How To Reduce The Risk From Swimming in Chlorinated Pools and Drinking Chlorinated Water.

Folks, it's Ben Greenfield here and I'm looking at a quote right now and it says there is no treatment or drug which can overcome or negate the effects of a poor diet, inadequate nutrition, lack of exercise and an unhealthy lifestyle. And that quote actually comes from the gentleman who we have as a guest on today's podcast, Dr. David Gedoff. And Dr. Gedoff is a naturopath. He is a board certified clinical nutritionist. And he also happens to know a lot about water and water health. And that's what we are going to be talking about today is for those of you who are spending time in swimming pools getting exposed to chlorine, maybe a little bit worried about this stuff and what it can do to your bodies and what you can do about it. We're going to focus on that today. So Dr. Gedoff, thank you. Thanks for coming on the call today.

You're very welcome. I am right here. It's so funny. Every, every state is a little different with their, let's say, laws and regulations. And in my state, I'm not allowed to use the word doctor. So everybody calls me David or naturopath. So it just depends on where I am and I don't care. When I was brought up, my dad was always telling my, my little friends, don't call me doctor. My name is Lou. Call me Lou. So I was brought up very liberal environment. Now I'm a little different now.

You're down in California, right?

I am down in Southern California within the boundaries of San Diego County.

Okay, gotcha. Now, you know, obviously as a naturopathic physician and a clinical nutritionist, you know a lot about various aspects of health and wellness. But what kind of got you into knowing about water? Where did you learn what you know about kind of water, water health, water filters, chlorine, its effects on the body, things of that nature.

Well, actually that came first and then continued. I've been seeing patients and helping them get well in a private practice for approximately 20 years. But for almost 10 years prior to that, I hadn't quite decided as I continued to learn nutrition, what I wanted to do when I grow up, which is sort of ridiculous. I was 60 a week and a half ago. I love fixing things. Now, of course, I love helping people help themselves fix their bodies. But, but so for 10 years prior to the 20 that I have now, I actually billed myself as a, if I can't do it right, I won't do it at all. Everyday home repairs for people and I went into people's homes and did various different things. And one of the things that was very, very interesting was water. So I went to the Pacific Quality Water Quality Assurance Conferences every year and the wqa, which is the Western version of that. And I got a huge education that most of the people doing water don't do because they're just doing the same thing over and over instead of learning. And I learned all about the different types of filtration modules, the different media, which is what we call whatever the water is going through, reverse osmosis units, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and was astonished at how few of the people that were out there doing water really knew any of this because they were salespeople for large companies. They didn't have to know anything. They were just trying to sell you a unit to get their commission. Yeah, yeah, I was actually. I was actually learning it because I was. Me, myself and I were the only people that had ever run any company that I've been working for for 30 years. It's basically just me. And so I just wanted to know this. And so I took training in reverse osmosis. I took training in deionization systems, a bunch of different companies that manufacture different types of media, four or five different types of charcoal, and et cetera, et cetera, as to what. What they really do, how they do it. And then when I switched occupations, I no longer believe anybody. One of the things that keeps me honest and I guess keeps me busy is I simply don't believe anybody except myself. And so when somebody says that this particular filter, for example, takes out fluoride, I go, really? Send me a bunch of lab tests and show me what instrument was used to test it, how much fluoride was going in, what was going out, how much of the media was used, and. And over and over again. They can't. Well, how do you know it takes out fluoride? Oh, well, we were told that by this person. So I called them up and they couldn't do it. So I spent hundreds of dollars on a fluoride meter. And I have chlorine meters and everything. And now I test things myself because otherwise I don't trust what somebody's told me.

Got it. So I gotta ask, how did you go from what you were doing with.

The water into medicine into naturopathy? I took a class when I was, I think, 17 at the new School for Social Research, which is a very progressive college in Manhattan. And it was entitled Nutrition Against Disease. The professor or instructor or teacher, whatever he Was called back then was a physician, Dr. Robert Giller, MD. And it was a regular 16 week full semester course. I took it for non credit. It simply seemed interesting. And he was teaching us all the college students in there. He was teaching us how he helped his patients to get well by teaching them to change their diets, testing them for all sorts of different types of food and chemical sensitivities so they knew what they needed to avoid running specialized tests, including hair analyses, which he let us all run on ourselves. So when he was going over that particular part of the course, we'd be looking at our own hair analysis, etc. And I was just so fascinated at 16 or 17 that I said, wow, I need to know this. Never even considered that it had anything to do with my being in it as an occupation. It was just interesting. I like to know things very, very thoroughly, even if it's not for an occupation. And so I started reading and I read, you know, let's Live magazine and Rodale Press's Prevention back when it was decent magazine before they started taking pharmaceutical ads. And then I started reading all sorts of books, Adele Davis books. And then I started realizing that all these people are giving their opinions and selling books. And if I really wanted something, that was was the meat of the matter, the nuts and bolts of the matter. I needed to be listening to people in the field that were using what they were doing, such as Robert Giller, to help people get well. And it was working. And I started going to some seminars and conferences and things like that. And I'm not exactly even sure what happened about 20 years ago when I said, okay, I'm not interested in fixing things in people's houses anymore. I've been studying nutrition all my entire life. What do I have to do to get some credentials and change fields? And that's what I started doing.

