Morley Robbins on The Copper Sugar Connection and the PAM Enzyme

This episode is brought to you by Nourish Me Organics, your gut health superstore. Nourish Me Organics is the premier online store for all things gut health, including probiotics, prebiotics, natural health supplements and home fermentation kits. So head to www.nourishmeorganics.com and use the code Happy Gut for 10% off. Join Kruban Govinda, a seasoned food scientist and gut health expert. In this episod we chat with Morley Robbins on the copper sugar connection and the importance of the Pam enzyme.

Hey guys. Crib.

And Gavin from the Gut Health Gurus podcast. I've got a background in food science and today I have a third time visit to the podcast. The first three Peter Molly Robbins, welcome to the show.

Look, I'm just thrilled to be here. I appreciate the opportunity to have yet a third either either you lots of questions or I just have too much to say. I don't know what it is but.

Well, I'm really excited today to have you on and extreme, extremely grateful. The, the main reason that I wanted to have a chat is because a mutual friend of ours, Martha Carlin.

Oh, wonderful.

Mentioned to me and been sending some papers and some information about a special type of enzyme which we're going to get into as we continue this conversation. But I just wanted to start off by just asking Molly, is there anything because we're now in 2024, I think it's been a while since we chatted last time, but is there anything that you've kind of maybe changed your mind on or something else that's peaking your interest at the moment?

That's, that's a wonderful question. Every day is a new discovery, as you probably can imagine. What's, what's absolutely fascinating is it isn't that I've, I've changed anything at this point. I mean, the, we're really, we're revolving around the copper iron dynamic, which is revolving around oxygen status. We've talked about that. I think what's, what's really come to light in a more intense way is just how disregulated our iron is in our body. I, I think the scale of it is. It was described in an article I read this morning as the Trojan Horse. And it's a beautiful description of it because we can relate to that. We, we know that story. Yeah. Oh yeah, I know that Trojan horse story. Well, here, here's the wicked part. You're, you're a nutritionist, you're very savvy about the microbiome. You Must be if you're talking to Martha Carlin, who's a genius around microbiome, and she's probably, should probably be the only citizen scientist to win the Nobel Prize. That would be my theory. But there's a, there's a delivery mechanism for iron that I just learned about a few weeks ago. It's like, oh, my God. So you've heard of sugar and you've heard of insulin, and we're going to talk about these hormones in a minute. But what I read recently, just a few weeks ago, and this is a 1983 study which should make our sphincters tighten up. So that's 40 years. They knew this 40 years ago that when insulin presents to a fat cell, there's a two to three fold increase in iron uptake in that fat cell. Did you know that? No, I didn't do that. It's like that, that sends a chill down my spine. And, and it's, I don't think it's just fat cells. I think it's any cell, muscle cell, organ, cell, gut, the enterocytes. Think about that. And so, but what's fascinating about it is it's a silent Trojan horse for delivering iron, is the use of sugar. I mean, it's like, it's like, wow. And they've known this for 40 years, but no one talks about it. And, and the thing is, I, I've, you know, you're saying, has my thinking evolved or what am I focused on? I really have boiled it down. Iron causes aging and copper causes longevity. That's it. And if you can really internalize that and act on that, you're going to do pretty well. But if you start dancing with the, the pundits of the day and start getting lost in all of their verbiage, you, you'll lose sight of the big picture. And that's really what I'm trying to do is, you know, I keep, I guess what, what do the, the chefs call it? Reductionist. You reduce? I'm reducing. Reducing, reduce. I keep trying to reduce the thought to its essence. And, and that's kind of what I've gotten to. Iron is aging and copper is longevity. And it's, it's amazing how little the scientists and the practitioners know about iron.

So it's like, it's like you're almost going back to first principles or Occam's razor, that kind of concept. I'd like to just go back a little bit. So what's, what, what's your thoughts on the significance of this study? That you're talking about. So insulin, say just go through a scenario. So you consume sugar or some sort of something that influences the insulin response. And then what's the implication of this iron uptake and why does it happen?

How much time?

As much time as you like.

