Podcast Episode #31: Mysterious “Product X” Destroys Microbes, Blowtorches Body Fat, Fights Fatigue, and Powers Performance.

Welcome to podcast episode number 31 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. Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and I am coming to you today from Sacramento, California where I'm in town to promote my new book, 100 Ways to Boost yout Metabolism. You can check more about that out@100waystoboostyourmetabolism.com and what I want to talk about today has a little bit to do with metabolism, but the main feature of this podcast is actually about the mysterious product X. And if you want the lowdown on product X, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com check out the latest blog posting. I recommend you actually read it before you even listen to this interview. However, once you've listened to the interview, you can also surf over there and learn a little bit more about this brand new product X that destroys microbes, blowtorches, body fat, fights fatigue, empowers your athletic, your mental and your physical performance beyond belief. So that's going to be the main interview in this podcast. We're also going to have a few special announcements, a listener Q and A and a couple or at least one very interesting research study recently done on artificial sweeteners in particular Splenda. So listen in to this Week's release from BenGreenfieldFitness.com announcements. All right, let's start off with some of the announcements. First of all, it was so popular, I received so many emails from people who had tried this stuff and loved it that I decided that I would put the recipe again on this week's podcast episode. Show Notes it is the recipe for Delta Tea and this is my secret energy drink tea recipe. It's a combo of green tea, pomegranate, sun theanine and B12. Incredibly low in sugar, almost no carbohydrates, no artificial sweeteners, and basically it's this packet of energy powder that you put into about 8 ounces of hot water. Tastes just like spice cider. I'm not kidding you. So check out the recipe to that and the link to where you can get your hands on those ingredients in the show notes to this podcast. And then also, you heard me in the introduction mention the 100 ways to boost your metabolism book. Well, I'll put the link to that website in the Show Notes. But also if you want to feature this book on your own personal blog or your own website, I'm actually offering anybody who puts it on their website and wants to actually sell it 50% commission on a book that sells for $19.95. So that can be a good way for you to make a little income on the side. And I'll put a link in the Show Notes where you can click on that if it's something that you're interested in doing. Okay, the last couple short announcements are that my Synergy of Fat Loss lecture is still available in the show notes to this week's podcast@bengrufflefitness.com and then I'm also still offering the BGF special discount code on triathlon training plans that are pre written. So you get basically a complete detailed daily workout plan at a fraction of the cost of monthly coaching. That's something that you're going to want to check out too if you've got some races planned for this summer and especially for you Northwest triathletes. I've actually written out plans that are specific to some of the popular races around the Northwest, like the Blue Lake Triathlon or the Pacific Crest Triathlon. So there's something on there for everybody and you can just go over to the Show Notes, click on the links.

And it'll be in there.

Now as far as calendar events, the main thing that I wanted to mention was this February 22nd online live TV show and Q and A where I'm going to demonstrate to you the exact pills and dietary supplements that I take on a daily basis. I'll tell you how they work, what they do, whether or not they'd be recommended for your needs. And the cool thing about this is you'll have a little chat window where you'll be able to watch me and interact with me as I give the video lecture. But then you'll be able to type your questions as we go and I will answer them. We'll be able to interact with other people who are in the room. And we did this last month. It was incredibly popular. People got a lot out of it. So it's going to always be the last Sunday of every month at 6pm Pacific Time and all you do is you surf over to the blog BenGreenfieldFitness.com you click on the link that I have there and it will bring you straight into this free online TV Q&A. It's a 60 to 90 minute Q&A session with me and this month is going to be February 22nd, Sunday night at 6pm for you local people. I do want to mention this for anyone who lives in the same area as me, Spokane, Coeur d' Alene area, February 17th, that's a Tuesday night. And February 24th, that's also a Tuesday night. I'll be giving a couple health and wellness talks over at Pilgrim's Health Food center in Coeur d', Alene, Idaho. I'm doing one on metabolic testing and what it means for you on Tuesday, February 17th. And for heart Health Month I'm going to be talking about exercise and heart heart attacks on February 24th. If you're nervous about getting a heart attack during exercise, I'm going to be letting you know whether you really need to be and what you can do to decrease your risk. And the final special announcement. This is for you triathletes out there. I'm pretty excited about this one. Coach Cal's critical speed camp is coming down from Canada to put on an Ironman Triathlon training camp in Coeur d', Alene, Idaho. I am Calzyrisky's assistant coach for this camp. I'm going to put a link to it in the show notes. It's May 9th to May 14th. First of all, if you're doing the Ironman Coeur d' Alene triathlon, this is six weeks prior. It's at a perfect time in your build up to Ironman Coeur d' Alene to throw down a lot of volume for beginner, intermediate or advanced triathlons or triathletes. There's levels for anybody at this camp. Five solid days of training. It's like a vacation. There's food, hotel. If you're local, you don't have to stay in a hotel. You can just show up to do the training sessions. There's talks by physicians, physiologists, biomechanists, coaches. It's just five days of full on triathlon, Splenda and afterwards there's actually a couple days tacked on where I'm going to be doing guided bikes and guided runs on the Coeur d' Alene course and teaching you some of the some of the custom fueling and strategies that you can use for that particular race. So if you're doing ironman Coeur d'. Alene. If you're doing an Ironman this year, period, you're going to want to look into that camp. I'm going to put a link to it in the show.

