2020 Podcasts

345: The Link Between Your Libido and Your Cellular Health

This week I’m bringing my friend Susan Bratton back to the show. Susan is a world-class expert in ageless intimacy. I just had to have her back because we had so much fun, and there are so many concepts we wanted to continue to explore together. Susan will reveal some of her top secrets for boosting libido and sexual health. Susan shares some surprising reasons you may struggle with libido and shares some simple biohacks you can use to boost your sexual health.

More about Susan Bratton:

Susan Bratton, Intimacy Wellness Expert, is a champion and advocate for all those who desire intimacy and passion their whole life long.

Best-selling author and publisher of lovemaking techniques and bedroom communication skills including Sexual Soulmates, Relationship Magic, Revive Her Drive, The Steamy Sex Ed Video Collection, Hormone Balancing, The Pump Guide and Thrust In Time as a small selection of her 34 books and program.

You can find The Susan Bratton Show on YouTube at BetterLover.com, her more personal posts @susanbratton on Instagram, and her new sexual vitality supplements, Flow, Boost, Desire and Drive in the links below!

Show notes:

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Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, boy, Susan Bratton, we had her on talking about sexual vitality on a past show. This topic, libido, wait until you see the things that she shows. You’ll see me get embarrassed at least one time in this show. I’m going to say, this show is directed at people that have libido issues, mostly related to health issues, but this show is for everybody.

I’m telling you, the tips that she gives, the links to products, the links to the biohacks that work for this condition, there are a lot in this show. That means there’s a lot of answers. You’ll see; you’re going to want your spouse to watch this show with you. You might want to watch it with he or her first or maybe yourself first before you share it, but no, I think that this is going to be a show that you’ll probably share more than most. Check it out.

Ashley Smith:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, we welcome back the lovely Susan Bratton, who you may remember from “Episode 287.” Susan is a world-class expert in ageless intimacy. We just had to have her back because we had so much fun and there are so many concepts we wanted to continue to explore together.

Susan is an expert in detoxing for sexual vitality, supporting your libido with nutrients and botanicals, and sexual biohacking. This will be nothing short of lively and fun. Let’s get started and welcome Susan Bratton, and of course, Dr. Pompa to the show. Welcome both of you.

Susan Bratton:
Greetings, it is very nice to see you and to be with you again.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, she is back, folks. That’s not just a sunset coming over her head. That’s just the way she is every day, trust me. Oh, gosh, I can’t wait for this episode. We had to have you back after the last one. We’ll put the link here to the last show where we got dicey with the whole sexual vitality conversation. I think some of that will shock you.

Today’s conversation is specifically about what we promised, libido. This is a huge problem. My audience is people who are looking to get their health back. I have a lot of health-challenged people that follow me. I would say a huge percentage of them, hey, libido is gone.

Okay, I talk a lot about getting to the upstream issue, but the question I get often, Susan, is okay, great, but what can I do in the meantime? As we know, you’re the expert, or should I call you the sexpert, which you don’t like that; you’re far beyond that; you’re way more than that. As you know, this can be disruptive to relationships.

I think this show’s really important because if we can give you some breakthroughs—which Susan has some really amazing stuff. This is cutting-edge stuff, stuff that you may have heard about she’ll take you to the next level on it, and I promise you, stuff you probably haven’t. Okay, what is libido because maybe it’s not what we think, Susan?

Susan Bratton:
Thanks, Dr. Pompa, so much again for having me. I really want to talk about libido and define it because I like to define it as a comparison to other things. I like to think about there being a stack of your human experience. One thing is your libido, then there’s your desire, and then there’s arousal.

Libido is your life force; it’s your lust for life; it’s what powers your creativity; it’s what powers your enthusiasm. It also powers your appetite for your sexuality. When you’re health challenged, which we all are at various times, and some of us more than others, we find that diminishes our libido because our body is being this little mitochondrial batteries. Our batteries on low so it doesn’t have enough bandwidth, it doesn’t have enough juice to also feel like it wants to be intimate.

I know that people who are health challenged carry a lot of guilty feelings, a lot of shame because they feel like, I should want my partner, I should want sex, I wish I wanted to have sex, but I don’t. I feel bad like I’m letting them down. We end up getting depressed and beating ourselves for it or feeling anxious because we know we’re letting our partner down.

At the end of the day, everybody wants to feel love, connection, touch, holding, sensuality. One of the things that I can tell you is that when you don’t feel well, often, what’s happened is you’re starting to beat yourself up because you’re not having “sex,” like penis in vagina intercourse. When you think about sex as that, and that’s the biggest goal, you have to pull yourself back and say, well, I might not be—I might not desire that right now, but I might desire being held, or holding my partner, a full body massage, a nice head rub, maybe just some erotic pleasuring with no goal in mind.

Dr. Pompa:
It takes the pressure off if there’s no goal in mind. It takes the pressure off and it may lead to arousal, possibly.

Susan Bratton:
Yeah, and you said that beautifully, Dan, because if you think about libido, libido is how your body is feeling and whether or not you’re feeling “horny,” you’re feeling “frisky,” you’ve got a little lust, you want sex. That’s the body. That’s a measure of your health. That includes your gut biome, and your hormones, and the things we talked about a lot on the last show.

Dr. Pompa:
Even let me speak from now a sick person who is now healthy. I can tell you that what you’re saying there is truth to because I would say when you’re sick, you’re focused on yourself. There were times that once I got in the motion, then it would be much better. Now, okay, so even now as a healthy person, I can tell you that there’s many times where it’s the last—it’s not on mind. I’m busy, this and that. Once some of the things that you mention start, then okay, I didn’t even realize that I was actually wanting to do this. Here I am.

You’re right. You can’t just all of a sudden want sex. My wife reminds me that sex starts in the kitchen. I still don’t understand what that means, man. It’s never happened yet in the kitchen. That’s me. It doesn’t start there. I know what she means by that; I’m just playing. Anyway, to your point, I think that this is—you have to start with some of those things that you’re mentioning.

Susan Bratton:
You know you’re feeling better, you know you’re getting better, you know your healing is working when you’re starting to have little fantasies, or you’re even thinking about sexuality, you even thinking about being held, and touched, and interacting. Those are all ways you can notice that you’re coming back to health. You’ve got libido; that’s your body. Then you’ve got desire.

Desire is really the headspace. That is, I’m not upset with my partner, or I am, I like them, I feel good about myself, I feel like a sexual person. Because many people have body image issues or they’ve suffered surgeries of various kinds that make them feel less desirable. There’s desire, which is another component of it, and that’s your headspace.

Arousal is what you were really taking about, Dr. Pompa, which is you didn’t know you were in the mood until you started down the path. That’s why when you have an understanding of the difference between the masculine and feminine, very important, the masculine is generally testosterone dominant; the female is generally estrogen forward. He is more often ready to go and he is naturally more goal-oriented and looking at the final sex, penis in vagina intercourse.

Estrogen, it has its eye on everything. It’s not ready. It’s not the initiator; it’s the responder, it’s the receiver. Estrogen wants testosterone to sweep her away into pleasure. She doesn’t want the pressure and the performance anxiety of “guaranteeing” it will lead to sex.

The solution for couples who have any kind of libido mismatch where they don’t both want it about the same, which is 99.9% of all people, is people are—somebody wants and somebody’s like, I don’t know, maybe if you talk me into it. Can we start with a foot rub? I think for the large swath, you can generalize to say that the masculine is often more ready to go than the feminine. She needs to be warmed up, to be held, to be emotionally connected, to make sure everything is set and good, and she can relax. She wants to—

Dr. Pompa:
Gosh, such work you women are.

Susan Bratton:
It’s not work. See, it’s joy; it’s pleasure.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m joking. Right now, the women are typing their hate mail to me. I’m just laughing. I am sitting here with a smile on my face because I’m thinking, oh my gosh, men, we’re like—it’s almost embarrassing actually. It’s like let’s just get right after it. It’s like we’re looking to that end goal. Here you are describing estrogen wanting this process and leading me. Us men are going, oh my God. All right, we have to change that obviously a little bit.

Susan Bratton:
One thing I’ve found is that when men understand what women need, they want to give it to her. What they want is to give her incredible pleasure. They actually don’t really feel like it’s work, but women are afraid to ask for it. Part of what I like to do is I like to let women know that it’s okay to ask for what you need because your arousal pattern is much slower than his.

The advice that I give men is here’s what she needs from you. Number One, good grooming. Nobody likes a dirty bird. Number Two, emotional connection and presence.

Dr. Pompa:
Men, did you hear that? Good grooming, okay, yeah. Should we define that a little bit better because every man is like, what do you mean? I shower. Does there need to be a little more definition about that? What do you mean?

Susan Bratton:
I have so many things I want to talk about that I’ll leave your grooming conditions up to you as an individual. Good grooming, emotional connections, and presence, not going for a goal, not trying to make me do, make me have a good experience, but being with me in the experience. Then slowing down, slowing yourself down. Throttle yourself back, boys, and drop into a connection with your women that is co-creation of pleasure. Stop thinking about the endgame. You’ll net more sex when you give up your goal.

That’s the thing that for many men when they say, my wife, she went through the menopause and she doesn’t want sex anymore. I’m like, well, I’ve got to tell you the truth. Your wife is using her menopause as an excuse for not wanting to have sex with you anymore because it wasn’t good enough for her to fight for her sex life. Let me teach you a few skills where you can actually get your wife to want you for sex again and maybe even initiate it.

Dr. Pompa:
The men that just heard that are like—the men are just going now be like, ah-ha, see it’s not a real excuse anymore, but there is another side to that; there was another side to that.

Susan Bratton:
Yeah, but that’s a separate show too because I really want to get into sexual biohacking. What happens as you age? Because if you’re listening or watching this interview with Dan and I, you care about your sexuality. You’re one of those people who didn’t give it up. You actually want—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and you should. By the way, they—

Susan Bratton:
You want to know.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, this affects your health. Orgasms actually make you hormonally healthier. Relationships, touch, makes you more hormonally healthier. All of this applies to your health, but yet, your health applies to this topic. I want to let you go on, but I do want to remind you that many people watching this, they’re sick; they’re toxic; they have hormone challenges. That alone can affect their libido. Is this still going to all work?

Susan Bratton:
I think that hormones get too much credit for their contribution to people’s libido.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, good.

Susan Bratton:
If you are thinking in your mind, I’m sick, and my hormones are whacked, and that’s why I don’t want sex, I can tell you that’s not actually the reason.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, great. That’s what I was hoping you would say. I want everyone to hear that because I knew that people were thinking that. Let’s put that behind us.

Susan Bratton:
What if it’s not your hormones? What else could it be? Let’s explore.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right. All right, good, this is good. We’re just heading in the right direction. Okay, what do we do?

Susan Bratton:
The very first thing that you do is remember what I just said, which was your libido is your health. It’s two sides of the same coin. You’re working on your health. The better you feel, the more turned on—the more you’re going to want sex. That’s one thing. Notice how as you get better, you feel more sexy. Number One, witness your healing.

Number Two, make sure that there’s nothing between you and your partner or yourself that’s holding you back from your desire. Check in on that. Number Three, make sure that you’re not rushing yourself and that you’re actually thinking about your sex life as co-creation of sensual pleasure, not penis in vagina intercourse, because that’s too big of goal, especially when you don’t feel well. Baby steps, this is about baby steps. Get a foot rub; that’s sex, too.

Dr. Pompa:
Number Two, though, there’s maybe some complicating factors there, making sure there’s nothing between you and your spouse. That can be a brick wall that’s built and you don’t even acknowledge anymore. That right there could be the dang sticking point. What do you say to that? Any advice around that one?

Susan Bratton:
What I think is important for you as you’re listening to Dr. Pompa and I on this particular conversation is for you to just be open right now and taking in everything that we’re saying and looking for the places in your own life where you see the little warning flags so that you can know, oh, okay, actually I love my husband. I just don’t feel that well, but actually, I did notice that I—oh, yeah, if we just slowed down. Oh, I’ve got this pain. She just told me what I could do to fix that. We’re going to get into that next.

Then I’m going to tell you about what supplementation supports libido and why because it also isn’t what you think, just like hormones aren’t the reason why your libido is crap. They’re a very small part of it. Here’s where they are the part of it. Let’s just discuss that for a second because I want to go into what goes wrong with the female body, and what goes wrong with the male body, and how you can use sexual biohacking to solve those problems.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s where we want to go.

Susan Bratton:
Let’s do ladies first shall we, Dan?

Dr. Pompa:
Yep.

Susan Bratton:
Okay, the very first thing is that since you’ve been thinking about hormones, make sure that if you are doing hormone—bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, you consider that if you have low orgasmic response, like you’re not feeling your orgasms as well as you used to, or you’re struggling to achieve a climax, that testosterone cream compounded in shea butter rubbed on the clitoral structure, on your vulva, on the clitoral structure, works very well to improve the loss of sensation that you get as you age. Another thing that works for well for that are what are called O-Shots or orgasm shots, which are PRP, platelet-rich plasma, spun down, and put into the clitoral structure, which is a spongy structure because it’s full of erectile tissue. That can actually rebuild your tissue.

It can help with incontinence and with laxity because it can improve the musculature in the pelvic bowl, so PRP. Then if you’re super rich and you want to just throw as much as you can at your yoni, yoni being another word for the female genitals, a sweet world, Y-O-N-I, you can do stem cells. If you put some me mesenchymal stem cells in your clitoral structure, like go for it, girl.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, those can come out of your own hip.

Susan Bratton:
Yeah, you can get them out of your iliac crest.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, the PRP is a simple treatment. They just take your blood, spin it down. What’s left is the PRP in that injection. It sounds worse than it is. I know people that have had it down. My wife has not, but—

Susan Bratton:
I’ve had it four times.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, okay, yeah, exactly. I’ve interviewed Harry Adelson on the show that he does that in his clinic.

Susan Bratton:
His girlfriend.

Dr. Pompa:
We can put the link to the show.

Susan Bratton:
Yeah, with Amy, Dr. Engleman does it.

Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Amy Killen, right, who we’ve interviewed. Yeah, we’ll link those shows. It is a simple procedure, but effective would you say?

Susan Bratton:
Super effective. I had my first O-Shot when I was 54. I didn’t notice that much, but I was also dealing with a lot of—and here’s the other issue. I’m advancing the conversation here. Vaginal atrophy, laxity, what happens as we age is that we get sarcopenia, muscle and tissue loss. Our growth hormone declines with all the rest of our hormones and so we’re not holding onto the tissue we used to have.

That’s why you can work out harder and you don’t get any bigger. It’s the same thing with the tissue in the genital area, both for the masculine and feminine. You lose tissue, and you lose sensation, and you also have diminished blood flow. When you have diminished blood flow, which we’re going to talk about with supplements, blood flow is very important to keep your vasodilation nitric oxide fuel tanked up. I’m going to talk a lot about why. That’s been the missing link for your pleasure and lubrication and for your tightness in that musculature.

Dr. Pompa:
You did that very aggressively, I might add, that tightness.

Susan Bratton:
Right, because when you can’t get a good grip on a penis with your vaginal tissue, you can’t experience the—

Dr. Pompa:
When you said grip on it, it was the hands. Then us men went, oh my God. Okay, but it was the vaginal—okay, got it.

Susan Bratton:
Yeah, you’ve got that nice grip on his penis. That gives you more orgasmic pleasure for orgasm from intercourse. When women don’t have the ability to have those nice strong contractions and that grip, when it’s just—when their vagina is literally flaccid or lax, it’s from the tissue in the vagina, which is called vaginal mucosa, it actually begins to shrink just like your bicep shrinks when you stop going to the gym. Your tissue shrinks as you age, as blood flow declines, as your hormones decline.

Dr. Pompa:
That sucks.

Susan Bratton:
What happens is your vagina becomes more open, so you get a big, floppy patty. It’s the worst. Your male body partner, as he ages, his penis starts to shrink. He’s atrophying in the tissues getting smaller. He’s getting a smaller—

Dr. Pompa:
Oh my God, is there good news right now? You’ve got to bring us good news.

Susan Bratton:
No, this is the stinkiest part of sexual aging is you’ve—now, you’re bigger and he’s smaller. You can’t feel a darn thing, which is why, you want to get the grip back.

Dr. Pompa:
Gosh, oh man.

Susan Bratton:
You can.

Dr. Pompa:
My friend Ben Greenfield has had his penis injected several times. The point I’m making is the PRP and the stem cells goes the other way as well.

Susan Bratton:
Yeah, I’m going to talk about penises in just a second. I’ve got some things to show you.

Dr. Pompa:
I just couldn’t help it.

Susan Bratton:
Yeah, please, let’s talk about penises as much as you want. I’m a penis expert.

Dr. Pompa:
Not yet because you have to show the infrared treatment, which you’re going to talk about, which is in your hand.

Susan Bratton:
That is what I’m doing right now. We’re not going to penises yet.

Dr. Pompa:
It looks like we are, but we’re not.

Susan Bratton:
This is vFit. You can get this at vFit—it’s at joylux.com. It’s red light therapy. It vibrates; you can hear the vibration. It’s warm. It’s warming.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s sounding a little sexual, but it’s truly a treatment, I promise you.

Susan Bratton:
No, this is a do it yourself, at home, FDA certified medical device for vaginal rejuvenation. Before the vFit, you had to go get your vaginal mucosa lasered or burned with RF devices to regenerate the mucosal tissue that’s thinning with age. Now, I love this product because the vFit is—you don’t have to go to an office; you don’t have to get burned; you don’t have to get wounded.

This is a non-wounding vaginal restoration device. It rebuilds the collagen with the heat. It stimulates the vaginal mucosal mitochondria with the red light. The vibration helps with the—it’s basically doing Kegels for you to increase the pelvic muscle in there.

Dr. Pompa:
Do we have a link that we can put up?

Susan Bratton:
Yeah, I’ll give you one. I actually have a link where—because I’m a spokesperson for them because I love them so much. I chased them down for over a year. I was like, I want to tell the world about this product. They gave me a little special page where you get a free bottle of their vaginal replenishment product that goes with it, so it saves you some money.

Dr. Pompa:
My only fear, and I’ll speak this for all the men watching is, that thing’s glowing, it’s vibrating, it’s all this. Guys, they may not even need us anymore. Look at this thing. How do we compete? You know I’m joking.

Susan Bratton:
This doesn’t give you orgasms.

Dr. Pompa:
No, I’m joking. It just was so magical and it was glowing. Here we are. It’s like all of a sudden, us men were feeling inferior to this. No, I get it. It’s a device for—

Susan Bratton:
You want to buy this for your wife or girlfriend as a gift because when she uses this for eight weeks every other day, she’s going to have the most luscious vaginal mucosa. She’s going to be turned on and desire sex in a way she hasn’t for a while because it gets everything going again. It turns back the clock, which is what sexual biohacking is supposed to do. It’s supposed to make you feel 35 instead of 55, or 65, or 75. That’s what I love about this. You don’t have to go get a treatment; you can do this at home. This is my favorite product of the year.

Dr. Pompa:
Does it come with the actual protocol? Do you have to do it every day, how long?

Susan Bratton:
Yeah, every other day. It’s a 12-minute protocol every other day for eight weeks. Then you can go on maintenance mode or you can see how you do.

A lot of women get it—my girlfriend got it. She did it every day, full-on, right out of the box because she’s like, I can take it. She’s like, “That thing hurt. I did a little bit too much. I was a little sensitive from that.”

I was like, “Well, did you follow the directions?” She said, “No.” Follow the directions. Listen to your mother. This works. Be careful. It’s an FDA approved device.

I think it’s like $500. It’s affordable. One laser treatment sets you back $1,500 because you’ve got to go for a series.

That I think is important. Then the other thing that I think is also important is just making sure that you are self-pleasuring if you don’t feel well, whenever you feel well, self-pleasuring, and using something that is going to stimulate not just the external vulva and clitoral structure that’s showing, but is going to go inside the vagina area. Because what happens for a lot of women is—well, a girlfriend of mine just emailed me.

She said, “I feel like my vaginal opening is almost fused shut. I have a new boyfriend. Lubrication is not my issue; it’s accommodation. What do I do?” For a lot of women, they let it go so long that they have to then do a lot of remediation where it’s much better if you’re using a product that is—this particular product from Fun Factory is a thruster.

Dr. Pompa:
This is the place in the show where I get a little embarrassed. Okay, go ahead, just announcing it.

Susan Bratton:
Oh, this is self-care. This is sexual self-care. Please don’t be embarrassed or am I embarrassing you?

Dr. Pompa:
No, you’re fine. Yeah, when the device started shacking, you know, anyway.

Susan Bratton:
This is a little rocker magnet. It actually does a very nice thrusting that is very good intravaginally. You want to keep that vaginal mucosa and the insides of the clitoral, and urethral, and perineal structures of erectile tissues stimulated. If you’re only focused on an external stimulation, you’re missing 95% of what keeps you healthy, young, feel good, orgasmic intensity, so having some kind of a g-area, or urethral sponge, or a pulsator of some kind. These are from Fun Factory. They make non-toxic toys. You want to be very careful not to buy—

Dr. Pompa:
No, you took one of my questions right there. I was going to nail you with that like, there could be a toxic component to that.

Susan Bratton:
Zero toxins, these are super high quality, Fun Factory. When I get to the men’s products, I’m going to show you a few super high-quality, non-toxic men’s products that are also very good.

Dr. Pompa:
Told you this would be a fun show, folks, and informative, and healing.

Susan Bratton:
Yes, we’re responsible for our own bodies and keeping them young. We talked about the PRP; we talked about the vFit; we talked about the Fun Factory thrusters, pulsators, and g-spotters. Those are all really good things. We talked about the testosterone cream. Then the other thing that I think is really important is getting enough good quality fats in your system.

Dr. Pompa:
I preach a lot of that; that’s for sure.

Susan Bratton:
I know you do. That comment is not only welcomed on your show but understood. I don’t need to go into great detail on it, but having both cod liver oil if you can get the kind with the flavored strawberry or orange or what have you, a big scoop of that.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m a big fan of just eating cod liver. You can buy them online at different things, honestly, because a lot of the cod liver oil is rancid. Anyway, yeah, so fats.

Susan Bratton:
Yep, healthy fats, including vitamin E, mixed tocopherols are very important as well in combination with the DHA, and the EPA, and those kinds of things. The fats really help keep everything lubricated, so does hyaluronic acid. That’s also very good for lubrication. Which women find that as they age, their—one of the reasons their vaginal mucosa becomes delicate, fragile, difficult, painful sex, it’s not always lack of estrogen. That is a contributing factor, but often for women who they’re managing their estrogen and they’re still having vaginal pain with sex, just up your fats and your nitric oxide, which I’ll talk about in a bit.

Your vagina doesn’t have glands that lubricate. The way your vagina gets lubricated is through the seepage from your blood plasma. Your body recruits the fluid from your blood plasma. It comes through all the epithelial layers—the endothelial layers of your vaginal mucosa and seeps into the wall. That’s where your lubrication comes from.

You have to be hydrated, and have a lot of healthy fats, and have good vasodilation blood flow. That’s also what keeps your pelvic musculature in good shape and reduces urinary tract infections and bladder infections. Women who have chronic UTIs, they’re often low in nitric oxide. It’s very simple stuff that the doctors generally don’t tell you about. That’s the female.

Now, the male, he’s shriveling. He’s got shrinkage. This is his problem. His second problem is that he is having diminished blow flow due to atherosclerosis. His blood vessels are lined with fats from eating too much barbeque and bad fats all his life. His blood vessels are lined with bad fats that then become calcified. They make his blood vessels brittle.

He can’t pump the blood where he needs it. It might be to his brain during work, his stomach after lunch, and his genitals during lovemaking. If he can’t move the blood around, if his vasodilation is impacted, the first place your body says, I need to protect the heart and the brain, you’re not going to get anything down below the belt. As soon as he begins to exhibit loss of size, as soon as he sees that he’s not as large as he was in his youth, as soon as he sees any trouble achieving or maintaining an erection, if he goes soft, or he can’t quite get as hard as he used to, that’s most likely the blood vessel issue, the atherosclerosis.

The treatment I recommend, and this is a treatment you go get done, is GAINSWave, which is a sound healing that actually blasts the plaque off the penile arteries and stimulates new tissue growth. I like to stack it because we’re biohacking. I like to stack it with P-Shots, which is the man’s equivalent of the O-Shot is the P-Shot, PRP into the penile tissue to stimulate new growth. It increases and regains sensitivity, it regains erectile function, and it restores tissue.

There’s a third piece to the stack that I think is not only vital, but if we’re talking about a guy who can’t afford to go get GAINSWave treatments and a P-Shot, I call this the “poor man’s GAINSWave P-Shot.” That is a vacuum erection device. A Vacuum erection device, this is a unit that is—has a handheld little pump. It attaches to cylinders. Depending on the man’s size, he gets a cylinder. They go up quite large.

The particular product that I like is called the Whooper. It’s the only one I recommend because it has this extra-large cylinder. This wraps around his penis. The penis goes in here. He pumps the pump.

Dr. Pompa:
I was wrong; this is the part of the show where I get embarrassed. It really does pull the blood in and it can fix the problem. To your point, this is another way of doing it without doing the GAINSWave.

Susan Bratton:
Yeah, well, I like it with the GAINSWave. In best of all worlds, GAINSWave, P-Shot, Whooper.

Dr. Pompa:
Got it.

Susan Bratton:
What’s nice about this is the penis and the testicles go into this larger one. That’s why it’s so big.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, my God.

Susan Bratton:
This restores length and this restores girth. What happens is, if you’re having—if you have severe erectile dysfunction and you can’t—the most common type of erectile dysfunction is called a venous leak. That’s where you can get the blood in, but you can’t trap it in. Your blood vessels are so brittle that they’re supposed to trap the blood in to hold the erection, but they can’t do it anymore.

What you can do with the penis pump while you’re repairing the damage with the pumping, every other day you pump for ten minutes, take a break, ten minutes, and you’re done. My husband pumps while I use my vFit. We’re not embarrassed at all to be together. We’ll watch TV. It’s good to maintain your erectile function into your 90s.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I just had a visual there, my wife and I doing this.

Susan Bratton:
I know; isn’t it so funny.

Dr. Pompa:
Anyways, so hence the laughter, okay.

Susan Bratton:
This is a constriction ring. If you have severe erectile dysfunction, you can pull the blood in with your pump and then you can trap the blood in with this ring. It doesn’t crush the corpus cavernosum. This is called a Giddy, G-I-D-D-Y, getmegiddy.com.

This is the little rubber band that’s adjustable. That holds all the blood in the penis for a half hour. You can make love. Then you can let it off and the blood will run back out.

The penis pump is good for intractable erectile dysfunction as well as for simple reversal of early-onset ED. Any man who’s taking Viagra to achieve and maintain an erection could get rid of the pharmaceutical by taking a nitric oxide supplement and using a penis pump for 13 weeks. It’s the difference between letting your body—supporting your body and growing new tissue and healing versus just covering up the systemic issue of atherosclerosis with a pill.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, right. Yeah, no, these are real solutions. These are big problems that people really have no answer to.

Susan Bratton:
Everybody has them.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s a new device called a TRT, a tissue regenerative therapy that actually that they were using. They use it to basically wounds that won’t heal for diabetics. They use it for actually shoulders, knees, pains in the body, necks. They’re using it now—some of the top in the world are using this device like the GAINSWave for these dysfunctions that we’re discussing.