Gotcha. Okay, cool. So for people who are tapping their fingers waiting to hear more about water now, as promised, we're gonna get into it. Okay, so let's start here. And this may seem like a dumb question, but I think maybe some people don't even think about this before they hop in the pool to swim laps or maybe jump in the pool to cool off. Why does chlorine get added to pools?

Well, chlorine gets added to pools because the pool water, even if it came out of a tap, which of course, where it normally came out of somebody's hose or whatever, and therefore theoretically would have already had some chlorine in it and has met the requirements for that particular city, state or municipality is the proper term to be bacteria free. We now get into the pool. And so now we have all of the bacteria coming off of our bodies. We have pieces of skin that you don't see unless you're using a microscope coming off of our bodies. We have people sneezing in the pool, of course, we all know we have people urinating in the pool, etc. Etc. Plus we've got things falling down into the pool from the outside. It's not just coming out of a tap into your drinking glass and being drunk and consumed immediately. And therefore there's quite a bit of additional, both bacteria, viral, fungal and possibilities for that, as well as things like your skin and leaves, which are a good medium for these things to want to grow into. So we're giving them food. And so in order to, since we're not changing the pool water every 20 minutes or once a day, it's not like you drink a glass and fill it again. It's the same water. We have to do something to make it so that bacteria don't grow in the pool and we don't end up with a level which when somebody gets in there and gets them in their eye, you know, they get an eye infection or they get some in their nose, which people do all the time. They get a sinus infection or, you know, you drink some and you get a whole body infection. And so they need to replace the chlorine that has quickly used itself up because of the air, the sun, and, and just the amount of things it has to do, we have to put more of it in, hold it up at that level to continue to kill things. So that, that would be the reason.

Okay, gotcha. So in terms of chlorine actually being in the pool, is there anything that we need to be worried about? I mean, as far as somebody who's swimming laps multiple times per week, maybe even not Michael Phelps, who's living in there for five to six hours a day. But I mean, average, there's a lot of triathletes that listen to his show, for example. They're getting in the pool three to four times a week. What type of potentially dangerous things might, might we be exposing our bodies to when we swim in chlorinated pools?

Sure. And really exactly as you say, it is the way it is. It has to do with just the amount of time that we're in contact. I have, as a really quick, quick side note, I've got a number of people who told me that their mothers or fathers who were artists before it was required that a number of toxic substances that were in oil paints get removed, who all died of leukemia and lymphoma. And the doctors, admittedly, they even knew it. It wasn't like, we don't know why. Oh, well, yeah, with your occupation, of course, you were handling, exposed to breathing, in, touching this stuff. And that's the stuff that caused leukemia and lymphoma. So we knew that. And now here we have instead the toxic substance chlorine. And chlorine is pretty darn well researched, actually. You can go on any websites that have toxic toxicological information and find out what we know chlorine does. We know it's a very strong oxidant. You know, people take antioxidants. Well, it's a very strong pro oxidant or oxidant. So it starts damaging everything it touches immediately. Just how badly it damages it varies depending on the level and how much antioxidant abilities your skin tissues and the rest of your tissues have because you've been taking antioxidants. So we're promoting oxidation, we're promoting aging. We're were drying the skin out. I have people that move from the country where they were on a well, they were bathing in well water into a city where all of a sudden they're bathing in chlorinated water. And they said the astonishing difference that nobody would have been able to even make them believe until they saw it on their own skin, of how much drier their skin was when they're taking the same bath in water 100 miles away, but the water is filled with chlorine, which is aggressively drying out their skin.

You mean not even in an actual chlorinated pool, but just the amount of chlorine added to the typical municipal water?

