Podcast Episode #26: The THREE Main Causes of Illness and Poor Performance

Podcast episode number 26 from BenGreenfieldFitness.com welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast, your free weekly audio exposure to cutting edge fitness, nutrition and wellness information. My name is Ben Greenfield and I'm an exercise physiologist, certified personal trainer and nutritionist. Each week I'll be bringing you information that goes outside run of the mill exercise and diet advice. We so whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to lose a few pounds, enjoy this week's podcast episode from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Welcome to this December 15, 2008 edition of the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. This is Ben Greenfield, and today I have a fascinating interview with Dr. David Minkoff. And during this interview, Dr. Minkoff, who's a complementary and alternative medical practitioner down in Florida, reveals some really interesting techniques that he uses to help heal his patients. And he sees everybody, from people suffering chronic fatigue all the way up to professional Ironman triathletes. He's got a lot of really useful information in this podcast about toxins, nutritional deficiencies, allergies. So I really encourage you to listen in to that interview. We also have a listener Q and A about whether or not running in cold weather can actually damage your lungs. Now, I also will have a couple special announcements about some new programs rolling out in 2009 for nutrition assistance and personal training. And then finally, if you haven't subscribed to the newsletter, I would highly recommend it. You can do that@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Remember, every week there's information coming out that's not featured in the podcast or in the blog. And so if you're not signed up for that, then you're missing out on some great material. And this week we actually will have a little hiatus in the articles on nutritional myths by metabolism mastermind John Gilbert. And instead, this week's newsletter article is going to be focused on the close tie between mental health and physical health, which is actually something that comes up during the interview with Dr. Minkoff in today's podcast. So let's move on to today's listener Q and A. For today's listener Q and A, I want to actually answer a question that one of the triathletes that I coach asked me concerning winter running. And in particular this athlete was concerned about the fact that they had been told that running in the cold, especially in severe cold like we're experiencing up here in the Pacific Northwest, can actually freeze the lungs or can damage the lung tissue. Well, the fact is, is that you cannot freeze your lungs, basically, in nearly any climate known to man. This is because what you feel, that burning sensation that you feel when you breathe in cold air, that's just the cold air going right through your mouth and your throat. Now, by the time the air gets to your lungs, it has passed through your windpipe and already been heated up to your body temperature. And so basically what happens is that in order to warm the air up to your body temperature, your body has to basically humidify the air with warm water molecules found inside your body. And this is because cold air is not only cold, but it's also very dry. And so once you finish a run in the cold weather, you can have a dry throat. It can feel raw. You can have kind of a dry cough. And so when all these things add up, it feels like it's possible that your lungs might be damaged. That's not really the case. The cough or the discomfort that exists in your throat after a run or after exercise in the cold weather is simply your body's response to having had to warm or humidify that dry, cold air that you're breathing in. So I personally have two solutions to this problem. The first solution is probably the easiest, and this is to wait until a really good college basketball game is on TV and then hop on an indoor treadmill and do your run. That's my favorite solution. The second thing that you can do, and a more practical approach to actually running outdoors, is to cover your mouth with basically an outdoor running mask or any type of clothing or garment that you can pull up over your mouth. And what that can do is help to warm and humidify the air before it even gets to your throat, and so you'll get less of those cold, dry throat symptoms after you run. So that is today's listener Q and A. Before we move on to this Week's interview with Dr. David Minkoff about the three main causes of illness, chronic fatigue or any lack of performance, whether it be athletic or any type of physical performance. What I want to do is give you a couple of special announcements. The first is that on January 4th, and I did announce this in last Week's podcast, but January 4th, Sunday at 5:00pm Pacific Time, I will be live on video answering all your questions on anything to do with fat loss, weight loss, exercise, fitness, nutrition, wellness, etc. Now, the way that this works is I will be live on video and you will be able to actually type your questions into me via a special chat box that appears beside the video of me. Now, this will not actually be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com I will have a link on the website that you can click to to go to a special TV page, an online Internet TV page that will allow me to broadcast video live to you while you type in your questions to me. So it's going to be very interesting to see the type of questions that we get, as well as to be able to answer your questions live and interact with you in real time. So that's going to be about 90 minutes long and it's also going to include a special where I'm going to present 12 of my top fat loss techniques for 2009 and I promise that I won't be giving you basic run of the mill advice. So you're definitely going to be at this 5pm Pacific time, Sunday, January 4th. Now the second announcement is about a huge opportunity that I am offering to any of my newsletter subscribers or podcast listeners. And basically it is the chance to actually work with me as your personal trainer and your Nutrition Consultant during 2009 for a very, very low rate. Now, the only way that you can qualify for this special is if you adhere to two of my requirements. The first is that you have to be able to write down a clear number one highest priority closest to your heart defined health related goal for 2009, whatever that might be, to tone your butt, abs and thighs to complete a triathlon, to win a triathlon, to pass your physical with flying colors, to lower your blood pressure, whatever the case may be, you have to be able to write that down and give it to me and you'll be able to do so in a questionnaire that'll be in a link on this week's show Notes. You also have to be willing to allow me to capture in photograph or video form or collect photos and videos from you of your transformation and success as you go through this program. Which means you will be one of those before after people if you sign up for this program. Now I will be taking people on a case by case basis, which means that if you are in fantastic shape, then you might have a little bit harder time getting into this program unless your goals are very clearly defined to allow me to use you as a testimonial or as a subject. And so that would mean that if you're in super shape, you might have to have a goal such as to complete an Ironman triathlon, whereas it might be a little bit easier for you if you're out of shape if you have a lot of issues in terms of fitness and nutrition that you need to overcome, this is going to be something that's right up your alley. So as long as you don't mind your 2009 success to be recorded, then you are 100% eligible. Now, here's what you get. You're going to be getting a free bottle of the Thermo Factor metabolism boosting supplement that I've talked about on this show before. One of my favorite ways to reduce carbohydrate cravings and to lose fat quickly. You're going to get a free bottle of the Ener Prime Superfood multivitamin that I take every day to massively strengthen my immune system and keep me going at 100% every day of the week. You're going to get a free copy of 100 Ways to Boost your metabolism, a book that I wrote that's full of tips on metabolism. You can read more about that@100ways to boost your metabolism.com, but that's going to be thrown in there as well. You're going to receive a monthly meeting with me if you are local in the area. This monthly nutrition consult and personal training meeting with me is going to take place at my office in my studio. If you are not in the area, this is going to take place via video and phone conferencing online. Now, you're going to get a monthly meeting with me as well as unlimited phone and email access to use me as your trainer and as your consultant. You're going to have this access to me for a full year, for the entire year of 2009. Like I say, I'm filtering people through this program. I'm only accepting a limited number of people and I will go through your questionnaire and you will receive an email from me personally within 24 hours. If you're accepted into the program, the entire program, the thermo factor, the Enterprime, the book, the full access to me. I'm offering that to a limited number of individuals in 2009 for 1, 49amonth and that's it. So here are the rules. You got to sign up by midnight on December 31st period. If you're not in by 2009, then you're not in. If you're a podcast listener, that's fine. You are allowed to tell people about this. Primarily family members or referred friends are going to be eligible. Initially, I only offered this special to 20 people, but the record requests to be included in the program were so great that I'm going to be getting a few more people in and I will put a link in the show notes that you can click on. When you click on this link, you will be brought to the questionnaire that will be considered your application into this program where you'll be able to sign up for the package and be directed to that questionnaire. So if you have any questions, you can email me. Ben Greenfield Fitness and now let's go ahead and move into this week's podcast interview with Dr. David Minkoff.

Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and I am here with Dr. David Minkoff. And Dr. Minkoff is a complementary and alternative health care expert. He runs a comprehensive wellness center down in Clearwater, Florida. And they basically offer just a huge amount of cutting edge therapies and modalities to treat patients for total wellness. In addition to being an expert in Total Wellness, Dr. Minkoff is also himself an Ironman triathlete. He just recently completed Ironman Arizona. And how many other Ironman triathletes have you done, Dr. Minkoff?

This is my 35th one that I've completed.

Was the 35th.

Yeah. I did my first Ironman in 1982 in Hawaii and I've been doing it ever since.

Wow. And I'm sure that you know quite a bit about keeping the body put together, having done that much to your own body. So I'm really excited to hear your thoughts on wellness and health and recovery and performance for the everyday weekend warrior as well as the Ironman Triathlete. So before we get going into the interview, can I mention the newsletters that you have on your website?

Yes. I write two newsletters that come out every other week. One is called the Body Health Fitness Newsletter. This is oriented toward athletes or people who enjoy athletic activity. Our company, Bodyhealth.com Inc. We sponsor a group of triathlete and endurance athletes. And so some of the articles are from the guys that we sponsor on training tips or their experiences or their ideas on training and nutrition. And then the rest of it I do, which is kind of my experiences or tips on health and what to do about it. The other one is called the Optimum Health Report, and this is more focused for the general consumer on health and fitness and how to maintain your own wellness and enjoy a long life without having to see doctors and end up in hospitals and medications. A lot of it has to do with the environment and its influence on health and how you can improve your nutrition to ward off the flu and other things like that. The newsletters are free. If you go to our website, www.bodyhealth.com. you can sign up and they'll come every week on Wednesday morning. And if you don't like it, you can get off. But most people enjoy it. We have about 15,000 people who get it every week, and they really like it. The feedback on it's good.

I personally subscribe to those newsletters and they are full of fantastic information. Now, down at the LifeWorks Wellness center in Florida, what type of patients do you see?

