generally three days after, when they’re healing. I generally follow up by Skype, and I’m able to actually have a Skype consult, one of which I’m going to have a post-operative consult today with a patient who was referred by you and who was treated in the US.

Dr. Pompa:
I get to meet all my clients because I have clients all over the world, and it’s like I get to meet them here. I love it. Let’s talk about—you’re expanding. We have a exciting thing that’s happening, so tell them.

Dr. Gerry:
This is the most exciting thing: The wall between medicine and dentistry is coming down. Really, the health centers, the wellness centers of the future are going to bring—and what Dan and I do, I think, are two of the most important aspects of helping people get well. That is the oral-systemic link. It’s dental and detox, detox dental and a lot of it detox.

Dr. Pompa:
It works.

Dr. Gerry:
Look at this: There are patients who are toxic. Their functional medicine doctors are like, “You’re loaded with metals.” Eliminating heavy metals from the body is not just a science, but an art. You have gotten that down because you lived it. You lived that, and that’s what I love, that you’ve helped so many people, Dan. You put them on a protocol that is personalized for their particular circumstances.

That involves not hitting it with a hammer, where if you try to get the mercury out of the rest of you—you may get mercury out of your mouth, but if you’ve been found by your functional medicine doctor, your biologic doctor—I never know what term to use anymore. I use biologic a lot because it’s easier. Everything is biologic.

Dr. Pompa:
Functional medicine doctor, yeah.

Dr. Gerry:
If your biologic physician has said you’re showing up in examination with heavy metals and the diagnosis, I highly recommend that you follow Dr. Pompa’s protocol because he is intuitive. He is experienced, and he does not—what I love that you do is you don’t address this in a heavy-handed way. Getting mercury out of—mercury is a very insidious metal. I find a lot of nickel, by the way. A lot of people have old what we call porcelain fused to metal crowns, which is basically a metal thimble with porcelain on top.

Just this morning, when I was walking in my office, every crown I removed from the patient’s mouth with metal, I analyzed the metal. I’m actually going to publish on it because I’m finding a high number of crowns that were done in the 1980s when the price of gold went very high. The dental laboratories were using non-precious metals. They’re up to 77% nickel. That’s like pure nickel. Many times, dentists—a lazy technique that dentists had is they’d make the crown, and they’d leave the amalgam in the tooth.

Dr. Pompa:
Here’s one that—that poor gal yesterday.

Dr. Gerry:
Oh, that’s right.

Dr. Pompa:
I don’t even know if you could see that, but that shiny part in there, yeah, that’s amalgam. There was a crown that covered this big amalgam. He said enough mercury for three thermometers, and it was covered by metal. That’s called galvanism. It creates more mercury vapor. Poisons you, basically. It’s electrical current, so now you’re a battery.

Dr. Gerry:
Galvanism actually—what it’s been found to do, especially with dislike metals or metal like an amalgam metal, it cranks the mercury out of the mouth. It off-gasses—

Dr. Pompa:
That poor girl.

Dr. Gerry:
It off-gasses more because of the electrical current created by the galvanism. That’s one thing. Really, the center in East Hampton is opening in June. We’re very excited about it. We’re incorporating so many wonderful therapies that have shown great promise in helping people and helping people support their [01:12:51].

Dr. Pompa:
The end of June, here. Listen, and it’s going to be—we’re bringing in all this good stuff together.

Dr. Gerry:
Fran Drescher is hosting it, my good friend, Fran. If you’re listening—she is amazing. She is a cancer survivor, and she has become a wellness activist and using her celebrity position to promote wellness and taking charge. She said, “If people would—if people want something to stop, they should use the power—their purchasing power, their consumer purchasing power to get bad products to go away.” Stop buying them.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more there. Detox done right is critical. I think that’s another mistake people make. They get things like amalgam fillings out, and then they go, “Oh, okay, that’s it.” The mercury’s in the brain. One of the things that—my passion is teaching people the process. One of my pet peeves is, “Oh, I did mercury detox three months.”

Meanwhile, 25 years, 30 years, this mercury was going into the brain, and it’s three months. You have to learn the process, and that’s what I tell my doctors. Teach people the process, right, docs? My docs listening? We teach people the process, and then they do it long enough to actually matter. Listen, we covered a heck of a lot of material here.

Dr. Gerry:
We sure did.

Dr. Pompa:
I love you, man. I could hang out here all day and look at this stuff. Matter of fact, I’m ready to do a surgery now. I’m ready to go in, doc.

Dr. Gerry:
Right on. All right, let’s go.

Dr. Pompa:
I would love to. It was fun, though, yesterday. Really, I got teared up in there several times because I knew I was watching this girl’s—all this money, time, and heartbreak, and I was watching it change.

Dr. Gerry:
My dream is to take good dentists and just put a—so biologic dentistry is not a specialty. I’m a very, very competent, very, very good restorative dentist. I do beautiful cosmetic dentistry. All that is well and good. Just put a biologic cap.

If I could get dentists—and one of my biggest regrets was in 2006, I named—I gave a naming gift to New York University for a clinical research wing. It’s The Curatola Wing for Clinical Research. That was to promote translational research. I was doing research—oral microbiome research. I was passionate about getting greater understanding of our microbial composition and what we’re made of.

Dr. Pompa:
It starts here, by the way. It starts here.

Dr. Gerry:
I wish I had, instead, given the money to open a center for integrative dentistry so that dentists could start to put this biologic cap on and take the most talented graduating fourth-year dental students and put them—now, train them to think biologically, looking at root causes of disease and not treating the symptoms. Don’t look at the patient as a walking tooth.

Look at the patient as this living, amazing life force that’s in a tent of the body, as Paul calls it. The reality is that we have this Divine ability, God-given ability to self-regulate and heal. Understanding that and just understanding that mindset, they’d be able to look in patients’ mouths and be able to diagnose toxicity. They’d be able to look at the root causes of disease in the mouth and work in tandem with doctors like you.

Dr. Pompa:
Root Cause movie, we mentioned the move, Root Cause. If you want to see it—it was taken off Netflix, but it’s RootCauseMovie.com. Ashley, you could put that up when we actually spoke about the movie, as well, on the bottom, so you should see it. Share this episode with many. This is a life changer, man. Thank you, Ger.

Dr. Gerry:
Thank you, Dan.

Dr. Pompa:
Love you, man.

Dr. Gerry:
Love you.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s go check my bite.

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 this show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

273: The Anti-Cancer Revolution

with Ryan Sternagel

Ryan Sternagel's son Ryder was diagnosed with stage four neuroblastoma – a childhood cancer of the nervous system – just days before his first birthday. Ryan and his wife consulted countless doctors and health experts of all disciplines to employ an integrative approach that cut the amount of conventional treatment Ryder received in half through an integrative mix of super nutrition, complementary therapies and energy medicine along with a whole lot of prayer and healthy lifestyle changes. Ryan is here to share his story today.

More about Ryan Sternagel:

Ryan Sternagel is the founder along with his wife Teddy of The Stern Method, a platform informing and inspiring families going through cancer to succeed on all fronts.

Ryan hosts the Integrative Answers to Cancer podcast to share these strategies with those that need them. To further their goal of preventing future cases of childhood cancer, in 2018 Ryan hosted The Toxic Home Transformation – an online event that showed over 100,000 families how to rid their homes of all physical and energetic environmental toxicity.

Ryan will also be hosting The Anti-Cancer Revolution, a free online conference in June of 2019, and is the creator of Going Integrative, a step by step course for cancer parents and patients.

Ryan and Teddy continue to ensure that Ryder and his little sister Channing thrive for the rest of their lives, sharing how they do it along the way through their social media posts, videos and articles on The Stern Method website.

Additional Information:

Show notes:

The Anti-Cancer Revolution – online and FREE! June 17-23, 2019

The Stern Method

CytoDetox 2014

Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
On this episode of Cell TV, I taped this right after a conference here in Nashville, a Live It to Lead It conference, one of my seminars where we had the top scientists and doctors in cancer, alternative cancer. We learned a ton. One of the things that really just grabbed me was the increase, almost a 70% increase in childhood cancer since the 1950s. We learned a lot about the causative factors and why.

In this episode, I interview Ryan Sternagel. The seminar interviewed him and his wife and I wanted to bring you this story. Ryan talks about what they went through, their battle. It’s very emotional, but what they learned from it. Right now, it’s a pain to purpose story in their life. They’ve started a website. They are doing a series, a summit where they’re bringing this information to families where cancer is obviously a part of their story somehow, but also other childhood illnesses.

We talk about that all in this episode. You’re going to want to stay tuned and hear this story. You’re going to want to share this with as many people as you can because believe me, there’s families around you with kids that are sick, have cancer. It’s going to impact them greatly. They need these resources that we talk about in the show. I’ll see you in the episode.

I’m here on location with Ryan. I’m on location again at one of my seminars actually here in Nashville. We had you on stage last night, you and Teddy talking about your son. I was heartfelt, so was the audience. We had a lot of tears. The topic in this seminar was cancer.

I really wanted you to tell your story because what we’re seeing is a massive increase in childhood cancers. You all lived a healthy lifestyle. My family, we lived a healthy lifestyle, and my kids received lead inherited from my wife, and it created gut issues. We had children who were not well. It became inherited toxins.

You ended up with a child that here under a year old, and all of a sudden, you’re seeing these health things start rising up. Tell the story. I want you to hear this story because this is where we are as a nation right now that we see. Since 1950s, we’ve seen a 67% increase in childhood cancers. That’s concerning.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and you go back 100 years, and it was basically nonexistent at that point. The doctors had to travel from all around if they wanted to actually study a case of childhood cancer. Now, you go to the mall and you’ll see some kid with a wig or whatever.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, with its hair out.

Ryan Sternagel:
Like you said, my wife and I lived a very—obviously, we’re not as—we weren’t as tuned up with everything then.

Dr. Pompa:
As you are now.

Ryan Sternagel:
For the couple years even before Ryder was born, we were getting rid of using chemical cleaning products and personal care products. We were even pretty far ahead in realizing that EMFs were a concern and doing everything we could with that. I was getting into triathlons, and marathons, and that sort of thing. Teddy, my wife, was getting into Crossfit. We were lessoning to Ben Greenfield.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a good friend of ours.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, for sure. That’s actually I think how I found about you originally was hearing him on his—or hearing you on his show. Yeah, we were getting into all of it. Ryder was born in a birth center with a midwife. Everyone’s first question when they talk to us always is was he vaccinated; wasn’t.

Dr. Pompa:
You were like us; we did a lot of right things.

Ryan Sternagel:
That said, we were living the normal—he was our first kid, so living the normal new parent life for about a year. Like you said, things started—we didn’t really put them all together until eventually about a month before he turned one year old, my wife found a lump in his back when she was nursing him. It wasn’t sticking out huge, long, but if you bent over the right way like when she was nursing him, you could fill it.

To back up a little bit, it’s—when we found the lump, we started thinking about all these things. He was born in the 90th percentile. By that time, he’d pretty much stopped growing at about six months and then just plummeted on the growth chart. He wasn’t crawling and this was about almost a year old.

It’s just all the—he wasn’t handling solid foods which actually turned out to be an entirely different issue. Once we did get the diagnosis, it turned out that he also had a double aorta in his—coming off of his heart that was compressing his trachea and his esophagus. That was actually a whole other ordeal. After we got the cancer until control, then we had to fly him out to Pennsylvania to get a heart surgery.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh my gosh.

Ryan Sternagel:
Who knows; probably somewhere deep down those two things are related.

Dr. Pompa:
Obviously, there was part of the story where okay, they didn’t know what was wrong. Someone said this neuroblastoma, this type of cancer that really there’s no way that your child should have this. You brought him for a second opinion. They’re thinking there’s no way. Then what happens?

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, no, it was interesting because we took Ryder to—back to our pediatrician who was a naturopathic doctor. They basically brushed it off which was really strange looking back on it that he had a lump sticking out of his back and all of these other things that were adding up. They tried to send us to physical therapy for the crawling thing and occupational therapy to teach him how to eat. They even started making Teddy feel bad that she was breastfeeding him and maybe that was the reason he had fallen off the growth chart.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s unbelievable.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, I don’t know; it was really strange, really strange looking back on it.

Dr. Pompa:
I can’t believe in modern day—this modern day and age, they actually were thinking breastfeeding was why he wasn’t doing well.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, or maybe they just—

Dr. Pompa:
They wanted to give him the sugar, corn syrup, soy, GMO product in of course baby food.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and then Teddy comes home with all the organic baby food or whatever because they freaked her out. I don’t know. Anyway, we—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but that was Teddy, okay. Yeah, if she was going to move to food, she would have done that, but they weren’t going to put him on that. They were going to put him on the standard crap, whatever it is.

Ryan Sternagel:
It didn’t feel right. We never went to one physical therapy session. It was just something was—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you knew it was something else. As it turned, the tumor sticking out was just the tip of the iceberg.

Ryan Sternagel:
That’s what they said, yeah. Teddy was the one that diagnosed neuroblastoma just from clicking around on the internet.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, they thought she was nuts.

Ryan Sternagel:
We ended up seeing a—well, we got admitted to the hospital, but then it turned out to be an orthopedic physician’s assistant that we saw. He took an x-ray and then sent us back home and said nothing looked wrong. We kept pressing after that. Then finally they did an ultrasound just to placate us more or less. That’s when they did see a mass.

Then all of a sudden, it became okay, well now we need to get him back into an MRI to rule out neuroblastoma is the way they put it. Yeah, then the MRI, like Teddy was saying last night, it was supposed to be a half hour; then an hour goes by; then an hour and a half. When the doctor and her nurse did come back in, they both—they had tears in their eyes. It was their words. They said, “The lump you feel is just the tip of the iceberg.” Yeah, it was Stage Four cancer. He had a tumor inside of and growing out of his spine that was larger than his kidneys.

Dr. Pompa:
Because it’s in the spine—you heard it from stage. We had some of the top cancer experts in the world here speaking. They said sometimes there’s a time for radiation or chemo when it’s choking something like that like the spine. You have to decrease the tumor.

The problem is that long-term after that, you better do something else. Let’s tell the rest of this story. Alright, you get this diagnosis. I can’t even imagine how you and Teddy felt. What was going through your mind at that point?

Ryan Sternagel:
I look back on it and it’s hard to really—it’s almost like you remember it—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you lived through it, man.

Ryan Sternagel:
It’s almost like remembering it—

Dr. Pompa:
Survived through it is what I meant to say.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, it’s almost like remembering a dream.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s like when I think about when I was sick. It’s almost like a dream looking back.

Ryan Sternagel:
The one thing that I did just have a deep confidence on was that we were going to find a way to get this under control and reverse it. Along with the just getting healthy stuff, I’d seen a few documentaries on alternative approaches to cancer and that sort of thing. Yeah, I did just—your son gets diagnosed with cancer and especially looking at those scans; it was spine, spine, spine, tumor. You couldn’t even see the spine anymore. There was secondary tumors. They had metastasized into the bone.

Dr. Pompa:
Did you think for a moment, we might lose our son? My brain would go there. It would because I’m one those things, okay, the worst-case scenario. I almost want to visualize that; I would. Then I would be, okay, I’m going to fix this. It’s not going to happen. Did you guys do that?

Ryan Sternagel:
Of course, you know that is the worst-case scenario. I really just didn’t let myself dwell too much in that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I don’t know how I would have reacted. I guess that’s why I’m asking that question.

Ryan Sternagel:
I did a pretty good job of just keeping it together because I knew that’s what was needed for the family. For the first few weeks, I put Ryder to bed every night and by myself for whatever reason. I’d bawl my eyes out, to be honest with you. Then I’d pull it back together and just—

Dr. Pompa:
I’m sure you and your wife were strong at different times and lifted each up at different times. She’d break down; you’d be strong. You’d break down; she’d be strong.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, but that being said, it was a weird—looking back on it, a weird sense of calm almost in just knowing that we were going to find a way.

Dr. Pompa:
Look, you and Teddy are action takers. Meaning you go through a short period of time like that, but then you take action. The action is what you need to stay focused and not get too emotional right, so you took action. Here you were.

Let me back up. They came in now and say, okay, here it is. It’s chemo; it’s this, it’s that. Finish that part of the story.

Ryan Sternagel:
It took weeks and weeks and weeks to get a diagnosis. Then once we finally get the diagnosis, its, okay, you need to get admitted to the hospital immediately and begin chemotherapy. They didn’t even know—they hadn’t done a biopsy. The still weren’t 100% sure it was neuroblastoma. There’s different types of neuroblastoma that do have their own—there are different types of standard of care chemotherapy/radiation protocols that they put kids through.

Without even wanting to know all those details, they wanted him to get started immediately just on their best guess, I guess you could say. Like you said, there are times that shrinking a tumor is the right thing to do. We were certainly open to that, but we also wanted to get a second opinion.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I would have.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and make sure that this was the right thing for him.

Dr. Pompa:
They didn’t like that.

Ryan Sternagel:
They didn’t like it, no. We did agree to get a port placed right away because we had already been hearing about IV vitamin C.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it would be easier to do that.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, then just poking a one-year-old every time. We got the port placed. We said, okay, thank you for the diagnosis or what you’ve done so far. We’re going to go home and get a second opinion. From there, it was a stream of probably a dozen different doctors, and nurses, and social workers all telling us not to do it.

Dr. Pompa:
The CYS called?

Ryan Sternagel:
The CPS, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
CPS, was it? Is it?

Ryan Sternagel:
Child Protective Services.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, I was thinking CYS. Why was I thinking CYS? Child and Youth Services. It’s probably called a different thing.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and the different states call it different things. Yeah, it was weird how it worked out. We did take him home. We didn’t know about the CPS call.

Then I think two days after that, we were sleeping in bed with him, and he woke up in the middle of the night with a crazy high fever. All of a sudden, he was puking all over the place. We didn’t know what was going on. It was the hospital that we had just worked so hard to get out of, all of a sudden, it was 90 miles an hour back to the hospital. It turned out that he had got a bloodstream staph infection.

Dr. Pompa:
From the port.

Ryan Sternagel:
As a result of getting the port put in. At that point, we were just basically for lack of a better term, trapped in the hospital. For those couple of days, I had been calling around all sorts of different Mexican and German clinics and trying to figure out what we’re going to do. All those travel plans went out the window because now we got—

Dr. Pompa:
The infection, yeah.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, now we got the infection.

Dr. Pompa:
Then, okay, there you are in the hospital. Okay, so they do the chemo. At least they shrink it.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, at that point, we considered a round of chemotherapy because it’s like okay, we do have to do something about this tumor.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it could choke off his spinal cord.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, so we went through a round of chemo and that was tough. Like I was starting to say last night is we demanded a feeding tube right away. At least, I think I mentioned this last night.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you did.

Ryan Sternagel:
They wait for a lot of these kids to get super emaciated and just looking like a typical cancer patient. Then they’ll put a feeding tube in and try to but the GMO crap into them.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but because you wanted to put all the good nutrients in, put it in right away. That was smart.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, so we demanded that. That was actually weird enough; that was a fight in and of itself.

Dr. Pompa:
Of course.

Ryan Sternagel:
Just getting that feeding tube in him because he doesn’t understand.

Dr. Pompa:
You guys ended up bringing your juicers, your blenders. You set up. You had all the nutrients. You weren’t the average family. They were probably laughing at you like oh, look at these people; meanwhile.

Ryan Sternagel:
I know; some of the nurses thought it was cool. They’re like, oh, you’re making your own feeds because they call the stuff the feeds. Yeah, you can call it that. It was quite the operation in there and had water filtering.

Dr. Pompa:
At this point, you’re doing a combination of standard care and natural care, which was really smart.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and then finally, we cleared the infection. The infection actually ended up coming back because they didn’t realize it was living in the line. We got out of the hospital and then ended up going back to the hospital. Then he had to get the line taken because it wasn’t a port he got put in; it was actually a Hickman line. We had tubes taken out of his chest.

Dr. Pompa:
It was in the line.

Ryan Sternagel:
Then we had to get the line taken out and get the port put in. Between those two occurrences, we were actually on I think our way back to the hospital just for a regular appointment type of deal. My uncle calls me because he was looking over the house just helping out with everything. He said, “I just go a knock here on the door from CPS, Child Protective Services. It sounds like somebody is not agreeing with the way you’re doing things sort of thing.” Of course, when we get to the hospital, they’re like, “Oh no, we didn’t call.” I don’t know who else would have done it.

Dr. Pompa:
That makes me mad, I’m going to be honest with you, for different reasons of our freedoms. It’s your child. That’s a whole another show. I don’t even want to go down that road right now.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, it was quite interesting, to say the least. We get a child in cancer diagnosis, but then we’re also in a CPS office answering questions about, were you molested as a child? How do you discipline your son? It’s like, my son is one-year-old. I’ve never needed to discipline him before. Anyway, it’s an unfortunate part of the story.

At that point it was like, well, we did talk to the hospital. It sounds like you guys are complying now. As long as you keep complying, we won’t have a problem. Successive trips to the hospital and more appointments, it became very clear that we would need to keep doing the chemotherapy or there would be a new problem.

Dr. Pompa:
Because initially, you said one shot. Is that right, or two, or three?

