Why You Can’t Live Without Minerals

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today we're going to talk about minerals and some foundational questions about why they matter in your biology and why you probably would do a lot better as a biohacker or just as a human being who wants to be hard to kill if you pay way more attention to them. You have about 30 trillion cells in your body. Every one of them uses minerals. The reason the body uses minerals, there are some basic chemistry things that we do, but in biochemistry, minerals are oftentimes part of enzymes. And what enzymes do is enzymes allow the body to do chemical reactions with far, far less energy than would normally be required. In fact, without enzymes we wouldn't be alive. So they're building blocks, but they're also basically factors in enzymes. And if you're missing some minerals, then you don't make enzymes well, and then your body does its best with what it's got. And our guest today is Caroline Allen, who's a co founder of Beam Minerals and she's going to talk about what happens with minerals, how she used minerals for her own biology. And we're going to go really deep into research on how they work in human physiology, especially minerals that come from ancient plants. Something called fulvic and humic mineral complexes. Something that if you're, you know, 70 or 80 years old, you might have heard of these because we talked about these a lot when the research was hot in the 60s, 70s and 80s and then we kind of moved on. But these work differently than other minerals. And I've been reviewing the literature and I'm blown away. And what I've been doing for the past two years now, thereabouts, is I actually put it in my, my coffee in the morning because you can't taste it. And all of a sudden I'm getting the benefits that you're going to hear about on. This is something that is affordable and something that I think has a system wide effect on human biology and something that's really worth your attention, which is why we're doing a show based on it. I'm happy you guys are all here to listen in the live audience, both Clubhouse and Upgrade Collective. And Caroline, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Dave.

It is my pleasure. Now, you were kind of like me, corporate career, software development, business consulting, boring life. Okay, it's not that boring, but it gets old. It does get old. And it did something bad to you. As far as I can tell you Got inflammation everywhere. And kind of tell me your story and what minerals did for you because it's important that people connect with that, just like this is a real thing. So what happened to you?

Yeah, well, I think there's a couple things. I think life happened to me, meaning even without all of the stress of a corporate career. This happens to everybody as we grow older. But what specifically happened to me is that I ended up with a body that had inflammation throughout. I had major gut inflammation, I had major mouth inflammation, I had hemorrhoids, I had headaches almost every day. I had had a lifelong gluten intolerance that I unaware of, but that certainly added to the inflammation in my gut, and I learned about that. But even with taking gluten out of my diet, I still continue to have this systemic inflammation. I had flat lined adrenals and I had very low thyroid, so I was in a bad way. And I had worked with naturopaths and all sorts of different people trying to find out what was wrong with me and get better. And then my friend Dan Howard introduced me to Fulvic and Humic minerals, this beautiful simple drink.

How much did you spend trying to get better? Like, like breast house?

How many, how much money?

Yeah.

Oh, I probably spent $75,000.

I 300,000. And I spent another million since then on upgrades. But that' it's that big of a deal. And you're not alone. There are many people who spend all of the money they have because they're wrecked. And then they're like, I don't know what to do. And that's what motivates me to write my blog and to do this podcast. I'm like, I don't want that to happen to anyone else. I'm lucky that I had a job where I could afford to get well. But how much money of that 75 that you spent did you need to spend? Knowing what you know now.

You know very little. I. I really think very little. And that is because, you know, after, after getting well, and that's a little bit of a story, but after, after taking these minerals which allowed my body to naturally come back to homeostasis naturally do the healing work that it does when it's well supported at a cellular level. I mean, it was like magic. If, I mean, one of the quick stories that's really great is that I had really bad inflammation in my mouth, like deep, these deep pockets. I went to my dentist. I remember I cried at my dentist like multiple times because I was trying to figure out what was wrong with me? And I started taking these minerals, and I'd taken them for about two and a half months, and I went in to get my teeth cleaned, and I used to have to have Novocaine to get my teeth cleaned because it was so painful. And I went in and I had my teeth cleaned, and it was pretty easy. You know, I actually didn't use any of the pain medication. And then my dentist came in, and she looked in my mouth, and immediately she said, oh, my God, what is happening? What are you doing? The PH in your mouth is totally different. The tissue is changing. What are you doing? And I kind of thought about it. I didn't really think of anything. I was like, I don't know. But what I realized after she went out and then came back was that I had been taking these minerals and. Yeah. So. Yeah. And then. And that was repeated with my naturopath and with all sorts of things over a period of time and over a period of three years. My health is just. My adrenals are almost back to normal, all sorts of things.

