The Superfoods That Are Killing You – Teri Cochrane | 1128 | Dave Asprey

So this is really interesting, and we have the clinical literature, and I'm happy to share it with your friends, is now oxalates have become like shard glass in our bodies.

Yeah.

And they will break through. And they're tied to heart disease, they're tied to any kind of fibrogenicity. And so what do we do? We got to stay away from them and take things that will break them down.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we have my friend Terry Cochran with us. She's an integrative practitioner and pioneer in what we now might call personalized healthcare. She's been working on very customized approaches towards individual treatment, as well as some things about nutrition and food where we're in agreement on many, many different things. And we're going to go through some specifics about food, some specifics about how your metabolism works in a way that you haven't heard on the show before. And we'll even tie this into how you think about food, how you feel about food and your life and how that affects your biology. The last time you heard Terry on the show was episode 646, so a few years ago. And that was when we talked about this R3 program and the wildatarian diet she did. Her R3 program ties together your physical well being with quantum biology. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you know that I have put at the very core of biohacking this idea that mitochondria are at the foundational level of, of your biology. Everything that's happening in your body is a reflection of what's happening in them. Terry is one of the very earliest people in the field who's had a similar perspective. So there's a lot of wisdom to be learned here. Terry, welcome to the Human Upgrade.

Thank you so much, Dave. So good to be with your audience again and great to see you.

My pleasure. Now, I talk about these 4F words in my work that mitochondria do. Fear, food, the other F word, and then fertility. And lately I've added a fifth F word, which is forgiveness. So this is how you start the loop again by letting go of the first four. But you talk about the big four, but they're not F words. So in your work you have big four metabolic impairments. Can you teach us about those?

Absolutely. And I love the fact that we both have our big four and now plus one.

Nice.

So about a decade ago, I discovered that our macrocosm, our food supply, had been hijacked. And it had been hijacked through two major disruptors. One was the crowding of animals and the torturing of them, which not only filled them with hormones and antibiotics and foods that they could not digest, but it also tortured them by crowding them into spaces that were not, we say, inhumane, but it's in animal. It's just not to a living species, the thing to do. And when you talk about the mitochondria driving all of us when they crowded these animals, what ended up happening is the stress response within them. And this is in the clinical literature, in my book, and now it's been forwarded many times with other research. These crowding conditions created these indigestible proteins by the name of amyloids. And we build these amyloids within our body as a homeostatic mechanism. It's an inflammatory response. These are endogenous internal amyloids, and they come in and they create an inflammation and then we put out the fire. That's normal, a normal mechanism. However, these exogenous, heavy burdened amyloids came into our food supply. Chicken being the most studied and the dirtiest of birds, because they're most crafted, crowded, really created a deleterious cascade of an autoimmune response. Because amyloids, we now know, that turn on viral structures and the herpes family of viruses, Epstein Barr turns into Hashimoto's, varicella turns into Ms. Or polycystic ovarian syndrome, or Bell's palsy, or even ulcerative colitis. We have the cytomegalovirus turning into cancer or lung disease or heart disease. And so these viruses got lit up by the amyloids. And then the second piece, which was really elucidated by the beautiful work of Dr. Stephanie Zenith, was glyphosate. Yeah, right. So everybody's talked about glyphosate. So we talk about the shikamate pathway, we talk about the bacteria. What's little less talked about is the fact that it also disrupted protein by mimicking glycine. And glycine is necessary for protein metabolism. So we had two vectors breaking down our ability to process protein, and then it also broke down the ability to convert our happy sulfur friends into sulfate, which is necessary for bones and tendons and mental health and the integrity of our gut. And then the last thing, was it related to the oxylobacter bacteria, which just kind of wiped them out. So this glyphosate, these two interrupters, of the crowding and torturing of animals, which disrupted protein. And then the glyphosate, which again disrupted protein. And sulfur and oxalate metabolism, created this massive, massive deleterious impact. Amyloids, which are protein malabsorption, sulfur malabsorption, oxalate malabsorption, and then our stress response in our cells, fat malabsorption. Now, Dave, what we've not talked about yet, and this is something that is so, so fascinating, is that the spike protein mirrors exactly what these spore disruptors do.

What the what disruptors do?

Spike protein. They do the exact same thing as.

Which of those things as creates amyloids. As amyloids. Okay, got it.

Create seven vectors of amyloids. It actually makes oxalates, Disrupts fat metabolism.

The spike protein makes oxalates?

Yes, it's in the clinical literature.

Oh my God. That's one I missed. So for listeners, oxalates are these compounds that are usually made by plants, but can be made by fungus. In fact, if you have mold in your house or if you have candida, you have more of them. They find calcium in your body, they form razor sharp crystals that are behind kidney stones, behind gout, behind all kinds of autoimmune and other symptoms that you think are aging. And it turns out spinach and kale, which I've been on the war against kale for a long time and so have you, Terry. We're both early, early oxalate people. These are really important. So if you are trying to recover from COVID and you're doing it with spinach, kale, raspberries, almonds and beets because you heard they were superfoods and maybe some, some peanut butter. Cause you heard it was protein and your life sucks. Maybe you should listen to my old episode on Joe Rogan where I teach him about spinach and kale and why those kale smoothies aren't good. Oh, wait, never mind. Joe Rogan deleted that when he went to Spotify. But I love you anyway, Joe. Anyway, maybe you could listen to the one seven years later where he says that he had to quit the kale smoothies because of oxalates. Or you trained Mike Tyson on what to eat and Mike went on Joe Rogan and said, hey, killer kale. So guys, if you didn't hear it 10 years ago from me, and you've been denying this forever and you're really sucking your in your life right now post the last three years, maybe you need to make a nutritional change because the other thing you talked about Here from Stephanie Sinnef, by the way. She was on the show talking about these things seven years ago, I believe, including the glycine thing is Oxalobacter, this bacteria that used to be in our gut. It's not present anymore. It didn't make that big of a difference in oxalate metabolism, but it helped a little bit. According to this, the research I've seen, it's gone. So what are we going to do? What's the answer? We'll get into amyloids in a bit. Those are something we also share an interest in from longevity. But what are you going to do about oxalates right now? Let's start with that.

Okay, so thank you for that, being a pioneer in the war against oxalates, because now you've been in too.

I mean it's.

Yeah, we're in this together now. What they found. This is fascinating, Dave. In the cadavers of people that had experienced the spike protein, those over 70, 80% had oxalate crystals in their thyroid.

Oh wait, was that just for Covid or was that just everyone over that age? I thought it was in everyone.

Was it everyone? I thought it was in the spot. So this is really interesting and we have the clinical literature and I'll happy to share it with your friends, is now oxalates have become like shard glass in our bodies and they will break through and they're tied to heart disease, they're tied to any kind of fibrogenicity. And so what do we do? We got to stay away from them and take things that will break them down. So what breaks down oxalates? Okay, we. Anything that has a crystalline structure. We need an emulsifier, but we need intelligent emulsifiers. And so what are intelligent emulsifiers? Well, we love serrapeptase because as a proteolytic enzyme, it's going to break down fibrogenicity. It's going to break down something that is hard.

It breaks down scar tissue that's formed around razor sharp crystals of oxalic acid or of oxalates in the body. Calcium oxalate. But breaking down scar tissue while you leave the shards in doesn't seem like a long term strategy.

