271: Secrets of Medicinal Mushrooms
with David “Avocado” Wolfe
I had the pleasure of having David “Avocado” Wolfe speak at my recent seminar, and we sat down together to record this episode of CHTV while on location there. David is sharing all of the principles of wild foods, namely medicinal mushrooms! He's unlocking the magic behind these nootropic, neuro-transmitting superfoods such as chaga, reishi, lions mane, and turkey tail.
About David “Avocado” Wolfe:
David “Avocado” Wolfe is the rock star and Indiana Jones of the superfoods and longevity universe. The world’s top CEOs, ambassadors, celebrities, athletes, artists, and the real superheroes of this planet—Moms—all look to David for expert advice in health, beauty, herbalism, nutrition, and chocolate! He is the visionary founder and president of the non-profit The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation charity with a mission to plant 18 billion fruit, nut, and medicinal trees on planet Earth.
Additional Information:
The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation
Live It To Lead It – Newport (November 14-17)
Fastonic – Molecular H2
David Avocado Wolfe's Website
Transcript:
Dr. Pompa:
All right, I’m smiling ear to ear because I just filmed the episode you’re about to watch with David “Avocado” Wolfe. He needs no introduction because he is a YouTube and a Facebook sensation with millions of followers, deservingly. He is a wealth of knowledge in this episode. Look, we had a blast. That is why I’m smiling ear to ear. Wait until you see the episode. I’m telling you, you’re going to learn a lot.
We’re talking about some wild foods that I can’t wait to add more into my diet. Mushrooms—wait until you see these mushrooms in the episode. He even gives a biohack for male pattern baldness with cacao from the bark of the actual tree. We talk about all these amazing wild foods, vanilla bean.
Of course, we talked about avocados and some amazing things to do with avocados, but also, how to actually even impact the absorption, the assimilation of nutrients in blending. Some amazing biohacks that I’m going to start doing right away. Wait until you see this episode. A lot of fun. I’m telling you, this may be one of your favorite episodes. I’ll see you there.
I’m here on location, actually, with David “Avocado” Wolfe, and actually, I’m here at my location. You actually just spoke it, the Live it to Lead it HCF seminar.
David:
Great time, absolutely.
Dr. Pompa:
I loved it. I loved the talk.
David:
I did, too. I just loved your audience.
Dr. Pompa:
He did love it. He did. You were having fun, man.
David:
Oh, man, I was like—it’s a treat. You know, I’m a public speaker by nature. I’ve done four or five public speaking events per week for 25 years. When you get in front of a good audience and you can just let loose, there’s hardly anything better.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I saw your fun. I was having fun with you, honestly. I was having to throw a lot of speakers off stage because they were over time, but we didn’t do that to you. We were having fun. We were having too much fun.
David:
Right, you guys were very gracious.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, no, it was great. We’re going to talk about some of the things that he focused on that I’m like, “We got to tell the Cellular Healing TV folks about this.” We’re going to make sure we do that. I have to ask this question first. David “Avocado” Wolfe. What is he saying? Is he saying David “Avocado” Wolfe like avocado, really? Why do they call you “Avocado,” man?
David:
I have been an avocado grower since 1978 is when I planted my first avocado tree in southern California, and I’ve been at it ever since. When I was about 21, 22, 23, we used to go to the jungles of northern San Diego County, which is the avocado growing region. Basically, avocados turn a desert into a jungle. There’s many abandoned avocado orchards there, and we knew where they were.
We’d go in there with Army bags and fill up on avocados. I would get all my food and a lot of citrus for free. That was one of the ways that I got the name. The real name, actually—I’ll give you a little insight there. The real name that my crew gave me—because I didn’t make that name up for myself. My crew gave me that—was actually Fats Avocado.
Dr. Pompa:
Fats Avocado.
David:
Kind of like Fats Domino. Over the years, that part dropped off and just became “Avocado.”
Dr. Pompa:
I love the whole thing, literally. First of all, if you search this guy, you’re going to see pictures of him and a lot of avocados. You had a PowerPoint up, and you were—you could just tell your excitement for the avocado. This is no joke.
David:
Yeah, it’s no joke.
Dr. Pompa:
You showed it, and you’re like, “Look at that picture!” I don’t know what kind of porn you call it; avocado porn or something. Like, “Look at the meat on that and the meat to seed ratio.” I remember, yeah, which means it’s a good avocado, right?
David:
That’s right.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, so let’s just—avocados, there’s a lot here, so let’s kind of unfold this a little bit. It’s more than just his name. There’s amazing qualities to avocado. One thing I learned was there’s 600 varieties or different types of avocados, which have different, obviously, benefits. Let’s talk about why avocados is one of our favorite health foods. Let’s start there.
David:
I want to get into an area of avocados. I didn’t even get into it in our talk because it was just a little too far out, but we might as well get into it, which is polyhydroxylated fatty alcohols.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s a big word.
David:
They’re generally shortened as PFAs, polyhydroxylated fatty alcohols, and they are protectors against UV radiation, and they’re also super powerful antioxidants. They’re the most powerful antioxidants, probably, in the avocado and generally accredited with giving us, actually, skin protection in the sun.
Dr. Pompa:
Nice, where do they grow?
David:
Yeah, they come from the highlands of Guatemala, the highlands of Chiapas. They come from the Caribbean. In those places—we come from basically relatively cold climates. You go to those places in the summer, and it’s—it could be sweltering. You can’t even move for three days, stuff like that. That’s a piece of the puzzle that’s not talked about too much. Then the one I was able to get into was the incredible [rev] carotenoids, or carotenoids. People have different pronunciation of it.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I think I say carotenoid. You say carotenoid, whatever.
David:
I say carotenoids or carotenoids, but carotenoids because it kind of hits carrot, and then people go, “Oh, you mean the stuff in carrot, which is true,” like beta carotene in carrot. There’s many carotenes in avocados. Probably the most dominant yellow pigment is lutein, which is very important for eyesight, and it’s probably the most bio-available of the carotenoids or carotenoids.
Lutein is one of those things that as you age, you’ve got to make sure you have enough lutein just to maintain healthy eyes. Then another whole fraction of it is the chlorophyll and the pheophytins. It’s interesting about avocados because if you cut an avocado in half, you can see that the middle part’s more yellow, and then it gets green towards the edge.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it does, yeah.
David:
Then if you actually study what’s in the skin, you’ll find out it’s degraded chlorophyll in the skin of the avocado. They’re called pheophytins, and they also have interesting medicinal benefits. The overall picture is I think we’ve got at least five, could be six, yellow carotenoids or carotenoids. We’ve got two orange carotenoids or carotenoids, and then we’ve got typically chlorophyll and then—two types of chlorophyll, chlorophyll A and B and then pheophytin A and B.
Dr. Pompa:
There’s a lot to an avocado. I think it’s one of the only foods that transcends every diet, meaning everyone loves them, your keto people, your Paleo people, your vegans, vegetarians. Everyone loves them.
David:
Fruitarians, yeah, everybody.
Dr. Pompa:
Fruitarians, you’re right. Actually, I think it hits them all. Maybe it’s the perfect food. One of the things you said about the avocado, too, is you go into certain areas and the avocados are very different, and it’s like that watery, stringy one that nobody likes to eat. You made a good point. If they didn’t have air conditioning, they would like that, meaning that it was grew that specifically for the region. It’s that stinking hot. It had a lot of water, probably electrolytes. Who knows?