Ryan Sternagel:
They had said that the protocol would be four rounds of chemotherapy. Then I asked, “Well, what are you looking for in those four rounds?” They gave me a couple of different metrics of reduction in tumor size and that sort of thing. By that point, we were already going off to see a naturopathic oncologist on the side, and then getting IV vitamin infusions, and then like we talked about, just shoving all these different supplements into his feeding tube. I think I can get there in two rounds. If we can hit these markers in two rounds—

Dr. Pompa:
You were smart. You asked, okay, what’s the goal? Because if we can hit the goal sooner, can we stop the poison?

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah; and so, that will never happen, but okay. We’ll give him a—because usually, they don’t give him another scan until after four rounds. They said, well, we’ll give you scan after two rounds. Of course, we blew those metrics out of the water.

Dr. Pompa:
Did they stop? No, they wanted to keep going.

Ryan Sternagel:
No, we actually said this, this, and this. No, you didn’t. Then we got to four rounds. We’re like, okay, now we’re done, right? No, I don’t know where you got four rounds; it’s going to be eight. The story kept on just getting crazier from there.

Dr. Pompa:
What did you do? Did you have to comply to the eight?

Ryan Sternagel:
That’s when we moved.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s when you bailed.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
You went to Utah, which you’re my neighbor technically. You ended up going to Utah and a little different pressure.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and it’s not like we just called them and said, would you not let us do chemotherapy.

Dr. Pompa:
No, but you realized you had to get out of there.

Ryan Sternagel:
Utah, it's very natural health friendly, which Washington state was too, but it’s also a little bit higher on the personal liberty scale I guess you could say as far as—

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, a little bit more freedom I would say here.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah; and that was enough for us to say let’s give it a try. Like I said, it’s not like Utah is some bastion of parental rights where you can do anything.

Dr. Pompa:
No, but you ended up here. A different hospital, a different philosophy, what happened?

Ryan Sternagel:
The team we landed on ended up—it was nice that we were starting over with this team. By that point, Ryder, the secondary tumors were pretty much gone. The metastases was pretty much gone. The primary tumor was so much or so substantially reduced at that point that they were okay with what they called a wait and see approach, which makes a lot of sense. They knew we were doing all the natural stuff and maybe they put some credence into that, but really more than anything, they were just willing to see Ryder as an individual, our son, and think maybe four rounds of chemo is enough for this kid.

Dr. Pompa:
We’ll see what happens. That seems a more sensible approach to me. Okay, so they did that. What happened?

Ryan Sternagel:
He said if things start going the wrong way, we can turn on a dime. Yeah, that sounds good.

Dr. Pompa:
It didn’t; it started going the right way without treatment, without chemo. It started going in a very positive direction rapidly.

Ryan Sternagel:
It was crazy. Once we had the choice and they were actually willing to work with us, it was—that actually was like a whole new, oh crap, do we really want to stop? Yeah, but we ended up stopping at that point. Yeah, things kept going in the right direction.

Dr. Pompa:
Today, it’s the size of a walnut. It looks like it may just be scar tissue.

Ryan Sternagel:
You could call it a residual mass at this point. On one scan over the course of a year, it ticked up just slightly. Of course, that was pretty disheartening, but I—there’s something called ganglioneuroma which is cells that are—it’s basically benign cells that aren’t cancerous but maybe just smoldering in there, that sort of thing. That being said, we doubled down on just everything we were doing holistically. Then on the next scan a few months later, it stopped in its tracks. Then this last scan we got, it actually looks like—that mass has been there for a long time. We would like it to go away. On this last scan, it actually looks like it is starting to break up a little bit, which is pretty cool.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s awesome. How many years later are we now, five or six?

Ryan Sternagel:
We’re just about five years later.

Dr. Pompa:
Pretty amazing.

Ryan Sternagel:
He was diagnosed in May and it’s—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and how long has it been since the last chemo, four years?

Ryan Sternagel:
Four plus years.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome. I’m sure that I asked you this question last night, what did they say? Here you stop the chemo. Obviously, and their comment was?

Ryan Sternagel:
Just good luck.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, good luck to you. It’s like, oh, you got lucky. That’s good.

Ryan Sternagel:
This team is pretty cool.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I’m liking this team. There’s no bad things about this team.

Ryan Sternagel:
Our primary oncologist at one point made the crack that these aren’t vitamins that we’re giving these kids here, which he’s actually acknowledging the toxicity of the treatment. They’re always trying to minimize it which is—that’s the only person I’ve ever really like—oncologist that I’ve heard really actually acknowledge that. Yeah, it’s powerful.

Dr. Pompa:
We’re going to share your website here, but you all have done a lot from a nutrition standpoint, from a detox standpoint, which is where something you and I resonate here on which is part of the success that you’ve had obviously. From pain to purpose is my story. You have a great purpose now helping families with these situations. One of the things that you and Teddy were amazing at is working through it: how to get these healthy foods in a child, how to get these types of things in an infant all the way through. That’s a hard situation. On your website, you have all these little tips and things that you—the only way you could learn is going through it. I have no idea how to get that into your child. You guys help these families.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and there wasn’t any—there was alternative or integrative cancer websites obviously.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but nothing with all the things here’s what to do, how to do it.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and especially for kids, that sort of thing. Along the way, we started posting everything we were doing originally just to Facebook for fundraising purposes and to just show other families what we were doing because we saw a lot of these families just up close and personal in the hospital that it was an exact opposite of a juicer.

Dr. Pompa:
You guys are doers, man. Yeah, I want to know. Okay, give the website and share this because how many other families are going through childhood cancers. They need this resource. Give the resource.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, the website is thesternmethod.com. Our last name is Sternagel; that’s a little hard to remember, so we shortened it up.

Dr. Pompa:
Smart.

Ryan Sternagel:
It’s the Stern Method.

Dr. Pompa:
Sternagel, that’s a dyslexic. Who knows what I’m calling it.

Ryan Sternagel:
Fun fact, it was actually originally called my kid cures cancer, but that got politically unfeasible to be running around with cures cancer in your name.

Dr. Pompa:
That stinks though. I’m like, well, okay, your son cured cancer? No, his body cured cancer. Anyways, yes, obviously, this must have been—it must have decimated your finances. What does it do to a family?

Ryan Sternagel:
Teddy and I were just getting started, a young couple. Ryder was our first kid, that sort of thing. We get asked this question a lot, or people assume, and they make comments about, you’re so lucky that you were so well off to be able to afford all this. Because they see us posting all the different energy medicine gadgets we’re getting and just hundreds of dollars’ worth of supplements. Like I said, the IV vitamin C in and of itself adds pretty quick. Like I said, fundraising was a really big thing for us.

Dr. Pompa:
Do you talk about that on your website at all?

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, good.

Ryan Sternagel:
We have a course coming out in just a few months here that’s going to be—take people through not only how we think about supplementation, and nutrition, and detox, and a lot of the stuff you think about when you think about cancer, but a lot of the mechanics of how we’ve made all this stuff work for us between because we’ve raised tens of thousands of dollars to be able to afford all this stuff, and even just how do you fit all this stuff into a day. Having a healing schedule more or less was really big for us. It just started out with supplements because we’re on 50 different supplements at any one time. Some are with food; some are without food; some are right before bed.

Dr. Pompa:
Navigating that, it’s like how were you working? This is a full-time job. I’m sure Teddy really raised up for most of it.

Ryan Sternagel:
We were fortunate in that I was an outside sales guy without an office to report to, so I was already working out of the house. That being said, it was still—I will never forget the first few months that Ryder was diagnosed. I wasn’t really selling anything, but the checks kept coming in. I’ll always be grateful to my old day job for that. I’ll never forget that.

Outside of that, at some point, I had read that book, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. It was all about how to get out of your day job and only work four hours. Fast forward, the second part came true, I don’t have the day job anymore, but now I work way more than 40 hours, but it’s for a good cause obviously. One of the things in his book was outsourcing as much of your day job as you could using freelance services like upwork.com and things like that.

I said, well, I could—we’re raising money fundraising. What if I found somebody to do all the parts of my day job that it didn’t necessarily need to be me doing? I outsourced a lot of the data entry and proposal writing and stuff like that to a guy that still works for us in the Philippines. That gave me more time to just be on PubMed doing research and implementing everything we were doing for Ryder.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’ve done shows on you—with you I should say, interviews, how to make your home safe. I’m sure you have a lot of that on your website too, which is really important because obviously this weekend we heard a lot about the causative factors of cancer. So many chemicals in the environment that we have no idea. Even in utero, as I pointed out in my story that my wife giving my kids the lead, so many other chemicals. They all talked about you have to get upstream to cause, the detox, all of it is critical.

Ryan Sternagel:
That’s a really big component of what we’ve done for ourselves and what we try to get out there to other people is you can throw all of these therapies at the problem as you want, but if you’re still living in an environment that potentially had a big percentage causative factor in the first place be it chemicals, or mold, or EMFs, or most likely a soup of all of those things, then you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you just said something. A lot of us focused on chemicals in our environment, moldy homes, there’s a lot of environmental things that you have to consider; really very important. Obviously, you guys, you were doing a lot of the right things, but yet, we live in today’s day and age. There’s a lot of stress on the DNA.

Ryan Sternagel:
It’s got to be taken up to the next level, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan Sternagel:
That being, it’s stress.

Dr. Pompa:
You wife is going through a lot of stress.

Ryan Sternagel:
When she was pregnant actually, she had a day job situation where it was one of those trying to make things so miserable on her that she would quit and they wouldn’t have to pay the maternity leave. At least that’s the only explanation I can come up with for why they were treating her the way they were. It got to her. It really got to her. I could see it on her face when she came home every day. We ended up pulling her out way early than we had planned on. I still think about that to this day; that may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. I don’t know.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, when you look at physical, chemical, and emotional stressors, they come together and create a perfect storm. It can trigger certain conditions no doubt about it and genes for that matter. I hate the cliché thing that you would say, okay, there’s one thing, one piece of advice you would tell a parent that’s going through this, but for this situation, I think it’s worth saying that. Because I just put myself in this situation, I think gosh; it’s like I can’t even imagine. What one piece of advice would you give them?

Ryan Sternagel:
I’d say as hard as it is to look at it like this, I still think it is the best way to look at it is it’s really caused us to take ten steps back. Look at everything from the biggest picture possible and basically just do our best to remove all badness for lack of a better term from our life be it physical, toxins, the home environment, or just the energy my wife and I are putting off, and then trying to project the best energy we can onto him, or getting him outside. Just really living the best life possible. Just trying to replace all of any negative factor with something positive.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re helping people do that. I started this piece by saying a 67% increase since the 1950s in childhood cancers. By the way, most experts if not all experts feel that it is environmentally induced. Meaning that’s the biggest component of this increase that we’re seeing. Why else is it happening? Physical, chemical, and emotional stress. The chemicals, we’ve done many shows on that we’re exposed to today, hidden things: flame-retardants. I could go down the list of things.

If it doesn’t show up as a child, it may show up later. Autism right now is sailing. One in two kids predicted by 2032 if the statistics stay the same; it looks like it is. This is where we are right now as a nation.

Ryan Sternagel:
That’s a good point you made about maybe something’s not showing up right now, but it might later. I think a lot—we have a lot of families following us that are just—that aren’t going through cancer but are inspired to live healthier lives for their families.

Dr. Pompa:
There you go, yeah.

Ryan Sternagel:
For the folks that don’t really subscribe to that and just look at us like, well, that’s unfortunate for you that you have to be so paranoid about this stuff, but our kid’s healthy.

Dr. Pompa:
For now.

Ryan Sternagel:
We don’t need to—but it’s like even if they don’t—even if they never come down with childhood cancer or something like that, with adult cancers rates being pretty much one in two or one in three these days, you want your kid getting diagnosed with cancer when his 40?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but it’s even beyond that. Look, my kids are here at this particular seminar. I had a conversation with all the youngsters. They’re like, look, our whole generation, everybody is sick. All of their friends are sick. They’re already developing degenerative conditions. They’re on meds. They’re doing things just to focus.

Like you said, how many are taking Adderall? It’s a sick generation. I probably know that more than you because my kids are there. You see what I’m saying? They’re telling me what’s going on. It’s scary. When your kids’ age get to there, I don’t know what we’re going to see. We’re going to see an explosion of autoimmune, cancer, and other terrible basically degenerative conditions.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, no, I’m started getting invited to birthday parties and stuff like that now and just seeing all the kids; it’s crazy.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, and it’s beyond that. It’s the food. It’s the chemicals. It’s the stress of life. It’s the EMFs. We’ve done shows on all these things. Ryan, thank you. I appreciate you coming on sharing. Share the show because this is important.

Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, we should mention the event you’re going to be on that we’re putting on.

Dr. Pompa:
Put it out.

Ryan Sternagel:
It’s called the Anti-Cancer Revolution. It’s an online conference or summit if you want to call it that with 40 plus speakers. You’re on it, Dr. Pompa. I’m informally referring to it as the truth about cancer meets what you might hear at an integrative physicians’ conference, a naturopathic oncologist conference.

Dr. Pompa:
We’ll give you a link for that, so you can share it and be a part of that as well. You need to hear the information. Yeah, thanks for doing that. Alright, see you on the next one. Remember, fix the cell, get well.

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.

272: How Women Can Maximize the Benefits of Fasting

with Dr. Felice Gersh

Today I am joined by Dr. Felice Gersh, who is an award-winning board certified OB/GYN, as well as fellowship trained and board certified in integrative medicine. She is here today to talk about fasting, particularly in women’s health. There are amazing ways nature works to preserve female fertility and optimize success through the application of fasting, and you’ll hear how and why.

More about Dr. Felice Gersh:

Felice L. Gersh, M.D.'s educational background includes an undergraduate degree in history from Princeton University, a medical degree from the University of Southern California School of Medicine, OB/GYN specialty training at the prestigious Kaiser Hospital in Los Angeles, and graduation from the 2-year Fellowship in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona School of Medicine. Additionally, she has been trained extensively in functional and environmental medicine.
Dr. Gersh has a strong focus on the role of women’s unique rhythms and hormones, emphasizing the impact on female health of nutrition, timed eating, intermittent fasting, fitness, stress management, emotions, sleep, electromagnetic energy, and endocrine disruptors.

Additional Information:

Newport Beach, November 14-17
Prolon Fasting Mimicking Diet
Fastonic Molecular Hydrogen

Transcript:

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, we are joined by Dr. Felice Gersh who is an award-winning, board-certified OB/GYN as well as fellowship trained and board-certified in integrative medicine. She is here today to talk about fasting, particularly in women’s health. Dr. Gersh has a strong focus on the role of women’s unique rhythms and hormones emphasizing the impact on female health of nutrition, timed eating, intermittent fasting, fitness, stress management, emotions, sleep, electromagnetic energy, and endocrine disruptors.

Dr. Pompa and Felice Gersh, welcome to the show. I know this is one of your favorite topics, Dr. Pompa, as well as our audience, one that they love as well. Let’s get started. Welcome to you both.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, thanks for being here Dr. Felice. I appreciate it. This is one of my favorite topics. Matter of fact, I just got back from Bulletproof conference speaking on this topic. A chapter in my book honestly called, Beyond Fasting.

Look, I get excited about this because when I started the lecture at Bulletproof, I asked the women in the room, how many of you struggle to intermittent fast, struggle on low carb diets, or even longer fasts. Most of the hands went up. I talked about, look, my diet variation principles and why it’s more imperative. Fortunately, I had some women in the room who were doing that and said, look, this was me; now, I’m successfully fasting, etc. and how much it’s changed their lives. That was helpful.

Listen, you’re coming at it from even a different perspective. Clinically, I stumbled upon this with the doctors that I train. I can’t wait to hear how you stumbled upon some of these finds. I want to start off here then. You’re an MD. How did you find fasting and fall in love with fasting? I have to start there. Mine happened in the ‘90s.

Dr. Gersh:
I was a much later comer than you. I actually did not find fasting; it found me. It was serendipity. What happened was a researcher—actually a market researcher contacted me several years ago and asked my office staff if I would be open to doing an interview to talk about something interesting called fasting. I’m always open to new things. After all, I’m an integrative doctor, so clearly, I left the conventional path quite a while ago. I didn’t completely abandon it, but I expanded everything that I do to try to be the most efficacious and safest. I look at all new potential treatment options.

I said of course. I always say yes because if you say no, you’ve closed doors, doors maybe forever. It turned out that this marketer had two agendas: one was a secret agenda and one was the open one. The open one was just to find about 150 integrative doctors, functional medicine doctors across the entire US and interview them about potential use of a fasting mimicking diet. Something that no one had heard of, it was not marketed. It was only used in clinical studies and before that, mostly with mice and such. It turned out that was the open agenda. The secret agenda was to find a doctor that would be the test site for use of this fasting mimicking diet to introduce it as a commercial product.

To my great please, I ended up being the selected doctor. I went through a whole series of interviews. The last one was with Professor Valter Longo over at his research center at the USC campus. We had lunch which he usually doesn’t have. He had that just specially for me.

He explained everything. We went to his lab and he introduced me to his research assistants. It was like no way I was going to say no. I was the first office, the first practice in the entire world that actually used the prototype of ProLon, the fasting mimicking diet. I gave feedback; not on efficacy in terms because the studies were all about that but in terms of use and acceptability.

By my feedback, they made some modifications, made some flavor changes. I convinced them to make it gluten-free. We made some changes and then it became a company. I continued to work with them. It was completely voluntary. I was a volunteer and I was happy to do it. For about another year and a half, I was working as a volunteer using the product myself, so I was one of the earliest users.

Then after about a year and a half, they asked me to be officially on their medical advisory board for their startup company, L-Nutra. That opened a whole new world for me, the whole relationship. I learned all about fasting and all the different types of fasting and time restricted eating. I became just totally enamored with everything circadian. I’ve never looked back since.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no; like I said, it was back in the ‘90s that I found fasting. Then eventually, I found partial fasting. Again, it was haphazardly into it whereas we were—I was doing a lot more water fasting at that point, and still do, but found that when people carried on in a partial fast that they all of a sudden kicked back into the results. I found this French guy, [Albert Mezier]. He just talked all about partial fasting. That got me going with the partial fast years ago. As a group of doctors, we utilize water fasting, partial fasting. Then Longo, his work basically becomes [00:06:08]. I know about this: restriction of calories down below 1,000; restricting proteins exactly.

Anyways, I was like, oh my gosh, he made it so easy. He put it in boxes. Of course, I was actually reading some of Longo’s work before I actually knew that he was associated with ProLon which is basically the partial fast in a box. Anyways, now we utilize this amazing tool which takes literally—I wish I had one here to show; maybe you do. It’s literally a box of food for here’s Day One; here’s Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, Day Five.

One of the things that we had found is five days was a sweet spot. Gosh, five days we’ve been doing for years. We didn’t have the science. It was just: look, it takes people about three days to overcome hunger, fat adapt. Day Four, they see most people feel better, so let’s ride it out one more day. That was always the theory: let’s keep things going. We had no clue. Then Longo comes around as says, oh, five days is actually a magic number because you get this massive rise in stem cells.

Anyways, okay, so fast mimicking diet is something that we both love. The ProLon has made it really easy with the boxes. I know that with your expertise as an OB/GYN, fertility is one of the things that you have found that really fasting can transform in women. Talk about that and then other benefits that you—now that you’re doing a lot of this type of fasting, talk about some of the other benefits as well.

Dr. Gersh:
One of the things that has not gotten anywhere near the emphasis that it deserves is having women become healthy before they actually conceive. There’s a growing epidemic of infertility and of just unhealthy women who actually are successful in getting pregnant. We now know that if you’re unhealthy when you are pregnant, you epigenetically modify the baby. The baby’s genes are altered in their expression. You’re actually changing your grandchildren as well because everything changes if you’re unhealthy when you’re actually making a baby and the baby is developing within the uterus. We must help women to become healthy before they get pregnant.

Now we live in a world where something like 70% of people are overweight and obese. It creates leaky gut. We now know that obesity itself will create circadian rhythm dysfunction, will give you leaky gut. Most people who are really overweight are actually very malnourished as well, so they have nutrient deficiencies.

When you are in this state, you also have more difficulty with your detoxification pathways. The master organ of detoxification is the liver. We also know the kidneys and the skin are also involved, but especially the liver. What we have when we have a lot of obese, unhealthy people is that they develop fatty liver which is something that will change how the body can detoxify. We have altered gut microbiomes which are key as well to detoxification.

There’s now data that shows that fasting can actually alter the way genes are expressed in the detoxification pathways so that you can actually detoxify it better. There’s actually studies of people from Ramadan where they’re fasting all day. They’ve shown that they dramatically lower their heavy metal load: the cadmium, and the lead, and the mercury, and so forth, arsenic. Their levels go down with the fasting or the 40-day Ramadan. We now know that fasting can help lower our toxic load which is a huge problem for women who are pregnant. When babies are born, they test their cord blood and they find over 200 different toxins; nothing is tested. Yet, we just act like nothings happening, but these are changing the metabolic processes of these children forever.