TRT, did I do a show? I think I did a show on that. We talked about it, so Ashley can add that show as well. Wow, okay—

Susan Bratton:
I’ve got a couple of other quick ones to show you if you’re still good with show and tell?

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s do it. Yeah, let’s do it.

Susan Bratton:
Okay, the other piece of it is that—I really want to just quickly take a quick pit stop into the prostate. It’s very important. You don’t want to become or have your husband become a guy that gets up five times at night to pee. He stands there; he’s got a tiny little stream. He can’t really get a full force pee going.

He can’t drive more than an hour because he’s afraid he’ll pee his pants. It can get bad. He’ll have prostate issues; he might have a prostatectomy. The most important thing that a man can do, just as I recommended to the woman to do internal stimulation of the vaginal tissue—my little penis pumps are making noise here.

Dr. Pompa:
Uh oh.

Susan Bratton:
A man can also stimulate internally the prostate, which is the male G-spot. It’s called the P-spot. There are battery-operated massagers so you can get a vibration along with the stimulation. There’s all different kinds of them. There’s remote controlled ones, etcetera.

As women, I think it’s important for us to encourage our men to self-care in these areas because I always feel like I’m Dr. mom. I think a lot of women do. A lot of men would be embarrassed or shy to put attention on their prostate, but prostate massage is the—besides diet and exercise, which are always our fundamentals here with Dr. Pompa, of course, is just take the embarrassment out of it and put the encouragement for sexual self-care into your household because nobody knows what you do at home. You’re going to live long and happy and have a fabulous intimate life with really good health with the simplest of $20 tools.

Once you do it three times, you start doing it in front of each other, it’s no big thing. You’re just taking care of business. There are a lot of things that can be done.

Dr. Pompa:
Literally.

Susan Bratton:
Exactly; now, there’s two more things I want to show you in the masculine sphere that I think are quite interesting. These are pleasure toys that help for men who are having erectile dysfunction issues. This particular one is by Hot Octopuss. This is called the Solo, I think it’s called. Their names I never remember, but you can go to Hot Octopuss with two s’s.com.

There’s a plate inside here that the penis rests in. It doesn’t have to be fully erect. It pleasures the frenulum, which is essentially the male clitoral area if you will at the end of his penis. That’s pleasure for him, but he can wear it this way. This part also vibrates. You can have a missionary style kissing intimate experience even if he isn’t able to completely penetrate where she’s getting this vibrator and he’s getting this floating plate of pleasure. She’s got a little controller that she can operate this pleasure dome right here.

Dr. Pompa:
That can be good or bad, I don’t know.

Susan Bratton:
You can have the closeness that you want without being fully functional. This is another very interesting product. There’s a vibrator here; there’s a vibrator here. This traps the blood in. His penis comes out here. This is for her and this is perineal stimulation, P-spot, for him.

One of the things—I do a lot of primary market research because I have a very large following who love to take my surveys and I love to ask them questions. I recently did a survey. I sent it out once and I got over 3,000 responses from couples and singles, about half couples, half singles, about slightly more men than women, but not much, pretty equal.

I said, what are the things you’re the worst at in the bedroom from this list. In the top three for both men and women was—and by the way, I offered gender-neutral options in my surveys as well. There aren’t that many takers of that, but I do believe that everything should be supported across the gender spectrum. Both the males and the females said, I really stink at using sex toys during lovemaking. I thought, there’s so many good toys out there. It’s really just about getting over your embarrassment, knowing which toys to choose, finding ones that are right for you, doing experimentation.

One of the things that fixes the monotony of monogamous intimacy is doing new things together. In the 21st Century, the year 2020, where we are right now with companies like Hot Octopuss, Fun Factory, and—where’s my—this one is by Mystery Vibe. This is a Tenuto, T-E-N-U-T-O, by Mystery Vibe, this one.

With the world having these products, why not try them? Have some fun; laugh a little; get good at things; feel some new feels. There’s just a lot of really great things that you can do to have more fun in the bedroom. When you start with a low libido, having that little extra help from a nice pleasure toy ain’t the worst thing in the world.

Dr. Pompa:
Hey, that’s right. Like you said, hey, it may not be your hormones. It may be—

Susan Bratton:
Boredom.

Dr. Pompa:
No, but again, you brought so many things from blood flow, just I don’t want to call it normal aging because to me it’s abnormal aging, but yet, common with aging, probably a better way to put it, which happens. You had answers. A lot of these things are answers, even in the actual active intercourse, they’re part of the answer. Interesting stuff, unique answers.

I told you this show would be full of things you may have heard of, but plenty that you have not. You never cease to amaze me. You always pull these new things. I’m like, well, gosh, I feel like such a child. I don’t know these things. Thank God I have you as our sexpert that comes on and educates us.

Honestly, obviously, this show would benefit anybody, but my followers are really people, health seekers that are really—but this is a big deal. You have to enter into this with your partner, your spouse starting with conversation. Would you agree?

Because I know what people are thinking. I always try to think like my viewers. Oh my gosh, I would love to do this with my wife or I would love to do this with my husband, but they’re afraid to breach the conversation. Do you have suggestions for them?

Susan Bratton:
Yeah, one thing I sent an email to my followers and I said—because I have a newsletter. I sent out an email. I said tell me the reason. What’s the obstacle that’s preventing you from having the intimacy that you crave.

All answers are accepted except I don’t have a partner. This is not about dating; this is not about partners. This is for people who have a partner or who don’t have a partner, but it’s not the fact that they don’t have a partner that’s the issue.

As hundreds of responses came in, I thought, I can fix that. Then I thought, I can’t help every single person individually. What can I do?

I put together a process of conversation that I call the magic pill method. Because I thought to myself, if I could give everybody a magic pill to fix their problem, what would it be? It would be this communication strategy, which is, and it’s at magicpillmethod.com. I can’t go into all the details here, but you can print it out at home, discuss it with your partner. Try this technique together.

Essentially what it does is it has you make a list of all the things that you use to do that you don’t do anymore that you like and you missed. Then you make another list that is all the things that you could possibly still do that are in the intimate connection category. Then you eat a really good meal. You have lots of hydration. You sit on that couch together and you hold hands. You discuss your list of what you used to do that you miss and your partner has their list.

Then you talk about the things you could do and the things they could do. Then you talk about what is holding you back physically or emotionally from doing those things that you both like on each other’s lists. Then you decide what are you going to do to fix that thing.

If it’s lack of erectile dysfunction, go get a GAINSWave treatment. If you have pain with intercourse, get a vFit. Now that you are aware—once you pinpoint what the actual issue is instead—because what happens with couples is they hit a wall. They don’t talk about it. Their sex life goes away over something solvable. They just didn’t know what the solution was because they didn’t really know what the problem was. Often, the problem seems like this big general thing when it’s not; it’s actually one little thing with a solution.

What that does is that says we’re going to compromise because we maybe can’t do what we used to do, but we sure have some fun things that we can still do together. Then you’re back to connection, hand-holding, intimacy, feeling good, generating oxytocin, and all those things that everybody wants and deserves. That’s my solution for how do you talk about what you want is the magic pill method that diffuses the blame game and the shame game.

Dr. Pompa:
Probably the easy way to get there is share the show with them, make them watch the show with you. That breaks the conversation and breaks you right into that answer. That’s great advice there. Where can people find out more? What do you want to—where do you want to lead our viewers?

Susan Bratton:
I think what I want to do is we didn’t get much time to talk about the supplements. I think I would just like to briefly tell you about that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you can, go ahead. Talk a few minutes. You mentioned it a little bit. I didn’t know you had other little things there to show. Go ahead and show those.

Susan Bratton:
Yeah, what I want to do is I researched libido for a number of years. I researched every botanical and every piece of peer-reviewed medical science, clinical data, as well as all of the ancestral wisdom around botanicals for libido. What I realized is that there are about—there’s five plant products botanicals that help you feel more desire, more libido, more sexual health.

Often, they operate on supportive hormones, blood flow, but they also have some elusive components to them. What I found is that for—our ancestors over the eons always wanted to feel more desire. It’s not a modern-day thing due to our stress over social medial, and the political climate, the pandemic, and the race riots, and all the crazy stuff that’s happening now. It’s actually that we’ve always craved feeling more desired. We have because it is what I started out this conversation saying, which is, it’s the fuel of our creativity. It’s our passion for life, our lust for life. The more you feel turned on, you’re turned on for life.

There’s five libido botanicals. The first one is maca. Eat some sugar-free chocolate every day and you will have your maca, your cacao. I’m sorry, your cacao; chocolate is your cacao.

The second is maca, which is a Peruvian root vegetable that is very good for feeling that zest. It’s a zesty botanical. Maca is great.

Now, both of them, you need about a gram to three grams of, a fair amount of material. It’s not the kind of thing you’d want to put into a capsule and take a supplement. You want to put maca in your smoothie. You want to have a nice piece of dark chocolate, a square of dark chocolate every day, and you’re good to go.

The other three that are good for supplementation are fenugreek, which comes from the Ayurvedic world, tongkat ali or long jack, which comes from the Southeast Asian traditional Chinese medicine world. Then the third is Tribulus Terrestris, which is your Mediterranean botanical.

They offer very similar properties. They work for male and female-bodied people, but I don’t recommend stacking them. This is where stacks can be overwhelming, especially if you’re in delicate health. That’s why you only want 300 milligrams of one of the three.

What I did was—and here’s the thing. I said, okay, I could make this tongkat ali 300-milligram supplement, and make sure it’s got the components, and it’s the right extracts, and it’s good product, and it’s organic, and all those things, but most people aren’t even taking their daily vitamins. Now, on your show, they might be, but the average bear is probably not even getting enough borane to decouple his testosterone from the protein. He’s probably not getting enough vitamin D to produce the hormone.

Dr. Pompa:
Magnesium is a player as well.

Susan Bratton:
Magnesium, the selenium. You need to have your basic fundamental micronutrient and minerals for all of the production of things that your body needs to give you a libido. What I did was I made a multivitamin, multimineral with a beautiful mineral profile that’s all methylated Bs, methylcobalamin, 5MDHF for your B9, etcetera, and TMG, the butane in it so that your body doesn’t even have to work any effort at all to methylate the vitamins. They just get bioavailability absorbed it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s better.

Susan Bratton:
I made a vitamin mineral. One of them has the Tribulus, one has the fenugreek, and one has the long jack.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, that’s brilliant.

Susan Bratton:
That’s what I came up with. You herb cycle. It’s always the same vitamin and minerals because you need that every day, but then you go from Boost to Drive to Desire or whichever one you want to do.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, cycling herbs actually works better. It’s a principle that I teach because the body adapts. You break that adaptation with a new cycle. That’s brilliant, Susan, absolutely brilliant.

Susan Bratton:
Thank you. Then here’s where the stack comes in. These you don’t stack. You don’t want to take three times the vitamins you need every day; you want to cycle through the botanicals and always get your vitamin minerals.

This is where the stack comes in. This is Flow. When I looked at what really makes you feel good, for men, it’s having a firm erection makes them turned on. For women, it’s feeling some arousal and vaginal lubrication. That’s a signal to us that even though how lubricated we are has no connection to how turned on we are, we women like to feel lubricated to feel our desire.

When we age, by the time we’re 50, we have half the nitric oxide production ability that we did when we were 20. We literally can’t pump the blood around like we used to. A lot of people take a nitric oxide supplement to support their cardiovascular health to reduce neuroinflammation, to improve their hormone profile. There’s lots of reasons people take it. Pretty much the people who follow me take my brand because it gives you better hard-ons, and more vaginal lubrication, an increased orgasmic intensity because you’re getting the blood flow to your pelvis that’s gone missing as you age. It gives you all the other benefits of nitric oxide.

The thing is, I looked around in the market because I am happy—as you can see, I talk about a lot of brands. I don’t need to make everything, trust me. If somebody has a great product out there, I would much rather they do their thing and I just tell my friends about it, my followers about it. I looked for an organic nitric oxide product made for people in middle age who want more blood flow. Really, there’s only people who have heart conditions, or people who are young, people who are trying to bulk up their biceps in the marketplace.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you’re right about that.

Susan Bratton:
They weren’t organic. I am an organic girl. I also realized that a lot of the blood flow supplements are made with arginine, which by the time you’re over 40, the arginine pathway in your body is dysfunctional.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes, citrulline is better.

Susan Bratton:
My product is made out of organic watermelon rinds. The citrulline comes from organic watermelon rinds. Then I put nitrates in it because that’s a separate pathway that your body can use from organic spinach. The vitamin C is from organic acerola cherries, the bitter cherries that helps actually absorb all of the watermelon and spinach. Then I put nack in it and acetylcysteine, which is like a PDE5 inhibitor. It slows the combustion down, so you get better blood flow longer from the nitric oxide supplement.

Dr. Pompa:
Awesome.

Susan Bratton:
Women tell me, I am moist. I have taken this for like ten days and I’m moist for the first time in ten years. This is amazing. Men say, I don’t have to take—some men still have to take their PDE5 inhibitors, the Viagra, Levitra, Cialis because they just don’t—they still can’t produce enough of their own or they’ve got atherosclerosis or what have you.

A lot of the younger guys who are taking Viagra, they don’t even need to take that. They can just take a nitric oxide or get a nitric oxide supplement and they get all the blood flow they need. It either helps with your PDE5 or it helps you get rid of having to take a PDE5 inhibitor. It helps all the other functions, too.

If I was going to say anything for anybody, what’s the Number One supplement you should take to improve your libido, I would say, take a nitric oxide supplement, mine or somebody else’s. I like organic. Then look at libido botanicals after that because really the blood flow’s more important than anything.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I agree. Do we have a link for those? Do we have affiliated content? They can order them directly through you if we put the links up?

Susan Bratton:
Most definitely.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, cool. That’s what we do because I know people are going, okay, I want that, including, hey, I want to try them myself.

Susan Bratton:
Yeah, I’ll send them to you. I send them to you and Merily, no problem at all.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely.

Susan Bratton:
You don’t have to ask.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’m a believer in those products you mentioned, actually, all of them, and the way you’re doing them passes the mustard for me. Yeah, thank you for that. We’ll put the links right here to make it easy on you watching the show. We mentioned a lot, so we’re going to put all those links here. Ashley is going to be very busy putting the links.

Susan, thank you so much. I’m tell you, a wealth of knowledge in this area. That’s why you’re our sex experts that we bring on the show because you just—you always have amazing answers.

I knew you would for the subject of libido. A complicated topic, but I think you hit it at every possible angle of causation. I think you really have. I know that people are going to share this show because there was that many goodies in there. The first person you better share it with is your partner, so Step One.

Thank you again. I’m sure we’re going to have you on in the future.

Susan Bratton:
I’d love to.

Dr. Pompa:
You have so much to offer on so many topics. Thank you again.

Susan Bratton:
Yeah, thank you so much, Dr. Pompa. Thank you as a health seeker who is also standing for your sexuality. It means a lot to me that you’re still watching or listening to Dr. Dan and I talk about this. I wish you much love, much connection, and much health sex-cess.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, there you have it. Thank you, Susan, appreciate you. Thank you so much.

Ashley Smith:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 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.

344: Emotional Eating: What Are We Truly Craving?

Today I welcome good friend to the show, “That Health Chick” – Errin Smith.

Errin is an avid health and fitness fanatic who is expert trained in holistic health for over 10 years, and is the founder host and producer of What We Crave: The Emotional Eating Summit, which Dr. Pompa recently appeared as a speaker.

I asked Errin to join me on the show because emotional eating is such an important topic that gets so overlooked, and yet so many people struggle with it (and really don’t talk about it).

With people spending more time indoors than ever before, and with emotions at an all time high, this could not be more important to listen to , and share with loved ones today.

More about Errin Smith:

Errin Smith, also known as “That Health Chick” is an avid health and fitness fanatic who is expert trained in holistic health for over 10 years, and is a consultant for the top practitioners in the country, such as Dr. Dan Pompa and Dr. Zach Bush MD. She's also the founder host and producer of What We Crave: The Emotional Eating Summit.

Show notes:

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Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
Are you an emotional eater or would you say that you have any type of eating disorder? I would say most of us would say no. In this episode you might find out that you’re wrong. Some of your health problems of not feeling well are actually tied to emotional eating. The woman who I love and adore in this episode, you’re going to hear from Erin Smith that this was her problem. Wait until you hear her discoveries so much so that the solution, she gives us ten things that transformed her life. You’re going to get those ten. Stay tuned for an amazing episode that you’re going to want to share.

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today we welcome good friend of the show, that health chick, Erin Smith. Erin is an avid health and fitness fanatic who is expert trained in holistic health for over ten years and is the founder, host, and producer of What We Crave: The Emotional Eating Summit, which Dr. Pompa recently appeared on as a speaker.

We wanted to bring Erin on the show because emotional eating is such an important topic that gets so overlooked and yet so many struggle with it and really don’t talk about it. With people spending more time indoors than ever and with emotions at an all-time high, this could not be more important to listen to today. Let’s get started and welcome to the lovely Erin Smith and, of course, Dr. Pompa to the show. Welcome, both of you.

Errin Smith:
Hi, guys. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Pompa:
She’s the lovely Erin Smith. We love you, Erin Smith. You deserve every bit of that. Oh, my gosh. We’re so glad to have you on Cell TV.

Errin Smith:
Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
I can always talk to you any time on any subject.

Errin Smith:
I know, right? I love you guys so much. Thank you for having me. This is going to be awesome.

Dr. Pompa:
You’ve been a busy girl. We promoted The Summit. I think it’s worth talking about because we didn’t do it on Cell TV in the sense that there is such an important message here. I think when people hear about what we eat or what we crave, food addiction comes up in their mind. They would say that’s not me. Then emotional eating some people might say that’s not me either.

I would argue you need to listen to this whole show because it just might be you. This is broad in this eating disorder. I even hesitate saying that because people would never say I have an eating disorder. What do you crave? That’s a very important question. That was the question in your summit.

I think it really needs to resonate with people because your cravings, your addictions, your emotional eating could play into something you haven’t thought about. Erin, I want you to start with your story. You did this summit for a reason. You interviewed the top experts in the world.

One of the questions we’re going to ask her, folks, is what she learned from it, what she took away. This is an area that she owns because she’s been through it. Let’s start there. You’ve been through it. Tell us how did you get here? How did you acquire all this knowledge that I believe everyone needs? That’s why you’re here today.

Errin Smith:
Thank you. It’s interesting, working with you and all of these amazing experts, you would think I have it all together with ten years of this, learning the protocols and the fasting and biohacking. It just goes to show you that there’s something much deeper like what you said that maybe some of us aren’t looking at. I know I wasn’t. Back then for me I just didn’t have the tools. I didn’t have the emotional resilience.
I could tell you about nutrition and super food and detox protocols. When I get stressed, I’d be the first to eat an entire cauliflower crust pizza and Bulletproof bars and a pint of keto ice cream because it was keto and clean and non-GMO and organic. Honestly, I was using healthy food. I never touched the junk.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, she’s disciplined, folks, very healthy food. That brings me to my point. I want you to go on, but my point is that many people watching this show are already eating healthy. I don’t have an eating problem. I don’t have emotional eating. I don’t have food addiction because I eat healthy. That’s what you thought.

Errin Smith:
Right. I was using health food to numb out, and I wasn’t even aware. I got stuck in the cycle for years. I think too because I had spent all my career learning about health, I became so passionate. I didn’t take the time to learn about the other areas that you need to look at. If you want real health where you have all of these pillars dialed in, that is real health. It’s not just I’m going to eat organic and have a green juice.

Emotional eating kind of sits you down and says honey, you’ve got some blind spots to work on. Pausing on this, just quick back story, this will help make so much sense. First of all, you know me, Dr. Pompa. When I go all in on something, I go all in. I give your wife, Merily, a run for her money when it comes to who eats the most.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. My wife has been told she eats like a linebacker. Thank God she intermittent fasts and does that in small windows; you as well.

Errin Smith:
That’s why I love her. I also go beast mode on fasting and workouts and being an athlete. I’m kind of just wired like that and not to mention growing up as a kid I was an athlete. My dad was always trying to bulk me up to gain weight for basketball. I was always eating. That will come into play here in a minute.

Just rewinding a little bit, back in my 20s when I first moved down to California, I worked out like a crazy person. It was very South Beach Diet, zero fat, two fat grams a day, working out twice a day, spin, hot yoga, saunas, adrenal failure, working 18 hours a day, totally depleted of minerals and fat. I did this huge colonic detox that I knew nothing about. I wasn’t working with a practitioner. I just whipped up a recipe I found online.

I completely messed everything up. I ended up in the hospital with a grand mal seizure. That’s called doing detox wrong, as you talk about. That’s called the beast mode seizure. I should have died. It was a miracle I didn’t. It took me six months to recover.

That literally changed my life and started working in holistic health. From then on I got into sales. I was so passionate. I had a second chance at life so I was like I’m going into sales. I’m going to work in super food sales or do something. I just want to be part of this industry.

Then I discovered keto. Then I felt so incredible because I’d been so depleted for fat for so long to the point where I was so depleted I’d be on the freeway driving in 90-miles-an-hour traffic. I’d have to pull over to the side of the road and just sleep because my brain would just shut down because I was so depleted in fat. Keto brought me back to life. I remember that first sip of bulletproof coffee. I was like this is glorious. Of course, I got obsessed with keto. I went beast mode with keto.

Dr. Pompa:
I remember that.

Errin Smith:
I’d bring you bulletproof coffees every morning at conferences. Fast forwarding at the peak of my sales career was at the peak of my emotional eating. Even though I was in the Nutraceutical sales holistic health space, that’s where things started to fall apart. For me, starting to work from home, going from outside sales rep, working with doctors out in the field to inside sales rep, sitting all day behind my computer not moving, not connecting with other humans, high stress, sales goals that were completely unattainable, fear of getting fired all the time, the most stressful goals I’ve ever had. You know me. I can handle stress. I’m an athlete. I can handle this.

This was like phone rings, it’s my boss, constant visceral reaction, fight or flight. Your whole body just completely freaks out. I just found myself grabbing for the food. It was healthy food, but I was just like snack all day, bulletproof coffee. Whatever it was, as long as it was healthy, I was just a bottomless pit.

Dr. Pompa:
I have to ask a quick question. If I would have asked you or if I would have said to you at that point Erin, I think you have an emotional eating problem, how would you have responded to me?

Errin Smith:
I would have been like no, I’m not. I just like to eat. I think I would have just been like I work out so much that I just need to eat more.

Dr. Pompa:
I think that would have been your answer. Go on.

Errin Smith:
This was when I was 28. This is ten years later. Not to mention I would have to fly across the country once a week to the East Coast. If you’re over in Florida, 6:00 a.m. Eastern is 3:00 a.m. Pacific. Your sleep is trashed. Hunger hormones are whacked.

I’m needing to eat more because you’re starving and you’re a bottomless pit. Then you eat more, and then your blood sugar spikes. Then you eat all the snacks because you can and it’s keto. Then you’re also working from your desk sitting for 16 to 20 hours a day not moving. You’re too tired to go work out. Then you eat more.

Then you fly home and you have to do it all over again the next week. I did that for six months straight. That’s where I remember, you noticed that I was at my worst. I had gained 25 pounds. That was including multiple fasts because I knew I had to fast. I would shame fast it off.

I gained all this weight, then 14-day bone broth fast just to get the weight off. Then I’d go into keto and feel amazing. I’m like I’ve got to stay in keto, so now I’ve got to eat all the keto. Then I’d gain the weight back. I was stuck in this cycle. You saw me. I was swollen and puffy and inflamed.

Dr. Pompa:
I have to admit too, I feel a little guilty because I saw that. I knew that it was unhealthy. I knew that you were running an unhealthy course. I saw the ups and the downs. I love you. I never wanted to hurt your feelings. I never wanted to approach you and say there’s an issue here.

The reason that you don’t look the way you want to look is because of this issue. I never had the guts to approach you on that. I feel like I should say I’m sorry. I never wanted to hurt you. I don’t even know what the lesson is here. Do you approach somebody? I don’t think you would have heard it anyway.

Errin Smith:
I was not going to hear it. I’m so grateful you didn’t say anything because it brought me to where I am now. I put on the summit. It was very pain to purpose. I put on my own summit to figure it out to help other people with this.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s such an amazing summit. The link will be here. If you even feel like this is an issue for you, there’s an answer in this summit. We’re going to talk about that in a minute. Go ahead, finish the story.

Errin Smith:
You should see the people that reached out to me. They were in the same health space. They were like oh, my God. That’s me. If I helped one person, I’m stoked. I was in so much joy and purpose to help bring this. It was all worth it. I even took a picture of one of the worst. I look six months pregnant. I’ll pull it up on my phone.

Dr. Pompa:
No one worked out more. No one ate better, yet she was bloated out to her point. It was this problem that she was talking about. I’ll have to have you tell the story after you show this, the yogurt story. This addicted girl could have bought stock in yogurt. That addiction created another problem, but I’ll let you tell the story. Okay, let me see the picture.

Errin Smith:
I just had it. Of course, my phone is—oh, there we go. This is I don’t know how many years ago. Does Erin look pregnant there? Yes, she does. That’s just bloatedness. Isn’t that crazy?

Dr. Pompa:
That’s crazy.

Errin Smith:
It was like that all the time. I was just thinking it’s just because I had some erythritol. It’s fine. It will go down. Granted, erythritol was part of the problem, which we’ll get to.

It’s just funny because the most ironic thing was I was the most educated I had ever been about health. Somehow I was the most exhausted, not really happy, adrenal fatigued, numbing out, not to mention impulse shopping and retail therapy—that’s another conversation. It was just like it’s healthy. It made me okay. It was okay.

You can just do it. I didn’t care. I had the F-its for six months where I just didn’t care. I became so fascinated. I’m still doing this, and I know better. I repeated it. Here we are with the summit.

Dr. Pompa:
I think so many of my viewers really can relate to that. Many of my viewers are healthy. They do healthy things, but yet they’re still searching and looking for that thing to get where they want to be. They’re going through this. That’s why I think this is such an important show.

Errin Smith:
One more thing, which is so interesting, when I said I’m going to get to the bottom of this and figure this out, if I can just figure out why it’s happening not just what to do when it happens fast, but why is this happening, I can get to the bottom of this and actually change my brain. I started filming these interviews right before COVID. Then COVID lockdown hits, enter the worst emotional eating epidemic of all time, and my summit launches. I was like if this isn’t divinely timed, I don’t know what is. Here we are.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, yogurt story.

Errin Smith:
Oh, the yogurt story!

Dr. Pompa:
I’m not going to let you forget.

Errin Smith:
Being in California, they have the healthiest stuff everywhere. When I was fasting and in keto, there’s people who can do straight-from-the-farm dairy.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m one of them. I’m great with it, no problem.

Errin Smith:
Before, I had cut out dairy a long time ago. I was like I’m keto now, so I can add it back in. These jars of full-fat dairy full of these amazing probiotic fermented—it’s amazing. You feel amazing. All the good chemicals that are made in your gut go up to your brain. You just feel alive.

Of course, I got hooked on that. I would do sometimes three of those a day. Do you know how much full-fat dairy that is for someone that is not supposed to have dairy? It just goes to show you that sometimes certain things are not just because it works.