No, the long term strategy is we really have to rethink what healthy food is for us and we have to redirect our plate to less greens. Killer kale, Swiss chard, spinach, almonds. You know, they used to say, Tufts University 12 years ago said eating almonds will reduce your risk of stroke by 60%. Now eating almonds could actually increase your risk of stroke because it's creating an oxalate crystal, potentially creating a blood clot.

Wow. You're on a journey to live longer and way better, right? What if there was one system that makes everything else in your body work better? Well, there is, and it's your vascular system. It's the intricate network inside of you that makes sure nutrients it's the intricate network inside you that makes sure nutrients, oxygen and hormones reach every corner of your body. Your vascular system influences everything from your brain all the way down to your toes when you don't have a functioning vascular system and it's tough to make anything else work better. That's why I am so obsessed with protecting my vascular system. One of the best ways to do that is to support your endothelial glycocalyx and provide your body with nitric oxide support. Seven years ago, I started taking arterosil and it's my go to for protecting my glycocalyx support. And I recently came across a new product from the same company called Vasconox. Vasconox provides nitric oxide support for up to 24 hours, as shown by an open label published study. This is something that I definitely feel. You can feel your blood pressure changing. Together, Arterosil and Vasconox are an amazing combination to make your vascular system last way longer than you do. Head on over to calroy.comdave to get a discount. I feel like I've. I've been beating this drum. You do too. I. I don't think I've beat it hard enough, though. I wrote in the first chapter of the bulletproof diet, this is geez, 2012 or something. And I said, okay, these are the things we're dealing with in plants, right? And in meat, right? And in plants, it's oxalates, it's phytic acid, and it's histamines, which are more common in meat than in plants, but can be in plants in some plants. Omega 6s and lectins, right. And so each of those kind of has had its day like lectins have had their day, and they matter more. Some lectins matter more to some people than others. They're not all bad because you make them every day for use in your body. Just different foods, flavors of lectins. But oxalates, I identified them. It came out against the really strong ones, but not strongly enough. And in my most recent book, I, I talk a lot more about that. But it, it seems like either we've all got worse at processing oxalates, which you may have just explained why or maybe they just build up over time. And because I was a raw vegan and a regular vegan also maybe I built up more of those. You can only eat so much whole grain, which has more oxalate than white grain.

Exactly.

So I, I, I just feel like in the 70s some asshole decided that eating the shell of the walnut was good for you for some reason and you should just eat whole foods and it doesn't work like that.

It sure doesn't. And, and Dave, one of the things that really I've done deep research over this last almost four years because I still have an active practice. And so they become my human, human upgrade lab in real time in my clinic because of the way that I deploy my applied kinesiology. And what's been so fascinating is my big four has also now added a fifth. And that fifth is histamine, which is.

Oftentimes caused by oxalates too. Okay, yes.

And so what we're finding, this is really interesting. Again we'll share all the clinical literature that I have found and all the, all the anecdotal outcomes in the success stories of my practice is well with your audience. So what's really interesting is the spike protein, however it comes into your world, will turn on the histamine receptor 1 gene, HRH1. That histamine receptor gene cross and intersects with the sulfation pathway which then also intersects with the oxalate metabolism pathway. So we have this layering of hell and what we're finding is histamine, I call it sneezing on the inside. It's not necessarily an itchy eye, sneezy runny nose. It can make idiopathic anxiety disorder. It can create actually increase your estrogen, which then will increase your risk of all sorts of bad things. Especially if you're growing oxalates and you have Candida, you're going to get endometriosis or grosses the size of your head. We've had 20 something year olds having full hysterectomies in my practice because of their healthy eating habits. And so this very big layered cake has become a very big deal and many are being sent down very incorrect rabbit holes when they're being given anti anxiety medication for idiopathic anxiety or ulcerative colitis. So they try to calm their nervous system and actually the causal is the layers of histamine, oxalate and sulfur. And then that that pharmaceutical further backs up that phase one liver detoxification which further flips the histamine on its trajectory of. Oh boy.

So this seems almost intractable. If you're listening to this, you're going, okay, we haven't even gotten into this idea that eating animals that were mistreated is bad for you. And I think you might have heard that on the show before. And Terry, in our last interview, you're the one who, who I think is, has been the original person talking about how we have a problem with amyloid. In these people who've read my longevity book, you know that amyloid is one of the sources of intracellular and extracellular junk that builds up over time and that your body can't process much amyloid. So this is one of the things you, you want to eat less of it and generate less of it over time. And I talk about techniques and strategies for that, probably even in eating grass fed meat. And that would have come from, from your work. So we're, we haven't even gotten into that. And now you're saying don't eat most of the plants. And it, it's not most of them. There are some you can eat. But even things that like sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes are, are better than wheat. But especially if you're eating the peels, they have a meaningful amount of oxalate. And I've found that over the last six, seven years, I've, I'm, I'm into it. I can feel what foods do to me at a very nuanced level because, well, try running at 10% of your mitochondrial levels and you just, you learn subtle shifts. You can feel them. So I'm just like, I don't, my body doesn't want that. I'm gonna eat it. So the problem is you would say, all right, let's go carnivore. I did that when I wrote the bulletproof diet. You do all Carnivore. You get sick. A lot of people get sick on it. By the way, though, you feel great for the first while, just like I did when I went raw vegan. So I felt amazing and lost weight and did all the carnivore stuff. But we didn't call it carnivore. Cause there was no name for it. It's just, it's one edge of the bulletproof zone on the bulletproof diet. But then three months in, I'm waking up a dozen times a night, I can sleep 10 hours, I don't feel great and I get a leaky gut and I get some more food allergies. And so it can't be just Carnivore, but it's gotta be something else. I have my ideas about what's what works really well. I'm six and a half percent body fat. I'm never hungry and I eat a lot of steak, but I've always eaten a lot of steak. So tell me, what do you do that works?

Great question. And again, I'm the princess and the p. Because I have all the genetics, the, that flip on histamine phase one, liver detoxification, turmeric kicks my butt. I have sulfur and oxalate processing issues. I have a protein malabsorption mthfre1298c. So that one is one that doesn't allow for protein digestion. And my entire father's side of the family rarely made it to 60. Wow, so it was heart attacks. Now I understand why, right? The sulfur, the oxalates, the protein, even back then when we were less toxic as, as a human population. So for me it's a dance. And this is to your point. We are nuanced beings and it's leaning into the energy of food and understanding what we need when we need it. And a big part of my work is really having my clients become their own body interpreters so they can understand the dance. We can never be all things, all the time in one direction because the body is never static. So if we're carnivores, or if we're vegans, or if we're vegetarians, or if we're pescatarians and we'll get mercury toxicity. So it's, it's understanding this beautiful dance. Right. And so part of the work is you first got have to clear the vessel so the receiver is understanding the correct information. When there's a lot of static in the system, you're so confused.

Okay, there's static in the system. That makes a lot of sense. Even if you go to things like autism or Asperger's, it's essentially a lot of static onlines that don't have enough signal, enough electricity. So if we're all getting some static now, what's the fix?