Well, that's interesting. The patients are everywhere, from the really chronically ill, severe chronic fatigue, multiple sclerosis, even some people with cancer who are at the really lowest end of the health spectrum that you could get. These people are just fighting to live all the way to the most elite athletes that you can imagine, from professional cyclists, baseball players, football players, triathletes. And we work the whole spectrum because really, when we look at illness and performance, the causes are the same. And in the sicker guys, they just have a lot more to do. And the really elite guys, we basically do the same things with them. But the tweaking may produce a 1% or 2% increase in performance, Whereas the guys at the bottom of the list, you might get a 50 or 100% change in performance. Meaning that I can now get off the couch. He can go to work, he can live, and he has a future that he can improve into, Whereas before he was burdened down with a diagnosis and a disease and a bunch of medicines and no hope. We work the whole spectrum and we really see a smattering of all those kinds of people.

I've spent a little bit of time on your website and noticed that on there that you say you believe there are three main causes of illness. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yes. And this is how we approach every patient or how we address every patient. If you look at it, almost everybody that goes to a doctor or a regular type doctor comes in with a bunch of symptoms which the doctor listens to. The doctor will do a physical examination on them. He might do some laboratory testing on them, and then what he'll do is make a diagnosis and prescribe a drug. Probably 95% of people who walk into a doctor's office have this happen. A guy comes in with a headache, he's got high blood pressure, he gets a drug. A guy comes in with impotence, he can't get an erection, he gets a drug. A guy comes in with elbow pain, he gets a diagnosis of arthritis, he gets a drug. And our approach is really the other way, a person has a symptom. The symptom is the body's expression of attempt to deal with or heal some problem that the body has. And if you look at it, there's really only three things, or almost everything will fall into the three categories that are below that symptom. The first one is that this person is missing one or more essential nutrients that their body needs in order to function. If you just imagine a rector set, you're building a building. The body is like an erector said, There's 13 trillion cells in the body, each of which has needs. And if those needs are met from nutrition, they will function well. And if those needs aren't met, they won't function well. Right now we have an epidemic of people that we've discovered. We've been doing this for five years, but it's now kind of reached the mainstream. Is almost everybody we test in our clinic has too low a level of vitamin D.

Dr. Minkoff, did you say vitamin D as in dog or B as in boy?

D as in dog. Okay, vitamin D. Sunshine, vitamin. 95% of the people who walk in our office, all of my staff, everyone, was severely vitamin D deficient. Now, the dermatologists in the world think that sunshine is harmful. And it can be in high doses, but it's an absolute necessity for a human body. And people who live too far north or who are afraid of the sun or who wear sunscreen all the time do not get enough vitamin D. Unless they're taking something like cod liver oil, they won't get it in their diet. And so people are deficient. Now, vitamin D is very important in about 20 different body systems, from immune function to anticancer to bones to.

To.

Control of blood pressure. Many, many, many, many, many things. And yet almost everybody is deficient in it. Now, I challenge all of you out there, who has had a blood vitamin D level done? Practically nobody, unless they come into a clinic like ours. Here is a missing nutrient that practically no one knows anything about, which is essential for body function and can make someone sick. I've got dozens of patients who came into our office who were diagnosed with hypertension who, when we check their vitamin D level and their magnesium levels, they're both low. We put them on vitamin D and magnesium as a part of our treatment protocols, and their blood pressure is normalized and they go off medication. Very simple, but it really works. The first thing we do is look for, and we do a whole laboratory specific panel looking for about 90 different essential nutrients that most people are missing essential fats, essential amino acids, vitamins, minerals. These are the basics of which the body's built. Almost everybody that we test has deficiencies. They're low in zinc, they're low in selenium, they're low in molybdenum, they're low in one of the omega 3 essential fats. They're low in amino acids. If they don't have these nutrients, their body won't function optimally. Now, the guys at the high end of the spectrum are usually missing less, but by providing them, they get better performance. The guys at the low end of the spectrum might be missing 10 out of 12 essential minerals. Their levels are actually very low and the body won't function well minerals. So as you replace these things, they start to better improve. I want to just give you a really stark example of how this works, because some people pay attention to what I say and some people don't. One of my key employees at my office, I started talking about vitamin D about five or six years ago, and I measured my vitamin D level. And I'm outside a lot training, so my vitamin D level was good. So I told everybody, get your vitamin D levels done. Because I started seeing these hypertensive patients who needed vitamin D. I thought, holy smokes, this is a breakthrough. So almost none of them did it. A few years later, one of my key employees came to me and said that she had been to the dentist, and the dentist had done her routine X rays on her teeth, and he had told her that she was losing jawbone. Her jawbone was demineralizing, and that her teeth were probably going to all fall out within the next two years, and that what she really needed to do was plan on getting some false teeth. So she came back into the office in a panic. And the first thing I said to her was, what's your vitamin D level? Because vitamin D has a lot to do with bone health. She said she didn't know. Well, she had the vitamin D level done. Her level now minimal. Minimal, low, normal, 30. We like to keep people above 60 between 60 and 100, and even 80 or 90 is better. So she's at 6.

And just to clarify, you're in Florida, Correct?

