Transcript of Episode 236: Epigenetic Resets and Cellular Repair
With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Dr. Michael Smith
Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. In this episode, we are discussing epigenetic resets and cellular repair with respected integrative medicine professor, Dr. Michael Smith. He will talk to us about how in order to get rid of illness and autoimmune conditions we must first turn off the gene. We’ll discover how to revitalize the way our DNA repairs itself while clearing our cells of waste. We’ll hear tips on how to strengthen genes, mitigate inflammation, and reverse existing damage. Dr. Mike will also share his top epigenetic resets for people living in the modern world.
Before we get started, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Mike. Dr. Michael Smith is an author, public speaker, and frontline clinician with over 20 years of experience. After a personal 25 year struggle with Crohn’s and colitis, Dr. Mike discovered functional medicine in epigenomics and now focuses on complex chronic autoimmune cases. In his practice, Dr. Smith combines the leading-edge sciences of functional medicine and evolutionary nutrition with the ancient wisdom and vast experience of traditional Chinese medicine. Dr. Mike is a co-founder of the prestigious Academy of Classical Oriental Sciences, the first five-year fulltime doctorate level training program in traditional Chinese medicine. He is also the primary developer of Neuro Somatic Therapy, a hands on approach to reducing the way people embody distress, illness, and trauma. Dr. Smith has committed his life to service as a healer, a teacher, and spiritual mentor. This is one info-packed episode, so let’s welcome Dr. Pompa and Dr. Smith and get right into it. This is Cellular Healing TV.
Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Michael, welcome to Cell TV. This is a topic that I talk a lot about, but I think my goal here for people watching this is to bring some real hard—or real easy to do but life-changing lifestyle changes they can do to change their DNA, to change their epigenetics. What does that mean? I’ve talked a lot on this show about, look, you’re not going to get rid of this autoimmune disease, or this thyroid condition, or whatever it is unless you can turn off a gene that’s been turned on that creates it. Dr. Michael, you experienced this yourself, so start with how you got into this area of epigenetics and all that you teach. I can’t wait to hear some of this information because you really do have some really great things to help turn off our bad genes, which, by the way, we all have turned on. Welcome and tell your story, Michael.
Dr. Smith:
Thanks, Dan. I just wanted to say thank you very much for having me on. I’ve been checking out your show and what you’re doing, and you’re a rock star. Thank you so much for teaching doctors because we all need mentors, for sure. For myself, I actually got into this back in the mid-90s when I was diagnosed with Crohn’s and colitis, and it hit me really hard. I went from a 165 pound professional athlete to a 112 pound dying guy in the hospital in the space of about 2 months, so that was pretty life altering. People in the hospital were basically saying drugs, surgery, and weak and sick and in pain forever, and I was like I’m going to look for a second opinion. My version of a second opinion was to study everything on the planet, so I got into Chinese medicine, functional medicine, evolutionary nutrition, and that’s about 25 years ago.
Now I’m doing what I do now. I think I’ve only had the required treatments twice pharmacologically in that entire time, so this way of taking care of yourself actually works. I’ve been in medical practice 22 years, and 85% of my patients with autoimmune disease get better following these kind of protocols. It’s people like you, people like me that are just keeping our nose in the books and trying to figure it out that are going to make this work for people, for sure.
Dr. Pompa:
How long ago was that that you had the Crohn’s and colitis?
Dr. Smith:
I think it was 1994 or ‘05 when they were first poking around with that.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s funny. I got sick. It was right around 1999, 2000, so something bad was going on. It’s funny. I literally had dinner night before last with Jordan Rubin. Do you remember his story? I remember it was—the book, it was yellow. It was Patient Heal Thyself.
It was funny because my daughter was there, and she didn’t know who Jordan was. I said I read Jordan’s book years ago. I pulled on the internet his picture. There he was, like you, 100 pounds. A strip pulled up, and then there he was in the after. That intrigued me to read the book.
Then sitting at the exact same table was Dr. Chris Zaino who’s also been on the show, and he too had Crohn’s. Here we had three people in the room, myself, Chris Zaino, Dr. Chris Zaino, and Jordan Rubin. All who were told you’ll die unless you do these treatments. As a matter of fact, part of Jordan’s story and you may not know this is, some years later, it was more in the—I think it was 2008 maybe or ’09. It was 2009. He was told he had cancer, which he did, and basically, you have three months to live. That’s a true story. Jordan doesn’t really put that out there much, but again, understanding what you’re going to talk about on the show is really how all of us sitting at that table got our lives back.
Let’s give everyone a 101 in epigenetics. Why is this so important? I talk a lot about it, but my goal on this show is to give some people some real hard things here that they can take home and do. Why is this important, and how did you end up from Crohn’s to understanding this?
Dr. Smith:
I used to be an engineer, actually, so it’s my natural tendency to want to reverse engineer problems. When I first got into functional medicine, my whole thing was all disease starts in the gut. What’s going on with your microbiome and all of that? Once I got about probably a good decade into that, I was like, okay, what else is going on? Then you go deeper into the matrix of the body. I think it’s worth saying for people that are unfamiliar with epigenetics that, most of us in the developed world, we have the image in our mind that your genes in my sense of humor would be like a blackjack dealer at a casino. You’re sitting there hoping for an ace and a jack, but sometimes you’re worried. Is it going to turn out to be a cancer or a maybe Parkinson’s?