You're from. You're probably familiar with Robert Lustig. He wrote a really entertaining book called Fat Chance. He's written several books. Metal, what's the one Metabolism. Anyway, he's a really prolific writer, as you know. But he said something in this article, Fat Chance. The book was written in 2013 and it's referring to a 30 year period earlier. And he said we need twice as much insulin to clear the same amount of glucose as we did 30 years ago. Well, you know, a lot of people have the service audible. Well, my audible is Dr. Liz, she, she reads to me while we're driving, wherever we're going. And she read that sentence and I almost had an accident. It's like, what? So the reason why that's so important is that that means that that copper is involved in glucose regulation. And really extending the concept. Insulin is a backup plan. Insulin is a very powerful hormone, as you well know. But I don't think we're. Again, I take a somewhat contrarian view. I don't think the body runs on hormones. It runs on minerals. And hormones respond to mineral dysregulation and, and they respond to oxygen status, but the body doesn't run on hormones per se. That's a very countercultural statement. But, but I think what's happened is farming has changed. Commercial herbicides and fertilizers are very prevalent. The one that's most prevalent is glyphosate. It chelates copper at a preferential rate. That's outrageous. It'll chelate copper a billion times faster than it'll chelate magnesium. It'll chelate copper a thousand times faster than chelates zinc or iron. And these numbers begin to kind of gloss over. We can't relate to a billion times faster. A thousand times faster. I mean there was a time when I could write, run an eight minute mile. And my son, at that time, my younger son. Yeah, I don't think, I don't think my older son could have done it. But my younger son, he ran a mile in 402, so he was twice as fast. So I, I went to the gym just to see what that felt like. And I almost killed myself. And I realized that the machine was doing all the work, but that was twice as fast. A thousand times faster. A Billion times. We can't, we can't relate to this. And so when we find out that we need twice as much insulin, that means we have a copper crisis. That's what that really means. And, and I think that, to answer your question, why is this happening? Because no one's minding the store. No one's acknowledging mineral concentration of the soil. Wonderful book, if you haven't read it, by Gabe Brown. Dirt to Soil. It's a beautiful, very, very simple but very powerful study about how do we restore our soil, how do we get regenerative farming back in the mainstream? And if we don't know what the minerals are in the soil, we're not going to know what the minerals are in the plants or the animals, and therefore we're not going to know what's going. And, and people are so quick to use nutrient tables, you know, and they've got a lot of eye candy now, right? Really cool online. But they haven't been updated since the 1950s. People don't realize that. They don't realize that, that, that data. Garbage in, garbage out. It's garbage data now. Because a lot of things have changed since the 1950s. At least I think they have. And I know, I think you would agree. And so people, well, I'm eating copper rich foods. I'm like, they're not copper rich anymore, they're not mineral rich. And that's the challenge, is that the concept of minerals is very boring. It's very. There's no sex appeal. And so it's not taught in, in doctor school. I'm not even sure it's taught in nutrition school, to be honest, at least to my satisfaction. And so people don't know these basic underlying components of our environment that have tremendous influence over our metabolism, over our ability to make energy, over our ability to signal and communicate. And so it's just, I think there's a gap in our understanding about where the problem really resides.

I'm not sure whether we've covered it in previous topics, but how does copper manage glucose?

That's a wonderful question. Oh, my, my computer's driving me crazy. You probably never have these problems.

Oh, I do. Of course I do.