We're in Florida. We have 340 sunshine a year here. And she's a pale Caucasian girl. The darker your skin, the more sun you need to get vitamin D. The lighter your skin, the less sun you need. She's a very pale girl, doesn't need a lot of sun. She wasn't getting any because she wears sunscreen and of course she's afraid of the sun, so she stays out of the sun. And her level was very low. We put her on oral vitamin D and her body is vitamin D resistant. She has a genetic abnormality where her body requires very high doses vitamin D to get a highto get a decent level in her blood. She requires 13,000 units a day of vitamin D to keep her level at about 65 to 70. And you know what? In six months, a re x ray of her bone in her jaw showed remineralization of her jawbone. She's not going to lose her teeth, she's going to be fine. Now, in an athlete or a high performance athlete that's got this kind of deficiency, this can make a big difference in your training to get an effect and how well the training effect takes hold on injury prevention, on recovery, on all these things.

And so when you're talking about three main causes of illness, we can almost say three main causes of illness or poor performance.

Absolutely, absolutely. So the first category is this, this thing of deficiency and you just can't do it by eyeballing a patient. I know that a lot of the guys that come in to see us have been to the regular doctor and they've gotten routine blood tests, CBC, Chem 25, blah, blah blah. And often these tests are not abnormal. When the body actually has deficiencies, unless you look for the specific items, you don't get them. And when you look at the, you'll find them. So deficiency is a huge one. It's the most important one.

Now if I could interrupt for a second. When you're bringing an athlete or a patient in for testing, do you have a specific series of tests that you use? For example, will an athlete come in and simply do a blood test? You do saliva, I know some people use hair.

Well, I mean the first thing we do is our new patient visits are between an hour, an hour and a half and we do a thorough history and physical as a routine that a routine doctor would do. The other thing we do is some specialized testing, some kinesiology testing. We have some other machines that will measure. They're called electrodermal screening where we get an idea of if people are familiar with the acupuncture model of meridians and nerve flow. We have some specialized diagnostic equipment where we look at each of the meridians to see if the nerve flow within those circuits are normal. And if they're not, we can pull up other things to see what is going on. Is it some deficiency that's there, Is there some other thing going on? So we look at it a little bit differently. The other thing on the lab testing that we do is that sometimes if you look at just serum levels of things you don't get, the body protects it. It'll keep a magnesium level in the blood normal for a long time.

And to clarify to our audience, when you say serum levels, you're talking about a blood. A blood serum test.

Blood serum test? Yeah, Like a routine blood test. Like go to my doctor, get a magnesium level done, and the doctor will say, well, your magnesium level is normal. That's true. The blood and the magnesium level is normal. But the body protects the blood magnesium level so it will deplete cells in order to keep the blood magnesium normal until the cells are very depleted. Then you'll see a low magnesium level in the blood. But. But by then, if you're looking at performance or health, you're already way down the scale. You're way deficient. We look at what are called packed red blood cells, where the blood test actually looks at the mineral levels that are in tissue, like in the red blood cells. We look at all these trace minerals in there, and it gives you a much earlier indicator of when cells actually have. Has a deficiency going on. And that's very helpful. The other thing on this is that a lot of people who are just, for example, magnesium deficient, if you give them oral magnesium in various forms, they do not absorb it very well. And sometimes with these guys, when they're deficient, we give them intravenous minerals, intravenous magnesium to build their level up. And then once their level is reasonable, their gut will then start to absorb it again. And you can use oral supplements to keep them normal. As you're probably aware, people who sweat lose magnesium. So these things are lost and they need to be replaced. A lot of people who aren't eating diets that have whole grains and whole foods are not getting these trace minerals. If they're eating a lot of fast food or a lot of processed food, the minerals are gone or not usable. So people are deficient. I've seen studies where 80% of people where this kind of testing is done show just in one mineral, looking at one mineral like magnesium are deficient. And magnesium is involved in over 200 different reactions in the body, from thyroid function to heart regularity to blood pressure, all kinds of things, gut function. And you get these sort of key things that are low. You'll get loss of function. It's fairly easy to remedy. Once you sort of get this idea that boy, people have deficiencies. The other major, major one is protein. Almost everybody that we measure is protein deficient. The diet that they eat or the supplemental proteins that they take are lacking in essential amino acids in the right balance for them to be able to keep their body in a normal protein metabolism and normal turnover. As you may be aware, the body ideally turns over its proteins at a very certain rate. But if not enough of them are coming in, not enough essential amino acids are coming in, the body's turn turnover rate slows down and it will hold on to proteins that have nicks or that are injured. And a lot of the things that athletes experience with chronic soreness or tendonitis type things or lack of training effect, lack of lactic acid clearance, all these various things may be related to not getting enough essential amino acids.

Amino acids, that's an interesting observation. There are several athletes that I've worked with who experience chronic levels of inflammation, tendinitis, et cetera. And coming from a different perspective, I always notice that high carbohydrate, inflammatory type of nutritional intake is present in their diets. And from what you're observing, it's protein deficiency just as much as the presence of processed sugars.