That gives us a very passive relationship with our genetics, with our family history, with whether or not we’ve been exposed to toxins, other things like that, and so it leaves us a little bit afraid in the corner with that mindset. In the last couple of decades, especially in the last five years and even more so recently with more modernized lab testing, we’re having this completely huge revolution that says your genes are more like the backup drive on your computer and the epigenetics which comprise to being 45,000 and 50,000 unique enzymes, nutrients, and the chemical pathways that actually rebuild and recode your genes.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s a great analogy. Your genes that you get from your mom and dad, so to speak, that’s your hard drive that you really can’t reprogram, but the software, that’s what you reprogram. It’s the same with the epigenome versus your genes, as an example.
Dr. Smith:
Yeah, so say the more stress we have, the more inflammation we have, the more sugar we eat, the more alcohol we eat, obviously, the more we’re around things like toxins or hard radiation and things like that, the more the informational space or what I like to call the soup around your genes starts to taste a little bit bitter, and the genes start to say, well, I don’t really like how this is going. Maybe I’ll reach into the back pocket, so to speak, and try something a little bit emergent. Life is I think, obviously, about adaptability. We’re always adapting to new things. We’re doing our best. We build skills. We build habits. Some are good. Some are bad.
As we get into that sense of adaptability, your genes are adapting as positively as they can, but I think it’s also fair to say we can all get impatient and make some short-term decisions. When your genes do that, they do things that are sometimes a bit random. You talk to certain people around evolution, and that’s the story. We get hard radiation, random genes, and now ducks get big feet. I question that myself, but at least we have that perspective, although it’s still passive. Again, when epigenetic system starts to adapt and it’s not sure how because of a new pressure or something that’s around too many seasons in a row—I know you and I are big fans of seasonal eating. If we keep doing the same thing, mono diet, over and over again, the genes start to get itchy or a little bit uncomfortable, and they literally start throwing out random ideas. Depending on what’s buried way, way down in your genes, it’s anybody’s guess what’s going on.
Now that we can actually test what are called SNPs or singular-nucleotide polymorphisms to see where people are the most at risk or the most susceptible for these things and adjust those pathways, we’re having this amazing revolution in confidence. Although I admit we’re all pretty new at this and it’s going to take us probably another decade to really be certain of some of these protocols but I don’t know, I’d rather be on the front line with my toe in the water of what’s new than sitting in the back row hoping somebody else figures it out.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I mean, these pathways are very complicated, and we are in the early stages. It’s exciting. It really is, even understanding that we can turn off these genes that are turned on. I mean, for you to fix your Crohn’s and colitis, you downregulated and turned off certain genes. Again, we’re going to get into some of these things that you did and that we know can have that ability to turn off the genes, but let’s stay down this road a minute. If you talk to most scientists or doctors, they still believe, though, that you got diabetes, or Crohn’s, or colitis because your mom did, and there’s really nothing you can do about that. I don’t get that. With all this new science, why aren’t we hearing more about this? You know what I mean? Why is there a sticking point with doctors today with this?
Dr. Smith:
I also teach doctors, so I can just basically say that part of it is the idea becoming a professional learning expert. We both went through med school. I think I’ve been at this for 25 years. I’m a learnaholic. Maybe my personality is a bit different, but I can respect when a lot of people who’ve graduated and get the lab coat, their stethoscope, or whatever, they want to be done with having to go deep into the books all the time to keep up with what’s going on out there. I think a part of their mind just naturally wants to close that book. Maybe it’s a year. Maybe it’s a decade. Maybe it’s never. All we can do is educate, inspire, and motivate people to open their minds and that book back up again, so I think that’s just a part of the facility of wanting to feel in yourself that you’re an expert, that you know what you’re doing.
Then there’s insurance companies that don’t want to pay for these new lab tests right now because there’s not enough [curated] studies for them to feel that that’s a confident way to manage healthcare. That’s a bit of a thing in the road. I live in Canada. We have a relatively social Medicare system, which, unfortunately, it’s very—I think it’s very credible. It’s very efficient, but it’s also they don’t want to spend unnecessary monies. If you go to there to say I have a thyroid problem, they’ll test your TCH, and if it’s within reference range, they’ll say it’s not your thyroid. Unless you want to pay out of pocket for a private lab tests through someone like me.
I think it’s just that natural stick in the mud mentality where I think we’re maybe just mentally and economically tired, and we’ve lost our sense of passion and interest in what’s possible a little bit. There’s so many people like yourself, I mean, with the podcasts, with YouTube, with a lot of these other things, all the courses people like yourself and I are putting out there. It’s inevitable that people are going to just naturally go, okay, what is this stuff really about? It’s going to be like a watershed moment when everyone’s going to say I can totally see how this works.
Dr. Pompa:
People watching this that have got issues that aren’t correcting, maybe thyroid, maybe diabetes, name the condition, does epigenetics apply to all of these conditions, most conditions?
Dr. Smith:
What I would say that’s really unique is—because we can get really into the geek out of what each of these magically numbered and coded genes may or may not exactly do, or cause trouble, or potentially resolve. What I’m more interested in myself are what are called mediating influences like inflammatory cytokines and things like that that actually change the momentum of how your entire physiology works. It’s like the dashboard lights of your car. Now, if you had a dashboard light that was just a little bit amber saying, excuse me, at some point I might need a little bit of an oil change, your physiology is going to maybe—you got a sore elbow or something like that. If your entire dashboard console lights on fire, you’re not going to be driving very far. You’re going to have to pull over and fix the car. I think it’s just dependent on what the mediating or informational substances are that are going to actually either self-correct or perhaps you could say even self-harm the potential for your genes to express themselves, so my focus mostly is in things like inflammation and specific nutrients that the body needs in abundance for different kinds of illness.