It's like, it's like right in the middle of my screen. All right, how does. That's all right. So we have two terms that are complementary. We have glucose intolerant and we have insulin resistance. They're not the same thing. Or they're, they're interrelated, but they're not the, they're not the Exact same thing. And so glucose is an oxidant, it's very abrasive. Guess what insulin is? It's an antioxidant. Not just a hormone, it's an antioxidant. It's trying to calm down this, this beast of a food substance. And the, there, there is no one article, there's no billboard that says here's the answer to your wonderful question about copper and glucose. But there's a thousand different hints in the literature and one of the, one of the more powerful ones is, you know, 1986 article by Leslie Clive. He'll be 90 years old this year. He's an MD, PhD, he's a cardiologist by training. He's a copper expert. He wrote a wonderful article for your listeners in October of 2022 called chronic copper Deficiency. For those who aren't quite sure what this whole thing is about. And so if you have, if you don't have enough copper, iron is going to build in your system. They've known that since 1920. That's a well established biological thing. And so when in 1986, Dr. Clavey was studying two men who had hyperglycemia, high glucose, and he was really trying to understand what's causing it and he made a very powerful observation that children with Minky's disease, minkies is a genetic defect where these children and they, they usually die by the time they're three years of age. They don't have a copper pump, the ATP 7, a pump to move copper into the enzymes to help regulate the body. And so they, they have next to no copper in their tissue. And so he makes the point that cop the children with Mank's disease are glucose intolerant. Wow, that connected some pretty big dots there. And, and then you find out that there's, you may have heard of the triopathy of diabetes. It's three conditions. There's retinopathy, neuropathy, the nerves, especially in the lower limbs, get very buzzed out. And then nephropathy, the kidneys go out. Well, those three, those three conditions are taking place in tissue that is insulin independent. Insulin doesn't work in those three tissues, doesn't work in the retina, doesn't work in the nerves and does not work in the kidneys. It's absolutely my. Wow. And so there's a, another, there's a backup mechanism for regulating sugar being traded off with sodium to get the sugar into the tissue, but it requires the presence of an enzyme called ascorbate oxidase. Most people have never Heard of it, but ascorbate oxidase is a copper dependent enzyme. So if copper is not present to regulate that flow, and we're getting into vitamin C metabolism, not ascorbic acid, vitamin C, it's very different beast. And so we start getting into realms of research that most people are not familiar with. And then I think that the third is, a third hint, if you will, again is we know that cello plasma is the master antioxidant of the body. And, and its priority focus is to keep oxygen and iron at bay, keep them properly regulated so they don't cause oxidative stress. And it does this through the action of an enzyme called ferro oxidase. Very, very important enzyme, I think, I think it regulates a third oxidant, sugar. And, and the reason why I say that is that in another article by Dr. Clobet he talks about, actually it was in this, it's this article from 1986. What happens in the state of hyperglycemia, high blood glucose is it blows up the ceruloplasmin molecule and then the copper comes out and gets oxidized, goes from copper one to copper two and it's immediately bound up by albumin. But albumin doesn't have the same metabolic properties, cerulo plasma. And so there's, there are many different references to copper status and sugar status. And that notion of cerulo plasma blowing up was also written up in a 2019 article by two scientists from Russia. So it's not just old news, it's new news. And in a corollary fashion, people are probably familiar with estrogen and they know that estrogen rises as we get older. It's, it's well established. And what else is rising as we get older? Iron. So iron's going up and estrogen's going up. What's not being accounted for is, what's not being accounted for is copper and cerule plasma. So if, if ceruloplasmin is the master antioxidant and when ceruloplasmin goes down, because copper status is going down as we age, when the body's got to go to the backup plane. So if iron is rising, there's not enough copper to run ceruloplasmin, body's going to rely on estrogen. I think the same dynamic is taking place with, on the sugar side, if ceruloplasm is not present, the body has to default to insulin as the backup plan. And it, there's a certain elegance and symmetry to that model. It's not like I have a hundred articles to back it up. I'm really relying on my intuition. But my dot connecting, having read about 10,000 articles now over 15 years, to try to piece all this together, it makes more sense to me from an operational standpoint. This idea that hormones run the body. That's never made sense to me from the get go. And so it's, it's a very disruptive idea. But I think it, it has more integrity, if you will, looking at it from that standpoint.

That's a very interesting summation. It's almost. You've gone through a process of deduction, reasoning morally on multiple studies, on your own reading intuition. So that's, that's amazing. I think it makes complete sense what you're saying. So, so how, how do people actually. So if, if all like estrogen's going up, insulin, the reliance on insulin is increasing as we age, how do we mitigate? And also, you know, how do we manage these hormones better? Is there any strategies that people can take from those insights to actually make a difference to their own lives?