Dr. Pompa:
I would argue that one of the benefits of that product was that it was a fully fermented product, really fermented. If you let these things sit, the darn tops would blow off. They would pour out. That’s how fermented it was. You had SIBO unknowingly. You were putting all of this probiotic into a SIBO situation, which is an absolute disaster for people.
A little bit of it may have been okay, but you were putting this in and these bacteria were building up in your small intestine. That was even a bigger problem than just the dairy itself, honestly. I watched that happen with other people with fermented foods. This one was a powerhouse. It built up in your small intestine.

Errin Smith:
I was like but it’s good for me, so I can keep eating it. I remember taking that yogurt and eating it because it was the only thing that made me feel good amongst all the stress. It was like I didn’t want to hear it.

Dr. Pompa:
We actually crave the things that are actually oftentimes creating a problem oddly. We crave foods that we have literally become intolerant to. It’s the weirdest thing. Then you just want more of that, whether it’s the xylitol, erythritol sweeteners. Whatever it is, you start doing that and we’re realizing that the addiction is part of this craving. It’s odd.

Errin Smith:
I remember telling you I am addicted to this yogurt. Is it possible to be addicted to yogurt? Yes, it is. I have 35 interviews later a summit with these top takeaways. There’s like 50.

Dr. Pompa:
I asked you to narrow it down to ten. Let’s bring my viewers ten of what you learned that changed your life. Here you are in a totally different place. You’re the best Erin I know. These ten things narrowed down, let’s start. Let’s give a little [18:31].

Errin Smith:
I’m going to keep this as quick as I can. There’s so much to this, so it’s really just the tip of the iceberg. One of the things that hit me the hardest, I interviewed Tricia Nelson. She said, “You don’t have an eating problem, you have a living problem.” That was probably one of the most powerful quotes that hit me. I was like oh, man.

As one of the characteristics of someone that emotionally eats or stress eats is that we have a lack of boundaries and that we’re people pleasers. With myself, with family, with friends, with work, you name it, that was me. I couldn’t stand up to my boss. I couldn’t say no to other people. I’m like I’ll work until 2:00 a.m. on that project, sure. No problem. I don’t have a husband or kids. I can do it.

I would sacrifice my health just to get this approval, this validation that I was seeking, and it drove me into the ground. I was choosing all of it. I was really unaware of the way I was running my life. I had to take some inventory and look at what am I doing and what can I change? Everyone’s different, but we all know that one thing that we’re like I can change that there. I can adjust that here. I can say no to this.

It just takes some time and some self-reflection and some work. This is all internal work stuff. That was one. There were times where I’d be like I don’t have the budget for that snowboard trip, but I’m going anyways. It was the same area in my life where I was overeating and saying F-it and just eating all the food. I would say that with my budget with finances.

Dr. Pompa:
You’ve got a life problem like she said. It wasn’t like I can control this. You had a realization that this was extending into your entire life on everything. That brought it to another level of consciousness.

I know you, Erin. You desire to help people. You desire to be successful in every aspect. You realize I’m going to help nobody. I’m not going to be successful. This is ruining my existence. That was part of it; another one.

Errin Smith:
Another one is the gut, which you talk about a lot. The gut is the center of the universe for health. If our guts aren’t working, which mine clearly was not, enter brain fog, depression, anxiety, exhaustion, emotional eating, all the things. For me, I was like my gut is fine. No, clearly there was a problem.

I interviewed Dr. Zach Bush, who we talk about all the time, about how delicate our lining is where all of those feel-good chemicals are made. When that lining falls apart, which it’s only half of a—take a hair and chop it in half, and that’s how thin our lining is. When that thing falls apart, everything collapses around it from physical, emotional, everything. We talked about glyphosate, toxins, sugar, alcohol, processed foods, anything, including healthy stuff. It can tear the lining, including stress.

Dr. Pompa:
Like the yogurt, when those good bacteria got overbuilt in your small intestine, you’re bloating. SIBO is small intestinal bacteria overgrowth. In that case it was a healthy bacteria, but look at the symptoms it caused.

Errin Smith:
If our gut is supposed to make these feel-good chemicals, our serotonin, dopamine, all these things and we’re not making it in our lining because it’s just destroyed, of course we’re going to reach for the food. We want that dopamine hit from the food because our guts are not making what they’re supposed to be making to get us to feel good. That was major. We have to fix the gut or else we’re going to be stuck in this crappy state of emotional stuckness. You talk about the power of ion biome, which was formerly Restore, as a supplement. It’s a game changer for the leaks and the tears and getting the gut to turn on and function again.

Dr. Pompa:
I use it in every program because you’re right. The leaks and the tears, that’s what it does. I want people to hear this too. Some people go I don’t have a gut issue. I’ve seen this a lot. It’s like they don’t have problems digesting things.

They think they don’t have a gut problem, but a lot of that micro biome is how your brain works. That’s to your point. This can be the symptom, not the digestive problem after you eat. I can eat anything. I’m fine. Meanwhile, the micro biome is off, and it affects this brain. That can be part of this addiction and emotional eating. Okay, third one.

Errin Smith:
I was going to say I think everyone that—we’re exposed to glyphosate every day. No one is escaping it. You have to put up that armor every day if you even want to be out in the world. It’s mandatory now. Then speaking of toxins, I interviewed you, of course. You shared your story of the toxic overload and how toxins are connected to emotional eating, weight gain, weight loss resistance.
If we’re not looking at those like you always talk about, it’s a center point of so many problems. Again, you feel like crap from the toxins. You’re going to need a dopamine hit. You’re going to reach for that food. You’re always going to be stuck in that cycle, which you talked a lot about. You went through it too.

Dr. Pompa:
I did, absolutely.

Errin Smith:
Of course, I’m sure you probably don’t need to speak to that because you’re always talking about it.

Dr. Pompa:
I was encouraging you to continue brain phases because it’s the deep-rooted toxins in the brain that oftentimes lead to the problems. Your pituitary hypothalamus controls your whole hormonal system, your endocrine system. That’s why people end up with cravings. That’s why people have leptin resistance. That can lead to the physiological craving of food as well. Keep going.

Errin Smith:
That’s why we’ve got to get to the cell to get well. The next one is inherited trauma. This is another big one. I interviewed Bobbi Vogel with Etheric Medicine talking about how when we experience trauma, whether that’s physical, mental, emotional, that energy gets stuck. If we don’t release that, that can just lead to stress and anxiety and depression and stuckness.

We’re reaching for the food because we’ve got this trauma that we don’t even realize we have. That actually can carry over from past generations through DNA, which I know you talk a lot about. I actually took a hard look at my parents and their parents and sort of the generational trauma that they experienced. There was so much not feeling safe, abandonment, scarcity.

You have to earn your love. You have to earn everything. You can’t just receive anything, lack of self-love, lack of worthiness. My mom felt that her entire life and she was pregnant with me. No wonder my subconscious needed some work in those areas with those trapped emotions.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m going to ask the question. What I have found—by the way, trapped emotions in traumas is no different than a toxin that gets trapped in the cell. This does as well. It literally is in you like a toxin. Sometimes just the conscious thought of the awareness of I have this is enough to actually let the body let go of it. What else did you do now that you realize I have all these traumas?

Errin Smith:
The awareness for sure, releasing it. There’s several different techniques. One is through breath work kind of like how Hank, your doctor that is one of your [26:24] doctors.

Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Hank helped you do a lot of this too. I love Dr. Hank.

Errin Smith:
Oh, my gosh, so much work where you’re actually thinking of the emotional and pulling it out through the breath, targeting those organs that it’s stored in.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, Ashley, we’ll make sure we put Dr. Hank’s information here. He has a practice in Laguna Beach. He does this emotional work. We’ll give Hank kudos. Let’s send some people to him, but go ahead.

Errin Smith:
He’s amazing. I remember I would just walk in and he would just go bing, bing, bing, and I would just bawl tears. I had dad issues that I didn’t even know about that are just in there that we just are not aware of. When I interviewed Bobbi, she talked about being aware of it and understanding that there is purpose in all of this and that you can go from victim mindset to growth mindset. Your story can help so many other people. It completely changes the way you see your life.

Dr. Pompa:
You have to look back once you realize that this could be a problem at those and then you have to change the way you think about it. You have to change the perception. Your perception becomes your reality. You realize I needed that to become who I am today. Part of that you have to start speaking about it to people that way.

You have to talk about let me tell you why I had abandonment. Let me tell you why I needed that. The thoughts are one thing. You have to change the way you think about it. Then it’s more magical even the way you speak about it to other people, which takes you—it’s like a detox. It’s almost like you have to let it out.

Then you start reprogramming your subconscious. The more you speak at it differently, how important that was. I had to do that with my dyslexia. I thought it made me a dumbass because I couldn’t read until sixth, seventh grade. I had traumas to that.

Unknowingly they were stored in me. It wasn’t until I started realizing this made me be able to do this. I can do this because of this. That made me great. You have to speak that though.

Errin Smith:
[28:34] doing these interviews on the summit and doing these types of things, I look at the summit over and over again. You rewire your brain just listening. [28:45] the power of speaking and listening is amazing. Next one, that sounds basic, but it is everything. I’m not talking about sleeping. I’m talking about the deep, restful REM sleep we’re supposed to be getting.

Even if it’s four hours if you’re a mom that only gets four hours a night, it’s four hours of deep, restful sleep. When I didn’t sleep, I was an emotional eating basket case bottomless pit. For me that was everything. When I was able to just figure out how to get good sleep, which I interviewed Barton Scott who’s got an amazing magnesium supplement, I got the best sleep of my life. It’s from Upgraded Formulas. Literally the eight hours of—

Dr. Pompa:
We’ve interviewed him here as well. You call can go watch that episode on how to test for that. He puts together some great products. I use that magnesium as well.

Errin Smith:
You know how picky we are. We’re picky. I won’t recommend anything unless I am sold for life. I have huge expectations. When I met Barton, I was like okay, let’s try this. Let’s see. I was like oh, my gosh. I was sleeping so well.

There were some days I didn’t even need coffee, which is like you know you’re getting sleep when you feel rested like that. Sleep is the one thing that can either destroy everything or change everything. It’s the one most powerful hack from your mood to cortisol, the ability to burn fat, store fat, hormones, hunger levels, recovery, detox, repair. If you’re not getting sleep, anything you’re doing, your body can’t put the pieces together. You’ve got to get that sleep. Let’s see, let me go through my list here.

Dr. Pompa:
You’ll have to get the summit because in it is all these sleep things that you did to increase your deep sleep. They’re in there. Obviously, we don’t have time on this show, but that’s why you need the summit. Again, the summit link we’re going to put right here so you can get the summit. It’s amazing. Go ahead.

Errin Smith:
Thank you. Just going back to the eating habits and the snacking, I remember when I was sleep deprived I would rage Whole Foods and just be like throw it all in my cart. I would annihilate it.

Dr. Pompa:
I remember at the seminar, I’d see you at the seminar. You came with bags of food. You always were prepared. I wouldn’t even think about it. I’d be like we’re at the seminar.

You’d be like I have this and I have this. I’m like wow. It’s not even in my conscious. I was blessed because you’d give me things. You’d have the drinks. You’d have this. You’d have that.

Errin Smith:
I would have everything. It was my love language for sure. You’re like geez, Erin. I was always thinking about my next meal. I was always like what do I get to eat next? What is happening?

That’s the thing is those damn snack foods, even if it’s healthy. That is part of the problem. I was never satisfied on those snack foods no matter if it’s a Bulletproof bar with whatever. I was always like this is—your body is wired for whole food. Anything else you will never be satisfied.

You want to change the game and just focus on whole foods. When someone told me that—I think it was Meredith. I was like no, that’s too easy. I was like oh, my God. It is so true. You are so nourished with whole foods. It’s such an easy hack. Why do we not do it?

Dr. Pompa:
Everybody wants their addiction. When people come from the addiction of the typical snacks, they find the healthy addictions. What does it do to us as humans? The human goes they feel a little better about it. Our CEO, Roy, who we know, Roy was sitting back on the airplane. We were on the same flight heading to a funeral together.

This huge man sat next to him. They have the whole bag of food. All they did was eat, him and his wife, the whole flight. At the end when the woman came up to ask would you like something to drink, guess what he said? Diet Coke. That makes him feel a little bit better.

The low-fat label makes us feel a little bit better. It’s just a label, but it makes you feel better about your choice. By the way, at the end of that flight, they had to have someone come on the plane and get him out of the chair. This happens every time. They had the special wheelchair. He was eating himself into that obesity.

The point I’m making though is the Diet Coke, the keto label, those snacks, we find them at all the [33:33]. We’ll pay more for them because we feel better when we eat them. It’s still snacks. It’s still raising blood glucose and insulin. It’s still addiction of sweet somehow.

Errin Smith:
I notice when I was wanting those things, it was because of other things. I was stressed out. I wanted to just—I deserve this. We all deserve to live a little. Don’t get me wrong. If I’m with you in New York and Jerry and we’re going out to dinner, I’m going to enjoy myself, but it’s like when it’s all the time. Next one is all things—this seems so easy.

Dr. Pompa:
What number are we on?

Errin Smith:
We’re on number seven. We’ve got a few more. There’s a few in this one, but it’s all things primal in Mother Nature. We have to get outside in nature. We’ve got to ground. We’ve got to get movement, fresh air, sunshine, human connection, love, hugs, and laughter, all the things that are free.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, that seems basic, but even I get caught up in my day. I get caught up. Then I realize my physical body yearns to be outside. It really does. I always go I feel so much better. I fall victim of just getting sucked in and not doing it.

Errin Smith:
I know, right. Hey, you know that you have awareness around that which is good because for me, back then, I—it was sitting in a home with recycled air, disconnected from the earth, my feet not touching the ground, behind my phone, behind my computer, no eye contact, or love or connection with other humans. You wonder why we’re grabbing for food because we are craving to feel.

When we get out into nature, it’s—our soul is like, thank you. This is what I’m built from. We have to be—we just have to have it. We have to be around people. We have to have the connection and the hugs. Because when I didn’t have all of those things, my eating habits were the worst.

You look at COVID lockdowns. What is that doing to us? You look at the suicide rate because it has stripped everything from us as far as all those basic elements that we need; granted, I’m still going out. Every day, I’m out there now. You look at someone that may not be aware of how important that is and you look at what’s happening to people. They’re literally just falling apart, and in more ways than one.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep, absolutely.

Errin Smith:
You think about the happiest times, when you’re on vacation is when you have all those elements: the nature, sunshine, fresh air, people, love, all those things. It’s like, why do we wait until vacation to do this? Why can’t I incorporate this every day? We all have the same 24 hours. We have to just—it’s just priority, right.

For me, I know when I catch myself, I’m like, I haven’t moved today. I haven’t been outside. Like you, we got caught up in like, I got this, this, and this going on. We lose ourselves.

It’s like op, but we can get it back on track. Just literally get out there and get the fresh air, get the sunshine. Because you know when you’re at the beach, your appetite goes away because you’ve got the sunshine on your skin. Your vibes are high. You’re near nature; you’re near the waves. All of a sudden, I’m not really thinking about food, right?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s right, yep.

Errin Smith:
Okay, next one is—and this one, Andrea and Mindy, we talk about this, is we’re going too damn fast. We’re not breathing. We’re not present. We are completely disconnected from our bodies. We call that rushing women syndrome.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly, yeah. Women are more guilty of it than men. I guess that’s why you all refer to that as that.

Errin Smith:
I know, right. This was so me. There’s two pieces to this. Going too fast starts with the fact that we are not slowing down to breathe. That was me.

I remember back in my sales days when I was this young hustler, I would kill the day, crush it, but I would—my practitioners were like, girl, you’re not breathing. I’d walk in, rush around, talk to them, do the things, and just do a million things. They’re like, slow down. What are you doing?

I’m like, what do you mean? I’m breathing. They’re like, girl, you are not breathing. It took me ten years to realize that I was not breathing. That put me into adrenal fatigue because I was in fight or flight.

Dr. Pompa:
Sympathetic, yeah, it puts you in a sympathetic dominant state. Then that wastes the adrenals out. It’s a problem.

Errin Smith:
Yeah, and if I would have just slowed down and took some breaths.

Dr. Pompa:
Where’s Merily at? Merily needs to hear that because she’s got that syndrome. Trust me, she does, rushing women syndrome.

Errin Smith:
Oh, yeah. No wonder your brain is going to reach for food because it’s got to soothe this crazy, chaotic state, and just to get us to calm down and relax. Breathwork is the foundation. Besides sleep, I feel like breathwork, man, that’s the first thing that goes for me. When I get stressed out, my breath goes.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and we probably need to talk about the how to.

Errin Smith:
Yeah, I interviewed Josh on the how to, Josh Trent with Wellness Force. He’s amazing. Man, as much as breathwork is the simplest thing to do, it’s one of my biggest hurdles. I’ll get to the next one on that.

Man, just having a morning routine and adding that in or having—and just taking time to slow down. I interviewed Josephina [Bashout]. She’s like, women are outside of their bodies. Somehow, we get a badge of honor when we do ten million things in a day and we kill ourselves. What is that all about?

We’re not breathing; we’re not prioritizing our joy; we’re not prioritizing the way we feel. What is that all about? Where do we learn this?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s a modern problem; it really is. You’re right, we get badges for being that person. It’s so detrimental to our health.

Errin Smith:
Yeah; and she’s like, hey, I’m all about getting things done and going after your goals, but when we’re too much in the do-do-do-do, and be in the receiving mode, and we’re hustling too much, our vibrations are like, I am stressed out all the time. What we’re putting out into the world is just constant stress. All we’re going to attract is more stress versus if we can change our energy, slow down, and focus on our breathe, and just get into our bodies. Which again, I’m not—moms, most respect for moms ever, but there’s got to be even five minutes in the day where we can just go inward, and put ourselves together, and just slow down.

Again, you slow down, you’re way less likely to reach for the good. For me, I remember when I went to Bali with Meredith right before COVID. Life was so awesome. I was just eating. It was like, no, I’m not even hungry.

I’d have the beautiful, organic meals, vegan amazingness. I’m like, something has changed here. Maybe there’s low EMFs here, but I’m like, I’m breathing, I’m slowing down, and I’m not reaching for the food. This is amazing. It was a great testimony to we have to work at it every day to weave that into our life. Okay, and then the last one, which is toxic perfectionism and worthiness. This one really hit home for me.

Dr. Pompa:
That one plays off the last one in some sense.

Errin Smith:
I know, right; I know. I interviewed Angela Bell on this one. She said, “If you’re a toxic perfectionist, you’re always trying to improve your worth. You will always do everything you can outside of yourself to improve it,” like the badge of honor, always doing more. That was me. I would stay up—wake up at 6 AM and work until midnight just to get that, my star for the day that I did this. I got validation. I was searching for love outside myself versus inside myself.

The interview with Angela was amazing because she goes into just our wiring from childhood, which is something that we didn’t grow up learning. For me, at a young age, I had to earn love. That was the way I interpreted it. That’s why you become a perfectionist is because to be perfect, that equals learning love. I watched my mom sacrifice her whole life, put everything else for her kids, and she took the crumbs. With my dad, it was, well, you need to live your life this way. If you don’t, I’ll withhold love. It was this perfect recipe of perfectionism, and lack of worthiness, and emotional eating to—just to feel the love that I craved.

Granted, my parents were awesome. I had no issues. It was just their parenting style; they didn’t know any different and how it was making me feel. They just didn’t have the tools. We can have grace around our parents instead of blaming and being the victim. To just go, they didn’t know; now, I know. I can make a change.

The way that we can change this is really interesting. This really hit me hard was that we have to understand that our worth never changes. It’s set from the moment that we’re born.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Errin Smith:
We can’t. I was like, yes, we—yes, you can. You can improve your worth. That’s what I was thinking when I heard this. I was like, you can do—no.

Dr. Pompa:
Because God creates us with that worth.

Errin Smith:
Exactly, yes. That is the thing is we are born with it; we don’t have to do anything to earn it. It is ours.

We have to see ourselves—the person that I love the most are my nephews. They don’t have to do anything to earn my love; I love them like they’re my own kids. We have to learn to see ourselves and love ourselves like we love that person that means the most to us. I was like, oh, dang, I’m definitely not doing that.

When our setpoint of worth is planted firmly and we begin to show it differently in our lives, our decisions are—change for the better. We show up differently. We start attracting more things into our life that are better because we finally have changed that inside of us.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. I have to ask this. This is what you asked every one of the people you interviewed. I’m going to flip it around on you and ask you.

Errin Smith:
Let’s do it.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, at the end of the day, we crave what we crave, but what do you think we’re actually really craving?

Errin Smith:
Thank you for asking that because, man, I—it took me a while to get here. After doing all of these interviews, I asked everyone on the interview that same question. They all had different answers. I was like, gosh, the common thread in all of this is that we’re craving to feel alive. We are craving to feel alive.

That could mean our physical bodies, our physical health, our connection to ourselves and each other, to love, to movement, to our—to how we feel vibrationally in our purpose, or in peace and connection to faith. If you think about all the common threads, when you are most alive, do you ever crave food? Think about a wedding where you’re dancing your butt off, and you’re just so happy, or you’re at Disneyland on a ride with your family, or you’re watching a football game, you’re at the Super Bowl, or you’re snuggling with your favorite person, or in you’re in gratitude being in nature, or you’re traveling, and you’re just in awe of the magnificent beauty that nature is, all of these things that make us feel alive including our health.

When our health is—we get rid of those toxins, and we fix our gut, and we start putting in those good foods, our whole vibration changes. We feel alive. I think that’s what we’re craving. The key—yeah?

Dr. Pompa:
Go ahead.

Errin Smith:
I was just going to say I think that’s the key is to do all the things that make you feel alive. Fill that cup every day because that’s how we make peace from the inside out. That’s how we can make peace with food because when you have all those things dialed in, you’re like, I don’t really think about food.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, exactly. Just hearing you speak that, I was just trying to boil it down to one thing. You know what I heard you say? Happy, I crave to be happy. I think that’s all of us.

To bring this full circle, something you actually said at the very beginning was that it—there’s pillars to this; meaning, it’s not just—health is not just this. You are good at this, but it’s this, this, this. It’s this balance.

To be happy, it’s this balance because that’s ultimately what you just said is we just—I just want to be happy. How are you happy when you’re addicted to food, emotionally eating? You’re not happy. You’re striving at that point. All those ten things really, you realized, aw, this is helping me create that balance to ultimately crave happiness; we crave happiness.

Errin Smith:
Right, yeah. No, you nailed it. Isn’t it such a beautiful, fascinating thing that this is all of these things and what it comes down to is this? Yet, we have these struggles.

How beautiful it is that we can bring this to people and be like, hey, this [00:47:57] like here you go? It took me ten years to figure this out. It’s such a simple thing, but it’s just the awareness and [00:48:08] it’s not in the fridge; it is something else that you are craving deeply and to figure out what it is.

Dr. Pompa:
I think when we look at happiness, we can be full because those yogurts made you happy, man. I watched those make you happy. You know what I’m saying? It was an addiction; it wasn’t a lasting happiness.

Errin Smith:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
Ultimately, it’s the balance of all of this. It’s brought you happiness. I think that there’s little red flags along the way that realize that temporary happiness, not lasting. I think we have to look at our lives and say temporary might be part of the problem. Lasting, this is lasting; this is good.

I think we literally have to check off the boxes. I think the Summit, just like it changed you, will get people’s—we can check off the box. Get the Summit. Honestly, it was just obviously a blessing to be a part of it, but it blessed so many. Thank you for being here, and doing this, and getting it out to people. Thank you, Errin Smith. We love you.

Errin Smith:
Thank you, guys. Thank you for—

Dr. Pompa:
[00:49:22] know about that.

Errin Smith:
[0:49:23].

Dr. Pompa:
Thank you. I had a little guilt about that. I was like, heck. I saw that. Okay, well, thank you.

Errin Smith:
Yeah, I know. Thank you, guys. Yeah, it starts October 20th. It’s free. Yeah, the links in the notes. Yeah, What We Crave. I’m excited for you guys to watch it. Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
What We Crave, Emotional Eating Summit, be there.

Ashley Smith:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern.

343: Mineral Balance For Longevity, Hormones, and Sleep

My guest this week is Barton Scott, a chemical engineer and nutritionist who is the founder of Upgraded Formulas.

Barton is here to discuss the patterns and relationships between how you feel and your mineral balance. It’s more important than you think when addressing root cause. You will learn about the relationships between how you feel and your mineral balance, why minerals and other elements are a larger part of a health solution than vitamins, and why this is so important to understand.

More about Barton Scott:

Barton Scott is a Chemical Engineer, Nutritionist and the Founder of Upgraded Formulas– A nanotech company focused around performance and longevity–specifically with a focus on correcting mineral deficiency with a new category of supplementation to increase health span, focus, blood sugar management, and sleep quality. Upgraded Formulas is incredibly inspired by the work charity:water does and supports them in the great work they do with a portion of every sale. Charity water, it is a non-profit organization that provides drinking water via new water wells to people in developing nations.

Show notes:

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Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
While everybody is concerned about vitamin deficiencies, mineral deficiencies far more causative and preventive for disease than vitamins; a matter of fact, vitamins don’t even work without minerals. We’re going to talk about specific mineral deficiencies and how that lines up with certain conditions: memory, sleep, thyroid, adrenals, and what’s the most accurate way to actually test for mineral deficiencies. Check out this episode.

Ashley Smith:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Our guest today is Barton Scott. Barton is a chemical engineer, nutritionist, and he’s the founder of Upgraded Formulas, a nanotech company focused around performance and longevity, specifically with a focus on correcting mineral deficiencies.

Barton is here to discuss the patterns and relationships between how you feel and your mineral balance. It’s more important than you think when addressing root cause. I cannot wait to learn more, so let’s get started and welcome Barton Scott, and of course, Dr. Pompa to the show. Welcome both of you.

Barton Scott:
Thank you so much, Ashley.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, I appreciate you being on the show. This is a very important topic. A lot of talk always about vitamins: vitamins, vitamins, vitamins. I’ve always been a believer that minerals are actually what start the fire. They’re more important than vitamins, and yet, when do we talk about vitamin—or when do we talk about minerals. It’s always vitamins.

Even I am victim of that. I just did a video recently of the five big deficiencies of vitamins. Some of them were minerals, actually, but we’re rarely talking about mineral deficiencies. That’s part of this show that I think is going to be very helpful to people.

What minerals are for sleep? What minerals are best for adrenals, thyroid, immunity, which is hot right now, anxiety? There’s specific minerals that we can be deficient in to drive those symptoms, but also help mitigate a lot of those symptoms. Let’s jump right in.

I want to hear your story, man, because you were sick like me. When I was sick, I did a hair analysis, which we’ll talk about, which I believe is the best way to look at mineral content. I had massive deficiencies and overloaded in other minerals. We’ll talk about that because obviously a lot of people have mineral deficiencies period. Tell your story, Barton.

Barton Scott:
Oh my God, well, thank you for that intro and everything. For me, it started in my early 20s. I was finishing up chemical engineering. I just started to lose my memory, my short-term memory; long-term was fine, but it just—it was like evaporating.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’ve been there. I know what that feels like.

Barton Scott:
Yeah, you’ve been there. You just go, what the hell? I’m lucky enough to eat—to be able to pay for and eat really good food like organic everything. Even ten years ago, I cut out toxic triggers like gluten, dairy, soy. I’m thinking, I know I’m eating a better diet. What is going on?