Then you look at something like diabetes. If you can’t rearrange your entire insulin physiology, lipid physiology, a whole bunch of neurological processes, your body’s going to remember itself, again with that hard drive analogy, as the genetic self with that metabolism and that immune system and move their problem or idea of itself. It takes a while to what I call reverse engineer the dashboard lights, and when that’s really stable, the information that’s prying those SNPs or those genes to cause more problems, they’re not getting those wrenches to say ratchet it up or down. That gives the chance for us to get in there with nutrigenomics and maybe start to -inaudible- to those genes and the way they express themselves in a way that’s more favorable. I’ve seen it go so badly with people who are—I’d love to hear if you heard a story about this where people who are new with nutrigenomics, and they throw a new patient into a huge pathway for some specific gene without doing anything else, without maybe a month of detox and nutrient dense eating and maybe some intermittent fasting or everything else you need to do to get well. That’s almost always gone terribly wrong for people.
For me, it’s like systems. Let’s take care of the thing that’s the loudest, the thing that’s the most deficient and balance all that out. Then we get in there with the little—I think of a guy who’s trying to fix a watch with a tiny screwdriver, and that’s going to take time. I mean, it’s been my experience that the—the old metaphor of the tortoise or the hare, when you’re working with nutrigenomics, you want to be the tortoise or the turtle. Slow is the way to win that race.
Dr. Pompa:
I give people an analogy of autoimmune and most diseases, how it starts today, of a three-legged stool. These three things are there or have to be there for you to get sick as a causative factor. If one’s missing, you might not get the autoimmune, but the first leg is certain genes get triggered. The next leg is stressors, physical, chemical, or emotional that turn on the gene, and then the last leg is the gut, the microbiome and its role here. You put all those things together. It’s a perfect storm. If you don’t get rid of the stressors, can you turn off the gene really, meaning that we can do all this amazing work?
Dr. Smith:
I really think that’s dangerous, actually, to even try.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly, that’s what we’ve found clinically. All right, let’s jump in. Nutrigenomics, what is it? I loved this film years ago, and it was when this was just really getting popular. It was a film. They took two sets of mice, brothers and sisters, exact genetic twins, and they exposed one group to a chemical. They fed the same, exercised the same, exact same environments. They exposed this one to a certain chemical, stressor. It turned on what they call the agouti gene, and those mice became fat. As a matter of fact, the next generation inherited the gene turned on, and they became fat little teenage mice despite their diet. We’re seeing that today.
I thought that was a great video to understand this epigenetic and how our genes of susceptibility get turned on, and folks, we all have them. We all have genes of susceptibility. It’s a matter of do you have enough stressors to actually turn it on? In that particular video, this would be nutrigenomics, meaning they gave them methyl groups, certain methyl groups that actually turned off the gene, protect it, made the DNA better. Is that an example of this?
Dr. Smith:
Yeah, obviously. I mean, the agouti mice were both for researching obesity on one track, and then they also did for cancer. I think it was within two generations of putting them on an epigenetic reset diet—not only with methylation donors and things but also just -inaudible- ratios. Within one generation, their actual physiology was normalized. I think, within three generations, there was only about 18% of the mice carried the gene in an active enough state that, if they had put them into a high stress environment with the worst possible mouse kibble, they would get fat or get cancer. I mean, that’s everyone’s favorite epigenetic story is, look, we bred these mice specifically genetically to be predisposed to obesity and/or cancer, and we can prove that they can’t get these diseases, even if they’re prone to it in a way that’s chemically more forceful than anything you’d probably see in humans.
Dr. Pompa:
All right, let’s talk about it. What can people do? We all have these susceptibilities. Many people have these genes turned on. They’re saying, hey, maybe this is a reason I still don’t feel well. Where do they start, Michael?
Dr. Smith:
Again, it all goes back to adaptability. I have a cultural background that’s focused around storytelling, so I like to give people information in the context of something that sounds a bit like a story.
Dr. Pompa:
Better way to learn, actually.
Dr. Smith:
I find that to be so. This is a big mouthful. I’m not sure if I’ve coined this or not, but I like the way it sounds. What I find, though, is interesting right now in my research are called nutrigenomic [epox] or long periods of time in which human beings have been suddenly faced with a completely new environmental series of stressors and opportunities that fundamentally forced us to adapt in a way that actually made us more like us, so the first one I usually bring up to people’s attention are ice ages. When you look at glaciation over the last say three million years, there’s been nine almost extinction level event ice ages where, basically, mountains of snow and ice are coming up from south and north and south and north, squeezing all people, including primates, towards the equator. That’s what I call a bit of a bar fight because the predator prey dance is going to get pretty extreme, and then it’s going to get pretty quiet.
Now, when we have ice ages, you got no rain. You got no trees. You got no house for whatever humans used to be, if we actually were long ago primates. Nobody’s able to be sure, yes or no, but we can run with that story because science likes it. What actually seems to be the most credible is called the aquatic ape theory from a scientific point of view where early primates or early proto-humans went to the ocean following freshwater runoff, again, no trees, no other source of food, and actually started knocking mussels off of rocks and going, wow, this is pretty good. Then one of the only two circumstances in which primates will stay on two feet is either to look at the world around them, to smell for danger, or if they’re in water.