Fasting in a pre-conceptual way—now not when women are actively trying to get pregnant, but we have to prepare for pregnancy preferably years ahead but at least one year ahead if you haven’t really given thought to it to give time to lower the toxic load. Also, we do fatty liver, improve the gut microbiome, and just overall improve the entire metabolic state of the woman, her nutritional status. I really believe that the vast majority of women say age 21 and over should incorporate fasting regiments and time restricted eating way before they become even interested in becoming pregnant. We will have much lower complication rates during pregnancy which are just crazy.

Look at the C-section rate. The C-section rate isn’t astronomically high and rising because all obstetricians are lazy, good for nothings, and they all want to go home. That’s not really what’s happening because now they have in hospitals what they call laborists, doctors who are in the hospital 24 hours a day. They have someone covering labor and delivery. It’s not that they’re trying to go and out and do something; the women are having abnormal labors. They’re having large babies. They’re ending up with high levels of C-sections which then begins life on the wrong foot because they don’t have the right microbiome from the smearing of all the lactobacillus as they exit the uterus and enter the world. It’s so important to get women healthy.

As well, women now are using a lot of contraceptives that actually are endocrine disruptors. Women have to deal with that before they get pregnant. We now know that fasting regiments can improve the microbiome and actually like I said help the liver. There’s so many reasons why reproductive-aged women, even thin ones, as long as you’re not too thin, not the ones that are below like a BMI of 18, that they should all be incorporating because we’re all exposed to toxins. We all eat food that is sometimes nutritionally deficient. This really should be part of everyone’s health regiment I think starting from about age 21 up.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree. One of the things you said, you said a few important things, Number One: if you talk to myself and the doctors I train, we’d agree, we don’t fix these bad guts that everybody has, the microbiome meaning, with just giving bacteria. It doesn’t really fix the gut. It can help certain symptoms no doubt. However, we do it with fasting regiments and fasting strategies to your point. Then you talked about something that I don’t want to brief over because we’ve been talking about the five-day fasting mimicking diet, etc. I want you to talk more about how you’re using that in your practice.

Let’s back up to something that you said. It’s basically eating within a certain eating window, basically timed eating. Let’s talk about that, better known as intermittent fasting. How are you using that in your practice? Then we’ll move on more to these five-day fasts.

Dr. Gersh:
Yes, well, something happened a number of years ago. I don’t know who started it, but we have to stop it. That was this notion that you should eat about two hours to somehow maintain your blood sugar. I say if humans had needed to eat every two hours, we would have been extinct a long time ago. It’s actually the exact opposite. We should eat less frequently, but we should get all our nutrients in. It’s not about nutrient deficiency; it’s about not eating all the time.

We have situations where our insulin and our glucose levels are spiking up and down all day long. We now know that it’s not just the average like when you get a hemoglobin A1C level and you’re looking at a representation of your average glucose; that doesn’t tell the whole story. What you don’t want are these high incursions up and down all day long of high glucose, high insulin, then it drops. Those are terrible. They’re bad for your brain, your entire neurological system. We have to have a steady, low, but healthy level of insulin and glucose all day long.

Nature has everything planned. Most of our genes are either clock genes or related to clock genes. It is who we are. We are genetically programmed a certain way. We have this beautiful circadian rhythm of cortisol which a lot of people have heard of. Our cortisol is very high in the morning when we get up. Cortisol causes our body to breakdown because after all, you should be coming off a whole nighttime long of fasting. Actually, when you have the high cortisol in the morning, you are now starting to breakdown your—some of your body fat. You’re going to start making all the glucose from your liver, the gluconeogenesis.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it releases the glucose.

Dr. Gersh:
Right, so that’s right in the morning so that you wake up, you get this surge of morning glucose. Then you also become a little bit insulin resistant. Cortisol is going to make you a little bit insulin resistant. That’s because we evolve to that, what if no food did come in, that we will be able to have the glucose around for our brain. It makes it harder for other tissues to get the glucose, but our brain can get it.

The right thing to do is to eat within two hours of getting up. I know a lot of people are fasting well into the afternoon, but that really isn’t well aligned with our—the way our circadian rhythm and our genes are put together. You can do it, but it’s not optimal. Humans are very adaptable to many circumstances. That’s why we’re still here and we didn’t become extinct like Neanderthals. They were not as good as famines as we are. Our homo sapien genes are very great in that they can really deal with famines. That what we should harness: our amazing adaptability to not having food, but we want to have it at certain intervals.

There was a study out of Israel using women who have polycystic ovary syndrome which is so dramatic. Women with polycystic ovary syndrome are very emblematic for people with metabolic syndrome, menopausal women because they have all these same metabolic dysfunctions. What they showed is that if you ate two-thirds of your intake of food for breakfast, and approximately one-third for lunch, and that leaves almost nothing, but they had a tiny, little dinner. I’ll tell you what Professor Valter Longo has suggested as an alternative for people who can’t do this where they finish their food for the day when it was lunch. What happened with those women in that just one month, their insulin levels went down by 50%. There is no drug that does that.

Dr. Pompa:
I read that study, the first one you mentioned. One of the things that we discovered is in our group, we actually do it a little—we have a test. We test glucose and ketones in the morning. We see the dawn effect as it’s called, cortisol brings it up. Then we’ve learned to test people before their third meal and to see if glucose is trending down and ketones are trending up. What we found is we can actually adjust their eating windows based on what their body is metabolically doing.

Because once people become extremely fat adapted, we find that we get a better result by riding out the fasting window, but it can—it’s not for everybody. That’s why we test their numbers so we can see actually what their body is able to do, wants to do, and how it’s read within the lines. The irony is this: we find it’s different for everybody. When we test it, we go with where that eating window wants to be.

Then we can even watch as people get healthier. Then we can watch that their eating windows actually even get better. Then when they’re not eating—which we don’t do this every day. I have a principle called diet variation. Then we can go without food and the body actually succeeds. Again, we don’t want to do that too often because you’ll have too much autophagy and the body can actually work against you. Anyways, yeah, a little something to think about.

Dr. Gersh:
I love that. Actually, doing the individual variation and looking at what we call precision medicine, individualized medicine, is really very key. Very few people are able to do what you’re doing. That’s fabulous and fascinating. We know that probably the future is that everybody will be wearing the continuous glucose monitors because we now know that some people can eat exactly the same food and have dramatic differences in their glucose response. The human body is so amazing that how it can adapt and do very well under different circumstances. For the average person—and in your group is clearly far above average in terms of your keto-adaption.

Dr. Pompa:
You talked about the eating every two hours or five, six meals a day. By the way, to your point, it’s been said that the average American is eating between 7 and 21 times. Okay, now, everyone would say, okay, that’s not me. You have to understand that every time they drink the kombucha, have a handful of raw nuts, the health—you don’t realize that every one of those little things spikes your insulin and glucose.

To your point, if you want to die sooner, just spike your insulin and glucose more immediate. Meaning the more often you eat, the more chances of disease and the shortening of your life. The opposite is true; if you want to live long, eat less. However, we know chronic long-term caloric restriction doesn’t work. These short-term caloric restrictions actually work. I’ve coined this term of don’t eat less, eat less often. You will absolutely—

Dr. Gersh:
That’s exactly what I say. That’s why I make it so clear to my patients we’re not trying to make you nutrient deficient or food deficient; we just want to time it during the day so that you’re not eating all the time. That you stop eating—we now know from looking at the way that our clocks are arranged in our bodies regarding our insulin, our pancreas actually goes to sleep. It wants to rest after 7, 8 at night. No matter what you’re eating late at night, it’s not going to be good for you because your pancreas is really—you’re stressing out your pancreas at that point.

Dr. Pompa:
Especially people who are already metabolically challenged. Then you have the sleep thing if you’re eating an hour or two before bed. I have a ring that I’m able to measure my deep sleep and REM sleep. There’s nothing that affects my deep sleep more than eating before bed. Not even right before bed; even if I eat two hours before bed, I get half the amount of deep sleep.

Folks, that’s the recovery sleep that we all need to feel good the next day. You may sleep eight hours, but if your deep sleep is under an hour, I promise you, you didn’t recover the way your body needs to. The worst thing you can do is eat too late at night to your point.

Dr. Gersh:
Yeah, and as we age, we know our growth hormone, of course, does go down. That’s predominately a night phenomenon. We don’t want growth hormone high all the time; we know that can increase cancer, but if we have no growth hormone—it’s always this beautiful balance that we’re trying to create. Then we can’t grow and heal new tissue. That’s the beauty of going in and out of these different types of phases. It’s like the yin and yang. I don’t know how the Chinese got it so correct so many thousands of years ago that there is a time for autophagy and then there is also a time for regrowth and rebooting. We have to let our bodies do those beautiful rhythms—

Dr. Pompa:
I’m a believer in that. I know there’s a lot of criticism about a pathway called mTOR. No doubt, long-term stimulation in mTOR, eating all the time, eating high protein will absolutely age you and cause disease. However, short bursts of mTOR is actually really healthy for you.

Dr. Gersh:
Yes, mTOR, I hate it; I’m always going around having to defend the defenseless. A lot of times I’m going—like defend hormones because it’s like—now they’re like terrible testosterone, terrible estrogen. It’s like, no. Then poor mTOR is getting it now. It’s like, we need mTOR. Then all these pathways are there for a purpose. Cancer is upregulated mTOR, but that’s a dysfunction of a beautiful, normal pathway. We have to do everything so that the bodies don’t get dysregulated and go down those aberrational pathways distorting our normal, beautiful rhythms and functions.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s beautiful and you’re right. One of the things that we had learned to is if we do five days a month of say a fasting mimicking diet and then we also do five days a month especially a week before a woman’s period where we eat higher, healthy carbs, it’s magic for them. During the high, healthy carbs, you get a little mTOR stimulation. The five days in the fasting mimicking diet, you’re stimulating autophagy. Again, it’s this balance that we’ve learned to create that works for women’s hormones. Tell me how you’re using the fasting mimicking diet in your practice. I want to hear more, especially for women.

Dr. Gersh:
Okay, universally, every woman as she goes through the menopausal transition—this is universal—every woman becomes somewhat inflamed, develops some degree of insulin resistance. There’s research out of Harvard that shows that the gut microbiome becomes dysbiotic as women go through menopause because estrogen has a role in virtually every organ function, every organ, everything. It’s the master hormone of metabolic homeostasis of women. When you lose your peripheral estrogen production, the production of estrogen that’s done in a paraquinone way in individual organs for their own individual use does not increased to make up the loss. Women’s brains make less estrogen, have less estrogen available, and all the other organs like the gut which makes its own estrogen supply, but it doesn’t make enough to make up for the loss of the ovarian production. You have a state of metabolic distress and oxidative stress that develops in all women.

Except for the small exceptions for whatever reason they’re not a great candidate, I recommend it universally as my patients are going through the menopausal transition and into menopause up to around the age of 65. Then it has to be very individualized even up to 60 in case they’re very frail or have other metabolic dysfunctions that doesn’t really make it safe for them to do anything other than just get by every day because we don’t have data on fasting people who are already insulin dependent and so forth. I’m not such a maverick in using fasting in people who are really unhealthy.

We can prevent all that deterioration and maintain a good healthy female body if we add in periodic fasting like with the fasting mimicking diet ProLon starting in the menopausal transition. For me, you never know exactly when that’s happening. We know it’s a very gradual process around age 40, certainly by age 45. I don’t see any reason why every woman shouldn’t be on it about four times a year after they do their loading dose with ProLon with the three months in a row, be doing this on a regular basis for health maintenance.

Then when you look at the data on just stem cells alone, and people are running around the world paying a fortune to get stem cells, and here not only does it increase your basic stem cells, but actually, it increases—it doesn’t replace them; it actually increases your pool of stem cells. It’s phenomenal. It really improves your immune system. It’s such a boost to your immune system, so why would we not want to do that?

We know that as we age, our ability to deal with infections like sepsis really declines. There’s a reason why when there’s a flu epidemic that they always say, who are the most vulnerable. There’s the very young children and then there’s the older people because our immune systems age. They become less functional. We really want to do whatever we can to maintain a healthy immune system. We can do this in their 40s and in the 50s during the years that we now set the pace for what’s going to happen as we get older.

Do we have long-term—we don’t have long-term data, but we have a lot of data now that shows that when you do ProLon, when you do periodic fasting that you reduce inflammation. You reduce metabolic chaos. We do see inflammatory markers. We normalize lipids. We normalize blood pressure. We lower fatty liver. We reduce fat in the liver which is so hard to get rid of. Women after menopause are much more prone to developing fatty liver.

I think this is such a huge thing for women because I’m a big believer in hormone therapy in menopause. The problem is no matter how we give it, it’s not the same like replacing their ovaries. We don’t have that capability to—I know there are people trying to create stem cells for ovaries so that we can get an ovarian transplant in menopause, but we don’t have that yet. No matter what we do, it’s not the same as having ovaries, so we are still going to age. This is how we—

Dr. Pompa:
I think a part of natural aging in menopause though is we’re meant to produce less estrogen. Obviously, it’s the body going into the next stage. The body’s innate intelligence, it knows this balance. The thing nice about fasting is it—you’re not forcing the body one way or the other. The body’s basically saying, okay, this is going to help me be more balanced. It’s going to help me create more stem cells so I can make my own estrogen. It’s meant to drop, but not drop like it’s dropping in this country in modern day. It’s dropping so much that women, the bottom falls out. Now, they end up with hot flashes and too many symptoms.

To your point earlier, this is a normal process that women are supposed to go through. It will create some inflammation and some adjustments, but the body when it’s in homeostasis figures it out. I believe that our DNA is set up to fast. Fasting helps our body find homeostasis meaning this balance hormonally, microbiome, all these adjustments that need to be made.

My wife and I, we’re in our 50s. I tell you; we have de-aged. We fast, we do five-day fasts probably about four times a year. We do a combination of sometimes water, sometimes partial fasting, fasting mimicking diet. My spring fast coming up is going to be a fasting mimicking diet. I’ll tell you; nothing has worked better for us as far as—and even we measure something called telomeres which is biologic cellular age. We have both massively decreased our—I should say increased our telomeres and increased our age in a good way.

Dr. Gersh:
No, I get it totally. I’m doing that as well. I’m doing the four times a year with the ProLon. I think it is—I sometimes feel like I’m de-aging as well. The reality is that you touched on it and that’s really very important. Woman today, when they hit menopause, they’re not as resilient. They don’t have the reserves that they had in former decades, in former generations because they—by the time they hit menopause, they’ve been exposed to many endocrine disruptors.

Many women have been on oral contraceptives often for decades which really takes its toll. It is what it is. It’s not a health food. That’s why they don’t give birth control pills to women if they have a heart attack because it’s not helping their metabolic state. Women have not been exercising the same. Their circadian rhythms are off because all the blue light and so on. Women have a disadvantage now when they hit menopause, so they need all the help they can get to get through it.

I think that’s why women are having more symptoms. We know that hot flashes are associated with a much worse prognosis in the long-term. If a woman has very bad hot flashes, that’s a really red flag that she really needs to get really fine-tuned and really look at her diet, her lifestyle, and incorporate fasting because she’s at much higher risk for developing many ills associated with aging.

Dr. Pompa:
You hit on something. We agree the amount of toxins, estrogen, hormone disruptors that we’re exposed to today, so many things, like you said, the light, we have so many things against us hormonally. Then I believe that genetically we’re set up for times of feast and famine. It’s a chapter in my book. Our DNA is set up to fast and we’re not fasting. It’s all feast. That too is destructive for the hormones.

We have this destructive for the hormones and we have this going on destructive for the hormones. Look, we can’t take all the endocrine disruptors out of your life; however, if you add these periodic fasts as we’re talking about—and my doctors would agree, the best place to start is a ProLon fasting mimicking diet. It’s in boxes. You don’t have to think. It’s easy. It’s safer than water fasting.

Dr. Gersh:
It’s is.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s easier. Forget about it; it’s easier than water fasting. I know many of you out there will be—have had massive transformations with water fasting and I’m a believer; however, without supervision, etc, it’s much harder. This is a place to start. Will change your life; it will.

Dr. Gersh:
Absolutely; and there is some people out there who are amazing in their determination. They’ll do long water fasts for several days, but I live in a world of average people and in terms of actually implementation of a fast. If I went and I told all of my patients that I think would benefit from a fasting mimicking diet or a water fast to actually do just the water fast, I would have compliance of about 1 to 2%. I have to be realistic because it doesn’t matter if you give good advice if it’s not taken. As a doctor, I need to not only give good advice; I have to help my patients to incorporate it into their lives. That’s where it’s so much better when I give them ProLon than I tell them to water fast.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s a personal thing. I go without food. I could do it all the time; it’s no big deal.

Dr. Gersh:
I know you can.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, my point is the average person goes, I can’t go without food. Here’s the question back: won’t I die? Literally, their brain is like I could die. That’s a hard jump to make. It’s eat this box of food, one every five days. Oh, I can do that. Okay, here it is. Yeah, that’s cool.

Dr. Gersh:
I get amazing success with ProLon and not with water fasting. That’s why they had to invent because you can’t get huge compliance if we’re talking about people.

Dr. Pompa:
I have to say something. For years, we put people on partial fasts. I have all the instructions and this and that. Me personally, I preferred water fasting then partial fasting. Here’s why: because once I would start eating, it was very difficult for me to stop. I would be like, oh; it was just emotionally—I was in my kitchen. I’m just better off not eating.

However, the first time I did the ProLon, the fasting mimicking diet, when here I had my box of food for the day, it was a completely different experience because this is what I had to eat. I didn’t find myself wanting to stop. Here’s what I had. I found the partial fast with this was a completely different fast. It is was easier for people.

Anyways, it’s a great thing. I think you kind of answered this, but when shouldn’t a woman fast? We talked about, hey this is the best thing for women, but what about the one that maybe shouldn’t?

Dr. Gersh:
There are sometimes when a woman shouldn’t fast. In terms of categories, if you’re very thin, then you really don’t have enough fat. We don’t want to take women who are under a BMI of 18. The other group would be if they’re actively trying to get pregnant.

The body doesn’t want women who are unhealthy to get pregnant. If the body thinks there’s not enough food coming in, it might actually stop you from ovulating. There are studies in—it’s interesting that you said that you started in the 1990s. There was a little flurry of studies in the 1990s on fasting and women. The NIH was supporting these studies and then it completely disappeared. Now, of course, we’ll bring it back.

Back in the 1990s, there was some studies of short-term fasting like two, three days. What they found was that if they took women that were very thin, they actually didn’t ovulate if they fasted them for like three days during the follicular phase, the phase before ovulation. They just didn’t ovulate.

If they took average weight women, and this is the 1990s, they weren’t really working with the very overweight women, but if they took average weight women, they found that they did ovulate, but their spike of estradiol, that spike that proceeds ovulation was lower. We don’t know really what that means, but it doesn’t sound like what we’d want to do. I would not want to fast women during a cycle that they actually want to get pregnant because they may not ovulate or they may have a lower peak maybe that would affect their luteal phase. That would increase their risk of miscarriage. We don’t have any data on that, so that would be a definitely not.

The other times would be if they were ill. We know that when you are doing like ProLon, during the days that you’re on it, your immune system actually becomes less robust. Your white cell count goes down and then it springs back up to normal. Your stem cells actually—everything gets a little depleted because your body goes into a quiet mode. It’s a little bit lower. It doesn’t want to. You don’t want to stress your body out when you’re actually fasting.

If you’re coming off of a cold, or you’ve been ill, or say you’re a mom with a bunch of small children and they’re all sick, maybe that wouldn’t be the time to be having your own fast. You don’t want to—you want your own immune system to be healthy at the time that you’re doing this. Other than that, there’s—you don’t really if you’re having surgery. You do it right before surgery because—or something of that sort, or right after surgery, if your body has been traumatized, or say you’re doing a marathon. You don’t want to do it when you’re preparing right for a marathon because there’s no data on that, but we just want to be cautious. There’s very few exclusions as you can see.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, it’s true. I have to give Jason Fung credit for this. I believe it was him who—one who would say okay, someone who is underweight, don’t fast them. I think it was him; it might have been Thomas Seyfried. Said, listen, for people who actually are underweight, you can fast them. What will happen is you’ll find that they’ll lose five, six pounds. Then a month later, they actually gain muscle. Clinically, in my doctor group, we tried it and it worked.

I think it’s become a classic answer that you and I were giving that if you’re underweight because you intuitively say, yeah, that might not be a good idea. What we found was the exact opposite. I guess the only theory there is it’s the stem cell rise that—well, there’s two theories that I think Jason gave me is the stem cell rise is part of it. Being that’s why it takes a month or two and then the weight comes on because you start—the only protein you’re really getting rid of is the bad ones that aren’t recovering. You end up with new ones and there’s more recovery.

Then the second thing is the gut. It’s the microbiome changes. The gut gets a little better, so now your assimilation increases, and therefore, that could lead to weight gain a month later. Anyways, interesting clinical observation.

Dr. Gersh:
Yeah, no, the only thing that I would add based on that is that there is a little difference between men and women. I don’t know that data, but it’s really fascinating. With women, you have to be especially careful because of eating disorders.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, that was my next question.

