Is Radiation Actually Good For You? The Hormesis Effect, The Healing Power of Radioactive Stones, Ozone Therapy & Much More With Jane Goldberg.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, we want to go back to earth, back to nature, do things that just come from our ancestral understanding, and figure out how to live in a healthy way with Mother Earth as our leader. When you have radiation therapy today, that's about equivalent to the same millirems that were there for the atomic bombs. And she walked. She walked around the apartment because she had enough energy to be curious about where she was. Again, she hadn't walked in a week.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Today's podcast, I've alluded in the past, a few times in the past few months about this irradiated stone on in the shape of a cross that I have been wearing about my neck. I'm not kidding, I'm actually wearing this stone. It's a green stone. It's a mixture of malachite, chrysocolla, turquoise, silver and copper. It's actually something that comes from King Solomon mines in Israel or is known as the Eilat stone. But I am wearing it about my neck. Ever since recording the podcast that you're about to hear to take advantage of the so called benefits of radiation hormesis, does it work? Thus far, I haven't done a lot of self quantification to tell you, but based on what you're going to hear in today's episode, you may have your own ideas about this. It's with Jane Goldberg, who's kind of crazy but also kind of cool. And I think you might dig some of the things that she has to say about hormesis and particularly radiation hormesis. All right, so if you heard my podcast called the Ultimate Biohacked Workout and the Future of Fitness, then you turned into a, a very interesting audio episode where I walked you through this crazy experience I went through at this place called System Fit in New York City where I was hooked up to a Vasper machine and doing blood flow restriction and electrical muscle stimulation. And towards the end of that show, you may have heard that we were about to wander across the street to this place called La Casa to undergo this kind of cutting edge ozone sauna recovery treatment with something called a hocat. Now, I will link to that podcast episode I just described if you go to the show notes for this episode and I'll give you the link to the show notes momentarily. But anyway, so I went over there and I tried this hocat. HOCAT stands for hyperthermic ozone and carbonic acid transdermal Technology, I realize that's a mouthful, but basically it's an ozone steam sauna. You sit in there, your head's exposed to the air, but your body is inside this sauna where it's getting infused with ozone and carbon dioxide and steam and these photons of light and oxygen and pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. So it's quite a fancy device. It's like tens of thousands of dollars. This isn't something you just pick up and put in your living room. But the proprietor of that place, La Casa, where I was doing this recovery treatment, she has a whole bunch of kind of cool recovery biohacks and some more ancient treatments as well. The place is kind of like a spa, biohacking. And anyways, I was in there with my head sticking out of this ozone sauna and I said, is it okay if I'm kind of smelling a little bit of this ozone? And the lady who runs this place, her name is Jane Goldberg, she said, well, she wasn't too concerned about the mild amount of ozone that I might be breathing in because of this concept called hormesis. And specifically, Jane happens to be an expert in something called radiation hormesis. She has co authored an entire book on it called the Hormesis Effect. This idea that things that would normally kill you or harm you in large amounts could be actually good for you and your longevity in small amounts. So she gave me a copy of her book while I was there and I read it on the plane ride home. And I was prepared because I'll tell you the subtitle of the book. The Miraculous Healing Power of Radioactive Stones. So the book is called the Hormesis Effect, the Miraculous Healing Power of Radioactive Stones. And like my, my woo woo radar went off big time. As you can imagine hearing, hearing a subtitle like Healing Power of Radioactive Stones. But the book turned out to be super duper interesting. So interesting I decided to get Jane on the show to talk about this entire concept that the Earth, the planet Earth, emits natural low level radiation that may in fact be beneficial for us. And radioactivity in general may not be quite the villain that has painted to be and may kind of like sunlight, the UVA and UVB radiation from sunlight be something that induces this mild hormetic effect. So Jane, like I mentioned, runs this La Casa spa in New York City. She also has a La Casa in Puerto Rico. She is actually super OG in the realm of holistic wellness in New York City. She's been practicing there for many years. She's written eight different books. She has this super popular holistic newsletter called Musings from 20th Street. She has had her own television show called the really well reality group therapy TV show. She is a licensed psychologist, PhD certified psychoanalyst, oncological psychoanalyst. She works a lot with cancer patients. Like I mentioned. She also is well versed in the use of hormesis to heal the body. And I will link to all eight of her books along with this book, the Hormesis Effect, her upcoming book about biohacking for women, and also her book, the Revelation Revolutionary Mind. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com hormesiseffect that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Hormesiseffect I'm running out of air here with this introduction, Jane, so I think I should probably just shut up and say hello.

Hey Ben, you have done such a great job of introducing hormesis, hormesis effect and the benefits of hormesis. I don't have anything left to say. We can call it quits right now.

All right, good. We're done. Talk to you later. Okay. So anyways, first let's just cut straight to the chase for something that I briefly mentioned just then, and that's this idea of ozone. And the reason I want to talk about this is not to give a give a complete description on what ozone is because I actually just recently did a pretty comprehensive podcast on ozone because honestly, a lot of people are talking about it and its relation to antiviral therapies at this point, because we're recording this during the whole quarantine viral pandemic that seems to be sweeping the world. But with ozone, one of the things that people get concerned about, especially with the medical use of ozone, is the exposure of the respiratory tract to ozone and a lot of ozone therapy. You know, although it's delivered rectally or sometimes like an ear insufflation or drinking ozonated water, generally you're trying not to breathe in the ozone. And so, you know, when I was doing that HOCAT treatment, I, I could smell a little bit of ozone and I thought it might be dangerous. But what's your take on breathing in mild amounts of ozone? Because I know you have a unique perspective on this.