I could go for hours about this, but when you look at the human adaptive physiology that we have now, we’re all about 25% porpoise metabolism in the sense of fat storage and things like that, and the rest of us still is pretty much genetically a primate. I just ask people to take a moment and say what do you think people ate whenever, however far back you want to go, 15,000 years or 2 million years ago? What did our ancestors eat at the beach? It would’ve been a lot of raw fish. It would’ve been a lot of small green plants growing by moving freshwater and more raw fish and some sea vegetables. Eventually, we developed the habit of naturally learning to swim, learning to hunt in the water. This is what I bring up is what I would call two fundamental opportunities with respect to what I call epigenetic resets. I can get into those if you like.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, exactly. Let’s recap. What you’re saying, there were these stressors in our environment that drove us into different environments.
Dr. Smith:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, then our DNA started adapting to those environments. Are you saying that we’re—what is the point there, though, meaning that we still carry that DNA? Where are we going with that?
Dr. Smith:
Again, I’m just going to go with the story that primates used to eat a lot of tubers and fruit and insect. Now these primates are eating a lot of raw fish full of DHA, EPA, and genetically, that’s pretty new for us. Some of our early ancestors adapted to that amazingly well, and it’s actually a medical anthropological fact that our brains have doubled in volume in the last two million years, which is the biggest anthropological change in any species over time that we have any proof of. There’s lots of reasons why that could’ve been said to happen, but I think from a pure medical standpoint, if you’re eating a few pounds of raw fish every day, it’s going to change the shape and structure of your brain. It’s going to change the way your digestive system works. It’s going to change our metabolism, in other words ketosis, than it would’ve been towards a higher carbohydrate demand. That’s going to make a massive difference on our capacity on every level.
There is some theory that humans used to have a breeding cycle similar to other animals, and at that level of nutritional density, we started having menstruation every month. I don’t have any evidence of that. That’s just another theory. I think it’s just another way of saying what an amazing gas pedal for human evolution. Who doesn’t recognize the benefit of maybe having a good bowl of sushi if you’re going to a sushi restaurant?
Dr. Pompa:
Sounds good. Okay, so were there other times obviously in history that other types of stressors—I mean, besides ice ages?
Dr. Smith:
I just want to bring up another one because I’m thinking of ideas that bring practical opportunities to the listeners. By moving towards eating more fish that’s maybe more in a broth instead of fried on a barbecue might be better if you’re afraid of eating something like ceviche, which is raw fish cured in lime juice, or sushi meat, which is basically fish that’s been frozen low enough to kill those bugs. Here’s another one, and I think this is a really unique one. Let’s say that it’s two million years ago, and you and I are back at the beach trying to do our best to keep our families happy. We’re off to go hunting for some fish. We’re going to probably swim out into the bay, and then have to swim straight down into the bottom of the bay, maybe 10, 15 feet, and do some spear fishing. Then come back up to the top, and then swim back home and give the food to our family.
What’s really interesting about that from a physical fitness level, when you’re actually under a physical load, say, swimming downwards and then upwards without a breath exchange to breathe, it upregulates something called BDNF, which is brain derived neurotropic factor, which actually engages growth in the brain and/or a repair. Now we’re living longer. There’s less degeneration due to age, and we’re just a much more stable, much more intelligent, and much more adaptable species. One other example that brings up BDNF for people which I’m sure you’ve talked about a lot is fasting, so there’s another epigenetic opportunity. Obviously, our ancestors have lots of times of feast and lots of times of famine.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s my whole theory. Again, it’s in our DNA, feast-famine, and our bodies are set up for that and literally need it.
Dr. Smith:
Yeah, I just think it’s hilariously commonsense that, if you’re really hungry, you’re going to have to think better. If you’re in a situation where you’re having to work your butt off to get your needs met, you’re going to have to think better. However the universe works, we get smarter when we have to think better just because of evolution. That’s not maybe really technical, but hopefully, that gives people a sense of confidence. It doesn’t have to be rocket science to work.
Dr. Pompa:
What do you say about this, if I played devil’s advocates? Okay, so there’s certain things that we adapt to, and it’s in our DNA. I can see that. There’s amazing healthy cultures that live where no water is when you go into these areas of Tibet. I visited some of these places in Africa. They get no fish. They get no DHA from fish sources and very little when they do, and yet, my gosh, some of the healthiest people ever that I’ve met.
Dr. Smith:
Yeah, and almost all of those people live on certain tubers that are high in precursors for certain steroid hormones that also affect the physiology and growth of the brain and the immune system. Although their diets are higher in carbohydrates in the sense of paleo always is the best, I think human physiology can adapt to anything if you’re consistent. When you look at all of the—they call the blue zone areas where the most long lived people are. They just have really consistent holistic cultures and diets and ways of being that are just so consistently favorable over time because of the consistency and the fact that they’ve been doing it for so long. If you go back through evolutionary past, we in a way have all the same evolutionary pasts. We all have been through some of those biggest resets already, so we’re already prepared in a way I think to fit into an Okinawan diet or a Mediterranean diet and things like that.