Oddly enough, I also do a hair analysis at this point among about $10,000 of other testing, all in a pretty tight period of less than a year. I look at a couple of different labs. I’m looking, is this usable data? I finally found something that really—and it correlated across a couple of different labs.

I was chronically deficient in a couple of minerals that I had taken large amounts of from quality brands. I felt like I could really trust that it wasn’t a quality issue. In other words, what I mean for people listening is, I knew that if it said 400 milligrams, it would contain 400 milligrams. It was sourced well. Luckily, fast forward to 2020, I feel like that’s a pretty low bar, a pretty set bar in most cases.

Quality is just a given, but as a chemical engineer, the thing that we get trained in addition to having basically a minor in chemistry, a minor in math, and almost a minor in physics is that we have a major discipline in chemical engineering. That’s really around the thermodynamics of and the physics of absorption as it relates to actual—not theory. That’s part of what we learn, but we do a lot of actual hands-on stuff you can’t do outside of school really in processes, and building processes, and making—really, what chemEs get paid for is you go to a company that’s doing billions of dollars a year. They’re like we want to increase by 3%. You’re like, okay, got it. That’s your entire job is increasing efficiencies.

I had this lens that otherwise seems alien. I started thinking, well, this is—my first thought is like, even though my brain’s barely working it seems like, I’m like this is an absorption issue. This is not just me. I had been an athlete; I had been a wrestler. I was sweating since I was eight or nine all the way through high school: two a days, and just not eating that much, and watching what you’re actually taking in. I was nutrient deficient. I had induced hyperthyroidism, all sorts of issues just like you, Dr. Pompa.

We’re all here because we struggle along the way. Then we didn’t give up. We were like, oh, I’m not going to accept this, especially early. If this had happened to me in my 70s, or 80s, or 90s, I might have been like, oh, well, this is just getting old, but I knew, all right, I have big plans for life. There’s a lot I want to do here and a lot of people I want to help in some way. I didn’t know how at that point.

I remember thinking, this is—I’m not well enough to solve it now, but I think I know where to start. That’s taking a process and improving upon it. That just became the beginning of the journey. Here we are about eight years later.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt. Just like anything else, pain to purpose. You’ve dedicated your life to making better minerals and really putting together an incredible process in a company. I have to say here’s some of my favorites right here, this magnesium and the iodine. I love both of the products. Let’s talk about—

Barton Scott:
Those are two of my favorites as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly.

Barton Scott:
I’m most proud of them. I have them right here, too.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I know, right. I just ran back and grabbed them right off my counter.

Barton Scott:
It’s so cool. Iodine, real quick for anyone listening, has been shown—not just our iodine, but iodine in general, has been shown to be antiviral, which means if you put it in a petri dish with viruses, they cease to replicate. Granted, I think most—I think the RDA for iodine is just stupendously low at 150 micrograms. Japan eats about 12 milligrams per day. It’s just a huge increase there. It’s linked to intelligence, too.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.

Barton Scott:
It’s really key. We can get into that more later.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I do; it is. By the way, iodine is—we might as well go in that direction. It’s one of the things in the soils that is very depleted. Of course, they used to put it in bread.

Barton Scott:
What was it in, again?

Dr. Pompa:
Then it was salt, the salt in the bread. Anyways, adding it to the salt was a big deal. Bromine was added to the breads and the salts, too. Anyway, the bottom line is that it’s deficient in the soils.

It plays a significant role in the brain development in a child. Studies show a link to IQ, which is huge, solid studies. When I talk about the five big deficiencies that I mentioned earlier, iodine is one of them; so is magnesium, by the way. These two make up what I feel most Americans are, in fact, deficient in.

Let’s have the iodine conversation for thyroid. I know if I asked you, what are the minerals related to thyroid, you would talk about iodine. There’s a lot of controversy around iodine and the thyroid because some believe that autoimmune thyroid, Hashimoto’s, shouldn’t take iodine, but I’m here to say that, my doctors as well, we couldn’t help people get over Hashimoto’s or their body correct Hashimoto’s without iodine.

You just have to start slow and low. You can’t battle these thyroid conditions, even Hashimoto’s, without it. What is your take?

Barton Scott:
A hundred percent, so thankful that you said that. It’s one of the things that I’m glad we went straight to that really upsets me when I hear people—it’s chemistry, guys; it’s not an opinion. The mineral that’s most important—there’s many, but the mineral that’s the most important for your thyroid is iodine. How are we going to argue that we want to continue producing thyroid hormone without having a key constituent for the process?

It’s like if you’re running a paper mill and you’re not putting any inputs into the system or you’re drastically reducing those inputs. You have many five inputs. You’re like, oh, well, we’re just going to completely shut down Number Four over here or Number One.

Is the end product going to be the same? Is the thyroid going to then cease to really output—these are building blocks for thyroid hormone, just essential for the body. A lot of people are walking around with poor metabolisms, cold hands, cold feet, low body temp, all those things.

Dr. Pompa:
Hair thinning, which is very important, yeah.

Barton Scott:
Hair thinning.

Dr. Pompa:
Women, when we talk about thinning hair, yes, hair falls out, but even the texture of the hair. Literally, iodine plays a very important role there. There’s different theories for why iodine, don’t take iodine for Hashimoto’s or autoimmune thyroid because people can get what’s called a thyroid storm. That is correct if you take a lot at once if you have Hashimoto’s.

There’s different theories for that. It can be a detox theory where it chases off a lot of different types of chemicals, including [00:11:57] off the sites. There’s other theories. The bottom line is my experience has been the opposite. You can’t help that condition without iodine. You just have to start with drops.

That’s why I love your product here because it’s done with a liquid where you can start low and slow and work up to these molecular doses that you need literally to fix your thyroid. Again, that’s not my opinion; I believe it’s solid in the literature. What other minerals to the thyroid would you suggest?

Barton Scott:
I really like selenium is well.

Dr. Pompa:
That would have been mine; I just wanted to see what you said.

Barton Scott:
Yeah, I created a product I’m really proud of called Peak Thyroid, P-E-A-K. I have it over there at the counter. I could grab it later.

It’s a balanced ratio. Even it has a little bit of iodine in it. I created that for people that—for anyone. It just has a small amount of iodine. That way, if you had Hashimoto’s or something, you could still take one dose a day and get that because I’m really of the belief from everything I’ve read, and experienced, and talked with other people that you need some of it.

We have a blend of minerals there. It’s 50% zinc. We have a good amount of cooper because we find when you’re zincing [00:13:36].

Dr. Pompa:
Lost your sound. You hit your mute button by accident. Yeah, you hit your own mute button somehow; I don’t know how that happened.

Barton Scott:
Yeah, there we go.

Dr. Pompa:
What you were saying is when your copper and zinc, those two work together, then it affects the absorption and it affects the other minerals in the thyroid.

Barton Scott:
Exactly, really, it’s a blend of the four most key minerals. You showed Upgraded Magnesium there. That’s also important. Manganese is also important.

Those four I feel are—they can be very synergistic. Then from a chemical perspective, they play well together. That’s the other thing is that we—I just put things together that actually do from a chemical basis work together. Not everything does.

People that take a multivitamin that has iron in it, I really don’t agree with that. There’s a number of examples. At least some things are synergistic. Just like taking large doses of things for immune support, I know that’s something else we could—I’m very familiar with the research. I used to take large doses of vitamin C; I don’t anymore because I understand that one mineral and one vitamin affects all the rest.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, it’s true. To your iron point, a lot of people have high ferritin, which is very oxidative. Taking more iron can be more oxidative. We know it’s linked to strokes, other conditions. Then vitamin C can also actually—high dose C can actually upregulate more iron; not just in a condition called hemochromatosis, but in just average people as well. You have to be a little careful.

Barton Scott:
Absolutely; one thing that if—to touch on what you just said about iron, there’s so many people that exhibit symptoms of anemia that doctor’s say, well, you take iron, or nutritionists. A number of people make this mistake. It’s part of the reason why the test for minerals because you get to see them at least all at once. Whatever the measuring device was, you see them all on the same board.

When you take too much iron, what happens there? It can induce early aging, premature aging, which we all care about. We all want to feel younger. Looking younger is great but feeling younger is great.

The cells just won’t work. You start to push out copper when you take too much iron. Then symptoms get even worse.

Same thing with vitamin C. If you take too much vitamin C, you’ll start to absorb iron even better. Then what happens? You push out copper, so same problem. Then you start to dysregulate copper and zinc.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep, absolutely. There’s a relationship there. We’ll talk about the testing in a moment, but let’s rip through some of these main things here. Adrenals, what type of mineral deficiencies do we associate?

Barton Scott:
What I tell people is the currency that your adrenals spend in—these are little glands that sit on top of your kidneys. They’re really small, but they’re really important. They spend in a currency of magnesium, potassium, and sodium primarily. Without the right balance, not only just enough but the right balance—

Dr. Pompa:
You have a great potassium product by the way that many of our keto people absolutely love, too.

Barton Scott:
Oh, thank you. Yeah, Upgraded Potassium, I just made that—I made it very concentrated, so we’ll come out with a larger size soon because people are asking for it. I add it to my water all the time. If I’m going to the gym, I’ll put in some sea salt and I’ll put in some of that. It’s just good because I’ll do RO water. I just want to bring it back to life with some minerals. Yeah, thank you for that.

Yeah, Upgraded Potassium is awesome for adrenal support, Upgraded Magnesium. You can take our products out of the capsule if you have cramps. I’ve seen it really stop cramps quickly in a number of people right there in person. You don’t have to digest it, so it really works quickly. It’s amazing.

Yeah, sodium is important, too. A lot of people, if they’re doing keto, they’re just burning through these three, these big three, so quickly. You might be saving money on food, but you need to reinvest it into these minerals that are really providing electricity for your body.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, sodium, potassium, the basics of how your cell works. Your adrenals can really burn them down. When you move into keto, you’re dumping glycogen, which is stored sugar. Very normal, but you’re excreting a lot of these electrolytes and minerals. Taking them is really important.

Barton Scott:
I’ve got to say too on that, thank you for writing the book that you did because I did a five-day fast for the first time this year actually. I’d never done five days. By the end of the fifth day, I felt like I’d never been smarter.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s true.

Barton Scott:
It was interesting, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it is true. The ketones go so high. Your brain has so much extra energy that it just taps in.

Barton Scott:
I literally did what I felt like was two weeks of work in about two hours.

Dr. Pompa:
I couldn’t agree more. What about sleep? People ask me all the time, are there any minerals specific that help sleep?

Barton Scott:
Absolutely, yeah, understanding that about 80% of people are magnesium deficient. Magnesium is a component for melatonin, a really key one. It’s that paper mill analogy we talked about. You can’t really make enough melatonin if you don’t have enough of the constituents. That’s a great one. That’s a really important one.

Dr. Pompa:
Magnesium is one I always recommend. Calcium has been used for improved sleep for many years.

Barton Scott:
Yeah, absolutely. Calcium is up there, too. Calcium is sedative as well.

There’s a product right now—we’ll probably rename it soon just so more people realize that it could benefit them. Currently, it’s called Upgraded Bone Strong. It has calcium, it has magnesium, and it has boron. Boron is also synonymous with intelligence; it’s good for testosterone production as well.

It’s a really cool one. You just need small amounts of it. It’s really hard to test for, but you do need it. Because one thing I will say is taking calcium by itself is just something that people listening, you really want to be careful with that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, totally, which by the way, was so enraged through the 80s, 90s. It was like everyone; it was like every calcium product.

Back then, I didn’t know what I know now, but I had a philosophy. I’m like, that can’t be good. That’s going to build up in your bones and your arteries potentially. Again, these are just my thoughts. As it turned out, it turned out to be right.

You can’t absorb calcium without sufficient vitamin D levels, magnesium levels. K2 has a lot has a lot to do with the absorption, which actually brings up a point. We’re talking about deficiencies. We’re talking about so many people have mineral deficiencies.

Obviously, sunscreen plays a role here, people lacking vitamin D. Obviously, glyphosate, the chemical sprayed on all of our food plays a role here depleting soils dramatically and my stress levels. Am I missing anything? I just want people to understand why mineral deficiencies are so prevalent.

Barton Scott:
A hundred percent all of those things. When we were red-lining at our desk, it’s something I’ve realized. We get hyped on too much caffeine; we don’t move enough; our cortisol ramps up quickly; we carry trauma. All of these cause a faster mineral depletion.

Topsoil eroding from that’s something like 18 inches on average to 3 or so in the last 50 or 100 years has not helped. Even though we are eating and making efforts to do more regenerative agriculture, we need to do it faster and we need to do more of it. I try to not only do organic, but I try to support those, which there are more and more of those farms that are doing different biodynamic and regenerative methods.

That’s a long-term solution to what we need right now. The short-term solution is making it easier for your body to accept electrons from the food that it gets. That’s what we’re doing with minerals.

Our whole line for anyone listening is minerals because as I started to lose—or well, later on, as I’m studying, losing memory, and I lose someone really close to me, I lose a parent, I lose my mother to degenerative diseases, I start to think about longevity. I was born to older parents. We knew that things like that would happen, but I also knew that for someone that could afford modern healthcare, that was retired, that was living a pretty low stress life, that was doing pretty well from a diet perspective, but was not getting better because was not—a diet after a certain point doesn’t make much of a difference. I know that’s a controversial thing to say, but it absolutely doesn’t if you have severe deficiencies.

Dr. Pompa:
My saying, by the way, is a perfect diet today, whatever that is, will not get you well. You’re not well without a really good diet, but it’s not. People are struggling today. They’re eating this, this, this, and perfect, and etcetera, and not even losing weight on whatever the “perfect diet” is.

Barton Scott:
I couldn’t say it better.

Dr. Pompa:
When we look at what we’re under—just so people know, I just threw that out there. Glyphosate is a chemical being used massively. It’s in 60% of rainfall.

How it works, by the way, folks, how it keeps pests away, weeds from growing is it depletes minerals. That’s what it does. It literally pulls minerals to kill weeds. This is what it’s designed to do.

The problem is that it does it in our body, but it’s doing it in the soil. Now we have depleted soil. Oh, but don’t worry because they’ve spent millions and millions of dollars on putting minerals back in the soil in the form of fertilizers. Oh, if it were only so simple.

Barton Scott:
Oh, God, yeah. The NPK fallacy of nitrogen suggests.

Dr. Pompa:
The plants are growing. The plants pull the minerals in. That’s how we really get our minerals is by iodized minerals in the plants. Now, we’re deficient in that. I just want people to hear that.

Then, another thing, Barton, is heavy metals. This is my specialty. We pull heavy metals out of people. People are loaded with heavy metals.

Heavy metals replace where minerals actually should work. That’s another big problem creating “deficiencies,” or like even you said, people are trying to take minerals and they’re not absorbing it. Heavy metals can actually be the problem there, which is a whole other subject. I don’t want to get you distracted on that.

Barton Scott:
Sure, yeah, it’s true.

Dr. Pompa:
I do want you to say one thing before we talk about the testing of it because people are going to want, well, how can I accurately test this. I want to say—I want you to talk about why I made the comment in the beginning that minerals are more important than vitamins in [00:26:59] sparks. Explain that to people because that’s maybe why to diet doesn’t always do it. Explain the mineral’s role in nutrition.

Barton Scott:
Absolutely; minerals are activators. They are the spark plug. If you have a combustion engine and you don’t have a spark, you don’t have combustion even though you have all the other necessary components at your disposal. To say that is to quote a Nobel prize winner, Linus Pauling.

The other aspect of it though that’s interesting is they activate so many enzymatic functions in the body. When we’re low in magnesium, this is one of the things that when people fix, they—when you take Upgraded Magnesium, the very first night, most people sleep better because most people are deficient in it. If you don’t notice much of a change, you either didn’t take enough, or you just don’t have a deficiency, or you’re just not very in touch with your body, frankly. I am I think from being a wrestler and understanding, oh, I ate a Snickers Bar and I absolutely couldn’t even finish practice. At an early age, I started to develop this mind-body connection. I realized, oh, pasta doesn’t actually make me feel good even though everyone’s talking about carb loading. Maybe there’s something with that.

Now, we know it’s things like glyphosate that in addition to everything Dr. Pompa just mentioned, it also—glyphosate also goes through the lining of the gut and creates impermeability, which is a huge problem. If that doesn’t scare you into eating organic, I don’t know what will. Use fear as a good motivator here and start voting with your dollar if you aren’t already. I’m sure if you’re listening to this, you probably are because this just an amazing resource for so many topics. Magnesium though, you start to feel better because when you—imagine up to 800 or so enzymatic functions working better. These things don’t really work without that electron driving force.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s what I wanted people to understand. The minerals are the electron driving force. They are the sparks. Nothing works; your vitamins don’t work. The engine doesn’t fly without minerals in the cell. That’s what people have to understand. Okay, so—

Barton Scott:
Yeah, and when we’re fasting too, we’re making a lot of—we’re pulling from fat stores. We’re getting that. I also during that five-day fast, I took—I haven’t done without our minerals. I took our minerals throughout the fast.

I felt really good. I put in 8 to 12 hour days throughout the five-day fast that I did. I felt really good. Just to make sure I was—and those are zero calorie.

I say that because when the body has enough stored fat, when you have enough minerals, you can—and you get enough sunlight, too; you mentioned sunscreen. Getting enough sunlight and activating a number of different pathways through that, you really can sustain life for a very long time. Now, that’s a huge asterisk by that; do that under supervision, obviously. When you say—

Dr. Pompa:
You know what’s funny is there was a—I don’t know if you watched it, probably not, but Naked and Afraid. I always smile because [00:30:40]. My whole thing was, these people, they make such the big deal. It’s like, without food. They’re looking for food and they’re exhausting themselves.

My strategy would be I would go there and just fast for 21 days. I’m like, that’s the simplest thing to do. I’d build a shelter the first few days and that’s all I would do. I would hang out in the sun in my shelter.

This gal on there finally did this. Her team hated her because it was like—she was just doing nothing. She was like, I don’t need food. She’s like I’m just—she found a mineral-rich source of water. She was drinking water and laying in the sun.

Here’s the funny thing. They criticized her. She’s not a team player. By the end, she was the only one with energy. She actually built the raft because they were tanked.

All their food sourcing and she was the only one that actually energy. In the end, she actually won out. All she was surviving on was water, mineral-rich water, and sunlight. She kept saying, my sun’s my energy. Anyways, it was pretty funny. That would be my approach.

Barton Scott:
A hundred percent, that’s a great story.

Dr. Pompa:
I think it’s funny because I wanted to do that. My kids kept saying, “Dad, you need to go on there and just be like—

Barton Scott:
Crush it.

Dr. Pompa:
No need to look for food. I’m just going to fast for 21 days. I promise you I’d been running circles around all of them because they’re all completely doing their food sources. They get sick half the time eating crap that they shouldn’t.

Anyway, let’s talk about testing because I think that is something. We both agree. I don’t think hair testing is great for heavy metals, but years ago, I had Dr. Andy Cutler come into my seminars and show people how to look at mineral imbalance or ratios as an indicator of certain heavy metal, too much heavy metals, too much mercury, too much lead, whatever it is. It’s not a great thing to look at heavy metal in the body; however, it’s the way to assess your minerals in general. Talk about that.

I’m going to give you a minute to talk about your products, too, here before we wrap up. Are we offering a test? Does your company a test? Talk about hair analysis.

Barton Scott:
Yeah, we do. We have a really nice, really easy to use test kit. We found that so many people when we first started were struggling with the test kit that we had, so we just have continually improved from an information standpoint and packaging. You can see a picture on upgradedformulas.com of that. You can find a consultation there too option which almost no one offers.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m sure we’re offering a link for that. You can grab it.

Barton Scott:
Yeah, I’m sure there will be links you guys can provide in the show notes for people and make it easy and send them right there. I highly recommend the consultation because—I think we’ll have a second nutritionist here soon, but we have a full-time nutritionist now that I’ve trained myself that really knows how to go deep into this. I’ve got to say, more so than any other test that I’ve ever looked at, all the value is in the details.

Dr. Pompa:
Always.

Barton Scott:
Yeah, it really is. Dr. Pompa mentioned sodium and potassium earlier. That’s a ratio that we look for. What I love about this is that there’s a number of different ratios we test for.

We’ve partnered with a couple of labs that we really like and value their whole method and processing method. In fact, I know to be true that not every lab is created equal in anything and certainly not for hair testing either. We work with two right now that are really just I think the best in the game at what they do. They’re incredible. That’s another thing to mention.

What else? Yeah, the ratios themselves, I can tell if someone has mental disturbances, like severe levels of it just by looking at a couple of ratios. I can tell if someone is going to have dysregulated hormones just by looking at a ratio.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s great, yeah.

Barton Scott:
Zinc to copper, if it’s off, there’s no chance it will be—there’s no chance the person will be healthy from a hormonal standpoint. If sodium and potassium is off, there’s no chance that the person’s going to be—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, what people don’t realize is zinc plays such a significant role. I might reverse this because I’m completely dyslexic. Zinc is progestogen, copper is estrogen, or do I have that flipped?

Barton Scott:
You got it right, yes.

Dr. Pompa:
I got it right. That’s pretty amazing, actually.

Barton Scott:
Yeah, that’s awesome.

Dr. Pompa:
No, directly, zinc directly affects progesterone, etcetera. That ratio really plays with those.

Barton Scott:
A hundred percent, that is a great point that you make there. Iron to copper is another one. This one is important for anti-aging. You guys heard Dr. Pompa mention just oxidation, free radicals.

I think some of these diets that are really elimination diets are really problematic because they—without going into it too much, if any diet has you consuming too much of something, it’s going to what? Fill in the blank. It’s going to imbalance the rest of all the other key nutrients. If you’re taking in too much iron for any reason, what do you think that’s going to do based on what we’ve already covered here? It’s going to dysregulate a number of different things. That’s really important. There’s thyroid ratios that we look for.

Dr. Pompa:
Awesome.

Barton Scott:
Does this match up with blood is a question that I’m asked often. The answer is blood, for better or worse, we know we can affect it in a day. We know that if you eat a really sugary breakfast, what happens if you test blood sugar within three hours? It looks like you’re a diabetic.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s different. Yeah, blood is transient, meaning it’s in the moment. Literally, you can measure your mineral contents in the morning; it will be different by the afternoon. Hair literally gives you a six-month—correct me if I’m wrong.

Barton Scott:
Oh, yeah, six weeks.

Dr. Pompa:
A six-month view of what your minerals have looked like. Am I right on that?

Barton Scott:
What we find is certainly it—okay, I would say people should test every—if they’re really sick, they should do it every four weeks. The average is two to three months.

Dr. Pompa:
Because you’re actually changing it, you want to see the difference.

Barton Scott:
Exactly, you’re changing it. If you have something like six inches—we’re in quarantine over here. I haven’t had a haircut in like three months. Luckily, I’ll get one this week finally. If I were to cut off some of my hair that’s six inches, if I sent all of that in, that would be six months of data, for sure.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, okay.

Barton Scott:
What we find is that when we ask people to send in about an inch of hair, it takes the average person four to eight weeks to grow that hair. What Dr. Pompa is saying there is absolutely correct in that we are influencing those changes by doing—you don’t have to it with us. Obviously, if you can find somewhere that can give you a great consultation, if you can find somewhere that can give you a great hair analysis, sure, but we’ve figured it all out for you. However you do it, you’ve just got to test; otherwise, you’re guessing.

With you guys, you do the same thing on the polar opposite side, which is equally important, which is, hey, we’ve got to get these heavy metals out of here, so we test, too. Testing is key. Consultations are key. Then taking only the supplements are key. Then stopping the consumption of supplements you don’t need is also I would say equally important from a chemical balance basis because if you’re high in calcium and you’re taking more calcium, I promise things are only going to get worse.

Dr. Pompa:
I think with minerals, it’s even more important just to get those balances. That’s why you’re here. It’s why we’re offering the test and the consultation.

Just in finishing up just for time sake, I do want to give you a moment to say why your minerals. Obviously, you’re a believer. Why your minerals?

Barton Scott:
Yeah, certainly. I understood as it was talked about earlier that absorption was a real issue. I eventually was able to work with a manufacturer that was already doing some great work. I knew that we needed to make some improvements, make some tweaks. I understood that to get—we needed a really small, microparticle mineral size.

As a chemical engineer, I understood process improvement. I worked with them. We have a signed contract with them to reduce a—from a process standpoint, something that is you can think of it as predigested, I suppose in really layman’s terms.

All I can say is when you take our potassium, you fell a jolt of electricity. You take our magnesium, you feel a jolt. It’s because you’re putting this electricity into your body basically. These have electron driving force.

We don’t do flavors. I’m sorry; it’s not going to taste like fruit punch because it blocks absorption. What I’ve done is just created this line of minerals based on this understanding so that people can actually support and reverse their mineral deficiencies because life gets a whole lot better when you do.

You live better; you love better; you have more energy to do things. Because our electrical energy in our body is able to be measured from a number of different ways, heart, brain, etcetera, to the extent you could say that producing high voltage in the body is correlated to high output; high output’s correlated to high achievement; high achievement’s correlated to a high quality of life. High quality of life is what we’re after.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, and by the way, that’s a great point. You don’t create voltage with vitamin C; you create voltage with minerals. You do; think about it. They’re conductive.

I just want to show this for your sake here. I think it’s a great label. Size does matter; bigger is not better. This is just a good visual. There’s a regular mineral and there’s more of a nano-size mineral.

Barton Scott:
Yeah, exactly. Thank you for showing people that. Anyone that’s listening to this on the podcast can check out the YouTube or something and see that, most likely. Follow the links that are provided and you can see that, too.

What Dr. Pompa is pointing to is the size of a red blood cell and the size of that. We measure this in nanometers, which is a unit of measure for really small things. Yeah, the size of the mitochondria is ultimately what we care about. That’s less than 1,000 nanometers; usually, around 500.

Anyway, that’s only important to say that, look, the particle size matters; size matters. It absolutely does. In this case, small and also stable is really important.

There’s some companies that can make some really small particles. In a liquid form, we want them to be stable, too. That’s really important. We want a consistent product that’s consistent in every dose. I just applied my—you get [00:43:45].

Dr. Pompa:
Engineers, man, engineers are the brightest people. I always say the engineers of the minds that make it happen.

Barton Scott:
Thanks, we just know how to—we’re super practical people.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s true. Yeah, no, right. It’s so true, actually, yeah.

Barton, thank you. Thanks for being on, honestly. It’s an important topic. I really can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get to the topic, but we’ve been waiting for you.

Barton Scott:
Oh, thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, take advantage of the link, take advantage of the test. Barton, appreciate you, thanks.

Barton Scott:
Thank you so much, guys. Thank you for listening.

Ashley Smith:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 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.

342: How to Properly Fast: Women vs. Men

Today's guest is Cynthia Thurlow, and s he is here today to talk about intermittent fasting for women, especially regarding weight loss – and we’ll uncover reasons why we need to consider hormones, sleep and self-care to optimize results.

Cynthia is a globally recognized expert in nutrition & intermittent fasting, and her TedX talk on intermittent fasting has been viewed nearly 6 million times – you are about to learn why.