David:
Yeah, exactly, right. You’ve got a lot of potassium. There’s a lot of energy, a lot of interesting minerals, a lot of magnesium. Avocados are a nutrition powerhouse, but if you’re in south Florida without air conditioning 1,000 years ago, you can’t be eating these big, oily, Hass avocados.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, fatty, heavy, yeah.
David:
Yeah, heavy. In the summertime, you’re going to be sweating and be like, “This is too much.” The Caribbean is basically where that watery avocado and stringy avocado that we probably have tried and didn’t really like, that’s where it all originated. The three cultivars, we did get into that. It was pretty cool. We got into a lot yesterday.
Dr. Pompa:
You actually have farms. You have a farm that you live on in Hawaii, right?
David:
Yep.
Dr. Pompa:
Then for the winter—because you and I did an interview together. You were in a cabin in Canada.
David:
In Canada, yeah, in Ontario, Canada, northern Ontario under a lot of ice. On the back corner of my house, I had about almost two feet of ice.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s a lot of snow.
David:
What happens in that situation—for those of you who like in the north, you know this—is that if you don’t have enough of a pitch on your roof and you’re running a wood-burning stove, the snow will melt and hit a certain point where it pools off at the edge of your roof but doesn’t quite get off the roof. It will pool behind the ice and go into your roof.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s not good.
David:
It’s not good, so I would deal with that. That was my workout every day.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, yeah, that sounds like a mold trap waiting to happen. I have to ask you this because to our point here with the avocados, it’s like you probably eat a very different diet when you’re in your Hawaii place than you did when we did the interview. This is something him and I have in common. You were doing a lot of fasting, right?
David:
Yeah, so were you.
Dr. Pompa:
You were snowed in. I was. I was actually on a five-day water fast myself. Hey, you’re snowed in to this cabin. You’re forced to fast. I mean, you probably could have gotten food, but you chose to do kind of the thing at that time. You were fasting. How long were you fasting for?
David:
I did. I did three-day weekend of just water. I did a lot of—I did pretty much the entire month I was there, I did one meal a day, and the rest was liquids.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, that’s what I love about you because that would have been the appropriate thing to do snowed in the mountains. You’re going to start conserving your food like our ancestors. They were forced to fast at different times.
David:
Especially in February. You roll around to February, you’re out of food, basically, and you’re basically going—if you’re a human being back 1,000 years ago in that climate, you’re kind of going into a hibernation mode.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, so you eat less. Okay, then you go to Hawaii. You’re going to eat more fruits. You’re going to eat more avocados. That’s called diet variation. I preach and teach that, man.
David:
It’s really amazing because you can get to Hawaii, and there you got this cornucopia of goodness. The fundamental thing that would be underneath it is going to be coconut, whereas you get into northern climate, it’s like what’s going to be underneath all your food? It would be something like ghee or something.
Actually, I’ve been a vegan for—I was a vegan for 20 years, but I’m a vegetarian now. When I’m in the north, I’ll do buffalo ghee. Buffalo’s interesting because it’s more wild. It’s more original whereas cows are more domesticated. Maybe we should get into that, like wild foods.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s a cool topic, actually, and nobody knows more about it than you do. It’s an interesting thing because how important is ghee for someone who is a vegetarian or a vegan? You need those K2s, right?
David:
Yes, right.
Dr. Pompa:
The ghee is loaded with those incredible fats and fat-soluble vitamins.
David:
Right, exactly, and on top of that, you got the cholesterol molecule, which is really important. The whole thing of it with the way we turned cholesterol into something diabolical is really nasty and really dangerous. That’s the core molecule of all your hormones.
Dr. Pompa:
No, it is a hormone, absolutely, and makes your hormones. You make hormones from cholesterol. People don’t understand that.
David:
Right, exactly.
Dr. Pompa:
They’re running from cholesterol, and meanwhile, you need it to feel good.
David:
Yeah, and also create sex drive, for example. People on statins and cholesterol-lowering medication typically lose sex drive. It’s like well, we got to get you off that stuff so you get—we need to get you the right thing. Then another thing that we do and that I love that we do is we also expose long-held theories that turned out to be theory-tales rather than accurate facts. One of them is the cholesterol myth. I’ve been very deeply into capillary diseases, which it turns out that heart disease, stroke, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, those are all capillary diseases.
Dr. Pompa:
Number one killer. Yeah, that’s right, absolutely. We need cholesterol. Let’s talk about wild foods because it is one of the areas of expertise.
David:
Okay, cool, yeah. We got some in our hands right there.
Dr. Pompa:
It is a cool area. No, exactly. Matter of fact, I think in wild foods, there’s a lot—we don’t eat a lot of this stuff today like our ancestors did. There were different wild foods growing at different seasons. The wild food contained a lot of the stuff we’re discovering fights cancer. A lot of our speakers we had, obviously, a lot on cancer, talked about a lot of the things that are in wild foods that they can easily pick up at their grocery store now.
It was interesting. When I was interviewing you, middle of winter, you still had these mushrooms you were finding up there in Canada. I was kind of stunned by that. Are any of these mushrooms that mushroom?
David:
Yeah, these are harder to pick in winter. This is a chaga mushroom. The chaga mushroom—
Dr. Pompa:
You found one in winter, didn’t you?
David:
Oh, yeah. I’m always out there hunting mushrooms. It doesn’t matter.
Dr. Pompa:
It looks that way, too.
David:
You’re out there. You’re like, “Oh, there’s—look at that.” A lot of times in the winter, it’s easier to see because these are tree mushrooms. That’s an interesting things that I was really excited to get out to your group. Tree mushrooms are medicinal mushrooms. You can’t just say, “Oh, cut down those trees over there. They’re worthless. What do we need them for? Let’s turn them into wood.” They’re actually important creators of our medicine. This grows out of a birch tree. This is a chaga mushroom, the fabled king of the mushrooms.
Dr. Pompa:
Talk about the benefits of these different mushrooms.
David:
These are immunological.
Dr. Pompa:
Mushrooms are some of the most potent immune-boosting foods we can eat.
David:
Yeah, immune-modulating, too, so they’re anti-autoimmune.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, it helps autoimmune, but it helps your good immune. What’s this? What’s this?
David:
Okay, so this is the queen. This is reishi. If you turn that one around, people can see it.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s looks like a turkey tail.
David:
You could see the redness here, and you could see that this brown covering here is actually the spores. See, if I keep wiping this, eventually it’ll come off. You can start seeing—see, you can see it’s a little polished underneath?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
David:
When it releases its spores, the spores kind of come around, and lot of them are deposited even on top of the mushroom. Then the rest float through the forest. I can actually eat that. I just rub that, and I could eat that, and it’s good.
Dr. Pompa:
Really? What if I took a bite of this?
David:
You could do it. See, these are wood. These are woody mushrooms.
Dr. Pompa:
They feel like wood.
David:
This is the queen; this is the king. You can tell the colors, black and red.
Dr. Pompa:
Reishi—
David:
Yeah, reishi, chaga. When you’re dealing with red colors, you’re dealing with red energy, so that’s like your chi, the way you mobilize your energy, the way you mobilize immunity. Dealing with black energy here, you’re dealing with Jing, which is your primordial life force. That’s like your longevity. That’s your ability to survive.
In a cold climate, this mushroom right here was actually required until very recently for survival. I could take a piece of this, get it into a fire, get it hot as a coal, and then I would take another mushroom, a mushroom similar to this, not this exact mushroom.
This is a Ganoderma applanatum, but I could take a Fomes fomentarius, which looks like this. Core a hold into it, take that hot ember, drop it into that other mushroom, and walk around with a hot ember in my hand. For two days, it could make it. That’s how we controlled fire for 10,000 years in North America, Asia, and Europe.