So let me just say I'm so happy that we're starting about ozone because ozone has been like the sleeping beauty of holistic health for so many years and it's only caught on recently. I was involved with an organization, the foundation for Advancement of Cancer Therapies. And we brought in Dr. Horst Kieff. He was a German doctor. This was 1980, so this was so long ago. And he was the first doctor that was treating AIDS and HIV with ozone. So, yes, I have a slightly different perspective on breathing in ozone because of my understanding of the hormesis effect. So basically, hormesis is what you. The biological effect you get from a low dose exposure is very different than the effect that you get from a high dose. And so what you were breathing in was very low dose. Most of the ozone was going into the cabinet, and the cabinet was heated. And so your pores were open and the ozone was being pulled through the pores of your body into the rest of your system. But yes, we tried to cover the hole where your head stayed sticks out. We use a towel. We use like an apron over it. But yes, sometimes the ozone seeps out. And I think that's only to the benefit of the person who's in the steam cabinet. Because breathing in small amounts of ozone has a hermetic effect on the body, which means that it stimulates all good things to happen. It does irritate the lungs a little bit. You might be coughing a little bit. And in that irritation and the damage that it's giving to whatever system is being activated through the exposure to the small dosage of what would otherwise, at a high dosage, be a toxin, it stimulates the body to repair itself. And so you might cough for a few minutes, you might even cough for a half hour, and then your lungs are stronger, better, and more able to deal with whatever comes their way.

Well, I have to ask you. I'm not asking this to be an asshole. I just. I have to know, are you, you know, you said, I think. But has anyone actually done any research on this on, you know, say, difference in terms of dose effect? Because in. Well, let me put it this way, in your book, which we'll get into momentarily, it's just chock full of different studies on what types of radiation, small amounts versus large amounts, dose effect, et cetera. Have you looked into anything similar for ozone to see whether there's kind of like a law of diminishing returns in terms of how much is too much in terms of mild amounts of ozone inducing this hormetic effect when you are breathing it in?

No, I hate to say there have been no studies on the hormesis effect from breathing in ozone. There have been lots of hermetic studies for other stimuli like radiation, which is what we're going to get into, and drugs, lots of things. But nobody's done anything on ozone. So, yes, I think I'm the only person that's saying this because all of the ozone practitioners, they're doing a lot of iv. Of course, if you're doing an iv, it's going right into the bloodstream. There's no ozone in the air. There are not too many people who actually do the steam cabinet ozone these days. Most of it is iv. So, yeah, I think, and I think it strongly and I think with good reason. But no, there's no research.

Yeah, I know that in the blood there's a definite dose response curve. And I found some compelling literature on the effects of ozone on hormesis. But even that literature I couldn't find much in terms of the respiratory effect. But if you guys go to the show notes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com hormesiseffect, you can see what I actually was able to dig up in terms of the hormetic effect of ozone. But again, most of the studies on that that were blood. And so for me, I mean, honestly, my take on this is I'm still going to be super careful with not breathing in ozone, but I would love to see an actual study where they look at whether or not mild amounts of respiratory exposure to ozone could indeed have this so called hormetic effect. But that aside, there is quite a bit of research that's been done on radioactivity and radiation hormesis, specifically from things like geological formations, etc. And I want to dig into that. But before I do, I really haven't had a chance to hear your backstory, Jane, because, I mean, when I told multiple people when I was in New York City that I was at La Casa, ton of people knew of you and your name. You're kind of like, you're kind of like a legend in the holistic health industry in New York City. So I want to hear a little bit about how you came to open La Casa in the first place and what your actual background is.

Well, I think if you live long enough, you become a legend. I'm like almost as old as Methuselah at this point, but so I've been around a long time.

Are you going to tell people how old you are and keep it a secret?

No. When I give speeches, I open by saying how old I am because people don't believe it. I'm living proof that you can go into old age and feel great and look great, be really healthy and die at 100 or past 100. One of the leading researchers of radiation hormesis was D.L. luckey. And he lived to 100 and wrote his last book, I think when he was 98, which was a tome, a thousand pages. And he slept with a radioactive stone next to his bed, what he calls a hot stone. So a lot of low level radiation. Every night he had that stone next to his bed.

All right, well, we'll get into radioactive stones in a moment. But you still didn't say it. How old are you?

Yeah, I'm 73.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay, well, I've met you in person, I've hung out with you. I would not have guessed that. I would have guessed maybe like early 60s maybe. So that's, that's pretty impressive. Okay, all right. So. And I'm not just blowing smoke. You actually, you're remarkably well preserved for that age.

And by the way, no plastic surgery, no, you know, artificial whatever techniques.

Yeah, you just breathe in ozone through a garden hose. Okay, so tell me about how you got into all this.

So I just moved to New York and my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. That was completely unacceptable to me. And so I found an organization that basically disseminated information about non toxic treatments of cancer. And that was the foundation I mentioned earlier, the foundation for Advancement of Cancer Therapies. And through the guidance of the founder of that organization, my mother was able to reverse her cancer. And again, this was so many years ago. This was like 50 years ago. So cancer is reversible and cancer was reversible even then. But nobody, we didn't have the Internet, nobody was talking about it. So the doctor that was treating my mother said, I don't understand this. I've never seen this before where the cancer had eaten away your pelvic bone. Now your bone is completely normal. So that got me into holistic health. And that's been an abiding interest of mine. Kind of a parallel track to my training and my practice as a psychoanalyst. So that's why I opened these two centers in New York City and Puerto Rico.

What are the most popular treatments that you have, aside from that hocat unit that I was in when I was at La Casa, either in your Puerto Rico location or New York City.

Let's see, we really do a lot of pemf, we do a lot of colonics, we do the ionic foot bath. I love the ionic foot bath. Dietra Klinghardt says that it is probably one of the number one treatments of detox because it actually detoxes from heavy metals. And there are very few things that do that.