More about Cynthia Thurlow:

Cynthia Thurlow is a globally recognized expert in nutrition & intermittent fasting, highly sought after speaker, CEO and founder of Everyday Wellness Project. She's been a nurse practitioner for 20+ years, is a 2x TEDx speaker: her 2nd talk on intermittent fasting has been viewed nearly 6 million views. She has been featured on ABC, FOX5, KTLA, CW and in Medium and Entrepreneur. She's also the host of Everyday Wellness podcast, which was listed as “20 Podcasts That Will Help You Grow in 2020” by Entrepreneur magazine.

On April 14, 2020, Dr. Danenberg was appointed the Chair of the Periodontal Committee for the IABDM. He also created the Certification Program for Biological Nutritional Dental Professionals offered by the IABDM.

Show notes:

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Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
The question is is do women struggle with intermittent fasting, fasting, or low-carb diets more so than men? The answer might surprise you. What to do in and around these topics that I just mentioned I think will surprise you as well. This expert has six million views on her TED Talk, and after this interview, you’re going to see why.

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I am Ashley Smith, and today we welcome nurse practitioner Cynthia Thurlow. She is here today to talk about intermittent fasting in women, especially regarding weight loss, and we’ll uncover reasons why we need to consider hormones, sleep, and self-care to optimize results. Cynthia is a globally recognized expert in nutrition and intermittent fasting, and her Tedx Talk on intermittent fasting has been viewed nearly six million times, which is incredible. I cannot wait for this. Let’s get started and welcome Cynthia Thurlow and, of course, Dr. Pompa to the show. Welcome, both of you.

Cynthia:
Thanks for having me.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, this is going to be such a great conversation, one of my favorite topics, right? Let’s go right after it. I mean, let’s face it. Women, if we would really—and I’ve polled audiences I’m sure like you have, right?

Cynthia:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s this unspoken thing, especially in the world of ketosis and low carb and fasting. It’s like how many women struggle more so than you feel your husbands, or boyfriends, or men in your life? The hands go up. Cynthia, obviously, there’s something real here, but yet, people don’t talk about it. Why is it more challenging for women than men?

Cynthia:
I mean, I would say that when I’m speaking in groups or even within my own programs the one thing that’s consistent is women have cycling hormones. We are not consistent day to day, hour to hour, and we’re much more sensitive to the stressors that we experience in our personal lives. Whereas men can jump into the intermittent fasting pond, if you will, like a duck to water, women, it’s not always that easy. Now, I do find there are definitely women that as soon as they clean up their diets and they are mindful of the quality of foods that they’re eating and they’re sleeping well, then they can easily do it, but more often than not, there’s a lot of flexibility that needs to be stressed. I have to remind people that there’s no one-size-fits-all philosophy, that they may need to change their strategy around the time of their cycle. If they’re postmenopausal or they’re perimenopausal, goodness, things get much more interesting at that stage of life. I find that the women that have the easiest transition are the ones that are little less hard on themselves. I think rigidity as it applies to intermittent fasting as a strategy is often times a recipe for disaster.

Dr. Pompa:
Couldn’t agree more.

Cynthia:
I’m sure you probably have patients like this, the people who over exercise. They’re super restrictive with their diet, and then they’re really rigid about their dogma as it pertains to intermittent fasting are the ones that—particular personality type that I feel like they are the ones that really—they’re so focused on whatever that goal is, generally weight loss, that they almost undo all the good that they’re doing by being so rigid.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I find the same thing. Obviously, I talk about it in my book. You had sent me a text saying, gosh, why don’t—many people talking about this? I was talking about weekly diet variation, monthly, changing it around your cycle and how that’s more needed for women. You resonated right to it because you see the same problem I see, obviously. Let’s be clear. We’re both saying that fasting, intermittent fasting, low carb is possible for women. However, there needs to be changes made. We’ll discuss more of those in a minute.

I almost want to back up a second. We have new viewers often times that are like intermittent what? Just give a brief explanation. I couldn’t help but jump right in because of your TED Talk and your knowledge around intermittent fasting. What is it intermittent fasting and even why does—why are people, so many people attracted to it?

Cynthia:
I mean, intermittent fasting is not something that’s new or novel. I mean, it’s been around since Plato, Hippocrates, and biblical times, so I like to remind people that it’s the way our bodies are designed to work. We spend more time in a fasted state when we’re not eating, it’s that simple, than we do when we’re eating. In our overconsumption culture that we live in, I think the average American—I read a statistic the other day. They’re consuming either a sugar sweetened beverage or food 16 to 17 times a day, and that’s not the way our bodies are designed to thrive. Really, intermittent fasting is periods of time when you’re not eating and periods of time when you’re eating and the emphasis on more fasting and less feasting, and it’s really that simple.

I think people are attracted to it because now it seems novel. It seems new. Over the last I would say five or ten years, you’re seeing more and more people in the media and healthcare providers as well that are utilizing it as a strategy, and I would argue that it is one of the most important strategies that we should be using with our patients. We don’t need more pills. We don’t need more procedures. What we need are strategies that people can embrace throughout their lifetime and be able to do that and feel empowered. I think that’s really critical as well. We don’t want to feel like everything that we’re doing with our bodies needs to have an ICD-10 code on it in order to…

Dr. Pompa:
I mean, you said hormones play a big role in why women might have more difficulty adapting to this way of eating. It doesn’t make it wrong for them. It just makes it—maybe perhaps they need some different strategies, so let’s discuss those. One of the big ones that I know you discuss a lot about is sleep, right? It’s like, obviously, sleep impacts our hormones. How does this impact a woman in low-carb or intermittent fasting, and what can they do about it, more importantly?

Cynthia:
Yeah, I often times will remind women, if I can’t get you to sleep, I can’t get you to lose weight, so sleep is absolutely, positively one of the first things we will discuss. If a woman is sleeping well and she starts doing intermittent fasting and is low carbing—it’s now a verb in my mind, low carbing, and she suddenly starts to struggle with sleep. That’s a reminder that we need to dial in. What are the macros like? Are you eating enough calories, protein, and healthy fats during the day? Are you being mindful of where you are in your menstrual cycle? Are you dialing in on stress?

We know that people can wake up either in the middle of the night because their adrenals are stressed. Maybe their blood sugar’s low. It could be for so many reasons, or people are so engaged in electronics before they go to bed. They don’t have good sleep hygiene, and that can be really challenging for women throughout their lifetime. I see, cycling women, that can often times be the reason. Then perimenopause and menopause is a whole other situation where sometimes we’ll find, as women are having more fluctuating levels of progesterone relative to estrogen, they can start to struggle with sleep. It could be from insulin resistance. There’s so many issues that can drive that.

I always look at it as are you sleeping before you start intermittent fasting? If the answer is yes, then intermittent fasting is a go. If you’re not sleeping before you start intermittent fasting, then we have to dial in on that first. Intermittent fasting is considered to be a hormetic stressor, a healthy stressor, but if you’ve already got too much stress, adding more gasoline to the fire is not beneficial so really looking at those things. Again, I want to emphasize, if you aren’t sleeping, you can’t lose weight, and that can be related to a variety of things. A lot of it can be blood sugar, insulin resistance. It can also be relevant to that balance of ghrelin and leptin, which is the appetite satiety cues, which I know—I always remind people, when I had babies and I was breastfeeding and I was up all night long or it seemed like I was up all night long, what did I crave in the morning? It wasn’t broccoli. I craved sugar, and so I remind people that, if you’re not sleeping well, you’re not going to crave high quality foods.

Dr. Pompa:
I mean, you said something that’s so true. There’s a lot of different reasons why you’re not sleeping well, whether you can’t get to sleep or wake up in the middle of the night, can’t get back to sleep, blood glucose to certain hormones, cortisol, stress survival mechanism. With all that said, all my viewer wants to know is what can I do about it? You’re going to say, well, it depends on the cause. Go through some of the cause-solution relationships.

Cynthia:
Yeah, so first and foremost, I always start with the food piece. If you’re not getting enough calories in within your feeding window, maybe you’re not getting two good sized meals during your feeding window. The other piece with that is your dinner. I mean, sometimes you have to adjust your macros, meaning your protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Now, if you’re low carb, I know for myself, I can tell when I’m too low carb. I mean, I’m very attuned to how my body feels when I exercise. Maybe I’ve gone a little too low carb, and I need to liberalize things a little bit.

Being very mindful of how you’re structuring your meals. Sometimes people need to have—at the end of their fasting-feeding window, they need to have a little bit of a—I don’t want to call it a fat bomb because it gives a connotation that it’s dessert, but sometimes maybe you need to have a scoop of almond butter. Maybe you need to have a handful of nuts. Maybe you need to have some—something that’s a little bit of protein before you get to bed so that you’re ensuring that your body has plenty of fuel to be able to get through the night. That can sometimes be an issue when people are first utilizing intermittent fasting as a strategy, and they’re not fully fat adapted so using fat for fuel as opposed to sugar. That’s number one.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, let me just say something on that. You’re right; when people aren’t fully fat adapted, they’re—a healthy fat adapted person has the ability to burn fat through the night, and therefore, their brain gets plenty of energy. Their cells are getting plenty of energy. If that’s not the case, your brain needs glucose, freaks out, throws cortisol up to get the glucose up. Then, of course, you wake up, but your body survived itself. To your point, often times, doing something a little fattier before bed or protein sometimes can get you through that night until you get healthier. Toxins play a lot of role in that too, why someone can’t get really good fat adaption, and they can’t make it through a night. To your point, that is an issue.

Cynthia:
Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes I find that people are over exercising. They’re not allowing themselves to have some down time. I mean, those rest days when you’re working out in a strenuous program are critical. Sometimes people are just—their bodies are so worn out that they’re not going to be able to sleep properly. They’ve really just overtaxed their bodies. I think it’s important that people differentiate. They’re honest with themselves. What’s my food like? How much activity did I do? How is my stress dialed in?

I’m going to use a really perfect example. Given COVID and social distancing over the past five plus months, I’ve seen people who normally have no issues with sleep that all of a sudden start to struggle with sleep. A lot of it’s cortisol. It’s that survivalistic mechanism that you mentioned. People are fearful. They’re fearful am I going to be able to get to the grocery store? What’s going to go on with my kids? What’s going on with my job? I mean, just baseline survivalistic mechanism.

That stress piece has to be managed. Sometimes it can be as easy as do you get off of electronics? Are you meditating before bed? I used to think that was really woo-woo and silly, but there’s real sound reasoning how important that is. Making sure that in the morning you’re getting light exposure. Making sure that you’re not on electronics before bed. Making sure your room is cold and dark. If it gets really sexy and you have to wear a sleep mask like I do—I’m of that stage of life. I wear a sleep mask to keep all the light out. That could be beneficial.

Then I just say—we start to layer things in. There are specific adaptogenic herbs that could be helpful with helping to decompress before bed or having herbal tea or things that aren’t going to mess up your fasting window but can be beneficial. I think it really dials into sleep, the self-care piece, which I know you’re a fan of that terminology. We’re really looking at that in the food piece. That’s usually where I start. That’s typically where I start. Then I want to lastly just add in the hormone piece. Depending where someone is in their cycle, that can absolutely influence how well their sleep quality is, as upsetting as that can be. People say I sleep really well until the week before I get my period, and then all things are—things are completely different.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s one of the things in my book I talk about, the need for changing the diet often times right before your cycle. Whether it’s high carbs or high protein, there’s a lot of different hormone conversions and transitions that are being made and, therefore, different needs. Often times, five days of either high healthy carbs or protein depending on the person is the magic. Then the rest of the month it can really change you, and sleep’s one of the things that we know is a big game changer for people. You found similar things.

Cynthia:
Absolutely, and I think it’s also important for people to understand that we take sleep for granted until it’s not working properly. No, I’m serious. I never thought about sleep while I was in my 40s.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s true.

Cynthia:
Then, all of a sudden, I’m like what is this? Why all of a sudden is it—I feel like it’s a dog and pony show to make sure that my sleep’s ratcheted in. I use sleep as a barometer to really determine what’s going on? How well are we doing? It’s not related to a celebration where you’re excited, but the day-to-day sleeping and sleep hygiene is really critical. I think that one of the things that I’ve come to find out is that the influence of radiation and EMF is certainly something that’s not talked about enough.

We had a house evaluation, and it turned out that the amount of radiation coming from one appliance in my house was so much that we shut the Wi-Fi off at night. We removed the microwave. We did all these extraneous things to ensure that we were doing as much as we can. Sometimes you have to dig a little bit deeper if it persists. What could be driving cortisol to be waking you up at night, which, obviously, none of us want to have? For anyone that’s doing intermittent fasting, to just reassure everyone that you can successfully intermittent fast and sleep, but if you’re not sleeping, you need to figure out why.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we mentioned toxins. We mentioned blood glucose, not being fully fat adapted. You mentioned light, getting good morning light, cutting off light before bed, screens and that source, which we know has an effect on melatonin, deep sleep period. You mentioned EMF. I’m just reviewing because you said a lot of things and really important things, turning off your Wi-Fi. Really, I mean, it’s a simple solution going down and just hitting the breaker. Obviously, you can mitigate the issues in your room. There’s a little bit more knowledge there, but if you hit the breaker, you’ve got it. The problem with that, maybe people would say, well, my clock doesn’t work. You shouldn’t need the clock anyway. That’s a whole ‘nother topic.

Anyways, you can put your phone on airplane mode next to your bed. This is with an iPhone. You can set this up to actually go red screen. When you turn your phone on, if you hit it three times, one, two, three, the screen goes red. How about that? Yeah, isn’t that cool.

Cynthia:
Oh, look at that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so don’t ask me now how to do that, Cynthia. My son did this. If you have a teenager in your house…

Cynthia:
Yes, I do.

Dr. Pompa:
He could go into your settings and go, oh—I’m sure it’s under screen. Who knows, brightness maybe? You can actually do that so pretty cool.

Cynthia:
They’re so amazing with technology.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, they are.

Cynthia:
My kids are always embarrassed. They’re like, “Mom, how do you not know that?” I’m like, “Well.”

Dr. Pompa:
I get it. If you have to get up in the middle of the night for something, you might—a light, that red light still works rather than a nightlight. You could check the time, whatever. Those are all great. Okay, did I miss any of those sleep tips? I just reviewed them.

Cynthia:
I don’t think so. I mean, I think the next level is looking at things like Muse or a BrainTap or looking at adaptogenic herbs. Then I start layering other things to really help people, but from a very basic perspective, I think we hit the big ones. I do find that if you work through most of those that will generally get through most of the ideologies for why people are struggling, and then the next level up is looking a little bit more deeply. Doing testing if that’s indicated and pulling out appliances. I laugh. I had my BrainTap sitting on my desk for the hope that I will use it before I go to bed tonight. It’s a visual cue to remind me to utilize it, but there’s all sorts of technologies.

Dr. Pompa:
For BrainTap, there’s a couple products like that out there. It’s like the blinking lights, right?

Cynthia:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
The auditory component, light has that big of an effect on the brain. I mean, it does and, therefore, sleep.

Cynthia:
It’s amazing.

Dr. Pompa:
A couple products that I could just throw out there for people, there’s a product that saved my life when I was sick, Seriphos.

Cynthia:
Oh, Seriphos is amazing.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and it’s S-E-R-I-P-H-O-S, for people listening. It tapered down my cortisol, and again, I had high cortisol from toxins and different things. It’s not like you can remove the toxins in a day, right? Fact is is I needed something to help deal with that cortisol. I would take two, three before bed. If I woke up, I would take a couple more, and it would help. Then BIND is another great one just because—a lot of that cortisol rise in the middle of the night the Chinese call liver time between 2 and 4 a.m. Your body dumps bile at that time through the liver, and it’s a very toxic dump if you’re toxic. Then, phoom, your cortisol just goes through the roof, so you have something in there to catch it. It’s another little trick.

Some of the herbs that you mentioned—there’s a product on here called [Dream], or DRAM is how they say it, and it has some of the adaptogenic herbs. I know people will ask what the products are, and Ashley can put some of those in. Do you have any that you would recommend?

Cynthia:
I do. I like L-theanine, which is an amino acid. A lot of people that are struggling with that, they—it’s the anxiety piece, L-theanine. Relora is one of the adaptogens that I’ve gotten really very happy with, good results. I would say products like Ashwagandha has a good profile in terms of safety.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s good.

Cynthia:
A lot of these are plant-based compounds that are designed to be very nourishing. Relora is derived from magnolia bark, so it can’t get much more natural than that. That seems to be where I’m tapering. I would say a couple people I’ve had some success with GABA. There’s a product by Designs for Health called PharmaGABA that I’ve been happy with. Again, you want to take that at the very end of your feeding window because it does have stevia. Sometimes, when we’re talking about supplements, you just want to be mindful of what’s in them to ensure that it’s not a sugar alcohol or stevia or something that could potentially impact your fasting window.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so what does your intermittent fasting window look like? How do you vary it, change it being a woman?

Cynthia:
That’s a great question. I think, once people are fat adapted, I really encourage them to change things up. The average day, I probably do two or three 18:6s during the week.

Dr. Pompa:
Explain what that is for new people.

Cynthia:
Yeah, so it would be an 18 hours fasted with a 6-hour feeding window. However, I always have 1 day a week where I’ll just do a 24-hour fast, and I always ensure that it’s plugged on a day when maybe my eating window has been a little wider than it is normally. Maybe I got in three meals. Normally, if it weren’t social distancing, maybe I went out to dinner with my family or with girlfriends, and so I really want to just reset my body. Then, occasionally, I’ll do one meal a day. Again, it could be a 24-hour fast or 1 meal a day around a day that I’ve eaten more than I would normally, and I feel like that just gets me back on track. The point I want to make is that, when someone is fat adapted, I like to see things not being consistently and being rigid.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, me too.

Cynthia:
I think that’s really important. I think the flexibility piece needs to be stressed. Some people, they want to do a couple months of 16 hours fasted with an 8-hour feeding window or some variation like that, and that’s completely fine. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and my body just knows. Okay, I ate too much the day before, doesn’t happen very often these days. The following day I’m going to do something different. Our bodies are designed to have a little bit of variety. Just like we wouldn’t do the same exercise program every day, we want to make sure that we’re giving our bodies opportunities to adjust. It’s like you got to take an extra step. Okay, we’ll work with that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, and I’m the same as you. I just take it as I feel it. In my book, I talk about starting with a 5-1-1, meaning 5 days of low carb, and then you have 1 day where you fast for 24 hours and 1 feast day. You almost have to plan them. Like you, I just go with them. There’s days where I’m not hungry. There’s days I’m hungrier, and I can just roll with it. We’ve been fat adapted for a much longer time than most people, so we can trust our innate intelligence on that.

Cynthia:
Absolutely, and I think it also gets you connected with what true intrinsic hunger really feels like. That’s something that a lot of people have never experienced, or it’s been so long since they experienced what it’s like to be really hungry that it frightened them. I just remind them. I’m like, “It’s very cyclical. You may get a hunger grumble at 7 a.m., but you might not get another one ‘til 9.” I said, “That’s the beautiful thing about green tea, or black tea, or coffee is that it’ll help suppress those cues, so you can just keep going.” I just remind myself, if I’m doing a longer fast and I’m getting hungry, I’m like I must need some green tea. It’s time for some green tea, and that’s just the way that I roll.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, exactly, I mean, that is a great strategy and even anything warm, actually. The Chinese used to do just warm water. It’s like that would curb appetite. Of course, add a little bit of salt, and it curbs it as well. Then green tea and other teas can be a great thing as well. I always say that, if something that raises your glucose, that can break your fasting window, right? You can test it. You can test it simply by testing your glucose ahead of it and then 30 minutes after just to see. Some teas, for example, caffeine related, may raise your glucose, and it could be for other reasons as well. It’s always a good idea to test.

Cynthia:
That’s a great point. I keep trying to decide if I’m going to get a CGM, a continuous glucose monitor, just really for data collection. I’m starting to see a lot of the low-carb crowd that are getting them, and they’re enjoying tracking their information because bio-individuality rules. For a lot of people, coffee works really well for them, and for someone else, it may not. It may bump up their cortisol and raise their glucose. I think that there’s value in getting that validation.

I think most of us, once we’ve been doing this long enough, everyone once in a while—I’ll give you an example. Last week I had a higher carb day. There were some rice noodles, which I don’t normally eat. I haven’t really done grains for several years because it just doesn’t agree with me, and it actually spikes my blood sugar. I had them, and then I went for a walk a couple hours later. About halfway through my walk, which is normal that I walk in the hilly part of my neighborhood, I was telling my husband—I was like I just didn’t feel good and so, sure enough, went home, tested my blood sugar. The reason why I felt so terrible after eating these noodles, even after the walk, was it spiked my blood sugar, which is not normally what happens to me, but I felt so poorly. I was so attuned to how I felt.

I think it’s important. If anyone’s curious to know, there’s a—Robb Wolf is one of those individuals that has a book called Wired to Eat that I sometimes will recommend to people if they’re interested in trying to determine what their carb tolerance is, if they’re trying to figure out if grains work for them or other types of carbohydrates. That can sometimes be very illuminating about figuring out your N of 1. What works for me may be very different for each one of us.

Dr. Pompa:
I mean, look, no matter what you eat, you’re glucose is going to rise. The question is is how high? If it’s going far above 120, that can be an issue and how long it takes to come back down. If it takes more than two hours to come back down, you’ve got a problem.

Cynthia:
Right, exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
A problem with what you actually ate, to your point, right? Glucose is simple. When people always say does my coffee work in my fasting window, my question always—I don’t know. Test it. Test your glucose right before and right after. If it rises up consistently after, then you probably should change something.

Cynthia:
That’s a great tip.

Dr. Pompa:
The hormone connection really is—when people would ask me, well, should women fast, I would say, well—I was in a culture in Africa, and the women were fasting. Obviously, this is not just that culture. This is something that women are able to do. What’s the difference of women in the US and women in other countries that fast? The answer has to be around hormones, but then let me ask you a more specific question. What is it that’s creating so many hormone problems in this country?

Cynthia:
Oh, that’s a treasure trove of answers. I think there’s many things. I mean, our Westernized culture, it’s the food, our highly processed stupid American diet, a little nod to Ben for that, stupid American diet so highly processed diet, exposure to toxins in our personal care products, environment, and food, the stress. Even if you have indigenous cultures that are fasting, I’m fairly confident that they rise when the sun comes up, and they go to bed when it gets dark. They’re not eating all day long, and they tend to really ascribe to a philosophy of what our ancestors did, whereas we live in a culture where we’re attached to devices 24/7. We’re accessible. We’ve got stress that is unmanageable for most people.

I think it becomes a combination of many, many things that create these hormonal disrupters. Like I mentioned, it’s things that we’re exposed to every day. It’s the stress of our environment, and I think that many, many things contribute to this. I think, when you think about highly processed food that we’re eating and we’re spiking insulin all day long, that’s making us fat. It’s this very toxic—it’s like a toxic stew that we are experiencing. If you’re eating all day long and you’re not getting enough sleep and your hormones aren’t properly balanced because of those two reasons alone, I mean, that’s contributory. Then you’re infertile because of the toxins you’re exposed to and because you’re insulin resistant. I mean, it’s this very kind of circuitous toxic stew that we exist in.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree, yeah. Do you think that women today carry a different burden, perhaps more burden than in the past, meaning that it seems to me—I’m not a woman. That’s why I’m asking you the question. The idea women have unique stresses today, some of which are sending their stress bucket over the edge just with their duties, their roles, things, is that true, and what would be some of the changes that would have created this?

Cynthia:
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of—actually, I talked to my grandmother about this when she was in her 80s, which was a long time ago. One of the things that she said was that she was the World War II generation, and in her generation, they did work, even though they had children. That was during the war, and that was part of the war effort. She said the difference was they weren’t attached to a computer, and they weren’t attached to a cellphone. Kids ran around outside. When they were cooking dinner, kids were out of the house, and they would make these meals. Women still had these more traditional roles.

I think what has evolved in our society is that women are expected to have it all. They’re expected to get pregnant effortlessly. They are expected to get back to their pre-pregnancy weight seemingly overnight. They’re expected to cook these nutritious meals, and they’re expected to have these career/be a stay-at-home mom. I think there’s a lot of intrinsic pressure on each one of us wanting to be the kind of perfect…

Dr. Pompa:
I was going to joke and say and the problem with that is what? I’m kidding. I’m kidding. That’s a lot. You’re right. I agree with you on that, though. I mean, it is true.

Cynthia:
There’s a lot. I mean, when I look at friends of mine that whether they’re stay-at-home moms or they have jobs outside the home, it’s impossible to get everything done and also take care of yourself. I think there’s guilt about advocating for self-care, and there’s guilt about saying I’m going to go to bed early because that’s what serves me best. There’s guilt if you’re not making the perfect Instagram worthy birthday party for your kid or the Pinterest worthy invitations for something. I just think there’s a lot of—there’s just a lot of extra pressure on women that is unique and through no fault of our own. I don’t think it was intentionally.

My mom’s generation was part of that first wave of feminism, and so those women went out there and did a lot for trying to deal with some gender disparities, if you will. Not trying to be political, but I think there’s just a lot of expectations both societal. Then, also, social media I think is making things very hard for women. Women think what they see is normal, and it’s been Photoshopped or…

Dr. Pompa:
I agree, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, in many ways, this—that could go on a whole ‘nother direction. One of the things I saw when I was in Africa was the community was so different, meaning that the women—the men would go off hunting. The women were there, and you could tell they all support each other. It wasn’t like this one woman raising her three, four kids. It was her with this person, with that person, and there was a community that supported the raising of all the kids.

Cynthia:
Yeah, it takes a village.

Dr. Pompa:
There is a saying that it takes a community to raise a child, but yet, that’s not what’s happening today, right? We’re very individualized in our life. We don’t have that community. Some women do.

Cynthia:
Yes, you grow up in one area, and then you move away. Unless you have a strong sense of family support, that can make things so much harder. It’s interesting. I was telling someone the other day that—I have all boys, and so we’ve had a lot of ER visits. My youngest when he was 2 had a fall out of a second story window. In the middle of the night with a husband who’s out of the country, having to call girlfriends to come get my oldest so that I could be in the hospital with the little guy and trying to explain to people, I said it really does take a village, remarking about your strong sense of community for women. When women do have that support from other women, that makes the difference. It really, really does, and then they don’t feel quite so alone, or sequestered, or unsupported.

Much like men, men need guy time, and women need girl time. It’s hard for other—as wonderful as spouses can be, sometimes it really does take another woman to understand what—the pressures that certain women may be experiencing, so I agree with that. That’s a great observation.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, men often times have their work scenario. They get away too, and that’s hard. Yeah, I mean, I just see that women do have unique stresses today that carry on. To bring this whole conversation full circle, that affects cortisol. That affects sleep ultimately. That affects hormones, ultimately.

Cynthia:
Oh, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Again, I always say hormones is the real reason why people struggle to lose weight or have weight loss resistance, right? You look upstream, and you see all these factors that we were just discussing.

Cynthia:
It really can be hugely problematic, and I always say weight gain is a symptom of an issue. It’s not the weight gain is the issue. Weight gain is the side effect to what’s going on, whether it’s inflammation, toxins, etc., and that’s really what requires the digging, the detective work.

Dr. Pompa:
Despite our efforts, not just you and I, Cynthia, but almost everyone in our community, we talked about calories being not the way to lose weight, low-fat diets but yet, still our government, social media, media in general—I mean, you could turn on any morning show, and there’s going to be a—something, a recipe for low calories, low fat, and exercising more. The message is still we’re gluttonous. We don’t exercise enough, and we are absolutely—or I should say we’re gluttonous. We eat too much. We’re lazy. We don’t exercise enough. How do we change that, I mean, honestly? I would even lump low fat into that to where it’s still a low-fat, low-calorie recipe if you watch any morning show, and yet, it’s not the reality. Have we even impacted this at all?