Dr. Pompa:
I was going to say, “Why?” I didn’t know where you were going with that. Just for fire?
David:
Just to control fire, yeah. These mushrooms not only nutritionally, but they’re a key for survival. Otzi the iceman, he had Fomes fomentarius, that mushroom, on him. He was found in that mountain pass between Italy and Austria, and he melted out. Hikers walked by, and they’re like, “Somebody’s over there,” and it was a guy from 5,000 years ago.
He had these mushrooms on him. That’s indicating to us—it’s corroborating for us that these mushrooms had been used for survival as we suspected. Not only that, they’re nutritional. This mushroom, chaga, is one of the most powerful immunological mushrooms in the world, and so is reishi. When you start out, you’re like, “What do I start with with medicinal mushrooms?” reishi and chaga, the king and the queen. Go there first.
Dr. Pompa:
This one has aroma. This one—
David:
Does not.
Dr. Pompa:
No, okay.
David:
If somebody’s allergic to mushrooms, that’s an important point. When we’re allergic to mushrooms, you’re typically allergic to that part of the mushroom that smells like a mushroom. It’s that compound, that aromatic compound that people are allergic to. Chaga doesn’t have that compound, so chaga is actually good for people who are allergic to mushrooms even though it’s a mushroom.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, okay. Some of the health benefits, the main ones with each one of these.
David:
Reishi, not only immunological, but it’s great for chi, so it’s great to way you mobilize your energy. If you have trouble—
Dr. Pompa:
It’s an energy type of mushroom.
David:
It’s an energy type of mushroom, whereas the chaga mushroom is more like—let’s say you’re up late at night. You know what I mean?
Dr. Pompa:
Last night.
David:
Like last night. You’re working through the night or something. Then you’re on chaga tea. It’s not that stimulating. It’s a Jing substance, so it’s feeding into those deep batteries. That’s the kidney theory of Chinese medicine. You can drink this all night, not be stimulated, not be up, not be overly—too excited that you can’t sleep.
Dr. Pompa:
First of all, where can people find these? They’re not going outside in the woods. They’d be like, “I’m going to eat a poisonous mushroom.” You know what I’m saying? They’re not like you. You know every species. Where would they get—could they get this stuff in the grocery store?
David:
Yeah, you actually can.
Dr. Pompa:
Obviously, you can get it in pills, but I’m talking about if you wanted to actually use it live.
David:
This right here, you’re going to have—these are artifacts. You have to know somebody who’s a mushroom hunter. Really hunt the internet.
Dr. Pompa:
You don’t go to Whole Foods and buy this.
David:
Yeah, what’s great about this is that—I got into reishi mushroom through encapsulated products that I was getting in a health food store. A friend of mine cornered me in a health food store about 15 years ago. He’s like, “You got to check this out. This is the best thing ever. You’ve got to get onto this.” I was like, “Okay, I’ll get into it.” Very quickly, from starting with the store material, I got deeper and deeper into it. Within a year, I was a reishi mushroom hunter. That’s how it starts, and chaga, the same.
Dr. Pompa:
He looks like a reishi hunter, or a reishi mushroom hunter, doesn’t he?
David:
It’s great to have something as a hobby when you’re hiking. I love hiking, but I don’t love just going hiking for hiking’s sake. I’m always looking for stuff, wild food.
Dr. Pompa:
He’s like a kid, a big kid. I love it.
David:
Yeah, by the way, look at this. This is some cool stuff. This mushroom is growing out—they grow out the side this way. You can see this top one. See that top one? This is a related species to the reishi, so they kind of look like each other. What happened was this was like that coming out of the tree. Then the tree fell over, and it continued to grow that way.
Dr. Pompa:
They grow horizontal.
David:
Yeah, to the plane of the earth. What’s interesting there is that you’re getting now all these little interesting mushrooms, which are easy to get to. I could break this off. I could break this off easier. Typically, these mushrooms grow really big like this one, and they’re harder to break. If you try to break that off, you kind of have to start at the edge and kind of—okay, let me get that.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s woody.
David:
It’s woody. What I recommend if it’s too much is you put that in a towel, and you just take a hammer, and just hit it once, bam, and it will crack it. That way, you can break it into smaller pieces.
Dr. Pompa:
Do you grind it and put it in tea? What do you do?
David:
Yeah, you’re going to make—this is going to be used for tea, and it could also be used in alcohol, or both, even both.
Dr. Pompa:
What about this one?
David:
Same.
Dr. Pompa:
You have to steep out whether—alcohol does that, as well, right, to your point.
David:
Uh-huh, and they’re different, too. The water in alcohol’s different.
Dr. Pompa:
It pulls the nutrients out.
David:
Yeah, so people ask me like, “Why don’t you just eat it?” It’s very fibrous and woody.
Dr. Pompa:
You wouldn’t get most of the nutrients if you just ate it.
David:
You wouldn’t get most of the nutrients. It would go right through you. You couldn’t extract it. Ancient peoples figured out that like, “Hey, if we just keep making a tea out of that thing,” —that thing will make—this right here, that thing will make 55 gallons of tea easily.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I would imagine.
David:
That’s how much is in there if we did that whole thing. Normally, what I would do is I would just take a chunk, make a tea out of it, then make another tea. Drink that and just keep after it. Then I’m also throwing other things in there, some of my favorite herbs. I’d have nettles in there. I’d have rhodiola root in there. I would have some kind of a goji berries or something, something that’s going to add a little bit of—kind of smooths through the bitters.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome. It sounds good. Man, you’d be the guy. I invited you to stay with me, man. We’re going to enjoy all the—
David:
Oh, yeah. I will bring—
Dr. Pompa:
You’ll be bringing these mushrooms out. I can’t wait.
David:
I’ll get that whole system going at your house, and you’d be like, “Okay, I get this now.”
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I get this now. I have to say, though—we’re talking about the immune-boosting qualities of these mushrooms. You’ve made the comment from stage that, “Hey, I don’t get sick. I’ve never, ever, ever missed a conference or something” —
David:
Missed an event in 25 years.
Dr. Pompa:
Twenty-five years, and obviously, you live this stuff.
David:
Yeah, that’s important. I’m glad you’re bringing that up. We’re thinking, oh, you can’t beat the common cold. You absolutely can beat the common cold and every other thing. Any approach or reproach upon your immune system can be stopped if you have enough immunological intelligence. The polysaccharide fraction of these mushrooms, which comes out in tea, is a momentum-based phenomenon. On day one, you’d be like, “Okay, yeah, I feel good.”
Mostly, where you’re going to feel good from is more the fast-acting triterpenes. The polysaccharides, the long-chain sugars that are in these mushrooms, it’s going to affect your immune system at day one. Your white blood cells are going to go yep, we want that, more of that food. Then day 10, they’re going to be like, yes, more. At day 100, they’re going to be like, yep, we like this. It creates a momentum where, actually, after about a year or two, your whole immune system changes even if you’re not having the mushrooms.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s cool.
David:
It just becomes more educated or more intelligent. At this point, I can’t even calibrate how different my immune system is than it was before, but it is very different.
Dr. Pompa:
Look, some people are going, “Okay, I’m not playing around with mushrooms.” Do you lose the qualities if you put it in a pill? The pills that you buy in most health food stores, is there good ingredients in it, man? This stuff’s fragile.
David:
There could be good products. There could be good products in health food stores because people who are into this world want that for you. We know that the chances of you going and hunting this down in the forest is [00:21:31].
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s my point.