Notes.

The really nice part is that compared to most the other camps in the US it is dirt cheap. So check that out and we're going to go ahead and get on to the content in today's podcast. Listener Q and A. All right, I got an email from Jill in San Francisco and she says, is it true that if I sleep more, I will burn more fat? Well, Jill, there have been a lot of studies that have looked into whether or not people who sleep enough actually gain weight. And all of those studies have come to the conclusion that there is a significant correlation between sleep levels and obesity. But as far as whether or not if you actually sleep more, you'll burn fat, there hasn't necessarily been research that's looked into that. However, I do want to reference a highly reputable research magazine called Glamour. That's right. Full of peer reviewed studies. Well, it just so happened that Glamour magazine recently took several of their editors and all they did was they asked them not to make any significant changes to their diet or to their exercise. And all they wanted to do was see if they slept more, if they would lose more weight. And so what they did in this study was they had these women actually try and get the recommended 7 and a half hours of sleep, at least per night. Now, at the end of 10 weeks of getting more sleep, it looks like they had one girl dropped seven pounds, one dropped six, one dropped nine pounds, one dropped ten pounds, another dropped twelve, and one girl in ten weeks lost fifteen pounds doing absolutely nothing different except getting at least seven and a half hours of sleep per night. And I guess the question is, why does this actually work? Well, there's a few things that happen in your body when you don't get enough sleep. The first is that research has demonstrated that you get an increase in a hormone called ghrelin. Ghrelin is the hormone that basically makes you want to eat more. At the same time, you get a drop in hormone called leptin. And leptin is the appetite suppression hormone that causes you to want to eat less. And so as any of us might know, if we've gotten four hours of sleep, we're a lot more likely to eat more food. Well, researchers have actually found is that when you compare five and a half hours of sleep to eight and a half hours of sleep, people who get the five and a half hours of sleep actually eat an average of 250, 21 more calories than the people who are getting a full night sleep. So not only do you have an increased appetite, but you have a decreased ability to control the ability to stop when you're full, which is what leptin causes you to do. So you're craving a bunch of food, particularly sugary based foods, and your body isn't telling you when to stop eating them. Now, the thing that you combine this with the double whammy is that when you're getting deep sleep sleep, you actually have a release of growth hormone. And unlike what some people might think, growth hormone does not cause you to grow. It doesn't cause you to necessarily gain fat or gain mass. What it does is it causes your body to actually burn through fat stores. Now, if you're not secreting growth hormone while you're asleep, your body is not going to get the signal to burn through fat stores. And I emphasize this over and over again to the clients that I train, whether online or face to face. I'm always telling them to make sure that one of the things that they do is not just the exercise, not just the nutrition, but manage the sleep and the stress component. It's huge. You can have the perfect nutrition program, the perfect exercise program, but if you're sleeping for four hours a night or five hours a night, you are not going to see the effect that you really want to see. So I Recommend at least 7 and a half hours of sleep, sleep per night. And the highly reputable Glamour magazine is who we have to thank for some of that insight into whether or not sleep actually makes you thin.

