Morley Robbins on The Root Cause Protocol: How to Reverse Disease & Restore Health

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 happygut for 10% off. In this episode, Molly Robbins discusses the Root Cause Protocol, a program that helps to reverse disease and restore health. Morley discusses the role magnesium, iron and copper play in the disease process and how to treat them with the Root Cause Protocol.

Hey, guys. Criben Govender from the Gut Health Gurus podcast. I've got a background in food science, and today I have a returning guest, someone that I've been looking forward to speaking to again for a long time. So many people that have listened to the first episode have asked me for the repeat because we kind of left it hanging on a cliff's edge, and there was so much more to explore. So people have just been screaming at me, when are you going to get him back on? So today we have Morley Robbins back in the show. Molly, welcome.

Thank you so much. And I feel the same way. I've been looking forward to this continuation of our chat because it was a very exciting exchange when we. When we first had that opportunity.

Absolutely. I think we really were just teasing the audience, and I think we've. We've finally. We've caught up again, and then the anticipation of the episode. I think people are going to really enjoy this chat. I think it's going to be a lot more practical because the first conversation was centered around pretty much the essence of Morley's work, which is the minerals, the copper story, the iron story. But the big thing that was missing in that first conversation was the Root Cause Protocol and the actionable insights, takeaways from the protocol, and more. I understand that you've written an amazing new book, the Cure your fatigue, the Root Cause, and How to fix your own. So I think it's a perfect opportunity to explore the book, give the audience a bit of a teaser so they can go out and actually grab a copy of the book, but also to continue on exploring the Root Cause Protocol. So how about we start with a very quick refresher just in case people are just jumping onto this podcast. I do encourage you to listen to the first episode, but how about we do a very quick recap before we jump onto the Root Cause Protocol?

In terms of how I got here.

The essence of the. I think the original story we covered in episode one. So really about the whole magnesium story, because you're the magnesium man, Right? So the recap of magnesium and copper and iron, and then we'll dig deep into the root cause protocol.

Sounds great. Yeah. So I was introduced to the wacky world of minerals about 12 years ago as a result of a frozen shoulder. And my now wife made this comment about the innate healer, and I didn't know what that was. So that got me thinking, got me researching, and I first latched onto the importance of magnesium, reading Carolyn Dean's book, the Magnesium Miracle. And it really, it's a fascinating way to start your journey. And what you discover is that just about every condition on the planet has some connection to magnesium loss. Well, then I went, well, why do we keep losing magnesium? I refer to it as the magnesium burn rate. And it took me about five or six years to connect the dots. And basically the whole premise is when we have stress in our world and we all have stress. Cribbon and I had stress about five minutes ago trying to figure out were we connected. And we're both like, oh, but we got over it. But when we have stress in our world, we have oxidative stress in our body. And the way our system is set up is there are enzymes that cleave off phosphate groups, and in that process, magnesium gets released, and that magnesium goes right into our urine. And so there's this constant process of dealing with the stress of life. And we've all had some pretty notable stress the last couple of years, and we don't need to talk about it, but we know what that's done to our. Our whole psyche and our whole sense of self. But when you have that constant state of stress, it starts to affect other minerals. And particularly when we're in a state of chronic stress, what starts to rise is fear. Fear that the stress will never go away, fear that we can't respond to it. And fear actually activates two key hormones, cortisol and adrenaline. We know that it's very well chronicled in the articles, but they have an impact on iron and copper. Adrenaline ramps up iron big time, totally changes its presence in the tissue. And cortisol has a known ability to bind up copper a thousand fold stronger than it binds up zinc. Well, basically, what you've done is you've shut down the ability to make energy. And when we're under stress, what we really want to be able to do is respond to that stress. We have to mobilize energy to think our way through. And I Think the best definition of stress I've ever come across is by Mark Hyman, who's a functional guru at Cleveland Clinic here in the States. He said stress is the body's inability to make energy for the mind to respond to its environment. To me, that really crystallizes what this whole dynamic is about. To put all the pieces of the puzzle together is that when we're in a state of stress and it becomes chronic, we lose this constant magnesium burn rate. It's binding up our copper. And once copper is not bioavailable, once it's not usable, iron takes off like a rocket. And when iron mixes with the oxygen in our body, that's what creates the oxidative stress. And then we burn even more magnesium as a result of that. So that's how all these minerals kind of interact. And what's supposed to be our savior is the master antioxidant protein, ceruloplasmin. And that word appears about a thousand times in my book. How do I know that? Because I had to narrate that book recently, and I couldn't believe how many times I mispronounced. Got to the point where the engineer would say, you have to do it over. I said, hey, it's my book. I can say it any way I want to. No, you didn't say it right. But, but, but that protein, it's hard for people. I'm. I struggle with trying to understand. Does so many different functions in the body. I mean, it's just. It's a. It's absolutely a miracle. And doctors don't know what it is. There's no. There's no test that allows us to understand its functional activity. At least here in the States, I think there are certain places. I know India. You can get the test. I don't know what it's like in Bali, but it's very difficult to get your functional copper status. It's the most important marker in our body. Why? Because copper is the only element on the planet that regulates oxygen and iron and keeps them from creating rust. I think that's pretty important to know, and it would be really nice to know. How well are we doing? Is our body able to maintain its equilibrium, maintain its homeostasis? And it's largely that one protein that's keeping the score, if you will.

That's amazing. That's a nice little recap on all the key buzzwords from our first conversation. So one burning question I have straight off the bat and the comments I receive at times. How do you reconcile someone when they talk about copper toxicity.

Right, Right out of the blocks.

Yeah, straight. Straight into it.