Absolutely. I mean, first and foremost, what we have to do is lower our stress, right? And when I say stress, there's like a thousand different forms of stress. But Mildred Selig classified four different categories of stress. We have physical stress. You just fell down a flight of stairs, you were in a car. That's physical, environmental stress. We've got all sorts of toxins in our water and our air and in our food down the aisle. We have metabolic stress. We don't have the right nutrient profile in our body and we, we don't have the, we're not able to run the metabolic pathways. And when, as soon as the pathways don't work right, there's going to be oxidative stress, which is probably the greatest stress of all. And then the fourth stress is psychological or emotional stress. And when, when you use the word stress, that's what people think of as emotional stress. What people need to know is as soon as you go into a state of emotional stress, you are creating metabolic stress at a physiological level and you're operating out of fear. And fear triggers very powerful hormones, triggers cortisol and adrenaline, but it's also triggering noradrenaline if, if you have enough copper to make it, and people don't think about the cortisol and the adrenaline response, and that response creates hypoxia. And, and when you say the word hypoxia, you think Mount Everest, top of mountain Everest, when in fact it's there's another form of it called functional hypoxia, or down inside the cell, there's not enough bioavailable copper to activate the oxygen to create water to release energy. So how do people deal with this if they've got to lower their stress there? What stresses you out may not stress me out. And vice versa. Yeah, because we're all different. Right. You've all had different experiences, but we all do have our perception of stress, bills to pay. Gotta get along in relationship, gotta deal with our colleagues. What have you gotta, you know, gotta deal with our neighbors and a bigger community. Got to deal with the insanity of the world. Right. World's a lot different today than it was last time we talked. It's a, it's a crazy world out there and it doesn't seem to be getting any calmer. So we've got to be able to kind of get all that under wraps. We've, we've got to lower the, the amount of iron in our tissue. It's just, again, a good rule of thumb for iron is to take your age and multiply it times 365. So I'm 71 times 365. I've got about 26,000 milligrams of iron coursing through my body. You can make the adjustment on your age. Well, I, we're designed for 5,000, 5,000. I've got, I've got five times that. And so my wife and I, we go to look to Red Cross on a regular basis to stay on top of our iron status because that's going to help us manage our oxidative stress, you know? Got it. You gotta have a good diet. You've gotta, you need to have supplements that we talk about in the Root cause protocol. And in the last couple years, one of the supplements that I really put a lot of emphasis on was copper. And I developed a copper supplement called recuperate. And no, I've not become a supplement whore. I just, I just know that there's a very serious shortage of this bioavailable mineral on the planet. And so I've decided to, you know, and there are other people that are doing it. I'm not the only one. But I, I couldn't stay on the sidelines any longer. So I think it's important for people to know that if they're relying on nutrient tables and, you know, historical sources of copper, you might want to reinforce that, might want to supplement that. And so within the, the Root cause protocol, we focus on three minerals. Copper, and iron and magnesium. And what is important for people to understand is that we lose, in a state of acute stress, we lose magnesium very quickly. In a state of chronic stress, we lose access to copper. And we've got it. We, we must have copper and magnesium to make energy. And what's getting in the way of copper design. And so trying to simplify the model as much as possible to get people to realize that they can get on top of this, that they can control their personal environment and begin to bring greater balance and homeostasis stasis back into the beam.

So it sounds like all the foundational aspects of root cause protocol are still in play. Is there any, is there any changes you've made to the protocol or any adjustments?

We're always exploring. I think one of the adjustments that we will clearly make this year is Martha's Sugar Shift. I think it's amazing product.

Amazing product.

Wonderful, wonderful product. And we're, you know, we were adding things like red light therapy, which makes obvious sense. What we're trying to be really careful of, and I think you can appreciate this along with your followers, is we could easily have 75 components and we just overwhelmed people. So we're really trying to be respectful of, of how we add to the, to the base. But the, the, the bulk of the stops and the bulk of the starts are identical today to what they were when you and I last talked.

Right. So still those foundational aspects, which are pretty solid.

Yeah.

And, and remind us, remind us quickly of the, the tenants of the recourse protocol, because I think some listeners want. Have no idea what we're talking about.