Right. Just the much, much, much, much lesser amount of chlorine in a municipal water supply, not even anywhere near the amount that would be in a pool or spa, and their skin starts drying out. So it increases cancer rates. It's a pro oxidant, which causes damage to the skin and causes to age faster. And there's probably a list of. Of those things we know it causes. For example, in medicine and in science, we try to be careful, or most the more scientific people try to be careful. Many of the ones out there, I hear, they don't be careful, and they'll throw you 15 diseases that something causes, and you go look for it, and there isn't a shred of evidence that causes 12 of them. We know that Parkinson's, for example, can be caused by pesticides, but there are a lot of other things we think it causes. Well, we know that there are quite a number of cancers in which the risk factor goes up dramatically if you're exposed to chlorine. And we are. And we're not just exposed to it on our skin, because anybody who has a pretty decent sniffer can smell the chlorine level. And that's because chlorine outgasses right out of the water into the air. And if you happen to be swimming in an indoor pool, I don't know what the percentage would be. It hasn't been studied, but I would say it's at least 100% worse. It could be 200 or 300% worse because instead of the part that comes out of the air wafting off and going out of their environment, it's being held in the enclosure that you're in if it's an indoor pool. So now you're getting a whole bunch more into your lungs and not just into your arms. So I would recommend people, if you've got an outdoor pool and an indoor pool and there isn't any reason you have to have one or the other, do yourself a favor and swim in the outdoor pool.

Gotcha. Now, what about, and I've heard about this before, like organic compounds that are in the pool, you know, from people's, you know, dead skin cells that you referred to earlier, or anything else actually reacting with the chlorine to form chloramines. Is that something that's completely different than chlorine and a different risk altogether, or how does that work?

Chloramines are a different risk. And I still haven't seen anything that I can wrap my arms around or teeth around that proves to me that chloramines are made in that way. They may very well be. I've seen people talk about it, but I haven't seen any documentation. More often, chloramines are in the water because your municipality has decided to. Chlorine doesn't last long enough, and they're now chlorinating your water with chloramines. So although the extra that's being put in is a chlorine product, what came into it might be a chloramine product. And as you say, it may very well be that some of the things that it reacts to may turn into chloramine. Chloramines appear to be a little bit more dangerous, a little bit longer lasting, Although neither of those is as bad as bromine, which is fascinating, because if you ask some pool supply companies or some pool service companies, and you don't know anything about this, and you simply say, you know, my pool, if you have your own pool or a lap pool in the backyard, my pool is purified with chlorine. But I've recently learned that that's really, really harmful, is there's something else you can put in there. And the only thing that can be used in the same manner, in other words, very easy to switch from one to the other, is bromine. And so the pool companies that don't know anything except that you asked them to switch it say, oh, yeah, yeah, we can put bromine in there instead for you. And you go, okay, go, fine, do that. And now your pool is purified with bromine, which according to toxicologists, is so much worse than chlorine that you have just hurt yourself tremendously more than leaving the chlorine alone.

Wow. Okay. And chloramines are also an oxidant. Is that the main issue with them?

Chloramines are also an oxidant. They seem to last a little longer, be a little bit more aggressive. They don't break down quite as fast. And that's why a lot of the municipalities are using them in the supply. I don't. I can't find really good toxicological data comparing them in some good research to chlorine, other than they last longer. Whereas bromine, we know for a fact, is far worse. And with all these things being horrible, it's one of the reasons in Europe they use ozone, which we can certainly discuss.

Okay, gotcha. Now, this may not be a news flash for a lot of people. I think some folks are aware that chlorine is not like the hottest thing on the planet to be like, you know, submerging your body in or maybe swallowing some of while you're swimming, you know, a few times a week. But in terms of actually reducing the damage, things that swimmers, triathletes, people who are lap swimming a lot can do before swimming, during swimming, when they get out of the pool. What type of things? Like from a nutritional supplement standpoint or from like a food consumption standpoint or, you know, maybe there's some other strategy that I don't know about. What can people do to actually protect themselves to reduce the damage or to eliminate some of the damage caused by swimming in a chlorinated or a brominated pool?