The part of that conversation that I find that gets really stuck for people, say I’ll use the example of the Mediterranean diet which became I think labeled as a California diet and something else like that, is people who are shopping for an idea are a bit impatient. People who are shopping for an idea because they’re ill are very impatient. When we start reaching for these ideas from other parts of the world, we hope we can grab onto those and stuff those into our DNA, or our gut, or our microbiome and make that work. When you look at the statistics on people who grew up on say a Mediterranean diet, that’s 10 generations, and you’re talking to a 60-year-old who’s lived on the same diet every day of their life genetically, epigenetically, physiologically. Half the research says that most of the benefit to these diets is they all sit around the same table two times a day and have a really good conversation. There’s a lot more to it I think than just what we eat.
When people say, oh, I’m going to go try this new diet; I hope that changes my genetics, I’m like, yeah, I don’t think you can just shop for new genes. It takes a couple years to change your epigenetic battle. The idea that we can do this in a hurry is going to get more people dissatisfied and disgruntled. We’re not thinking about it in the context of genetics. We’re thinking of it in the context of a Band-Aid.
Dr. Pompa:
It does take time, and people lack patience. I have to say this. I think the magic here, though, is the adaptation, meaning that we can look at all of these stories, and it’s really adaptation, adaptation. Even the Mediterranean diet, they were always eating different foods only because they didn’t have refrigeration, or they didn’t have whatever. Things were different seasons. I don’t care where you live. Things change that force you on different diets, even environmental changes, tragedies, whatever it is. Feast-famine forces adaptation and adaptation changes genes.
You’re making that argument, but today, I think one of the problems is we lack the adaptation or being forced to adapt. People are on the same diet all the time because at one point it worked, so we’re taking away one of those things that really keep our DNA sharp. Let’s look at exercise. The only reason you get better is because you’re forcing adaptation, and if you adapt, you get better. If you don’t adapt, you get weaker. Is that a good analogy?
Dr. Smith:
Absolutely, here’s one that isn’t specific to exercise. It’s definitely going to help anyone who’s going to go to the gym, and it’s going to help anyone who’s trying to lose weight or detox. Let’s say again from our story of, well, maybe humans used to be primates. We spent a couple of million years learning to swim and hunt and have some scavenging adventures off into the land as the ice ages receded. I’ve got a lot of personal experience of actually taking people out in the bush. I used to teach wilderness survival skills and primitive skills and stuff. Again, imagine you and I say 200,000 years ago, and we’re off into the new world where we’re migratory. We’re trying to find new sources of food, new ways to live.
I’ll do a yin and yang example. A yin example would be water. I don’t know if you’ve ever done any really low-tech camping, but the hardest thing to carry around for most people in the bush is water. When you look at the physiology of human beings, we’re obviously going to need close to about two liters of water a day for optimal illumination and just overall hydration. If you’re looking at, again, migratory humans a long, long time ago, the easiest thing is to just drink most of your water in the morning. You can carry the water along in your belly. You don’t happen to have any kind of plastic thing you’re going to carry it around with, and nothing has wheels. You have to carry your kids and your weapons and everything else. Also, I mean, I used to hunt a lot. You don’t walk around with a canteen sloshing with water in it. Human beings have evolved to actually require a certain amount of water first thing in the morning for optimal physiology, and if you’re okay with this, I’ll do a little dance pantomime for your listeners and your viewers because it’ll be a bit funny.
Dr. Pompa:
Do it.
Dr. Smith:
All right, so I’m going to pretend that I’m your liver. I’m your liver, and I’m in there for millions and millions of years. Every morning, I’m expecting to take all my nights work of turning fat soluble toxins into water soluble molecular waste. Here I am with my little liver hands. Holding my hands underneath your happy stomach going where is the water? This has been going on for millions of years. I want my water to get rid of these water soluble toxins, so I can get back to work for the rest of the day.
Now, here we are nowadays, and I put my little liver hands out after a good night’s work. I get an egg muffin and some really bad coffee. I’m trying not to swear at the rest of the body here, but I’m like, fine, I’ll do all the work to reverse this and put it back into fat soluble storage. Making the whole body more congested. Causing what I would call a certain initial epigenetic stressor toward methylation dysfunction, inflammatory status, nutritional deficiencies in certain ways. If the liver is always going where is the water and it’s never getting it, it’s going to get really, really upset and have to adapt in a negative way.
This is a really cool fact I picked up a couple years ago. There’s three countries in the world right now that if you’re in the hospital, especially in the ICU, they’ll make you drink that water first thing in the morning, and if you don’t do it, they’ll just put it into your IV as saline. You’re getting one-half postoperative infection, one-third postoperative stay. This is an amazing opportunity, but all we have to do is go, oh, maybe I’ll get up in the morning and just start off with some—start with just one cup of water. Work up to two. If you can, work up to four. It takes a few weeks to get used to that kind of water in your body at first. You’re going to have to urinate more at the beginning.
Every person, myself included, that’s done this feels like they’ve lost about five years off of their complexion and their body but, most importantly, how they feel on the inside. Now your body isn’t having to stuff things under the carpet of your liver and then your adipose tissue. Now you’re poor brain’s sitting on top of this basic burning tire—fire of burning tires just trying to keep itself alive. That’s not what I would call a high adaptive environment. That’s a highly erosive environment.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s funny. I drink my water in the morning, and I don’t drink much throughout the day at all unless I’m thirsty, honestly. That’s when I drink my water, so that’s your first tip right there is drink the water in the morning.
Dr. Smith:
Tip number one is try and get that first liter in there for the first couple of days, and if you want to have some fun with it, do your little liver dance. It’s like a [Chi Gong] exercise. The more we embody our intentions, the more we actually enact our belief and our will. The more we sit there and sip at it going, God, I hope this works; this guy may be a crazy person, the less—we’re back in that place where we’re passive. I think that’s the least adaptive state for any human being is to sit there in the corner going I hope somebody figures this out while I’m sweeping this crap under the carpet. I really try and motivate people to get really, really engaged and really, really involved.