So the fix is understanding that we first have to eat what I say, counter seasonally. So because we carry such a large toxic burden, even if we are clean, we're still going to be. It's a bit ubiquitous. Our water, our even organic products have cross contamination to glyphosate. And so what we talk about is every season you're going to eat counter to what is being pollinated. Especially with a really high Histamine load. So during the spring season, especially here in the metro D.C. area, we stay away from tree nuts. During the fall, where mold is heavy, we stay away from anything that's sprouted or fermented or is mold or fungus. During the summer, we stay away from grasses, even that very, very smart. And liver cleansing wheatgrass can tip the scales and we move away from that. So to answer your question, what do I eat? I'm a wildatarian, for sure. That has changed my physiology. I'm so much younger than I was 10 years ago in my mind and my physiology and even in my DNA. Age, metabolic age. And I really dance with the. What are my hierarchy of needs? So I love the, the root vegetables that relate to like carrots are amazing. I love my purple potatoes because of the, the phytonutrients that they carry, those antioxidants.

Carrots are not low oxalate at all.

They're not. But this is the hierarchy of needs day. This is where I have a new, even a nuanced layered approach. So neither carrots nor sweet potatoes are low in oxalates. However, they are very, very high in beta carotene. And so beta carotene is really important for the epithelial tissue of the GI tract. So. And they help modulate insulin. And so for me, when I layer that this is the nuance and this is when you come to my practice, we tell you exactly where you should be. Where, where's the hierarchy of needs? And so for me, carrots and sweet potatoes without the skin on the sweet potatoes, I can, I can eat them. I also eat a lot of artichokes, which is so great for liver detoxification and really high in nitric oxide. I eat a lot of bib lettuce, but I don't eat arugula again, you know that sulfur, I don't eat any of the Swiss chard, spinach, forget it. And so I look to.

So tell me about arugula one more time. Because of the sulfur, it's an issue for you.

Arugula has sulfur.

Got it. So people who can't process sulfur don't eat arugula, but otherwise arugula is okay for you.

It's really good. And again, hierarchy of needs. If you need to metabolize a little bit of estrogen, then baby arugula, not every day can actually be quite good. And cooking it will be better. Just kind of sort of just sauteing it a little bit in butter kind of takes. That, takes that bite down.

Do you Ever feel guilty, though? Like, I buy arugula. You get 5 ounces, it's in this giant plastic clam. And then you throw it on the stove and you light the stove, and it instantly goes. And it's like three bites.

It's three bites.

So, like, I just spend five bucks on three bites of stupid green stuff. I. I feel. I, I feel victimized.

Well, the way, the way to help obviate that is that you stick some other stuff in there that will help it grow.

Like steak. Is that, Is that the best?

Exactly. Like steak or something that it doesn't, doesn't break down. I really. You know, potatoes have become a resistant starch. Unless you have a dysbiotic gut. They're not terrible.

But potatoes also are higher in oxalate.

They are. Again, hierarchy of needs. So this is where what I look to the non negotiables. Yeah, Spinach. So high in oxalates.

It's dumb.

Yeah, it's just like, what are you doing? Let's just. Let's just build some chard. In our system, almonds, super, super high in excellence. And we also have to consider the crossover of oxalates and molds. So berries that can be high in mold will help you get more oxalates. They're. They're oxalate builders because the mold will create that. That Oxalobacter bacteria, that oxalate, they, they go together. That's why Candida, which is a fungal species, you will see that your oxalic acid, if you do an organic acid test, when you have Candida, is going to be elevated. And so that's why we stay away from molds. Molds are tricky. With oxalates.

I have an oxalate mold berry story. You want to hear it?

Yes, please.

All right. Years ago, when I'm recovering from being a raw vegan and I've started developing the fertility diet that was behind the Better Baby book. My. My first book. A lot of listeners don't know that. I spent five years writing a book on fertility that taught me a lot. I go to the market and I'd go there sometimes with. We had just my daughter at the time, and, you know, I have this kid on my back and I'm pulling a. A red wagon to buy all the vegetables and stuff. And I'd buy berries, but not just a few. I would buy, like 20 little boxes of red raspberries. They're so good, right? And then I know they mold, so I take them home and I'd spread them out on little drying trays And I'd spray em with grapefruit seed extract so they wouldn't mold. I'd be very careful. I'm a trained raw vegan after all. And I put them in the fridge and I'd eat them throughout the week because I know raspberries are good for you, they make you live forever. And after a while and I gotta, gotta pee and like, I'm like leaking. Sometimes I have to pee like 25 times a day. And I go to my doctor and he's like, oh, that's weird. We'll go to this top guy in San Francisco. And I go in there and I go in for this meeting and he goes, I don't know here. And he gets this giant camera and sticks it in my dick hole. Say that here. I don't know. Is that a medical term? I'm like, oh my God. And like, I don't know that. That is not an in hole for, for me anyway. And oh, that was traumatic. And afterwards he comes out and was like, I didn't see anything. I'm like, what did you just do to me? This is horrible. So I go home and I'm just like, what? And I dug and I dug and I saw somewhere in some little form. Oh, sometimes raspberries make you have to pee. And they thought it was ellagic acid. It's not. What's going on is raspberries are high in oxalates. I was getting. Because I was also eating a huge amount of plants and I wasn't oxalate aware enough. Yep, I was getting high levels of razor sharp crystals in my urethra. And so I had to pee all the time. And so I finally figured it out. I stopped. I'm like, okay, that's so much better. And to this day, I just had a friend recently, like, oh, you have interstitial cystitis, do you? Maybe you should put away the kale and raspberries. And literally three days later it's like it went away. Like you didn't have interstitial cystitis. You had oxalate poisoning from eating foods you think are healthy but aren't 100%. Yeah, this happens. So I just, I paid for it with a camera.

Oh my goodness, Dave. Ouch. That is not a story to be repeated.

Yeah, I want people listening especially. Seems like more women get it than men. And to be clear, I also had toxic mold and I had had Candida before. And oxalates build up over time. You can remove them from the body even probably it's more possible than people believe. And I think I found a good way to do it. And I can share some info about that with you and with listeners if you're interested. But it takes work and time and that then has the effect of causing immune response which has an effect of just having less kidney stones, less joint pain, less other neurological issues and things like that. But it's probably a multi year process.

Kind of like it is a multi year process. Absolutely. Especially when we're over calcifying with a lot of remineralization. So when we become out of mineral balance, this will also impact the oxalate burden because it's going to hold on to any calcium you're taking in. The only one that I would say is a counter to the oxalate crystals is some level of calcium citrate through dairy. That's why you're so smart with butter.

I don't think calcium citrate works.

Really?

Yeah.

Interesting. Not supplementally. I'm talking about through dairy.

Dairy seems to help. But is the form of calcium in dairy primarily calcium citrate?

It has a lot of calcium citrate in it.

That was more calcium phosphorus than calcium citrate in dairy.

It's a combination. From what I understand. You may be right on that. Can't quote. I haven't looked at the phosphorus piece of the calcium.

It's mostly in the protein too. Not on the fat. I don't believe butter has a lot of calcium in it. More of the fat solubles.

The butyrate is very good for the bacteria, which helps the Oxalobacter. Maybe that's the indirect. That's the indirect piece to it.

So tell me all of your strategies for getting rid of this oxalate thing. Because oxalates are part of it and you can't have glyphosate to your point. And then we're going to talk some more about amyloid anyway because amyloid pisses me off and so does industrial farming, but so does the vegan diet. So you know the fact that torturing animals is bad for them and bad for you and bad for the world is a fact. The fact that you need to eat ethically treated animals to show up in the world the way you can is also a fact. So banning animals eating. Banning eating animals is dumb and will result in probably the destruction of our species. So we're not going to let them do that. But also treating animals poorly is dumb. So like the obvious answer is don't eat mistreated animals, but eat animals. And when someone Mistreats animals. Punch them in the face. Wait, that would be mistreating a human animal, another animal. I thought I had a good strategy there, but sounded good. But don't spend money with those people.