Cynthia:
I think the tide is changing. I do believe that there are more and more healthcare providers like ourselves that are using—this is a platform to really help change the narrative. That’s really what it’s about. This dogma, I think we’re at least 20 years behind the dogma. Every time I do a post talking about CICO, calories in, calories out being dead, I have trolls that come from every direction because it really challenges people’s belief system. I just remind people. I’m like, “Listen, I haven’t counted a calorie in five years, and I only did five years ago as an experiment. I don’t believe in doing that.” I said, “If once you have gotten to a point where you are comfortable enough with your feeding-fasting window and you respond appropriately, your body intrinsically will let you know I’ve had enough.”

This emotional eating piece, which I think is unfortunately exacerbated by this whole misnomer that breakfast is the most important meal of the day—that it’s all about over exercising. You have to over exercise every time you eat too many calories. It just meets this notion that—this repetitive, pedantic kind of notion and mindset that we have to worry about—our bodies are not keeping score per se. It’s time for us to get back to eating the way that our ancestors did. I’m quite confident that 200 years ago there wasn’t a Hostess Twinkie that people got out of the vending machine, and they looked at it and said, okay, this is 450 calories. Therefore, I know what I need to do to burn this off. I mean, that just isn’t the way that our bodies are designed to function.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but it’s still the message.

Cynthia:
It is, and so yes, there needs to be more open-minded individuals that are doing government regulations. I mean, unfortunately, I don’t see the USDA making any significant changes in the near future, but I did actually read recently—was it the AHA? One of the American Heart Association—one of the major associations was saying, okay, maybe saturated fat isn’t that bad. I was like, okay, that’s a start.

Dr. Pompa:
That is a start, mm-hmm.

Cynthia:
Granted, it’s 20 years plus, 30, 40 years that they’ve been propagating that fat is bad but slowly but surely. I think it really—it requires people to think outside the box. I use the term I don’t like to be sheeple. It’s like I ask a lot of questions. I probably irritate people because I ask a lot of questions, but if I still believed in the prevailing old antiquated dogma, I wouldn’t be here today. I just got tired of writing prescriptions. Some of us just have to get fed up enough that we just say there has to be a better way, and it all starts with food. I always say that’s my standard mantra. It all starts with the food that we’re eating.

Dr. Pompa:
Unfortunate, the guilt that that message lays on us as we—so many people, it’s like they failed because they couldn’t control their appetite. The reason they thought they couldn’t control their appetite is because the message is eat less, so none of us could eat half of our meal and push it away. Bad things happen, right? Eventually, we fail no matter what because our body wants to survive, or we start eating our own muscle because our body wants to survive. Either way, it’s a lose when you try to caloric restrict, and you know this from my book. My message is don’t eat less. Eat less often. That’s the key is, when I eat, I eat to full, but I just do it less often.

At the end of the day, I promise you, Cynthia, we do eat less. We’re not pushing calories away. It’s a completely different hormone shift, one for survival and one that’s just easy.

Cynthia:
I think the big thing is when you’re satiated, and that’s something that I teach my patients. When you’re satiated, it’s a completely different connection with your food. I was jokingly telling someone the other day—my father, who’s in his 70s was horrified that—he’s like, “I can’t believe how many eggs you eat a week and how much bacon.” I said, “Dad, here’s the thing. I’m so satiated. I don’t even think about eating again until four or five hours later.” I said, “That’s the distinction. If you get up in the morning”—and he’s a frail 70-plus-year-old guy. I would say, “If the first thing you eat is—you’re eating fruit, and you’re eating a muffin. You’re eating an English muffin.” I said, “All you’re doing all day long is your blood sugar is going up and down like this.”

He was trying to figure out why he was having energy issues. I reminded him. I said, “If you got up, even if you had a piece of bacon or you had an egg, you would be so much better off keeping your insulin from spiking throughout the day that you wouldn’t deal with those energy slumps. You would have plenty of energy.”

Dr. Pompa:
I agree. By the way, when your body’s burning its own fat, you don’t have insulin and glucose spikes. It knows exactly what it’s doing. What’s your thought on this? There’s different takes to eating first thing in the morning or waiting it out a little bit, right? Are you an early day person eater or a later day person? What’s your thoughts?

Cynthia:
I would say a midday person. I just find I’m not hungry when I get up for the first several hours.

Dr. Pompa:
Me neither.

Cynthia:
Actually, my 12-year-old, since we’ve been socially distanced and he’s been home, he doesn’t eat breakfast until 10 or 11 o’clock. He was concerned because he had heard me say children shouldn’t intermittent fast. I said, “You’re not intermittent fasting. You’re just listening to your body. You probably ate at 8 o’clock at night. You probably had your second dinner, and you’re really not going that long.” To respond to the question, for me, personally, I’m not even hungry until 10 or 11 o’clock in the morning.

Dr. Pompa:
I love Dr. Fung, but he talks about people eating earlier, even Valter Longo talks about people eating earlier. Myself, I’m not hungry. I’m healthy. My children, they don’t eat. I don’t have a child that gets up in the morning and eats, right? There is the cortisol effect in the morning, meaning your cortisol rises. They call it the dawn effect, and your glucose rises. Isn’t that glucose rise just—that’s part of why we’re not hungry, right? I’m not sure that I agree with the morning eating, even for diabetics. I don’t know.

Cynthia:
Yeah, I mean, if we think physiologically why that happened is because we were—well, maybe the men were going out to hunt or look for food. It physiologically made sense. I find that, most of the people that I’m working with that are intermittent fasting, they prefer not eating. They like to push it ‘til later in the morning.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, the tribe that I saw, they got up, and they went out all day. They didn’t eat in the morning. They did not eat. They got up, went before dawn, and then they came back late afternoon. They weren’t eating. They came back and ate one—well, probably like a three-hour meal, very long meals, but it was still one meal. It just lasted a long time.

Cynthia:
That’s amazing.

Dr. Pompa:
I mean, yeah, I think that there’s different thoughts about that, whether you skip breakfast or skip dinner. I guess it really depends on what time your dinner is and what time your breakfast is. Eating first thing, I just—I think the body’s meant to survive on that glucose that rises up with cortisol.

Cynthia:
It makes me laugh. For so many years, I would get up. I would go to this hardcore conditioning class at my gym. I would drink a protein shake going there, and I’d drink a protein shake coming home. Then I’d have a meal before I got to the hospital. I was still thin, but it’s unbelievable when I think about—I mean, I was just eating these small little meals all day long.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s what we thought was best, honestly.

Cynthia:
Right, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Until I went and spent time with the tribe in Africa, I really didn’t see anything different than that until then. I was like, boy—that just started me questioning it. It got me to research it further to realize, gosh, maybe this is bad. When you look at studies, really, the people who eat less live longer, but it’s not just eating less. It’s eating less by eating less often, right?

Cynthia:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s it. If you’re eating all the time, the energy that it takes to deal with that food constantly and we’re not allowing our body to burn its own stored fat. Although you were skinny, fact was is you probably had a lot of organ fat and visceral fat, and like I said, we’re actually creating health problems.

Cynthia:
Yeah, absolutely. The perfect storm and for women that are listening is those perimenopause years. Five to seven years before women go through menopause the game changes. We’re much more prone to insulin resistance, even if you’re thin. I tell people that’s when women sometimes will get stuck, and that’s when we really have to dial in on all the things that we’ve alluded to, the sleep, the self-care, or the nutritional choices. That’s when I find people start becoming a little more receptive to making those changes.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I agree. That was going to be my last question is perimenopause, menopause, just advice for women who are going through that right now. As we pointed out, hormones are really the answer and the problem. I mean, the healthiest women no matter what are going to go through a hormone change. It’s normal; advice.

Cynthia:
I would start with the food piece. If you are not already really focusing on protein and healthy fats, that’s critical. I just remind women that, in perimenopause and menopause, all of a sudden the game shifts. You can’t just eat copious amounts of carbs. You can’t just eat all the wine and the chocolate cake that you want. If you focus on protein and healthy fats to keep your blood sugar stable, that’s critical. That’s number one. I would say that this is not the time to be over exercising. All of a sudden, people go from wanting to do really strenuous exercise like they had been doing to all of a sudden realizing they just feel burned out.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, burned out, that’s true.

Cynthia:
I remind women that this is a time to do—make sure you’re doing some strength training. Making sure you’re doing some restorative practices like yoga, walking, really critical. This is when sleep becomes absolutely paramount, as well as looking—dialing in on the stress piece like I’ve alluded to and a time to think about intermittent fasting. I know that scares a lot of people to consider doing it, but I really do believe that, if women are able to capture that strategy in perimenopause, then their transition into menopause will be that much easier. The women that really struggle with perimenopause and go into menopause just being miserable, they’re having hot flashes. They can’t sleep. They’ve gained 50 pounds. They crave sugar because their bodies are just looking for a quick source of fuel. They’re the ones that could use that advice the most, so sometimes bad habits from our 20s and 30s need to be rectified.

The other thing that I always like to remind people is the most inflammatory foods are things like gluten, grains, dairy, processed sugars, and this is the time to clean it up. It may not be that everyone that’s listening is sensitive to all of those foods, but I find it can really be instrumental. I know, for myself, I kicked out gluten at 40, grains and dairy a few years later, made a huge difference.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, the no grain is a way big step better than just gluten free. Number one, so many gluten-free products are super sugars and even worse. Number two, there is a lot of proteins that people react to beyond gluten. What I find is taking grains out period seem to have the most anti-inflammatory effect.

Cynthia:
I think it’s those subtle changes that really have a lot to do with it. I do find that alcohol—if people have been really leaning on alcohol as a stress reduction strategy, all of a sudden it really dysregulates their blood sugar. They just don’t tolerate. They can’t have more than a glass of wine or more than one drink, and all of a sudden, they’re having the hot flashes and not sleeping. That’s where I would probably start. Those are the things that, if you can master that, you will definitely have a much easier transition into menopause.

Dr. Pompa:
I couldn’t agree more. I want to highlight something that you just brushed over, and that’s resistive training. I think resistive training around that time is more important because bones are remodeling. Really, you get a hormone optimization that occurs with resistive training, so shift more from cardio to resistive. I think it plays better, especially in that time.

Cynthia:
If you look at the data on muscle being the organ of longevity, I mean, the more muscle mass we have, both men and women, the less likely we are to be obese, have diabetes, have all these metabolic disorders, so I remind people. Sometimes they freak out. They’re like I don’t want to get big. Women cannot get as big as men. It’s physiologically impossible, but I remind people the muscle that you keep on your body is going to help you burn—have more thermogenic burn. You’re going to burn more calories, and you’re going to do it when you’re not even doing anything. There’s a lot of bang for the buck.

Dr. Pompa:
It creates a hormone optimization when you’re not doing anything, right? When you resistive train, you may not burn fat while you’re doing it, but for 36 hours, your body’s actually burning more fat and hormonally optimizing. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. The problem is social media, once again. They see these women, and they’re like I don’t want to look like that. Okay, they didn’t just lift weights to get that way. There’s a lot of hormones in getting that way. Even today, even the—not the bodybuilder women but the bathing suit women—I don’t even know what you call it. They too are taking hormones. You’re not going to look that way, but you are going to help regulate your hormones by adding some resistive training in.

Cynthia, great talk, I mean, I think every woman needs to share this one with every woman and friend they have. These are the topics of the day. I mean, this is the advice that if you just did half of what Cynthia just said, I’m telling you, your life’s going to change so do it. Thank you, wealth and knowledge on the subject. I loved it.

Cynthia:
Thank you so much. It was really a pleasure to connect with you.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely, we’ll have you on again. Thanks.

Cynthia:
Sounds good.

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 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv, and please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, or sharing the show with anyone who may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

341: Carnivore and Cancer Free

Today I welcome back an amazing guest from episode 310, Dr. Al Danenberg.

When you last met Dr. Al, he talked all about his unconventional cancer journey. He is here to share the next chapter. After his integrative protocols and therapeutic carnivore diet, his recent PET scan showed something remarkable. I can't wait for you to hear this story.

More about Dr. Al Danenberg:

“Dr. Al” Danenberg is a periodontist and was in private practice for 44 years. He incorporated ancestral nutrition & lifestyle with his leading-edge laser protocol to treat periodontal disease. In September 2018, he retired from the practice of treating individual patients. However, he still consults with patients by phone, Skype, or Zoom regarding nutrition, lifestyle, oral and overall health, and the importance of a healthy gut.

Dr. Al received advanced training in evolutionary nutrition from the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health as well as The Center for Mind-Body Medicine. In June 2014, he received his Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (CFMP) designation as well as his certification as a Certified Primal Health Coach. In 2015, Dr. Danenberg was appointed to the faculty of the College of Integrative Medicine and created the college’s integrative periodontal teaching module. Then, in April 2017, he earned the designation of “ADAPT Trained Health Professional” from Kresser Institute. In July 2017, Elektra Press released Dr. Danenberg’s book, “Crazy-Good Living”, which is based on ancestral nutrition and lifestyle.

On April 14, 2020, Dr. Danenberg was appointed the Chair of the Periodontal Committee for the IABDM. He also created the Certification Program for Biological Nutritional Dental Professionals offered by the IABDM.

Show notes:

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Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
Have you heard about the carnivore diet? Okay. Episode 310, we interviewed Dr. Al about the carnivore diet. He, because of his cancer, basically went in to a carnivore diet. At that show, he was two to three weeks into it. We couldn’t help but do a follow-up. Wait until you hear the results of the carnivore diet. What he did. His doctor’s feelings about this whole thing. The results, most importantly, but a wealth of knowledge. We talk about causative factors. We talk about the how-to on a carnivore diet which is really important. It’s not what you think. Anyways, what a story this is and one you’re going to want to share. Check it out.

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I am Ashley Smith. Today, we welcome back an amazing guest. He was on episode 310. His name is Dr. Al Danenberg. He joined us last time to talk all about his unconventional cancer journey. He is here to share the next chapter and give us some updates. After his integrative protocols, his recent PET scan showed something remarkable. I’ll let him share what that is. Let’s get started and welcome Dr. Al and of course, Dr. Pompa to the show. Welcome both of you.

Dr. Al:
Oh, thank you so much, Ashley. I appreciate it.

Dr. Pompa:
Al, so when you popped on the screen before we started recording, I said, he’s alive.

Dr. Al:
I am alive and kicking and all that stuff.

Dr. Pompa:
The reason I said it is because, hey man, you were supposed to be dead long ago. What the heck?

Dr. Al:
December of 2018, that’s a long time ago.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you’re off the schedule here, gosh.

Dr. Al:
I know. I know. My oncologist is floored, literally floored. He said he has no patient—number one, he has no patient that’s not gone with chemotherapy that has had a result like I’ve had with the kind of unconventional protocols that I’ve created for myself. He’s really amazed.

Dr. Pompa:
Look, I’m one to say, if you get to the cause, the body can heal. Yeah, you’ve done some conventional things to help your body heal even faster, but we’ll talk a little bit about this oral cavity is the cause of 85%, 90% of most disease today. Definitely most gut conditions. I believe it was one of your big discoveries. This is your background, for goodness sake. You know more about the oral cavity than most, that’s for sure. Obviously, affecting you, driving cancer and other conditions often. We’ll get to that. This is part two. We left off and you just started the carnivore diet. Start with what is it in case people didn’t see the first show, but go back and see the first show. The link is going to be here.

He had just started. I think he was two or three weeks into the carnivore diet and we said, we’re going to do a show, check-up on you because everybody thought you were nuts except me because I said, hey, well, isn’t for cancer all the plant-based diets the key, the Gerson diet, et cetera. You and I were going, no, I would be doing the carnivore diet. All meat and fat, really? Fill us in. Help us from there.

Dr. Al:
Really. As a matter of fact, it’s really real. Prior to January 1st 2020, I was on a Paleolithic autoimmune diet. Great diet to help my body’s immune system and support it with healing. That was part of my cancer protocols. I had several and that was one of the major protocols. I did some research, as you know and we talked about. What this carnivore diet may do not just for chronic disease, but very specifically for cancer which is what I have. I have a terminal bone marrow cancer called IgA kappa light chain multiple myeloma which is much more complicated with my lytic lesions throughout my body. Not only do I have these malignant plasma cells running crazy, but in addition to that, I have so many holes my bone structure that my bone, my skeleton can’t support the weight of my body and I’ve had pathological fractures more than you probably have fingers, but enough. Quite enough pathological fractures. I think we went into that already.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we did.

Dr. Al:
Yeah. When I did some research about the carnivore diet, and the carnivore diet is not a meat-only diet by no stretch of the imagination because meat-only for most people they think muscle meat. That is a very unhealthy diet. You need to have a combination of proteins that are animal-based. It needs to be collagenous as well as muscle meat. The more important element is actually the fat and the ratio of fat to protein in terms of grams is two to one. I’m eating a hell of a lot of fat and I’m not gaining a pound. As a matter of fact, I’ve lost maybe five pounds along the way and I’ve not changed my lean body mass.

What’s really nice, I’ve got plenty of energy. Plenty of energy until maybe 6:30 in the evening and then, I start to conk out. Okay, I’m a sick guy, right? Still, I’m doing really well. It is basically a two to one, fat to protein in terms of gram diet of muscle meat, organs. Organs are critical because that’s where the nutrients are and fat and all the collagenous material. That’s what I eat. I was doing that absolutely strictly for the first five plus months. Then I started to tweak it a little bit based on the diet that is used at the Paleomedicina clinic in Budapest, Hungary where they actually are treating their patients that have severe chronic disease as well as cancer with this particular Paleolithic—they call it a Paleolithic ketogenic diet, carnivore diet, generally, 100%, but they will go up to or down to 70% animal-based and 30% plant-based. Basically, plants that are adequate for a Paleo type diet.

Dr. Pompa:
I think you’re doing about 10%?

Dr. Al:
Yes. I’m doing about 10% plants that have minor antinutrients and basically, 90% carnivore at this point.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s be clear. You did five months of just organ—

Dr. Al:
Absolutely, 100%.

Dr. Pompa:
Two to one fat or meat, et cetera.

Dr. Al:
Right, right. As a matter of fact, when you go to shop for a carnivore diet like that, it’s an easy shop. There’s only a few things that you buy. You have to create some variety in your life, but still, the beautiful thing is, it’s so satisfying to eat this food. You’re not constantly hungry. I don’t snack at all. There is no snacking whatsoever because I’m not hungry. I basically start my meal 12:00, 1:00 in the afternoon. I have my dinner maybe at 6:30-ish and that’s it. I really don’t do anything other than drink quite a bit of water.

Dr. Pompa:
This is what people want to know. Bring us through what these five months look like. Your health condition. Again, your doctors are just, what. Not only is he alive, he’s thriving. Take us through what the carnivore diet did for you, the changes, what you felt, what were the changes in your bone, your cancer, your PET scan. Take us through.

Dr. Al:
I see my oncologist every month. I do traditional bloodwork which is basically a CBC and blood chemistries. Every two to three months, I do a very specific cancer bloodwork looking at the unnatural antibodies which are the IgA antibodies in my case that are being produced by my malignant plasma cells. For the most part, my blood chemistries are all within normal range which is amazing because with all these holes in my body, I should be having significant calcium in my blood studies and I don’t. I don’t have any calcium that’s above the limits. Generally, it’s right in the middle of the range. I don’t have alkaline phosphatase problems or any of the other chemistry problems. Basically, my chemistries are good. My CBC is good.

Dr. Pompa:
I mean, most people would be like, isn’t his cholesterol going up because of all of the—

Dr. Al:
I’ve never been concerned about cholesterol.

Dr. Pompa:
Me either. That’s why I said it with such—

Dr. Al:
My cholesterol is important for my hormone production. All the males that have problems with cholesterol also have erectile dysfunction. I mean, it’s crazy. Anyhow, in my opinion, this diet has allowed my immune system to really be supported and has done a tremendous job in improving my ability to even withstand normal infections. I’m theoretically at high risk. When I saw my oncologist, maybe two or three months before the COVID thing started, he and his PA, his physician’s assistant, came into the room. They were wearing masks. They were drooling and sneezing and they had red eyes. They told me that they had a bad case of the flu, but they needed to be there. Of course, I took the flu shot. That’s another issue. I thought I was going to be in this room, my immune system is so compromised, I’m going to get sick. I never got sick. I believe everything I’m doing has really supported my immune system. There’s not a really good test to determine if your immune system is really healthy other than not getting sick.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s true.

Dr. Al:
I’m not getting sick. We go along. My blood chemistries are good. I’m never in remission, by the way and I will never tell anybody I have a cure for cancer. I just have a series of protocols that really are improving my immune system. I think that’s the bottom line to everybody’s health.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, of course. What’s going on with your bone? I remember obviously you—multiple fractures in the bone. How’s it healing? What do your doctors say about that?

Dr. Al:
I do not have a current bone scan. I do have the bone CT which was part of the PET scan which was where they injected me with radioactive glucose to look for cancer cells. That was in May of 2020. What we were doing at that point, my oncologist said, “Let’s just see how much cancer is throughout your body.” We had a PET scan when I was diagnosed in September of 2018. One in June of 2019 and this was the third one in a row. We had that. I had that. It was on a Friday morning. My oncologist called me Friday night and he said to make sure my wife gets on speaker phone. I said, “George, okay.” He’s reading the radiologist’s report and the radiologist is saying there are no active cancer cells in my entire body. I said to George, “Wait a minute. Read that again.” Read that again and of course, my wife is crying. I am off the floor floating.

Basically, there are no cancer cells. Now, in reality, that’s not true because the PET scan is only looking at moderate to large amounts of cancer cells in clumps. I don’t have those anymore, but I did. Now, there are probably these malignant plasma cells that may be dying or may be dead already and they’re still producing all these abnormal IgA antibodies and they’re still floating around. There’s going to be several months before maybe that clears out, if it clears out. I got to tell you I feel fantastic. If I will go for the next 20 years and still not be in remission, I’m okay with that. Not a problem.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s remarkable your attitude through it all. It really is. I’m always just fascinated by it. You give people a lot of hope. You really do, Al.

Dr. Al:
There are always ways to deal with things. There’s a lot to be said with stress and emotion because you can be the healthiest person around but you’re under emotional stress it’s going to affect your entire system especially the epithelial barrier of your gut. You’re going to have LPS leaking out because of the stress. You’re going to have metabolic endotoxemia. It doesn’t matter how healthy you are, that stress is going to do it. If you can control stress and of course, have a significant other that really supports you, and I do. My wife is amazing. She picks me up when I’m down and I can get really down by the way. That has been really, I think, a major factor why I’m doing as well as I doing with my other protocols, like I said.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s awesome. God has you alive for a reason, Al. I don’t think he’s taking you out any time soon. Your message is too important.

Dr. Al:
Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
Honestly. What did you feel? Your transition. We spoke to you since you were three weeks into it and you had said, it was a little rough in the beginning, right?

Dr. Al:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
You were just breaking through I think when we spoke to you. How did it break through? You know what I’m saying? What were some of the most significant changes?

Dr. Al:
Great question. I had to think back a little bit. Several things that were happening had a little bit to do with bowel movements although I never had a bowel movement problem before the carnivore diet. I think maybe I had some issues for the first week or two but nothing severe. When I’m on the Paleo autoimmune diet, I’m basically fat adapted anyhow so it’s not like I have these carbs—withdrawal from carbohydrates. I haven’t been a junkie food eater for over seven years although I was, but for the last seven years, I’ve been really excellent. I think that maybe there was a transition because of the very high level of fats.

I remember years ago, I was convincing my son-in-law to drink some bulletproof coffee that I made, and I made it with a lot of fat. He never had fat in his coffee, and he had diarrhea all day. I mean, when you have this high level of fat in your diet, your gut is going to talk to you a little bit. I think that was the main problem. Other than that, I really experienced great energy, great clarity. I never had problems with sleeping and I never did during the carnivore diet in the early stages. I can’t tell you that I had a specific problem other than maybe some bowel movement issues for the first week or two.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s great. Give us a day of your eating. Give us what it was like. Take us from you get up and what you do. As a matter of fact, take us through a day in your life actually, Al.

Dr. Al:
Absolutely. It’s boring for most people because I’m not getting out. I do walk for example. First thing in the morning, and when I say first thing in the morning, it’s very hot and sticky in Charleston, South Carolina. First thing in the morning is 6:30 to 7:00 AM for me. I will get out and walk about a mile. That’s impressive for me.

Dr. Pompa:
No, I was going to say—I mean, you have to understand. There was a time when Al walked, he would just fracture hips and femurs.

Dr. Al:
Because of those fractures, I was in hospice ready to die in September of 2019, so I’ve come a long way. I’ve got some things in my legs to support me because of the fractures, but I walk about a mile a day. I have a mile that I’ve tracked off that I can identify. I walk it. I love it and I do that. During the day, and it’s not every day, maybe three to four times a day I do some modified squats and modified push-ups. That’s a little complicated because of the fractures in my femurs. Then I have a right humerus that was fractured that never was set. I have this complication but I do it and I don’t have any problem with it. That’s what I do every day to every third day.

Now, I do love my coffee, so I have my pressed coffee in the morning. I make it with two tablespoons of collagen peptides, two tablespoons of heavy raw cream because we can get raw milk in Charleston, South Carolina. I make it with two tablespoons of my own ghee that I make from grass-fed butter. There’s a lot of fat in my coffee. Love it. I mean, I love it. I drink basically 16 ounces, two cups in the morning. I sip on it for an hour or two, but I love it. Then I’m not eating until one-ish o’clock. My breakfast or the first meal, although some people will say if you had collagen peptide, you had a meal already. My first real meal that I’m chewing would be—for example, today, I had liver pate which is phenomenal. It has a four to one fat to protein ratio. It’s made with some really good stuff. I get it at Whole Foods. I had that and some salmon roe.

Dr. Pompa:
Do you actually buy the liver pate there?

Dr. Al:
Yeah. I can make my own liver pate and I do that sometimes, but this is pork liver and chicken liver that is made with some seasonings. Maybe some onions, I think, and a couple other things and that’s it. Very, very excellent and it’s a quick eat so I do that. Tonight, I will prepare for dinner. I’m going to have some ground beef. Let me tell you the ground beef that I get which is really amazing. There’s a farm in Florida that raises grass-fed, grass-finished wagyu beef. Oh, my god. It is amazing.

Dr. Pompa:
I want that resource. I want that resource.

Dr. Al:
I will send you that and that article, yeah. A farm in Florida, I’m making a note. Wagyu beef has a great flavor. It is definitely distinct. It has higher fat content. Actually, there is a much higher omega-3 fatty acid content than regular grass-fed beef which is high in omega-3, so it’s even higher than that. They have all kinds of cuts and I just get a variety that I like. I get the fattier cuts like [00:21:08] and cow tail or ox tail, some short ribs. These are really fatty and their ground beef which is great and sometimes prime rib. Tonight, I’m going to take this ground beef and I’m going to sauté it with some Himalayan salt. I put a little sprinkle of kelp granules just to make sure I have some iodine.