David:
There are great products in health food stores. There are great products available.
Dr. Pompa:
You created a lot of products, and you can tell them where you get them. Have you created one with mushrooms?
David:
Yes, for example, we could take this—
Dr. Pompa:
I want to buy yours.
David:
Okay, cool.
Dr. Pompa:
I do. It’s like if I’m going to take a mushroom product, I know this guy. I know he’s harvesting the best and doing the best things. You take your own products like I do.
David:
I will bring you—a good friend of mine, Farmer Joe, he’s my neighbor. This guy was one of those guys who is—we have many of these in our community. He was just like a real party guy in the sense of he drank, did every drug, did all that stuff to almost the point he killed himself. He survived it and basically said, “I’m going back to the earth and going back to farming.” He comes from that. He’s a legit kind of character in the sense of when you go over there, he’s really organic.
He doesn’t use a chemical on anything. He lives from the earth. He developed a system where he takes the chaga mushrooms picked from our forest and cooks them down to a granular material. Literally half a teaspoon of that stuff into hot water, instant tea. That’s made using, essentially, a maple syrup type of device. He’s essentially cooking out, and trying to get all of the material out of the chaga mushroom, and then evaporating it off, and concentrating it down to a syrup, and then crystallizing it.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome.
David:
You’d love that product.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, man. Give them where to go to purchase this stuff. This is cool stuff, man. I’m not going to get this, but you know what I’m saying. What products do you have?
David:
Yeah, what I would—I would go to—let me just go down the list of types of products because that’s important. You got capsules, you got powders. We innovated years ago the whole idea of giving people this kind of mushroom as a powder. Now, you can’t powder this mushroom. There’s too much wood, but what we can do is we can grow this mushroom on corn. We can grow this mushroom on rice.
We can grow this mushroom on hemp. The hemp’s my favorite. My friends up in Edmonton grow reishi mushroom on hemp. Then you can take the mycelium or the white material, and you can just dry it, and it powder it. Then that way, you can have it as a powder for your drink. This is the fruiting body or the reproductive organ of the mushroom. The body of the mushroom’s actually in the tree in this case.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’d be back here.
David:
We could create a fake tree, which is a big bag of hemp stalks, for example, that have been used to grow hemp seed. You take all the materials at the end of the season, and you grow it on it.
Dr. Pompa:
Does it take on some of those qualities?
David:
It does. The hemp reishi is something else, man. It really is. Then you have that big bag. You’ll get two products out of that. You’ll get the fruiting bodies that’ll come out of the bag, but the bag itself, you can powder and use as a powder in your super-food drinks or whatever.
Dr. Pompa:
They’re going, “I want to buy that.” Me, too.
David:
Yeah, and you can get that. You can get those kind of products. They’re all over the internet. You just have to kind of hunt around.
Dr. Pompa:
What would you look for?
David:
You’re going to look for reishi mushroom mycelium. That’s what it’s called, reishi mushroom mycelium. It would be the powdered mycelium of this mushroom or the powdered mycelium of chaga.
Dr. Pompa:
Do you have a company that’s good?
David:
I like Paul Stamets’s company, Fungi Perfecti. There’s a great company. What are they called? Mushroom Sciences, that’s a good company. They focus on hot water extracts. We focus a lot on alcohol extracts. The ways that I get these mushrooms to you is I’ll get them to you at a live event like this. Typically, on the internet, it’s going to be a dual extract. We’re going to extract it with alcohol, and then we’re going to add the tea of that mushroom in concentrate to a bottle so that every dropper full, you’re like, “Oh, okay. I got something on that one.”
If I’m out and about—let’s say I’m a tour or something, and there’s no time to make tea every day, then I’m bringing those bottles. If I’m out at a party like we were at last night, being out on the town here in Nashville, then at that point—let’s say I’m at a big party with my friends in the mountains of western British Columbia, then I’ll drink an entire bottle of tincture in a night. That’s really something. That is really powerful.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I want to do that. You have to understand, I’m a biohacker by nature. I want to try everything. After this interview, we’re going to go do some ‘shrooms. That didn’t sound very good. We’re going to do some of these ‘shrooms.
David:
Yeah, and by the way, these are not—these two, in particular, are above psychoactive. They’re in a category that’s beyond that. Once you’ve, like Farmer Joe, you almost killed yourself with drugs and alcohol, you don’t want that anymore. You want to go to the next level higher, and reishi and chaga, they represent that. They really do.
Dr. Pompa:
Are they nootropics in a sense because they—
David:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Pompa:
A nootropics means it’s good for your brain. It makes your brain work better, basically.
David:
Yeah, reishi contains neurotransmitters.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, that’s awesome.
David:
Many mushrooms do, actually. They’re nootropics, so they’ll improve your focus. Generally, what we say is—let’s say somebody’s been on Adderall. In Chinese medicine, they’re shen disturbers.
Dr. Pompa:
A lot of people, kids, are using Adderall without understanding the real consequences.
David:
There was one guy here who was like that. You could see the effect that it has on, actually, your overall aura, really. I don’t know how else to describe it. You could see the overall countenance of a person. Reishi, historically, is the mushroom that was recommended in Chinese medicine for that. When somebody’s been—their nervous system’s disturbed. Their countenance is disturbed. Their aura is disturbed. Then you go to reishi.
Now, if you’re in a—I got to put this out there. If you’re in a health food store, and you’re like, “Okay, this is a reishi. This is a Fungi Perfecti.” I think Paul calls his line Host Defense. You see reishi, and you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to get that one.” One or two’s not going to be that strong. It’s not going to feel it, but if you took nine capsules, you’ll feel it.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s what I want to do.
David:
You’d be like, “Whoa, I feel calmer. I feel able to meditate.” This is an excellent meditation mushroom, by the way. I love reishi for meditation.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s the nootropics effect, obviously. We could talk mushrooms all day.
David:
I know. [00:27:29].
Dr. Pompa:
I know. I love these things, man, but I know the nutrition, the healing. There’s so much here. It’s very exciting. You talked a lot about—there’s other wild foods. Matter of fact, I was just going to ask you about one, but I almost want to just let you talk about which one you love to talk about.
David:
Okay, right now, because of springtime, it’s kind of the signal to cleanses. You have the young, green plants coming up. Like in Ontario, soon the leeks are going to be up. When the leeks come up, that’s basically a liver cleanser. You’re going to go out, and you’re going to pick the leeks. You’re going to make a salad out of leeks. Start cleansing your liver. That’s following the signals of nature. Young, green, sprouted plants have this rejuvenative quality.
When you get to right now, the end of winter, you’ve been huddled in there. You’ve been fasting. You haven’t had much fiber. You probably had too much fat and protein through the winter to get you through, not enough salad. That’s when you go to the green foods that are going to have that rejuvenation. That’s essentially what Ann Wigmore had institutionalized in her Hippocrates treatment, which is let’s get you sprouts and sprout juice to rejuvenate your liver and get you back to live again and live enzymes.
Dr. Pompa:
It goes with my theory of diet variation, meaning today, we eat the same diet. People get locked into the same eight foods, and they’re eating it year-round when we were forced to change our diets, seasonally, environmental pressures, lack of food, change of food, whatever. Here comes spring, and it really is providing, just like the avocados in the areas they grow, it’s providing what our bodies are yearning for. Like you said, it’s that spring cleanse.
David:
This is the thing we were getting back to on what’s your underneath thing that’s always there? In the tropics, coconut’s always in season, so it’s one of the things you could eat consistently because that’s what’s there. Ghee basically could always be in season because it keeps. This is very important for survival. Almost every other thing is changing constantly.