Yeah, I mean, it's never one thing as you know. But this is one of the sort of deficiencies, if we look at it across our clinical practice spectrum, is that a person who gets up in the morning and has a bagel with some peanut butter on it and a cup of coffee or a glass of juice and then has a sandwich for lunch and a piece of chicken with some vegetables at night, they're not getting enough essential amino acids from those foods to maintain their protein balance. A healthy protein balance, or what I would say an optimum protein balance. When we look at menopausal women, when we look at high performance athletes, we look at people with chronic illness, they're all protein deficient. I was the original protein deficient patient because I was a vegetarian from age 4 and all vegetarians and all vegans are protein deficient. I haven't seen one that's not. There just aren't enough essential amino acids in vegetable proteins, including dairy, that for most people, or at least the people that we've been looking at, will maintain an optimum protein metabolism within their bodies. Like six or seven years ago, I injured a hamstring in a race and I coursed around with it for two years. Massage and chiropractic and injections and heat treatments and God know, muscle stimulation, God knows What? It never really healed up. And whenever I would try to push it hard, it was always sore, it wouldn't heal. I ran into a guy who had gotten a product from Europe. He said, try this out. This is a mixture of essential amino acids in a special balance and it's supposed to work better than normal proteins. I was supplementing with whey and soy and I was calculating it as best I could, but it wasn't working for me. So I started taking these tablets and in three weeks my hamstring healed and I could feel this product. I actually gained about bunch of weight and I was worried, but I was getting on the scale and my body fat wasn't changing. I felt like I was stronger, but I didn't see it anywhere. When I talked to the guy who invented this product, he said, well, you're just remineralizing your bones and you're building enzymes that you should have had that you didn't because you were deficient. That's where the weight is going. My maximum heart rate within six weeks improved by 12 points. Had a lot of amazing changes physically. And so we started using it in a clinic and then we started using it, we started using it in athletes. And we saw a very high profile athlete who was on the Discovery team and he was in some trouble physically with an illness that wasn't diagnosed. And we worked with some of his other physicians and helped him figure out what was going on with him. And we put him on this product, which is called map. Map it stands for master amino acid pattern. And he had an amazing recovery, just amazing recovery. And then later said, I can't believe it. I can use anything I want. And this stuff, I've used a lot of stuff that didn't work. And this stuff really works. We give it to the chronic patients and we give it to the athletes because it allows their body to get the essential amino acids that it needs so that they can recover, train and live better. In the published studies on this stuff, the athletes who were track and field athletes had been competing at least two years. So these guys were pretty seasoned performers. After 30 days on MAP, their lactic acid clearance improved by 16%. Lactic acid is an enzyme and enzymes are made out of protein. When you put in the optimum stuff, you give the body a chance to sort of maximize the genetic potential of the whatever that guy is. I'll never be Lance Armstrong, but I have genetic potential. And if my nutrition is right, if my deficiencies are handled, I can maximize what I got. And that's the same for everybody. That's the sort of first category of what are they missing?

In addition to nutritional deficiencies, it looks like the second one that you list is toxins.

Yeah, I mean, we live in an environment of toxic soup. Even the polar bears in Antarctica, if you do fat biopsies on them, are polluted to death with plastics and dioxins and heavy metals. The oceans are polluted, the air is polluted and the environment's polluted. And most of us live in environments where our exposure to things that are, that are not good for us is continuous all day long from pesticides and herbicides and plastics and Styrofoams. When's the last time the average guy went into a restaurant and ordered something that got heated up in styrofoam in a microwave or on a plastic plate with a microwave and then ate it? We just take this stuff in all the time. We try to caution people to be as careful as you can about store your food in glass, don't store it in plastic, Don't let dentists put mercury in your teeth. Buy organic food because the pesticide levels are a lot lower. Just sort of common sense things. But we measure these things in people and we find that almost everybody has a heavy metal burden. Mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, and these are all tissue poisons. They block the body from making ATP, they block the body from making thyroid hormone and growth hormone and these other things. The first thing is try to stop putting the junk in. Try to put in whole organic foods as much as you can. It costs more. Yeah, you can't do it all the time. Yeah, but we sort of say if you can do it 80% of the time it's going to help.

And it's simple lifestyle choice. I'll have some clients come in to, for example, come into my office for a workout and they'll show up with. In the middle of the summer, they'll show up with a water bottle, a plastic water bottle and I'll walk by their car later on in the parking lot and they'll have a whole case of plastic water bottles sit baking in the sun in the middle of the summer in the back of their car. And that's what they're dumping into their body five, six times a day.