Sure. Okay. Well, the first thing is people need to understand a principle that most people don't understand. And another way to look at it is radiation. Because people ask me, how do I Protect myself from chlorine in the pools I swim in. And how do I protect myself from radioactivity with, you know, maybe is coming in from Fukushima and a bunch of different things like that. And in both instances, what you're doing is not exactly protecting yourself from the occurrence because it's happening. It would sort of be like somebody saying, okay, somebody hits me with a baseball bat 10 times a day. How do I protect myself? And the person asked, being asked, says, you get the person to stop hitting you. No, no, that's not an option. I have to swim in this pool or I have to go in this area with radiation. Well, the only way you can really protect yourself is by eliminating what's going on. And that, of course, would be putting in your own pool and having it purified with ozone. But what we can do is we can help make the cells of your body which are going to be in contact with the chlorine and the cells inside your body and lung tissue, et cetera, which you're going to be breathing it in a lot more in an indoor pool. We can make them more able to resist some of the damage by having your antioxidant level higher than it normally would be on somebody who is not trying to protect themselves. There's a lot of nonsense out there in the antioxidant world because people want to sell you a particular supplement. And so you'll hear this particular substance, and maybe it was extracted from a plant or whatever, is 10 times more powerful than vitamin C, and this one is 100 times more powerful than vitamin E. That doesn't matter because in most cases, those esoteric supplements, the, that they found in some rainforest fruit maybe, are substances that nobody on the planet except people in that area of the world have ever been exposed to. So they're not required. And so in the petri dish, if it's 100 times stronger than E or C or whatever, it doesn't matter. What's important is that we bring in the antioxidants that our body's cells use and not worry about all of this other stuff. And therefore we have vitamin C, phenomenal antioxidant. We have vitamin E, phenomenal antioxidant, which is fat soluble, so it gets in the cell membranes. We must have enough fat. This is a big issue that people don't understand. If you want to hurt yourself much more than you are already hurting yourself when you go into the pool, it's fairly simple. All you have to do is be on a relatively lower than normal fat diet. Because fats are our protective agents. It is the fats in your cells that protect you from a lot of the oxidative damage that occurs. It is the antioxidants that we eat that help protect the fats. So the people that are going to have the least difficulty are the people that are not buying anything that has less fat than it was supposed to have. So you don't buy something that says low fat on it because that means that the way nature gave it to you, you're telling nature she's wrong and you're reducing the fat. So you always have the right amount of fats in everything. You always leave the yolk and the egg, you always leave the skin on the chicken. You have full fat dairy products, et cetera, because we need those fats to protect the body from the chlorine. And then we make sure we have enough of the antioxidants to do a job protecting those fats so that they further do their job correctly. And the simple ones would be vitamin C and vitamin E. We'll go over a couple of others. And of course vitamin D, hopefully everybody now knows, is a phenomenal protective agent from cancers. So many of the cancers that chlorine promotes. Having your vitamin D level brought up to the point at which in US Standards, and I state that because in European or Canadian standards, the numbers are different. So the numbers I'm going to give you are for US vitamin D tests, you want your vitamin D to be up somewhere between 60 and 80 or 60 and 100 on a US test. And however much D it takes you every day to do that, and vitamin C, I usually recommend swimmers to take at least 4000 milligrams of a good vitamin C a day. So maybe 1000 milligrams tablet four times a day or 2000 with breakfast and 2000 with dinner. But it's got to be at least with dinner and breakfast because vitamin C doesn't stay in your body all day. Better off with C taking it three times a day.

Doctor, if I could ask real quick, you know, I know that there have been some studies that have shown that like high amounts of vitamin C and vitamin E taken in like A synthetic vitamin 4 may increase risk of stroke, for example. Are those the type of supplements that you're recommending? Are you recommending that folks just like increase fruit and vegetable intake? Is there, is there some other form of vitamin C and vitamin E that you recommend? Or what do you actually come at this from when you look at, you.

Could eat the highest vitamin C fruits on the planet which actually would be camu, camu all day long and barely get the amount of C you would need to protect from chlorine. See what happens is as soon as we bring in toxic substances that we were never exposed to, the amount of nutrients we get from plants is no longer adequate. The only studies that have ever been done showing that vitamin C has ever caused a problem were done with insufficient amounts of C. In other words, somebody decided to try people at 500 milligrams a day which was a pro oxidant in that particular individual because that individual needed 2,000 a day. So if anybody wants to learn more about vitamin C, I would actually send you free of charge because I don't have anything for sale on my website. Just put in David, get off and everybody can spell David and most people can spell getandoff.com and it will redirect you to the site. Go to the area that says MP3 lectures and recordings. There's a two part because of how long it is. Lecture by one of the world experts, Dr. Thomas Levy in vitamin C and you'll find out more about vitamin C than you've ever known. But yes, I do in fact mean the forms that are high dose in tablets and not the amounts we can get from fruit. As a matter of fact, when I have people coming into me with a lot of problems, I often have to cut their fruit by 90% because the amount of fructose they're getting in that fruit that no traditional population ever ate because we didn't have stores and the fruit was only ripe for 12 weeks of the year and then they didn't see it until next year is actually causing a lot of problems. Vitamin E, I am very particular vitamin C, there's lots of vitamin C's on the market. Vitamin E, I'm very particular. The only vitamin E product I sell in my office is called Unique E. That's its entire name. For the first 45 years of that company's life it was the only product they made. They now make a couple of other products but it's the only vitamin E and they pull out all of the parts of the E complex D, alpha D, beta D, delta D, gamma, tocopherol and they leave them in that ratio instead of trying to decide what your body wants. I get better results with that than everything else. So I have most people take that.