Research corner.

You asked for more research, and so I'm going to give it to you. The Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health just came out with a study that revealed some pretty shocking information about Splenda. What happened was that in the animals used in this study that were given Splenda, they actually lost the amount of good bacteria in their intestines. It decreased by 50%. The pH level in the intestines actually increased. And what that means is that the intestines became more acidic. And as I've told you before on this show, anytime you increase the net acid level in the body via sugar or via inflammation, there's quite a bit of damage that occurs, including insulin resistance and a propensity to store fat and not be able to burn through your energy stores. And then there was also an effect on something called P glycoprotein and what that meant was that the body became more resistant to the effects of health related drugs like the type of medications used in chemotherapy or AIDS or heart conditions. Those weren't actually absorbed by the small intestines, they were shunted through the body. And, and so Splenda had all these combined effects of not only affecting the health of your gut, but also affecting the way that your body would respond to medication. Now, I always encourage people to go with a natural based sweetener versus an alternative sweetener, but this just goes to show you that it's more than simply having a hunch that the artificial sweeteners might do something damage to your body. Science has proven that this stuff can destroy your gut, which actually happens to be pretty relevant to what we're going to talk about in today's interview. But it can also wreak some other havoc. And there was actually some recent research that suggested that there might even be an insulin release when you consume artificial sweetener. So the whole reason that we're consuming in the first place, so that we, we don't get that insulin release and that fat storage that sugar gives us, it turns out that that might not be really the case with artificial sweeteners. And so what I would encourage you to do is don't eat fake food. Eat natural real food. And if you got to control calories, just control calories. Don't make up for it by consuming a bunch of artificial sweeteners. So definitely check out that research if you'd like, in the Journal of Toxic Toxicology and Environmental Health. I'll put a link to that on the nih.gov website. And the actual title of the study is Splenda Alters Gut Microflora and Increases Intestinal P glycoprotein and cytochrome P450 in male rats. So more dangers with artificial sweeteners. Check it out. And next up, we are going to move on to this week's introduction interview. I'm really looking forward to get this one out to you. You're definitely going to want to listen to this and you're definitely going to want to go over to the webpage and learn more about Product X after you listen into the interview.

Hey, podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and as I promised, I'm here to talk about a particular nutritional compound that I'm personally very excited about that I just discovered. And I wanted to get an expert on the show to actually talk to you about it. And the substance in question is called oil of oregano. And I've been using this for Just a fairly brief period of time as a way to treat bacteria in my stomach. And I've also used it as a treatment for sore throat as well as a, interestingly enough, household cleaner. You're going to hear more about oil of oregano, much, much more about it during this interview. But on the other line, I have Shuford Hyde, and he is the, or was the manager of Palouse Organics, which was an organic beef cattle and farm operation actually near Moscow, Idaho.

That was.

That was a town near where I went to school at University of Idaho. Shuford has a wife and a daughter and lives down there in Moscow. And he has an interesting story about how he actually discovered oregano oil that I wanted him to tell to us to get things started. But, Schufer, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Thank you, Ben. Glad to be here.

So tell me a little bit about how you discovered this stuff, because I know there's a lot of people out there that basically know nothing about it. And I've seen a lot of raised eyebrows so far from people when I've mentioned the fact that I'm starting to use this stuff.

Okay. Several years ago, Ben, I had an infection on my foot, athlete's foot. And we don't like to use a lot of pharmaceutical medicine, so I was looking for some kind of natural remedy.

Hold on, back up. What's wrong with pharmaceutical medicine?

Well, kind of created a nightmare in a way with antibiotics in that we've got a lot of super bugs now that are highly resistant because of mutations they've gone through to the antibiotics that are available, and they're having to be administered today as such large doses that they're sometimes having some pretty nasty side effects.

Yeah, I was being the devil's advocate there. We actually had a doctor on the show last week who was kind of talking about some of these same issues and how people's digestive tracts in particular had havoc wreaked upon them from antibiotic doses that kill all those good bacteria. But sorry for interrupting your story. Go ahead.