That's very important. You put your food dollars to vote against or for something. And you know, to your point of what do I eat? And stories repeated, you didn't repeat the story in your life because you stopped eating the oxalates. Right. And who knew that? A good berry for me. My oxalate story, and I'll get to the amyloids in a minute, is I started making all these BlackBerry smoothies. The first two days I felt great. By the second week, I had shards of crack crystals under my foot pads.

Oh yeah, those are fun either.

I'm not going to do that again. I will not do that again. So you know these oxalates and what are my strategies? So we really have to alkalize the oxalate crystals. The more we acidify, the more we can endanger or augment those crystals. So they say that lemon and lime actually break down. It becomes alkaline and it's a ph alkalinity as you metabolize the lemon. However, this is where the nuanced approach in my practice really is really effective in pioneering. If you've had a lot of stones and your kidneys are irritated because you're also not breaking down protein and you have a sulfur issue, then actually any kind of citric acid, which tends to be an emulsifier, can be a problem. And we know that vitamin C in high doses actually will increase the oxalate burden.

Yeah. So high dose vitamin C is bad news, guys.

Yep. And so be very careful with IVs. So IVs have become the bomb. Right. And we know that vitamin C is an immune builder. It helps with our pandemic. However, IV user beware, because those high doses are going to increase your oxalate burden. And this is another dirty little secret, is that it will also increase your iron absorption. Well, guess what iron does now, Dave? It makes amyloids. And iron becomes lipid, like so it becomes a fat soluble, something that's going to further feed the mold, which encases itself in a lipid layer.

So high iron is, we've known for a long time, from a longevity perspective, that's bad news. And I did not know the mechanism of action also included making amyloid, but there you go. So it, it's getting pretty complex though. So we're saying you gotta lower oxalates and you're saying that lemon and lime, even though they're acidic, that they're alkalizing. How does. How does that work out?

They come in acidic, but the end. The end product is their pH balancing. However. However, if you're too irritated, then lemon and lime are going to irritate those nephrons, which are the cells of the kidneys, and they're going to hurt your joints. So what we tend to do is we tend to look at what is an emulsifier, which I absolutely love. Salt.

Oh, my gosh. You mean having more salt and water every time you drink water the way we've been talking about for years, would be beneficial for you? Oh, my gosh, it would be. But what about kidney stones? Everyone knows salt causes kidney stones. Terry, didn't you read all the papers on how a high salt diet causes kidney stones?

Oh, my gosh. Only a high salt diet if the salt has been demineralized. Oh, why?

You mean you need traits, minerals, and high amounts in your detoxing. What if someone put those in coffee? That would be terrible.

That would be dangerous.

Right?

So. Absolutely. So we have to redeploy a mineral balance, and we have to get salt back into our diets. Folks, this is so important. They've done new studies that mineralized sea salt not only is an emulsifier, it actually helps lower blood pressure. That salt that we've been told was a devil is not one of my.

First big talks about a health topic. In fact, not one of the first major time that I presented to the nonprofit that I ended up running. We would have these top experts come in from previous generation, guys like Dr. Sinatra, Julian Whitaker, and a lot of the early, early longevity guys in Palo Alto. This is how I became a biohacker, is I learned from people in their 70s and 80s when I was in my 20s. And I said, all right, I'm finally going to give my own talks. I'm a leader like, I'm a curator, but I also want to be a content creator. So my first big talk was about salt. And I went through all of these different studies, like the Dash diet. And the closing slide was from the former head of the American Society of Hypertension. So this is a doctor who studies blood pressure.

And.

And he said, well, I'm just going to measure sodium excretion in a whole bunch of people to see how much they eat instead of believing religious studies about, I don't know, how many sodium did you have yesterday? I'll write that down for you. And at the end of studying 3,000 people for several years. He just said, end of the day, if you want to live longer, eat more salt. And that was how I closed out my presentation after going through 20 studies and what was wrong with them. So you're right. You know, salt, salt, at least sea salt or salt from a mine, ideally because of microplastics. It's part of it and it helps with oxalates. How would one know. Able to do lemon juice.

So the way you know is that you take lemon on an empty stomach. And if you're two things. So one, you have to look at what is the. The constitution of your esophagus because it does go down acid. If you have acid reflux, stay away from any acid. But if you eat lemon and it actually you feel jointy in 25 to two hours out, you are actually contributing to an oxalate crystal burden.

Are you sure? I think that's nonsense.

Food works that fast.

No, I don't think that's why.

Tell me.

Doesn't work that fast.

Okay.

The other thing that lemon is known to do is to release histamine from cells. So what you do is you take a quarter of a Benadryl with your lemon juice and then you don't get sore joints. I'm going to argue that it's histamine, not oxalate.

Brilliant. Brilliant. Thank you. Well, you're welcome.

I went down both of those paths. I. Because of all the mold and stuff I've been exposed to, I've had issues with histamine for years and issues with oxalate, they tend to go hand in hand. The oxalate thing was probably toxic mold. And being a vegan when I didn't know any better. And that's why I'm so passionate about helping vegans see the error of their ways and preventing them from forcing my children onto their sick path, that is anti life. But I'm not judgy at all or anything like that.

So to your point on that, histamine, because if you look at a lot of the limonene and grapefruit in phase one liver detoxification, which that shunts it a little bit, it's going to increase your histamine load. So that is a brilliant observation. Thank you, Dave.

You're welcome. I know you're a brilliant clinician and I have a lot of respect for what you do, and so it brings me great joy to say you're wrong, because I totally could be wrong when I say that. I just like to be triggering.

I think it's a yes. And because acidity rules, it is a yes.

And there's another thing that seems to be important and I like to give credit where credit is due when I can. And this comes from Chris Masterjohn. He was, I think episode number six or number eight of almost 1200 episodes. This is years ago, a brilliant PhD biochemist researcher. And he just was on in the last couple months and we talked about this a little bit and he says it doesn't make sense that humans would be unable to remove oxalate via some metabolic pathway. It's probably just blocked. And he's a master of blocked pathways. So he said it's probably biotin dependent and here's why. So he has a great paper and we talked about on the show about how what level of biotin you would need to be healthy. And he thinks a substantial portion of people have a block where they need a lot more. So I take like way more biotin than most people because my body needs it. But for most people it's, you know, under. I think it's under a milligram. But cranking your biotin up to the levels that works for you may be really helpful. I noticed when I cranked my biotin up that I got oxalate detoxing issues like really deep pimples, which is a sign of oxalate crystals coming out through the skin. That plus a combination of, not just lemon juice, which I was just drinking here, I do about two to four ounces a day, which is a relatively high amount. But I worked my way up to it. I also do potassium citrate instead of calcium citrate. You can also do sodium citrate because you don't want too much calcium. So I do in divided doses, 6 grams of potassium citrate a day, which is basically 2 teaspoons. That's a meaningful amount of potassium which your body needs if you have enough sodium. If you take that much potassium in a low salt diet, it'll you up. So just full warning, guys, don't go out and do that because too much potassium without sodium can give you arrhythmia, unstable heart rate. It can, you know, it's not good. But having adequate levels of that mineral are very important. And the reason you use the citrate form and you could do half sodium citrate, half potassium citrate if you're worried is that citric acid is also going to go in. And when I get my levels right, when I wake up in the morning and I pee the pee is cloudy, which means it's full of oxalate that my body's releasing. But I don't have the other symptoms of that. So I've managed to titrate it. But you take away my biotin, you take away the potassium citrate or you take away the lemon juice, it doesn't work as well. So that's the Dave recipe. But I think your mileage may vary depending on what your body's up to.