I will maybe season it with some fresh shiitake and organic onions that I’ll chop up and cook with it. Those veggies, they’re very, very small in amount and they are appropriate for at least the Paleomedicina philosophy of a carnivore diet which I agree with. That will be it. I will have maybe some fruit. I’ll have some cherries maybe, four or five cherries. Cherries are great. They are low on oxalates. They have maybe one gram of carb per cherry so five cherries is not going to do anything to me, but I like that little taste. That will be it.

Dr. Pompa:
Before that, you just would have had the meats.

Dr. Al:
Yes, without the cherries, without the onions. Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
No vegetable on your—

Dr. Al:
No, not at all. Not at all. My only seasoning would be Himalayan salt. I will drink plenty of water when I’m thirsty all day long and I love FIJI artesian water from France. I like the natural spring waters. That FIJI is really a nice flavor for me, so I like it.

Dr. Pompa:
I like the flavor too. When you switched from pure carnivore to adding in 10% the vegetables, some of those fruits, what did you notice? Did you notice anything?

Dr. Al:
No, I didn’t, but I got to tell you something exciting. Let me show you my arm.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m thinking like you started getting more gas maybe.

Dr. Al:
No. No. Those vegetables and fruits really didn’t have a lot of fiber either.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, yeah. I just thought maybe.

Dr. Al:
No, I did not, but let me show you. I have a CGM on my arm and I am experimenting—I’ll write about this in a couple of weeks. I am experimenting on my glucose control as a cancer patient, but it’s fascinating. For example, I experimented with raw Manuka honey. Raw Manuka honey is okay with carnivore. First of all, it’s an animal-based food and I took, which is very interesting, I took two tablespoons of Manuka honey. That’s a lot of honey and ate it and my glucose was about 85 to 88. I’ll tell you about my glucose normally. 85 to 88 at that point, it spiked to 154 in an hour and a half and dropped down to the low 80s within another hour. Interesting. I was on basically an empty stomach.

Dr. Pompa:
How did you feel when that spiked?

Dr. Al:
I didn’t feel anything different. Not a thing different. Now, here’s another interesting thing. When you are on a very low carb or a carnivore diet, your resting blood glucose is significantly higher than you think it should be. There are some studies that show that. It’s very interesting. Here’s my philosophy about this. I’m not sure if it’s accurate or not, but my body needs some glucose and it knows how to make glucose when it doesn’t have it from gluconeogenesis.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Dr. Al:
Because I’m not eating any carbs, it’s going to raise my level of glucose. When I wake up in the morning, my glucose is around 105 to 110.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, the dawn effect, typically, the dawn effect may be low 90s for people, but meaning, the dawn effect [00:25:22]. It’s normal to have cortisol go up and glucose to be a little higher in the morning than the rest of the day. Yours went up to maybe 10 points higher than normal.

Dr. Al:
Yeah. I think it stays stable at that high level in the middle of the night and that’s why CGM is interesting because it’s showing that its maybe a 110 to 115 while I’m sleeping. That’s a lot. I think that may be normal for me, but this is interesting. When I have my coffee and I only know this because I’m wearing the CGM and I’m looking at the results every five minutes, because it records every minutes.

Dr. Pompa:
Coffee made it go down.

Dr. Al:
Yeah, exactly. All this fat dropped it to 85. My normal level was 100 to 110 dropped to 85 and then it stayed basically where it was. Then I have lunch and I had lunch with zero carbs today and it stayed maybe at a 100 to a 104. After I ate, it only peaked to a 107 to a 109.

Dr. Pompa:
What’s your theory?

Dr. Al:
My theory is that when I eat the fat, I’m producing ketones and my body is doing very happy and he doesn’t need any endogenous glucose, gluconeogenesis. It’s not doing anything with glucose and it’s got all the ketones it wants. When I look at my ketone levels—when I drink the coffee and after the coffee, my ketone levels are moderate. As the day progresses, it goes down, my glucose level goes up.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, the body, it can only use sugar fat for energy. When you’re not eating in the middle of the night, your body makes glucose which it knows how to do. Here’s the thing you have to understand because people might say, yeah, but he’s losing muscle because it’s gluconeogenesis, you lose your muscle, but you haven’t lost muscle. If you didn’t use muscle or proteins, only using bad muscle or protein, let’s be clear via breaking it down via autophagy. The liver is producing it, gluconeogenesis, other methods obviously, just for energy. It’s raising up your glucose.

Dr. Al:
It can use anything to get gluconeogenesis.

Dr. Pompa:
My theory here is, because your body wants to do nothing but survive and the innate intelligence does this. It doesn’t want to use your major fuel source. It doesn’t want to tap in to the fat if it doesn’t have to. It will make glucose for you to burn other methods as we’re talking about via gluconeogenesis. It will keep that glucose out there for you to use because your brain needs it. Your brain can’t use fat. It will use ketones or that. To the point, when you eat fat, it will make the ketones, your brain’s happy with that and your body will use some of the ketones as well. That’s what I think is happening. I guess we’re on target.

Dr. Al:
I agree. The muscle mass is very important for the body. The fat is not as important. I think the fat would be metabolized to get what it needs.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the body needs glucose. The brain needs glucose, but it wants to hold on to your fat because it knows, it’s a good lifeline. I mean, that visceral fat. You’re not fat, but when I speak of fat, I’m talking about visceral fat. Your body goes, I might need this so let’s just store this in other ways.

Dr. Al:
Yeah. It’s interesting. This CGM I think is very telling because it helps people—for me, understand variation in glucose is normal and its okay to be at 70 or 80 which everybody thinks is ideal, maybe or maybe not. I don’t know. I like the idea my body knows when it spikes, how to use the insulin properly and get rid of the glucose. Then the insulin I’m sure goes away quickly because the number drops precipitously. I think its effective and this is where I am right now. I’m doing a little educating myself about glucose and its metabolism, but of course, I’m thinking that my body is very satisfied with all the nutrients I can get in the carnivore diet.

From the research that I read from specifically, Paleomedicina clinic because they’ve treated 5,000 patients since 2011 and these are not rats and mice. These are human beings that have severe chronic disease and incurable cancer. Let me tell you this case study that they just published. I’m not sure if you saw it. I don’t think I told you about because I just recently read it. 52-year-old man who was previously diagnosed with glioblastoma. He had conventional treatment with radiation surgery and chemotherapy, went into remission maybe for a couple of months and then, it came back. The medical people were going to start him on the same regimen and he rejected that.

He went to Paleomedicina clinic in Budapest, Hungary. They put him on the Paleolithic ketogenic diet, strict carnivore diet, no plants whatsoever, no medicines, no supplements. Their report was after 38 months of him being with no progression or symptoms and living functionally normally. Now that’s glioblastoma, 38 months carnivore diet. Interesting. They have many reports like this, but this is the longest running report that they’ve published that I could find. This report is very interesting because they go into the details why they think it is the way it is.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s answer this for people. I’ll let you answer this for people. Wait a minute, don’t you need vitamins and mineral—all the stuff that plants offer, all the phytonutrients, the vitamin C, et cetera. You have cancer. What I’ve heard, I’m speaking for people, what I’ve heard is, for cancer, you need all these vitamins and antioxidants and that you’re getting none of that or that gentleman for 38 months got none of it. Al, how do you explain that because all the cancer diets are high plant diets. As a matter of fact, only plant diets, vegetarian, vegan diets. What’s your answer?

Dr. Al:
Here’s what’s amazing. The animals that I’m eating have a digestive track to digest the antinutrients in plants. That’s what they eat. They have a very short—small intestine but a very long large intestine and a cecum where all the plant material is digested and the antinutrients are destroyed. All the nutrients are absorbed in their fat, their organs and their muscle meats and the collagenous material in their bodies. These nutrients are the bioactive nutrients that we think we’re getting from plants. What we get from plants are these bioactive nutrients superimposed with the antinutrients that are competing with our ability to process them.

Here’s what I think. We have a DNA code. Interestingly, it has evolved for 160,000 years at least if you believe in evolution which I do. This code knows exactly what it requires. We need to eat. We need to drink. We need to breath. These are things that we can’t deny ourselves of or we’re going to die. That’s one extreme of the pendulum. The other extreme of the pendulum of the DNA code is that our DNA knows that it has never created the enzymes or the efficiency to get rid of poison in our body.

Now poison can be defined in a lot of ways, but whatever that irritates and punctures our body continuously is poisonous. It’s like taking a splinter in your finger and removing it and the skin heals. Yeah, it will, but if you take that splinter and keep stabbing it in the same puncture hole, the skin never heals. If you put the same junk in your gut and you breath the same air that is contaminated, you’re going to constantly irritate your body. I believe our DNA does not allow that and we keep doing that.

What we’re doing in a carnivore diet is that we’re eating all these biologically active nutrients that, when you eat the meat and the fat and the organs get absorbed in our body. These are theoretically the phytonutrients minus the antinutrient components that are in the plants. Here’s another very interesting thing. Vitamin C is critical for health. Not so sure that vitamin C in capsules and liposomes, liposomal and all kinds of vitamin C may be the ideal. The ideal vitamin C for humans is the vitamin C in liver. The vitamin C in liver is actually heat stable. Vitamin C from plants which is a slightly different chemical isn’t heat stable. Heat will destroy vitamin C in oranges, but heat will not destroy the vitamin C in liver.

When you’re not eating the carbohydrates because glucose competes with vitamin C to get into the cell, if you’re not eating all this glucose, the vitamin C has no problem getting into the cell especially if it’s coming from a highly biologically active source which would be liver which is very interesting. The same thing with magnesium. Magnesium competes with glucose to get into the cell. If you’re not eating a lot of glucose, overly carbohydrate type of diet, then the magnesium has no problem to get into the cell. Now, I eat organs. I eat bone marrow. I’m eating a lot of this real, but I’m also eating it desiccated forms from animals that have been grass-fed and grass-finished. I’m getting all these nutrients and I think that’s a very critical part.

Dr. Pompa:
I think so too.

Dr. Al:
If I’m just eating ribeye steak every night, that’s not going to cut it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, because to your point, that’s why it’s two to one fat because the fat is really what holds the nutrients the animal ate. The animal brings in the nutrients, makes them super bioavailable, stores them in the fat and you’re eating the fat. Of course, that is. The body survives. We know the [00:37:09] people were eating mostly fat throughout the winter.

Dr. Al:
When you say that, there are some studies from Paleolithic times that have done nitrogen testing to determine where this protein is coming from, plants or animals, and most of it is coming from animals. This is stuff that’s been published in very well-respected medical journals around the world. I think there is a reason why plant-based foods are so popular. There’s an industry that makes a lot of money on processing plant-based foods. When you go to a fast-food restaurant and get a plant-based burger, that’s the ultimate in marketing plant-based foods. I think that there is not as much money in the real animal products as there is in packaged processed plant foods. There may be other reasons. Listen, I think a vegetarian diet, a vegan diet is far healthier than the standard American diet. I mean, there are degrees of what you need and what you don’t need.

Dr. Pompa:
You know my philosophy, moving in and out of some of those diets periodically is what nature forced in the past. I want people to understand that our bodies, I think, need these times of changing up the nutrients like we’re talking about.

Dr. Al:
We need variety. We need challenges in our body. I agree with you.

Dr. Pompa:
Likewise, going to a plant-based, it can be very challenging. There are toxins in the plants. Lectins or [00:38:53], phytates, all of those things are little toxins. Then moving to an all-meat diet because of the increased fat or I should say the carnivore diet with all the fat is a new stressor that changes the microbiome. That shifting could be good. I have to say, we have to get back, and I want to touch on this again here in the last moments because I want people to hear how important cause is.

You’ve dedicated part of your life to this research. By the way, we’re going to provide the links to some of your articles. Brilliant article writer. If I can only write as eloquent as you, Al. I’m telling you he is great. He is a great researcher, great writer. We’re going to make sure we have all of those links. Ashley will put them up. You have to go read his stuff, folks. You do. Just absolutely brilliant.

The other part of your research is this, this oral component which I stand—I feel like oftentimes in functional medicine is this guy who keeps telling people, oh my gosh, we have to look here. Hidden infections. Obviously, amalgam fillings. People get that more. You and I resonate so solid on this. This is your background. Infection. What do you think the cause—how much disease is this causing. Obviously, it led to a lot of what you’re battling.

Dr. Al:
Here is my philosophy from my reading research. I’ve not done actual studies on animals or humans in this regard but reading. I think everything starts from the gut, and here’s why I say that. The gut microbiome is so critical. It affects the epithelial barrier of the gut. Inside the gut lumen is lipopolysaccharides which are normal for the gut but totally toxic to the human body that leaks into the bloodstream. When there is a change in the gut microbiome with food, with chemicals, with dirty electromagnetic fields, poor sleep, emotional distress, over exercising, there are so many factors that affect the microbiome.

Once that microbiome changes and the mucus layer is affected, and the epithelial barrier is damaged, and LPS and other junk that’s not fully—or other substances that are not fully digested leak in the bloodstream, the immune system goes haywire and it stays in a chronic state. It can’t mount a defense when something really severe comes into the body because it’s in a constant chronic stage. What happens is, there’s a change in the chronic systemic inflammation and a change in the overall health of the immune system. That change affects the mouth and there are maybe 700 or so potential species of bacteria in the mouth that are in a wonderful homeostatic balance.

We know that when we look at skeletal remains of 10,000 or 20,000 years ago, in humans, we can see jaw bone relatively intact, tooth structure relatively decay-free but tartar around the root surface near the bone which is a dental plaque that has calcified. The reason there’s no damage to the tooth and no damage to the bone for the most part is because the bacteria is in a state of balance. Dental plaque—this is going to floor you or somebody, I’m sure. Dental plaque is healthy until it’s not. You don’t want to remove dental plaque because here’s what dental plaque does.

First of all, the tooth gum unit is only area in the body where a hard substance pierces the epithelium and goes into the inner structures of the bone which are basically sterile. That pathway needs to be protected or any pathogens in that area will slide down like a sliding board into the internal structure of the body. What happens is, our bodies have created a healthy biofilm called dental plaque. That dental plaque surrounds and attaches to where the gum tooth margin is. That dental plaque does three things. It’s the gatekeeper to take minerals from the saliva and it passes it to the root surface and remineralizes the root as necessary, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The other thing that dental plaque does is that it creates, because it’s so many species, a variety of hydrogen peroxide that literally kills other potential pathogenic bacteria in the mouth from getting into this very critical gum tooth margin. The third thing it does is it has some chemical buffers that protects the surface of the root so that it is not too acidic. It maintains the pH of 5.5 or more alkaline rather than more—

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah. What you’re saying is, the plaque is like fireman in a fire meaning—

Dr. Al:
Absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
They’re there doing a reason right. Don’t kill the firemen because they’re actually there. It just so happens that every time here’s these fires, these guys in the red coats are there but they’re not causing the fire.

Dr. Al:
Correct. When the gut is dysbiotic and we have chronic inflammation, the immune system is somewhat compromised, this garden of bacteria starts to change and some of the potential pathogenic bacteria that are not a problem when they’re in balance have the potential to overgrow especially from eating the foods that support that growth of bad bacteria. Then you have unhealthy dental plaque. That’s when dental disease occurs. Now, that’s the first time most practitioners see a problem. They see the inflammation in the mouth and they say, wow, this mouth is causing disease in the body. That’s only 50% true. It’s only the second nidus of infection. The first was the gut.

Here’s what I believe. There has been a study that was published in 2010 that showed that 94% of the US population has some form of gingival inflammation. That is gingivitis. That is infection. Now, that may not kill you, but it is infection. The only reason they have that, in my opinion is something has gone wrong with the gut. You don’t have to have stomach problems. You don’t have to have bloating or diarrhea or constipation. It doesn’t have to be symptomatic gut problems. It’s just that inflammation has gotten into the circulatory system. Basically, that solution is to treat the mouth but also to treat to gut. There are hidden things in the mouth that most people don’t even see even dentists. Failing root canals that are not painful for the patient, but there’s changes in the bone structure.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, right. No, I mean, we have this—and it goes the other way around. You have these root canals that people have and you can’t fix the gut. We get a root canal out, boom, microbiome changes.

Dr. Al:
Absolutely. You’re starting to balance things now because everything—you’re not getting a change in the gut microbiome by swallowing the bacteria. That’s a misnomer because the stomach acid kills the bacteria, but the bacteria can seep into the bloodstream under the gum pocket which is called a leaky periodontal pocket. It can get into the lymph and eventually get back into the circulatory system. What is very unrecognized is that, all this inflammation and infection can travel the myelin sheaths of nerves as it travels to other areas in the bone that don’t even go through the circulatory system. There’s a lot of ways that this can—

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, that’s why there’s certain teeth to represent problems at certain areas.

Dr. Al:
This is my impression of meridians. I think the meridians are nothing more than the nerve canal, the nerve channels where the bacteria is transmitting instantaneously.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve said the same thing, yeah.

Dr. Al:
I think that we need to write a paper about that because I’ve tried to research that and I can’t find that anywhere.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s funny. I had a client here locally seeing the dentist who’s local and I was saying these bacteria that kept forming here were affecting her knees. He just went up and just put some procaine in that area. Within one minute, all her knee pain was gone. Now, he made the point. It won’t last until we get this infection out, but the infection were literally travelling those nerves.

Dr. Al:
It’s a great educational tool and diagnostic tool, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Dr. Al:
Now, here’s something that I think anybody that’s a practitioner can do to determine if there is active gum inflammation and infection. Just looking at the gum tissue doesn’t always do it. When you brush and floss, it may bleed, it may not bleed, but you still may have infection. Here’s the little gadget that works really well. These are called TePe interdental brushes. These are very little brushes that look like a toothpick but there are silicon filaments that you clean between the teeth by scrubbing in and out. These little filaments stimulate the gum surface between the teeth. If there’s any inflammation, you will get bleeding in that area.

Anybody could say to their patient, not being a dentist, they could say, take these and clean between the teeth and let’s see if there’s any bleeding especially in the back of your mouth which is where most people have bleeding but they’re not able to see it. If there is any pink or bleeding from these areas simulated by that little brush, it’s a telltale sign that there’s gum infection. If you can’t treat it, that’s fine, but get them to the right biological dentist to get that taken care of.

Dr. Pompa:
You might have cavitation which a tooth was pulled or a wisdom tooth and it holds infection which you and I have had this conversation. That was me. I mean, I had one. I didn’t know. I used to form all these plaque as a protector and now I form no plaque at all, but I got rid of these infections. It had a dramatic effect on—even my resting blood pressure, so many things [00:49:44] infection.

Dr. Al:
Just think about it. This infection, although it may not cause pain, sometimes it does, but it doesn’t cause pain, this is constantly stimulating your immune system. Cytokine reaction constantly. Your immune system is constantly being overworked just to try to treat this and it’s not doing a good job and you have some chronic systemic inflammation. Once that is gone, your whole immune system can be reenergized which is what our bodies really need today.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree. Listen, Al. We’re out of time. I can’t believe that that was so fast. What a breadth of knowledge, from pain to purpose story. Thank you for sharing this. We’re going to have to have a part three. We got to just keep following up with you, Al.

Dr. Al:
Here I am. You’re wonderful and thanks for the opportunity.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. Reach out to Al. His contact information’s here but Al, go ahead and just voice where you’d love people to go.

Dr. Al:
My website drdanenberg.com, D-R-D-A-N-E-N-B-E-R-G dot com. If you go to the little navigation bar and hit contact and send me an email with a question, I answer all my email questions. All of them.

Dr. Pompa:
He does. All right, Al. Thanks for being on.

Dr. Al:
Have a great day. Thanks. Take care.

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 10:00 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 or sharing the show with anyone who may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

340: The Magic of Castor Oil Packs for Lymph, Liver, and Detox

Today my guest and I will be talking about the healing benefits of castor oil. Dr. Marisol Teijeiro is the proclaimed “Queen of Thrones,” and will explain why daily castor oil packs can be therapeutic for liver detox, digestion, constipation, anxiety, and even hormone balance. And she will also share other ways to implement castor oil in your life. I can’t wait to share more about this simple tool we can all add to our toolbox.

More about Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro, ND, BA – Queen of the Thrones ™ is a world leader renowned for empowering people to improve their digestive and gut health by unlocking secrets found in the number one product our body produces, our stools.

Her life’s mission is for the billions of people around the world, both healthy and suffering from digestive issues like constipation, bloating, gas, irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and more, to understand the inner workings of their bodies.

She’s the founder and clinical director of Sanas Health Practice, where she’s helped thousands of patients live happy, healthy lives. She teaches at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine, appears as a guest on TV and podcasts, and speaks around the world.

Her passion and first-visit prescription is castor oil and castor oil packs. She shares cutting edge tips and techniques that are scientifically supported, clinically practiced and historically honored.

Show notes:

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Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
Did your grandmother tell you to use castor oil for everything? She may have been right. As a matter of fact, modern research says that she was right again.

All right, this guest is known as the queen of castor oil. Look, we know it clears lymph, we know it clears the liver, it opens up detox outside of the cell. It goes perfectly with cellular detox, but what about hormones, constipation, IBS? What about gut issues, microbiome? Oh yeah, wait until you hear the new science and wait until you hear the challenge that I’m going to do for 30 days. You may want to join me, but you’re going to have to watch this show. Check it out.

Ashley Smith:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, we have an expert who will be talking all about the healing benefits of castor oil.

Dr. Marisol is the proclaimed “queen of thrones” and will explain why daily castor oil packs can be therapeutic for liver detox, digestion, constipation, lymph, anxiety, and even hormone balance. I cannot wait to hear more about this simple tool we can all add to our toolbox. Let’s get started and welcome Dr. Marisol, and of course, Dr. Pompa to the show. Welcome both of you.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Thank you, very excited to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
Her smile outdoes me, Ashley. It’s like, bam.

Ashley Smith:
It’s great. I agree.

Dr. Pompa:
I know; she just lights it up. As soon as I see her, I just start smiling. I don’t know why. It’s just that’s what I do.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Good, it’s my magical, mystical power.

Dr. Pompa:
You are the queen of castor oil and the “queen of thrones.” I don’t know; it’s just that’s good branding, I think. Every one of those topics you just like—every one of them, okay. All of my viewers need to know this. All of my viewers want to know about every one of those subjects and how to use castor oil for it.

Obviously, I preach and teach detox, have for 20 years. Look, assisting detox, my cellular detox, it’s a perfect match. People do saunas, Epson salt baths, this and that, but—the coffee enemas, there’s a lot of things, but I think this takes a backseat not because it deserves to take a backseat. I think that just the word maybe hasn’t gotten out; therefore, we brought the queen on to make sure that doesn’t happen anymore.

We’re going to assist our detox. We need to clear lymph. All of those things are huge. We need to clear our liver, kidneys. How in the world does castor oil do it? Okay, we’re going to find out.

Let’s back up though. Castor oil sounds like moon oil. This sounds unhealthy maybe. Now, if you’re my age, grandma used castor oil for every dang thing, okay. Let’s be clear. New people, I think when I said it to my son when I got that for him, he’s like, “Is that motor oil?” Anyways, so what the heck is castor oil? Let’s just start there.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
I know, right. I felt the same way, too. I remember my first experience seeing castor oil and being told about castor oil. I was working in natural health industry, going from health food store to health food store, practitioners’ office. I saw the castor oil on the table or on the lower bottom shelf at the health food store. I’m like, what is that stuff?

What got it for me was that it—I really was really attracted to it. I kept on seeing it everywhere. Anywhere and everywhere I would go, I would see castor oil. I started to realize that this was a real golden thread along natural health and the natural health industry. Actually, when I started researching it, I found the authentic roots of castor oil all the way dating back to Cleopatra right before Christ, 4000 BC, with all the Egyptians. Yeah, major ancient mystical treatments as well as our fathers of medicine, Hippocrates, the man known for—

Dr. Pompa:
“The father of medicine.”

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
That’s right. “Let your food be your medicine, your medicine be your food,” and how health begins in the gut. All the different ancient medicine practices all used castor oil. It was really incredible.

What this oil is, it’s truly a mystical oil. Its other name is known as “the palm of Christ.” It is said to potentially be one of the oils that was used in the Bible or by Jesus Christ that was used to anoint the sick. It was just for me fascinating because I’m—

Dr. Pompa:
I love that.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Yeah, very spiritual and mystical. It was used to help heal the sick in that way. Historically, castor oil was also used to elevate the kings and queens as they took their throne, one of the reasons I’m called the “queen of thrones,” that and I talk about poop, of course.

Then in the clergy as well, too, castor oil is one of the oils used to anoint as they moved up in their clergy. It’s said to be vegetable oil. The leaves look like the palm of Christ. The bean is basically cold-pressed, a good quality castor oil now. Many of the ones on the market are not good quality, which you have to be very careful about. The best quality is a cold-pressed castor oil.

This oil has so many healing benefits to it. Sometimes, I feel that I’m speaking about snake oil, the old connotation about how this oil does everything but does nothing. Castor oil, it does everything. It says what it does and it does it, which is what makes it so spectacular.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, all right, so let’s talk about its benefits. Obviously, I mentioned how it can be assisted in detox. Oh, there’s my wife. She should be listening to this conversation.

Merily Pompa:
I saw a big, bright smile. How are you?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, she’s beautiful, right. She just lights up the screen.

Merily Pompa:
Oh, I love your haircut. It’s super cute. Nice to meet you. What’s your name?

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Marisol.

Merily Pompa:
Marisol, nice to meet you.

Dr. Pompa:
She is the queen of castor oil, literally. Okay, how does castor oil work for anxiety? We could talk about it clearing lymph in a moment, the detox [00:06:34].

Merily Pompa:
Oh, I can’t wait.

Dr. Pompa:
Hormones.

Merily Pompa:
Send me some.

Dr. Pompa:
Hormones and anxiety, how does that work? I don’t even understand that maybe.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Awesome, well, the thing is this is that castor oil works for every condition because castor oil when used as a castor oil pack, which for those who don’t know it, is basically a cotton compress. This is the one that we’ve created to make it really easy. You simply pour castor oil and you place it on your liver. We made that really easy to do and easy to comply.

When done as a castor oil pack, there are various mechanisms. Now, I love how you talked earlier on about cellular awakening and how you really focus cleaning out of the cells. The castor oil pack and why it’s a perfect marriage with cellular detox is because castor oil packs tend to work more on the extracellular space and things that are happening within the extracellular space or in the compartment outside of the cell.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Castor oil does five very important things. I love using the acronym FAITH to remember it. I’ll guide you through it because it’s just an easy way to remember.

F stands for function of digestion, of the digestion, absorption, and elimination. Castor oil, when you put it on your body, it will help you. You put it on that night, but when you’re eating your meals during the day, it will actually help you to improve the function of how you’re absorbing, how you’re digesting, improving digestive factors like stomach acid, digestive enzymes, helping you to absorb all those good nutrients, all the phytonutrients that are going to help with your hormones, help with anxiety, making sure that you’re getting all those things that you’re lacking.