Dr. Gersh:
Okay, yeah, eating disorders are bad.

Dr. Pompa:
I thought of another one: eating orders and fasting do not mix.

Dr. Gersh:
Yes, exactly. I’m going to write that to my mind. It doesn’t matter what their eating disorder is: if it’s bulimia, if it’s purging, if it’s binge eating, if it’s anorexia nervosa. There are issues there, so we might actually trigger something.

We don’t have enough data. We have to be cautious because of lack of data. Women have double the incidents of insomnia, and depression, and anxiety. Women are a little different, so you’ve got to care—be very cautious about their emotional states and how these things can impact them.

Dr. Pompa:
I’d also add too for short that the reason why someone’s underweight is a big reason that you can’t just say something across the board. Another one is cancer. There’s certain cancers that respond amazing to cancer. Other cancers that could be causing someone to be cachexic and underweight do not.

I interviewed a scientist. They said look, if it’s a cancer that’s more metastatic or a tumor that has its own blood supply, fasting isn’t good. If it doesn’t have its own blood supply, fasting is great. Tumor differences make a difference whether fasting could be successful or not. Again, those listening, check with your doctor. There’s different conditions like this that can be different. Cancer is one of them. It’s not always a great thing. Sometimes it could be, but not always.

Dr. Gersh:
In menopausal women, one of the biggest risks for breast cancer recurrence is actually weight gain and obesity. What I would say and then recognizing that we don’t have a lot of data, if a woman is seen cured from her breast cancer, so now we just want to make sure she doesn’t have a recurrence of breast cancer, but everything else is fine, she’s not on any treatment, I would say that would be a candidate for—once again, we don’t have data on that, so we have to look at relative risk. We definitely don’t want women to become obese after menopause. That is a very big risk factor for cardiovascular disease, dementia, of course, diabetes, and breast cancer. Every case needs to be looked at individually. I 100% agree cancer we have to be cautious.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. Look, with any type of extended fast, work with a practitioner. That’s why we’re training more and more practitioners, Felice. Where do you practice? Can people visit your website?

Dr. Gersh:
Yes, I have a real brick and mortar practice. That’s mostly what I do. That’s my biggest job. I’m located in Irvine, California. It’s called the Integrative Medical Group of Irvine. We see men and women. My website is felicel—I have my middle initial in there—felicelgershmd.com.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, great. A wealth of knowledge here. It’s amazing what you said that you are heading the way here with not just fasting, but women in fasting where it’s more controversial I would say. To your point too is women do, they’re very different. The hormone challenges make not just fasting more difficult for women often, but just even low carb diets are harder for women. A lot of it’s hormonally driven some of these issues.

Dr. Gersh:
Yeah, absolutely because I have found yes, I think women are very different. Women’s bodies are designed to store fat much better and much more powerfully than men. If you think of a set of fraternal twins who are seven years old. They’re raised identically by their parents. Then you fast forward a dozen years; now they’re 19. Even though they’ve done everything the same for the past 12 years, their bodies are going to be very different. If you did a body composition, you’d find even though they ate exactly the same food, the female of the twins would have a lot more body fat.

We are meant to have babies whether—that’s our destiny; doesn’t have to be our true destiny, but it’s our biological pathway that nature wanted for us is to have babies and to store fat so that we could nurture babies, and have enough food for the famines that were inevitable, and breastfeed, and so forth. Our bodies are designed to grow and store fat a lot more than men. We do need more studies that are gender-specific. Until 2015 when they did studies, they didn’t even have to include women or even designate what the gender of the study subjects were. We have much more data on men then we do women. It would be great to accumulate data on women and how they respond differently to keto diets and fasting because we know it’s going to be different. We just need to get more data.

Dr. Pompa:
Do you find that—okay, you have a practice full of women. You’re helping them with hormones, bioidentical hormones, balancing their hormones. Obviously, in your practice, you’re getting them—I’m sure not all of them, but at least some of then to incorporate fasting into their lifestyle. Do you find that you have to really massively adjust bioidentical hormones? Meaning that the fasting has such an impact that it’s like okay, all of a sudden, their cells are becoming more sensitive to the hormones; they need less. The become more balanced. What are you finding there?

Dr. Gersh:
Yeah, I would say that the same is true if they’re on thyroid hormones that we can alter their sex hormone binding globulin, their metabolism. We know that estrogen is so key to the body that there’s actually a microbiome dedicated to detoxification of estrogen in the gut called the estrobolome. When you have the wrong microbiome, the wrong estrobolume, you can make different types of metabolic byproducts that are actually potentially carcinogens. By doing this, and we don’t have long-term data, so just my own experience, is that we actually help them to metabolize their estrogen better.

Yes, we do have to watch their estrogen levels because how they absorb it, how they process it may change. That can be true as well as I mentioned for a thyroid hormone because estrogen is actually very important for thyroid hormone receptor function. Many hormones in the body, they’re very interactive. It turns out that estrogen actually can help regulate the function of receptors for testosterone, and progesterone, and thyroid.

If you metabolize estrogen differently, if you absorb it differently, excrete it differently, yes, it can have an impact. That’s why everybody needs to be treated as they’re N of one because—and treated like we started out with that everyone needs to be looked at for person individualized medicine because we all are unique in our—in every aspect of our bodies. We have our own unique imprint, our own microbiome, and so forth.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt about it. We find the same thing clinically. Yeah, great information. I hope if people heard this: incorporate fasting into your life. Your life will change hormonally, your microbiome, the gut, every place that everyone is struggling with. It’s like, fasting is key; it really is. Our DNA is set up for this, and yet, all we’re doing is feasting.

Dr. Gersh:
We are animals of the animal kingdom. We are genetically programmed. The beautiful thing about fasting is that unlike pharmaceuticals, we’re harnessing our own innate mechanisms for healing, for maintaining health. As an integrative doctor, that is always my goal to try to do things to incorporate our own body processes, our own innate ability to heal, regenerate, and stay healthy, an optimize every aspect of our lives.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, Dr. Felice, thank you. You know what, folks; we’ve been talking about fasting mimicking diet, the ProLon. I’ll have Ashley put it in the note shows because we have how to get it, how to get an actual kit as we’ve been discussing the boxes of food for five days. We’ll make sure we provide that resource for you here in the note shows. Dr. Felice, thank you. I love this topic and you’ve added a lot to it. It was a great conversation. Thanks for being on Cell TV.

Dr. Gersh:
My pleasure, it’s been a lot of fun.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode which was brought to you by Fastonic molecular hydrogen. Please check it out at getfastonic.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, or sharing the show with anyone who may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

271: Secrets of Medicinal Mushrooms

with David “Avocado” Wolfe

I had the pleasure of having David “Avocado” Wolfe speak at my recent seminar, and we sat down together to record this episode of CHTV while on location there. David is sharing all of the principles of wild foods, namely medicinal mushrooms! He's unlocking the magic behind these nootropic, neuro-transmitting superfoods such as chaga, reishi, lions mane, and turkey tail.

About David “Avocado” Wolfe:

David “Avocado” Wolfe is the rock star and Indiana Jones of the superfoods and longevity universe. The world’s top CEOs, ambassadors, celebrities, athletes, artists, and the real superheroes of this planet—Moms—all look to David for expert advice in health, beauty, herbalism, nutrition, and chocolate! He is the visionary founder and president of the non-profit The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation charity with a mission to plant 18 billion fruit, nut, and medicinal trees on planet Earth.

Additional Information:

The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation
Live It To Lead It – Newport (November 14-17)
Fastonic – Molecular H2
David Avocado Wolfe's Website

Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
All right, I’m smiling ear to ear because I just filmed the episode you’re about to watch with David “Avocado” Wolfe. He needs no introduction because he is a YouTube and a Facebook sensation with millions of followers, deservingly. He is a wealth of knowledge in this episode. Look, we had a blast. That is why I’m smiling ear to ear. Wait until you see the episode. I’m telling you, you’re going to learn a lot.

We’re talking about some wild foods that I can’t wait to add more into my diet. Mushrooms—wait until you see these mushrooms in the episode. He even gives a biohack for male pattern baldness with cacao from the bark of the actual tree. We talk about all these amazing wild foods, vanilla bean.

Of course, we talked about avocados and some amazing things to do with avocados, but also, how to actually even impact the absorption, the assimilation of nutrients in blending. Some amazing biohacks that I’m going to start doing right away. Wait until you see this episode. A lot of fun. I’m telling you, this may be one of your favorite episodes. I’ll see you there.

I’m here on location, actually, with David “Avocado” Wolfe, and actually, I’m here at my location. You actually just spoke it, the Live it to Lead it HCF seminar.

David:
Great time, absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
I loved it. I loved the talk.

David:
I did, too. I just loved your audience.

Dr. Pompa:
He did love it. He did. You were having fun, man.

David:
Oh, man, I was like—it’s a treat. You know, I’m a public speaker by nature. I’ve done four or five public speaking events per week for 25 years. When you get in front of a good audience and you can just let loose, there’s hardly anything better.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I saw your fun. I was having fun with you, honestly. I was having to throw a lot of speakers off stage because they were over time, but we didn’t do that to you. We were having fun. We were having too much fun.

David:
Right, you guys were very gracious.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, no, it was great. We’re going to talk about some of the things that he focused on that I’m like, “We got to tell the Cellular Healing TV folks about this.” We’re going to make sure we do that. I have to ask this question first. David “Avocado” Wolfe. What is he saying? Is he saying David “Avocado” Wolfe like avocado, really? Why do they call you “Avocado,” man?

David:
I have been an avocado grower since 1978 is when I planted my first avocado tree in southern California, and I’ve been at it ever since. When I was about 21, 22, 23, we used to go to the jungles of northern San Diego County, which is the avocado growing region. Basically, avocados turn a desert into a jungle. There’s many abandoned avocado orchards there, and we knew where they were.

We’d go in there with Army bags and fill up on avocados. I would get all my food and a lot of citrus for free. That was one of the ways that I got the name. The real name, actually—I’ll give you a little insight there. The real name that my crew gave me—because I didn’t make that name up for myself. My crew gave me that—was actually Fats Avocado.

Dr. Pompa:
Fats Avocado.

David:
Kind of like Fats Domino. Over the years, that part dropped off and just became “Avocado.”

Dr. Pompa:
I love the whole thing, literally. First of all, if you search this guy, you’re going to see pictures of him and a lot of avocados. You had a PowerPoint up, and you were—you could just tell your excitement for the avocado. This is no joke.

David:
Yeah, it’s no joke.

Dr. Pompa:
You showed it, and you’re like, “Look at that picture!” I don’t know what kind of porn you call it; avocado porn or something. Like, “Look at the meat on that and the meat to seed ratio.” I remember, yeah, which means it’s a good avocado, right?

David:
That’s right.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, so let’s just—avocados, there’s a lot here, so let’s kind of unfold this a little bit. It’s more than just his name. There’s amazing qualities to avocado. One thing I learned was there’s 600 varieties or different types of avocados, which have different, obviously, benefits. Let’s talk about why avocados is one of our favorite health foods. Let’s start there.

David:
I want to get into an area of avocados. I didn’t even get into it in our talk because it was just a little too far out, but we might as well get into it, which is polyhydroxylated fatty alcohols.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a big word.

David:
They’re generally shortened as PFAs, polyhydroxylated fatty alcohols, and they are protectors against UV radiation, and they’re also super powerful antioxidants. They’re the most powerful antioxidants, probably, in the avocado and generally accredited with giving us, actually, skin protection in the sun.

Dr. Pompa:
Nice, where do they grow?

David:
Yeah, they come from the highlands of Guatemala, the highlands of Chiapas. They come from the Caribbean. In those places—we come from basically relatively cold climates. You go to those places in the summer, and it’s—it could be sweltering. You can’t even move for three days, stuff like that. That’s a piece of the puzzle that’s not talked about too much. Then the one I was able to get into was the incredible [rev] carotenoids, or carotenoids. People have different pronunciation of it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I think I say carotenoid. You say carotenoid, whatever.

David:
I say carotenoids or carotenoids, but carotenoids because it kind of hits carrot, and then people go, “Oh, you mean the stuff in carrot, which is true,” like beta carotene in carrot. There’s many carotenes in avocados. Probably the most dominant yellow pigment is lutein, which is very important for eyesight, and it’s probably the most bio-available of the carotenoids or carotenoids.

Lutein is one of those things that as you age, you’ve got to make sure you have enough lutein just to maintain healthy eyes. Then another whole fraction of it is the chlorophyll and the pheophytins. It’s interesting about avocados because if you cut an avocado in half, you can see that the middle part’s more yellow, and then it gets green towards the edge.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it does, yeah.

David:
Then if you actually study what’s in the skin, you’ll find out it’s degraded chlorophyll in the skin of the avocado. They’re called pheophytins, and they also have interesting medicinal benefits. The overall picture is I think we’ve got at least five, could be six, yellow carotenoids or carotenoids. We’ve got two orange carotenoids or carotenoids, and then we’ve got typically chlorophyll and then—two types of chlorophyll, chlorophyll A and B and then pheophytin A and B.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s a lot to an avocado. I think it’s one of the only foods that transcends every diet, meaning everyone loves them, your keto people, your Paleo people, your vegans, vegetarians. Everyone loves them.

David:
Fruitarians, yeah, everybody.

Dr. Pompa:
Fruitarians, you’re right. Actually, I think it hits them all. Maybe it’s the perfect food. One of the things you said about the avocado, too, is you go into certain areas and the avocados are very different, and it’s like that watery, stringy one that nobody likes to eat. You made a good point. If they didn’t have air conditioning, they would like that, meaning that it was grew that specifically for the region. It’s that stinking hot. It had a lot of water, probably electrolytes. Who knows?

David:
Yeah, exactly, right. You’ve got a lot of potassium. There’s a lot of energy, a lot of interesting minerals, a lot of magnesium. Avocados are a nutrition powerhouse, but if you’re in south Florida without air conditioning 1,000 years ago, you can’t be eating these big, oily, Hass avocados.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, fatty, heavy, yeah.

David:
Yeah, heavy. In the summertime, you’re going to be sweating and be like, “This is too much.” The Caribbean is basically where that watery avocado and stringy avocado that we probably have tried and didn’t really like, that’s where it all originated. The three cultivars, we did get into that. It was pretty cool. We got into a lot yesterday.

Dr. Pompa:
You actually have farms. You have a farm that you live on in Hawaii, right?

David:
Yep.

Dr. Pompa:
Then for the winter—because you and I did an interview together. You were in a cabin in Canada.

David:
In Canada, yeah, in Ontario, Canada, northern Ontario under a lot of ice. On the back corner of my house, I had about almost two feet of ice.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s a lot of snow.

David:
What happens in that situation—for those of you who like in the north, you know this—is that if you don’t have enough of a pitch on your roof and you’re running a wood-burning stove, the snow will melt and hit a certain point where it pools off at the edge of your roof but doesn’t quite get off the roof. It will pool behind the ice and go into your roof.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s not good.

David:
It’s not good, so I would deal with that. That was my workout every day.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, yeah, that sounds like a mold trap waiting to happen. I have to ask you this because to our point here with the avocados, it’s like you probably eat a very different diet when you’re in your Hawaii place than you did when we did the interview. This is something him and I have in common. You were doing a lot of fasting, right?

David:
Yeah, so were you.

Dr. Pompa:
You were snowed in. I was. I was actually on a five-day water fast myself. Hey, you’re snowed in to this cabin. You’re forced to fast. I mean, you probably could have gotten food, but you chose to do kind of the thing at that time. You were fasting. How long were you fasting for?

David:
I did. I did three-day weekend of just water. I did a lot of—I did pretty much the entire month I was there, I did one meal a day, and the rest was liquids.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, that’s what I love about you because that would have been the appropriate thing to do snowed in the mountains. You’re going to start conserving your food like our ancestors. They were forced to fast at different times.

David:
Especially in February. You roll around to February, you’re out of food, basically, and you’re basically going—if you’re a human being back 1,000 years ago in that climate, you’re kind of going into a hibernation mode.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, so you eat less. Okay, then you go to Hawaii. You’re going to eat more fruits. You’re going to eat more avocados. That’s called diet variation. I preach and teach that, man.

David:
It’s really amazing because you can get to Hawaii, and there you got this cornucopia of goodness. The fundamental thing that would be underneath it is going to be coconut, whereas you get into northern climate, it’s like what’s going to be underneath all your food? It would be something like ghee or something.

Actually, I’ve been a vegan for—I was a vegan for 20 years, but I’m a vegetarian now. When I’m in the north, I’ll do buffalo ghee. Buffalo’s interesting because it’s more wild. It’s more original whereas cows are more domesticated. Maybe we should get into that, like wild foods.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a cool topic, actually, and nobody knows more about it than you do. It’s an interesting thing because how important is ghee for someone who is a vegetarian or a vegan? You need those K2s, right?

David:
Yes, right.

Dr. Pompa:
The ghee is loaded with those incredible fats and fat-soluble vitamins.

David:
Right, exactly, and on top of that, you got the cholesterol molecule, which is really important. The whole thing of it with the way we turned cholesterol into something diabolical is really nasty and really dangerous. That’s the core molecule of all your hormones.

Dr. Pompa:
No, it is a hormone, absolutely, and makes your hormones. You make hormones from cholesterol. People don’t understand that.

David:
Right, exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
They’re running from cholesterol, and meanwhile, you need it to feel good.

David:
Yeah, and also create sex drive, for example. People on statins and cholesterol-lowering medication typically lose sex drive. It’s like well, we got to get you off that stuff so you get—we need to get you the right thing. Then another thing that we do and that I love that we do is we also expose long-held theories that turned out to be theory-tales rather than accurate facts. One of them is the cholesterol myth. I’ve been very deeply into capillary diseases, which it turns out that heart disease, stroke, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, those are all capillary diseases.

Dr. Pompa:
Number one killer. Yeah, that’s right, absolutely. We need cholesterol. Let’s talk about wild foods because it is one of the areas of expertise.

David:
Okay, cool, yeah. We got some in our hands right there.

Dr. Pompa:
It is a cool area. No, exactly. Matter of fact, I think in wild foods, there’s a lot—we don’t eat a lot of this stuff today like our ancestors did. There were different wild foods growing at different seasons. The wild food contained a lot of the stuff we’re discovering fights cancer. A lot of our speakers we had, obviously, a lot on cancer, talked about a lot of the things that are in wild foods that they can easily pick up at their grocery store now.

It was interesting. When I was interviewing you, middle of winter, you still had these mushrooms you were finding up there in Canada. I was kind of stunned by that. Are any of these mushrooms that mushroom?

David:
Yeah, these are harder to pick in winter. This is a chaga mushroom. The chaga mushroom—

Dr. Pompa:
You found one in winter, didn’t you?

David:
Oh, yeah. I’m always out there hunting mushrooms. It doesn’t matter.

Dr. Pompa:
It looks that way, too.

David:
You’re out there. You’re like, “Oh, there’s—look at that.” A lot of times in the winter, it’s easier to see because these are tree mushrooms. That’s an interesting things that I was really excited to get out to your group. Tree mushrooms are medicinal mushrooms. You can’t just say, “Oh, cut down those trees over there. They’re worthless. What do we need them for? Let’s turn them into wood.” They’re actually important creators of our medicine. This grows out of a birch tree. This is a chaga mushroom, the fabled king of the mushrooms.

Dr. Pompa:
Talk about the benefits of these different mushrooms.

David:
These are immunological.

Dr. Pompa:
Mushrooms are some of the most potent immune-boosting foods we can eat.

David:
Yeah, immune-modulating, too, so they’re anti-autoimmune.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, it helps autoimmune, but it helps your good immune. What’s this? What’s this?

David:
Okay, so this is the queen. This is reishi. If you turn that one around, people can see it.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s looks like a turkey tail.

David:
You could see the redness here, and you could see that this brown covering here is actually the spores. See, if I keep wiping this, eventually it’ll come off. You can start seeing—see, you can see it’s a little polished underneath?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

David:
When it releases its spores, the spores kind of come around, and lot of them are deposited even on top of the mushroom. Then the rest float through the forest. I can actually eat that. I just rub that, and I could eat that, and it’s good.

Dr. Pompa:
Really? What if I took a bite of this?

David:
You could do it. See, these are wood. These are woody mushrooms.

Dr. Pompa:
They feel like wood.

David:
This is the queen; this is the king. You can tell the colors, black and red.

Dr. Pompa:
Reishi—

David:
Yeah, reishi, chaga. When you’re dealing with red colors, you’re dealing with red energy, so that’s like your chi, the way you mobilize your energy, the way you mobilize immunity. Dealing with black energy here, you’re dealing with Jing, which is your primordial life force. That’s like your longevity. That’s your ability to survive.

In a cold climate, this mushroom right here was actually required until very recently for survival. I could take a piece of this, get it into a fire, get it hot as a coal, and then I would take another mushroom, a mushroom similar to this, not this exact mushroom.

This is a Ganoderma applanatum, but I could take a Fomes fomentarius, which looks like this. Core a hold into it, take that hot ember, drop it into that other mushroom, and walk around with a hot ember in my hand. For two days, it could make it. That’s how we controlled fire for 10,000 years in North America, Asia, and Europe.