Exactly. And those are phenomenal. The Terry recipe, which you've asked me just a few minutes ago is that I take a lot of my wildlights. So that I invented for a Division 1 athlete that could not handle any electrolyte powder. And so because of her sulfate and oxalate sensitivity.

This is a watermelon based product, right?

Yes, watermelon, cilantro and sea salt. And it is amazing for breaking down. So you have the subsodium potassium exchange and we have the watermelon which is really high in citrulline, which is going to increase your nitric oxide, but it also decreases uric acid. Right. So uric acid is really a bad boy. And then uric acid is going to is going to cross over with ammonia. So if you're eating the bad meats, you're going to get a triple whammy. I also look to vitamin B6 in the form of P5P. That's been known to manage the oxalate burden. Right. So P5P, my Wildlife super salt. Super salt. And I start every morning with a green juice to help to alkalize my body. For me, acidity kicks my butt with a green juice.

So you put like kale? No, what's in your green juice?

So I do cucumber because it's got silica, also helps to bind oxalic acid.

But it has lectins in it.

It does, but I'm less worried about lectins.

Very few people have cucumber lectin sensitivities. I don't worry about it either for that very.

It's lectins. I think on the hierarchy of needs, that's like number seven for me.

Unless you're particularly sensitive to one type. You'll know it like there are people where you take a bite, you know, then don't do that one. For most people, I agree they're not the most important. But high lectin foods are probably bad. But cucumber is not high. So anyway, so just a little side thing.

Cucumber and cilantro. I love cilantro because it is a liver detoxifier. It's a heavy metal chelator. It is high in chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is going to help oxygenate because it's going to help my mitochondria. It's not. Even though it's. It's high in iron, it's an iron that is bioavailable. So the iron. Iron is a very bad thing. And the work of Morley, Dr. Morley Robbins, who's wonderful, we've collaborated a lot, is that it's the bioavailability of iron. It's when it gets stuck in the tissues. We actually had, and this is really interesting as a sidebar, but very fascinating in how well meaning doctors can actually almost kill you. We had a client who had a hemoglobin of 2. So they said, we need to infuse you with iron. We need to give you an iron infusion. I said, please do not do that. Please do not do that. Your iron is not bioavailable. It is stuck in your tissue. So they gave her an iron infusion. The iron went to 600. She had a pulmonary embolism, and she turned on three autoimmune conditions. Oh, that's because the iron turned on the amyloids. The iron turned on all of her biofilm. It turned on Lyme.

Oh, my gosh.

So it's really important that we understand the bioavailability of what we're bringing into our bodies. And so alkalinity for me is, number one, acidity is going to kick my patches. And it's probably a combination of histamine and the acid that hurts my. If I drink lemon juice alone, I can feel it in my kidneys. In 30 seconds, I am less histamine. Only until this pandemic, which flipped me a little bit. But acid can be problematic unless you're buffering it. And I think, Dave, the reason why you have such an amazing. Beyond the fact that you were saying it's the phosphorus, Right?

From dairy.

From dairy, yeah. And the lemon is actually the histamine, which you're obviating with the Benadryl.

I don't have to do that every day. In fact, I almost don't need to do Benadryl with lemon juice. But for people who get that symptom, you would do it just for a few days. And I do take. And I've been recommending for the whole pandemic, I take Claritin. I think blocking histamine is probably a good longevity strategy at this point. Like, everyone should Be on Claritin if you want to live longer because you have less inflammation and the world's inflammatory right now.

I think an anti inflammatory via Nanahistamine is phenomenal. One that I love is the DAO enzyme, because if you. And again, back to genetics, if you're missing that DAO enzyme, then an antihistamine of a histamine 2 blocker may not be sufficient. You've got to look to that replacement of that enzyme which is going to then lower that histamine response. And sort of just like when things are turned on, a light switch turns on another light switch and all of a sudden you're on fire. It's the similar cascade backwards, right? When you turn off the histamine response, the oxalates are going to be better, the sulfur is going to be better, and then you can manage these loads differently. Histamine is a very big deal right now.

So I wasn't going to talk with histamine or talk with you about histamine, but it seems like we should have a little side chat about that. I have found that I've went really deep on mast cells which are activated in chronic fatigue. They're activated by toxic mold and they're activated by Covid or other viruses when you have long Covid. So we have this mystery chronic fatigue thing. It's really just these immune cells called mast cells that are like landmines. And then they get supposed to be activated by a real threat. They get activated by non threats. And when one of them goes off, it sets them all off. They release histamine. There's our histamine sensitivity. So if you block histamine for a while, they start to chill out. And then when one of them gets set off, they don't set off the rest. And about 80% of people seem to respond well to Claritin and Pepcid. Taken twice a day in the morning and at night. So that was a recommendation. I could only put on Telegram during the last three years because for some reason when I put it everywhere else, it got just shut down. But it seemed to make people not have long Covid. Oh, sorry. I love long Bovid. I'm sorry, that was a mistake. That's what I was talking about, just in case, you know, because censorship is not real. Just to be really clear. All right, there. I've confused the algorithms enough. So all hail Zuckerberg. What else was I saying? Okay, so we have. We have 80% of people doing that, but it blocks stomach acid. So I tell people, take Obtain hcl. What else besides the DAO enzyme you're talking about? What else should people be doing that they're not doing for histamine?

Histamine, which has been a real long term play in this world of the pandemic, is quercetin. Quercetin is a mast cell stabilizer. Quercetin with bromelain is a wonderful combination because it's also going to help that protein digestion. And so taking that is a really, it's very, very rare that someone can't do quercetin with bromelain. The only time quercetin would be contraindicated is if your phase one liver detoxification is so backed up, so backed up that you got to open it up and open up those channels a little bit and then do it with salt, do it with zinc. However, zinc will increase your iron load. So we got to be careful because we got over zinc over these last several years.

It happens a lot.

I really like, I really like the quercetin with bromelain. Also a big, a big easy cheap thing is charcoal, folks.

One of the original biohacks for years it was probably the third product I made at bulletproof was charcoal. Talk to me about charcoal, histamine and oxalate. How does that work? When do I use it?

So I love charcoal. If I'm going to do anything when I go out and I'm not certain about what, who's going to be preparing the food and what's, what ingredients could be hidden in that, that beautiful plate of mine, I will, I will what I call bookend my, my, my meal with charcoal. So I will take it beforehand and I will take it afterwards. It's a wonderful antihistamine. I do not travel. I don't leave my house without charcoal. It's in my purse. It's a binder, it's an alkalizer. It breaks it down. And you're the expert on charcoal way deeper than I am. But I find that that is you not to take it every day because it binds to everything and then you're going to be demineralized. But in those strategic times, it's a masterful, easy hack, especially if you've set off an autonomic nervous system response where histamine keeps hitting your gut and you can't stop going to the bathroom. Take charcoal.