Okay, got it. So higher fat intake, vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin D. Those are some of your main recommendations in terms of kind of protecting the body.

Those are Some main recommendations I might add. One more I might add in without going nuts and just going off to deep end and giving hundreds more. And that would be alpha lipoic acid. Alpha lipoic acid is a fascinating substance. It is both a fat soluble and water soluble antioxidant. It is a liver protective agent and it helps to donate electrons to regenerate other antioxidants so they can last longer in the body without becoming damaging.

Okay, got it. All right, so I'll make sure I put a link to that website and to the vitamin C supplements or the vitamin C lectures that you recommended in the show notes here. Now, what about things that remove chlorine from the skin? Skin like chlorine removing soaps or shampoos or conditioners? What are your thoughts on those? Do you have recommendations in terms of getting it off the skin more quickly or what do you come at things at from a standpoint of like hair and skin and kind of getting chlorine off after swimming?

Well, most of the information that's been given out on that is actually either misleading or wrong. Chlorine is very active. We know that. It's an extremely active halogenated product, very strong pro oxidant. And what happens is it gets on something such as our skin and it immediately starts doing damage. And very quickly you can't remove it anymore. Yes, there's no question that as soon as you get out of the pool, instead of sitting and talking to your buddy for half an hour or sitting in the sun or doing something else, you should immediately at least rinse off with our chlorinated water. But the chlorinated water is not as chlorinated as your pool was. You're still doing a benefit. Absolutely. That would be helpful. And doing so with soap, any kind of soap, will certainly help to better rid anything in the top layers. It's just that most of the chlorine has already changed into something else. Chlorine is active, so it becomes, you know, something. For example, you put sodium chloride. Sodium chloride is chlorine and sodium. But it doesn't smell like chlorine. Although it has chlorine in it. It's got plenty of chlorine in it. That's what saltwater pools are. They make a little bit of salt in the pool and then the instrument that it goes through pulls the chlorine out of the salt and chlorinates the pool. So, you know, it's, it's, it's not something we can wash off very much of other than just the top amounts, which we're still wet in. And pulling that off is really immediately you want to just get right into a shower, get that off. That will reduce it a little bit. But most of the damage has been what was happening while you were in the pool water. And therefore, we want to have all the good fats in it and the antioxidants to help make it so that those cells are damaged less and more protected, as opposed to trying to get it off afterwards. That won't do anywhere near as much as some people selling a product might want you to believe.

Okay, so just basically rinse as much as possible and go from there.

Yes, definitely.

Okay. Now what about, like, you know, kind of testing to see if there's chlorine buildup in your body or if you know you've got some kind of damage that's occurring from swimming in chlorine? Are there specific tests, like nutrient or vitamin or mineral or hormone tests that you can take to see how chlorine might be affecting your body or how able your body is, how equipped your body is to be able to withstand the damage from swimming in chlorine?

All right, well, first of all, there aren't any tests that would be able to validate that damage that had occurred was due to chlorine so that that wouldn't happen. You might, you can do some tests to see your antioxidant level, et cetera, but you're never going to be able to validate that chlorine did that. If we could, if we could come up with tests like that, we could prove that this did that. Then we wouldn't have to do these population studies for 15 years on people to try and show that something seems to be making these people worse. That would be terrific, actually. We would end up outlawing numerous substances that we use every day if we could do that. But you can certainly check your antioxidant status. What I would tell people is do not use the relatively new, I think it's been out for eight years machine where you put your finger into this thing, it sends a light into it, and it takes a look at the. At the level of only carotenoids. In other words, you could have huge amounts of vitamin C, you could have gigantic amounts of vitamin A, you could have lots of vitamin E, and it could say you have no antioxidants at all because those are not colored substances and they don't register on that machine. So it's very misleading. But there are labs out there. Probably the best blood test I've ever seen is called The Ion panel, I O, N Metametrics Clinical Laboratories. And that tests all of your antioxidants, it tests all your amino acids, it tests all your essential fatty acids, it tests your detox pathways, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that gives you an idea. If there's a whole bunch of stuff that you're way low in that maybe somebody should help you do something about.