Ancient humans figured out, oh, my God, if I could make some olive oil, I could survive because I’d have a fat source that stays with me throughout the seasons. Now, it’s hamburgers every day. It’s gotten to that point where it’s like this is not—has anything to do with anything legit wild food. Another big category of wild foods that I’m really into, and obviously, on the other side of the season, is wild berries.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, man, you showed some of that, the color spectrums, and the proanthocyanidins, and all the things based on each color, the blues and—here comes the blueberries, which again, spring. I love it. I’m going to be loading up on some of the really good berries. That’s my fruit of choice. I just love the berries.
David:
Me, too, yeah. If you’ve been around the nutritional world a long time—and I think this point came across really good last night, which is wild food, it can’t have too much sugar because every insect, every candida, every mold in the forest is coming for that sugar. It just, by nature, is in balance, so it’s not going to create a problem inside us because it’s not hidden behind a farmer’s fence line. It’s not protected from nature. It’s part of nature.
That’s something with farming. This is a very important principle of farming. If the bugs come for the cabbage, then that cabbage wasn’t meant for you. You let it go. Go to something else. You go with what is going to make it there. This one kid, his family first came to one of my events, he was six months old. This kid’s a genius because he’s gotten this information since he was born. I was asking him about growing tomatoes, and he’s like, “Oh, I don’t grow tomatoes. They’re just too weak to survive in my ecosystem.” I was like, “Whoa.” He’s in a rainforest.
Dr. Pompa:
It wasn’t getting what it needed to protect itself from the soil, so therefore, don’t do it.
David:
Yeah, don’t do it, exactly. That’s the principle of wild food. You can go hunt wild food, which I recommend, especially wild berries and wild, young, green plants. The other side of it is you can kind of create a wild food garden, which is what I do. My stuff is wild. I’m not going, running around going, “Oh, we got to spray this. It’ll protect this from something.”
Dr. Pompa:
When I grew up, most of the families, we all had a garden. It was for a reason; it saved you money because you could grow most of this stuff in the summer, and then [00:31:40].
David:
Absolutely, and tastes better.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it sure does and more nutritious. Most people out there are going, “Okay, I’m not hunting anything. I’m working 10-hour days.” They’re hunting in Whole Foods, man. Go to Whole Foods—
David:
Yeah, but they could be out hiking.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s true. I know some people are out there hiking, and they’re going to be hunting foods, man. There’s no doubt about it, but the other ones are going, “Okay, so what do I do in Whole Foods?” Can you give them some advice?
David:
Sprouts, broccoli sprouts, radish sprouts, go to the really potent sprouts that are going to have that sulforaphane.
Dr. Pompa:
Even in Whole Food, you’re going to see more of those things as spring comes.
David:
Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Pompa:
You’re going to see fresher berries, so buy them and get them.
David:
Yeah, and hunt them down in your local ecosystem. Really, it’s just amazing. Every ecosystem, you don’t need to know every plant. Everyone knows dandelion. Literally, if you got dandelion in your yard, eat it. Try it out. At least experiment with it. Then you go from there. It’s not like I suddenly learned like, oh, okay, here’s the 100 things in my ecosystem. Just start out with the stuff—one thing that I knew and then two things.
Dr. Pompa:
As a kid, my best friend growing up—I don’t know where we got this idea, but we heard about making dandelion wine.
David:
Oh, whoa!
Dr. Pompa:
We’re just kids, right?
David:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
Back then, you didn’t have the internet. You know what I mean? I don’t even know where we got this. Maybe I found some book or something. I was a biohacker then. We made dandelion wine. Our parents had no idea what we were doing. The bottles had balloons on the top, like fermenting.
David:
Oh, geez!
Dr. Pompa:
Anyways, it worked. Yeah, we got sick, but it worked. Our parents thought we poisoned ourselves, but actually, no. We just were alcohol poisoned, I think, as kids. Pretty funny, but anyways, we experimented.
David:
That’s the thing, too, is it is a big experiment. A lot of this is an experiment. You’re not going to go out the first day and make the best reishi tea, although you could get lucky. You’re not going to go out and suddenly find this or something, although you could get lucky. You got to go out there and just kind of go, “Oh, okay, I think that’s it.”
What’s amazing today is you got your phone. You go, “Let me look on my phone and see” —you can pull it up, and you can pull it up on images on a search engine and be like, “Okay, is this that?” You’re like, “Okay, that’s it.” That’s kind of neat, too.
Dr. Pompa:
Do you have resources on your website? By the way, this guy has—I don’t know how many millions of Facebook followers you have. We have people here with big followings. I promise you, his is the biggest. You’ve been at it a long time.
David:
I’ve been at it a long time, 25 years.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. Remember the bullet?
David:
NutriBullet.
Dr. Pompa:
Someone said last night, “What does he do?” I said dah, dah, dah. Like, “I think I saw him on TV with that bullet thing.” That was you.
David:
Yeah, actually those guys came to me. They had a little, tiny Magic Bullet.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah, the Magic Bullet.
David:
It’s like a small one. They’re like, “We want to go to the bigger thing like your market, that bigger, more robust blender.” That was probably about 2010.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, was it that long ago?
David:
That long ago, and so I worked with them. We created what was back then—I think it was called the VitaBullet was the original name of it. Then one of those guys came back. He’s like, “NutriBullet,” and everybody’s like, “Yeah!” That became the name. I co-developed that project. I’m still in that project, and I still absolutely love that project. It’s awesome.
Dr. Pompa:
You said they really focused on a specific heat or not heat. They really dialed that in, the RPMs and—
David:
They dialed it in.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
David:
The NutriBullet Rx, the more robust system, if you hit the button and you go for the six minute and 45 second cycle on it, it will make your perfect soup at the perfect temperature to extract from the vegetables in that soup the carotenoids or carotenoids.
Dr. Pompa:
Do you sell those on your website, the NutriBullet?
David:
I don’t because it’s so available. It’s in all stores, and it’s everywhere, so I just direct people there. I do social media.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. Give them your website.
David:
DavidWolfe.com, D-A-V-I-D-W-O-L-F-E, E at the end, the English spelling, not the German, dot com. You can also find me Facebook.com, David “Avocado” Wolfe, or you can find my Instagram, David “Avocado” Wolfe.
Dr. Pompa:
Find him, entertainment. He was entertaining last night.
David:
It’s entertainment that’s got another—it’s edu-tainment.
Dr. Pompa:
It is. You educate like crazy. All right, I’m going to give you men out there a little biohack, one of the things you said from stage last night. You were talking about chocolate. We can talk more about chocolate because I learned a lot, actually. This is what I didn’t know: There’s a way to take the outer portion of the chocolate, make this serum that you make, and put it on your head, men, and it literally, for male pattern baldness—and you said it works, man.
David:
It works. There’s a very interesting thing. We got a lot of guys on my farm, for example. When we make that up—so I’ll get a big glass container like this that’s open at the top, so it’s a big, open glass container. I’ll fill it with water, maybe three quarters. Then we’ll take strips of cacao bark. It’s actually the bark of the tree.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, the bark. I was thinking the outside of the cacao seed. No, it’s the bark.
David:
That’s also used for other things. That’s a whole other—
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, talk about that.
David:
Chocolate’s a big story, very big story. We trim our trees a lot, so we do have that material, and you just put it in water. You just basically soak the bark in water, and it secretes a gel very similar to aloe vera, almost identical. It’s a man’s thing. Women go for aloe vera. “I’ll put that on my face,” and all this kind of thing. It’s interesting. You got all these guys on the farm and all these women on the farm. The women don’t go for it. The men do. It’s a trip. It’s interesting. It’s energetic.