And is that different than those little pads that you can buy off Amazon that you put on your feet that turn black the next morning that I think are probably just an oxidation reaction with the skin on the bottom of the feet? Or are these ionic foot pads doing something different?

Yeah, this is based on electrical charge, so, yeah, it's completely different. Different process, different technique.

All right, got it. And Klinghardt's great, by the way. I'm actually going to be interviewing him in a couple of months. I believe about. He has some wonderful, wonderful research on everything from EMF to detoxification. Like, he's another guy who I really, really want to get on the show at some point. But regarding this concept of hormesis, I'd love to hear a little bit more about when that came into kind your wheelhouse as far as your interest.

Okay. So I had a little dog. She was six pounds, Poodle Lily. And she suddenly got really sick. And so for a week, she didn't drink, she didn't eat, she didn't move because she was so weak from not eating and drinking. I was keeping her alive by bringing her to the vet and having her subcutaneously rehydrated. So one of my psychoanalytic patients came in. She had just gotten a dog herself. And she looked at Lily and she said, oh, what's the matter? What's wrong with Lily? And I said, she's dying. I'm like $4,000 into vet bills. Four different vets, including even a homeopathic vet. Everybody says she's dying. Nobody knows what's wrong, nobody knows why, and nobody knows what to do. So my patient Suzanne said, well, you need to bring her to Donna on the Upper west side. So that night I went to Donna on the Upper west side of Manhattan, and I had Lily in my lap, and there were these tubes that we put around her and gave her about a. A five, seven minute treatment. And then I put her on the floor and she walked. She walked around the apartment because she had enough energy to be curious about where she was again. She hadn't walked in a week. That was a PEMF machine. The next day, I went out.

Pmf, by the way, just for people listening in who may not have heard all the podcasts I've done on pemf. That's pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, a pulsed form of EMF that unlike, say, a very, very high frequency pulsed wave, like 5G is actually, and we see this a lot with EMF, is something that induces a positive cellular response and A decrease in inflammation and an increase in blood flow. And you guys can go listen to any of the previous podcasts that I've done on pemf, but that's certainly a technology I personally use almost every day.

I have about five PEMF devices now. So the next day, I went out and bought my first PEMF device. It was $25,000, but. But it helped to save Lily's life. That was one of the things. So now I'm back at Donna's, and she says, well, does Lily want some hormesis water? I said, I don't know. What is that? So she puts a bowl of water down. There's a little stone in it. And I said, well, what's that stone? And she said, oh, it's radioactive. So I did what I think most people would have done. I jumped away. I went to the other side of the room and wanted to get as far away from that stone as possible. And I certainly wasn't interested in my dog getting exposed to it.

It.

But Donna said, no, this is going to be very helpful to her. Trust me on this. So I brought Lily over to the bowl of water, and she drank. And again, it was the first time she had drunk anything in a week. So what's really interesting about this story is that the next. So Donna gave me the stone to bring home. The next day, I put out five bowls of water. I wanted to do a little experiment, see what was really going on here. So I had a bowl of alkaline water. I had a bowl of organic chicken soup. I had a bowl of honey water. I had a bowl of Pedialyte, because all the vets kept telling me, feed her Pedialyte. And then I had a bowl of water with this little rock in it. And every time she went to the water bowls, she went to that one. She loved the hormesis water. So Lily was cured, I think, from the PMF and from the hormesis water. And for the rest of her life, she finally died. She was 6 when that happened. She lived to 19. She died about eight months ago. And, you know, she lived a great life and was, you know, wonderful to me and to my daughter. And I absolutely attribute part of her health to the fact that she was drinking radioactive water every day for the rest of her life. As do I, by the way.

You drink radioactive water?

I do, and I sleep on a radioactive pad every night, yes.

Okay, so tell me about how you would actually make radioactive water.

Well, you have to get a stone, and you have to know the mellorems of the stone, it has to be the right dosage. And since we're talking about hormesis, obviously the point is that it's a low dose radioactive stone. And the co author of my book the Hormesis Effect is Jay Gutierrez. And he's the one that actually perfected this technique and created a delivery system so that people don't have to guess and they're not going to get damaged. So you get the stones, you get the mud pack and whatever else you want that's radioactive for whatever. You can get stones that are precisely for your eyes. You can get stones that are precisely for cancer tumors, depending on the mellorems.

All right, we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves and I want to come back to these stones and I want to come back to this guy Jay, who co wrote this book with you, because I know he did a lot of research in this area. But before we get into that, I think a perfect place to begin to kind of highlight how radioactivity, which we just generally kind of like ozone, we in our modern culture consider any of it to be completely bad. I think that the atomic bomb would be a very good place to start here because that was where my eyes first began to open pretty wide when I was reading your book, when we got into the so called health effects of the atomic bomb. So can you get into that? What were the health effects of the atomic bomb?

Yeah, I know it sounds really bizarre, but it's true. So we dropped two bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are four different kinds of radioactivity. There's alpha, beta and X rays, which of course we use for X rays and gamma. The bombs were gamma rays. These are highly destructive. These penetrate into the body and basically if you have enough of it, it'll kill you. So the bombs did not cause burning to death because gamma doesn't burn people. It penetrates through. It doesn't sit on the skin. So that's one myth that I want to dispel that people died of radiologically induced burns. They didn't. There were a lot of deaths from the gamma radiologically induced cancers that came. But where it gets interesting is that if you take, let's say concentric circle from the epicenter where people basically died almost instantly, and then you go out a little farther, you go out a little farther, you go out a little farther and then you get to a point where there was no exposure to radiation at all. And then if you come back in a little, and then there was a low Dose exposure. These people that had the low dose exposure have lived longer and healthier lives than the people that had no dose exposure.