Yeah. If you eat some food like that leftover turkey or maybe even worse, leftover pork or leftover fish and you like, you get disaster pants. It wasn't the MCT oil in the dressing Guys, it was. It's a very common cause of food poisoning. People don't know it's food poisoning. They just think they have diarrhea because they eat it so much. Leftovers will do that to you. It's your body going, I have histamine in the gut. Get it out, and you can throw it up or you can poop it out. But, you know, if. If I feel that coming on, like. Like there's any kind of. That, a fraction of a Benadryl will stop it almost instantly. I get it at a lot of restaurants. Restaurant food is not that fresh. I don't eat out that often for that reason. But it's a. It's kind of a magical tool. And activated charcoal. I choose one of the two. So if I'm really like, oh, my God, something's not right, and you can feel it, maybe you're coughing a little bit, you start feeling your brain shutting down. This is all histamine stuff.

Yeah.

So then what I'll do is I'll take three charcoals, four charcoals. I don't get constipated easily, so I'll take those. But then I'll. I'll take a pink Benadryl thing. They should be compounded, but whatever. And I'll just bite off, like, a quarter of it, and I'll put it under my tongue so it absorbs. And then magically, I don't get brain fog. I don't get the shits. And everything is fine and normal. I'm not coughing. And if you're looking at me going, dave, what are you talking about? This never happens to me. Actually, yes, it does. You just think it's normal. You go to restaurants, you feel like shit afterwards, and you just think you're supposed to feel like shit. You're not. There's a whole different level of consistently feeling amazing. And once you feel it a few times, you go, oh, maybe I can feel that way all the time. You start recognizing what food does to you. I don't think I'm that delicate of a flower, but I know my mold has set me up for this, my exposure to it, and maybe some genetics, but it's all hackable. And so I love it. We're having this detailed conversation. Some people are. Eyes are glazing over. These are tricks that no one talks about.

Nope, they don't. And it's easy. And, you know, the histamine, antihistamine with the charcoal, the quercetin with the charcoal also works. So either of those two is an easy Hack for a. It's a short, short term, stick it in your mouth. It took about two seconds. And you've just avoided disaster for the next week potentially, because then you're going down all these rabbit holes, going to doctors, saying, do I have parasites? Do I have leaky gut? What do I have? You had a histamine response, folks.

And histamine responses can be all over the map. And they can be neurological, they can be as much as schizophrenia.

Yes.

And you're saying what? One of the things that taught me about this early on, it's probably 25 years ago, I read this really cool book about rotation diets, which are enormously annoying and something you don't need to do anymore. I did them for two years straight where you had to look at what class of food, food, everything. It was like playing Rubik's Cube with your diet. And the guy who had written this book, and I wish I'd remembered his name, it was too long ago. He had found that he had patients who were schizophrenic. And he'd put him on a clean diet and in a room with clean air and they'd become fine. And then you'd walk in and someone would just breathe secondhand smoke on him. And then they would go back to thinking they were Jesus and like, oh, my gosh, that's a histamine response. They're allergic to it. And so maybe that's what's going on with you. And what we just talked about here so far is if you manage histamine levels, you may feel way better. You manage oxalate levels, you may feel way better. What about amyloid? Let's talk about. You and I both agree, chicken is not great food, especially from industrial chickens. And industrial meat isn't great food because it's mean to the animals, bad for soil, and it's probably better than eating crickets or soybeans for humans for sure. But I, I want to, I want to talk more about amyloids, amyloid excretion, what we can do if there's no choice but eating regular industrial meat.

This is a really big passion focus for me because of the massive downstream impact of autoimmunity and acute illness that these amyloids are creating. It's the anti longevity play. If you eat the dirty bird, you're just shortening your life, literally in the United States. I can say that unequivocally. Why? So as we talked about, the tortured animals have these truncated protein structures in their tissues that cannot be, cannot be destroyed. By any cooking process that has been created to date. And so one of the things that I believe I was pioneering in is that I had an end stage cancer client who had amyloidosis. End stage amyloid doses turned to cancer wrapped around its heart, Put him into congestive heart and kidney failure. Two rounds of chemo failed. He had given, was given his last rights. Go home and die. And somehow they found me. This is over a decade ago. And I started researching what the heck are amyloids? I'm like, oh, my God, where are they coming from? Oh, they're coming from our food supply. Holy moly. What do amyloids do? Oh, they make cancer. Oh, they turn on viruses. They create autoimmunity. And so this gentleman that had been given his last rites, the marker of amyloids in his body were light chains. Within three months of reducing the amyloid burden, taking down his histamine and sulfur, he had the full enchilada, sulfur oxalate, histamine. You had to manage it all his light chains and normal. Wow, that's impossible.

Is what?

Light chains, which are the marker for amyloids.

Okay, and how do I get that measured?

It's a blood. Blood test.

Okay. It's a live blood cell analysis.

Yes. Live blood cell. It's light chain. And I don't even think it has to be live blood cell. It's just your serum level. It is a lifeless serum. Serum blood, Just go get it and they'll test your light chain numbers. Okay, so this guy is alive a decade later, no cancer. Go figure. So I thought I was onto something. So what else do amyloids do? Oh, my gosh. They help spark the viruses that live within us that have been hanging out, leaving us alone because we've all been exposed. Viral structures are us. There's more of them than us. Virus, bacteria, fungi, parasites, we coexist. Well, they make them bullies in our sandbox. And then all of a sudden, you had mono when you were 14. And now at 40, you have Hashimoto's and they put you on a bunch of thyroid medication, but you can't process that. So that thyroid medication makes you wonko and makes you gain 70 pounds because you can't process the thyroid hormone, which is turning on your estrogen, which is making you fluffy and competing with your serotonin, so it's making you super depressed and anxious.

Wow.

Right? So amyloids now are contributing to this viral reactivation. But guess what they also do. The fragments build biofilm and they take DNA fragments from our GI tract, which multiply every three or, you know, they regenerate every four to five days.

Wow.

Those fragments will create biofilm. And that biofilm is going to fortify your mold. It's going to fortify anything that has a lipid structure. Candida strep. Strep is tied to a pediatric neuropsychiatric disorder, which I work a lot with.

Amazing.

Trying to kill their parents. And they are seven. I work a lot with that. And we've been very successful against. Manuscript.

Against.

Against this pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder. We've been very successful. But we've got to rid the viruses and the. And the bacteria. So it's not just about viral reactivation. It's DNA fragments forming biofilm. And then I. And then the biofilm will make more amyloids. So I call it the ping pong effect. And then the amyloids will create the viral. Will help protect the viral structure.

Hey, I've got a really good recipe for sliced, like, slivered almonds, Chicken breast on top of kale salad. Would you. Would you like to join me?

No poison on my plate. I'll pass. I'll go fast.

Okay. If you had to eat a bowl of almonds or chicken breast, which would it be?

Oh, my. Oh, that is such a. Mm. I would say I would eat a bowl of. Mm. Oh, that is such a hard question. Pass, Dave, pass.

You can't pass. You gotta eat one.

Okay. So I would say chicken is so destructive. And because in the pandemic environment, we know that spike protein makes seven vectors of amyloids. I'll eat the almonds, and then I'll take a bunch of my wildlife vitamin B6, A, heck of a lot of salt, semantohistamines, and try to pass the almonds. It's very destructive. But guess what? The oxalates also, they play with amyloids, but it would be an indirect hit to contribute to amyloids because of the biofilm that they also create.