I’m not saying anything to anybody, but the men are going, “Okay, let me dip my hand in there,” and then you scrub it in like that. That’s all you do. We got this big thing with the bark in it and the water. The gel comes out. You dip your hands in there. You get this gel on your hands, and you rub it into your scalp. It reverses male pattern baldness. It’s the traditional cure for male pattern baldness in the Amazon.
Dr. Pompa:
Would it work on women who say, “My hair’s thinning?” Would it help?
David:
Maybe, but it’s more of a man’s thing. It’s just a trip like that.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, now they’re asking the question, “Where do I buy the bark, man?” You can’t buy the bark in a grocery store.
David:
It’s not available as a product, yet, although I have gone through iterations of how to stabilize the material. I’ve made, probably, three or four different versions to see, hey, is there a way we could actually get this out there? The stabilizing thing that I think works is apple cider vinegar. We may put a product out at some point in that regard.
Dr. Pompa:
Smart, yeah. You can buy everything on the internet. I wonder if you Googled cacao bark—
David:
Yeah, you could probably buy it, exactly. Throw it in water and [00:38:11].
Dr. Pompa:
Throw it in water. There’s the answer. All right, give me some of the other benefits because you did. There was a lot more benefits. I love eating just the cacao seed itself.
David:
Yes, thank you.
Dr. Pompa:
I actually love that.
David:
If you’re into ketogenic diets, and you’re just like, “Look, I don’t want any sugar,” or you want to have chocolate without sugar, you eat cacao nibs by itself. They’re delicious, and they’re nutritious, and they’re powerful, 10 times more nutritious than an almond. They’re the most nutritious nut in the world. That’s an interesting thing, too. It’s a nut.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s a male food in a sense, too. Bodybuilders actually take it for recovery, but also, it raises T and these other things that they want to raise.
David:
It’s a driver, too, so you’ll see it in a lot of products. You’re going to see—especially bodybuilder products, you’ll see caffeine is added and/or theobromine. Now, chocolate contains a lot of theobromine, not that much caffeine, but it does contain caffeine. When you add chocolate to something, you’re basically helping it drive into your system. You’re helping your body absorb it. They’ll tell you, “Oh, we’ve got this chocolate flavor of our protein.” They’re doing that because their protein will work better because they would get in better.
Dr. Pompa:
I just got really excited because I was like, “Oh, I remember when you said it from stage,” and I was like, “Oh, my gosh. We have to blend with him right now.” One of the best ways to get things in is blending, right?
David:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Juicing certain things, too, but you were talking about, great, you can blend or juice this, but the problem is absorbability. You gave some great tips on how to do this to increase absorbability majorly. Talk about it.
David:
This is NutriBullet. Years back, they’re like, “You need to figure this out. Here, go figure this out.” It’s this whole science of absorption of our food and how many antioxidants actually make it into our blood. It’s one thing to say, “Oh, there’s a certain amount of antioxidants in this.”
Dr. Pompa:
Right, but can you get it in your blood and cells? That’s the question.
David:
Right, is it getting in? That led to the next generation of antioxidant research, which is what’s changing in blood chemistry an hour later, two hours later, four hours later, eight hours later, sixteen hours later, twenty-four hours later, two days later? That’s been worked out on many different antioxidants including carotenoids.
One of the things about the carotenoids or carotenoids is things like lycopene, for example. Let’s just do that one because that’s tomato, the red color of tomato. If you eat a tomato, only 5% of that lycopene is going to make it into your blood.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, not much.
David:
That’s not much. It’s 95% of what you paid for or what you grew is going to go right through you. What’s been figured out is if you blend that, 10% makes it in. Now, that makes sense. That’s like chewing it. We don’t chew enough. Nobody chews enough. When you blend, you chew 1,000 times in a minute. It’s ch-ch-ch-ch.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, more nutrients that you’re getting out of the food.
David:
You’re going to double your absorption of lycopene, just as an example.
Dr. Pompa:
Five to ten.
David:
Five to ten percent.
Dr. Pompa:
We can go higher.
David:
Then if we go—if we’re like okay, lycopene, and all carotenoids, and almost all antioxidants in plants are oil-soluble. The next level beyond that is you’re going to add a little olive oil. Now, if you add a little olive oil and blend it—
Dr. Pompa:
That’s why the Italians, we do tomato with olive oil. It’s going to up the lutein. You felt that grassy olive oil. You just felt that in your throat?
David:
Yeah, it was like—yeah. I do a lot of olive oil, pretty much every day.
Dr. Pompa:
Me, too, yeah. [00:41:33]. I love it.
David:
It’s one of my favorites. It’s just Mediterranean, you know, Mediterranean diet. Anyway, the thing that’s interesting is then, okay, can we get even higher because 40% is a lot different than 5%. It’s eight times more. We got eight times more antioxidants from the same food basically in the same amount of time. Then can we even improve that? The answer is you bet we can. We can improve that because the next step is with a little bit of heat. Not too much, but a little bit of heat.
Let me tell you this. This is an interesting piece of research. We can even get it up to 60% absorption of lycopene in the case of tomatoes if we blend them with olive oil and get them up to about 114 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s probably 35 Centigrade.
Dr. Pompa:
If you keep the thing spinning, it creates enough heat.
David:
Yeah, it’ll create enough heat.
Dr. Pompa:
Then you’re making a warm soup at that point.
David:
Right, and it’s molecularly heated up because it’s heated up by the friction of all those molecules in that blender for six minutes and forty-five seconds. Then we go to the next level, which is so fascinating to me. If it cools down, it takes the lycopene absorption in this case down back again to 40%.
It’s the temperature you consume it at, turns out was in blood research, is going to indicate how much of that lycopene in this case is going to make it in or other carotenoid. That’s telling us something. It’s kind of like the Chinese medicine theory of when you drink warm water, it’s accepted by more people as being hydrating in the morning. Typically, people drink warm water with lemon all over the world.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s the way they start their day, a lot more hydrating.
David:
There’s something to that. Now, certain metabolisms, interestingly, are different, a small fraction. I think I’m one of those people. I drink cold water even in the winter. You know what I mean?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I don’t gravitate to that.
David:
A colon hydrotherapist showed me that, actually, because we used to have a colon hydrotherapist come to our retreats. One of the things that this colon hydrotherapist would show me is that almost everybody’s going to release better on warm water, but some people are outliers, and they release better on cold water. It’s just one of those—
Dr. Pompa:
You’re an outlier, dude. Of course he’s an outlier. Of course he is. There’s no doubt about it. Vanilla bean was one you actually didn’t have a chance to really get to from stage last night.
David:
Oh, man, the vanilloids.
Dr. Pompa:
Again, they were running them off the stage, perhaps. Tell me about it.
David:
The vanilloids, that’s a story you’re going to be hearing more about. Many, many psychoactive substances are vanilloids. They’re related to the vanillin molecule. Just off the top of my head, like mescaline, which is closely related to adrenaline, which is very closely related to vanillin. You think, what do you mean? The vanilla flavor like [00:44:22].
Dr. Pompa:
[00:44:22].
David:
What’s in vanilla has a very strong visceral connection to one of our core—basically, one of our core energy systems, which is our adrenals. You think, what? Wait, hold on. Go on further. Let me give you another example. Capsaicin, which is in hot peppers, is a vanilloids, and it’s related to vanilla, and it’s related to adrenaline. It’s related to mescaline. Mescaline’s a psychoactive substance. That’s the psychoactive substance of peyote.