Yeah, and there was actually, I guess, back in the 90s, a Japanese researcher published the Health Effects of Low Level Radiation, which I think was a book, not a paper, in which they also reported significantly lower death rate for all those exposed to low levels of the radiation fallout than for those who had no exposure at all. Although, as you pointed out, there is kind of a dose response effect here where people with large amounts of exposure to these radioactive particles obviously died. And I in no way endorse, you know, dropping an atomic bomb anywhere to increase health. There are better ways to get radiation hormesis that we'll get into later. But it's really interesting, you know, I've talked about this before on other podcasts with Chernobyl as well, how rodents seem to be living a disproportionately long period of time around the area of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. And so there's definitely something going on here. But how would you actually describe radiation hormesis in terms of what actually is going on? What's the actual definition of radiation horme?

The definition is basically that you're using a very low dose of radiation, and it's stimulating. It's causing a slight damage on the cellular level, and it's stimulating the cell to go into repair mode. And as it goes into repair mode, lots of things happen on lots of different levels, genetically, biochemically, cellularly, and so the body becomes stronger. I want to go back to the Hiroshima, Nagasaki thing because there was another study. It wasn't really a study, it was just an observation that people went in to take measurements the first day after most of the radiation contaminants had been dissipated because of the wind currents. The people that went in the second and third days where there was further dissipation of the radiation, the. The first people had better lifetime immunity. They lived longer than the people that had the second and third day exposure. So yet, one more way that we can prove radiation hormesis is a good thing. Now, I do want to say that X rays, radiation therapy for cancer, this is high dose. This is not low dose. In fact, when you have radiation therapy or a full body CAT scan, for instance, today, that's about equivalent to the same millirems that were there for the atomic bombs. We're exposing ourselves to high dose when we do medical treatments.

Wow, interesting. Okay, I want to eventually get into a little bit of the difference between dangerous Radiation versus helpful radiation. But back to radiation hormesis. There's a section in the book where you and your co author, Jay, pretty elegantly define multiple theories in terms of the mechanisms of radiation hormesis. And I would love to unpack a few of those. For example, apoptosis or built in cellular suicide. What's going on there? When it comes to hormesis, especially via.

Radiation, the radiation actually induces apoptosis, cellular suicide. And that's really important for us because cancer is a situation where the cells don't commit suicide. I call these cells communist because they do it for the good of the rest. They kill themselves. Suicidal communists. So radiation hormesis induces apoptosis. And so we've had pretty good luck with treating cancer patients.

Also, do you know much about this Japanese researcher, Dr. Sohei Kondo, that you talk about in the book who did some of the study on radiation hormesis and cellular apoptosis?

You know, it's interesting, the Japanese became the world's leading experts on radiation hormesis because of Nagasaki, Hiroshima and after the bomb. And they kind of got themselves together at some point. They really understood radiation hormesis and they created spas where you would go in specifically for radiation, low level radiation therapy. They would paint the walls of the spas with radioactive paint. Hot springs all over the world, anytime you go in a hot spring, it's radioactive because radiation comes from the sky, it rains down on us, and it comes from the earth that comes up. And so if you're in a hot spring, you're doing radiation hormesis therapy.

Okay, got it. Yeah, I've heard that as well. That and I had a discussion with Brian Hoyer, a building biologist who came to my home and did a building biological analysis of my home about these so called geopathic hot zones, these areas of geopathic stress where depending on how heftily you're exposed to them, may actually induce too much stress, such as, you know, you wouldn't want your bed placed over an area of geopathic stress for a long period of time, such as the one third of your night while you're one third of your life while you're asleep. But then when you look at a lot of these hot springs, for example, or you look at locations like say, Sedona, Arizona, where they say that there's a lot of good energy or there's a lot of, you know, like good vibes coming from the ground there, you can actually test. And it turns out that there is a large amount of radioactivity associated with some of these, like Native American healing spots, hot springs, Sedona, some geopathic stressor spots. And so, yeah, it's one of those deals where you wouldn't necessarily. And this is, this is just, you know, same type of logic you'd use with sunlight. You wouldn't go necessarily even build a house on one of those spots and live in it because that higher amount over long term of radiation exposure could be bad for you. But going and visiting something like that on infrequent basis and getting this mild amount, kind of like, you know, 20 to 60 minutes of sunshine a day could actually be helpful not only for this cellular apoptosis that you get into in the book, but then it appears there's also an effect on detoxification pathways, correct?

Absolutely. I don't know if I agree with you about long term effect, long term exposure, because radon kind of proves the opposite. So this was how they discovered radon is kind of a funny, interesting story. So there was a nuclear worker, a nuclear plant worker, and he was coming. And of course they test the workers when they come into the plant and when they leave the plant. And this guy set off the alarm when he was coming in. That was bizarre. He's not supposed to set the alarm before he goes, before he's exposed from working there that day. So what they discovered was that in parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, there's what's called the reading prong. And that's like where there's a fissure on the earth, that's where radon comes up when there's a crack in the earth, earth's crust. And the gas, you know, radioactivity, radio gas is there and so it's just seeping up. So they decided radon causes cancer. They just kind of arbitrarily decided radon causes cancer. Everybody knows that. And so this one researcher, Bernie Cohen, he was at the University of Pittsburgh, he decided to do what he thought was going to be a really simple study. He just took this is, by the way, the largest epidemiological study that's ever been conducted in the US So he took a map of all of the counties, 90% of the counties of the U.S. and he overlaid on it all of the. With the cancer rate. And then he overlaid a map with radon and fully expected to see high radon, high cancer. Right. Isn't that what you'd expect to see? Absolutely. He didn't see that. He saw a high radon, low cancer. And he kind of didn't believe It. So he started slicing up the data in various ways, you know, for age and diet and blah, blah, blah. And he kept getting the same results and he still didn't believe it. So he just set aside the test and forgot about it and then repeated the whole thing five years later and he got the same result. So guess what he did? He went down into his basement and turned off his radon eliminator. So on the basis of that one guy going into the plant and then studying radon, and then they built this hundred million dollar industry based on testing radon, eliminating radon. And I have a house in New Jersey. If I decide to sell my house, by law I am required to do a radon test. So somebody has to buy that test kit to do the test.