It’s also going to help you eliminate. Elimination is such a key factor in hormonal problems and anxiety problems. I have a history of hormonal and anxiety problems. What I always noticed was that whenever I got constipated, my anxiety would kick up a notch. It would be because I would be backing up of toxic substances that literally need to come out of your body. Hormones, of course, hormones, the biggest issue is that these estrogens that come out through the stools. If you have excess estrogens and they’re just staying in the body and being recirculated, well, then you just get a hormonal messy soup.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow, interesting.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
That’s the first thing, function, F: function of the digestion, absorption, and elimination. A stands for antioxidant status. Castor oil is actually an incredible source when it is cold-pressed in a glass bottle, highest quality oil like the one that we have. It contains many phytonutrients, including well-known substances like glutathione, which is our, of course, you and I, probably our favorite master detoxification agent, that helps clean everything up.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
It contains high sources of vitamin E, other—the components of essential fats in castor oil are a combination of omega-6s like from linoleic acid, the same you get in sesame oil, also oleic acid, the same you’d get from olive oil, and very important end result of what you get when you take Omega-3s, which is basically the prostaglandins because castor oil’s molecular structure actually looks like a prostaglandin, the end result of what you get when you take your fish oil. You now don’t have to manufacture from the fish oil down to the prostaglandins with the actual castor oil pack.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, exactly, and I’m not a fan of fish oil because of it’s rancid. We do want the prostaglandins, so this is a bypass. That’s cool.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Yeah, it’s super cool. The cool thing with castor oil too is that I’m sure some people have in their minds right now, what are you—you’re telling me to put castor oil on this compress, on it, and then absorb it through my skin. How is this oil going to be able to do it? It does it because it’s a very—it’s the most unique of all vegetable oils. If you want to go on like a geek out on the science, biochemically, the main component of castor oil has an alcohol group on one of the carbons. This makes it able and the proper molecular weight to be the only oil that can go through all the layers of the skin and actually go straight directly into the lymphatic system in the dermis and the circulatory system.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, wow.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Really phenomenal, yeah. We’re only at the second letter of the word, FAITH, like, whoa. After that, all that goodness and nourishment that you get in your body that are antioxidants that we are so depleted in this day and age with all the stress we have, and all the toxicity in our environment, and lead in the air from the time they used lead gasoline. I could go on and go on.

Then, there’s always a byproduct. The body responds to all this—all these problems. It does one important mechanism of action that we see pervasive and we see throughout every single condition, which is inflammation, right?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
That silent killer that causes so many problems. Castor oil when you—in the castor oil pack, when you place it on your body, one of its main action is to help with balancing and regulating, not totally taking out inflammation because inflammation also is very healing, but it balances and regulates it. When that happens in the extracellular space, well, then your cells can breathe. They can take in all that goodness. They can eliminate what they need to eliminate out of the cell, move it to the extracellular space, and then move it out to the digestive tract or the water-soluble pathways and be eliminated out of the body. That’s a pretty cool mechanism of action.

When you wear the castor oil pack over your liver, you’re doing—an extra added bonus is that you’re actually helping the liver to detoxify and cleanse better because you’re reducing the inflammation directly in that area. While the liver, being so bombarded by having to cleanse and purify so many different chemicals, and hormones, and extra cholesterol, and all the things that we have going on in our body, when it starts to lose its function, it gets inflamed. That’s a way that we can preserve our youth and our energy, and feel better, and feel less weight around our center and all this good stuff that you get when you have less inflammation in your central core. Super cool.

Then you asked about anxiety. The letter H—oh, sorry, T, which is—stands for the reduction of tension and stress. The aspect of actually placing the compress on the body, what this does is—these compresses, you want them to be a very soft flannel material. This is a cotton sherpa. It’s organic of course because we don’t want to have—be processing or delivering toxins into the body.

This soft material and the way that it is displayed on the body, what it does is it stimulates and triggers the receptors on the skin as does the castor oil because of the texture of castor oil. For all those viewers and listeners who’ve ever played our touched castor oil, you know it’s a lot thicker than all the different types of oils. It’s just got a completely different consistency.

When on the body, it triggers those receptors. Those receptors message the ganglions or the networks that communicate to the central nervous system into the brain. It actually stimulates hormonal productions and neurotransmitter productions. One of my favorite hormones that it triggers is oxytocin. Oxytocin, being that hormone/neurotransmitter that balances out cortisol in your body and reduces stress, makes you feel good, makes you feel connected to Mother Nature, to earth, to everything spiritually as well, too.

They often say that castor oil packs is a way that we can get connected to our soul and our own guidance in terms of how to heal from a spiritual perspective as well, too, not just physical, such great stuff. There’s also demonstration that when you stimulate these receptors with soft material, you’re also stimulating—in that oil, you’re stimulating the dopamine production, which is also a great neurotransmitter that makes you feel well and makes you feel rewarded in life. Just a great way to end the day doing your castor oil pack in that evening point and time, going to sleep, having a great night’s sleep, and just really circling in to have a great day.

Then the final thing it does, which is already such a great long list of these foundational things that really help your body to set well, is that you become the host with the mostest. What I mean by host is not that you’re having parties all the time and everyone loves, but that’s also a good benefit because you’ll probably—you’ll feel better, have more energy. You’ll just feel less stressed, so you’ll be able to do those things. We host trillions of microbes on our skin and in our digestive tract. Castor oil has been shown to be incredibly effective to not only help to breakdown biofilm—this is research that’s done in periodontal medicine, great research studies done out of Brazil comparing it to conventional biofilm breakdown substances that are chemical. Castor oil is one of those natural substances that breaks down biofilm and helps to reset a good balance of good bacteria versus the bad bacteria in your body.

The fact that there aren’t too many substances that actually effectively breakdown biofilm in the gut—biofilm is one of those things for people out there, if you’ve been taking probiotics for a long time and you’re just like, I don’t know if it’s working. It maybe worked a little bit at the beginning but not so much now. Do I need to keep on taking it? Of course, you need to keep on taking probiotics because our guts are constantly changing, but more importantly, you need to be supporting and breaking down the biofilm that the bad bacteria create that is almost like their cocoon that they protect themselves so that you can’t repopulate with the good stuff. When you’re doing these packs, you actually help to remake that biofilm into healthy biofilm, and change the environment, and make it healthy.

That’s why I say for so many people who’ve struggled with their health, they feel that they’ve done patchwork and improvement in certain areas, but they’re missing some keys, well, it’s all about going back to that basic foundation, rebuilding our FAITH in our body’s ability that it can heal by, of course, F, improving the function of the digestion system and elimination, getting those good antioxidants. This is the same thing that I know you preach a lot, too. Lots of good antioxidants, balancing out that inflammation, reducing the tension and stress in the body, and improving our ability to be a great host and have good microbes.

When you add a tool like this into a daily—a nightly practice or daily, that really supportive through your body, I love to compare it to the parable that’s in the Bible about building a house on a rock versus building a house on sand. When you do castor oil, building a rock—you’re building your house, your temple on a rock that is solid. That no matter what wind comes, no matter storm may arise, you’ve built an incredible foundation versus building your temple, your house on sand that the minute a wind comes, the minute a storm occurs, you just don’t have the ability to be flexible and to be standing strong in your foundation.

Dr. Pompa:
You mentioned obviously applying it to liver. Let’s get into the how-to: how long do you have to do that? How much do you have to put on? Can it be used on other parts of the body? Let’s go through on all the how-tos, and how and where we use it, and when.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Love it. Again, what I did is—for me, one of the things and one of the challenges with castor oil in the beginning of my practice and even for myself because I was told to do castor oil packs for 10 years, I think 10 to 15 years, I refused to do them because the way that they were done in the past was messy, challenging, too many steps. You had to go find—I’m sure you remember, right?

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
It was, find this, find that, go there. Who has time for that in our day and age?

Dr. Pompa:
My first experience with it was it unclogged breasts, not me, my wife. My experience, there’s a breast duct that’s clogged, castor oil. You do it with that. It was like, oh my gosh, it’s horrible.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
So messy. I knew more than anything in my clinical practice—I do a lot of cleansing and detox like you. What I saw was that if it wasn’t easy, people just wouldn’t comply. They just wouldn’t do it. It would just be that barrier. I realized myself, I was the perfect patient. I wasn’t doing it either because I was like, this is too much.

When I got really sick, I finally created a tool to make it easy to do. It was really what created a strong foundation in my health. Since doing castor oil packs, I feel more vibrant than I have at 25.

I had a fatty liver. I had PCOS. I have none of those signs. It’s not like I live a totally angelic life where I don’t drink or don’t do anything ever. I believe in a nice balance of discipline and indulgence.

Dr. Pompa:
Me, too.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Like living life but not going too crazy on either end. That because I feel and I see with my patients too because it’s really been that thing that changes the needle when they do these castor oil packs. I created this really easy tool, all in one, a little kit. It’s got all the components to make it easy to do. This is a project that is 10 to 12 years in the making now. This has been ten years.

This is Model 10 or 12 because I change a little bit of it every single year. It’s drastically different from the first model. This is definitely the easiest. All we get is great feedback from people about how easy and they can do it every night. They just love it.

One side is soft. That’s the side, as I said earlier, you want to put on your skin because that’s going to trigger all those good hormones like oxytocin, dopamine, the soft side on the body. The outside is a healthy polyurethane that’s made without any chemicals. It’s the healthiest thing that you can use, same kind of material that we use for reusable baby diapers that are organic, very healthy. This creates a barrier for the oil. That means easy to use and reusable.

Like anything, these packs have a life; it’s somewhere between two to three months. With consistent use, you want to renew it and get a new one. All you do is simply pour your first time two tablespoons of organic castor oil in a glass bottle, cold-pressed, hexane-free. You absolutely need to be looking for all these things because there is so much—

Dr. Pompa:
We’re going to provide a link for all this, which is good. Okay, go ahead.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Yeah, so there’s so many castor oils out on the market that are not cold-pressed or not hexane-free. Ours is actually the very first batch, which gives it all of those high levels of antioxidants like the glutathione, the vitamin E, all those things that you’re looking for. I pride myself in making sure it’s the best of the best of the quality. You’re really looking for that. That’s incredibly key.

Also, because castor oil is that one oil that acts as a carrier—people love their essential oils. Castor oil, best oil to use to bring the essential oil into the body. If it’s in plastic, which most on Amazon and everywhere else are in plastic, you’re also going to be carrying plastic into your body. It won’t become that—what you’re looking for. You really need good quality.

The first time you do the pack, you put two tablespoons of oil. Each time after that, only one, and less as you go, which also makes it more affordable because the old recommendations to do the pack was to use basically half a bottle on one shot, a real waste. It wasn’t needed.

You take the pack. I’m going to stand up here. You place it on your liver, which is underneath your right ribcage. You simply attach it, nice and simple.

We often recommend for people to do it at nighttime. The reason being is because, at night, it calms you down, improves your digestion. The liver tends to cleanse between the hours of 1:00 and 3:00 AM. We’re optimizing all of that functionality of the body.

You sleep great. You usually wake up in the morning and have a great bowel movement as well, for most cases. We want to encourage those natural cycles in people and have them honor them. That’s an easy way to do it.

I recommend nightly for people also knowing that people may not do it nightly. If we say nightly, then they might do it four or five times a week. Ideally, if you want to get that effective and especially improving things like your microbiome, you require at least a minimum of seven days in a row. The reason for that is that on seven days, castor oil also stimulates nitric oxide production, which is a natural anti-aging, but anti-inflammatory, but also super important for circulation. Nitric oxide is what helps to regulate that microbiome. It’s one of the reasons I love beats and different vegetables that have lots of nitric oxide.

Put it on the abdomen, on the liver is the ideal. Many women who have hormonal problems like say PCOS, or uterine fibroids, or ovarian cysts, they can also place it on their pelvic region, so right above—right around their hipbones. I say to do that one night there, one night on the liver because the source of the problem is still the liver because the hormones need to process. Do it locally, I’ve seen results in terms of reduction of size of cysts, fibroids. There’s a lot of eclectic use there.

A lot of people discuss how incredible it works for different masses of the body, cysts anywhere, or even stretch marks. Women post-birth, they can wear the castor oil pack to help with reduction of the stretch marks, or if they’ve had excessive weight gain and then lost, another way that you can help to get your skin back into normal areas because castor oil also works on scar tissue. A stretch mark is basically a scar tissue that hasn’t healed properly. You want to use that castor oil to heal it. That’s another place you can use.

Another area that’s really great is directly over the digestive system. I recommend this for patients when they have really bad digestion and they see a lot of undigested food in their stools. I tell them to do the packs during their most—their biggest meal of the day. Then that way, they can get a bit better digestion.

You can use it on musculoskeletal problems, anything from a joint pain in the hip or a sciatica. It’s exceptional for low back pain, or if you’re feeling tension in your adrenals, or if you’ve very stress, or you feel that you’ve got tension in your kidneys, or maybe your doctor has told you that you’re not processing well from your kidneys. Place a castor oil pack over your kidney.

This pack is exceptional over breast tissue as well, too. It’s actually formed perfectly in order to be able to cover the breast area. You can use that for ducts if there’s a clogged duct. If there’s a worry or concern, maybe a history in the family line of breast cancer or any issues with breast, heavy cystic breasts, you can use the castor oil pack there.

In naturopathic school, I actually started using them as a neck pack because I was so tensed and stressed. I would just use my castor oil like that as a pack. It just would feel really good and would reduce all the tension and stress in my neck.

Dr. Pompa:
What’s the minimum time you need for it to work and what’s the maximum time?

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Great question. Minimum is about an hour; that’s all you need is a simple hour. Some people don’t want to wear it overnight, so they just wear it for an hour before they go to bed. Others love to wear it overnight. I do believe you do get a little bit more of a benefit if you wear it overnight just because you have that constant contact over the skin, but a little bit is better than nothing. At least that hour is golden.

Some women who are menopausal, a lot of hot flashes and night sweats, they don’t quite like wearing it at night at first because they feel it just increases their body temperature. For those people, I always say, really great if you wear it in the morning for about an hour. Then over time, they’ll notice their hot flashes start to diminish. Their night sweats are reducing. Then I say then move it towards the evening because then you’ll notice that you’ll get even more benefits.

You work with it as a tool that is really all-encompassing, no matter what the condition is. The only time you don’t use a castor oil pack is when you’re pregnant. Other than that, when you’re pregnant, and then if you’re trying to conceive, you just have to work on a little bit of a schedule where if you’re trying to conceive, you use a castor oil pack for fertility from the time that you bleed at the beginning of your period to about 15 days in. Then you stop. Then you start again only when you bleed. Then you stop again after 12 to 15 days, so we’re working after ovulation.

Dr. Pompa:
Wait, you’re saying around the woman’s cycle.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
Say it one more time.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Yeah, if you’re working on fertility, trying to conceive, PCOS person, somewhere along those lines, you start wearing the pack when you’re bleeding. Once your period starts, you start doing your castor oil pack. Then count 12 to 15 days.

You might already be monitoring your ovulation or you can feel the mittelschmerz, which is that sensation that you get, a little contraction in the lower pelvic region. If you feel that, then you stop doing the pack, or if you know you get moody, or however you feel your ovulation, just stop the pack, but 12 to 15 days, around that area. Then go without the pack. The minute you start bleeding again, start it up again. That’s the easiest way to do it.

Dr. Pompa:
Got it.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
It’s so versatile. Then I even got to experimenting because what I had realized was that I said, it’s amazing. All these ancient practitioners, Cleopatra, Hippocrates, Galen, the father of humors, the black bile and all this cool stuff that he used to talk about that caused disease, I thought what’s really interesting is that the castor oil pack works all over the trunk area of the body. Would it potentially also work on the face aspect?

Dr. Pompa:
I was going to ask that. That was my next question.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
That’s cool. I’m reading your mind tonight. There was a lot of talk in terms of Cleopatra was said to be so beautiful because of castor oil. When I had so many different patients from so many different cultures, many of them would say about how they were using castor oil for beauty uses. I realized that the history of castor oil goes much deeper than just even Hippocrates and Galen, the traditional Chinese medical doctors to the emperors, Pliney the Elder, the doctor to the medicine man to the emperors of Rome, the Ayurveda tradition, all using it for health, but there was an entire area of the Mediterranean that was using it for beauty in terms of hair and in terms of face.

I started experimenting with actually doing a castor oil pack for the eyes. What we realized was this. Research demonstrated that when you wear an eye mask such as this, this is our little eye mask that we use, when you wear an eye mask to go to bed, you actually naturally increase your melatonin in your body. Again, it’s the same principle where the castor oil pack on the body, you’re stimulating those receptors. You’re building oxytocin and dopamine and all that goodness. When you do the eye mask, you actually start to build more melatonin.

What was an amazing clencher for me here was that I had always seen in a lot of research about how women as they age and what was a prognostic factor for a hormonal cancer later on was that all these women were having a major decline in melatonin over time. Many women can’t take melatonin; some can. I always recommend for them to take it if they can, but if they couldn’t, how were they to get and improve their melatonin? Some just didn’t want to take an extra supplement.

Then what I would do is I would have them do these castor oil packs, basically apply castor oil all over around the eye, because that helps with collagen production, it helps to reduce the wrinkling around the eye. It is incredible. It will help to actually improve eyebrow growth and eyelash growth. A lot of this effect is because of the nitric oxide producing capacity. Nitric oxide stimulates the circulation to the area.

As we age because of stress and tension in our neck muscles, all the circulation really diminishes in this area, so you reduce a lot of the nourishment and a lot of the blood flow. That makes us age faster. Castor oil, because of its improve of glutathione, works on age spots, melasma, for those who have hormonal issues. It really has so much—it’s honestly—

Dr. Pompa:
You answered one of the questions that I have is can you just put it on topically. It is thick, so when is the best time to do that?

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Yeah, always at night. We have a lot of guidance about this in terms of the beauty aspect. You can either use castor oil as a castor oil face wash. It’s the same principle as oil pulling in the mouth, where we also recommend castor oil to oil pull. For those who don’t know about oil pulling, it’s basically a way to clean your oral cavity. Ancient traditions often used sesame oil and coconut oil, but you had to do it for 20 minutes. With castor oil, you only do it for one to two minutes.

Dr. Pompa:
You can swallow it?

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
If you swallow it, then you’re going to be going to the bathroom a little bit later on. We don’t necessarily want you to swallow it because you are literally cleaning that oral cavity and exchanging the bad bacteria for the good bacteria. It helps incredibly the same way on the face.

You can do a face wash where you steam your face with a hot cloth. You apply castor oil, a little divot of castor oil to your palm. You mix it up in your hand and then you pat it gently all over your face. Then you take that same steamed cloth and then wipe it off. Your skin feels like a baby’s bottom.

There’s honestly no cream, no anything that will ever create that on your skin. It’s something for everyone to try. It really is phenomenal how it nourishes. What it does is for those who have acne, any type of a hormonal problem, or skin issue, it changes the bacteria that’s on our skin; therefore, creating less acne. Then, of course, it nourishes the skin as well too deeply. It helps with the anti-aging and all those changes in colors that you may be having on your skin as well, too.

Around the eyes, the reason why we want to put that eye mask is because, well, we want it to permeate very deeply into the skin because we really—this is a place that really shows the aging really rapidly. Just an incredible tool in that way. We’ve called it the original cleanse where people do that original castor oil pack on the liver like the ancients Hippocrates and such recommended, and the way that Cleopatra used it all over her eyes, and that we wear an eye mask to block out the light, sleep better, and also improve that melatonin naturally which also is an aid in anti-aging.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome. What is your story? You got into this for a reason. Tell us a little bit about that.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Yeah, my entire life, I was suffering greatly with IBS. I started as a young child, where it was constant constipation and anxiety. Those were the two major factors that I was dealing with a lot. I suffered incredibly. My mother suffered as well from the same anxiety as well as constipation.

My father, on the other hand, was IBS. There was part genetic, part environmental, how I grew up, the foods that I was eating, many I was sensitive to. Along my lifetime, I never really realized that constipation was a problem because it was—or having too much diarrhea because it was what was happening in my family. I just thought it was normal.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you didn’t know.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
I thought it was normal. If you go every three days or every five days, no big deal. Even though you feel really anxious, it’s not a problem. I really wasn’t connected to my body and didn’t understand what was going on.

As I got older, my period came on very late. I started dealing with sugar problems. Of course, suddenly, here I am with PCOS on top of IBS. I’ve got this hormonal mix with problems going to the bathroom. I felt devasted because I really felt that I was trying everything.

The doctors that I went to go visit with IBS would be like, I’m sorry about your luck. There’s nothing you can do. I even didn’t get very good care necessarily in the naturopathic treatments that I’d gotten because I really—it was very just superficial things. It really wasn’t doing anything to work on the root cause. I didn’t discover my food sensitivities until I finally really pushed to get them tested.

I had seen a doctor with my PCOS. They told me that I probably wouldn’t be able to have babies. Because of my issues with food, it was like, good luck, Charlie. You’re just always going to be dealing with this stuff.

It was my instigator to go back to school and become a naturopathic doctor because I had—I was already working in the natural industry as a pharmaceutical representative for a natural homeopathic pharmaceutical company that I learned so much in Germany. I was learning and training and became their scientific adviser. I had such a great concept about the study of toxins in the human system. I knew there had to be a solution; I just hadn’t found it yet.

I went back to school. School, of course, I’m loving what I’m learning, but I’m stressed to the max. My IBS worsens even though I’m doing all the right things. I’m eating the right diet, the naturopathic diet; I’m taking all the right supplements; I’m exercising the way I’m told to do it, but everything was in excess. With the excessive stress, I just crashed.

I was diagnosed then with mono, chronic fatigue. I was like, how did I get here? I have been doing everything right, especially during naturopathic school. I’ve been doing everything right. Then I just realized that the biggest problem was that my foundation wasn’t solid.

I was reminded at that point and time that the one thing I didn’t try, because I was doing everything from IVs, colon hydrotherapy, the one thing I hadn’t tried, but the one thing that along my entire journey everyone was telling me to do from the time I was working for that company, from the naturopathic doctors I had seen to the in naturopathic school, every condition they were saying, and do a castor oil pack. Don’t forget to do a castor oil pack. They one thing that I didn’t do was the castor oil pack.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s funny.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
I created it. Then from there, I did it every day diligently. I made it my religion. I just started seeing the changes. I was able to get out of bed because I was so bedridden, I couldn’t even finish my—I was almost unable to finish my last semester of naturopathic college.

Yeah, I’ve gone through the journey of understanding that hormonal unbalancing, how unbalanced you feel with those hormonal problems, how you lose all faith in your body’s ability to even get better when you’re dealing with such digestive disorders. You realize that you’re not even able to nourish yourself properly and feel vibrant. I always felt just fatigued and foggy-brained. I just felt horrible. I’m sure that’s no different than what people are feeling out there.

This was the clencher. It’s not like I stopped taking supplements or stopped doing any of my other detoxes that I was doing. I still do those, but this allowed me to do those and them to work even better. I dropped 10, 15 pounds. I’m at the best weight of my life. I feel better than ever. It’s so wonderful.

The best thing about this is that now I’m sharing it with the world. The comments that we get, it’s a rarity to see anything where people are not loving it. Everyone’s like, what a change in my life. This is solidifying everything that I’m doing in my practice. Everything is working better. My doctor’s happy; everyone’s happy. I really feel that it’s the way that I’m helping to change the world one person, one castor oil pack at a time. Just getting them to do those grassroots, mystical medicine that had its roots back in the day that now is being supported by incredible science that is showing that castor oil has all these properties.

The research that’s come out in the past 20 years on castor oil is phenomenal from the fact that it stimulates nitric oxide, that it works as good as capsicum and other anti-inflammatories, the fact that in an old-age home, they compared it to laxatives and they found that it was as good as laxatives without any of the bad side effects of laxatives in terms of urgency, all this. Then the periodontal research that just came out in 2017, just so cool. They’re continuing in medicine to utilize castor oil in terms of a way to bring in medicines deeper into the body. It is a spectacular medicine. I truly firmly believe that—there’s a movie I always reference to, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I remember.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Do you remember the dad and the Windex?

Dr. Pompa:
Yes.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
“Put Windex on it.” My patients all laugh at me because they’re all like, you’re like the father from the Big Fat Greek Wedding instead of—for you, it’s not Windex; for you, it’s castor oil, put castor oil on it.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m telling you, my grandmother, it’s like dang, she was right again. It’s like I go back. My father was the bricklayer who knew nothing about medicine but knew everything about medicine. Now, I’m looking back, it was my grandmother’s influence on him.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Yeah, and when I talk to patients, it’s amazing. Those of Caribbean descent, Mediterranean descent, Spanish descent, all the cultures that have a lot of indigenous, Native American, castor oil was everywhere.

Dr. Pompa:
That was mine, Italian descent. Obviously, in Italy, it must have been a thing.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
In Italy, there’s interesting about it because it—there’s some Italians who really don’t love castor oil because, in Fascist Italy, Mussolini was using castor oil as a torture tool. He was actually using castor oil because he would have people have such bad diarrhea that then they would actually give up the evidence. They would—

Dr. Pompa:
It shows you it was in the culture. Obviously, they were using it; he was just doing it this way.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Yeah, he knew about it. Then once I reformulate that mindset about castor oil, how it’s just really good for you, and you just need to know how to use it properly. It’s the same for the world right now. Pharmacists and in the medical—in conventional medical circles, in the hospitals, they used to actually use castor oil in OB/GYNs. All the OB/GYNs would use for labor. It’s not just one or two, there’s many orthopedic surgeons who are using the castor oils post hip replacement surgery.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, wow.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Because the healing is faster and it speeds up things. I just had a patient the other day come in and say, “Did you know that my hip surgeon just recommended for me to do a castor oil pack on my hip.” She goes, “I’ve already got it covered. My naturopath has been telling me and I’ve been doing them for years. I’ve got the pack and everything.”

Dr. Pompa:
All right, here’s what I’m going to do. You’ve convinced me. I love doing things, so I’m going to commit to doing it every day for a month. Oh, and my wife because she popped in, I’m going to commit her to it. I need a new one, both of us.

I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it for 30 days. I’m a very disciplined person. Then we’ll do another show in the future and I’m going to tell my experience.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Awesome.

Dr. Pompa:
I challenge anyone watching, do it with me. Why wouldn’t you? Look, grandma was right. I think modern science has caught up to why it works so well.

I’ve got to do it myself; otherwise, what am I doing? I have to live it to lead it. Ashley might join on this little venture for a month. She better actually because then we can—she can share her experience, too.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
Amazing, and you’ll see the difference. Along the journey, then you start to learn all the other uses of castor oil. Really, it’s the thing I travel with the most. I made a travel-sized bottle. We have or cosmetic—this cosmetic kit that comes with the eye mask for the beauty. This one has a little travel size bottle, not that I’m traveling much right now, but it’s the most important thing for me because it’s just the—it can work for so many different things.

One other little quick—the recipe I’ll leave everyone with is a super save the day salve. All you do is mix castor oil with baking soda. It works on all types of skin problems, including mosquito bites, sunburns, ringworm, fungal toenails. It has an effect on eczema and psoriasis. It keeps on going, the benefits of it.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh my gosh, all right, well, we’ll have you on again. We’re going to do our little experiment for fun. I love doing things like this. Yeah, we have to do it.

Marisol, thank you. Gosh, what a wealth of—that was the easiest interview I ever had to do. You canned on it. You knew exactly what you had to cover for the people watching. No, I appreciate that. Thank you.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
My pleasure, you’re welcome

Dr. Pompa:
All right, thanks for being on. Stay tuned, folks. Challenge, right here. We’ll put the link to get it. Welcome, let’s do it 30 days.

Let’s do this. Let’s commit to this. All right, awesome, thank you.

Dr. Marisol Teijeiro:
You’re welcome.

Ashley Smith:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern.

We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, or sharing this show with anyone who may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.