Yeah. So the origin of the root cause protocol was. It was actually an article by Ray Pete on iron toxicity. I can't remember when he wrote. It was like 2010 or something like that. It was an amazing article. And towards the end of the article, he made a very important observation. He said, to my knowledge, no one has ever come up with a recipe to increase cerulo plasma. I thought, that's what I'm going to do. I love that. That's a great idea. And, and so the Root cause protocol began with two stops and two starts, but the focus was on building more bioavailable copper. And now it's got about a dozen stops and a dozen starts. But the purpose behind it is to still increase the bioavailability of copper, make it usable. Why? Because you can't make energy without copper. You can't clear exhaust without copper. 45% of our connective tissue. 45% the tendons, the ligaments, cartilage, the blood vessels, all of these different tissues. You've got collagen and strength. And elastin is flexibility. You've got to knit those two proteins together in order to give tissue its integrity, strength and flexibility. Well, there's only one enzyme that does it. It's called lyseal oxidase. Makes all the connective tissue work properly. Color, you know, can't live without it. Right. Well, there's one enzyme that makes it possible. It's called melon. Melanin colors everything from yellow to black. It's activated by another enzyme called tyrosinates. And what is tyrosinates? It's got two copper atoms inside it. And so you can't color the human, human body, you can't color any, any animal unless you have copper acting on that enzyme function. And so. You ask, what's new? I'm, I'm gaga about the spleen. Everyone focuses on the liver on the right side. I'm preoccupied with the spleen on the left side. It, it's the hidden organization. Do you know what color the spleen is supposed to be?

No idea.

I didn't, I didn't, didn't know either.

Deep.

It's like it's the color of eggplant, right? Deep dark purple. And the deeper, and the darker the purple, the more vitality and the more energy it's got. And I had a surgeon share with me recently, he said, morally, I've never seen a purple spleen.

Wow.

And so, so what does that tell us? Well, it means that the organs can get vitiligo. You think about ligo in our skin, right?

Yes.

Not just skin deep, it's organ deep. And if the organs don't express the right color, they don't have enough energy, they don't have integrity of their function. And it's just, it's like, it's so cool to think of it that way. And so copper plays these many faceted roles in the body that nobody knows about. And, and so it's the Achilles heel you talked about. Occam's razor. You know, let's focus on the, let's focus on the, the least likely component. It's going to have the biggest impact. And that's bioavailable copper. And it has this in insane relationship with iron. It goes back to the beginning of time and it's just, it's not understood in the right circles. The, the practitioners, the nutritionists, the doctors, the, the nurses, the whoevers don't realize this Very powerful interplay between. What are these are. They're called redox active minerals. There are only two copper knife both have a relationship with oxygen that redoxes reduction, oxidation, the passing of electrons back and forth throughout the body. You understand that. But the thing is it doesn't just happen. It's regulated, it's managed. And copper is the general and iron is the foot soldier. And you don't have to be in the military to know generals have more brass, more stars. Right. Made of brass. And what's brass made of? Copper. 88 copper. And so copper runs the show. But nobody knows that and especially the gut. And this is where Martha and I go bonkers is she's always telling me about the bacteria running the, the. I like. Yeah. But they don't work unless they've got a battery. And she's go, okay, you got me there. Right. Okay. We go back, we can, we have these Jane curtain. You know in a conversations and we've, we've come to finally accept it. Yeah. You can't, you can't. Without the microbiome and the minerals, it doesn't work. And so that's, that's the beauty of bringing, you know, minds together to say how do we solve this problem completely?

I think each, each aspect has its own place to play and there's probably things that we haven't even discovered yet. So it's a great position to be, to keep in a relatively open mind to learning these new discoveries as they emerge.

Yeah.

So the, the next, the next thing I, I think it's clearly, it's clearly highlighted how important copper is. But I'm sure that the audience are thinking, okay, there's one, one, one way to get more copper is to, to have a supplement, something like your supplement. Are there any food based interventions that people can use, you know.

Yes, but let me, let me qualify. I was reading an article about a month ago from 2017. It was profiling the epidemic of chronic kidney disease in India with their rice farmers. And they use glyphosate. And glyphosate again chelates copper, which will lead to intense oxidative stress which leads to what's called kidney disease because of the iron accumulation that results. But in the article, in the introduction, they said it would be useful to tell you about a recent study done in France. France was vehemently opposed to glyphosate going back to the very beginning against the law to use glyphosate in France. But in this 2017 study about Indian rice farmers, they make Mention of the fact of a study, previous study, the profile that 99% of French people have glyphosate in their urine. That's a very chilling fact. That means it's in the air. That means it's in the, means it's in the water. That means it's everywhere. And so people have simply got to wake up to the fact that organic farming doesn't mean what we thought about back in the 60s. It meant something. Now, 60 years later, it's a joke. Do you know that organic farmers are allowed to use glyphosate now?