Dr. Pompa:
I was going to say, “Why?” I didn’t know where you were going with that. Just for fire?

David:
Just to control fire, yeah. These mushrooms not only nutritionally, but they’re a key for survival. Otzi the iceman, he had Fomes fomentarius, that mushroom, on him. He was found in that mountain pass between Italy and Austria, and he melted out. Hikers walked by, and they’re like, “Somebody’s over there,” and it was a guy from 5,000 years ago.

He had these mushrooms on him. That’s indicating to us—it’s corroborating for us that these mushrooms had been used for survival as we suspected. Not only that, they’re nutritional. This mushroom, chaga, is one of the most powerful immunological mushrooms in the world, and so is reishi. When you start out, you’re like, “What do I start with with medicinal mushrooms?” reishi and chaga, the king and the queen. Go there first.

Dr. Pompa:
This one has aroma. This one—

David:
Does not.

Dr. Pompa:
No, okay.

David:
If somebody’s allergic to mushrooms, that’s an important point. When we’re allergic to mushrooms, you’re typically allergic to that part of the mushroom that smells like a mushroom. It’s that compound, that aromatic compound that people are allergic to. Chaga doesn’t have that compound, so chaga is actually good for people who are allergic to mushrooms even though it’s a mushroom.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, okay. Some of the health benefits, the main ones with each one of these.

David:
Reishi, not only immunological, but it’s great for chi, so it’s great to way you mobilize your energy. If you have trouble—

Dr. Pompa:
It’s an energy type of mushroom.

David:
It’s an energy type of mushroom, whereas the chaga mushroom is more like—let’s say you’re up late at night. You know what I mean?

Dr. Pompa:
Last night.

David:
Like last night. You’re working through the night or something. Then you’re on chaga tea. It’s not that stimulating. It’s a Jing substance, so it’s feeding into those deep batteries. That’s the kidney theory of Chinese medicine. You can drink this all night, not be stimulated, not be up, not be overly—too excited that you can’t sleep.

Dr. Pompa:
First of all, where can people find these? They’re not going outside in the woods. They’d be like, “I’m going to eat a poisonous mushroom.” You know what I’m saying? They’re not like you. You know every species. Where would they get—could they get this stuff in the grocery store?

David:
Yeah, you actually can.

Dr. Pompa:
Obviously, you can get it in pills, but I’m talking about if you wanted to actually use it live.

David:
This right here, you’re going to have—these are artifacts. You have to know somebody who’s a mushroom hunter. Really hunt the internet.

Dr. Pompa:
You don’t go to Whole Foods and buy this.

David:
Yeah, what’s great about this is that—I got into reishi mushroom through encapsulated products that I was getting in a health food store. A friend of mine cornered me in a health food store about 15 years ago. He’s like, “You got to check this out. This is the best thing ever. You’ve got to get onto this.” I was like, “Okay, I’ll get into it.” Very quickly, from starting with the store material, I got deeper and deeper into it. Within a year, I was a reishi mushroom hunter. That’s how it starts, and chaga, the same.

Dr. Pompa:
He looks like a reishi hunter, or a reishi mushroom hunter, doesn’t he?

David:
It’s great to have something as a hobby when you’re hiking. I love hiking, but I don’t love just going hiking for hiking’s sake. I’m always looking for stuff, wild food.

Dr. Pompa:
He’s like a kid, a big kid. I love it.

David:
Yeah, by the way, look at this. This is some cool stuff. This mushroom is growing out—they grow out the side this way. You can see this top one. See that top one? This is a related species to the reishi, so they kind of look like each other. What happened was this was like that coming out of the tree. Then the tree fell over, and it continued to grow that way.

Dr. Pompa:
They grow horizontal.

David:
Yeah, to the plane of the earth. What’s interesting there is that you’re getting now all these little interesting mushrooms, which are easy to get to. I could break this off. I could break this off easier. Typically, these mushrooms grow really big like this one, and they’re harder to break. If you try to break that off, you kind of have to start at the edge and kind of—okay, let me get that.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s woody.

David:
It’s woody. What I recommend if it’s too much is you put that in a towel, and you just take a hammer, and just hit it once, bam, and it will crack it. That way, you can break it into smaller pieces.

Dr. Pompa:
Do you grind it and put it in tea? What do you do?

David:
Yeah, you’re going to make—this is going to be used for tea, and it could also be used in alcohol, or both, even both.

Dr. Pompa:
What about this one?

David:
Same.

Dr. Pompa:
You have to steep out whether—alcohol does that, as well, right, to your point.

David:
Uh-huh, and they’re different, too. The water in alcohol’s different.

Dr. Pompa:
It pulls the nutrients out.

David:
Yeah, so people ask me like, “Why don’t you just eat it?” It’s very fibrous and woody.

Dr. Pompa:
You wouldn’t get most of the nutrients if you just ate it.

David:
You wouldn’t get most of the nutrients. It would go right through you. You couldn’t extract it. Ancient peoples figured out that like, “Hey, if we just keep making a tea out of that thing,” —that thing will make—this right here, that thing will make 55 gallons of tea easily.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I would imagine.

David:
That’s how much is in there if we did that whole thing. Normally, what I would do is I would just take a chunk, make a tea out of it, then make another tea. Drink that and just keep after it. Then I’m also throwing other things in there, some of my favorite herbs. I’d have nettles in there. I’d have rhodiola root in there. I would have some kind of a goji berries or something, something that’s going to add a little bit of—kind of smooths through the bitters.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome. It sounds good. Man, you’d be the guy. I invited you to stay with me, man. We’re going to enjoy all the—

David:
Oh, yeah. I will bring—

Dr. Pompa:
You’ll be bringing these mushrooms out. I can’t wait.

David:
I’ll get that whole system going at your house, and you’d be like, “Okay, I get this now.”

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I get this now. I have to say, though—we’re talking about the immune-boosting qualities of these mushrooms. You’ve made the comment from stage that, “Hey, I don’t get sick. I’ve never, ever, ever missed a conference or something” —

David:
Missed an event in 25 years.

Dr. Pompa:
Twenty-five years, and obviously, you live this stuff.

David:
Yeah, that’s important. I’m glad you’re bringing that up. We’re thinking, oh, you can’t beat the common cold. You absolutely can beat the common cold and every other thing. Any approach or reproach upon your immune system can be stopped if you have enough immunological intelligence. The polysaccharide fraction of these mushrooms, which comes out in tea, is a momentum-based phenomenon. On day one, you’d be like, “Okay, yeah, I feel good.”

Mostly, where you’re going to feel good from is more the fast-acting triterpenes. The polysaccharides, the long-chain sugars that are in these mushrooms, it’s going to affect your immune system at day one. Your white blood cells are going to go yep, we want that, more of that food. Then day 10, they’re going to be like, yes, more. At day 100, they’re going to be like, yep, we like this. It creates a momentum where, actually, after about a year or two, your whole immune system changes even if you’re not having the mushrooms.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s cool.

David:
It just becomes more educated or more intelligent. At this point, I can’t even calibrate how different my immune system is than it was before, but it is very different.

Dr. Pompa:
Look, some people are going, “Okay, I’m not playing around with mushrooms.” Do you lose the qualities if you put it in a pill? The pills that you buy in most health food stores, is there good ingredients in it, man? This stuff’s fragile.

David:
There could be good products. There could be good products in health food stores because people who are into this world want that for you. We know that the chances of you going and hunting this down in the forest is [00:21:31].

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s my point.

David:
There are great products in health food stores. There are great products available.

Dr. Pompa:
You created a lot of products, and you can tell them where you get them. Have you created one with mushrooms?

David:
Yes, for example, we could take this—

Dr. Pompa:
I want to buy yours.

David:
Okay, cool.

Dr. Pompa:
I do. It’s like if I’m going to take a mushroom product, I know this guy. I know he’s harvesting the best and doing the best things. You take your own products like I do.

David:
I will bring you—a good friend of mine, Farmer Joe, he’s my neighbor. This guy was one of those guys who is—we have many of these in our community. He was just like a real party guy in the sense of he drank, did every drug, did all that stuff to almost the point he killed himself. He survived it and basically said, “I’m going back to the earth and going back to farming.” He comes from that. He’s a legit kind of character in the sense of when you go over there, he’s really organic.

He doesn’t use a chemical on anything. He lives from the earth. He developed a system where he takes the chaga mushrooms picked from our forest and cooks them down to a granular material. Literally half a teaspoon of that stuff into hot water, instant tea. That’s made using, essentially, a maple syrup type of device. He’s essentially cooking out, and trying to get all of the material out of the chaga mushroom, and then evaporating it off, and concentrating it down to a syrup, and then crystallizing it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome.

David:
You’d love that product.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, man. Give them where to go to purchase this stuff. This is cool stuff, man. I’m not going to get this, but you know what I’m saying. What products do you have?

David:
Yeah, what I would—I would go to—let me just go down the list of types of products because that’s important. You got capsules, you got powders. We innovated years ago the whole idea of giving people this kind of mushroom as a powder. Now, you can’t powder this mushroom. There’s too much wood, but what we can do is we can grow this mushroom on corn. We can grow this mushroom on rice.

We can grow this mushroom on hemp. The hemp’s my favorite. My friends up in Edmonton grow reishi mushroom on hemp. Then you can take the mycelium or the white material, and you can just dry it, and it powder it. Then that way, you can have it as a powder for your drink. This is the fruiting body or the reproductive organ of the mushroom. The body of the mushroom’s actually in the tree in this case.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’d be back here.

David:
We could create a fake tree, which is a big bag of hemp stalks, for example, that have been used to grow hemp seed. You take all the materials at the end of the season, and you grow it on it.

Dr. Pompa:
Does it take on some of those qualities?

David:
It does. The hemp reishi is something else, man. It really is. Then you have that big bag. You’ll get two products out of that. You’ll get the fruiting bodies that’ll come out of the bag, but the bag itself, you can powder and use as a powder in your super-food drinks or whatever.

Dr. Pompa:
They’re going, “I want to buy that.” Me, too.

David:
Yeah, and you can get that. You can get those kind of products. They’re all over the internet. You just have to kind of hunt around.

Dr. Pompa:
What would you look for?

David:
You’re going to look for reishi mushroom mycelium. That’s what it’s called, reishi mushroom mycelium. It would be the powdered mycelium of this mushroom or the powdered mycelium of chaga.

Dr. Pompa:
Do you have a company that’s good?

David:
I like Paul Stamets’s company, Fungi Perfecti. There’s a great company. What are they called? Mushroom Sciences, that’s a good company. They focus on hot water extracts. We focus a lot on alcohol extracts. The ways that I get these mushrooms to you is I’ll get them to you at a live event like this. Typically, on the internet, it’s going to be a dual extract. We’re going to extract it with alcohol, and then we’re going to add the tea of that mushroom in concentrate to a bottle so that every dropper full, you’re like, “Oh, okay. I got something on that one.”

If I’m out and about—let’s say I’m a tour or something, and there’s no time to make tea every day, then I’m bringing those bottles. If I’m out at a party like we were at last night, being out on the town here in Nashville, then at that point—let’s say I’m at a big party with my friends in the mountains of western British Columbia, then I’ll drink an entire bottle of tincture in a night. That’s really something. That is really powerful.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I want to do that. You have to understand, I’m a biohacker by nature. I want to try everything. After this interview, we’re going to go do some ‘shrooms. That didn’t sound very good. We’re going to do some of these ‘shrooms.

David:
Yeah, and by the way, these are not—these two, in particular, are above psychoactive. They’re in a category that’s beyond that. Once you’ve, like Farmer Joe, you almost killed yourself with drugs and alcohol, you don’t want that anymore. You want to go to the next level higher, and reishi and chaga, they represent that. They really do.

Dr. Pompa:
Are they nootropics in a sense because they—

David:
Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
A nootropics means it’s good for your brain. It makes your brain work better, basically.

David:
Yeah, reishi contains neurotransmitters.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, that’s awesome.

David:
Many mushrooms do, actually. They’re nootropics, so they’ll improve your focus. Generally, what we say is—let’s say somebody’s been on Adderall. In Chinese medicine, they’re shen disturbers.

Dr. Pompa:
A lot of people, kids, are using Adderall without understanding the real consequences.

David:
There was one guy here who was like that. You could see the effect that it has on, actually, your overall aura, really. I don’t know how else to describe it. You could see the overall countenance of a person. Reishi, historically, is the mushroom that was recommended in Chinese medicine for that. When somebody’s been—their nervous system’s disturbed. Their countenance is disturbed. Their aura is disturbed. Then you go to reishi.

Now, if you’re in a—I got to put this out there. If you’re in a health food store, and you’re like, “Okay, this is a reishi. This is a Fungi Perfecti.” I think Paul calls his line Host Defense. You see reishi, and you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to get that one.” One or two’s not going to be that strong. It’s not going to feel it, but if you took nine capsules, you’ll feel it.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s what I want to do.

David:
You’d be like, “Whoa, I feel calmer. I feel able to meditate.” This is an excellent meditation mushroom, by the way. I love reishi for meditation.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s the nootropics effect, obviously. We could talk mushrooms all day.

David:
I know. [00:27:29].

Dr. Pompa:
I know. I love these things, man, but I know the nutrition, the healing. There’s so much here. It’s very exciting. You talked a lot about—there’s other wild foods. Matter of fact, I was just going to ask you about one, but I almost want to just let you talk about which one you love to talk about.

David:
Okay, right now, because of springtime, it’s kind of the signal to cleanses. You have the young, green plants coming up. Like in Ontario, soon the leeks are going to be up. When the leeks come up, that’s basically a liver cleanser. You’re going to go out, and you’re going to pick the leeks. You’re going to make a salad out of leeks. Start cleansing your liver. That’s following the signals of nature. Young, green, sprouted plants have this rejuvenative quality.

When you get to right now, the end of winter, you’ve been huddled in there. You’ve been fasting. You haven’t had much fiber. You probably had too much fat and protein through the winter to get you through, not enough salad. That’s when you go to the green foods that are going to have that rejuvenation. That’s essentially what Ann Wigmore had institutionalized in her Hippocrates treatment, which is let’s get you sprouts and sprout juice to rejuvenate your liver and get you back to live again and live enzymes.

Dr. Pompa:
It goes with my theory of diet variation, meaning today, we eat the same diet. People get locked into the same eight foods, and they’re eating it year-round when we were forced to change our diets, seasonally, environmental pressures, lack of food, change of food, whatever. Here comes spring, and it really is providing, just like the avocados in the areas they grow, it’s providing what our bodies are yearning for. Like you said, it’s that spring cleanse.

David:
This is the thing we were getting back to on what’s your underneath thing that’s always there? In the tropics, coconut’s always in season, so it’s one of the things you could eat consistently because that’s what’s there. Ghee basically could always be in season because it keeps. This is very important for survival. Almost every other thing is changing constantly.

Ancient humans figured out, oh, my God, if I could make some olive oil, I could survive because I’d have a fat source that stays with me throughout the seasons. Now, it’s hamburgers every day. It’s gotten to that point where it’s like this is not—has anything to do with anything legit wild food. Another big category of wild foods that I’m really into, and obviously, on the other side of the season, is wild berries.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, man, you showed some of that, the color spectrums, and the proanthocyanidins, and all the things based on each color, the blues and—here comes the blueberries, which again, spring. I love it. I’m going to be loading up on some of the really good berries. That’s my fruit of choice. I just love the berries.

David:
Me, too, yeah. If you’ve been around the nutritional world a long time—and I think this point came across really good last night, which is wild food, it can’t have too much sugar because every insect, every candida, every mold in the forest is coming for that sugar. It just, by nature, is in balance, so it’s not going to create a problem inside us because it’s not hidden behind a farmer’s fence line. It’s not protected from nature. It’s part of nature.

That’s something with farming. This is a very important principle of farming. If the bugs come for the cabbage, then that cabbage wasn’t meant for you. You let it go. Go to something else. You go with what is going to make it there. This one kid, his family first came to one of my events, he was six months old. This kid’s a genius because he’s gotten this information since he was born. I was asking him about growing tomatoes, and he’s like, “Oh, I don’t grow tomatoes. They’re just too weak to survive in my ecosystem.” I was like, “Whoa.” He’s in a rainforest.

Dr. Pompa:
It wasn’t getting what it needed to protect itself from the soil, so therefore, don’t do it.

David:
Yeah, don’t do it, exactly. That’s the principle of wild food. You can go hunt wild food, which I recommend, especially wild berries and wild, young, green plants. The other side of it is you can kind of create a wild food garden, which is what I do. My stuff is wild. I’m not going, running around going, “Oh, we got to spray this. It’ll protect this from something.”

Dr. Pompa:
When I grew up, most of the families, we all had a garden. It was for a reason; it saved you money because you could grow most of this stuff in the summer, and then [00:31:40].

David:
Absolutely, and tastes better.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it sure does and more nutritious. Most people out there are going, “Okay, I’m not hunting anything. I’m working 10-hour days.” They’re hunting in Whole Foods, man. Go to Whole Foods—

David:
Yeah, but they could be out hiking.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s true. I know some people are out there hiking, and they’re going to be hunting foods, man. There’s no doubt about it, but the other ones are going, “Okay, so what do I do in Whole Foods?” Can you give them some advice?

David:
Sprouts, broccoli sprouts, radish sprouts, go to the really potent sprouts that are going to have that sulforaphane.

Dr. Pompa:
Even in Whole Food, you’re going to see more of those things as spring comes.

David:
Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re going to see fresher berries, so buy them and get them.

David:
Yeah, and hunt them down in your local ecosystem. Really, it’s just amazing. Every ecosystem, you don’t need to know every plant. Everyone knows dandelion. Literally, if you got dandelion in your yard, eat it. Try it out. At least experiment with it. Then you go from there. It’s not like I suddenly learned like, oh, okay, here’s the 100 things in my ecosystem. Just start out with the stuff—one thing that I knew and then two things.

Dr. Pompa:
As a kid, my best friend growing up—I don’t know where we got this idea, but we heard about making dandelion wine.

David:
Oh, whoa!

Dr. Pompa:
We’re just kids, right?

David:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
Back then, you didn’t have the internet. You know what I mean? I don’t even know where we got this. Maybe I found some book or something. I was a biohacker then. We made dandelion wine. Our parents had no idea what we were doing. The bottles had balloons on the top, like fermenting.

David:
Oh, geez!

Dr. Pompa:
Anyways, it worked. Yeah, we got sick, but it worked. Our parents thought we poisoned ourselves, but actually, no. We just were alcohol poisoned, I think, as kids. Pretty funny, but anyways, we experimented.

David:
That’s the thing, too, is it is a big experiment. A lot of this is an experiment. You’re not going to go out the first day and make the best reishi tea, although you could get lucky. You’re not going to go out and suddenly find this or something, although you could get lucky. You got to go out there and just kind of go, “Oh, okay, I think that’s it.”

What’s amazing today is you got your phone. You go, “Let me look on my phone and see” —you can pull it up, and you can pull it up on images on a search engine and be like, “Okay, is this that?” You’re like, “Okay, that’s it.” That’s kind of neat, too.

Dr. Pompa:
Do you have resources on your website? By the way, this guy has—I don’t know how many millions of Facebook followers you have. We have people here with big followings. I promise you, his is the biggest. You’ve been at it a long time.

David:
I’ve been at it a long time, 25 years.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. Remember the bullet?

David:
NutriBullet.

Dr. Pompa:
Someone said last night, “What does he do?” I said dah, dah, dah. Like, “I think I saw him on TV with that bullet thing.” That was you.

David:
Yeah, actually those guys came to me. They had a little, tiny Magic Bullet.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, the Magic Bullet.

David:
It’s like a small one. They’re like, “We want to go to the bigger thing like your market, that bigger, more robust blender.” That was probably about 2010.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, was it that long ago?

David:
That long ago, and so I worked with them. We created what was back then—I think it was called the VitaBullet was the original name of it. Then one of those guys came back. He’s like, “NutriBullet,” and everybody’s like, “Yeah!” That became the name. I co-developed that project. I’m still in that project, and I still absolutely love that project. It’s awesome.

Dr. Pompa:
You said they really focused on a specific heat or not heat. They really dialed that in, the RPMs and—

David:
They dialed it in.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

David:
The NutriBullet Rx, the more robust system, if you hit the button and you go for the six minute and 45 second cycle on it, it will make your perfect soup at the perfect temperature to extract from the vegetables in that soup the carotenoids or carotenoids.

Dr. Pompa:
Do you sell those on your website, the NutriBullet?

David:
I don’t because it’s so available. It’s in all stores, and it’s everywhere, so I just direct people there. I do social media.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. Give them your website.

David:
DavidWolfe.com, D-A-V-I-D-W-O-L-F-E, E at the end, the English spelling, not the German, dot com. You can also find me Facebook.com, David “Avocado” Wolfe, or you can find my Instagram, David “Avocado” Wolfe.

Dr. Pompa:
Find him, entertainment. He was entertaining last night.

David:
It’s entertainment that’s got another—it’s edu-tainment.