It's really interesting. I was actually able to find a study in the International Journal of Radiology and Imaging Technology. And this was published in 2016. And the title of that letter was Rectifying Radon's Record. And it was an open challenge to the epa. And I'll link to this letter in the show notes if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com hormesiseffect but what it says is that they reviewed and critiqued the past policies of the EPA with respect to indoor radon exposure. And their recommendation was that the plan be re reviewed because implementation of the radon mitigation strategy that they initially said would save thousands of lives by preventing lung cancer mortality. They said that based on all the research that's been done on radon, that that plan was more likely to increase rather than decrease the risk of lung cancer.

Yeah, and Don Lucky says that we are radioactive deficient. Like we're magnesium deficient, selenium deficient. So many deficiencies that we have today. He says we're radioactive deficient and that we really should be getting about 20 times the amount of radioactivity that we're getting.

It kind of reminds me of the article that I think Outside magazine published last year indicating that this whole idea of frequent use of sunscreen was probably killing more people of skin cancer than actually helping to mitigate skin cancer. And it seems like we're slowly learning the same thing about the natural radioactivity that we would find in nature. I mean, over and over again it. It seems to be that nature is not trying to slowly kill us. I mean, even viruses. And I've been really steeped in studying viruses lately. It turns out that for the most part they seem to be. This is probably the not right term because it refers to bacteria, the term biota. But they're almost very symbiotic. I mean, viruses are crucial to life on this planet. They're crucial as a part of algal blooms. They're crucial as a cell signaling mechanism very similar to exosomes. And so this idea of completely stamping out viruses or completely eliminating exposure to UVA and UVB radiation, or in this case, completely eliminating exposure to radon or any other forms of radioactivity. Well, it turns out that in many cases, natural exposure to these type of things does have this so called hormesis effect that is beneficial. And so we've got detoxification, we've got apoptosis. How about DNA? Because you know, ionizing radiation. What people say over and over again is that that's going to dam DNA and cause either unraveling or direct DNA damage. And I'm curious what you guys are able to find regarding DNA.

There are 200,000 DNA repairs every day in every cell. Ted Rockwell, he was one of the people that was involved in the nuclear submarine. Actually. He says this is a quote. It is the repair and removal process, or lack of it, that kills us. So if the body's not able to repair itself again, what radiation hormesis does is it causes a slight damage. By the way, this whole concept is now kind of under the big word, big title, big concept of stress, which Hans Selye created. He was working with mice, cute little guys on rooftops in Canada. He was subjecting them to terrible, horrible things like starving them to death and making them freeze to death. He really wanted to see what happens when you put a living organism on destroyed. But then he decided there was another concept called eustress EU for good stress. So stress isn't always bad. And that's basically the hormesis concept that in the right dose it does lots of good things.

Yeah, you talk about one study in the book that used electrophoresis to show the formation of new proteins in cells that were irradiated with low doses of radiation. And it turns out that what happened was there was actually an enhancement enhancement of DNA repair in response to low level radiation and then the coiling of the DNA. The coiling of the DNA also appears to be somehow affected by this. And you get into the coiling a little bit, but it looks like the re loosening of these coils. Because what happens in cancer is you see tightly wrapped coils in DNA. But it appears that loosening them is a mechanism, DNA repair that directly occurs in response to low level Radiation.

Exactly. So of course Watson and Crick discovered DNA. And it's not just that they discovered that the DNA is coiled, but they discovered that it's super coiled. Because to fit all of that DNA into that very small space, it has to be wrapped around really, really tightly. And yes, what happens in cancer is that the coil, so as we age, the coils get a little looser, but in cancer the opposite happens and they get really tight again. So what low dose radiation does is it returns the coils back to normal. So it does so many things on so many levels to the body.

Now there are some other mechanisms still. We just talked about the DNA repair, we talked about the apoptosis, we talked about the upregulation of cellular detoxification and even the stimulation of this so called superoxid. And by the way, part of some of the digging into ozone that I did prior to this call does indicate that possibly even on a respiratory level, that there is a little bit of stimulation of superoxide dismutase. Oddly enough, via the same mechanism of action that I've seen proposed for cigarettes. There was one, I forget the longevity researcher who I was talking with who said that there might actually be some evidence that smoking a cigarette on an average of about one, once every, it was like once every 20 days or so, may actually have a life extension effect due to again this hormesis effect. And I'm not going to condone that because I need to see more research on that. But regardless, it appears that cigarette smoking, that ozone exposure, and also this radiation exposure, it's pretty powerfully stimulating superoxide dismutase, which is one of our most powerful antioxidant mechanisms that blocks free radical damage. And so, so that's another thing that seems to be occurring. And then a lot of people are very interested in the immune system these days. And we know that high doses of ionizing radiation are immunosuppressive. I mean, multiple research studies have shown that. But what's the effect of low dose radiation in terms of the immune system?

It stimulates the production of lymphocytes, it increases help of T cells, it decreases the suppressa T cells. So everybody, everything good for the immune system? It does.

Interesting. Okay, so basically this low level radiation may actually enhance the specifically T cells while decreasing the number of suppressor T cells which would antagonize these active helper T cells.

Exactly.