And that one's called what again, Ion.

Panel usually? The one I usually order is called the Cardio Ion panel. And I believe ion stands for individualized optimal nutrition or something similar to that.

Okay, so I could put a link to folks over to the Metametrics website to take a look.

You could do that. People can actually there's a company now that allows the public, which is pretty neat actually, to order tests on themselves without the doctor that you're going to saying, no, I don't want to order that for you. I don't think that makes sense. And that's directlabs.com so if somebody went to directlabs.com and went to the button that says Specialty Labs and click the drop down menu and went to Metametrics, you will then be able to find the Cardio Ion panel. You can click out a sample report to see what kind of stuff it gives you, etc. And you get the wholesale price, which is about $900, whereas the retail is $2,500.

Perfect. Okay, cool. All right, so in terms of supplements and tests, that kind of covers that. Now what about, you know, basically aside from, you know, freshwater river or freshwater lake alternatives to chlorinated pools, you talked about bromine and how that might not be the best idea. But what else, you know, if someone has a backyard pool or if maybe someone is trying to convince the health club or the gym that they're a member of to switch to something other than chlorine, what type of alternatives are out there that you might be able to recommend?

Sure. And there are three main alternatives for a backyard or for your own, for your own pool or maybe for your neighbor's pool. Maybe two or three people get together because somebody has a lap pool and they go, hey, how about we all chip in and we do one of these things that I'm about to go over with you and we use a much healthier pool and we'll go over those three. As far as the health club, you're what's usually called sol, and that's because the municipality you live in, no matter what city it may be, doesn't Test the bacteriological nature of your water. That's not how any municipality in our country test to determine that it is okay for them to have people pay money to join this club. And being the pool, all they do is test the chlorine level. And because of that, somebody could spend a huge amount of money putting in a European style ozone system that makes it so that there aren't any bacteria there. The water is super healthy for you. And the health department would come in to check the pool to make sure that you're doing what's necessary. Whether you get your pool closed down and they put the chlorine test kit in there, you don't have enough chlorine and they close you down. So it wouldn't matter what else you do because they're just testing the chlorine level. However, for your own pools, for your neighbor's pools, if you can get a bunch of people that swim together and maybe somebody has a pool and you all chip in to have them purify it better. There are three options that I can think of, all quite different. One of them is ozone. And ozone is probably the best of all of them, which is the reason it's used all over Europe in I don't know how many, probably millions or many millions of pools. The biggest problem is that most of the companies in the United States that make ozone generation equipment for spas and for pools are using such poor quality stuff that it doesn't hold up. And they're putting out so much less ozone than that number of thousands of gallons requires that they themselves will tell you, you also better have this amount of chlorine in there or it's not going to be good enough. I've only been able to find one that I like. What they say on their website, everything is written up. Well, I don't have a pool, so otherwise I would have one of their units. And the company is Absolute Ozone and that's their website, absolute ozone.com can't tell you how much their stuff costs. But if I was able to put in a pool again, we lost our pool when my house burned down. The wildfires. I would be calling them up and finding out what unit I had to put in. So number one is ozone. Ozone puts huge amounts of activated oxygen or ozone into the water. It is again a pro oxidant, just like chlorine is, just like fluoride is. And it therefore oxidizes the bacteria or pathogens to death. The amount of ozone that is required to kill the pathogenic substance Pathogenic organisms is like a thousandth or less the amount that it would be if it was chlorine. So it's much stronger. And of course it dissociates into oxygen so it's not hurting anything. And so that's absolutely my first choice would be properly generating ozone generator. The others are very different. One is that there are a couple of companies out there, not as good as the ozone, but that make copper. Silver is one of the main ones. A copper silver unit where again, your water passes through this and electrically it picks up a certain amount of ions of copper, which keeps algae down and silver, which is antibacterial. And that gets adjusted to be the level that you need for it to be to keep the water pure. The last, and I haven't found any companies in that category that I really, really like, but I do know some people that have them and they say they're not perfect, but it's nice not to have chlorine in the pool. And the last one is really strange. The last one is where if somebody had told me what I'm about to tell you, the way I put it in my class, my bullshit alarms would go off and I'd say, you're crazy. And that is grander. G R A N D E R Grander water. I think it's granderwater.com. this is a device that is stainless steel. I'm almost not sure I should call it a device. And it's a stainless steel box which inside the walls of this box houses this special water that has been treated for over a year in some place in Austria by Johan Grander. And somehow or other, and don't ask me, I can't tell you, as the water passes through this stainless steel box, it picks up some of or is changed by the energy coming out of the grander water as it passes through. And in a way that nobody has ever been able to determine, they've been able to prove the results, but not the how it reduces greatly the harmful effect of harmful things in the water. In other words, it. If you test the chlorine level, it's the same. However, if you run water through a grander device, and that's part of its filtration system, it's not filtering anything, there's no filter in there. But part of it is it goes through this grander device as it's filtering your water, the amount of chlorine necessary for you to put in every two days, two weeks, however it is, you add your chlorine all of a sudden drops by 25 to 30%. Now, understand, you're not adding anything to this water. It's going through something. It's touching the stainless steel walls in this box, and nothing is being put into the water. And there's no filtration mechanism pulling anything out of the water. But somehow or other, the energy that it imparts to the water makes the water going through it less able to grow bacteria, less hospitable to bacteria. I don't know what to say, but they've done this research. There are thousands of pools all over Europe that use grander water because it enables them to drop down the amount of chlorine added dramatically. And what they say, which makes sense to me, is not only will it drop down the amount you need to put in to keep the numbers where you were told you needed to keep them, but because of the antibacterial abilities of the water, you don't need to keep the number that high, because I wouldn't want the number that high. I don't want that much chlorine in the water. You can also reduce the amount of the actual registration number that you're trying to keep to chlorine. I would just recommend people. Again, it's free. Go to grander and water.com go to. I think somewhere in their website it says videos. And watch two or three of the videos on different industries in Europe talking about how this water has changed their industry. It's fascinating, and I don't know what to say.