Well, I didn't hear the particular interview you're talking about, but that's dead on. The antibiotic can kill both good and bad bacteria in the gut, and there can be a consequential yeast overgrowth that can cause all sorts of systemic problems, such as athlete's foot, et cetera. Well, I'm looking for this natural remedy for athlete's foot, and I'm just running up a brick wall and I'm not doing finding anything that's helpful. So I'M in a library one day and I'm just sort of praying and walking through the stacks and sort of seeking some sort of book that would help me. And I run across a book by Dr. Cass Ingram, I n G R A m entitled the Cure is in the Cupboard. And this book turns out to be a list of therapeutic protocols for a substance I'd never heard of called oil of oregano, the essential oil of oreganum vulgare, a plant that grows wild in the Mediterranean basin. Well, I got to reading this book and it looked like, man, can all this be true. He claims that this stuff will knock out athletes foot better than the prescription drugs that are available at the drugstore. So I got some of this oregano oil and tried it on my athlete's foot and sure enough, it cleared it up. Zip, bang. And it didn't take long to do it. One of the things that really shocked me was the sticker price on this stuff. It was just off the charts. And I got to checking wholesale prices and found that there was an incredibly out of line markup on oregano oil. And I decided that this is something that the average person, not just the rich chapter, needs to be able to have. So we started a little business of our own selling oregano oil at a much more reasonable price. And that's how we got started in this business.

Okay. And I haven't seen much in terms of advertising from you. As a matter of fact, most of what I've heard about oil of oregano has really been word of mouth until a bottle ended up on my doorstep a couple of weeks ago. And I've been amazed with the stuff. But, but tell me about some of the things that you've heard, whether from customers or other people, about the types of cures that this has been used for.

Well, it's kind of a danger when you get into something like this that you're going to just tell anecdotal stories and people will just raise their eyebrows and shrug their shoulders. I'm going to try to confine myself, Ben, to types of remedies that have been actually documented with scientific studies.

So there's clinical research out there on the therapeutic claims of this stuff, right?

There's both laboratory and clinical research. Let me start with one that I was personally involved in. I received an email several months ago from a young doctor in the Philippines doing his clinicals and he wanted some of our olive oregano to test in a double blind study that he was doing on ringworm. So we sent him some and he In a typical medical manner, just sort of mixed it with some Vaseline and smeared it on these folks that had ringworm. And there were astonishingly positive results. I believe with this somewhat primitive method of application that he was using, he got something like 86% remission rates with this ringworm. You're not going to see much clinical research done with any type of essential oil, including oregano oil, in the United States, because the medical system here is largely driven by profit. But there has been quite a lot of research done in foreign countries.

You know, can we back up for just a second, Shuford, when you say that it's driven by profit, why would oil of oregano not be something that a pharmaceutical company could profit from?

Well, you can't patent a natural substance. In order to patent something, it has to be something that is synthetic or unique, that is not available to the general public, naturally. So to do these incredibly expensive double bond clinical tests that the FDA requires, you need to have something that you can patent and make a profit off of to recoup your losses on this clinical test. You can't do that with an essential oil. These just get generally passed over. As far as clinical testing is done in the United States, okay? Now, there has been clinical tests done in other countries. For instance, in Mexico, there was a test done at the Institute of Pediatrics that showed that it was effective against internal parasites, including Giardia, which is a nasty parasite that a lot of campers pick up. Sometimes called beaver fever. It's caused by drinking water that has been contaminated by the feces of infected animals. In other countries, there have been tests that have shown that it is an effective antifungal agent. And oregano oil has been demonstrated to be effective not only against parasites and fungus, but even viruses and bacteria. In a test done at Georgetown University by Dr. Harry Prius back in 2001, he tested oregano oil against staphylococcus bacteria, which is one of the nastiest bacteria that's present medical facilities. There have been whole wings of hospitals that have been shut down because they couldn't get rid of the staph infection that was there. And they just condemned that part of the building and abandoned it. Well, Dr. Prius at Georgetown University tested this oregano oil against staphylococcus along with the standard antibiotics such as streptomycin, penicillin and vancomycin, which, which have some dreadful side effects when taken in large doses. He found that the oregano oil was as effective against killing staph infection as the most powerful pharmaceutical antibiotics that are available today. I'm quoting here from a Georgetown University Medical center press release from October 6, 2001. These are just a few of the types of applications therapeutically that oregano oil has.