Dr. That's right. And you can measure this stuff. I just saw a study from some school aged children in New York City and these are five year olds in a kindergarten class. And they measured their blood and urine for toxic chemicals and they found hundreds of plastic and petroleum and heavy metal and pesticides derivatives in their bodies. At five years old, they put these kids on organic food for two weeks and they remeasured it. And the pesticide levels have fallen to about 5% of what they were before. The body responds, if you get rid of this stuff or if you stop putting it in. These kids weren't even on extra things to help get rid of it. They just sort of tried to control their environment so that they got less of the junk coming in. You can't get it ever to zero because this is just how we're living. But you can minimize it and it makes a big difference. Then the second part of it that we do is we put people on programs to help them detoxify. There are nutrients which will bind heavy metals, help remove plastics and petrochemicals. And especially once you get the body replenished with the nutrients that it's supposed to have, its detoxification systems can be assisted with other nutrients. And you can get people to start to detoxify. You can watch their hair levels or their urine levels or their stool levels. The heavy metal levels go down, the pesticide levels go down, they start to feel better, their energy comes back and they get better, they feel better.

Dr. The detoxification process is a combination of eliminating the wrong compounds, introducing the right compounds, and also ideally undergoing some procedures to assist with detoxification.

Yeah, and often there's nutritional supplements that can help the body to beef up its own mechanism for getting rid of this stuff. That can really help. And then just common sense things like people have a couple bowel movements a day and they drink enough water and they're urinating and they do something where they get them sweat or a lot of people, we even have them do sauna so that they can get. Because it's another way to get sweat out, to get stuff out. These are things that you can assist someone and as you do it, their body dumps this and they're poisons and they start to function better. They make ATP better, their hormone levels go up, their immune system improves, and they get life back in the body. The body will respond almost everybody, unless they're really just on death's door. You start to do these type of things and they, they will respond. The healthier guys respond quicker. But even then, if you take somebody who's eating basically a junk diet and for a month you put them on good food, organic, whole food, nothing that comes in a box or cellophane, no fast food. It's real broccoli and real Apples and real beef or a real chicken, if you can get them to do it and knock off the sugar within two to four weeks, they'll look at you and say, my God, I've got energy in the afternoons. I don't have to take a nap anymore. I'm sleeping better. Yeah.

Even some of the mainstream magazines I've been reading interviews with professional athletes, and I've noticed it a couple of times in the past few months that now they're saying that they're trying to eliminate anything from their diet that they can't harvest or kill. And I've noticed the same thing along the lines of the caveman diet growing in popularity. I think, especially among athletes, this type of thinking is beginning to catch on.

Absolutely. I think that the guy in Colorado, Loren Cordain, the guy who wrote the Paleo diet, I think his ideas are very usable by athletes, and most people will find that it's very effective. And it's exactly what you're saying. It's whole fruits and vegetables, organic meat, fish and eggs, and body will do well on it. For most people, it's the biggest barrier. I think it's the biggest barrier to people that aren't well and have gotten themselves into condition is that they're the brainwashing that's occurred from processed foods and then backed by scientific validity, Cheerios. I'm just taking an example, but Cheerios. Processed food and then adding vitamins and minerals, and you get all your daily requirements. Oh, it's wonderful. It's just garbage.

Actually, my two little babies, they just picked up on the concept of Cheerios. And I've been reading the nutritional label on that box with a raised eyebrow. You know, one of the things with harvesting and killing, I want to make clear to our audience that doesn't mean that you sit on your back porch with a rifle waiting for a deer to walk through your yard or a turkey to. To gobble by. One of the pro triathletes that was on this show last week said she shops around the perimeter of the grocery store. Something as simple as that.

If you look on the package and it's got anything in it besides what the main ingredient is, I don't eat it. I'm not 100%. But if you look through my refrigerator, the foods are what they are without other stuff in them. For the most part, I'm not perfect, but that's what I try to do. If you can get this stuff locally grown, organic, it's even better.

Absolutely.

It makes a big difference, like a huge difference. For people.

Finally, I'd like to hear you talk about Thei don't know if you had anything else to say about the toxins, but I know that third main cause of illness that you referred to was the allergies.

Yeah, just one last point on the toxins. This was another study. It's Mount Sinai Hospital, it's New York City, where they did cord blood samples on mothers who had just delivered babies to look for toxin levels. And the average mother had 280 identifiable environmental toxins in the cord blood. So this is not just a problem of us and our immediate 20, 30, 50 year futures. We are now breeding a generation of children which are toxic from the word go. What are we seeing? Well, we're seeing. When I was a pediatrician a long time ago, we never saw toxic. One in 50,000 was the rate. One of my mentors once told me when he showed me an autistic kid when I was a resident in the hospital, he said, take a good look at this kid because you'll never see another one. That was in 1976. Now, one in 150 children born have autism. They can't communicate. What's wrong with them? They have a polluted, toxic brain. What about all these kids that are getting ADD and adhd? Same thing. These kids are polluted and they're toxic and they're deficient. What about this? You have a huge epidemic now of diabetes in 10 year olds and hypertension in 14 year olds. We're producing a generation of kids that are born toxic and their bodies don't function. And all these diseases that they get are merely the two factors. They're toxic and they're deficient in, in nutrients. We can do something about it. We like to have gals that are pregnant or who want to get pregnant, take six months to a year and just get their nutrients replaced and get detoxified before they decide to have a baby, so that when they grow a baby, that baby is going to be as good as it can get. It won't be full of all this garbage. That's all I have to say about toxins. The third thing is what we call allergy. Now, most people's concept of allergy is I have a runny nose when I get around flowers, or my eyes itch if I get around the cat, or I get hives if I drink milk. And that's one concept of allergy. And when we talk about it, we just broaden it out a little bit so that allergy is actually the body reacting to something that isn't a toxin, but the body's reacting to it in a way that it. That's not healthy. It's doing something wrong. Why should somebody who eats peanuts get an anaphylactic reaction, a loss of blood pressure and can't breathe and die? Well, a lot of it has to do with programmed responses that their body has in it that sort of sit on top of they're already deficient and they're already toxic, and now their body's producing reactions that it really shouldn't produce. We can identify this with the specialized testing that we do. And we have some ways to reset the body so that it stops producing these reactions until we can get the gut normalized and the detoxification normalized and the nutrients replaced so that they'll stop doing it. A lot of people who. Who come with symptoms may have these allergy symptoms where they really don't have an identifiable structural problem. Their body's responding wrong. So that's the third category of things that we look at.