So one of the things that. That happens as you start to get inflammation over time is you see it in the gums. And there's two ducts underneath the tongue that release extra minerals or imbalanced minerals. And if you're eating a lot of oxalates or you're eating too much calcium, it actually makes a lot of tartar on the back of your lower teeth. And if you eat raw spinach salads every day or ca. Every day for a week, you'll actually feel like a graininess on the back of your teeth. And that's the body trying to dump all this extra stuff. And it's one of the reasons that gum health is an early indicator. There's also bacterial stuff. We just did an episode about different changing the oral biome in your mouth, but I experienced the same thing. I had to get my teeth cleaned four times a year because of this tartar buildup that was from mineral imbalances. And those can come from environmental signals messing with things. They can come from not having enough minerals, have too much of one versus the other. And the big thing that I learned, and the reason I wanted to have you on the show to talk about this, is that you can have too much minerals outside the cells and no minerals inside the cells, and you have too much in the cells of one and none outside or too much outside. So there's like, red blood cell and other tissue minerals, some of which is hard to measure. And then there's minerals floating around that can't get in. And it turns out the thing about getting them in the cells is what form which the delivery system. And the most evidence I've been able to find, and I mean, I went really deep on the science for this episode. I probably read 20 papers on. Most of them are 80s and 90s on, on humic and fulvic. And what it turns out is it's the size the minerals that are in them and whether they can actually get in. And there's interesting stuff around the electrical stuff on the membrane of a cell with these forms of minerals. And I'm. I'm pretty darned convinced that it's not one pathway. There's probably eight that I've been able to identify about how they're getting in. And you guys have heard me talk about liposomes. There's actually tiny micelles which are like liposomes, which are these little fat soluble things. So this is part of it. So you can't lick, you know, a bumper hitch and say, there, I got my iron. And that seems obvious, right? But that's actually how it works. So you got to say, all right, what's the form? And then you can have complex mineral forms like the chelates and like the orotate, which is one of my favorite forms for some of the minerals. But mineral salts go in a different way than these, basically nanoparticles, ionic particles. And I think it's worth doing both. And this is my first question for you. Do we need mineral salts or are you like, oh, just take your humic and fulvic and you're good to go?

Well, here's to talk about it. I feel like we have to kind of go down the rabbit hole a bit. Okay, So I feel like the humic and fulvic. I'm not saying you should. You don't need salt, of course you need salts. But I personally, from my experience and my research around cell salts, if I had a choice between taking cell salts and we don't. We haven't even talked about what the difference is. And humic and fulvic complexes, not acids or colloids, I would definitely go with the humic and fulvic. And we can go into why that is. And I think it's. I think it's because. So first of all, you know, the most exciting thing I think about it is, you know, these humic and fulvic complexes are really like. They're like Mother Nature's answer to mineral supplementation. All plants and animals across the earth already use these. That's what your body already uses, but you just have very low levels of them because of production farmed foods and all of those. You know, that's. That's one of your bandwagons. I know.

Let me. Let me paint a picture, and I want you to tell me when my picture is wrong.

Okay.

If you were to say, all right, I'm gonna. I'm a good person. I'm gonna eat my vegetables. Okay. And let's assume that you're bulletproof, so you know which vegetables are actually gonna punch you in the face and you eat them. So maybe you should eat less of those. Right. But you know, you're going to do a kale free juice and all that stuff. There's a certain amount of these minerals in those vegetables, but there's only so much. So imagine if you took tons of these things and you compressed them over time, and you got rid of most of the organic compounds, and what you had left was an incredibly concentrated set of minerals from plants. And then you made tea out of that.

Yes.

Like, way beyond what you could get from juicing, where you're throwing out all the. The extra bulk stuff, but you're getting so much more. How many pounds of vegetable matter? These are old dinosaur vegetables, basically. But, you know, how many pounds of those does it take to make, you know, a pound of fulvic and humic minerals? I believe it's like tons of ancient vegetable matter that gets compressed.

Yes.

Do you have a number?

Yes, and honestly, I don't have a number for that, but I believe it is Hundreds of pounds of this is raw plant material that is broken down and decomposed is kind of an interesting story. I don't know if you want to go into how they're actually created, because it's really interesting. So if you think about like a tablespoon of dirt, it's got a really healthy dirt. It's got like a hundred or ten. Excuse me, ten billion microbes just in a tablespoon. Okay. Now, of course, our soils that we're production farming in, most of those microbes have been killed from pesticides, so that's a problem. But anyway, you have these 10 billion microbes, and it takes a very specific set of species of microbes that go through a sequential process. So one microbe eats or digests some of the plant material and it excretes a substance. And then it takes another species of microbe that comes and eats or digests that excretion. Then another microbe comes and eats that microbe. And this goes on in, in a form like this. And ultimately you have a microbe that's excreting something called human. Okay. So it's a, it's gone just H u M I n. So and which is different than the ancient plant matter, which is called humate. So the human is what you see in the forest when you see things are decomposing or you look in a pond and you see brown water. That's human. That's the, that's this decomposition process happening. Okay. But the humate is the crystalline substance that's created out of that hundreds of pounds of raw plant material that's been, that's gone through this microbial decomposition process, ultimately ending up in human. And then slowly over a hundred, you know, over a million years, you know, getting compressed down into this crystalline substance. So it's, it's kind of like you get all of the best parts of the plants without any of those anti nutrients or any of those things because it's been broken down into its chemical or mineral components directly available to the body.