Okay, let's walk through some numbers, because I think it's important for people to have proper context. In the average human body, there's 5,000 milligrams of iron, and there's about 100 milligrams of copper. So it's a 50 to 1 ratio. That's important to know. And in the world of traditional Chinese medicine, they refer to copper as the general and iron as the foot soldier. And we know I'm not a military guy, but I've watched enough movies, and I have enough relatives who've been in the military to know generals have a lot more sway than foot soldiers. And so. And it's not just sway. I think they have more intelligence, to be honest. So, okay, 5,000 to 100. Well, let's go into the blood. And what we learn is that 70% of the iron is actually in the blood. It's actually in the hemoglobin of the blood. So that's 3,500 milligrams of iron. How much copper is in the blood? One milligram. And of that one milligram, 95% of it is supposed to be complex in this master antioxidant protein, ceruloplasmin. So that's significant. Suddenly, the ratio is now 3500-to-1 in the blood. Let's go down into the bone marrow. That's where all the action is. And a lot of people don't know that. There's an iron recycling program called the reticulo endothelial system Res. When I finally figured out what it stood for, I renamed it recycling because it's like, oh, my gosh, they try to make it so complicated. But in the bone marrow, where the decision has to be made, are we making blood today? Are we making bone? And what's important to understand is that every second of every day, we have to make 2.5 million red blood cells. Every second in the course of 24 hours, we make 20. Excuse me. We make 2 trillion red blood cells. That's like, whoa. There's a kind of a wow factor to that. And that takes a lot of energy to support that. But it only takes 25 milligrams of iron. Think about that. You got 5,000, and you only need 25 for this recycling program. And that's providing 95% of the iron that you need each day. You don't need a lot of iron in your diet, despite what the pundits say. So that's 24 milligrams of iron in the bone marrow and there's 47 milligrams of copper. Suddenly the ratios are very, very different because there's a lot of decision making that needs to take place. And you cannot mature red blood cells unless you have copper. You cannot let the iron out that needs to get out of the red blood cell so it can become a full fledged red blood cell erythrocyte, unless you have a copper dormant. I mean, there's so many aspects to it. And it was actually in 1932 that doctors LVM and Sherman here in the States figured out through experiment with rats, you cannot make hemoglobin without copper. But it begins to change the understanding about what's happening. So we go 5,000 to 100, 3,500 to 124 to 47. So where it really matters, we've got to have significant levels of bivalval copper. So everyone loves to rush to the term copper toxicity. And this was the brainchild of Carl Seifer. He was an MD, PhD back in the 60s. And for the research hounds, I would just encourage you to dig a little deeper on Dr. Pfeiffer. He doesn't have a pristine past. I'll just leave it at that. Let people start to dig a little deeper. I sound like Q, don't I go research. But, but the thing, but the thing is, when people talk about copper toxicity, how often do they talk about ceruloplasmin? Never. How often do they talk about iron status? Never. And it was a very interesting article that I found a number of years ago, it's probably about four years ago. And it was an article about schizophrenia. This was a study that was done in like 2016. And they were commenting on the fact that it seems that people that have schizophrenia have high copper in their blood. So what that would imply is that the copper has become unbound from the ceruloplasm protein. But what was particularly important was someone in the group of scientists that were studying this asked a very important question. I wonder if the medications that we're giving these patients is destabilizing the ceruloplasmin and causing the copper to become unbound. That was a very powerful insight that I think is playing in the background. And what people don't realize is that there are many chemicals that, that have that ability. Probably the most notorious is ascorbic acid. Ascorbic acid from, from the very beginning when Holmberg and Laurel, who were the two Swedish physiologists that discovered ceruloplasmin and named it Sky Blue protein or sky blue in the blood. They commented in their very first article in 1948, this property of ascorbic acid to denature ceruloplasm and cause the coppers to come out. And they don't come out one at a time, according to the experts, they come out like diarrhea, like there's this rush of copper. And we've been trained like circus bears a la Carl Pfeiffer to view that as a negative event and that copper is the bad guy. And what's hiding behind the curtain? Iron. It's really iron toxicity. And the most amazing thing is that people don't realize that the symptoms of so called copper toxicity are in fact caused by iron. But they put the spotlight on copper to demonize it. Why? Because they don't want us to have healthy levels of ceruloplasmin. And I just came across some, an article Cribbon just yet, just today's what, Wednesday. It was Monday. I've read a few articles, right? I mean like maybe 7,000 articles. And I'm just amazed at what I learned. I'm amazed at how much I have to learn. And I'm running out of time. You know, the sands of time are running faster now. But the important thing is this particular study was from 1991 and it was done by the International Copper Research Association. I'd never heard of it. It's called the ica. It's based here in the States and every couple of years they do a retrospective review of, well, what have we learned in the last couple years about copper? And it's worldwide. In this particular one, it was studying 1988 and 1989. The article was written in 1991 and there are only 3000 footnotes in this 100 page article. I'm like, oh my gosh. It's absolutely arresting to see what they knew about how critical copper is to our physiology. And they're talking about marine life and plant life and animal life and human life, but it's like, oh my. It was, it was absolutely a work of art. Well, what your listeners have to be thinking about was what's playing in the background in 1988, 89, 90 and 91. This rollout of glyphosate. Yeah, and what people need to understand is that glyphosate, one of its most toxic properties is it will chelate copper down to a PH of one. And I learned that from Stephanie Seneff at A meeting in Chicago a number of years ago and she was, she was very animated about it. And basically what she said was nothing stops glyphosate from chelating copper. Well, you have to begin to wonder, wait a minute, that's a pretty significant event. And so practitioners have been trained that we're all anemic and we're all copper toxic. That's the official narrative. It's a bold faced lie. And all we have to do is go back into the last two years and we know that all of those conditions are caused by copper deprivation and iron overload. And so the world was flipped on its ear in 2020 and the practitioners couldn't see it because they're trained in anemia and copper toxicity. The missing piece of the puzzle when people play that card is usually it's based on a hair test. Unfortunately, and I rely on hair tests, I'm not at all critical of hair tests, but it' enough. And so the hair test can be misleading, but they don't take the steps to measure it in the blood. A lot of people have been, have gone to practitioners who are trained by William Walsh. He's a very talented guy, electrical engineer here in the States. And he was influenced and I think in some degree trained by Pfeiffer. Again, that's not exactly to be proud of as people do their research. And he's measuring the impact that the so called copper has on zinc and B6 due to cryptopyrls. But what are cryptopyrls? They're defective heme groups. When you go into the, the literature, you find out that what causes that is that the loading of iron into the pyro group doesn't grow right. And that's done by particular copper enzyme called ferrochelotase. So ferrokylatase, which is the eighth enzyme, it's the last enzyme in the process to make heme. If that last enzyme doesn't work right because the crane operator is not working right, copper is not present. Well then it's a defective pyro group that causes the zinc loss and the B6 loss. Well, you don't solve that problem by drowning people in zinc and B6. You got to go upstream and say let's correct the problem of copper deficiency. So I think that we live in unprecedented times of propaganda. The narrative is usually backwards and people just need to broaden their field of vision to understand that the dynamics between copper and iron are totally interconnected. There is no copper metabolism that's independent of iron metabolism. They're absolutely joined at the hip of ceruloplasmin. And as you really get into the research of the iron dynamics and what happens with oxygen in the body, you suddenly realize is that the copper is why we're on this planet. Copper is why we're able to make the level of energy we can make, to have higher order thinking and be able to make the kinds of decisions and build the kinds of systems that we build. That's all a function of high energy activity. And there's only one way to do that, and that's through the bioavailability of copper. So I think it's a misnomer. I think it's misunderstood. Again, the phrase I use is we've been misled and misfed. And I think this is just another classic example and not everyone agrees with it. My former mentor, Rick Malter, he's still beating the drum of copper toxicity. And it's hard because he never uses blood tests, he's never really studied iron metabolism. And when I realized that he wasn't, he was, he was still taking his traditional stance. We were regularly in contact with each other. We were talking two or three times a week. I said, I said, rick, have you read any of my postal iron toxicity? He said, no. And by that, by that point I'd written about 30 different posts. I said, well, I guess there's no reason for us to keep talking, is there? And I hung up the phone and that conversation took place seven years ago. So unfortunately, I don't think he's stretched and he's not alone. There are many other practitioners out there who've taken this calcified stance that it's copper that's causing the problems. But it doesn't take long to really get into the literature to find out, oh, wow, there's, there's way more to the story. And just to end this, this little vignette, the most important article I found about my, my family's past. My, my dad had schizophrenia. So I've always been very interested in that, that condition. Wanted to make sure I wasn't gonna ritz out. You know, we all have that fear. And my dad, my dad left home in 1958 when I was six years old. He was, he was running away because he didn't want to have electric shock therapy. And that was the, that was the treatment du jour for people with schizophrenia. If anyone's ever seen Cuckoo's Nest, they know what I'm talking about. So the article that I found was from 1958 by Dr. Moore Martins M. A R T E N S at Tulane University. And it was using ceruloplasmin to treat schizophrenia. Like I went, what? So they had 34 patients, one shot of ceruloplasmid. So cribbin. How many people were cured of schizophrenia with one shot of ceruloplasmin?