Cool.

Do I have a grander water unit on my house? I have a grander water unit on my house. I don't know exactly what it's doing, but I put one in.

Yeah. Is that similar to structured water?

No, it is. Absolutely has nothing to do with structured work.

Okay. Okay, gotcha. Cool. I'll make sure I put a link to that and I'll see if I can grab those videos and put them in the show. Notes for folks. Okay, cool. So that's a lot of alternatives for people. I know that if you can't necessarily convince your gym to change to one of these systems, that's understandable. And you may just want to make sure that you protect your body, but in terms of, you know, other ways to protect your body when you're at home, you just talked about water filters and how you have a water filter in your house. When you're at home, you know, you're showering in water that's maybe been chlorinated by, you know, your municipality. You're drinking water. What can you do at home in terms of kind of like your recommended filtration system that people should put in their homes when it comes to something like this?

Well, one of the most important things that people always have to understand and a lot of times we just don't think about it and somebody tells us and we go, well, geez, that makes sense, is you need to know what you're trying to pull out in this particular discussion. We're talking about chlorine, so we want to pull out chlorine. However, if some of the listeners call their municipality up and that's whoever you pay your water bill to and say, do you put chlorine or chloramines in my water? And is it always the same? Does it change during the year? And you find out, ooh, we don't get chlorine, we get chloramines or ooh, we get chlorine for six months of the year, then we get chloramines for three months because they think it cleans the pipes out better and then they go back to chlorine. You need to know that because standard charcoal, regular, ordinary, it's called activated charcoal, it's called activated carbon, does a very, very good job of pulling out chlorine and doesn't do much of anything having to do with pulling out chloramines. Then there's another substance out there called kdf, just those three letters, kdf, which is a special type of copper zinc alloy, which does an even better job of pulling out chlorine. So they'll often put that into some of the filters because it can pull out, I don't know, I think 10 or 15 times more chlorine with the same amount of media and so it's less expensive and it pulls out a little bit of chloramines, not all of them, but a little bit bone charcoal, which is a special type of charcoal, and there are probably some others they've developed, also pulls out chlorine and chloramines, but it costs a lot more. So you need to find out what you're trying to pull out and then you need to make sure the person that is sizing your unit understands what size of pipes you've got coming into the house. They don't just show up to put it in and go, oh, well, if I'd known you had a 1 inch pipe supply, we would have sold you a larger unit. Because if you've got one inch pipe, that means you probably have five bedrooms. And of course I bet you've got a washing machine and a dishwasher. And somebody could be taking a shower at the same time you're doing the dishes and washing the clothes. And now you've got water passing through this device. 4 times more gallons per minute. And can it take it out when it goes through that fast? Because it's the contact time that makes a difference. So I recommend that. So certainly some type of whole house filter is a good idea. Charcoal is one of the best things. Bone charcoal is one of the better ones. But any kind of charcoal, but somebody has to test it once in a while, every six months, somebody should just do a quick test and make sure that it's still doing what you think it's doing. And if it's chloramines, regular charcoal won't do what the bone charcoal would. And then remember that if you really want to make sure that you're drinking water is cleaner, you might want a drinking water filter on or under your kitchen sink. Because for those, the speed at which the water flows through is very slow, the contact time is much better. And what they didn't bother to try to sell you for the whole house because maybe it would have been $15,000 instead of three, you can polish off the difference. So it depends on what you're trying to do. The other thing, which has been very, very large in the last 10 years or so, and I haven't seen a single experiment done to validate this, but I accept that it makes sense, is that we have been told that we will absorb more chlorine in the body. Let's say we will damage our body more in one 15 minute shower than we will by drinking a gallon of water three days in a row because of that, because you're in an enclosed environment, you're taking a shower, you're aerating the water, so you're promoting the release of chlorine. You're in an enclosed area, your shower stall, so you're breathing more of it. You're using warm or hot water so your pores are more open. So it makes sense. Since chlorine does come out of water, we know that if anybody has a fish tank, you leave the water for a week or two. Unless you're going to put a chemical in there to get rid of chlorine for the chlorine to outgas, we know it comes out. And therefore a lot of people without knowledge, they just don't realize it, are filtering the wrong water first. They've spent a lot of money on a filter in their kitchen sink for their drinking water. And they're being exposed to more in their shower. So I tell people the first thing you should put in is at least a shower filter. My favorite one out there, because they're made in the US and been around for a long time, is manufactured by Rainshower and shower is S H O W r Rainshower. But there are others. They use KDF and I think charcoal or maybe mostly kdf. But filter the shower and then work on your drinking water. Do it in the right order.