So it's the most concentrated form of minerals that you could get and you couldn't eat that many plants.

Exactly.

A lot of people listening on Upgrade Collective or just listening whenever, wherever they're listening to this when it gets published or on Clubhouse, they've probably heard of shilajit.

Yes.

What is the difference between the B minerals version of humic and fulvic mineral complexes and shilajit? Because there's interesting studies and there's a lot of overlap.

Yeah. I mean they're actually the same substance. One is from the Himalayas and one is from other locations where we get, as an example, where we get ours. The, you know, on a. You know, if you're going to try and eat. Have you ever tried to eat it?

In fact, I've never noticed.

Oh my gosh.

I don't think should works that well. I know people who swear by it, but it's basically kind of scum that comes out of rocks.

Exactly.

Which doesn't mean it's a bad thing. But the studies that I found show that the composition of minerals vary greatly depending on where you get it. And the, the size of the molecule is something called a dalton, a very, very fine unit of measure. I know about daltons because there's a reason that bulletproof collagen doesn't taste like shoes. It's because I got the daltons right. And it was a lot of work in the early days of making collagen. A Thing in order to. So I understand there's a difference in particle size and difference in composition of minerals based on where you get it. How do you know that you're getting the good stuff at B Minerals versus something else? Like do you have studies or what's your, what's your take on, on where you get yours?

Well, of course we think that ours comes from a very, very incredible, incredibly rich deposit. You know, one of the ways that you can tell that is in the full spectrum aspect of it. When you, when you do the certificate of analysis level testing and you determine what levels of minerals exist in this particular material, it's off the charts, much more concentrated than as an example. Ours don't come from the Great Salt Lake. So nothing against those minerals. Again, I think mineral supplementation of any kind is better than none, but they're just not very full spectrum comparatively to the humic and fulvic.

And when you say full spectrum and people wouldn't really know this unless you're really a nerd, but there's probably a need for iridium in your body. It's just excessively small, right. And there's these not very famous minerals that are out there and you want a little bit of those and having what you're calling full spectrum there. I think there's valid scientific evidence. But there are superstar ones like you know, zinc and copper and magnesium and whatever else. You're not going to get enough magnesium from these complexes, I don't believe, because you need, you know, a gram or so. So you're going to get magnesium and salt farm and you'll get calcium and sodium and potassium. So we're not talking about those minerals as much as we're talking about the, the, we'll call them micro minerals, for lack of a better word. But the ones you need just a little bit of.

Well, the only, the only thing that I would like to throw into the mix here is that though you may not get the large amounts of magnesium or potassium that you may need. The cool thing about ionic minerals is that when they are assimilated, they actually stay in solution much longer. So, and this is a whole thing we could talk about so they actually build up over time. So over time my system has become more, more remineralized and so it's easier for my body to maintain or gain homeostasis because the minerals are available. The way I like to describe this is kind of a cool thing that, a description that I ran across. And if you think about the gut as like a hose and on the inside of that hose is our hose are all these ionic receptors. So an ionic mineral, just for people who don't know what that is, is a mineral. Like if you have zinc, and zinc gluconate is an ionic mineral. It's been. It's bound. The zinc is bound to the gluconate. Okay. And on the inside of your gut are a myriad of receptors for all sorts of things, like iridium. There are very few, but there are receptors for iridium. There are receptors for phosphorus. There are receptors for all for these different things. So when we're talking about mineral, how to get minerals into our body, we have to think about first, absorption. And this is the absorption process. So you drink, or let's say you take a pill of magnesium and this mega dose format, and now you've got magnesium flooding through your gut. But you only have so many receptors, so you will really only end up getting about 10 or 12% of that. First of all, your body, because it's a pill or powder, you have to digest it first. And that takes a period of time. And then also there's only so many receptors. So most of it washes through, through, and you only end up getting absorption matters.

It's kind of like food. A lot of people don't know this. You eat a steak, you might spend 30% of the calories in the steak absorbing the steak, but if you eat corn syrup, you eat 100% of the corn syrup because it doesn't require any digestion. This is why that calorie counting stuff is nonsense. It's how much of it can the body use, which is important.

And I like that statement where people say, you know, we used to say we are what we eat, but actually we're what we assimilate.

There you go. I just posted on Instagram, a gram of uranium has 20 billion calories in it. So therefore, you'll get fat if you eat a gram of. You think you'll weigh 5,000 pounds after you eat it. Hey, it's just math. It's, you know, concert. It's Newton's law. And you're like, come on, guys, that's clearly absurd. But the idea is, okay. And also magnesium. If you take too much magnesium for your receptors, you get disaster pants. This is how you know if you've had too much, it gives you the runs because the body's like, I got to shed this. So there's a use for the salts, right? But then what do you get into the cells for enzyme activities? And I don't know and maybe you do. What percentage of a salt mineral is going to enter the cell? Do we have good data on that or does it depend on what kind of salt it is?