Anyway, when you start looking at these vanilloids, you start to find out that you can tweak vanillin and tweak capsaicin and get things that can cause you to be in hyper-focus.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s awesome, another nootropic.
David:
Vanilla is a nootropic. That’s the point I’m trying to make here. Yes, the smell, for sure, has that effect.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s why you have vanilla in all the incense.
David:
It’s the number one spice in the world.
Dr. Pompa:
Candles, all of it, because of the smell, right? I love the smell. Who doesn’t love the smell of vanilla?
David:
Who doesn’t love the smell? There’s a big science and a big story behind it. I not only will make—I’ll tell you what my favorite is because I’m a vanilla grower.
Dr. Pompa:
My next question was well, how do we consume it, man? What’s the best way?
David:
The best way to consume it is you basically—it’s valuable when you have it. You take a section like that. You got a bean like this. Make sure you get big, fat, juicy beans.
Dr. Pompa:
Where do you buy them?
David:
Don’t get dried twigs. You have to look. You have to hunt them down. You have to really find somebody who’s got it.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, so you can’t buy them in health food stores or anything like that.
David:
No, typically, you go to a health food store, you’ll—you can buy vanilla beans, but they’re like dry twigs. You go [cracking noise], and it’s like this is junk. You’ve got to hunt them down. I grow vanilla, but I sell only to my little group because I don’t have enough. I’m just a small-time guy. Anyway, once you get the nice, juicy bean, take a section about, maybe, I don’t know, three centimeters.
You’re going to cut that, and you’re going to make a tea out of that. Now, if you make a tea out of that, you can keep making tea, keep making tea, keep making tea. I always recommend saving some of that tea in the back of your fridge ice-cold, and you’ll find that it has a really amazing flavor the next day. What’s the background flavor? It’s one of my favorites. It’s cream soda. Cream soda flavor comes from vanilla.
Then even at the end, when you’ve—once you’ve made that tea, made that tea, made that tea, you don’t even just throw that vanilla away. It’s too valuable. You fish it out. You can blend it. I’ll throw it in a NutriBullet and blend it in with stuff, so I eat it, or you can throw it into alcohol. You start accumulating an alcohol with vanilla in it because that’s your vanilla extract. That’s what vanilla extract is.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, yeah. That was my next question. Okay, if they can’t hunt it, how can they get vanilla? Vanilla extracts, use it—
David:
Let me give some advice about that because there’s a lot of fraudulent vanilla extract. It can contain tonka beans. A lot of it was coming in from Mexico because tonka beans are relatively—tonka beans is a type of nut that’s about the size of an almond that has a—it’s where Coumadin comes from. It’s a blood thinner. You have to be very careful because some—it actually has to say on the vanilla extract, contains no tonka beans. Look for that.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, so if it doesn’t say that, it probably has tonka beans.
David:
Or it could be cut with it, or they’re not conscious of that problem.
Dr. Pompa:
The people that are on Coumadin would have to stay away from it, so they would have to know [00:47:44].
David:
Right, because it could hyper-thin out your blood.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, totally, yeah.
David:
That is a problem, actually, with vanilla extracts. In Mexico, they’re cutting it in to the vanilla extracts, and then people are having hyper-blood thinning reactions who are on blood thinner medication already. You have to be careful about that. It’s just a thing to look for. No tonka beans. Tonka is like Tonka trucks, T-O-N-K-A.
Dr. Pompa:
I was going to ask that, too. I’m a dyslexic, so we got to make sure we spell these things out.
David:
Right, you make it real clear. That’s a good thing to look for. Then vanilla extracts, just a little bit into your drinks, like your chocolate drinks—
Dr. Pompa:
I put them in my shakes. I love vanilla flavor with everything.
David:
It’s the best, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
I was doing something even better. It’s funny. I put vanilla extracts. I love the Cocoa Nibs, which is the cacao nibs. I could use that as a base with anything, man. Then I could put lettuces, anything, some berries. These are my shakes.
David:
Yeah, exactly. Vanilla and berries, how you going to beat that?
Dr. Pompa:
It’s the best.
David:
Vanilla, berries, and chocolate—with the NutriBullet guys years ago, they’re like, “You know what? When you get on TV, what you need to tell these people is you need to tell them, ‘Hey, if you want to get the great flavors of this world every day, this is how you do it.’” Man, that was good advice.
Dr. Pompa:
I’ve been in ketosis most of this winter. I do that, but, man, I’m—you have me so excited because I’m coming out of ketosis. I’m gravitating now to a plant-based thing with the berries. I can’t wait.
David:
Oh, nice!
Dr. Pompa:
You’re firing me up, man. Break out the blender.
David:
Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Pompa:
We’re going to kill it. We’re going to kill it! We’re going to increase all the nutrients. I’m going to—
David:
Boom, increase the nutrients, increase your immunity, increase your overall happiness and general vibration. We were talking about that with reishi, your overall countenance. In Chinese medicine, it’s more translated to aura. Shan is the word, actually. They would say shan also is—it’s interesting. In Chinese, shan is associated also with mountains.
Dr. Pompa:
Nice.
David:
If I said the shan yao yam, it’s the mountain yam, the one that grows in the mountains. That’s a very shan and kind of almost spiritually auric and protective kind of food, as reishi is.
Dr. Pompa:
When fall comes, you start getting your ground vegetables, all that fun stuff.
David:
Yes, roots.
Dr. Pompa:
There’s even that time for the grain, the ancient grain. The harvest in fall, that’s typically when I dig in a little deeper in some foods that I typically don’t eat. That’s what I try to do. I vary my diet. I love that. Number one, I don’t get bored. Number two, I believe it’s in our DNA. I believe it’s the way that really helps the microbiome.
David:
I completely agree with you. By the way, wild food for the microbiome is—
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, man. A lot of people made that point. It’s like we’re taking pills trying to increase—and there’s a place for that, but this stuff, we don’t even understand.
David:
It’s covered with it. [00:50:35] —
Dr. Pompa:
This is microbiome. This is like—
David:
[00:50:39] get the spores off.
Dr. Pompa:
We’ll find out 10 years from now what this does to the microbiome.
David:
Right, exactly.
Dr. Pompa:
There’s specific bacterias that will just love and thrive on that.
David:
Right there, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s just incredible.
David:
Same with this, as well.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt.
David:
That’s really true of all of the amazing herbs and wild foods of your ecosystem. Again, you don’t have to know everything, but knowing one thing is kind of your foot in the door.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. One more little fun thing here, and again, I could go on and on, man, with you. I’m so into these wild foods, it’s unbelievable. Charcoal—
David:
Oh, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Charcoal’s not a food. However you and I believe—I take charcoal all the time. It’s a product that I created, Bind, and we dug for all these charcoals because there’s a lot of dirty charcoal that people are selling on the market. We tested it.
David:
Shockingly so.
Dr. Pompa:
Lead, we tested—it was hard to find. We found this one charcoal that binds. This stuff, if you threw it in the air, it goes vroom to the walls. Look, you showed some really convincing studies that I think I showed in the past, how charcoal extends your life. Talk about that.
David:
This is one of those shocking—
Dr. Pompa:
There’s no nutrients here. How’s charcoal [00:51:52]?
David:
It’s one of those shocking discoveries. You’re like, “What does this mean?” In scientific research, and animal research, and lab research, to extend the life of an animal by 20% or more is pretty much impossible. The only way you’re going to get there is by fasting. That will only be in certain types of studies where the animals are fasted correctly, meaning that they weren’t malnourished to begin with and stuff like that, or your calorie restriction, you might get 20% extension of lifespan.