I mean, this is going to sound maybe strange. We’ve just met, so I hope this isn’t too weird. Given my cultural background, I mean, I think we’re all a little bit of a shaman. If we’re more engaged in the idea that our purpose, our belief, our hope, our prayer, our mindset, that’s going to have a massive effect on everything, especially your genetics.
Dr. Pompa:
I want to get more into some of those really lifestyle tips like that that could affect our genome and protect our DNA, but before we do, I have a hard question. Fifty percent of my audience, I’m making up numbers, perhaps don’t believe that humans came from apes or primates, and the other half probably does. Does this theory still hold up if you don’t believe that?
Dr. Smith:
Your liver still has to do the fat soluble exchange to water soluble tissue.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s not the water thing. I wasn’t talking about the water. I’m talking about the whole thing, how you brought it back to primates and the whole theory came out of that.
Dr. Smith:
Yeah, I’m just saying that whoever designed the universe and whoever made humans as amazing as we are, they made the P450 cytochrome system work the way it does, and that’s what I’m speaking to. Because I’m usually speaking in a more scientific, educating doctors thing, I would use something like evolution, but I’m not attached to that as an ism or as a belief. It’s just a way to tell the story.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, that’s why I asked the question. I just don’t want people to stop listening. I’m always sensitive to different beliefs, and I always tell people I don’t want you to believe what I believe. If there’s a truth here, if I bring up my beliefs, Christianity beliefs in Christ and that stops you from listening, oh, my God, I don’t want to do that. Okay, now let’s talk about just some of the different things. Water, you drinking it in the morning is one of them. What are some of these other simple lifestyle things that people can do to protect their DNA, repair their DNA?
Dr. Smith:
I made a yin and yang idea. If water from drinking it in the morning is a good idea, let’s look at an example of fire. Nowadays we have what people call sauna. In my culture, we have sweat lodge. Pretty much every culture in the world that isn’t living near the equator has found a way to, basically, force the temperature of the body to go up. Part of it was to stay warm, but eventually, it actually became a celebration of health and a chance to hang out and tell stories and do other things.
When you look at the physiology of what happens when the human body is in an environment above 140 degrees Fahrenheit, you see some profoundly amazing things happen from the dissolution of immune system complexes, which are one of the most erosive things in autoimmune, the decongestion and formation of unnecessary lipids. When the body temperature goes up, those substances which are a bit waxy are more melty. That’s unscientific, but it is easy to say as I can. The body can mobilize them through membranes more easily. When you look at what are called the heat shock proteins, when a person is consistent with that kind of an opportunity to get their body temperature up, even if you’re only doing it once or twice a week, you can see about a 15% reduction in all-cause mortality. To say that out loud feels arrogant, but that’s the scientific research is 15% reduction in all-cause mortality from cancer to epigenetic dysfunction to anything else because these people keep elevating their body temperature. However it is that we came across that habit, well, that I believe is a profoundly effective habit.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so I get in my far infrared sauna. I also have a Joovv light, which uses near infrared, and that really goes deep and creates exactly what you’re talking about. Then I think that there’s a place here in Salt Lake down the hill from me. I live in Park City, so we call it down the hill. It’s US Cryotherapy. They have the one where you get in the cold, the whole body, because most of your cold receptors are from here as well as heat receptors. Then you go from that to the Joovv, so you go from cold to that deep hot. Again, what are we doing? It’s adaptation again. We’re forcing that adaptation that creates—I mean, studies show it raises growth hormone, norepinephrine. You dig into this body fat that you typically can’t even burn all to save your life.
Dr. Smith:
Yeah, so I think the next one—I’m sure your listeners and viewers have heard you speak about this, and it’s up to you how much deep or not you want to go into it. Either intermittent fasting, regular fasting, anything that has to do with any tradition that encourages you to limit your caloric consumption in any number of ways are all -inaudible- adaptations. The more consistent you are, the more longevity you’re going to get from that, and I would say the more correction you’re going to get epigenetically over time. Your epigenetics has a momentum, and until we can stabilize that momentum, I would call it erosive instead of adaptive. When you’re consistent enough with those habits, the momentum goes from erosive to neutral, and then, hopefully, with maybe some lab testing and some more specialized protocols you could be more accurate. Either way, you’re still going to get to that place where the pressure becomes an adaptive positive, and if you can keep running with that, or meditating with that, or whatever you want to do with that, you’re going to keep getting healthier and relatively younger in the sense of how you respond or adapt to the world.
That’s I think the most commonsense thing is that when you start waking up in the morning and you roll over to talk to your spouse, or you’re taking care of your kids, or you’re doing your morning emails to figure out what the rest of the week’s going to look at, when you feel sharp and creative and focused and you can associate lots of different things together to solve problems, that’s I think what we think of is when you think of relatively youthful. Our culture, what relatively old means is tired, forgetful, slow, weak, frail, and all of those things or on 15 medications in some kind of care facility.