Well, again, it does. It depends on the, the delivery format. So again, it's, it has to do. And so this is why I'm trying to get to this piece, which is about. So we talked about absorption, now let's talk about assimilation. So absorption is getting those minerals into the bloodstream, okay. And then assimilation is getting those into the cell. Okay. At least the ones that need to get into the cell. Okay.

Right.

So that's where this fulvic complex is a killer thing. It means just amazing, because the fulvic complex is a flavonoid. And what it does is it carries 60 times its weight, up to 60 times its molecular weight of nutrients into the cell. Then it carries, it can carry up to 60 times its weight of toxins and biowaste out of the cell. So think about all that inflammation in my body that was stored in the cells. And because I didn't have much of this transportation capacity, literally my system was toxified and having a really hard time getting rid of these toxins and et cetera.

So even after reading all the papers on these, I understand there's some stuff we're going to talk about with inflammation. Like I think there's six papers on inflammation reduction from these complexes, like on par with taking cortisol levels. And cortisol is profoundly anti or prednisone, at least in the study that I found. But even before we get there, I don't understand how fulvic and humic minerals cause toxins to leave cells. I know they do it, but I don't understand how, how does that work?

Oh, great. Okay, so think of it this way. So there are, there are, there are lots of ways actually that things come in and go out of the cells. Okay? One of them, the kind of, the, the basic way, is passive diffusion, okay? And that is related to what's called a concentration gradient. So if you have, you know, two bodies of water that are attached together through a channel and one has more salt than the other, over time they will naturally try to create a concentration gradient of that salt. And that's what's happening in your cells and outside your cells all the time is this passive diffusion. The next type is called the CO transport. Excuse me, Active diffusion is the next one. So active diffusion requires a flavonoid, like the fulvic complex, something that actually can carry or open a channel. And carry something into the cell or out of the cell still using that diffusion process. The third way is this CO transport and that's what the fulvic does because fulvic minerals there, these complexes are one of the most highly charged molecules like, known to man. They're amazing that way. So they attract these, the minerals, et cetera, the nutrients, and carry them 60 times of their way in using this standard passive. Once the channel is open, the passive diffusion process occurs. Now one of what's even more cool is that the humic complexes have this ability. It's like a, it's a chemical process. It interacts with the cell at an atomic level and it opens more channels in the cell wall. They call it. They say that from their studies, the humic complexes increase cell wall permeability. So that's how, that's why these humic and fulvic things are so incredible. And one of the things that they're studying worldwide is that the humic and fulvic, they occur together everywhere in nature and they have this somewhat symbiotic relationship. And, and as soon as you start studying it, you actually end up in quantum mechanics. And I know nothing about that. That's probably the limit where I went, okay, I don't know if I can study this. But the fulvic complex actually has an ability to change its electrical charge. And there. One of the reasons that they posit that occurs is because the humic complex only stays in solution in a certain ph range.

So you've got to stay somewhat alkaline for this to work, right?

Exactly. And the fulvit complex actually changes its electrical polarity to adjust the phase in the area to keep that. They, they don't know exactly why it does it, but they notice that it keeps the ph at a certain level.

Thank you for saying, in the area. So there's a lot of very annoying. You have to drink alkaline water or you're a bad person. I fell for that in the late 90s. And I'm just going to say it's B.S.

Yeah.

A battery has positive and negative and it doesn't work without that. And you have the equivalent of batteries in your biology. So sometimes you need alkaline here and you need acid here. And it's the difference between the two that makes electrons, it's kind of important. So like, the quality of your water matters greatly. The structure of your water matters greatly. But if you're worried about alkalinity, baking soda kicks ass over alkaline water. And it's A lot easier to make. Um, and you can do potassium bicarbonate and all these other things. But what you're saying is this stuff gets into the cell and it changes its polarity. So it's tuning inside or at the border of the cell, it's tuning the, the alkalinity so that you get better flow of gunk out of the cells, you can do the cellular cleanup. Okay.

Exactly, exactly. And then the cool thing.

Oh, go on now, people, in the upgrade collecting science piece for you guys on daveasbury.com as well, going into the science here. But I believe that this is letting you get more of the gunk out of the cells, which is one of the seven big things you'd maintain. And I've written a lot about toxic metals and things. So people see reductions in mercury and reductions in nickel and lead and things like that because probably they're opening up their cells.

Exactly. And the cool thing is, so now you've using this fulvic. This fulvic complexes have gotten that gunk out of your cells. Finally your cells. I kind of say like your cells are having a party and because they're so happy to be getting rid of all this junk and that it actually affects the nervous system, at least My experience in talking with many people is it actually affects the nervous system over time because the nervous system kind of starts to relax a bit instead of kind of being on edge. But once that gunk gets out of the cells, now you want to get it out of the body. And this is the beauty of the humic complex. So we talked about this fulvit complex is very, very small, much, much smaller than a cell. But the humic complex is actually a very large molecule. It hangs out in the bloodstream and it's supercharged and it's a chelator. So it's the way I like to describe it. I think it's a really good visual is think about a Velcro ball. And it basically travels through the bloodstream, picking up heavy metals, binding with free radicals, picking up bio waste and toxins. And then at a certain point, it gets so heavy, kind of at a molecular weight level, that it falls out of solution and it leaves the body through the normal channels. It's like nature's janitor is the way I think of it.