By the way, that means that all nutrients, like, let’s say olive oil—which olive oil in research is one of the great life extenders. It’s 9 to 18 percent, typically in studies in, let’s say, a mouse, or a dog, or a cat. You’re thinking, what? Olive oil, whoa. That’s only 9 to 18 percent. What does that mean? Let’s say human lifespan is really 100. We should easily make it to 100. If we extend the lifespan 9%, that means you’re going to make it to 109 years old, just to make that clear. If we’re going to extend the lifespan 20%, it means you’re going to make it to 120 years old.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s a ton!
David:
That’s crazy. With activated charcoal, it is common in scientific research to extend the life of an animal 21%, 30%, 33%, 34%.
Dr. Pompa:
I thought I saw one 38 on one of your slides.
David:
Yeah, 38%, even 40%, 43%, 44%.
Dr. Pompa:
Forty percent, so 140. That’s incredible.
David:
It’s almost like it’s hard to actually accept that. You’re like, “What does this mean?” I’ll tell you what it means. It means one thing, and that is for longevity, detoxification is way more important than nutrition.
Dr. Pompa:
We gravitate on that. You and I love nutrition. We’re all about it; however we both agree that detoxification, especially today, is more important—
David:
Way more important.
Dr. Pompa:
First of all, the fact that charcoal can extend lives, it has something to do with this toxicity issue.
David:
For sure, no question.
Dr. Pompa:
Then another product we both love is CytoDetox. These are both particles, things that are in the soils, that help humans to detoxify.
David:
It’s the whole name of the game, it really is. You want to become healthier, you detoxify. Essentially, what’s making us sick is the metabolic toxins, the environmental toxins, and then toxins that accumulate just from life. We have toxins generated every day by metabolism, but what about the toxins from three years ago that we generated by metabolism that have accumulated, plus environmental toxins, which are food, air, and water?
Dr. Pompa:
The cool thing is charcoal works amazing in the gut, pulling stuff out of the BioComplex from the liver. CytoDetox, that gets in the cell and the cell membrane where a lot of these toxins accumulate. The two together, it’s magic.
David:
Clay, too, in your—you’re [00:54:50] because I think in your Bind product, you’ve got charcoal and clay.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we have four different types of binders in there, even humates, which, again, this is stuff that we find in the soil. It’s there for human and animals’ protection because they would eat that. The point is we had trouble finding a clean one. When we built the product Bind out that has all these cool binders in it, we had to test all these products. We still test every batch because every once in a while, you get a contaminated—they’re binders so they end up getting contaminated.
David:
That’s an important point. Let me just specify that point. Let’s say you go and you’re like, “Let me get a big bag of activated charcoal that’s open, not encapsulated.” If you leave that open in your house, it will pull to itself every toxin in your house, in the atmosphere, that it can get to. It’s an attractor. Now, just think about what that does in your body. It’s going to pull to itself. Interestingly, the binding forces are called van der Waals forces.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s cool.
David:
What’s interesting about them is we think of—sometimes we think of, oh, activated charcoal. It’s going to bind up my healthy nutrients. There’s no research to show that.
Dr. Pompa:
No, it’s true.
David:
That’s a shocking statement, meaning that in research science, they’ve been trying for 70 years to prove, for example, that activated charcoal interferes with B Vitamins. It doesn’t. It doesn’t interfere with Vitamin C. It doesn’t interfere with calcium, magnesium. It doesn’t interfere with any of the major macronutrients, protein, fat, carbohydrates. That is really shocking. That has to do with these electrochemical forces that are going on with charcoal, we call van der Waals forces.
Another thing that’s interesting about that, let’s say you use charcoal to—let’s say you’ve got an activated charcoal filter in your house or something, air filter. Then you want to purify that charcoal. You can heat it up. It’ll disperse the chemicals off that it’s accumulated. Let’s say you wanted to use that charcoal again. You could literally heat it off, volatilize those chemicals off, cool the charcoal back down, and use it all over again, brand new, like it’s brand new. It’s not a sponge in that way that we think about it. It’s something else going on. There’s nobody who really actually understands how it works.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s incredible. When we look at—we did a lot of study—the active ingredient in CytoDetox is clinoptilolite, which is a zeolite particle. Again, we had to actually come up with a patented process how to clean it because it’s such a darn good binder.
David:
Right, pulls things to itself.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly, so we had to knock the bad stuff off. It’s really cool because it comes from volcanic ash. Again, the environment provides. Think of all the radiation from a volcano. What does nature provide to absorb it so that wildlife doesn’t die? These clinoptilolite particles. That’s really cool, right?
David:
That’s such an interesting thing. I’m a big fan of hunting these on lava fields on the Big Island of Hawaii. There you’ve got lava and all of the amazing compounds and zeolite compounds that are created, especially right there in the ocean because as those boulders of lava go in, they expand.
Dr. Pompa:
In the water.
David:
Right, and they create zeolites right there on the spot. It’s fascinating.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s how it happens.
David:
Along the whole coastline because it’s touching the water. Another thing that’s happening is that forests are being mowed down by this lava. What grows out of that wood? These.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s incredible.
David:
If you’re really paying attention to the overall kind of direction of our message, what we’re talking about, lava is new earth. It’s young. It’s renewed. Then if you’re looking at this, you’re talking about immune system. There you are on that lava field of wood, rain, sun, moon. It’s a laboratory. When you got these growing out there—that’s what I do. I go and hunt these out there. You make a tea out of those medicinal mushrooms that have literally grown right above that lava as it’s been cooling, it’s something else.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s killer. You imitate it, right? Take CytoDetox, Bind, the mushrooms. We talked about cacao.
David:
As powders, get them as powders. Start there, or capsules.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. We talked about vanilla. We talked about charcoal, obviously, the chocolate, cacao. I don’t know, man. The biohacks, right, adding the fats in the blender. Dude, wealth of knowledge.
David:
That was a lot that we [00:59:06].
Dr. Pompa:
That was a lot. No, but I get really excited because, like I said, I’m going to be switching my diet over. I can’t wait to start—
David:
To get in.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I just can’t wait to start consuming these foods. Awesome. Don’t you just love him? He’s like a big teddy bear. I just want to squeeze him up.
David:
Right on base, there.
Dr. Pompa:
No, I did. I fell in love with you this weekend, man. Thanks for being here.
David:
We had [00:59:23].
Dr. Pompa:
It was great, absolutely. We had a lot of fun.
David:
Yeah, it was great.
Dr. Pompa:
Share this one. It’s going to be a lot of fun for anybody who watches it, obviously. We’re going to have to have you back on. You know what? We’ll have it when we’re out. You’re coming to Park City. We’ll do a show, and we’ll make it real interactive. We’ll go hunting. How about that?
David:
Yeah, and make it simple. It’s not that hard. It’s really not that hard. I love it when people have that breakthrough. They come to me like, “We found our first one. We made our first tea.”
Dr. Pompa:
That’s going to be me, man.
David:
It’s really fun. It’s usually a husband and wife team. They’re like, “We did it.” It’s so cool.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s awesome, man. The hunting part is part of it, right? I just need to add more of this to my diet.
David:
Yeah, and again, it’s been made easy for us.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, awesome, man. Thanks again. See you on the next one.
Ashley:
That’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode, which was brought to you by Fastonic Molecular Hydrogen. Please check it out at GetFastonic.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at CellularHealing.TV. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, or sharing the show with anyone who may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.