Dr. Pompa:
It is. You educate like crazy. All right, I’m going to give you men out there a little biohack, one of the things you said from stage last night. You were talking about chocolate. We can talk more about chocolate because I learned a lot, actually. This is what I didn’t know: There’s a way to take the outer portion of the chocolate, make this serum that you make, and put it on your head, men, and it literally, for male pattern baldness—and you said it works, man.

David:
It works. There’s a very interesting thing. We got a lot of guys on my farm, for example. When we make that up—so I’ll get a big glass container like this that’s open at the top, so it’s a big, open glass container. I’ll fill it with water, maybe three quarters. Then we’ll take strips of cacao bark. It’s actually the bark of the tree.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, the bark. I was thinking the outside of the cacao seed. No, it’s the bark.

David:
That’s also used for other things. That’s a whole other—

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, talk about that.

David:
Chocolate’s a big story, very big story. We trim our trees a lot, so we do have that material, and you just put it in water. You just basically soak the bark in water, and it secretes a gel very similar to aloe vera, almost identical. It’s a man’s thing. Women go for aloe vera. “I’ll put that on my face,” and all this kind of thing. It’s interesting. You got all these guys on the farm and all these women on the farm. The women don’t go for it. The men do. It’s a trip. It’s interesting. It’s energetic.

I’m not saying anything to anybody, but the men are going, “Okay, let me dip my hand in there,” and then you scrub it in like that. That’s all you do. We got this big thing with the bark in it and the water. The gel comes out. You dip your hands in there. You get this gel on your hands, and you rub it into your scalp. It reverses male pattern baldness. It’s the traditional cure for male pattern baldness in the Amazon.

Dr. Pompa:
Would it work on women who say, “My hair’s thinning?” Would it help?

David:
Maybe, but it’s more of a man’s thing. It’s just a trip like that.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, now they’re asking the question, “Where do I buy the bark, man?” You can’t buy the bark in a grocery store.

David:
It’s not available as a product, yet, although I have gone through iterations of how to stabilize the material. I’ve made, probably, three or four different versions to see, hey, is there a way we could actually get this out there? The stabilizing thing that I think works is apple cider vinegar. We may put a product out at some point in that regard.

Dr. Pompa:
Smart, yeah. You can buy everything on the internet. I wonder if you Googled cacao bark—

David:
Yeah, you could probably buy it, exactly. Throw it in water and [00:38:11].

Dr. Pompa:
Throw it in water. There’s the answer. All right, give me some of the other benefits because you did. There was a lot more benefits. I love eating just the cacao seed itself.

David:
Yes, thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
I actually love that.

David:
If you’re into ketogenic diets, and you’re just like, “Look, I don’t want any sugar,” or you want to have chocolate without sugar, you eat cacao nibs by itself. They’re delicious, and they’re nutritious, and they’re powerful, 10 times more nutritious than an almond. They’re the most nutritious nut in the world. That’s an interesting thing, too. It’s a nut.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s a male food in a sense, too. Bodybuilders actually take it for recovery, but also, it raises T and these other things that they want to raise.

David:
It’s a driver, too, so you’ll see it in a lot of products. You’re going to see—especially bodybuilder products, you’ll see caffeine is added and/or theobromine. Now, chocolate contains a lot of theobromine, not that much caffeine, but it does contain caffeine. When you add chocolate to something, you’re basically helping it drive into your system. You’re helping your body absorb it. They’ll tell you, “Oh, we’ve got this chocolate flavor of our protein.” They’re doing that because their protein will work better because they would get in better.

Dr. Pompa:
I just got really excited because I was like, “Oh, I remember when you said it from stage,” and I was like, “Oh, my gosh. We have to blend with him right now.” One of the best ways to get things in is blending, right?

David:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Juicing certain things, too, but you were talking about, great, you can blend or juice this, but the problem is absorbability. You gave some great tips on how to do this to increase absorbability majorly. Talk about it.

David:
This is NutriBullet. Years back, they’re like, “You need to figure this out. Here, go figure this out.” It’s this whole science of absorption of our food and how many antioxidants actually make it into our blood. It’s one thing to say, “Oh, there’s a certain amount of antioxidants in this.”

Dr. Pompa:
Right, but can you get it in your blood and cells? That’s the question.

David:
Right, is it getting in? That led to the next generation of antioxidant research, which is what’s changing in blood chemistry an hour later, two hours later, four hours later, eight hours later, sixteen hours later, twenty-four hours later, two days later? That’s been worked out on many different antioxidants including carotenoids.

One of the things about the carotenoids or carotenoids is things like lycopene, for example. Let’s just do that one because that’s tomato, the red color of tomato. If you eat a tomato, only 5% of that lycopene is going to make it into your blood.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, not much.

David:
That’s not much. It’s 95% of what you paid for or what you grew is going to go right through you. What’s been figured out is if you blend that, 10% makes it in. Now, that makes sense. That’s like chewing it. We don’t chew enough. Nobody chews enough. When you blend, you chew 1,000 times in a minute. It’s ch-ch-ch-ch.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, more nutrients that you’re getting out of the food.

David:
You’re going to double your absorption of lycopene, just as an example.

Dr. Pompa:
Five to ten.

David:
Five to ten percent.

Dr. Pompa:
We can go higher.

David:
Then if we go—if we’re like okay, lycopene, and all carotenoids, and almost all antioxidants in plants are oil-soluble. The next level beyond that is you’re going to add a little olive oil. Now, if you add a little olive oil and blend it—

Dr. Pompa:
That’s why the Italians, we do tomato with olive oil. It’s going to up the lutein. You felt that grassy olive oil. You just felt that in your throat?

David:
Yeah, it was like—yeah. I do a lot of olive oil, pretty much every day.

Dr. Pompa:
Me, too, yeah. [00:41:33]. I love it.

David:
It’s one of my favorites. It’s just Mediterranean, you know, Mediterranean diet. Anyway, the thing that’s interesting is then, okay, can we get even higher because 40% is a lot different than 5%. It’s eight times more. We got eight times more antioxidants from the same food basically in the same amount of time. Then can we even improve that? The answer is you bet we can. We can improve that because the next step is with a little bit of heat. Not too much, but a little bit of heat.

Let me tell you this. This is an interesting piece of research. We can even get it up to 60% absorption of lycopene in the case of tomatoes if we blend them with olive oil and get them up to about 114 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s probably 35 Centigrade.

Dr. Pompa:
If you keep the thing spinning, it creates enough heat.

David:
Yeah, it’ll create enough heat.

Dr. Pompa:
Then you’re making a warm soup at that point.

David:
Right, and it’s molecularly heated up because it’s heated up by the friction of all those molecules in that blender for six minutes and forty-five seconds. Then we go to the next level, which is so fascinating to me. If it cools down, it takes the lycopene absorption in this case down back again to 40%.

It’s the temperature you consume it at, turns out was in blood research, is going to indicate how much of that lycopene in this case is going to make it in or other carotenoid. That’s telling us something. It’s kind of like the Chinese medicine theory of when you drink warm water, it’s accepted by more people as being hydrating in the morning. Typically, people drink warm water with lemon all over the world.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s the way they start their day, a lot more hydrating.

David:
There’s something to that. Now, certain metabolisms, interestingly, are different, a small fraction. I think I’m one of those people. I drink cold water even in the winter. You know what I mean?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I don’t gravitate to that.

David:
A colon hydrotherapist showed me that, actually, because we used to have a colon hydrotherapist come to our retreats. One of the things that this colon hydrotherapist would show me is that almost everybody’s going to release better on warm water, but some people are outliers, and they release better on cold water. It’s just one of those—

Dr. Pompa:
You’re an outlier, dude. Of course he’s an outlier. Of course he is. There’s no doubt about it. Vanilla bean was one you actually didn’t have a chance to really get to from stage last night.

David:
Oh, man, the vanilloids.

Dr. Pompa:
Again, they were running them off the stage, perhaps. Tell me about it.

David:
The vanilloids, that’s a story you’re going to be hearing more about. Many, many psychoactive substances are vanilloids. They’re related to the vanillin molecule. Just off the top of my head, like mescaline, which is closely related to adrenaline, which is very closely related to vanillin. You think, what do you mean? The vanilla flavor like [00:44:22].

Dr. Pompa:
[00:44:22].

David:
What’s in vanilla has a very strong visceral connection to one of our core—basically, one of our core energy systems, which is our adrenals. You think, what? Wait, hold on. Go on further. Let me give you another example. Capsaicin, which is in hot peppers, is a vanilloids, and it’s related to vanilla, and it’s related to adrenaline. It’s related to mescaline. Mescaline’s a psychoactive substance. That’s the psychoactive substance of peyote.

Anyway, when you start looking at these vanilloids, you start to find out that you can tweak vanillin and tweak capsaicin and get things that can cause you to be in hyper-focus.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s awesome, another nootropic.

David:
Vanilla is a nootropic. That’s the point I’m trying to make here. Yes, the smell, for sure, has that effect.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s why you have vanilla in all the incense.

David:
It’s the number one spice in the world.

Dr. Pompa:
Candles, all of it, because of the smell, right? I love the smell. Who doesn’t love the smell of vanilla?

David:
Who doesn’t love the smell? There’s a big science and a big story behind it. I not only will make—I’ll tell you what my favorite is because I’m a vanilla grower.

Dr. Pompa:
My next question was well, how do we consume it, man? What’s the best way?

David:
The best way to consume it is you basically—it’s valuable when you have it. You take a section like that. You got a bean like this. Make sure you get big, fat, juicy beans.

Dr. Pompa:
Where do you buy them?

David:
Don’t get dried twigs. You have to look. You have to hunt them down. You have to really find somebody who’s got it.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, so you can’t buy them in health food stores or anything like that.

David:
No, typically, you go to a health food store, you’ll—you can buy vanilla beans, but they’re like dry twigs. You go [cracking noise], and it’s like this is junk. You’ve got to hunt them down. I grow vanilla, but I sell only to my little group because I don’t have enough. I’m just a small-time guy. Anyway, once you get the nice, juicy bean, take a section about, maybe, I don’t know, three centimeters.

You’re going to cut that, and you’re going to make a tea out of that. Now, if you make a tea out of that, you can keep making tea, keep making tea, keep making tea. I always recommend saving some of that tea in the back of your fridge ice-cold, and you’ll find that it has a really amazing flavor the next day. What’s the background flavor? It’s one of my favorites. It’s cream soda. Cream soda flavor comes from vanilla.

Then even at the end, when you’ve—once you’ve made that tea, made that tea, made that tea, you don’t even just throw that vanilla away. It’s too valuable. You fish it out. You can blend it. I’ll throw it in a NutriBullet and blend it in with stuff, so I eat it, or you can throw it into alcohol. You start accumulating an alcohol with vanilla in it because that’s your vanilla extract. That’s what vanilla extract is.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, yeah. That was my next question. Okay, if they can’t hunt it, how can they get vanilla? Vanilla extracts, use it—

David:
Let me give some advice about that because there’s a lot of fraudulent vanilla extract. It can contain tonka beans. A lot of it was coming in from Mexico because tonka beans are relatively—tonka beans is a type of nut that’s about the size of an almond that has a—it’s where Coumadin comes from. It’s a blood thinner. You have to be very careful because some—it actually has to say on the vanilla extract, contains no tonka beans. Look for that.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, so if it doesn’t say that, it probably has tonka beans.

David:
Or it could be cut with it, or they’re not conscious of that problem.

Dr. Pompa:
The people that are on Coumadin would have to stay away from it, so they would have to know [00:47:44].

David:
Right, because it could hyper-thin out your blood.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, totally, yeah.

David:
That is a problem, actually, with vanilla extracts. In Mexico, they’re cutting it in to the vanilla extracts, and then people are having hyper-blood thinning reactions who are on blood thinner medication already. You have to be careful about that. It’s just a thing to look for. No tonka beans. Tonka is like Tonka trucks, T-O-N-K-A.

Dr. Pompa:
I was going to ask that, too. I’m a dyslexic, so we got to make sure we spell these things out.

David:
Right, you make it real clear. That’s a good thing to look for. Then vanilla extracts, just a little bit into your drinks, like your chocolate drinks—

Dr. Pompa:
I put them in my shakes. I love vanilla flavor with everything.

David:
It’s the best, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
I was doing something even better. It’s funny. I put vanilla extracts. I love the Cocoa Nibs, which is the cacao nibs. I could use that as a base with anything, man. Then I could put lettuces, anything, some berries. These are my shakes.

David:
Yeah, exactly. Vanilla and berries, how you going to beat that?

Dr. Pompa:
It’s the best.

David:
Vanilla, berries, and chocolate—with the NutriBullet guys years ago, they’re like, “You know what? When you get on TV, what you need to tell these people is you need to tell them, ‘Hey, if you want to get the great flavors of this world every day, this is how you do it.’” Man, that was good advice.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve been in ketosis most of this winter. I do that, but, man, I’m—you have me so excited because I’m coming out of ketosis. I’m gravitating now to a plant-based thing with the berries. I can’t wait.

David:
Oh, nice!

Dr. Pompa:
You’re firing me up, man. Break out the blender.

David:
Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
We’re going to kill it. We’re going to kill it! We’re going to increase all the nutrients. I’m going to—

David:
Boom, increase the nutrients, increase your immunity, increase your overall happiness and general vibration. We were talking about that with reishi, your overall countenance. In Chinese medicine, it’s more translated to aura. Shan is the word, actually. They would say shan also is—it’s interesting. In Chinese, shan is associated also with mountains.

Dr. Pompa:
Nice.

David:
If I said the shan yao yam, it’s the mountain yam, the one that grows in the mountains. That’s a very shan and kind of almost spiritually auric and protective kind of food, as reishi is.

Dr. Pompa:
When fall comes, you start getting your ground vegetables, all that fun stuff.

David:
Yes, roots.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s even that time for the grain, the ancient grain. The harvest in fall, that’s typically when I dig in a little deeper in some foods that I typically don’t eat. That’s what I try to do. I vary my diet. I love that. Number one, I don’t get bored. Number two, I believe it’s in our DNA. I believe it’s the way that really helps the microbiome.

David:
I completely agree with you. By the way, wild food for the microbiome is—

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, man. A lot of people made that point. It’s like we’re taking pills trying to increase—and there’s a place for that, but this stuff, we don’t even understand.

David:
It’s covered with it. [00:50:35] —

Dr. Pompa:
This is microbiome. This is like—

David:
[00:50:39] get the spores off.

Dr. Pompa:
We’ll find out 10 years from now what this does to the microbiome.

David:
Right, exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s specific bacterias that will just love and thrive on that.

David:
Right there, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s just incredible.

David:
Same with this, as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt.

David:
That’s really true of all of the amazing herbs and wild foods of your ecosystem. Again, you don’t have to know everything, but knowing one thing is kind of your foot in the door.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. One more little fun thing here, and again, I could go on and on, man, with you. I’m so into these wild foods, it’s unbelievable. Charcoal—

David:
Oh, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Charcoal’s not a food. However you and I believe—I take charcoal all the time. It’s a product that I created, Bind, and we dug for all these charcoals because there’s a lot of dirty charcoal that people are selling on the market. We tested it.

David:
Shockingly so.

Dr. Pompa:
Lead, we tested—it was hard to find. We found this one charcoal that binds. This stuff, if you threw it in the air, it goes vroom to the walls. Look, you showed some really convincing studies that I think I showed in the past, how charcoal extends your life. Talk about that.

David:
This is one of those shocking—

Dr. Pompa:
There’s no nutrients here. How’s charcoal [00:51:52]?

David:
It’s one of those shocking discoveries. You’re like, “What does this mean?” In scientific research, and animal research, and lab research, to extend the life of an animal by 20% or more is pretty much impossible. The only way you’re going to get there is by fasting. That will only be in certain types of studies where the animals are fasted correctly, meaning that they weren’t malnourished to begin with and stuff like that, or your calorie restriction, you might get 20% extension of lifespan.

By the way, that means that all nutrients, like, let’s say olive oil—which olive oil in research is one of the great life extenders. It’s 9 to 18 percent, typically in studies in, let’s say, a mouse, or a dog, or a cat. You’re thinking, what? Olive oil, whoa. That’s only 9 to 18 percent. What does that mean? Let’s say human lifespan is really 100. We should easily make it to 100. If we extend the lifespan 9%, that means you’re going to make it to 109 years old, just to make that clear. If we’re going to extend the lifespan 20%, it means you’re going to make it to 120 years old.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a ton!

David:
That’s crazy. With activated charcoal, it is common in scientific research to extend the life of an animal 21%, 30%, 33%, 34%.

Dr. Pompa:
I thought I saw one 38 on one of your slides.

David:
Yeah, 38%, even 40%, 43%, 44%.

Dr. Pompa:
Forty percent, so 140. That’s incredible.

David:
It’s almost like it’s hard to actually accept that. You’re like, “What does this mean?” I’ll tell you what it means. It means one thing, and that is for longevity, detoxification is way more important than nutrition.

Dr. Pompa:
We gravitate on that. You and I love nutrition. We’re all about it; however we both agree that detoxification, especially today, is more important—

David:
Way more important.

Dr. Pompa:
First of all, the fact that charcoal can extend lives, it has something to do with this toxicity issue.

David:
For sure, no question.

Dr. Pompa:
Then another product we both love is CytoDetox. These are both particles, things that are in the soils, that help humans to detoxify.

David:
It’s the whole name of the game, it really is. You want to become healthier, you detoxify. Essentially, what’s making us sick is the metabolic toxins, the environmental toxins, and then toxins that accumulate just from life. We have toxins generated every day by metabolism, but what about the toxins from three years ago that we generated by metabolism that have accumulated, plus environmental toxins, which are food, air, and water?

Dr. Pompa:
The cool thing is charcoal works amazing in the gut, pulling stuff out of the BioComplex from the liver. CytoDetox, that gets in the cell and the cell membrane where a lot of these toxins accumulate. The two together, it’s magic.

David:
Clay, too, in your—you’re [00:54:50] because I think in your Bind product, you’ve got charcoal and clay.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we have four different types of binders in there, even humates, which, again, this is stuff that we find in the soil. It’s there for human and animals’ protection because they would eat that. The point is we had trouble finding a clean one. When we built the product Bind out that has all these cool binders in it, we had to test all these products. We still test every batch because every once in a while, you get a contaminated—they’re binders so they end up getting contaminated.

David:
That’s an important point. Let me just specify that point. Let’s say you go and you’re like, “Let me get a big bag of activated charcoal that’s open, not encapsulated.” If you leave that open in your house, it will pull to itself every toxin in your house, in the atmosphere, that it can get to. It’s an attractor. Now, just think about what that does in your body. It’s going to pull to itself. Interestingly, the binding forces are called van der Waals forces.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s cool.

David:
What’s interesting about them is we think of—sometimes we think of, oh, activated charcoal. It’s going to bind up my healthy nutrients. There’s no research to show that.

Dr. Pompa:
No, it’s true.

David:
That’s a shocking statement, meaning that in research science, they’ve been trying for 70 years to prove, for example, that activated charcoal interferes with B Vitamins. It doesn’t. It doesn’t interfere with Vitamin C. It doesn’t interfere with calcium, magnesium. It doesn’t interfere with any of the major macronutrients, protein, fat, carbohydrates. That is really shocking. That has to do with these electrochemical forces that are going on with charcoal, we call van der Waals forces.

Another thing that’s interesting about that, let’s say you use charcoal to—let’s say you’ve got an activated charcoal filter in your house or something, air filter. Then you want to purify that charcoal. You can heat it up. It’ll disperse the chemicals off that it’s accumulated. Let’s say you wanted to use that charcoal again. You could literally heat it off, volatilize those chemicals off, cool the charcoal back down, and use it all over again, brand new, like it’s brand new. It’s not a sponge in that way that we think about it. It’s something else going on. There’s nobody who really actually understands how it works.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s incredible. When we look at—we did a lot of study—the active ingredient in CytoDetox is clinoptilolite, which is a zeolite particle. Again, we had to actually come up with a patented process how to clean it because it’s such a darn good binder.

David:
Right, pulls things to itself.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly, so we had to knock the bad stuff off. It’s really cool because it comes from volcanic ash. Again, the environment provides. Think of all the radiation from a volcano. What does nature provide to absorb it so that wildlife doesn’t die? These clinoptilolite particles. That’s really cool, right?

David:
That’s such an interesting thing. I’m a big fan of hunting these on lava fields on the Big Island of Hawaii. There you’ve got lava and all of the amazing compounds and zeolite compounds that are created, especially right there in the ocean because as those boulders of lava go in, they expand.

Dr. Pompa:
In the water.

David:
Right, and they create zeolites right there on the spot. It’s fascinating.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s how it happens.

David:
Along the whole coastline because it’s touching the water. Another thing that’s happening is that forests are being mowed down by this lava. What grows out of that wood? These.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s incredible.

David:
If you’re really paying attention to the overall kind of direction of our message, what we’re talking about, lava is new earth. It’s young. It’s renewed. Then if you’re looking at this, you’re talking about immune system. There you are on that lava field of wood, rain, sun, moon. It’s a laboratory. When you got these growing out there—that’s what I do. I go and hunt these out there. You make a tea out of those medicinal mushrooms that have literally grown right above that lava as it’s been cooling, it’s something else.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s killer. You imitate it, right? Take CytoDetox, Bind, the mushrooms. We talked about cacao.