A lot of longtime listeners or people who've read my books know about activated charcoal. And I've been just beating that drum for 10 plus years. And what activated charcoal does, it also has a very strong negative charge and it'll attract toxins, but it doesn't enter the blood. It stays in the gut. And if you can have something that has an equivalent effect that actually does it in the blood. Cleaning the blood is kind of important for anti aging. In fact, you guys have seen me on video getting my blood taken out in basic dialysis and washing through special filters to remove crap from the plasma and then putting the clean ozonated plasma back in because that actually does make you younger. But having little mop up operations every day seems like a really good anti aging strategy.

And then think about using the humic with the charcoal.

Yeah.

What a great team, right?

Oh, totally. And you can take them together, actually, can you take them at exactly the same time or will the charcoal bind? They're both negatively charged. They shouldn't stick to each other. Right.

I don't see any reason you couldn't take them together. I certainly do.

From a biochemistry perspective, I think it's okay.

Yeah.

Some of the things that are happening in the world right now, there's people who are getting long Covid we have massive problems with autoimmune issues, with allergies. All of those are tied to mast cell activation. This is the mechanism of inflammation. And one that if you've ever taken an anti allergy pill or you've swollen up after a mosquito bite, whatever, it's all about mast cell degranulation. And what happens is when you take benadryl or something like that, you're blocking histamine. But what the studies are showing about humic and fulvic, the stuff that, you know, you stuff that you're talking about, this whole episode, the stuff that beam minerals is based on, is that in studies that it reduces TNF alpha, which is a major inflammatory marker in the body or signal in the body. And what happens in the gut. And I wrote about this in the fasting book, if you fast, the gut bacteria get annoyed because like I don't have any food. So then they make something called lipopolysaccharide. And lipopolysaccharide is something that causes systemic inflammation, causes brain fog. It causes cravings so bad gut bacteria will do that, stressed gut bacteria will do that. And they use it in animal models to cause inflammation. This is what Wim Hof was basically taking when he was doing his breathing to show that he could actually consciously control his immune system. Well, it turns out that in a study they were adding fulvic to people reduced the TNF alpha that came out as a response to lipopolysaccharide so they're introducing this nasty chemical that all of us have being made on board every day. And this stuff blocked it and it reduced Cox 2, which is what those non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs like aspirin and Aleve and stuff like that. I think aspirin is COX2, I don't remember. But anyway, that's what those things do and they're saying, hmm, that's interesting. And the studies go on and on. Reductions in something called IL4, IL13. So what this shows is not just from one study, but many studies, gee, these have an anti allergy effect. And if you're worried about your immune system going bonkers after you get any infection, bacterial or viral, even the real popular trendy viral ones, Notice how I avoided saying anything there that would get noted by any sort of automated systems listeners?

Yes, yes.

But I think it's a good idea to have this stuff present on a regular basis because you don't want overactive inflammatory mast cells in the body. And it's an epidemic happening right now.

It's one of the things that changed in my body is I used to be so allergic in the spring to pollens and grasses, et cetera. I don't have any of that anymore.

How much do you drink every day and how often?

Because I still have.

So like.

Well, you know, it depends on the day. I mean I have an endless supply of course, but I mean you drink.

A gallon a day or what does this.

No, no, no, no. I drink about an ounce of the fulvic and an ounce of our humic Fulvic product, our micro boost a day. So you know, 2 ounces and you know, but there's days where I wake up and I just feel logie or you know, maybe, who knows what it. Or maybe in an afternoon I might feel low G. I'll. You know, I actually love our sprays. Actually the. They're really great for a really quick pick me up. Just spray it, breathe it in three or four times and go on with my day.

But you know, the spray you're talking about, I had not experienced spray. So I've, you know, been aware of shilajit and I've been aware of just the idea of this, but I hadn't had a properly formulated one. And so I started drinking the bean minerals. But you sent me the spray and I'm like, do I really. I hate magnesium oil. That stuff is dumb. Oh yeah, some people really need it. This is like a really slimy magnesium you put on your skin that's supposed to be good for you. It's not worth it. It makes you itch and it's gross, and it feels like you have lube on you all the time. I hate it. No, but this stuff doesn't do that at all. It just goes away. And so I'm like, all right, what's the deal? But you've missed it, and you actually breathe in.

And.