You know, one of the things that comes to mind when you're talking about the staphylococcus is the staphylococcus, the resistant staphylococcus that's been a real problem among athletic turf and sporting fields. The MRSA that was big in the news over the past few months. I'm wondering how something like that would respond to a potent antiseptic such as an oregano treatment. Obviously, the entire field might end up smelling like pizza, but, man, there's some applications there that seem pretty profound. So you've touched on some of the things that the oil of oregano could be used for, and I want to return and talk to that or talk about a little bit more in a second, because I know there are tons of other applications. I've personally discovered quite a few. But what would keep someone, or why wouldn't someone simply be able to go to the grocery store and buy oregano spice and grind it up and use that as a spice on their salad or put it on their dinner? What's the difference between that and an oil of oregano?

Well, the spice that is called oregano in the grocery store is really what we would call sweet marjoram or Mexican sage generally. Now, you might be able to go to some Greek specialty grocery store somewhere and find genuine oregano Bulgari. But even if you did, the strength of the therapeutic quality is not going to be as great in the dried herb as it's going to be in an essential oil. An essential oil is a highly concentrated mixture of the volatile oils out of the herb itself. Let me give an example. When we want to get 1 pound of Organa Bulgari essential oil, which is just slightly over one pint, we're going to have to distill somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 pounds of the leaves and flowers of the oregano Bulgaria plant. And that's why the substance is so highly concentrated.

So, in other words, not only would you have to get a hold of the real stuff, which is not particularly the stuff that's sold in the grocery store, but you'd have to take it home in a wheelbarrow with £200 and figure out a way to distill it.

That's correct. An essential oil is a highly concentrated compound made up of the volatile liquids that are in Any plant substance. There's about 300 of them that are in common use today. We're speaking specifically today about the organum vulgare essential oil.

Okay, and does that go by any other names other than oreganum vulgaret?

Well, because the oil is taken from plants that are wild, harvested in the Mediterranean basin bend, it's sometimes called wild Mediterranean oregano oil. It grows all around the Mediterranean. Spain, Greece, Turkey, etc.

I did take about two years of Latin back in high school, but remind me what the meaning of the name oreganum vulgare actually is.

Well, probably the term organum comes from two Greek words which means joy of the mountains. That word probably has something to do with the wonderful aromatic smell that is given off in the spring and summer when this plant is blooming in the mountains around the Mediterranean Sea. The term vulgare is like word that is the base of the word that we have for vulgar or vulgate. It means common. So this is the common oregano plant.

Okay. And compared to commercial oregano that you find in the grocery store, basically what we're saying is that there's a big difference between that and the Oregonum vulgare that would be found in, like, an oil of oregano.

Yes, these are two completely different species of plant. And although the culinary spice in the grocery store is called oregano, strictly speaking, it is not oregano. It is Mexican sage or sweet marjoram.

Now, I've seen a lot of oil of oregano here and there at different grocery stores. Is that typically the. The commercially available oil, Is that the Oregon and Bulgari extract?

Well, there are numerous suppliers of oregano oil in the United States, and I would just have to look at the Latin name of the substance on the bottle to be sure that it was oregano Bulgari. But if it's not specified, I think I would look elsewhere.

Now, if it weren't oregano vulgari and it were being advertised as oil of oregano, what would it be?