Okay, what about, you know, when we look at a lot of these mechanisms, obviously they're going to act to impart some amount of longevity or Anti aging when we're talking about DNA repair or immune system strength. But what about direct effects in terms of anti aging due to the free radical theory of aging? You know, lipid peroxidation, which is one really compelling reason to avoid vegetable oils, for example. But it looks like, based on what I read in your book, that there may be some effect on lipid peroxides as well.

Well, yes, I confirmed that and I don't have much more to say about it because I'm really not a biology person. But you seem to understand it pretty well.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it has profound anti aging effects for a variety of reasons.

Yeah, it looks like one of the main effects would be decreased permeability of cell membranes and decreased lipid damage, especially to the cell membrane. So again, this low level radiation seems to have an effect on that too. So you know, there are a few other mechanisms that you get into the book, including the production of endorphins and enkephalins, which are kind of like pain relieving type of molecules and feel good molecules within the body. And so you know, of course folks can, folks can grab the book and read it to delve into some of the actual research behind all of these different mechanisms of action via again, what we would call low dose exposure to radiation. But when we talk about low dose versus high dose, you know, one thing I still need to wrap my head around is the different forms of radiation. So are we looking when we talk about things like dosage or exposure time or frequency or ionizing versus non ionizing, like using a stone for example? Because it looks like from what I've read in this book, using something like a radioactive stone or making radioactive water would be one way to get exposed to this low level radiation. What are we talking about in terms of the radiation frequency or the radiation dosage or amount? Have you looked into that?

Well, the body does not process whether radiation is man made or natural. So if you come across a radioactive stone versus you are exposed to an X ray that would have the same dosage, which actually is probably not possible unless you got a really hot stone. The body doesn't know the difference, but the body does know the difference in terms of what the wave particle is. So whether it's it's alpha, whether it's beta, whether it's gamma, that's the main principle in terms of whether the body reacts to it positively or negatively. It's always going to react negatively to gamma. Gamma is always destructive.

Okay, so from what I understand in the book, it's Measured with something called MRM per hour. Is that correct?

Yeah.

Okay, so MRAM per hour as far as like one of these stones, do you know what that would be?

Jay spent a lot of time being very specific about which stone had which mellow rim. And just. I have a chart, let me see if I can find it, that just gives some.

Well, as you're looking at that chart, one thing that was really compelling to me in the book was that things like Brazil nuts and bananas and even the freaking human body itself is producing, producing some amount of low level radiation. Like you talk about in the book how sleeping next to another person for eight hours gives you two millirems per year due to the natural levels of radioactive potassium in our bodies. It turns out that bananas have a large amount of the same radioactive potassium. Brazil nuts have about a thousand times the radioactivity of most foods due to their radium content. And so we find radiation being emitted by the human body body and also by freaking fruits and nuts. But the MRAM of those, you know, everything I've come across is showing MRAM of like, you know, two up into the hundreds. But then, you know, if you look at like a dental X ray, it's six. However, you know, correct me if I'm understanding this incorrectly, but that dental X ray is a huge dose all at once. Whereas like sleeping next to another person all year might be be close to the similar MREM exposure, but it's spread out over the course of an entire year. Am I kind of like on the right track there?

It's a good point. 650 millirems for a brain X ray, 110 for a head and body X ray. Seven and a half millirems. This is interesting. Per year for spouses of recipients of cardiac pacemakers. So you're being exposed all the time to this stuff? Yes. Brazil nuts is one of the highest of foods. The banana story is kind of interesting because there was one port that was only bringing in bananas. And every time the bananas would come in, the detectors would go off and so they were. What's going on? Well, bananas happen to be high in terms of food for radioactive activity, but.

It'S not because they've been irradiated. It's because they naturally from their potassium content. Potassium is a naturally radioactive, radioactive element or mineral. And so that's totally natural radiation for something like a banana.

Yes, absolutely. And we human beings are apparently also naturally radioactive. When we sleep next to each other, we get some from each other.

Now, after reading the book, I had thought about getting one of these low level radiation emitting pendants or rocks and kind of experimenting with a little bit, tracking my sleep cycles, tracking my hrv, tracking some of my blood work to see how I responded. Because I found this idea of using rocks and stones and pendants for this, you know, far easier than me, just like, you know, whatever, traveling to Sedona a few times a year. So talk to me a little bit about these rocks. I want to hear more about your co author, Jay, who sadly is no longer with us. But I would love to hear about how he found these rocks, where these rocks come from, how people can get these rocks, how the rocks are used. I know you're using them to make water, so. So geek out on these rocks for me and fill folks in on that because that seems like the best way to be getting exposed to this if you were going to do it. Unless you're going to like fill your home full of bananas and Brazil nuts.

It'S the only controlled way to do it, thanks to Jay. So Jay was a helicopter repairman. And so when he lived in Colorado, and whenever there was a downed helicopter in one of those states, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, where you live, live, they would send Jay and he would have to figure out what was wrong with it and then get it back. So in these beautiful kind of remote states where not many people live, he was always looking at rock outcroppings and he noticed some really beautiful rocks that he thought, you know, I could take some of that home, I could make jewelry from it. So he did. And so he made bracelets and he made necklaces, and he really had a lot of fun making jewelry and that. Then he started getting really bizarre feedback from people. A woman that was wearing a bracelet said, you know, I had arthritis in my wrist and since I've been wearing that bracelet, it's gone. And another woman said was wearing a pendant around her neck and said, no, I had a tumor in my breast. I could feel it. And now it's not there anymore. So Jay got really freaked out. He didn't know what he was doing to people and he got scared. And so he started doing research and he discovered that the, the stones that he was picking up were thorium and they were radioactive. And then he started researching, he spent about a year researching all of the medical literature on the healing effects of low level radiation. By the way, There are over 3,000 gold standard studies. Medical studies on the healing effects of low level radiation. Most of the countries know about this except the United States.

Okay, so where are these rocks actually coming from? From.