David:
As powders, get them as powders. Start there, or capsules.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. We talked about vanilla. We talked about charcoal, obviously, the chocolate, cacao. I don’t know, man. The biohacks, right, adding the fats in the blender. Dude, wealth of knowledge.

David:
That was a lot that we [00:59:06].

Dr. Pompa:
That was a lot. No, but I get really excited because, like I said, I’m going to be switching my diet over. I can’t wait to start—

David:
To get in.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I just can’t wait to start consuming these foods. Awesome. Don’t you just love him? He’s like a big teddy bear. I just want to squeeze him up.

David:
Right on base, there.

Dr. Pompa:
No, I did. I fell in love with you this weekend, man. Thanks for being here.

David:
We had [00:59:23].

Dr. Pompa:
It was great, absolutely. We had a lot of fun.

David:
Yeah, it was great.

Dr. Pompa:
Share this one. It’s going to be a lot of fun for anybody who watches it, obviously. We’re going to have to have you back on. You know what? We’ll have it when we’re out. You’re coming to Park City. We’ll do a show, and we’ll make it real interactive. We’ll go hunting. How about that?

David:
Yeah, and make it simple. It’s not that hard. It’s really not that hard. I love it when people have that breakthrough. They come to me like, “We found our first one. We made our first tea.”

Dr. Pompa:
That’s going to be me, man.

David:
It’s really fun. It’s usually a husband and wife team. They’re like, “We did it.” It’s so cool.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s awesome, man. The hunting part is part of it, right? I just need to add more of this to my diet.

David:
Yeah, and again, it’s been made easy for us.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, awesome, man. Thanks again. See you on the next one.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode, which was brought to you by Fastonic Molecular Hydrogen. Please check it out at GetFastonic.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, or sharing the show with anyone who may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

270: Influencing The Expression Of Our Genes

with Steve Ottersberg

I have invited the brilliant nutrigenomic consultant, Steve Ottersberg to the show today, and we are talking about how you can affect the expression of your genes. We’re getting into ‘all things' epigenetics today, from mitochondrial function to why toxins, poor diet, and toxic thoughts influence mitochondrial function and health.

Additional Information:

CHTV with Nasha Winters

Next Live it to Lead it event in Newport Beach Nov. 14-17

Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
Join me on this episode of CellTV. You have questions about cannabis, CBD oil? Yeah, well, this scientist is going to talk about why it may be the biohack of this century because of stress and how it affects your endocannabinoid system and how that can be an answer to your stress and, believe it or not, even an answer to help you burn fat as energy, change your mitochondrial health. By the way, are you defining yourself with a SNP, like the MTHFR gene? You better watch this episode. He brings some science to that. It may not be what you think. I’ll just say that.

Also, we’re going to shed light on mitochondrial health. This is why people can’t burn fat for energy. They can’t lose weight, don’t have energy period, brain fog, digestive issues, mitochondrial issues. He has some really cool biohacks. We talk about some really cool stuff around that. Join me on this episode of CellTV.

Ashley:
Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. Today we are going to be discussing epigenetics and mitochondrial function with nutrigenomic consultant, Steve Ottersberg. Just a bit about Steve—this is a great episode. He’s going to be such a great guest. With graduate training in drug design, Steve was immersed in a world of genetic code, enzyme kinetics, and toxicology. From biochemical pathways, cellular function, to physiology, the mitochondria is the key to health. Cancer cells that have depleted the mitochondria can lead to cancer progression, and Steve is here to discuss all of this with Dr. Pompa. It’s going to be just a mind-blowing episode, so I’m going to turn it over to you. Welcome, both of you.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, thanks, Ash. Yeah, Steve, it’s funny. You said you could just introduce me as the chief egghead, and I thought that was pretty funny. I look at your pedigree here, I mean, my gosh, I mean, obviously, top biochemistry and studying of epigenetics, which is one of my favorite topics, and the mitochondria, one of my huge topics. I mean, when we look at people today, lack of energy, can’t lose weight, autism. I can go down and keep going down, cancer, a lot of different diseases, Parkinson’s, all which are being affected by this massive insult that we’re having today because of today’s stressors, honestly, of the mitochondria. You bring a whole new light to that.

Now, I have to tell you, you know how I found out about you? I was interviewing your wife, Nasha, and Dr. Nasha, she’s a naturopathic doctor. Matter of fact, Ashley, you can add her interview to this because I think we discussed you a little bit, Steve. Anyways, she was basically telling me what her husband was doing in the other room. I’m like what’s he doing? He’s what? Oh, yeah, he talks about epigenetics. I’m like I have to interview him. This is one of my favorite topics, so here we are with an interview that I think you are going to bring your egghead views to a topic that so many people need to hear more about, honestly, Steve, so thank you for being on CellTV.

Steve:
Of course, my pleasure, I’m absolutely honored.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely, I have to ask you this. I mean, I don’t know how you ended up with all the areas of study you did, so you might want to just tell a little bit about your story. Then you married a naturopathic doctor. I mean, you were developing drugs for Merck. Am I right about that? I mean, how did you enter our world, dude? Is it just marrying into it? What happened?

Steve:
How far do we need to go back? I mean, number one, I’m youngest of ten kids, and almost all of my family members are scientists of one flavor or another. My wife and I, we met in undergrad, in anatomy and physiology lab back when I was in a premed track. I ended up deciding going through undergrad, as most people do, that medicine was not for me, and part of it was I fell in love with organic chemistry. That’s how I ended up doing drug design.

Dr. Pompa:
It was a financial mistake but anyway.

Steve:
Probably.

Dr. Pompa:
A lesson in love.

Steve:
I also have this ultra-acute sense of smell, so I don’t know if clinical medicine is absolutely the right place for my acute sense of smell.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s funny. I have a very acute sense of smell too. It came out of my chemical sensitivity from when I was sick. I still can go who has their shoes off? What’s going on?

Steve:
In grad school, I did drug design because I just have a really innate talent in organic chemistry. It’s just something that makes sense to me. The three dimensional aspect of organic chemistry and a lot of—the chemical aspect…

Dr. Pompa:
I did too, actually. It was the geometry aspect that I just got whereas regular chemistry, ahh, the formulas, blah, blah, blah. Organic, I got that.

Steve:
Yeah, same here, I was an average student in general chemistry. When I got to organic chemistry, it’s like my brain for the first time in my life realized, oh, my God, this is where you’re supposed to be.

Dr. Pompa:
We have one thing in common, maybe the last thing, well, no, our love for mitochondria, our love epigenetics.

Steve:
Yeah, there’s plenty and our love for Dave Asprey too. I mean, that was where I first heard you.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s great.

Steve:
Nasha and I met in undergrad, and we ended up going to grad school together. I chose the graduate program that I did because Nasha and I were struggling between I wanted to go to the Linus Pauling Institute in Oregon when she was looking at naturopathic school in Oregon, and somehow we ended up in Tempe, Arizona between Washington and Oregon.

Dr. Pompa:
Nice [00:05:55].

Steve:
Yeah, don’t ask me about that, totally opposite climate of what we were looking at, but we both ended up going to grad school together. In grad school, I ended up doing cancer drug design, which ended up landing me in the middle of Merck Pharmaceutical because Merck had been working on the same class of drugs that I was working on in grad school, and they were getting ready to launch this class of drugs as I left grad school. That took me into the pharmaceutical world for four years, which was weird because I was the only pharmaceutical rep with an honorary naturopathic degree. I had gotten an honorary naturopathic degree because for about six years for grad school and a couple years after grad school I had been teaching biochemistry board reviews to Nasha’s classmates. Because of that, they gave me an honorary MD, but they also taught me so much because naturopathic medical students have the best biochemistry questions ever across the board. They helped reaffirm my love affair with the mitochondria.

This is probably because, to me, the mitochondria like the liver—I refer to the liver and the mitochondria as the ghost of each other because the mitochondria is the Grand Central Station of all chemical reactions in the human body, and the liver is Grand Central Station to all physiological reactions in the human body.

Dr. Pompa:
Explain that a little bit better. I mean, I get—some people are watching this going what is the mitochondria? I swear. It’s where you make energy. It’s the powerhouse, if we go back simple biology. The liver is where you process all your toxins. Draw that inclusion in simple terms again.

Steve:
When you look at—so do you remember in medical school—do you remember the giant biochemical pathway that took up an entire wall?

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah.

Steve:
The central pathway to all other biochemical pathways is the mitochondria. It’s not just where energy is produced. I mean, I keep referring to it as Grand Central Station because it’s where all chemicals meet in terms of all biochemical pathways.

Dr. Pompa:
Which explains why we see so much mitochondrial dysfunction today at the heart of most conditions because of what you just said right there. Very few people are actually talking about that. I mean, all the way back to Otto Warburg where he said it’s a mitochondrial issue. This thing’s malfunctioning. I mean, it’s ancient glycolysis, and it’s causing this respiration issue and bad cells.

Steve:
For Otto Warburg, that was his natural conclusion because he is a cell biologist, and for the cell, the mitochondria—and when I say mitochondria, that’s plural. We look at our textbook drawing of a cell, and we have one mitochondria per cell. That’s not how it is. Cellular function is defined by the number of mitochondria that that cell can possess, and I say that arrogantly. I might irritate the DNA, the DNA biologist, but DNA is important. The nucleus is important, but remember that mitochondria has its own DNA.

Dr. Pompa:
I was just going to say that. Mitochondria has its own DNA. What you mean by that is meaning that heart, your eyes, they have far—the cells have far more mitochondria because they require so much more energy, right?

Steve:
Yeah, and what histological cell type has the most mitochondria?

Dr. Pompa:
I thought the eye. No, am I wrong? I guess I’m wrong.

Steve:
The eye is pretty dense, but look at the color of the liver.

Dr. Pompa:
The liver is brown.

Steve:
Yeah, I mean, a lot of that is from the cytochromes, from detoxification, but here’s the thing about the liver that most people don’t think about in—everybody thinks, oh, the liver is there for detoxification. The liver is also there as an organ of management of all of our cellular energy. Did you know that the liver has a greater capacity of controlling blood sugar than the pancreas does?

Dr. Pompa:
I knew that.

Steve:
Of course you did.

Dr. Pompa:
Most people don’t, right? The liver has so much to—look, toxic people, they can’t control glucose. Obviously, the cell itself is a big part of that, but the liver is a massive part of that as well. I mean, just [00:10:31] glucose, for goodness sakes.

Steve:
Yeah, absolutely. The mitochondria, to me, I started coming up with this conclusion of the importance of the mitochondria teaching naturopathic medical students about how the pathways tie together. I was teaching them to prepare for their NPLEX board reviews. They have to take their basic science boards at the end of their second year before they can get into clinic, and their board review questions were always very physiologically relevant. I couldn’t talk about glycolysis without talking about how glycolysis is related to glucogenic amino acids and ketogenic amino acids and fat metabolism, and that relationship between all of those pathways is the mitochondria.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, so how you use fat, how you utilize sugar, how you burn fat for energy or not, I mean, all these aspects—I mean, how much energy you have throughout your day, I mean, basically, all of that is governed by what you’re talking about here. Okay, so we have a lot of conditions that are being affected by the mitochondria, why people can’t lose weight, brain fog. I mean, I’m just bringing it to the average person watching this show going that’s me. We’re telling you, yeah, you have a mitochondrial issue to one degree or another. Obviously, the extremes are cancer and some other extremes. I mean, it starts with the brain fog, the lack of energy. You can’t lose weight, right? This is where mitochondrial issues start.

Okay, so what do you say the biggest effect is on these areas? What’s affecting the mitochondria to give those symptoms that most people watching this have? What’s the big one?

Steve:
Here’s where I start losing friends, sugar.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, we just lost half of our viewers. Okay, come on back. We have solutions.

Steve:
Yeah, well, I mean, here’s the thing is, when I first started studying physiology, I was an Olympic hopeful triathlete. I was interested in learning physiology because I wanted to make it to the ’92 Olympics, and as a triathlete, I trained tirelessly. I mean, I would go to swim practice five days a week. I would do 50 to 70 mile rides 3 or 4 times a week, so my very existence was dependent on optimizing my physiology so that my mitochondria would give me more endurance. I learned early on that sugar is not necessarily the best fuel for endurance athletes. I started to struggle with that in undergrad because I had a very, very, very deep-seated sugar addiction.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, many endurance athletes do because they buy into carbohydrates are the fuel, carb, carb, carb, and they’re high carbers. They all end up with metabolic problems later, another story, but you’re right about that.

Steve:
Yeah, correct. Over time, I learned that fat was a better fuel as an endurance athlete than sugar was because it gave me sustained energy. I mean, you know the term bonk. Endurance athletes will talk about bonk.

Dr. Pompa:
You waste your stored sugar out, all your glycogen in your gut because your inability to burn fat for energy.

Steve:
Yeah, so when somebody says that they’re bonking, they say that they go hyperglycemic. What that is is it’s that transition between burning carbohydrate and burning fat. There’s always a little bit of a chunky situation when you can’t stop and rest. For the endurance athlete, when they start out burning sugar but then they try to transition into burning fat in midrace, often they’re going to struggle through that transition period between the burning of sugar and the burning of fat.

Dr. Pompa:
One of the things that people have to understand is the key to being fat adapted athletes—and I’ve done shows. I interviewed Zach Bitters, all these guys breaking these barriers. They’re all fat adapted, but the difference is it’s not that they don’t use sugar. When you go high intensity, you’re burning sugar. The problem is is most of the race you’re not. Then your body can hold on to that sugar when it needs to pass someone, or accelerate, or do a high burn, but most of the time, you’re burning your stored fat, your own body’s fat. Therefore, you’re using your sugar when you actually need it. These other athletes not using their fat and they’re just using up their stored sugar, so they have to do this the whole time they’re running.

Steve:
Exactly, well, I think the key is what you said is fat adapted. It’s that metabolic flexibility that is lacking, and let’s go back to sugar. I mean, the fact is that today—I mean, what does the average American consume in terms of pounds of sugar per year? Last time I researched, it’s like 185 pounds of sugar on average. I’m not in the average. I’m way below average, so there’s somebody else out there that’s eating 200 times that.

Dr. Pompa:
That doesn’t account for the processed carbohydrates. That doesn’t account for the white bread, the white rice. I mean, all the carbs, for that matter, it really ends up turning into sugar. They’re talking about just processed sugar there with that number.

Steve:
Yeah, exactly, the physiological consequence of eating a five day supply of sugar for every meal of the day is an inability to be fat adapted, which is a result of poor mitochondrial function. I mean, when you look at the physiological consequence of eating that much sugar, in that concentration, sugar is a—I call it a mitochondrial poison because the normal regulatory mechanism of those pathways shuts off the mitochondria when there is that much sugar present.

Dr. Pompa:
I mean, Steve, people would argue, okay, the mitochondria is, obviously, set up to use sugar, aka glucose. What you’re saying is it’s the volume that becomes the poison in the destruction to the mitochondria itself.

Steve:
Correct.

Dr. Pompa:
Without geeking out here, which I know you so want to do, why is that? Too much sugar, what is it doing to the mitochondria that it’s shutting it down?

Steve:
The natural consequence of having a high state of glucose is that, when your blood glucose is high, your body thinks it’s in a well-fed state, which is normal. Your body should feel that on occasion, but when you look at our 200 year history—think back 200 years ago. How often was the human body in the well-fed state that we experience today?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, periodically at best, right?

Steve:
Right, harvest time. In the fall, when the fruit was ripe, we would gorge ourselves on sugar. We would have periods of low calorie intake or high fat intake because the sugars all gone because the apples are all gone and our cider is gone. All we have left is tallow to get us through the dead of winter.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, you just described my feast-famine cycling, my diet variation principle. Our DNA is set up to have times of feast and famine. The feasts, when they’re done periodically, are actually healthy. They remind [00:18:34] starving and all these good things happen, but you take the famine away; now you got a problem.

Steve:
That’s precisely the problem is that we do not—we don’t any longer have cycles of feast and famine. We just have cycles of feast, and that’s why we are metabolically inflexible is because our mitochondria are continuously downregulated from a high sugar diet. Our mitochondria don’t get to flex their fat burning muscles, and without practice we downregulate the number of mitochondria that our cells have. Then we start to have issues like degenerative diseases, like cancer, Alzheimer’s, ALS. All of the degenerative diseases that are growing today in our modern society could be prevented by simply instilling a fast with our famine. I mean, we have to have feast with our famine. We can have feast, but we have to fast after we feast.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, you need both. Matter of fact, my new book coming out, Beyond Fasting, it’s coming out the end of this month. I talk all about my feast-famine concept, right? When I looked at the literature on diets, they compared diets of low-fat diet continually, high fat. I mean, they did all the different diets. You know what worked the best (a diet that varied)? Feast-famine always worked better for weight loss. Therefore, I’ll conclude that because it forces the body to adapt in some genetic way and you can explain it better than I, something really good is happening to the mitochondria when we do feast and famine together versus one diet all the time, so to speak. Yeah, bring some light to that. Adaptation obviously is the key here.

Steve:
It is, and still, this is the thing with genetics. Our genetics is relatively static. We’re going to die with pretty much the same genetic blueprint that we’re born with. We have some events in life that will change our genes, but for the most part, you can think of your genetics as being static. Here is the thing about your genetics is you have the genes to encode for every possible epigenetic trigger that your body or your ancestors have been exposed to.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, so for example, Steve— just back up because you said something very big there. As humans, we have how many genes, 25,000, 26?

Steve:
Yeah, I mean, it’s huge, gazillions, like 27 billion.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m talking about as our actual genes that we get, right? You know what I’m saying? Epigenetically is where all of the big changes in who you are, Steve, right? In other words, who you are is an epigenetic issue more so than—explain the difference because there’s a big difference of genes and what happens epigenetically in question.

Steve:
Let’s just look at—if we look at one gene for one enzyme in the mitochondria, let’s just look at a single—let’s not even name it. Let’s just say that it’s gene X in the mitochondria that that gene contains the information to code for a protein that has something to do with mitochondrial function. You can encode that—your gene contains the information to encode that protein under five or six different conditions, so that protein can change based upon the epigenetic triggers that you are currently experiencing.

Let’s say that you are in medieval England, and you’re eating a diet that’s high in protein, low in vegetables. You might produce one epigenetic expression of that gene. Then you place yourself in New York City, 2017, and you’re drinking Starbucks. You’re going to have a different epigenetic trigger, and that gene is going to produce a different protein than your old ancestor did.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, this explains why you can have identical twins, and if they grow up in the same environment, I mean, they’re—you can’t even tell them apart, right? I mean, it’s like the way they speak, the way they do this. You pull them aside. Grow up in different environments. Now they’re liking different things. Their tastes are different. This is different, same hardware. Maybe it’s best to explain this to people as hard drives and software, right? They have the same hard drive. Yet, they plugged in different software because their environment was different, which changed their genes, and they come out to be so different.

Steve:
Yeah, I think the hard drive analogy is great because you can imagine that if you have—if your DNA is your hard drive, that’s not necessarily going to change, but it’s going to hold the information for the applications that you run, correct? Let’s just say that, if you had an identical twin that grew up in a different environment than you, your identical twin is going to be running application 1.0A, and because of your environment, you’re going to be running application 1.0B.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, therefore, now we have two very different people expressing very different lives with the same hard drive. Okay, so that explains then that epigenetics rules. I mean, there’s diseases that are pure genetic diseases, chromosomes misplace. What percentage is that, Steve?

Steve:
The genes that are—the diseases that are absolutely genetically based is a very small percentage.

Dr. Pompa:
Very small.

Steve:
Yes, most disease that we are experiencing in modern medicine today are lifestyle diseases. There are a small percentage of cancer patients that doesn’t matter what they do. They’re going to get cancer. The largest percentage of cancer patients today can completely redirect their prognosis with diet and lifestyle.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. Here’s the point, folks, that Steve and I are getting at. That environment, stressors, physical, chemical, emotional can turn on your set of genes and start expressing things for worse. Now, there is good news. We’re going to talk about things and how to turn them—turn the bad ones off and turn good ones on. That too has been an area of your study, right? That we can actually change our expression if a cancer gene, a thyroid, an autoimmune gene is triggered from a stressor, turned on, but we could actually change it.

You talk about a lot of these epigenetic changes happening in the mitochondria so talk about that. We talked about sugar. That can turn on genes in your mitochondria, and now you’re stuck just being able to use sugar. You go I have to eat all day long instead of utilizing your fat, right? That’s a gene that can be changed. Am I right?