What did I just say about allergies and direct cellular effects in multiple studies? Maybe it's a good idea to do that. So I'll miss my face with it. I have one behind me, behind the things that keep you from seeing my counter of crazy biohacking stuff. But I have it back there, so I'll do that a couple times a day. And then. I don't think I'm using enough. I probably use a tablespoon, but not an ounce. And I just put it in my first cup of coffee in the morning. Do I need to spread it throughout the day?

No, you don't. You don't. I mean, again, if you're thinking about your system and this, you're providing those as soon as you drink our minerals, because they're ionic, which, again, we could talk a little bit about what that means, but they immediately enter your circulation and become available, which is. It's just very, very cool. And again, they stay available for a long time. So, you know, everybody's different about when they want to take it. I personally don't think that it makes any difference. The thing I want to say about the spray that is so cool is, again, if you think about that fulvic complex and how small it is, it totally makes sense that it's going to work by spraying it on because it's immediately absorbing at a cellular level into your body, especially through your nasal membranes, which are very permeable. So I have people who use it for headaches, actually, that it works very well for headaches. Everyone's different. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe not. You know, like, they'll spray it, they'll breathe it on, and then 15 minutes later they'll go, wow, my headache is so much better. So you probably don't get headaches, right?

Not very often. Put me under bright LED lights for all day and I'll probably get one. But that's just from my brain being punched in the face by junk light. Otherwise, I'm pretty headache proof these days. I've gone through periods, though, and they were a big issue. Are you talking about migraine headaches or just any kind of headache?

You Know, I've not heard of people using the spray for migraines, but I do have a couple of people who, after taking the minerals, stopped having migraines. I had one guy who got a migraine every three days practically, and he doesn't get migraines anymore. So, again, the thing I most want people to understand is that if you think about your cellular system, which everything in your body is made of cells, and if you think about providing every single One of those 37 to 100 trillion cells in your body, they used to say 37, and now they got stronger microscopes. So now they say, oh, maybe there's closer to 100. So somewhere in there, if you think about providing all of those mineral cofactors that keep your cell operating in that aerobic way that generates the most ATPs, so that all of those functions, autonomic and otherwise, can, you know that it's an incredible support to the whole system.

Yeah, I can well guess what's in my mineral water right now. So I open a bottle of mineral water and I poured some de minerals in there. And I've just made a habit of doing that because it's easy. But my normal, most reliable dose is I make my first cup of bulletproof coffee in the day and I just add it in there and you can't taste it. And it all of a sudden I'm getting minerals that I wasn't going to get in another way.

Yeah.

Some of the other studies, though, they're showing noticeable effects on eczema. And this wasn't a beam study, so I'm not making any claims for your.

Product, thank you very much.

But, but just that these complexes, because they're reducing the inflammatory allergic response. And there's another one that showed after four weeks of daily use, and this was relatively high dose of fulvic, decreases in lipid peroxidation and significant increases in glutathione, which everyone who's been listening for any amount of time knows is really important. I make a liposomal glutathione capsule for bulletproof. It increases sod, which is an antioxidant that your mitochondria make that let you handle extra free radicals and catalase, which is another important antioxidant that the cells make. So, gee, I feel like there's a little bit of science backing up this stuff. But what would happen if you dried out a bottle of bean minerals and you had whatever was left at the bottom and you took that in a pill? Would it do the same thing?

It would you know, we actually do have a capsule that we usually suggest it just for traveling because it's hard to travel with these big bottles of liquid. It's not as bioavailable. So your body does have to first break it down to absorb and assimilate it. But it's highly concentrated. So yes, it would do the same thing. It would just. You'd have to take more.

You have to take more because the particles aren't all small Dalton particles. You get big particles and some of it'll break down, some of it won't. I'm assuming that's why the liquid's better.

It's also. So when you think about these ionic. The way I like to describe it for the laypeople is think of it like it's already digested. It's already in a. The form that your cells need it to be in. Nothing has to happen prior to it being used. So that's like when you drink it, it immediately is available. Whereas if you take the capsule or you dried that liquid out and ate the dust that was there, you would have to first digest it and break it down into those chemical components that can be used really at an atomic level, actually body for the absorption process.

Okay, that, that makes sense. So basically you want to take the liquid if you can, because it's going to be fully absorbed. But the pills work if you need them in a pinch.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah.

So we know that gut bacteria like it when you eat plants and they like prebiotic fiber. That's a big part of fast this way. I talked about it in Superhuman as well. It's anti aging. There is no prebiotic fiber in B minerals or in fulvic and humic. But there's a ton of minerals that bacteria like. And there's very interesting studies on the composition of gut bacteria when they're exposed to these super concentrated plant minerals. What do, what studies have you seen or what do you know about that?

Well, in fact, I was just reading a study the other day that was saying that particularly the humic is one of the best prebiotics that you can use for the gut for creating an environment for the best of the flora in the gut, that when you infuse it with this particular humic substance complexes, that it creates an incredibly healthy environment for the positive gut flora. So, you know, that changed my mind. I never, I never really thought about humic as a prebiotic on its own.