Well, they're coming from. Jay had his spots and so he was just mining them. And now his widow Fay, she obviously was with him when he was mining them, and she knows where they are. And so they're still mining them and they're still selling them.

Okay, so these are like secret, secret proprietary locations. But are we talking about like Chernobyl and like Hiroshima or are they finding these things in the U.S. no, we're.

Talking about your part of the world. Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho.

Okay, gotcha. And this wouldn't be because we've been burying nuclear waste in the ground. He's getting it from around those areas. Is it just natural radiation?

Yes.

Okay, do you know how he found it? Like, if he was actually going there with some type of radiation measurement device and then analyzing these stones and figure out which ones actually emitted a certain.

Amount of millirem, eventually he did that. Yeah. How he discovered it was kind of serendipitously because he just picked up a stone randomly and. And then somebody used it and they were cured of cancer. I think it was breast cancer. And so he had the rock studied and assayed and he found out what it was made of. And then he went back and found more rocks. And then he started. Everywhere he went, he would have a gaga canal with him.

Okay, has any research been done on these stones that you're aware of?

Well, if you're talking about controlled studies, I don't think. I think it's all just case studies.

Yeah. It seems to me that at some point someone needs to do like some double blind human clinical research on these stones. Because what I come across in the book is pretty compelling. But at the same time, we're talking about radioactivity. And so it gives me pause. Although when I'm outside climbing around on rocks, walking outside barefoot, I feel amazing. And I know that's due to the low level radiation and also the negative ion exposure that one would get from the pressure practice of earthing and grounding and rock climbing and tree climbing and then getting the UVA and UVB radiation from the sun at the same time. But you know, these stones that have it more concentrated, it just, you know, it's one of those things where I would love to see a few more studies before I start wearing one around my neck. Yet I'm. I'm incredibly tempted.

It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. For the same reason ozone has not been used by western medicine, because air is free and stones are cheap. You just, you know, if you have a Gallicana, you can find the stones. You just go out and search and so there's just no money in it.

So how does one actually find and use these stones? Like, can you buy them somewhere?

Yes, you can buy them from Jay's widow, Fay. The website is Nighthawk Minerals and the center where she is living and lived with Jay and. And does some therapies. She does do. I started to say high level compared to what you would do at home. She does. You know, there's a room that you can go into and you sit in and you're exposed to radiation. So that's in Pritchard, Colorado. So she's available by phone and you can go there and have various treatments. And when La Casa Rio opens and New York has had enough of its corona stuff, we have a bathtub treatment with radioactive.

And how does the water treatment work? Are you drinking the water or are you just soaking in it?

Both. Either.

Okay, how do you make the water?

Get your filtered water so it's pure, clean water, and you put the rock in it and you let it sit for a few hours and the water's radioactive.

Hmm, interesting. And do you wear these stones too? Do you wear them as like a necklace or a pendant yourself?

I tend not to because I'm doing it otherwise. And I'm so concerned about EMF that I actually generally am wearing an EMF protector as opposed to radioactive stone.

What's an EMF protector?

Yeah, they make these little pendants that you wear that presumably protect you from emf.

Yeah, I don't know if those actually do. I mean, they're not going to hurt you, but. But I have yet to see, again, compelling research behind those. Although I've got what I have on my desk here, I've got a pyramid. I've got. What's this pyramid? People always send me this stuff. I've got a P Ball pyramid, which is made in New Zealand by Life Designs and supposedly mitigates some EMF exposure. I've got a somavedic device behind me. I've got a Himalayan lamp upstairs. I've got a key emitting device. Some of this stuff, it's like, I'm not going to necessarily go way out of my way to like spend a ton of money on it. But at the same time, it's not, it's not going to hurt you to have these type of devices. I just, you know, some of this stuff just that, you know, I have yet to see a lot of compelling research. And I would never want to make people think there's good research behind them. But at the same time, some of the anecdotes that I've seen just in my own clients and people I talk to regarding sleep, decrease in inflammatory markers, et cetera, is pretty compelling. One thing in this book that comes up over and over again that we haven't touched on yet, that I definitely want to make sure that we fit into today's interview is the link between fungus and low level radiation. Because fungus in particular, a lot of people deal with candida and yeast and fungal overgrowth. And I in no way think that all fungus is bad. I think, as a matter of fact, small amounts of fungus are crucial to a healthy microbiome. But at the same time, fungal overgrowth is a big issue. And in the book, and I think Jay gets into this a little bit like around page 112 of the book in terms of this idea that radiation may have a specific effect, very interestingly, on fungus. And there's kind of like this interesting anecdote about the interplay between fungus and specifically mushrooms that tend to be growing in areas with a high level of radiation. And kind of this idea that the consumption of mushrooms like chaga and turkey tail, et cetera, may have a protective effect against high doses of radiation. And then in the same way, low level radiation may have an antifungal effect within the body. Have you looked into the relationship much between radiation and fungus?

Fungus is such an interesting problem because it's kind of ubiquitous. They're all over the place and they live forever. They've been around for kind of a billion years. And yes, I agree with you that they cause problems, but they also are extremely useful. And they're really kind of aggressive creatures. They fall between plant and animal. So Jay has this specific theory about why radiation hormesis is good for fungus. So what he says is that the radiation damages the healthy cells, but it also damages the fungal cells. But the fungus can't repair itself as quickly as the healthy cells. And so the fungus dies. And so then the healthy cells are no longer stressed, and then they can return to homeostasis and to the natural vigor that they have. So it's an interesting theory. It's only a theory, but it does explain why it is that radiation hormesis is useful for fungal overgrowth. And mold is a fun. So mold is kind of ubiquitous. A lot of people are suffering from mold toxicity. So it's good to know. And I know that Jay used to say when you have mold growing in a wall, just put a stone on the wall itself and it'll help to get rid of the mold.