God.

Because it's got carbon in it. So anything has carbon is okay. It's a brave new world. And so historically, sources of, of copper rich foods would have been organ meats, grass fed organ meats, seafood balls, especially nuts, seeds, leafy green vegetables. These are all known lentils. You know, here's a, here's a, a good shorthand. Any food that's been turned into GMO was a good source of copper, corn, soybean, sugar beets, alfalfa. Why do you think they did that? It's like, you know, it's just, it's wild, craven, like we're up against, we're up against a really evil empire. Yeah. And we just have to be. And I'm laughing not because I'm dismissing it, I'm trying to have, I'm trying to be playful about it. It's like, oh my God, if we got, if we got really morose, we just get so depressed about it. So yeah, we've got, we've got this evil empire and we just have to, we have to bob and weave and the, the idea that, that the food is safe. I think we have to be really, we have to be more discerning now, unfortunately. And again, back to dirt, to soil, back to the focus of regenerative farming and everything that people are trying to do. I, we're going to come out of it. But it's going to take some time for people to realize how deep the problem is and how important these minerals really are. I think they've been really messed with in ways that people don't realize.

You really opened my eyes. I think admittedly I've kind of lapsed a little bit in my discipline. So I'll certainly be going back to a lot of these first principles, forms of thinking. So thank you so much, Molly. And I want to give enough air time to the star of the show, which is this very special enzyme in the body, the PAM enzyme, which I know Absolutely nothing about. So I'm sure you're going to give me a little bit of a schooling for the next 20 minutes.

Well, you're, you're the only one who doesn't know about this. Do you want to have fun with your doctor friends? Kind of lean in and say, hey, tell me about the PAM enzyme. I was having dinner in Orlando, Florida, with a very, very high, big, big name in medicine, and I, I was just full of myself. I, I leaned over, I said, hey, what do you know about the pam? He went, the what? He said, what does it stand for? What's 35 letters? It's peptidyl glycine Alpha amidating Mono oxygenase. Now that's a name, Right? And it was first discovered in the 1980s. And there's a husband and wife team that have just recently retired after 45 years of researching one enzyme. Betty Eiper and her husband, Richard Menzel. 20 years at Hopkins, 25 years at UConn Medical Center. Get it, Yukon. And so when, when I first became aware of this, was reading Mastering Leptin, which is a wonderful book for those who are looking for a good book to read. And it was making reference to the hypothalamus, which I'm, I'm absolutely fascinated by. And just parenthetically, I think the spleen is the hypothalamus of the body to give people an idea of how important it is. So it's a big deal. But Byron Richards wrote that book, really cool book, and. He made reference to this PAM enzyme. So I was always fascinated by the PAM enzyme. This goes back to 2010, go way back. And back then, I thought it only activated 13 peptides. Well, 13 gave way to 43. 43 gave way to 279. 279 now has given way to 4700 signaling peptides. And so, you know, we're back to the phone. It works when it's on. Right. These are really cool devices when they work. Right. But if they, if they don't get a signal, it's no good. And so I bet you have clients that have insulin resistance.

Absolutely.

And you're blaming either the lack of insulin production or the lack of insulin sensitivity by the tissue. Right? Those are the two. Hey, it's not being synthesized. It's not sensitive. Right. Well, there's more to the story. So here are seven signaling peptides involved in sugar metabolism. The big dog is insulin. But then we have insulin growth factor incretin. You know, people are now focusing on glucagon. But incretin is its formal name, joining peptide, C peptide, humanin, specsin, and chromogranin A. Those are seven signaling peptides. And, and they've all got to be working. They've all got to be signaling, communicating with each other or the show doesn't work. And the tragedy cribbing is doctors don't know this, nutritionists don't know this, that there's a mechanism. Again, we're back to collagen and elastin. Only one enzyme knits them together. Melanin. Only one enzyme colors PAM enzyme. Only one enzyme creates the ability to signal, to communicate. And if you don't think there isn't fierce communication between insulin and chromogranin A and insulin and C peptide. And, and in your area of, of expertise, think about, think about gastrin colecystic, right? Think about what's, what's the one, oh, have you ever heard of. I'd never heard of this until recently. Somatostatin. Do you know about somatostatin?