What type of method do you use to test people for allergies?

We do it two ways. We do it electrically with this Meridian Health analysis, and we also do it by what we call autonomic response. It's sort of a way to test muscle response and challenge to something that's, you know, the patient holds something, and then we test does it affect muscle strength or not? And oftentimes, when it affects muscle strength, the patient is getting a sympathetic response to, say, holding a piece of bread or a peanut or something like that. And using some acupressure points, you can reset the autonomic nervous system so that in the presence of that, the weakness doesn't occur anymore and reaction doesn't occur anymore. And that works as long as you make sure that you do the other stuff too, which is get the nutrients replaced and get the toxins out. It's very effective, and it can be very powerful. Just thinking of a couple cases of a guy who had very chronic plantar fasciitis, and he'd been injected and massaged and even went in to debride his plantar fascia, and he still had pain. When we tested him. He was an oriental fellow. And when we tested him, the allergy that came up was white rice, which he ate three times a day and had for his whole life. We took him off the white rice and we did this. This acupressure procedure on him. And then he had to stay away from the riot for 24 hours. He came back to recheck two days later. And he told us that his foot didn't hurt anymore and that took care of his foot pain. It doesn't even sound believable, as I'm telling you now, but we've had a lot of these cases where this kind of thing is a reaction to something in his environment that it's not even a toxin. White rice isn't necessarily a toxic food food, but you can get a big physical change.

Oh, go ahead. Can you hear me?

Yeah, I can hear you fine.

We lost you for just a second there as you were finishing up your statement.

Okay, I forgot you asked me. Anyway, you were asking me about. It's an acupressure technique, and physicians can learn it. And if anybody's interested in it, they can just contact me and I can give them the references for it. So it's not 100%, but it's probably 80%. I was the first guinea pig. I had an egg allergy. When I eat eggs, my face would turn red and I would get a stomach ache. I was treated with this about nine years ago, had one treatment, and I've been eating eggs ever since. And I ate a lot of eggs. It can be very helpful for people who had food allergies. But sometimes the allergy symptom isn't a high cholesterol or it's a high blood pressure. It's an autonomic reaction, or it's a headache. So it can be different things. And if you test people and find out what it is they're sensitive to, you can make a lot of changes in. In a painless way that can be very fun to watch and people are very grateful for.

I think a lot of what you talked about today is the new paradigm in health management and wellness. And one of the things that I get complaints about is people think that taking charge of your wellness or of your health in this manner is expensive. And my response to that is always to point out how much money you're saving in health insurance premiums, how much better you feel. A lot of times there's a strong mental and emotional connection between your physical health and your mental health. And many of these conditions, like depression and anxiety and, you know, psychosis and dementia, a lot of these things that people are struggling with day to day, they could completely eliminate from their lives. And, you know, my question to people is, how much is that worth to you? When you get people who think that, for example, taking a supplement is expensive, what do you say?