100%.

It was 30. Well, it was 30 of 34.

Wow.

30 of 34. And then the question, the natural question to ask is, where can I get some of that? And one milligram of ceruloplasm is available for $403. Well, that's a very expensive way. I mean, it would solve so many of the world's problems, but then we'd have no problems to solve them. Right. So it's a fascinating journey. And I think what's missing is more practitioners need to understand the simplicity and the elegance and the enormity of bioavailable copper. That's really the bottom line.

Wow. I think I opened up a can of worms. Straight up.

No, it was a great question. I knew it was coming. I just didn't know when we were going to get into it. So I'm glad.

I just, I just see that. I see so many comments in the previous, the previous podcast and I thought it's good to just address it straight up and then we can sort of move on to some more productive. You can relax into it. And another follow up question is. So you mentioned the glyphosate being a negative impact on, on that whole copper story. Is there any other things that people should be aware of when it comes to the impact on copper?

Yeah, absolutely. But I was, I was doing a podcast with a, with a colleague a couple weeks ago and he's, he studied farming chemicals extensively. He claims that glyphosate is the 10th most toxic chemical that's used. I'm like, man, I don't, I don't want to know about the others. So we live in a very strange world. But for anyone who's familiar with the root cause protocol, you know, there's a series of stops and a series of starts. And again, I always like to give credit where it's due that the whole concept of creating a diet to build ceruloplasm was really sparked by an article that I read by Ray Pete. I think he's an absolute genius, but I do have a love hate relationship with him because I don't, I don't agree with everything he says. And I'm sure there are people out there that feel the exact same way about me. But. But the thing is, in this article on iron toxicity, he made the comment, he says, to my knowledge, no one's developed diet to increase the production of ceruloplasmin. And I thought, well, that's a great idea. I think that's what I'll do. And so it started out with two stops and two starts, because I was chatting with my oldest son, Matt, I was telling about my idea. He said, well, you know, Dad, I think what you really need is do this, don't do that. I thought, that's. That's exactly what I need to do. So there are a series of things that can affect copper. Again, we were in the very opening part of this conversation. I introduced the word fear. And what's important for people to understand is we spell it differently. Within the rcp, it's FE ar. So you can see the symbol for iron. And what does that word really mean? Iron attracts rust. That's what fear does. Because iron, if the state of fear attracts iron to our physiology, again, we're back to adrenaline. Once we go into a state of fear. And what is schizophrenia? It's adrenaline getting rusty from the unbound iron because the copper got destabilized. So the thing is, if you understand the dynamics of copper and iron, all these conditions make so much more sense. But the important principle is fear attracts iron. But iron activates fear, and it does so through a very important pathway called NLRP3. It's called the inflammasome. It's the nuclear origin of inflammation, and it's activated by iron. Well, that's a good thing to know, right? And so what the RCP is trying to do is cut through that cycle. Fear attracts iron. Iron activates fear. And what we really recommend people do is emotional freedom technique to release the energetic hold that these emotions have on our being so we can get on with our life. So emotions are very, very important. And emotional becomes physical, and physical becomes emotional. People need to know that they are. There's this symbiotic relationship between them. So emotions is very important. But within the stops, there's a whole series of things that we've got to stop doing, stop taking, because they affect copper status. I've mentioned ascorbic acid. That is very significant. People, I'm sure, have had their dance with vitamin D. They've probably heard me talk about this in other podcasts. But what I'm coming to realize is that vitamin D has an effect on vitamin A. Again, this is not my idea. This is the work of Mawson, 2013. And there's another. It's not Crosby. I'll think of it in a minute. But there's Another Conaway Conaway, 2013. Both articles written same year. And they clearly point out the fact that vitamin D blocks vitamin A absorption. It's like, okay, that's a problem. Why is that a problem? Because. Because vitamin A is really important for making copper bioavailable. And bioavailable copper is essential for managing oxygen and iron in our body. And what was fascinating to learn, Cribbon, was that the early scientists back in the 1920s were studying, well, what happens if we have a vitamin a deficiency? In 1925, a very enterprising physician named Dr. Burroughs, he was working at the Rockefeller Institute. I'll let people connect those dots. But he was able to prove that vitamin A deficiency causes cancer. They've known that since 1925. Now people are drowning themselves in vitamin D, not knowing that that's causing vitamin A deficiency. I think what we're going to see probably in about three, five years is a massive uptick of cancer on the planet and people are not going to know where it came from. So we encourage people to take cod liver oil, but not vitamin D supplements. People say, well, where I live there isn't enough sun. I'm sure there's a lot of sun in Bali. That would be my first thought. Maybe Bali is another way of saying lots of sunshine. But the key is many functions. But there's two that are very important. We know that vitamin D synthesis is activated by sunlight. Sunlight is very important to activate that. It's actually acting on the folate molecule, which has copper in it. Most people don't know that that's starting the whole process of, of creating vitamin D, both the storage form and the active form. But sunlight also activates the breakdown of retinol and they turn into what are called retinoids. And there are retinoic acids, there's four that stand out. And these retinoic acids are hormones. They're really powerful chemicals that are instrumental in, in our day to day physiology. I would argue that they're probably 100 times more important than vitamin D, but that offends the purists out there. But we have retinoic acids, we have nuclear receptors. They play critical roles in the transcription of new proteins inside our nucleus. And so we have RARs, RORs, our XRs, our ZRs. They're actually over 50 different nuclear receptors that are derived from