We all have I think an actual instinctual version to that possible future, and that in itself is a stressor. I’m afraid of who I’m going to be, so the more empowered, educated, and consistent we are, the more that proactivity is going to actually just make you become more you. I’m going to say this because I have a spiritual faith as well. Everyone in your life, they want the most of you that they can get. When we start to feel sick, we start to feel shy. When we don’t look perfectly well, we start to feel shy, and we start to find ways to maybe not be our full selves in the world. I can’t think of a less adaptive stature of any human being that I feel less of me, and I want to hide a little bit. We can find ways to give people that courage, that confidence, the chutzpah to try something new and stay with it and get that momentum, to get that clarity, to get that energy in the morning, to get that—I hope this is an appropriate thing but that mojo back in your love life.
That’s when we’re like, okay, this is worth the change because I’m more me, and the people in my life are getting more of me. That ripples up because people start saying—my son’s like, okay, dad, I’ll try that. That seems a bit weird. He’s a fitness buff now. He’s in the gym three times a week. Why is he always so happy? He put it into practice, and he sees it working for him. Sometimes I think we have to be a little bit of the beacon in the firelight of our family by not just worrying about ourselves. By seeing what we can do and then seeing that ripple out and mirror back. Somebody’s got to be the first pioneer with this stuff in every new group or every family.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, so it really is tapping into Bruce Lipton’s work. He was one of the first to say our thoughts. That’s what you’re talking about, positive, negative, things that drive our thoughts and how we feel. That basically affects our cell membrane. The cell membrane is ultimately what’s communicating with all of these vibrations, energies, hormones, all of it. Thoughts release certain wavelengths, and the receptors on the cell pick up those wavelengths. The membrane is in charge of changing the DNA for better or for worse. His book is The Biology of Belief.
Dr. Smith:
I wish he would’ve called the biology of attitude, or coherence, or something. A lot of people take belief as a dissociative thing. I could run on belief. If I had a chalkboard, I could actually go one level deeper into what you just said about what we would call a surface tension vortex in the fluid of the actual membrane of the cell. That’s how the peptides and the receptors activate the cells. You’re looking at the heart torus, which is Bruce Lipton’s big leap in epigenetics and physiology and evolutionary—I wouldn’t say evolution but just how we actually adapt to the world. His whole thing is the coherence of your actual bioelectric field around your heart. Now that changes, like you said, the bioelectric field around the cell, but it allows the receptors to actually become a higher traffic zone to get nutrients in and wastes out. It’s really all about flow, and when you talk about Chinese medicine, that’s pretty much all we talk about is circulation and flow.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, it seems crazy for people. What do you mean? Our thoughts can actually change our epigenetics? Absolutely, read Bruce’s book. I mean, it really does. The science is all around it. I mean, our thoughts no doubt can change us to become someone new. Your thoughts drive the receptors, which he called integral membrane proteins, which basically tell your DNA what proteins to produce. Those proteins is who you are. You produce certain hormones that make you feel a certain way, act a certain way, and you become a different you as you change your thoughts.
Listen, I mean, when you look at whether Tony Robbins’ messages, everybody, you become the—how you think your world is around you. You do. You literally start to epigenetically start to produce different proteins, and you become either healthier or sicker, either more positive or negative, more successful or not. Really, it starts with our thoughts.
Dr. Smith:
Yeah, if it’s okay for me to take a moment to speak to the Christian faith, I can’t think of a more beneficial affirmation to human endeavor than what we would call Christ consciousness. Not only with respect to how we are in the world but how we are to honor our life in this body and how we move through the world within it. That attitude of compassion, loving, kindness, patient, caring for those in need, I mean, that’s the most—to be generous is to be generative. To be generous is to focus on what grows and rebuilds and repairs. The more we’re living in scarcity and worry and my family, not your family, my race, not your race, those attitudes typically make people just more stressed in a way. I’m a big fan of all spiritual of faiths that—I mean, all of them because all of them—well, almost all of them have the attribution of you have to take care of each other and be good in the world. I think with that attitude in itself, I can’t think of a healthier start to your day than to wake up and say how can I be good in the world to everyone I meet in some way?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I agree. What about specific nutrients? Is there anything that stands out when people look at affecting our DNA and our genome?
Dr. Smith:
I would say my big start for most people is mediating inflammation so, obviously, getting off high inflammatory triggers, alcohol, sugars, overly highly processed foods. Unfortunately, barbecue is not that good of an idea, at least not -inaudible-. Anything to get rid of inflammation is a good start, so I would say start there. Then start looking at some of the most amazingly beneficial inflammatory mediators like Vitamin D3. I always recommend people take that three times a day for at least three months. Vitamin D, although we call it a vitamin, it’s actually an immune mediating hormone. If you get that hormone in your body three times a day along with other mediators that might be more specific to your actual condition or your epigenetic genome situation, you’re going to change everything.
I’ll give you guys a fun analogy for this. I think science is great and the -inaudible- are fun, but I think sometimes we need to see it in the real world. Because we live in a pretty PC world, I’ll try and make this a bit funny but in a kind way. Let’s pretend that I’m describing a Simpsons cartoon. Then I can be a little bit unkind but make it funny. Here’s a Simpsons cartoon, and it’s a construction site. It’s full of young men who never worked construction before. They’re all 20-year-old. They’re full of testosterone. They’re armed with power tools, and they’re ready to go to work.