Was a trick question. You're supposed to say that you eat the politician who is trying to force you to choose between the two. Because politicians are made out of meat.

Oh, my God, I love it. I tried to pass. He gave me no choice.

By the way, anytime a politician says they're going to force you to eat crickets, the answer is you're made out of meat. And I don't eat crickets. That's just. That's how the world. I don't want to go dark on Things like that. But we, I mean, a man's got to eat and a woman apparently. But you know, it's like we're just not going to do that. And I'm not going to force my kids into some sort of nonsense climate change driven thing when we clearly know who makes glyphosate, we clearly know who allowed it to be sprayed, we clearly know who's doing this and if they're going to use regulations on the stuff. No, I will not go back to feeling like all the time because I spent too much of my life doing it and it was entirely avoidable. I shouldn't have spent $2 million first half of that to fix myself. The other half, I just did it for fun, to upgrade myself. But the number of people suffering right now is enormous and we did it. And there are people who knew what they were doing. And I got to ask one more thing though. You talked about B6 earlier. You said that you use the form P5P. And I've been really vocal about something with B6 and I want to run it past you and see what your thoughts are. Pyridoxine HCl, which is the synthetic form of vitamin B6. It's in almost all supplements that are out there that use B6. Only 5% of it converts in your body to P5P, which is the active form. The other 95% clogs up the receptors for a thousand days. That means that if you're not taking P5P or a chelated form that's basically the same as P5P, you're almost certainly not helping a B6 deficiency. True or false?

Well, you are absolutely right, is that nobody should be taking a non chelated or natural form of P5P for multiple reasons. One is B vitamins, when they're not utilized, will actually hyper acidify your structure. So back to that hyperacidity. Also, you will see high B6 in your blood. You're not assimilating it. So we should get our B6 levels checked. If your B6 is too high, you're probably taking the wrong form. A third level of the B6 is with. I work with a lot of Ms. And Dave, again, not making claims anecdotally, but we just not only reverse someone's symptomology, but the lesions were gone.

Why not make claims?

Well, because then we get in trouble. We're just saying.

I mean, but if you had a patient who reversed it. That's not a claim, that's. That's clinical evidence, my friend. You're not going to claim you'll cure another person, but you had a person reverse it. That's a case report you can publish.

Yes, we can publish it. All the top neurologists are saying, how did we do this?

But it's not like it's impossible. Terry Wahls is a friend. She's been on the show a couple of times. She's a medical doctor who. What did she do? She went on a diet pretty similar to this. It wasn't low oxalate intentionally, but it probably was lower. But she also used electrical stimulation and she eats lots of meat and lots of grass fed meat. And I'd say I've been 80% agreement with her nutritionally and electrically. I use the electricity on myself too. It's one of the biohacks. So she reversed it when she had. She was in a wheelchair and she's like runs marathons. So if anyone says that you can't do it, like Terry's gonna kick your ass. Right?

Exactly. Both cherries are going to kick your ass.

I was going to say, I should say the cherries will kick your ass because you reversed it in a patient. And I don't think that's a bad thing to say. So you can't claim you can cure everyone, but can you claim you cured someone?

Yeah, absolutely. And the four neurologists were just totally dumbfounded. It was oxalate, sulfur and protein because he had turned on the varicella virus that attacked his nervous system. And so now this 39 year old protein shames his friends. If you're eating, if you're eating chicken, who turned on the amyloid? Who turned on the varicella? Who made me not be able to walk?

Wow. So protein shaming is a thing. So just online someone was saying, you know, some kind of nonsense about protein. I don't even remember the details of it, but it had to do with plant based proteins are the same because protein is protein and, and I'm like, that's awesome. Because that means spider venom and gluten are high protein. Like we should eat those. And it's so stupid. Anyone who's like high protein, unless you know what the protein is, it doesn't matter because some proteins will kill you. Now what's the best kind of protein? Is it grass fed beef from wild caught cows that you know. Okay, well that's why I live in Texas. They're wild enough here anyway.

They're very wild in Texas indeed, Dave. So my, my observations and just the, the evidence from the practice is regenerative farming will take away the problem that we created. Duh, duh duh duh. These cows didn't come up, didn't, haven't been on the planet for millennia and all of a sudden started breeding amyloids and these chickens the same. So we get back to regenerative farming. We will get back to living as nature intended. Which is actually the subtitle of my book and Wild I say now in this world of a pandemic where we are amyloid burdened on so many, I call it the disruptive mirror effect. So it's disruptive, right? We've got the amyloids coming from the food supply. Now we know clinically in the literature, hey, Spike protein makes amyloids. Go figure. Why would we want to overburden ourselves? Not being wild or a regenerative eating methodology is non negotiable in my book. The potential bad thing is too big. It's too way too big. And so living as nature intended is how each of us should be voting with how we decide to spend our money on food.

I kind of like that. But we're not living as nature intended. We're on Zoom right now looking at blue light screens and we, we do other things to help overcome limitations. So I would like to know. There are at least half of listeners right now are not in a position to always buy grass fed meat because it's damned expensive. Some bad people, we don't know if they were funded by the cricket soy lobby or another government that hates our people or maybe both. Or maybe they're the same thing. But someone's been going through and burning meat production, dairy production and even chicken production facilities, thousands of them across the US which is one of the reasons food's so expensive. Aside from the 40% of our currency that was printed last year or created out of thin air, which is basically stealing from your bank account. There's all that stuff going on, but they can't afford it. So let's say I've got two bucks a pound to spend on protein for my family and I can buy, you can go to the Costco business center and you can buy decent quality beef cuts, larger pieces, you got to cut them up yourself, but you can buy them for two bucks a pound. It's very affordable, but it's going to have amyloid in it, it's not going to be organic. What is my best strategy for eating that and still thriving?

Okay, so great question. And I'm a Cuban refugee, Dave, so I know how to stretch my food Dollar. So I think community is key here. If you go out and buy a regenerative cow, regeneratively raised cow, and you break it down among your friends, you can get to that very, very low price point. So community is key here. We're not going to all buy one cow, but we can distribute it across our friends. I'm doing it in my own neighborhood.

It's still six bucks a pound.

It's still six bucks. That's part one. And then the second piece is you. You help the food stretch. And if you do the ground, which, let's say the ground bison is $9.99 a pound, if you can get it now, it's probably $11.99. Then you take vegetables into that are non sulfur, non oxalate, and you stretch that food dollar.

But vegetables are more expensive than meat on a per calorie basis, not on a. It's five bucks for a little thing of arugula, and it has, like 7 calories in it.

That's true. The arugula is expensive. However, if you look at a zucchini, a zucchini is not expensive. It's going to cost you maybe a dollar. If you look at your own tomatoes. Tomatoes are high in lycopene. They are high. They're higher in histamine. But because they're also antiviral. Again, back to the hierarchy with the tomato.

The nightshades, even. Interesting.

I don't have a nightshade. I really think that sulfur and oxalate and trump the nightshades.

Got it.

And I've seen it over and over again in my practice. And again, the high antiviral nature of tomatoes puts them into a happy place.

Wow.

So the zucchini, the yellow squash, the cucumber, even you stretch it, it's not going to be perfect. And then certain beans, not black beans. Those are terrible.

You're gonna tell people eat beans. All right. My phytic acid, oxalic acid. Farting friends, like, we're not gonna like you after this. All right, so beans, Geez. Should we start smoking, too?