the retinol protein or retinol Molecules. Excuse me. And it's like, it's mind boggling. It's absolutely, it's amazing. Like the, if you want to make T4 and everybody wants to make more T4 so they have more energy. Right. Well, the thyroid, the thyroxine receptor needs to be attached to RXR in order to transcribe the thyroxine molecule. Can't make it. Well, that's really important. I mean it's like, it's so central and if you don't have RXR present, you can't make the thyroid hormone. Well, the other, other area where RXR is really, really important back to vitamin D is people have been trained over the last probably 25, 30 years. Well, that vitamin D is just the cure all. It's able to leap tall buildings. Right. Well, it turns out all of those attributes of invincibility are ascribed to active vitamin D. It's actually the active hormone125 dihydroxy vitamin D3. But that active substrate needs to be attached to the VDR vitamin D receptor, which is magnesium dependent. Ding, ding, ding. And rxr, which is retinol dependent. And that triad is what actually makes things happen inside the nucleus. And if that triad is not together, no can do. Now people don't, they don't. Like they didn't know that. Wow. So, so maybe this cod liver oil might be beneficial after all because it's got lots of retinol and it does have vitamin D in it and people have just been triggered into this thought process. You know, it's, it's a one trick pony. No, it's a three trick pony. And if the, if the three parts aren't together, it's not going to work. So a lot of vitamin D is not your friend. Ascorbic acid is not your friend. There are a lot of medications out there. Antibiotics. Oh my gosh. The antibiotics are very hard on ceruloplasmin and other copper enzymes. Amoxicillin, doxycycline, oh, azithromycin that everyone was sucking down the last two years. You're not familiar with the research that blows out the copper enzymes. Your liver, 40% loss of enzyme function. That's a good thing to know that there's an impact. Tylenol. Oh, everyone, you know, I got a headache. I got it. No, it's, it's blowing out the glutathione that's attached to the copper in your liver. Again, it's in the research, it's in the literature, but you Got to be a persistent little nerd like me to get up every day, read for two or three hours and just devote yourself to the fascination of, oh my gosh, I didn't know that. So the information is there and people are looking for easy fixes. Well, it's actually, it is simple, but you got to be really disciplined about what you do and you have to be very careful about what you eat. You know, the desire to have processed food is legendary on the planet now. And you've got to be careful of the seed oils that are used and the sugars that are used. Again, sugar will block copper uptake. High fructose corn syrup is very well studied by Myra Fields and a number of her colleagues at the US Department of Agriculture back in the 70s and 80s. It's an absolute fact that the front door of the cell for copper is called CTR1 copper transporter 1. What does high fructose corn syrup do? It locks. That door can open. That's like, wow, sugar, just plain old sugar is very hard on copper status in the body. So again, JB Collins at the University of Florida here in the States, he did research back in 2017, 2018, where they were working with the four legged rodents, mice and rats, and giving them iron supplements like people would get. But it's scaled down for the, for the animal. And what they discovered is that when, when the, when these rodents were getting iron supplementation through the food, through what you would get through iron supplements in a one a day vitamin, it was shutting down the copper metabolism. It wasn't working. So it's, again, people don't know that they are triggered into thinking that they're anemic and copper toxic. And I got to avoid this copper thing and I'll take as much iron as you've got, not knowing that it's the master pro oxidant element on the planet. It's, it's, it's the source of all rust. So the, the stops are very meticulous about avoiding these nutrients. You know, you should not be taking something that has molybdenum. Molybdenum, you should not be taking something has cadmium, you should not be taking something has manganese because all of those blocks copper uptake. And I'm not really bullish on a lot of medications because I don't think people realize that there is this inherent design to either affect magnesium or copper status or both. You know, the antidepressants are amazing at what they do to flush the body of the magnesium, that it's got cardiac meds are very hard on both magnesium and copper. Metformin people, a lot of people with diabetes, they don't know that metformin chelates copper. And the practitioners say, well, that must be why it works. Chemotherapy, the whole cornerstone of chemotherapy is that copper is causing cancer. Don't you know, wait, that's not what Dr. Burrows found. It was lack of vitamin A back in the 20s. But we're supposed to believe copper toxicity causes cancer. It's like, oh, my gosh. And so they use tetramolybdate to. To just suck all the copper out. And it's like, well, what are you doing about the iron that's causing the cancer? And what are you doing about the lack of retinol? And so, so the world of oncology is just upside down and backwards, and people don't know that. And it's just the. The. What I did, you know, back In March of 2020, I realized that we were in this kind of a surreal moment, and I thought this must have something to do with 1984. So I looked at the book that I had, and I saw that it was published in 1948. And for those who haven't read that book, it would be a good. It'd take you a weekend to read it. But it's about black becoming white and white becoming black, and citizens become enemies of the state. All right, so the title is 1984, written in 1948. You subtract that and you get 36. So then I add 36 to 1984. What do you get? 20. 20. And so that's what that whole thing was. It was the activation of the totalitarian state. And so then suddenly people. People have to say, well, wait a minute, then everything they're telling me is backwards. Yes, that's right. And the more you can kind of resign yourself to that reality and just relax that it's all backwards, folks. It's amazing how it calms you down. Stress level goes down, magnesium burn rate goes down, you have more energy, and it's an insane world. We're here to learn lessons. We're here to help each other learn our lessons. I don't know that we're ever going to change the operating system. I don't think that's within our purview. But we can certainly learn a better way to improve our energy production and support each other in that process. Hopefully that gives you some things to work with completely.