No idea.

No idea. Right. Somatostatin is the peptide that turns off the, the response. The body is not, is not designed to be in hyperbolic activated response, to be in this, in this hyper activated state. Here's the catch. The body is supposed to be able to make noradrenaline. What does that mean? Nor adrenaline. It's no R group on the adrenaline. What's the R group? It's a methyl group. When, when the methyl group is on the adrenaline, boom, it's really powerful. But noradrenaline, it's, it's not so bad. But what is noradrenaline doing? It's activating somatostatin to turn off the response, the stress response. That's a good thing, right? Especially in your gut, right? We're not, we're not supposed to be in sympathetic overdrive all the time. And so nobody knows about the PAM enzyme. Nobody knows that, that it's two copper atoms that need to be at a critical point when oxygen's there to cleave off a carboxyl group and put on a glycine group. And when the glycine group goes on, these peptides are turned on. They're like, hey, I'm, I'm here. Let's talk. Come on. And, and so in the way the proteins are made, there's, there's an N terminus and a C terminus, nitrogen, carbon. Right? And what we've learned is that the, the carbon, the carboxyl group, carbon, two oxygen and a hydrogen. The carboxyl Group gets cleaned off, and that's where. Where the peptides get activated. 4, 700 times. I, I know like a hundred of them. I'm only short about 4,000. 4, 600. But. But the thing is, this is going to blow your mind. Do you have a seat belt?

Stop you on.

If you were, if you were going to design lab tests to see whether peptides and hormones. Because that's what hormones are, signaling peptides, that's what a hormone is. They like to talk to each other, right? So if you're designing tests to measure these hormones, which end of the protein would you go after? Would you study the nitrogen side or the carbon side? Which one do you think would be really important to have as your focus to know whether it's on or not, active or not? You. You would, you would focus on the, on the carbon, right? The carboxyl end, right? No, all lab tests around the world focus on nitrogen because it's, it's inert, it's neutral. And so you don't really know. Oh, well, you know, your, your estrogen looks really high, but we don't know whether it's turned on or not. Can you believe that? I'm not making this up. R. This is, this is like what. We're, we're flying blind. We have no idea. We, we. The. The peptide may be there, but we don't know whether it's active. Is it communicating? Is it interacting with its partners, like those seven that I mentioned for sugar metabolism? Doctors don't know about all seven of those. It's a rare doctor who will measure insulin and C peptide. When you get insulin and C peptide together, you have a better understanding of, well, how much is really being made and really being used. We still don't know whether it's active or not. And so I, I share this. Not to freak everyone out. I think it's important for people to realize that there really is a very beautiful blueprint that runs our body. It runs our metabolism. And that blueprint runs on the chassis of energy and signaling peptides. How do you make energy? Oh, yeah, you got to have copper in the mitochondria. How do you have signaling peptides that can actually talk to each other? Oh, yeah, you got to have copper in that PAM enzyme. And so it's just, it's really important for people to realize that there, there is, as Kristan Kershaw says, there is a simplicity and an enormity to the copper metabolism. And it's, it is this Achilles heel that people don't think about. It, because it's so small. It's a hundred milligrams of copper, which fits on the head of a 1 inch stick pan. A little tiny bit of copper is regulating 5,000 plus milligrams of iron. And, and a very influential copper researcher, Maria Linder, passed away in 2022, in fall of 2022. But before she passed, she had an article published that year that talked about the fact that she thinks that humans don't really have 100 milligrams of copper. We have maybe about 70. So let's put that into context. Ideal body temperature, 98.6, 37 degrees if you're outside of the U.S. right? But, but 98.6, a 4% rise. A 4% rise in body temperature from 98.6 to 102 is called a fever. And you know how bad you feel when you have a fever. That's a 4% differential, 30% loss of copper. So that's seven and a half times. It's like the order of magnitude is just, it blows your mind. And nobody knows this because it's not taught in practitioner school, doctor school, nursing school, nutritionist school. And so we're fat, dumb and happy. We don't know, we don't know about it. So it can't be, can't be important. And I, and what I really appreciate is your curiosity and your willingness to let me bang my gums for an hour and share these insights because I think the world deserves to know this. And there are some very simple steps we can take to recover our vitality. And, and one of the most important is just to, to bring this enzyme back to life. And, and the reason why this is also important real quick, because I know we're running out of time. I'll talk like FedEx commercials, but in 2008 and 2012, Betty Eiper and Richard Mains had some very gifted graduate students and into some very interesting studies with rodents. And they had, and this was in two separate, completely separate experiments. The gist of the experiments were let's take a group of rats and deny copper in their diet. And let's take another group of rats, let's alter the PAM enzyme and let's create identical expression of the PAM enzyme based on diet and based on, quote, genetic defect. Okay? It's got two groups, same PAM expression. It's depressed expression. Then in both experiments they did the same thing. They fed both groups copper supplements. And guess what happened? The enzyme came back on and, and the author in 2014 in his dissertation. And yes, I'm geeky enough to, to read those types of things he talked about. Haplo insufficiency is a sign of copper deficiency and that should send a chill down everyone's spot because I take that statement and I apply it across the board of all so called gene defects. I think they're all signs of copper deficiency. And can they be corrected easily with copper? Probably not. It's going to take some time. But can they be corrected? I think they can. And I think it's so inspiring that the body is, based on those studies, has this natural ability to resume its optimal function just by the presence of one mineral. It's absolutely amazing. And so it just, I share that because I think people need hope, need data, need proof that I don't think there is disease. And when I made that statement, I think it was in 2012, I was on Facebook, I said, there is no medical disease. There's only stress induced mineral dysregulation. It causes metabolic dysfunction. I thought there'd be this tsunami of you don't know what you're talking about. You know what the feedback was? Nothing. Not one word. Not one word. So what do you think happened? I got emboldened and so it's just, I, I, I, I bound out of bed every day wondering where am I going today? Exploring the research and what I'm really focusing on now is ferritin, the iron storage protein. And it's, it is so fascinating and it's so far afield from what people think it is and it's, it's made, maybe that, maybe that'll be the 4p conversation down the road, but it's, it's an amazing protein that is not understood at all in conventional circles. So amazing. I'll leave a cliffhanger on that one.