Well, I couldn't agree with you more, Lipitor, which Is, I think the largest selling drug. Something like 10 or 11 billion a year is spent on it is for the average consumer, $125 a month. It's not inexpensive to be on drugs. It's expensive. For a long time I was an emergency room doctor. We were in an area where there was a lot of older people and some of them were in nursing homes and they would bring these people into the emergency room for one problem or another. The average patient was on 12 medications, something for blood pressure and their pain and their sleep and their cholesterol and their mood and their. In their high blood sugar. That's expensive. What I tell people is acute medical care is something that is really good if you have an acute appendix or if you get hit by a car, if you fall off your bike. The medical system is wonderful because emergency rooms and hospitals can really help you. And the things that they do are good and they're expensive. And so get insurance to cover major medical stuff for the routine, things for chronic illness, for colds and flus and those sorts of things. I think people should just budget themselves whatever they're paying in health insurance now and go to somebody who can actually help them restore their health care. Because it's not expensive, it's really cheap. A Guy might spend 3 to 5,000 a year or maybe the first year on getting their health tuned up, let's say, if they come in to us. But my brother, who is one of the people who doesn't listen to me, just had three stints put in his heart. That's about 100 grand. And now he's on three prescription medicines for $100 each a month. And that's expensive. And the most expensive thing is that by living healthfully and by hooking yourself up with healthcare practitioners who are going to help you in order to maintain your health and get your own optimum health, you're going to live a lot longer and feel a lot better than if you get your hands, than if you get into the system which uses mainly drugs to treat you. Because these people, there's nothing more priceless than good health. And talk to anybody who doesn't feel good. And so there is a way to maintain it. And it does cost some money, but gosh, an average guy will spend five bucks a day on a Starbucks coffee. You know, it's like. And you know, some people are into six people packs. They spend the money, but I think budgets of it for your own health and the supplements do make a difference. Our food, even our good food, is often depleted. So you need supplements to keep your vitamin and mineral and essential fat levels up. And it's just the price of feeling well. And I think it's cheap.

I agree. I think that a lot of people have a difficult time thinking forward to when they're 50 or 60 years old, about how much every year they're going to be spending on healthcare for the last 30 years of their life. If they don't spend maybe $50 a month, perhaps on supplements for the first 30 or 40 years of their life, it's simply an investment in your health, in my opinion.

Exactly. I think you're being optimistic when you say 50 or 60 because a lot of people now at 20 are already feeling the effects of the deficiencies and toxicities that are in their body. Viagra, the market for that stuff, there are millions and millions of guys that take that product because their bodies don't perform. And those guys aren't 50 and 60 and 70. A lot of them are 30 and 40. I mean, you look at the guys that they put in the ads now, they're younger guys, as if it's a macho thing that your body doesn't function and you've got to take stuff. Viagra is anywhere from six to ten bucks a tablet. It's not cheap. It's just a symptom of sick bodies. It's not genetic. They weren't born that way. They need a health care practitioner and a viewpoint on health which then goes sort of back to the basics of I need good food, I need to exercise, I need to get my sleep, I need to pay attention to those sorts of things and not be looking to the doctor with doctor, I've got this complaint and give me a prescription to make me feel better. Terrible, terrible way to do. Will cost you a lot of money and it will cost you your health. Because all of these medications have side effects that produce more problems. For the most part, in acute situations they're good, but for a long term solution, they're rarely good.

Absolutely. Now to our audience, I would tell you, go out, spread the word, tell your friends. Basically, if you spread the news about what you learned today and what you know about wellness, you can make a big impact in your community, among your family and among your friends. And even though you might get some strange looks at first when you talk about things like vitamin D deficiency, I think that over the next few years people are really going to start to catch on to how important this stuff is. Dr. Minkoff, thank you for coming on the show today.

Well, I enjoyed it. It was fun talking to you. And if anybody has questions and they want to reach me, they can do it through our website at www.bodyhealth.com or at www.lifeworkswellnesscenter.com. i do do some seminars that are also telephone seminars that are free of charge for athletes and guys who are fitness trainers who are interested in sort of our nutritional approach to improving performance. And if anybody's interested in them, they could contact us through the website. So thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Thank you, Dr. Minkoff. And I'll put a link to all that in the show notes for this week's podcast. This is Ben Greenfield and Dr. Minkoff signing out from Ben Greenfield Fitness.

Before you go, I have one more special announcement. If you want to see exactly what type of things are done by an online personal trainer or nutritionist, I've got a new page up that will allow you to track the progress of some of my clients to check in on how they're doing and see some special videos of them as they go. Now you can go there by accessing the URL BenGreenfieldFitness.com help. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com he l p. You can also click on the link to this week's Show Notes. I've got a couple videos on there right now of a client who has tried Slim, Fast, Atkins, Herbalife, Body for Life, interval training, personal training, a detox diet, a low fat diet, horseback or riding Slim and six, a home treadmill and elliptical trainer, mini trampolining, a gym membership, cleanses, Weight Watchers, Hoodia, Green Tea, Calorie counting, walking, hiking, Taebo, Wii Fit, Denise Austin Bands, Exercise Balls, Yoga and Lean for Life, and now me. And you're going to be able to track that and see if I can actually help her lose 95 pounds over 2009. Remember, if you enjoyed this podcast, be sure to leave us a ranking in itunes and on the show notes. For this podcast I put a link at the very bottom that shows you exactly how to go and do that. Leave us a little comment so that we can help spread the word about the website. And if you have any questions, if you want to be on the Listener Q and A or if you want to start a discussion, you have two options. You can email me Ben greenfieldfitness.com or you can leave a comment in this week's show Notes and and remember, the limited number of individuals who will be accepted into the 2009 special that I'm offering can Sign up for that and complete your questionnaire and your application form again in the link on the show. Notes to this podcast@BenGreenfieldFitness.com until next time, this is Ben Greenfield from Ben Greenfield Fitness signing out. Have a great week, SA.