That's a nice sort of summary of the stops. And the root cause protocol is There any other things that you would add to that stop list before we move on to the ones that we should be adding?

Yeah, there is one. I think this is very important for people. Again, the COVID cocktail was. Excuse me. The COVID cocktail was ascorbic acid, vitamin D and zinc. And people thought that that was going to be their salvation. They didn't know that that was a perfect way to destroy the bioavailability of copper, which it does. Again, we've talked about ascorbic acid, we've talked about vitamin D. Let's put the spotlight on zinc for a minute. There's a very famous physician, George Brewer, he worked at University of Michigan here in the States, and he was studying the use of zinc for 15 years. For 15 years he studied the use of zinc to chelate copper for people who had Wilson's disease. So for your listeners, Wilson's disease is a very. It's a genetic condition where there's this buildup of copper in the liver and eventually in the brain. And people die because there isn't proper copper. Recycling is taking place. Why? Because there's not retinol in their body. That's the real reason. But we won't go there. We're going to blame the genes, those bad genes. So the incidence of that condition is 1 in 40,000. So here in the States, there's 7,000, 7,500 people that have Wilson's disease. And here we've got Dr. Brewer studying for 50, 15 years the use of zinc to stop this booger worker copper. Do you know how many people take birth control pills? How many women? I was talking to a colleague just the other day. I said, how many women do you think? She said, it's probably 100 million women and people. Again, I'm based here in the U.S. but I'm sure worldwide, it's obviously a much bigger number. But what do birth control pills do? They blow up copper. Suddenly, copper is supposed to be around 100. It can easily double. And ceruloplasma is supposed to be at 30, goes up to 75. Absolutely. Just an explosion. And that's not good. That's a sign of systemic inflammation. And so the important thing is when you introduce zinc into the body, it triggers a very important protein called metallothione. What shouldn't be called metallothione. It should be called copper thionine because it binds up copper a thousand fold. I made that comment earlier, but people don't think about, well, what does that mean? Well, you've just lost the Ability to make energy because you can't activate oxygen in the mitochondria to become water to release energy molecules. If complex four can't turn oxygen into two molecules of water, most important enzyme activity on the planet, I would argue, is turning oxygen into water. And if you don't have copper, you can't neutralize the oxidative stress. The oxidants, the reactive oxygen species, they come up with like four or five different names for the same thing, but it's copper based enzymes. Superoxide dismutase, catalase, glutathione, peroxidase, peroxylase, ceruloplasmin. There's so many different copper dependent antioxidant enzymes that doctors aren't taught about that, their patients aren't taught about that. And so they don't, they don't know that that's what's running the show. And they're taught to take zinc because it, it, it'll stop the virus. Well, yeah, it'll, that there's one mechanism that will stop the replication. But in 2008, I found an article that clearly copper was a recognized agent to stop the SARS CoV virus. It stops it in its tracks, not just a little replication. And it's like, okay, I mean that's when I realized the whole thing was whatever. But, but the thing is people, people don't realize that this zinc is a very powerful mineral. And there's a lot of confusion around it. And they, they talk about the zinc copper ratio that was created, that whole concept was created by that guy Carl Pfeiffer. And, and that was in the 60s. What's important for people to understand is that the real luminaries, the clinical and scientific intelligentsia in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, we're studying copper and iron. Zinc wasn't even on the radar screen. Why? Because zinc is pure distraction, folks. And it really messes up your metabolism. So be very, very careful. If you're going to zinc, the best way to get zinc is through your diet. You know, meats and oysters and other shellfish are going to have zinc. But to be pounding down tablets from the bottle. No, that form, I put that, I classify that as a poison to our metabolism. So it's just, I have very extreme views, but it's based on my reading and reflection of the research and based on my client interactions. So it's just a word of warning. So thank you for that additional reminder. Cribbon.