Okay. Okay, gotcha. And basically, as far as like a whole house filtration, you recommend something like charcoal, but it's going to depend. And you should call your local municipality to find out what they're putting in the water.

Yeah, you want to make sure you know what's being put in. There are lots of companies out there. If you can find somebody in your area that's a small company where when you call in, you're talking to one of the owners or partners of the company instead of somebody simply saying, oh, we'll send somebody out. And now you've got a salesman coming into your house who makes their living so they can pay their bills by the commission they make on marking up the item. So now you're getting something where you're paying way more than if you can deal with a little company where you're dealing directly because they have to add in maybe an additional thousand dollars to this 2000 or $3000 unit to be able to pay his bill.

Gotcha. Okay, cool. It's good to know. Well, Dr. Gaddoff, you are a wealth of knowledge and I'm certainly going to link over to your website because in addition to, like, those vitamin C lectures that you referenced, you have a lot of interesting audios and a ton of really cool information over there. It's at Naturopath for. For folks. I'll just put a link in the show notes for this episode if you want to go over and check out a lot more of what Dr. Gedoff has, because his knowledge goes way beyond just water. And I'll be sure to put a link to all of the references that David recommended as we were going through and talking about chlorine. And of course, if you have questions or if you have feedback, you can go over to the show notes and leave a comment and I'll try and hunt down an answer for you. But Dr. Gedoff, thank you so much for your time today and for kind of filling us in on this stuff.

You're very, very welcome. I'll add one quick thing, because it's finally going to happen. We've been trying to get it to happen for 10 years. My entire course, which I've been teaching now for about 18 years, it's about 25 hours of instruction, is about to go online. We're not sure when, but let's say within the next 60 days. And people will be able to buy the rights to watch the entire course over a period of a couple months or at your leisure. What I've been told is that if you call up the Price Pottinger Nutrition foundation in San Diego, which I think is 1-800-foods, for you, but you can find Price Pottinger Nutrition foundation and just get on their email list, which they never sell to anybody. You will not get 50 million emails. You know, I think once a month they send you a recipe. You will then automatically be notified when anything important happens, such as my course is available online and you can look into it if you're interested.

Yeah, I think that's great, actually. And by the way, folks, for those of you listening in, I am a big fan of the nutrition pioneers Weston A. Price, as well as Francis Pottinger, who is of course behind the Price Pottinger Nutrition Foundation. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes and I certainly would endorse it as well. And I wasn't aware Dr. Get off. You were putting out this class, but that's one that I will personally be looking into for sure. So, folks, thank you for listening in. And Dr. Ghettof, thanks for coming on the call today.

You are very, very welcome anytime. I can help educate people and give them the true facts, so to speak, which is a ridiculous comment because all facts should be true, but usually they aren't. I'm happy to do.