Steve:
That is correct. I have a very specific example for that. The enzyme lactate dehydrogenase is very important in metabolic flexibility, and this is something that Nasha taught me. She has taught me some of the most amazing biochemistry tricks, and we teach each other back and forth. One of the things that she measures regularly in blood work that she does on her patients is lactate dehydrogenase. In a cancer population, when epigenetically the patient is leaning towards a cancering state, meaning that their cancer cells are starting to direct their physiology, this is when lactate dehydrogenase enzyme in the plasma starts to creep up. When Nasha sees somebody with an elevated blood sugar, elevated hemoglobin A1c, and an elevated lactate dehydrogenase, it starts to ring the bells of metabolic inflexibility, and it’s an epigenetic trigger that the cancer cells are starting to influence the relationship between the liver, muscle, and adipose tissue.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, I have to do a shameless plug. She’s speaking on Saturday at my event in Nashville. That’s the day that it’s open to the public, so folks, Ashley will put the link on how you can sign up for that and even get the—we’re doing a livestream because we literally sold out the event. Ashley can give you that, but yeah, she’s speaking. She’s going to be talking about that very testing and how she looks at that, brilliant.

Steve:
We all have the gene for lactate dehydrogenase, but we don’t always express it at levels that are causing problems. That’s the thing. Here’s the beautiful thing about what Nasha does. I mean, just by putting somebody on a low carbohydrate diet, in a short amount of time, we can start to see their lactate dehydrogenase epigenetically reverse back to a state in which is more healthy. That is a sign of metabolic flexibility.

Dr. Pompa:
To your point, clinically what we would see is someone who needs to eat all the time, hypoglycemic. They’re skinny fat. They’ll break their muscle down before they’ll burn their own darn fat, right? They crave carbohydrates, fail on every diet. I mean, I can keep going down a list describing somebody who’s stuck as a sugar burner with the inability to use its own fat as energy. There’s the word metabolically flexible, meaning if I eat sugar, I’m going to burn the sugar up. It’s dangerous. It’ll burn right up. If I’m not eating, my body burns its fat, so I don’t have cravings. You stay lean, and you have lasting energy. I mean, that’s the metabolic flexibility thing.

Okay, here’s the issue. That some people, even on a low-carbohydrate diet, speaking clinically now, they just don’t make that transition. We know that toxins play a big factor here. Let’s talk about toxins effect on the mitochondria and even—you like to talk about it even, mitochondrial epigenetics, right? It can keep that gene turned on so talk about that.

Steve:
Let’s pick on heavy metals first of all.

Dr. Pompa:
One of my favorite subjects.

Steve:
Yeah, I mean, this is—and you actually taught me something about how heavy metal toxicity can be carried generationally. To me, that was—I mean, it makes sense, absolutely, but it was shocking to hear. Oh, yeah, if a mother is exposed to mercury in utero, the baby is going to have mercury exposure as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Part of the other problem, Steve, is that the baby also inherited its genes turned on that mom had turned on.

Steve:
Correct.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s a lose-lose.

Steve:
Yeah, so when we look at mercury toxicity, there is a number of different things that’s happening with mercury toxicity. The number one thing for me as a biochemist, when I look at mercury, mercury is a soft—here goes my general chemistry terminology. It’s just gone. Mercury is a soft metal, and we refer to metals as Lewis acids. Lewis acids catalyze the reaction…

Dr. Pompa:
I forgot about that word.

Steve:
Yeah, do you remember Lewis acids and Lewis bases?

Dr. Pompa:
[0:30:57].

Steve:
Right, I had a little brain glitch there getting it into my terminology because I haven’t used this terminology in a while.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I think I purposely forgot about Lewis acids but anyway.

Steve:
Yeah, most of us do. The whole issue with Lewis acids is they catalyze oxidation reactions. This is one of the many issues with mercury is that mercury as a Lewis acid is catalyzing oxidation of sulfur atoms that are bound to molecules. When you look at energy metabolism and methylation in particular, there are a lot of sulfur containing biomolecules that are targeted by mercury. There’s a physiological effect because of this pro-oxidative effect of the heavy metal, but then because mercury is fat soluble, it tends to get into the nucleus. Remember that when we talk about genetics and epigenetics, in order for genes to be expressed, the histones have to open up, right? I mean, if you think about—think about your DNA as being in a wallet. If you’re going to spend your money from your DNA, you’ve got to open the wallet.

That’s the analogy I like to use, histones. Histones are your DNA wallet. Your DNA is wound up around histones when it’s in its stored state. In order to open those histones, the histones have to be methylated, and that’s where methylation is the first step of an epigenetic trigger is that the histones have to be methylated to be opened up to express the DNA. It turns out that mercury directly influences your ability to methylate your histones and open up your histones to express your DNA.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, and then, boom, it gets—certain genes get turned on. Now, here you are expressing something you don’t want to express, whether it’s [00:33:05] or weight loss resistance, diabetes. I mean, again, we can keep going down the list.

Steve:
Like every other disease state, what is being expressed during heavy metal toxicity is the stress responses are what’s being expressed, and there’s a time and place for that.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, that’s why one of the things it leads with mercury is people can’t sleep. They have bad energy. Yet, they can’t sleep right. Even when they do sleep, they don’t get into deep sleep, and most of them wake up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep. They have anxiety. I mean, all of these symptoms, part of what your saying is why they occur.

All right, so we have over sugared. We have over toxic, all affecting the mitochondria, directly creating oxidation. It interferes with the way it works and also turning on the genes in the mitochondria, so now you’re expressing what we just talked about. Are we doomed, man, or can we turn these genes off? What do we do?

Steve:
We are absolutely not doomed. Here is the best part of human physiology. Human physiology is incredibly adaptable. In order to get human physiology to adapt, we have to give it the right conditions. Number one, stress is the biggest limitation of physiological adaptability. The stress hormones absolutely inhibit metabolic flexibility. The first thing that we have to do in order for us to be able to have an adaptable physiology is we have to be able to manage stress. If we’re constantly releasing cortisol, we’re not going to be able to be metabolically flexible. There is nothing that we can do to the cortisol state that’s going—we can do any diet we want, but if we’re adding a good quality diet on top of cortisol, it’s not going to ever fix the problem.

Dr. Pompa:
Steve, I mean, some people think, okay, managing emotional stress is very difficult for some people, which there are strategies. We’ve done a lot of shows on those strategies, but there is the upstream toxic effect, right? We find that people have hidden infections in their jaw, I mean, metal in their brain. That’s a constant stressor, chemical stressor, and that’s where my cellular detox comes down to lower that stress bucket. What are other ways we can lower the stress bucket to mitigate what you’re saying?

Steve:
In terms of physical stress or emotional stress?

Dr. Pompa:
Any of it, I don’t know. Here’s the point, the body doesn’t know the difference.

Steve:
Correct, yeah, absolutely. I mean, here’s the thing, is regardless of whatever your spiritual beliefs are, you have to have some mental, emotional, and spiritual support in your life.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree.

Steve:
That’s absolutely essential, and I don’t care what you call it, yoga, meditation, prayer, religion, community. Anything that brings you a sense of community, a sense of belonging, nurture that. It’s absolutely essential. Then you have to eat good food with those people that are nurturing your spiritual and love and all of that. You have to provide your body with the fuel to detoxify. I mean, if you’re heavy metal toxic and you don’t eat vegetables, well, you’re going to continue to be heavy metal toxic, right?

Taking out the garbage is mental and emotional. It is not putting garbage in your mouth, but it’s also not putting garbage in your field of vision. How many people are filling their minds with garbage and then wonder why they’re sick? If you are just continuously filling your mind with garbage, your mind is going to output garbage, so fill you mind with the things that give you peace and give the world peace.

Dr. Pompa:
Here’s an interesting biohack that you’re an expert in. You’ve lectured maybe around the world, many, many lectures that I saw on your bio. This is a topic of many people’s interest, cannabinoids, aka CBD, aka hemp, marijuana. Now I’ve got everyone’s attention. You found that it has a profound effect. Some of the benefits that people receive from cannabinoids—and by the way, that’s the active ingredient. I’ll let Steve explain it more in what’s in CBD.

You found a profound effect on changing the epigenetics to good. It has a profound effect on the mitochondrial epigenetics and a downregulating of cortisol and our cannabinoid system, which we recently discovered, how that plays into our hormone system and helps with adaptation. This is a good biohack, talk about it. You’ve lectured a lot on this topic.

Steve:
Here’s the thing with the endocannabinoid system is, when you think about neurotransmission, neurotransmitters convey specific messages, but in general, we can break neurotransmitters down into excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters.

Dr. Pompa:
These are signals from our brain to our cells through nerves. It can be excitatory, contract, contract, or inhibitory, relax, relax, right? That’s what you’re saying.

Steve:
Exactly, yeah, so let’s look at dopamine, for example. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that’s very important for problem solving. Your baseline level of dopamine is what gives you the ability to think. Your dopaminergic neurons are important for your day-to-day cognitive function, and so the balance of dopamine transmission is very important. Where the endocannabinoid system comes in is the endocannabinoid system acts as a safety mechanism within the dopamine system, within all neurotransmission. What it does is, when you have a spike in dopamine response, your endocannabinoid system will take that spike, and it will modify it so that it does not cause problems.

You have a basal level of dopamine. Then you’re walking down the beach. You see a girl in a bikini, and your dopamine levels spike. People are addicted to dopamine. This is video games. This is pornography, cocaine, all of these things.

Dr. Pompa:
[00:40:11]

Steve:
Yeah, your iPhone is dopamine.

Dr. Pompa:
When you’re expecting, it’s like gambling. Oh, an email, oh, ooh, dopamine spike, dopamine spike.

Steve:
Yeah, so dopamine is important in the pleasure and reward response, but you can’t have dopamine firing all the time. What the endocannabinoid system does is it takes these spikes in dopamine, and it applies the antilock brakes. It doesn’t stop the dopamine response or any other response that it’s acting upon. What it does is it modulates the response so that it does not overtax the neurons that are undergoing this dopamine spike, and so one of the important functions of the endocannabinoid system is fear response extinction. If you ever had a kid in your practice that has bad dreams over and over and over again…

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, when I was sick, when I was mercury toxic, I called them adrenaline dreams. I hated it.

Steve:
Yeah, if you have this fear response over and over and over and over, that’s a sign of poor endocannabinoid function. Your endocannabinoid system, one of its purposes is to help you to forget painful memories. Does that make sense?

Dr. Pompa:
How does CBD, which contains cannabinoids—it obviously affects this endocannabinoid system. That’s why it helps so many people, and it also can downregulate epigenetics. What got you studying this? Talk about how it does that.

Steve:
One of the reasons that I have always been interested in cannabis and in cannabinoids in particular is because of cancer in my family. My oldest brother died of pancreatic cancer. I have a sister that is about 12, 13 years out of treatment for ovarian cancer, another sister with ovarian cancer. There’s a lot of cancer in my family. It was one of the things that we just always knew. Oh, well, if you have nausea and vomiting, this is a really good way to help.

Throughout the course of my education, I’ve been exposed to people like Dr. Ethan Russo. Ethan Russo is an incredible resource. He’s a neurologist, and he’s an incredible resource on endocannabinoid function and the cannabinoids that are produced by the plant Cannabis sativa. One of the things that Ethan Russo says about cannabis as a therapeutic agent is one of its benefits is it helps people that have terminal diagnosis, and it helps them with the perception of that diagnosis, which can often be more damaging than the diagnosis itself. If somebody tells you that you have a terminal cancer, how are you going to process that diagnosis in terms of your emotional state? More than likely, you’re going to play that diagnosis over and over in your brain because it’s such a traumatic thing that you need help to extinguish that fear response associated with that diagnosis. Does that make sense?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we know that our thoughts can actually turn genes on and off, right? Therefore, to your point, that focus on it can actually keep genes, certain genes turned on and even turn on others that will not work for you but against you. The mindset plays a critical role. I don’t care what condition you have. People don’t get that, but there’s science behind it, right? I mean, our thoughts change our genes.

Steve:
Yeah, I mean, absolutely, the science behind the endocannabinoid system is emerging because of political status of endocannabinoid science in the United States has been really challenging from a scientific perspective because of the federal classification of CBD and THC being Schedule 1. It’s really difficult to get an institutional review board to approve any kind of scientific study associated with cannabis. I just spoke last week at a cannabis conference in San Diego. The first two speakers of this conference were vets, and they were talking about the desperate need that vets have for the treatment of PTSD. When you think about what happens to a young or maybe not so young soldier that’s out in the battlefield, that constant stress of being in the battlefield, whether you’re in action or not, I mean, I can only imagine what must go through the young soldiers’ minds when they’re in the foreign land, walking through the battlefield in the middle of the night. What kind of stress response is going through their brains? I mean, it has to be tax season multiplied by three trillion, and you don’t sleep for months.

To me, this is one of the reasons why I’m passionate about education about the endocannabinoid system and education about the legitimate medical role for cannabis. Whether it’s in the form of hemp or whether it’s in the form of medical marijuana, it’s a really important clinical tool because there are people that don’t have—I mean, epigenetically, or genetically they’re not hardwired to be able to extinguish their fears the same as others. There is a molecule that’s part of the endocannabinoid system called anandamide. Anandamide is Sanskrit for bliss. They called this molecule anandamide because, when it was first isolated, it was discovered that it is what causes bliss in mice. Here is another crazy thing that nobody is really talking about the endocannabinoid system is that it’s built upon dietary fatty acids, and so your dietary fatty acid intake directly influences your endocannabinoid [00:46:48]. That high omega-6 diet that is so bad in terms of outcome for so many disease states is not only bad from an inflammatory perspective, but it’s also bad from a mental functional perspective.

One of my heroes in the scientific community is a researcher by the name of Olivier Manzoni. He works in France, and he does endocannabinoid studies on mice. He has shown in mice that mouse—in mouse studies, when mice are fed an omega-3 deficient diet, they lose neuroplasticity that is a function of their endocannabinoid tone.

Dr. Pompa:
I think, in today’s diet, you have vegetable oils and everything, even in whole foods. You have canola, I mean, all of it. You got brain-fed everything, and that creates the imbalance. Could that be one of the reasons why that people seem to have such a positive effect with cannabis, meaning that—come on. I mean, how could we need cannabis, meaning that it wasn’t like our ancestors were walking around smoking marijuana all—I mean, all of a sudden, there’s this greater need for it in the sense of, when people take it, they feel better. Is it all the stressors combined, and it’s just tapering down that dopamine expression? What is it exactly?

Steve:
Number one, my ancestors were walking around smoking cannabis all the time. I’m kidding. No, I mean, that’s part of—this is part of the issue. I mean, our diet and lifestyle set us up for being hyper-responders to them.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and cannabis is a check. It just helps it. It’s a perfect antidote in a stressful day and age, toxicity, physically.

Steve:
Absolutely, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s why it’s such a big player and the fats, to your point, the fats that we’re eating. We have all these bad toxic omega—I mean, omega-6 is good, but it’s the toxic rancid omega-6 that we’re getting in the diet and too much of all of this that is also affecting this cannabinoid system. It’s yet another reason endocannabinoid system—another reason why cannabis can really help people.

Steve:
Absolutely, here’s one of the coolest things that I learned in preparing for last week’s talk. You know the importance of DHA, talking about fish oil.

Dr. Pompa:
Mm-hmm.

Steve:
DHA is absolutely one of the best…

Dr. Pompa:
I would say from fish more than fish oil because so much of its—anyway, another subject.

Steve:
Yeah, absolutely, good point there. When you take in a good quality DHA, one of the things—one of the fates of DHA in human brain is that DHA is converted into an endocannabinoid that has the name synaptamide. Yeah, what does that make you think about the neurological function of that endocannabinoid?

Dr. Pompa:
Synapsis helps your brain fire better.

Steve:
Yes, absolutely, so when you consume a healthy form of DHA, your brain converts some of that DHA into synaptamide. It’s called synaptamide because it is a major stimulator of synaptogenesis, so if you want to produce new neurological pathways, eat a good healthy source of DHA to feed your endocannabinoid system.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and you don’t even need a lot to benefit. The problem is, again, all the rancid fats that we’re getting out there makes it even more important, a fascinating conversation. Again, I guess you’d make the argument that everybody could benefit from some CBD. Would you make that argument?

Steve:
Absolutely, yeah, I mean, the thing with CBD is CBD is—I don’t like when people call it non-psychoactive because that’s not true. CBD is psychoactive, and it’s an [00:51:04]. The thing with CBD is CBD supports a normal endocannabinoid system whereas THC is like the heavy hammer. When things are really bad, there is a time and place for THC, but I think, on a day-to-day basis, I don’t think that there’s anybody in our modern world that would not benefit from CBD, especially when they combine it with some good, healthy, essential fatty acids.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, when you see these kids smoking marijuana day in, day out, there’s no doubt their brain’s shrinking. There is no doubt it’s having a negative effect. You’re right. I mean, someone in a very stressful situation, someone with cancer, someone with—the THC I think can bring a benefit. When we look at the ancient hemp plant, it was very little THC. It was definitely more focused on the cannabinoid—well, the CBD.

Steve:
We always talk about the cannabis plant just in reference to CBD and THC. Those are just the two most predominant. There’s a whole family of non-psychoactive cannabinoids that we’re going to see coming out of the cannabis industry that are going to bring a lot of healing potential without the psychoactive properties as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, wow, a great combination, one last question. Right now it’s in vogue right now. Everybody’s testing their SNPs, and they’re being put on a lot of supplements for their SNPs. They’re labeling themselves. I’m homozygous. I’m MTHFR. They have all the labels. What’s your thoughts on that, which is very different than the epigenetics that we’ve been describing, SNPs? What’s your thoughts on that?

Steve:
I think there’s a time and a place for that. If you as a health-seeking individual want to get some clues on what might be the most high priority supplements for you to include in your diet, run your DNA test.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it gives you clues. I agree.

Steve:
Yeah, I’m not going to say that everybody that has MTHFR is expressing and needs—but if you have MTHFR and your homocysteine is 20, you are the person that should be a form of a poly and riboflavin and magnesium and all of the other—and see, this is the thing is MTHFR is one enzyme out of a family of enzymes that are involved in a pathway that utilizes B-12 and 5-methylfolate, and they do a lot of very important functions. If your MTHFR is not expressing and you have a normal homocysteine level and you’re taking handfuls and handfuls of 5-methylfolate, you might just be wasting money on 5-methylfolate.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly, the system’s very complicated. When you look at methylation alone, I think there’s 21 steps in this methylation pathway, right? It’s very complicated. I think we’ve learned more over the years. Just because you have a SNP, epigenetically, the body finds ways around things, and as a practitioner, we don’t know where you are in this process of the innate intelligence going, okay, we struggle here on this SNP. However, we found a way around it, so you don’t express it, right? I think that’s the mistake that we’re seeing right now is people are getting these tests, and then they’re just I’m that. Then they think that they’re that, and then they’re taking supplements based on they’re that. It might not be that. That’s what you’re saying.

Steve:
Yeah, and that’s why I always recommend a series of blood work. If you don’t see signs of B-12 deficiency in somebody with MTHFR, they probably don’t—they’re probably not going to benefit from a strict regime of supplementation.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, they’re not expressing that gene. The clues, it gives you clues. I couldn’t have said it better, Steve. Listen, thank you so much for clarifying so many things genetics, epigenetics, the diet’s role. The mitochondria is being—I guess it’s a cornerstone today, right?

Steve:
It is, absolutely, without a doubt.

Dr. Pompa:
The good news is is you gave us some great advice on how to change those genes in the mitochondria. Become a fat burner. Become metabolically flexible. It’s possible. You can change it back.

Steve:
It is. It is possible. You can affect the expression of your genes with everything that you do on a day-to-day basis.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, stress reduction, toxin reduction, diet changes, getting rid of the sugar, absolutely, and forcing adaptation, right? It’s like exercise.

Steve:
Express more love.

Dr. Pompa:
There you go. Thoughts also change the genes for better or for worse and the last piece of advice, cannabinoids, CBD. I think in today’s day and age, you made an argument for fats. You made an argument for the stress that we’re under, how it affects the endocannabinoid system. It’s under stress. There’s the biohack, got that too. All right, Steve, thanks for your brilliance, man. You’re more than an egghead. You’re a lot of fun too.

Steve:
Thank you, Dr. Pompa. It was a pleasure, absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
We love your wife and join us at the seminar. Are you going to come with her at the seminar?

Steve:
No, I will be on dog sitting duty here in Mexico. It’s our last week in Mexico, and I’m going to be getting our truck packed up while Nasha’s in Nashville.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we had that conversation because I’m like—I love the summers and the falls and the springs here in Park City, Utah. I’m just tired of the winter. I think I’m going to do what you guys did. I’m going to pack—we have dogs, so we have to go somewhere to drive. You drove through what part of Mexico?

Steve:
We’re just north of Puerto Vallarta, a little town of Bucerías. We’re just down the road from you in Durango in the summertime. We pack up our dog—our two dogs and our cat and a truck full of surf boards and windsurfers now. We take about four days driving down here. You know what we don’t bring (snow shovels)?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly, I’ll be leaving those behind. That’s my future. I’m driving my dogs.

Steve:
Good, I can’t wait to get some healthy sunshine with you down here to strengthen your mitochondrial function.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ll be in Cancun again in April.

Steve:
Cool, well, I hope you enjoy it.

Dr. Pompa:
Not far, okay, hey, we’re going to have you on again because I think you have some other topics I want to pick your brain about. Thanks, Steve.

Steve:
I’d love that. Thank you.

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 for more information. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at podcast.drpompa.com. 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.