That's good. I appreciate the controversial comments because I Think we're all in that same boat in terms of the immune system to take vitamin C, which is typically ascorbic acid, zinc. You know, this has been commonly recommended throughout, the, even the natural health space. But, you know, it comes back to come. Comes back to the very simple adage of trying to get as much of these nutrients as, as food because nature's nature kind of balances everything out, doesn't it? So, you know, if we can get zinc from oysters, as you mentioned, or, you know, vitamin C in small doses from fruit, things like kiwi fruits, things like strawberries, berries, it's all balanced out by Mother Nature. Whereas if we, we load ourselves up with, with supplements, it's very hard to get the optimal balance right. It's the same thing with vitamin D supplementation. You know, at one point, would have been about maybe five or six years ago, I was taking extremely high doses of vitamin D. Again, you mentioned vitamin D is one of these, these compounds, D3, that's recommended. I do think there, there is benefits, especially if you can get it from sunlight, which is really easy in, in Bali. But I was taking like something like five. It would be more like 10,000 IU a day. And what I found was I was trying to develop stones, so some sort of. Oh, yeah, because it was calcifying in my body. So I was waking up in the middle of the night with sharp pains in my. Maybe it's kidneys or gallbladder or something like that. I can't remember exactly where the pain was, but it wasn't until I stopped dosing so high that that symptom started to abate. So the warning here is some of these things might be useful in their natural forms, but certainly not overdosing and pumping ourselves for supplements. So I resonate with what you're saying for sure.

I have a client who's a former fireman and really smart guy. He's always researching and I always look forward to our conversations because I know I'm going to learn stuff that I never knew. And yesterday I didn't know about this study, but it relates exactly to your experience with vitamin D. I think he said he thinks he learned this from Stephanie Seneff. Just. Just a brilliant bright light on the planet. And it was a study done in Israel. I think the author was better B E T T E R 1980. And they studied lifeguards, Israeli lifeguards, who did not take vitamin D, but they had tremendous exposure to sunlight. So. So you would expect that there's going to be this Elevation of storage D and then ultimately activity in their body. What was interesting is that the, the level of storage D in these lifeguards never got above 60. And of course, what's people trying to get into the 80s and up to 100, but, but natural sunlight with these lifeguards never got up above 60, but the incidence of kidney stones was 25 times higher and those, that, that got all that kind of sun exposure. So there, there is, you know, it's a bell shaped curve. You know, it's the bookends that create the problems. Right. And so I've had many, many clients experience what you've experienced when they just began to calcify, they realized something was going on. And I think that people need to ask better questions and they need to demand better answers. I think that's really where we are as a populace. We've been, as I say, misled, misfed, and we just need to be more discerning about. Is that really what I need to do? Is there more to the story? And that's really what I've done, is spent the last 11 or 12 years really trying to pull the curtain back to say what else is going on that we just aren't hearing about. And it does get controversial. And I appreciate the opportunity to have these types of conversations that you may not agree with everything I say, but at least we can talk about it and have a dialogue about it to say, well, what about this, what about that? I think that's what's missing in the world today is there's these polarized positions and it's really difficult for people to say, well, let's talk about it and let's see where we do agree and where do we not agree and why don't we agree to begin to put some meat on the bones of why there are differences of opinion. Because you know what, if we agreed on everything, we'd have nothing to talk about. Right.

That'S it. I'd imagine we'd be like the Borg, you know, from Star Trek.

Exactly. Yes, sir.

Yes.

Yeah.

What's the word? We kind of automated robots.

Exactly. Automatons. Yeah, automatons.

That's the one.

Yeah.

So how about we, we segue onto the, the things that we should in terms of the root cause, protocol, of course, the things that we should be doing practices, dietary interventions to add onto the diet to, to boost the ceruloplasmin. Is that how you say it? Ceruloplasm?