I mean, we'll stretch your dollar. Not all beans. I like the adzuki bean is the highest in protein. It's very low in histamine. So not all beans. Black beans don't go near. Soy, of course, is an oxalate, and it's terrible because it's high in estrogen.

Pinto beans, I mean, should I go back to my New Mexico roots and get some lard and refried pinto beans?

Not lard, but I believe are you kidding?

Have you seen my pigs? My pigs are legit. They have lard. They'll make you happy.

Okay. They're happy lard. Not if you're talking Crisco.

No. Industrial lard is terrible.

Okay, yeah, not industrial lard, but actually tallow is fantastic. Right. So we can really stretch our dollars. And I've gotten to be able to make a. A meal for about $3.57. And I've posted it on my Instagram with it's very healthy. And you're not going to. We're not going to be perfect, Dave. So this is the thing is perfection not required, right? Perfection not required. And so what is the least worst option? And if I'm trying not to eat an amyloid chicken, that's going to cost me a lot per pound anyway. Chicken breasts are very expensive. Industrialized beef is number two. But if you can get to, like you said, a Costco that's even organic, you're getting better. It's like, how do we mitigate what we can mitigate? And again, not going to be perfect. When I go out and I have nothing on the menu, I will go for a grass fed beef and I'll be okay. Can I do that every day? No, but I can do it enough. And take my charcoal, take my antioxidants, take my digestive enzymes that are bromelain based, because a lot of enzymes that are plant based are actually made from aspergillus. So it's going to be mold. It's going to make worse problems. So it's really understanding where do I cross over and how do I feel? Because once you start taking the large burdens away, then you can manage the other burdens. Now if I have to eat industrialized meat, if I'm forced fed, then I'll take serrapeptase. It's a proteolytic enzyme. It's going to help break down that.

Amyloid burden with the food or on an empty stomach afterwards.

So proteolytic enzymes typically are taken on an empty stomach. I would take bromelain with my food, a bromelain enzyme with my food, and a proteolytic enzyme. Two hours, two hours after, one hour before my meal. So you do it in between. So you're actually breaking up those structures.

For most of the last 20 years, I've had between 5 and 10 of the large capsules of serrapeptase every night before bed. And this because I learned about this at that longevity nonprofit group in Palo Alto that I used to run. And like, oh, this is a really good strategy because it breaks up thrombin and fibrinogen, which cause blood clotting. And Before I was 30, I was diagnosed to being at high risk of stroke and heart attack because I had excessive clotting in my blood. I'm like, I'm not going to do that. For people listening, if you're eating industrial meat, you might want to do that. If you fly a lot, you might want to do that. If you were unwillingly subjected to a multi billion person clinical trial of a certain compound that shall not be named, you might want to do that because the data shows you might magically have more clotting. And this stuff breaks up clotting and it also can break up amyloid. So this would be a really good longevity strategy. It's not cheap, but you can buy big bottles of it online for relatively cheap now. So the question is, which is cheaper to buy relatively large cuts of affordable organic, if you can, or even non organic beef and then take serrapeptase, it's still cheaper that way because Serrapeptase is 20 bucks for a month's supply. So if you were to say, all right, this is my budget for meat, you're probably going to work out that way. I highly recommend organic or grass fed. And you know, if you buy the cheaper cuts from a farmer or the ground, you can do it.

Another thing we can do is we combine again. How do we stretch our dollars? How do we get creative? You can have a grass fed or regenerative farm meat with an amyloid, a less, a less perfect cut of meat and you mix them so because the overall amyloid burden will be lowered because you're going to have one with a lot less. So how do we do this? How do we stay. You're right. Living as nature intended. Nature is. Now I put nature in air quotes because we are in a high tech, really dirty planet on many levels. And so we have to get really creative. And so nature is right now denatured. And so how do we use what we have, be really intelligent about it and use the technology? So part of the wilditarian ethos is using the intelligence of technology with the wisdom of our ancestors and bringing it into the present moment so it becomes a yes. And so we can coexist and thrive. I'm very hopeful for our world if we can raise. And this is back to your mitochondrial. We got to keep our mitochondria happy. And how do we do that? If we do everything right and we live in a miserable existence of Negative thinking. We're still going to express everything and turn on those viruses and we're going to be as sick or worse.

I love what you're saying. We've gone through so much, so much really cool knowledge here. And guys, if you've been following some of the standard biohacking practices like taking P5P versus B6, using activated charcoal, taking magnesium, eating only grass fed beef for the past, in my case, it's been almost 20 years now. The differences add up over time and you don't have to do everything right. On rare occasions, I don't have grass fed meat. I really don't eat chicken very often, like maybe once a year. Just, I don't know why, because either it's some kind of heritage breed or someone made it with love and whatever, I can handle that. But if I eat chicken a lot, it just doesn't feel as good. Managing this thing about oxalate, thing about histamine with Claritin. I am almost to the point of adding a daily dose of Claritin as part of my longevity stack forever because the downside's very low and the, the risk of having this excessive immune response just from the world we've created is pretty high. So maybe that's more important than a statin. In fact, I would probably argue all day long and every cardiothoracic surgeon friend is like, DAV you buddy. And I'm like, all right guys, didn't need to put you out of business. But like, you're doing it wrong. We can debate that later. Terry, I, I greatly appreciate your work. Wilditarian Diet was, I think that was your most recent book. Is there a new one coming out?

Not. I'm building my teaching model, the cochrane method. It's 500 pages so far.

It's going to be cool and wild. Light is the electrolyte powder that you, that you talked about earlier. W I L dash L Y T E. Very good. Yes, you sent me a couple of those. So. And that's the watermelon with cilantro thing. And just for, just for completeness there with the wildlife stuff is that how many servings is, is in one of those things? Like it's a little canister.

It's. Yeah, it's about 50 servings in a can.

Okay, got it. So that's how that stuff works. And anything else that our listeners should know.

I really think that we're so grateful to you for opening up the door on the oxalate thing. This is a really big deal. Oxalate, histamine You've been pioneer in the oxalate histamine mold. And now more than ever, I just want to really applaud you, Dave, because it's time to really get real on this.

You know, I, I, I appreciate the pioneer thing. And on the mold thing, I've been a big voice for sure. And, and it's funny, the first chapter of the, of the bulletproof diet, it's like the big six trends in food, they're all there. But I can't say that I went as deep as possible on all of them. In fact, even the data on oxalates wasn't very good back then about what was in what food. So there's a book by Fallon recently that has more about, it's called Toxic Superfoods, has more about oxalates. I'm like, oh, well, look, there's more databases than the last time I looked. This is good stuff. I would just say my job is to understand directionally and then to find and curate experts and then come up with best practices across a lot of stuff that you're going to do. So I don't have to be the expert in everything. But if it's about food stuff, I'm pretty good about brain stuff, I'm pretty good mold, I'm pretty good. And the other stuff, getting good at oxalates and histamine. But I think there are people who are far better experts than me, and I'm looking to connect with them and learn from them. So thank you for teaching the whole audience here all your good stuff.

My pleasure. I'm hopeful for the future. We just got to stay positive and.

Be smart and get wood chippers.

Get those wood chippers. Fertilizer time.

I'm just kidding. I don't want that soil anyway. All right, guys, thank you for listening to this episode, and I'll keep bringing you the good stuff and some things hopefully you haven't heard anywhere else, because that's why you're here. You want to hear it here first? See you on the next episode. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.