I don't know that it's a prebiotic, but we know that it influences the good guys to grow more. At least I've seen a study like that. When I was doing the research for this show and for Upgrade Collective members, I just pasted like the most foundational study there. And for guys on Clubhouse or on the main podcast, I will include that and a couple dozen other studies in the piece that I'm writing for DaveAsPrey.com that'll probably be out about when the podcast comes up. But it's, it was fascinating for me because this has been circling in the world of biohacking forever. And you see these, these people and I'm going to be a little bit blunt here. They're usually the ones who believe they don't need to shower. Like, oh yeah, Shilajit, this stuff is great. You know, I put it in my blunt and I smoke and you're like, come, yes, you know, let's get a little bit sciency. But you know, we've been talking for a while, I've been playing with your stuff and noticing a difference. But I also had a little bit of a, you know, this is kind of like, you know, maybe older research, maybe it's not that good. But I decided I was going to give it the Dave level of diligence and really dig in on it because I've noticed a difference. Because on the surface it makes sense. But when you really dig in on the research, like, oh my God, there's so much here, but almost no one knows about it. So putting it all together in this interview I think is just valuable for people. And it's a very affordable way to get a broad spectrum minerals that actually go into the cells. Because delivery system is what matters for nutrients. Even something as simple as bulletproof coffee. Why can you not eat a stick of butter and drink a cup of coffee? It doesn't work. If you do that, you will just feel weird. But if you blend them, it creates micelles and it changes the structure of the water and suddenly it has completely different effects on something called cck. It's the delivery system that matters. And so I think for minerals there's something to be done here. So, yeah, I take my multi mineral complexes with a little bit of all the different mineral salts and different forms of minerals in it. But I also put this in my coffee because now I'm getting minerals that have a different delivery system and they're doing stuff at the cell level that you're not going to get from the salts. And I think it's one of those, look, I could spend all day, sometimes I do looking at all the hundreds of different supplements and like, what do I want to do with my biology today? Because I have the A, I'm lucky enough and fortunate enough to be able to have hundreds of different bottles of vitamins to play with. Plus, it's my job. I made it that way, so I get to do that.

Well, hopefully you like to take a lot of pills.

It doesn't bother me. I can take like probably 80 in one handful on a glass of water. And people are like, what did you just do? You're like a seagull. But what you end up with is you're like, okay, is it worth it? Right? It's how am I going to feel today? And am I going to live a lot longer if I do it? Because otherwise this one magic vitamin might just not be worth the trouble to open the bottle and take it today, even if you take the cost of it out. But this stuff a, I dumped some of my coffee. It's not that hard to do. But it's also a very broad spectrum and it's got a high performance delivery system side of them. I think it's worth it. And it's something that I consider to be a permanent evolution of my stack of stuff that I'm going to take. And I imagine taking this stuff for, you know, the next hundred something years because I think it's that important. And there are some things that aren't, are not negotiable. If I miss a day, I'm not going to die. I'm not going to say I take it every single day, but the vast majority of times buy my espresso machine back there. I got my bottle of B minerals and I just poured in there and it's not inconvenient.

You know, the other thing that I say to people is if you're spending a lot of money on your health and you're taking a lot of supplements, you absolutely need to be taking this humic and fulvic because first of all, the fulvic is going to supercharge every single other thing that you put in your mouth. It's going to help you get more nutrients from all the food you eat. In fact, at this point, I am not a big alcohol drinker, but when I do drink, if I take a small bit of alcohol because my system is full of this fulvic, it actually I get almost immediately high. So they say they use this term, it makes water wetter. But basically what it is is these humic and fulvic are bringing more of whatever you put into your body, into the cells where it's utilized so you.

Can save money on alcohol enough to actually buy a bottle of minerals just by ordering less tequila. You heard that here first time.

Well, it is funny because somebody actually bought me a bottle. I really like very good whiskey, but I hardly ever drink. So somebody bought me a bottle and I said, this is going to last me two years. But I seriously, kind of. My mission, I feel, is that if you're spending money on your health, you should be taking these humic and fulvic minerals because they're going to take everything else you're doing and supercharge it.

And I have one more question for you before we get into questions from the audience. Every time we've been emailing back and forth and I talk about humic and fulvic acid, you always get mad at me and you say, no, there are complexes and they're minerals. What is the difference between fulvic acid and umbrella will be complex, the one to use in beam.

Yeah, it's actually an important distinction. So it has to do with the way that they're extracted. So first of all, just generally speaking, we have a proprietary alkaline extraction process that does not result in humic and fulvic acids. Okay. Fulvic acid is the colloidal. Okay. And colloids have no electrical charge. They're very large molecules. They don't absorb into your membranes, etc. Were you going to say something?

Listening. It just means particles suspended. So they won't settle out of liquid.

Yes.

Okay.