Yeah. You should have narrated my book. I'll tell you, it Was, it was like 16 hours of blah, blah, blah. You just start to. You start to wane. Like, oh, my God. So, so, so for people to know. Just so people know, you can, you can get the book in a physical ebook or audio. And what's really funny is I had a very heavy hand in writing the book. There was a guest writer. It was Larry Trevieri. Guy's great. And he, he just, he picked up my voice. He really did a masterful job. And so then I had to read it four times for editing, and then I had to narrate it. And then the CEO of the company, Lantern Audio, sent me the file. He said, what I would recommend you do is listen to it, but read your book while you do it. I went, well, I've never done that cribbing. I'm embarrassed to tell you and your listeners how much I learned by that dual listening and reading. There was stuff in there that I had completely just like, we all guilty of it. We just. We see it so many times, we forget that it's there. But it was just a really powerful, like, wow, there's a lot of good information in here. Things for people to do. I think the first thing, most important thing is to really believe in your body's natural ability to heal itself. I think that's really important. That when Dr. Liz used the phrase many years ago about the innate healer, which sparked my curiosity, there really is one, and I would argue that the innate healer is bioavailable copper because it plays such critical roles in our immune system. I mean, the immune system is nothing without copper. I mean, you can. You can pump it full of vitamin D and zinc and all this stuff. It'll do things. But you really want to bring it to life. You got it. You got to feed it energy. You got to feed it intelligence. So copper plays critical functions in that regard. There's 40 quadrillion mitochondria in our body, so that's 15 zeros. Well, they don't work without copper. And it's. And it's not. The mitochondria are not factories. Excuse me. They're not furnaces. They're not energy furnaces. They're factories. They're making stuff. They're recycling stuff. These are intelligent beings that allow us to exist. And it's important to understand that and recognize that we do have this natural ability to rebuild and recycle and have resilience and respond to adversity. That's really important, especially when you've got a chronic condition, because when you have a chronic condition, guess what starts to creep in? The fear that you're broken. And that fear will eat away at you. It absolutely does. I've seen it in thousands of clients, so I think having the right mindset is very, very important. But again, I would start with diet. And I know that's your sweet spot. And people need to have a, they need to have an understanding of their ancestral origin because your genes have been formed by thousands of generations of eating a certain diet. It's really important to know that. And you know, the work of Kate Shanahan, deep nutrition. If people really want to understand the link between food and how it shapes our body and our function of our body, it's a wonderful book to read and she builds on the genius of Weston A. Price. And so I think it's useful to know that, that, you know, are we eating real food? You know, how, how is the farmer feeding the soil? That's really important to know. What is the what, what practices is the farmer engaged in to try to nourish the soil and the microbes that live in that soil so they can work with the minerals that are supposed to be in that soil to put it into the roots of the plants in a field that has glyphosate, the microbe, the fungi to bacteria ratio, excuse me, which is supposed to be 6 to 1 drops to 1 to 1. Apparently the fungi work off of copper. That would be my conclusion. And so if you don't have those heavy lifters doing the work, well, then you're not going to be eating real food. Why do farmers need to use so many chemicals, pesticides and fungicides? Because the plants aren't strong. Plants don't generate energy. Why don't they generate energy? Because they're not getting the minerals from the soil. So that's where it starts. Understanding you have to eat real food, eat it in, in season and, and not necessarily buy food that's coming from, you know, 1500 miles from, from where you live. That's the average distance here in the States, food travels over 1500 miles. It's like really is that. And I'm not about to green acres and put on my overalls, but we've got to be as locally as we possibly can because that's really, it's going to be fresher, it's going to be more nutrient dense. So those I think are some real important pillars. But then when we get into the actual guts of the starts, it's very, very important that you find the sources of copper. The Best that we found are bee pollen, real vitamin C. You've talked about food based sources which are wonderful. Again, we're back to the soil where those berries, those cherries, those, you know, whatever, whatever form you might be using as your source of vitamin C. Is there copper in the soil that's allowing for the vitamin C molecule to be made by the fruit, you know. And then. If you think you need more, there are companies that have vitamin C supplements that aren't flooded with ascorbic acid. That's important to know. And then I think organ meats become a very important source of a lot of nutrition, a lot of enzymes in organ meats, especially the liver, very important source of copper, very important source of retinol. Hyaluronic acid is amazing. Choline, it's the richest source of choline on the planet. And so there's a lot of good that comes from these organ meats, but it should be from grass fed animals, not grain fed. Grain and grass are very different. The nutrient properties are very, very different and they produce not just a different animal, but different organs in the animal. And the taste is completely different. So that's important for people to know how to manage stress. Again, we all have stress. When does stress stop on the planet? When we're six feet under. So we've got to get coping skills with the stress runder. And I remember a conversation I had with Dr. Liz's uncle who just recently passed away at the age of 95, led a very successful life, was a world renowned portrait artist and had had inventions to his credit, like 16 inventions. Guy was amazing, he was a brilliant guy. And I remember I was talking to him, I said, uncle Glenn, I'm curious, how do you deal with stress? He looked at me and he says, well, I don't have any stress. I said, excuse me? He said, well, he said, I have problems, I figure out what the problem is, I figure out how to solve it and then the stress goes away. Such a simple but powerful solution to the problem. And we just sat down and thought about it for a few minutes and solved it and then moved on. So I'm not suggesting that all of us can do that, but we've got to deal with our stress. And one of the best ways to deal with stress is to take magnesium. It's the chill pill. And what happens is when we get stressed out, magnesium burn rate kicks in, we lose magnesium and the world starts to get bigger and brighter than it really is. It's like we're wearing night vision goggles and Then we tend to overreact to our environment. So that's why the magnesium minerals in general are so important. The mistake that's commonly made when people start the rcp, everybody wants to get well yesterday, and so they rush in and they know they're stressed out, so they take a lot of magnesium. Well, what does that do? It tanks their adrenals. So it's like, slow down. The rcp, the root cause protocol has phasing, and what we're trying to do is ease people into this process of rebuilding and recycling. And what we encourage people to do is mineralize their food and water, salt, mineral drops, start working with adrenal cocktails, which are really designed to bring in vitamin C, bring in the salt, bring in the potassium, that really perk up the adrenal glands so they can begin to bring balance back into the body. What's important for people to know is that 95% of our vitamin C, the real vitamin C, is stored in the adrenal glands. And what's important to know about vitamin C is the engine of that vitamin is an enzyme called tyrosinase. Well, tyrosinase has two copper atoms in it. And what we've not known is that there's a whole series of enzymes that run on copper and a whole series of enzymes that metal and iron, and they're, they're parallel. And this is true in marine life, plant life, and human life, I assume all animals as well. And that early in the Earth's existence, it was running off of iron. But as copper became more prevalent because oxygen became more prevalent, then these enzyme functions flipped over to a copper side. And that's really, That's a good thing, because copper has these amazing properties. And there's an enzyme that people may know about in our liver called the cytochrome P450 enzyme family. There's 52 enzymes in the family, and that's what big pharma relies on to break down medication. Cytochrome P450. What is, what is P450? Well, that's indicating the absorption band for the mineral that's attached to that, which is called iron. And what's the corollary to iron? Oh, it's. It's actually tyrosinase, and that's the copper side. Well, in 1938, when Sven Gorgi got the Nobel Prize for discovering ascorbic acid, which is not what he was doing, but that's what the award was for, suddenly the world stopped having unrestricted access to vitamin C and was given A synthetic form called ascorbic acid. And that was a very bad thing because then it began to limit the amount of copper that was getting into the liver to allow for the natural enzyme process. And in a state of copper deprivation. That's when these enzymes go from a copper function to an iron function. And I think that's really what's happening on this planet is we're being regress back to an earlier life form. If you want my honest opinions. It's a very fascinating subject and one of the, one of the great minds this is Dr. Merchant. M E R C H A N T. And she studies this whole dynamic very thoroughly. The article that really changed my thinking was from 2006, between rock and a Hard Place. It's a very powerful article. Really get your noggin cranking. And so real vitamin C, very, very important. Real food, very, very important. Adrenal cocktails, very important to restore the function of our adrenal glands. And again, a lot of the optics in convention is to focus on the thyroid, right? We know the thyroid runs the body, right? No, it doesn't run the body. That's. That is absolute witchcraft. What does the word pharmacopoeia mean? It's Greek for witchcraft. People maybe don't know that. And so thyroid makes one hormone. The adrenal glands make 50 hormones. And that vitamin C is really busy. That tyrosinase enzyme is humping to support the production of hormones throughout the body. So it's good to honor the master gland, if you will. And I think it's very important that people get fat in their diet. And again, all the great nutritionists I think, like Weston A. Price, I understand there's, there's a modern day Weston A. Price. His name is Dr. Schindler. I just learned his name yesterday again for this fireman, fantastic conversation. And apparently Schindler is picking up where Price left off and he's studying who are the healthiest people on the planet. And it's going back to these exact same principles that Dr. Price undercovered. And so it's important, I think when Price was studying the DIETS of those 14 indigenous tribes, 14 discovered that 65% of their calories was coming from saturated fat. Well, that's a good thing. And we've got, I think now, based on the research that I've done around the mitochondria, I think they were or they are designed to be fat burning machines and they've been turned into sugar factors. Absolutely.