They’re supposed to go and build a house like you’re supposed to repair your body. If they’re out there trying to do this and they’re not really well informed or very well regulated with what they’re going to do, you could with a Simpsons cartoon analogy see it going pretty funny. Once you bring the older guy in there with a clipboard and a white hat and everything else saying, okay, my job is to make sure the tools go here, the lunch happens over there and there’s no barbecue and there’s no parties and no beer pong, then you’re going to see the construction really happen, but if you only have Vitamin D once a day, especially you’re in a highly autoimmune inflammatory state, your body will take that adaptively and say, oh, that’s going to be really useful later in case I’m in worse trouble, and it’ll store it in your kidneys. If you have it three times a day, after four days—and we’ve done some real interesting research on this. After four days, your immune system says I’m not sure how we did this, but we grew a new gland that’s secreting this adaptive hormone that’s keeping the whole construction site working, so let’s run with that.
Keep that going for about 100, 120 days. You’re actually going to see a downregulation of what are called memory B cells. That gets pretty complicated, but those B cells basically will either engage the cytokines and a bunch of other mediators in the immune system to be more aggressive or be more dormant. I call them the bounty hunters. They walk around with a wanted poster and a gun or an antigen tag and the ability to express about 100,000 of themselves per second in a highly active environment. Again, you’re taking that Vitamin D3, K2, maybe what’s called golden milk, which is a turmeric concoction that’s highly anti-inflammatory.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m drinking golden milk right here.
Dr. Smith:
Nice, yeah, there’s actually a recipe that I produced for people. It’s on my website. You can get it for free, and it’s medical grade. It’s a bit -inaudible- to do it the first couple of times. Once you get through the process, you’re gaining based on scientific estimates 8,000 times the curcumins bioavailability to your cells with that formulation and just taking some turmeric and pepper and going for some tea. Either way, there’s I think 56 known anti-inflammatory supplements that would be a good idea for that first three months, four months to downregulate those B cells so that the bounty hunter isn’t telling your whole body that you’re in a war, and you should shoot at everybody.
I’ve seen this happen for 22 years, since I specialize in autoimmune disease. It takes about 100, 120 days for everyone to just go from a certain reactive status to a relatively dormant status, and then you see the repair process just start to take off. Obviously, age and other factors are going to be a part of how you see that, but that is my experience. That’s step one. We need to get you to that first four months. Get your immune system to stop being the enemy. Get it back to an adaptive threshold, and then we can get more precise with what we’re going to do after that. That, for me, is always step one.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, yeah, that is step one. Do you have a—give them your book and how they can read more about step two, three, four.
Dr. Smith:
My first book that’s out right now isn’t actually about that. The first book I have out, it’s called Returning to an Ancestral Diet, and it’s basically just saying, okay, everyone look at your ancestors. Look at how they got here, and try and eat more like they did before industrial culture. If you’re more unwell, go back to when they were really healthy homesteaders. Most society started where, if you’re going to have any grains and things like it in your diet or some dairy products in your diet, you’re going to balance them out with naturally fermented vegetables. Make it in sauerkraut or kimchi. In terms of what that book’s about, that’s adaptive threshold number one is could you thrive on a healthy homesteader diet which is maybe 60, 70% plant based, lots of good animal proteins, lots and lots of animal fats, a little bit of maybe those grains and old school breads and maybe some of those pastas and stuff, but made the old way balanced out by those fermented vegetable probiotic foods.
You go back a little bit farther again in that book, you’re looking at what I would call the real paleo diet, and I can get into that in more detail if you want. Then you go back, and I make the joke—my sense of humor, I can’t help it. I actually came up with the idea of the ice age diet to make a little bit of fun of the idea of a paleo diet. People grab onto these titles, and then we end up having some kind of conflict over who’s right about history. I just like to be a bit tongue in cheek and say, well, I like the idea of an ice age diet because it’s about anti-inflammatory. If anything’s going to be the opposite of fire, it’s ice. That book there, Returning to an Ancestral Diet, it’s 600 pages. It’s got 500 recipes from around the world, but the focus on that is just for general health. Now, if you want to get well, start going back in time to what your ancestors were doing before we ended up with all these problems.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s the book that I have. Do you have a website as well?
Dr. Smith:
Yeah, my website is integrativehealthsolutions.ca.
Dr. Pompa:
You enjoyed the article in Scientific American. It was July issue, and it’s, basically, the real paleo diet. It’s pretty cool because it backed a point that I always make. It wasn’t what they thought. It was a very varied diet where they were eating times of meat, and then there was times more plant based. Again, what drove that (stress, environmental, lack of food, and the adaptation)? Anyways, it is a great article I think you’d enjoy.
Dr. Michael, we’re out of time. That was great. Thank you for being on Cellular Healing TV. I appreciate it. You’re going to have to go to his stuff, folks, to get step two, step three. That’s great, great stories. People learn from the stories, so thanks for being on the show.
Dr. Smith:
Thanks for the opportunity, Dan. Good to meet you.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.
Ashley:
That’s it for this week, but before we go, I just want to talk to you about CytoDetox. Did you know that long-term exposure to toxins affects our metabolism, behavior, immune system, and can also lead to disease? Toxins like environmental pollutants, cancer causing chemicals, preservatives, pesticides, heavy metals, and industrial waste are stored in tissues and cells throughout the body and brain, often for years. CytoDetox is a powerful detox supplement that can help you safely and naturally support your detoxification systems and flush away the toxins you encounter on a daily basis. All CHTV listeners can go to buycytonow.com to discover the science of CytoDetox and what makes it different from all the other detox products on the market. That’s buycyto-C-Y-T-0-now.com for more information or to purchase.
We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. You may also subscribe to us on iTunes or find us at podcast.drpompa.com. Thanks for listening.