Yes. But they're also. They're very large molecules. They have to be broken down first. They're completely. They're completely different. So the humic and fulvic complexes, which it took us a long time to understand how to explain this to people, we had lots of other language, but they are not acids. So one of the things to get clear on is in agriculture, they also use humic and fulvic. The people who know about humic and fulvic are the marijuana growers, the farmers, because they are putting these things in their soil to supercharge their plants, and they are using humic and fulvic acids. So they are humic. They're humic and fulvic that have been extracted using hydrochloric acid.

Okay.

So. And that's a whole chemical process that we could get into. We don't do that. Right. It's a. It's a totally different process. Well, I can't actually describe it in detail because it is a proprietary Process, but it is a chemical process in which we're extracting the humic and the fulvic, separating them out of the humate.

Everyone knows that proprietary processes are what bad people use. Totally joking. I don't give away how I keep the mold out of my coffee and how I test for it. And the people who are trying to sell competing stuff, like, you won't tell me how to do it. I'm like, all right, Coca Cola doesn't give you the original recipe either, so that's no problem. But you guys are not using an industrial extraction, using hydrochloric acid, because it doesn't yield the particles that you want. Okay?

Correct. That's exactly right. Thank you. Yeah, yeah.

All right. Shall we take some questions from the audience?

That sounds great.

All right, I'm going to go first to Upgrade Collective and then to Clubhouse. All right, if you'd like to ask a question here, raise your hand on Zoom here for Upgrade Collective. I know Brandon wants to add something. He's been reading the research I posted. Brandon, here you go. Brandon, you know how to raise your hand. All right, Brandon, just unmute yourself. Ask. Ask away.

All right.

Hello.

I had a question about, like, I feel like trying to, like, get to the bottom of the disease process is like, kind of like unknotting, like a ball of yarn, and you have to sort of figure out what to do in what order almost. And I've heard some people say, like, if you have symptoms of chronic infection, you know, don't. Don't take minerals or don't take, you know, certain things that you think will bolster your system, it'll actually be added to, like, the biofilm of some sort of, like, infectional, you know, matrix, you know, But I think the way you're talking about fulvic and humic, it seems to be a bit different. I didn't know about this. It was a knowledge gap. But do you think it's contraindicated to take this in, like, for someone in a certain situation like that? Or do you think that's just kind of bs? You don't think you can make them stronger?

Right?

Like the problems that someone could have.

Or, you know, Dave. Dave spoke about the very beginning, he spoke about the imbalances that can occur in a system. So, you know, if you start saying, oh, I'm having a problem and I need a whole bunch of copper, you're not going to take a pill of copper. You know, it's. It's would completely imbalance your system. When you talk about the humic and fulvic, you're talking about trace elements. These are, these are very, very, very small atomic level components. So you know, in nature, if you have a tree that's not doing well, the mycelium takes the human in the soil and it delivers the minerals to that plant in these trace amounts. That's the one thing, you know, that from my research and my own personal experience, I've tried taking all sorts of things, calcium pills and magnesium and potassium and all these things and they never did anything for me. But these trace elements provided to my body in this ionic format that can be absorbed and assimilated. So effectively they made just the hugest difference, you know, and without having to take huge numbers of pills or anything.

One of the studies that I looked at showed that using these things topically on staph infections, this wasn't a bee mineral study, this was looking at, you know, general humic and fulvic complexes to be really clear. So you guys didn't do a specific study on wound healing, but the science around this type of molecule showed speeding of healing, that it was specifically, I think against a staph, a type of staph infection and improvements in healing, including in infectious circumstances. So it could be though, if you have a specific thing that needs more of one of these things and maybe it would take it before, take it up before something else. And there are some long standing things like Lyme co infections like Bartonella, where they're actually destroying cells in the body over time so they can use the minerals and the proteins in the cells to replicate themselves. And there are some people who say, oh, you should starve certain minerals during that. But there are many other people who say you shouldn't. So my general consensus, or consensus, my general perspective on this is that making yourself deficient in a mineral to try and beat a bacteria seems like a bad idea. That you shouldn't give your body everything it needs in order to effectively run at full capacity so it can beat an infection. And that even in a case like Bartonella, and which is one of these slow growing, very hard to kill things that comes from ticks, or in my case, vampire bat bites that I had when I was a kid, yes, a vampire bat bit my neck once. And what ends up happening there is you want to give enough minerals that it doesn't need to break down cells and then you can go kill it. But if instead it's constantly attacking you, it doesn't work as well. So I would say the jury's out on that. Stuff, but it's it's pretty interesting.

You know, another example. Oh, go on.

No, no, go ahead. I was going to take another question, but what's another example?

Well, one other example is a person I know who had cancer, and he had gone through chemo, and then he had ended up with a gut bacteria. And he said his doctor told him that he had high levels of iron in his system and he shouldn't take any minerals. Okay. Now, the fact is that that is a that's a misunderstanding of what the humic and fulvic are, because if you think about humic as a chelator and fulvic as a chelator, they are actually going to support the removal of the excess iron out of your system. So, again, they support homeostasis of the system. That's what they that's just their natural thing that they do.