Great.

Yeah. And what's amazing is I've Read a lot of articles. I found one, only one that talks about the role of burning fat in the mitochondria and how it intensifies the production of ATP. So you go from when you ferment sugar you get 2 ATP. When you oxidize sugar you get 34 to 38 depending on the conditions, ATP. But when you oxidize fat, palmitic acid, you get 140 ATP. Well, that's a very different, very different function. Right. I tell you that extra energy goes a long way. It helps to fund and helps to support the function of the immune system. It's critical to go from M1 macrophage function, which is an inflammatory response, to go over to M2 function, which is one wound repair. You've got to go from glucose metabolism to fat metabolism because you need more energy for wound repair. And that, that is well chronicled in the literature. But nobody knows what that means. You can't burn fat without copper. The beta oxidation enzymes are, are absolutely essential to break down the fat into the acyl groups to allow for acetyl. Acetyl COA to be made. And that's what allows for this ramping up of the ATP. So it's just, it's going back to the basics and just trying to get people to focus on the critical few so that they, they feel comfortable that their body can support their day to day needs. Absolutely.

I think you've, I'm very conscious of your time, Molly. I think you've given the audience an amazing rundown on the basics of the root cause protocol. And absolutely. I encourage the audience to go out and get a copy of the book, cure your fatigue, because I think that will be a lot more in depth in terms of the actionable steps, a bit more prescriptive. We've given them kind of like the surface layer, so if they want to go deeper, definitely. I encourage people to, to go out and grab the book. So as we start to wrap, is there any other parting words that you would like to let the audience know about.

Again? Two thoughts. One, we come back to this article that I was reading, 100 page article. What I've really concluded is that the body runs on copper. And that's a very bold statement, but it really does. And the research that they uncovered just in this 1988, 1989 time period, it's arresting what people will learn from that particular study. So I think people need to completely rethink what's running my metabolism. When you get into the mechanics of mitochondria, get into the Mechanics of the immune system, getting the mechanics of the hormone production. You can't do it without copper and people just have not been trained properly around that. And in fact, what does run the thyroid, it's copper status and that's the work of Jens Weitag in Germany from 2012. It's a mind blowing study that completely gets you thinking differently about who's on first and what's on second. So I just want to encourage people to take a reflective moment to really think about this differently. Appreciate the plug for the book. I think it's got traction, it's doing very well. I'm surprised where it is in the Amazon rankings and I had a recent exchange with an interview with Joseph Mercola and that really helped give it some lift, if you will. And I'm very, very excited about it. And I'm thinking maybe what we can do when we get to round, to round three, maybe it's a Q and A, maybe it's a Q and A and get to the questions that I know your followers are going to have because a lot of it, I know you agree with some of it, maybe we have that debate, but I think your listeners really want to get down into the weeds and find out, well, what exactly should I do? And I would, I would look forward to the opportunity to have that exchange.

Sure, absolutely. I'm sure after we launch this episode, we're going to get a whole lot of people screaming at me again to get you back on. So definitely the first episode is one of the highest downloaded episodes. So huge kudos to you, Molly, and thank you so much for coming back onto the show. And as we always finish off our show, if there's one thing that someone can do for their gut health today, what would it be?

Everyone who has a gut issue, and I think we talked about this in the first session, has an emotional issue that they cannot resolve. I would encourage them to go to a practitioner who does emotional release work. A lot of people think they need to understand from a Freudian standpoint, well, what exactly happened? No, you don't. You just need to let go of it. You need to let go of whatever that emotional trauma is that keeps turning your stomach. Just let go of it. And that would be the strongest advice I'd have is it's not to in any way demean the importance of the issue. It's not to mean the importance of the gut rebuilding process that people can go through, but what you've got to do is nip the metabolic origin of it. And it's an emotional issue that's feeding that metabolic process. So that's what I would encourage people to do. Right.

Wonderful, wonderful advice that's been echoed by many past guests on the show. So, so on point. Molly. Thank you so much.

And you promised that the next next chat will be face to face and you're going to just fly over to Bali. Right?

Let's see if there's any budget in the kitty for that.

Maybe we'll move halfway.

Maybe Hawaii.

Yeah. Right. Okay. You have a lovely rest of your evening. Thanks again for the opportunity to have this conversation.

Thank you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Gut Health Gurus podcast with the fascinating Molly Robbins. If you enjoyed this podcast, 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, Cribban Govender, please follow him on Instagram and facebookthealthgurus. Also, check out our Gut Health Guru Gurus Facebook support group. With more than 16,000 members ready to help you on your 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 the Root Cause protocol category for products recommended by Morley Robbins. Until next time.