Amazing. Well, I've learned so much, Molly. There's so much I need to, to dig into after I listen back to this podcast. But I applaud you for the work that you're doing. It's so important. It's, it's so critical to the health of humanity. And I'm sure that people listening to this are going to have lots of nuggets to take away and implement into their own lives. So I always like to end the show with this question. If there is one thing you could do for your gut health today, what would that be? Molly Robbins.

Every person I've dealt with, I think we talked about this before, but I'll just remind the listeners, every person I've ever dealt with who had gut issues, has an emotional issue they can't stomach. As much as I talk about minerals and the importance of energy, deal with your emotional stress. Try to engage in your emotional freedom. Technique or emotion code, body code and hypnotherapy or something. Get beyond the fear, because when it, because when you have chronic stress, it goes into fear. When you have an unresolved emotional issue, it goes into fear. You think you're broken. You can't, you can't resolve it. You got to get on top of that and that addressing that emotional dynamic will allow the body to heal itself. And so when I started this work 15 years ago, I was 100 Newtonian. It's a physical issue. It's, you need this nutrient, that vitamin, that supplement, whatever. Now, 15 years later, it's all quantum. It revolves around these unresolved emotions. So it's just a very different world of perspective. And I think it's true for everyone who has gut issues, at least that I've encountered.

Wow, that's. That's amazing advice. Thank you so much, Molly. Until next time. I'm sure we're going to be round four at some point.

I look forward to it. Thank you again for the opportunity. You take care. Thank you, Molly.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Gut Health Gurus Podcast with Morley Robbins. If you found this podcast valuable, leave us a kind review and five stars on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcasting app. If you want to connect with our host, Cribbon Govenda, please follow him on Instagram, Facebook and TikTokthealthgurus. Also, check out our Gut Health Gurus Facebook group. With 17,000 plus members ready to help you on your journey. Journey to amazing Gut health. This episode is sponsored by Nourish Me Organics. Head to www.nourishmeorganics.com and use the code HappyGut for 10% off. Make sure to check out their range of Gut Health supplements until next time.