Interesting. Yeah. And I think it's also compelling in terms of the protective effects of mushrooms. Again, some forms of ionizing radiation. You know, I've talked before about how these voltage gated calcium channels respond to some radiation exposure, such as 4G and 5G to become open and flood the interior of the cell with calcium. And that a few ways to get rid of that would be, for example, high dose magnesium intake or for the DNA damage that some of that radiation could cause using something like sirtuins along with nad, or for some of the inflammatory pathways using something that would help to modulate NFL kappa B like ketone esters or ketone salts. And I think that I may be compelled after reading what I read about radiation in the book and from what I've seen on some of the melanin content of something like chaga, etc. That mushrooms might actually be something that for the higher dose radiation or some of the damaging non native EMF based radiation, those could actually be useful to add into that protocol as well. You know, supplementation with things like turkey tail, kale and Reishi. And furthermore, one of the things I got thinking about when it comes to fungus is that this might be a perfect way for someone to anecdotally test whether or not one of these stones is working. Like if you, if you've tested positive for Candida or yeast or fungal overgrowth and you decide you're not going to take a bunch of supplements or introduce a lot of confounding variables and just use one of these stones for a certain period of time or drink some of this radioactive water. I'd be quite curious what that would do to something like Candida infection, for example.

Yeah, and my profession is I'm a psychoanalyst and I own these two health centers. But Fay is the one that's really been working and Jay, when he was still alive with patients working with the stones and working with the various diseases and conditions. And so they really have the clinical data on that. But I'd like to add that the problem with fungus is not necessarily the fungus itself. It's the fungus eats and mostly it likes sugar. But the fungus poops. And what it poops out is mycotoxins. And the mycotoxins really are the problem.

Hmm. Okay. Yeah. And I had a pretty comprehensive interview on fungus that I'll link to in the show notes with an author of a recent book on what he calls the mycobiome and some of the beneficial effects of fungus and also the deleterious effects, especially when it when it's part of a co infection of mold, mycotoxins, Lyme, etc. So I'll link to that in the show notes. But just a couple other things that I wanted to touch on. First of all, I know that you have another book that you're launching on biohacking with specifically a focus towards women. What's the idea behind that book?

I'm co authoring that with Carlyn Brooks. She's one of the greatest EMF consultants. So she goes into your house and she figures out out like Brian Hoyle that you mentioned earlier. So we're looking specifically at the biohacks that don't cost a lot of money, that you don't have to go into a place with a fancy machine like the Hockett. The hockey costs $70,000. It's a great machine, but who can afford it? So we just want to do we want to go back to Earth, back to nature, do things that just come from our ancestral understanding and figure out how to live in a healthy way with Mother Earth as our leader.

Interesting. When does that book come out?

We're hoping it's going to be ready in about six months. It's got a great title. It's WW0. It's not World War I, it's not World War II because women don't believe in warfare. So it's World War Zero.

Okay. I didn't that's news flash to me that women don't believe in warfare, but I'll roll with it. So what'd you say the WW stands for again?

World War. World War Zero.

World War Zero.

Okay, cut out all the world wars and all the wars.

Interesting. It's an interesting approach. Yeah. And you're very interesting yourself, Jane, with these eight different books that you've written. And I think for anyone to get an introduction to you, they should come check out the La Casa spa and you've got one in Puerto Rico too, which I would imagine is a little bit more of a destination hotspot than the one in the New York City. But regardless, I'll link to both of those spas in the show notes. If folks go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com hormesis effect. I'll also link to the podcast that I did on biohacking and the Future of Fitness. So you guys can in that podcast, in the show notes for it, see a video of me in the hawk hat at Jane's facility there, the La Casa in New York City. And then finally, perhaps most importantly, I'm going to leave to this book because it really is quite thought provoking. The miraculous healing power of radioactive stones. I'll link to the Nighthawk Minerals website where you could find these stones. I'll link to some of the research on ozone and radiation that we talked about in the show notes, as well as the research on radon and its potential health effects. And then of course to all of Jane's other books. And I will keep you guys posted if I wind up getting my hands on one of these stones and experimenting with it and using it. But if you have your own feedback to add, if you've used one of these stones, if you have more questions, if you think this is all just a bunch of bunk and you want to jump in with your own opinions, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com hormesiseffect and leave your comments and your thoughts over there. Jane, anything else you want to share before I let you go?

Yes, if they want to buy the stones, they can buy them directly from La CASA's website, la casaspy.com and I also wanted to say that Carlin and I are planning to do two workshops in Puerto Rico on wwo. And finally, I've spent the last, I'd say about five weeks spending practically every free hour that I had researching what's happening with Corona. And I've created a document that's more like a tome. It's kind of of, you know, like what you do, Ben, you just dive so deeply into topic that you just, you get addicted to it. And so if anybody wants what I've written, they can just email me directly janegoldbergainegoldbergphd.com and ask me to send them this very lengthy, very extensive, very elaborate understanding of what Corona is, why it's here, what to do about it, et cetera.

All right, that's dangerous giving out your full personal email address on a podcast like this. But you did it, not me. So have fun with your inbox after this. All right, well, Jane, thank you so much for coming on the show and for everybody listening in. Again, the shownotes are going to be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com hormesis effect. I realize some of this sounds kind of woo woo, kind of weird, kind of new, but that's my job, is to look into things that might defy what we would consider to be the status quo in health and fitness and nutrition and medicine, et cetera, and perhaps give you some new things to think about and new avenues to explore. And low dose radiation appears to be one of those. So Jane, thanks so much for coming on the show and for everybody listening in. Until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Jane Goldberg of the La Casa Spa in New York City, signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance and plenty more. Plus, please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming you each and every week.