Well, it could be oreganum onites or organum linalool. There are about 30 different species of oregano plant, and all of them have some therapeutic value, but none have the quantity of a particular therapeutic constituent called carvacrol. That organum vulgare has to make a complicated story rather simple. The primary indicator of the strength of any oregano oil can be determined by the percentage of carvacrol C A, R, V, A C, R, O, L. And the essential oil, the oil that we offer is somewhere above 75%. The particular batch that we're Offering right now, Ben, is about 79% Carvacrol. Unlike pharmaceutical medicines that are standardized, oregano oil is a natural substance. Consequently, the chemical constituents can be in slightly different percentages from lot to lot. That's because the plant may have been grown in different soil. It could have been harvested at a different time of the year, it could have more or less rain, and even the skill of the distiller enters into the mix. But good oregano oil is going to be determined by the percentage of carvacrol in the oregano oil.

Okay, and you sent me a bottle of your oil to look at, and it came with a laboratory certificate of analysis, which I appreciate, but there's also something called thymol on here, and I know from my undergraduate studies in pharmaceuticals and biochemistry that thymol can also be used as an antifungal or an antiseptic. What's the difference between that and the carvacrol that you're talking about?

Well, without going to a lot of chemical analysis right here, There are about 50 different compounds in oregano oil that have been demonstrated to have therapeutic value. Thymol is a tremendous antifungal agent, and it is one of the substances that's used to treat fungus on fingernails, etc. But there's interestingly been some sort of synergistic effect that takes place when these different compounds are used together that is not present when they are used separately. For instance, the chemical complexity of oregano oil seems to indicate that there has never been a bacteria that could mutate in order to be resistant to the oregano oil, such as the bacteria that mutate to be resistant to pharmaceutical antibiotics. So the chemical complexity of the carvacrol, the thymol, and the various other substances makes oregano oil a substance that is much more wide range in its application. And at the same time, bacteria are seemingly unable to form any type of resistance to it.

One of my concerns initially when I heard about this was that oil of oregano would kill possibly the good bacteria in your stomach if it were so potent. What are your feelings on that?

Well, let's back up for our listeners that might not be exactly sure what we're talking about here. One of the big problems that people have that have used birth control pills or large doses of antibiotics is that there has been a killing off of the good flora in, in the intestines, such as the acidophilus, etc. What happens then is that there can be an overgrowth of what's called Candida albicans, and we get the classic yeast infection. Well, people have asked me, will oregano oil have a similar effect if I ingest it? Up until now, Ben, I've always just had to say, I think the jury's out for me, I don't know. So I've always advised people to just use some kind of probiotic, such as yogurt or kefir or some such, to make sure that that good floor and the gut stayed intact if they did ingest oregano.

Right, the same way that you would if you were taking. That's why I tell some of my clients they're taking antibiotics. Take a probiotic, get some yogurt, get some kefir.

Well, recently a friend of mine asked me that question. He said, schufer, is oregano oil a discriminant? What he meant was, does it kill the bad guy?

Schuffert, you broke up there for just a second. You broke up there for just a second. He asked you what?

He asked me, is oregano oil a discriminating antibiotic? And by that question he meant, does it kill the bad bacteria in the gut but leave the good bacteria unharmed? I had to say, well, frankly, I don't know. And I'm not going to make some hype and pretend about something that I don't know. He said, well, how would I ever find out? Well, I told him I'd read recently about an experiment that was done with another amazing substance called olive leaf extract, where they actually mixed some of this olive leaf extract up with some yogurt and went on to see if the yogurt would incubate in its normal manner with this antibiotic in it.

Dr. Okay. Because yogurt is good bacteria.

It is good bacteria. It has one, two, or three different types of good probiotic in it. Well, he did that with oregano oil, and the yogurt turned out to be just as tangy and tart with that same acidophilus taste that it had otherwise. Then he upped the amount of oregano oil to a tremendous amount in there and repeated the experiment with the same results. Now, I'm not going to use that anecdotal experiment to say beyond a shadow of a doubt that oregano oil is indeed a discriminating probiotic, but the evidence to me suggests that it is. Yeah, go ahead.

That's fascinating. And, you know, it's amazing, I think, how nature could actually produce a compound that is naturally discriminatory like that, or that naturally knows what would be harmful to the human body and what would not in terms of the bacteria growing within our stomachs.

Well, Ben, I'm kind of the mind that the creator of the universe is smarter than we are and that he has put all kinds of substances out here in nature for us that are beneficial to us. And we have just sort of got off on a little bit of a tangent with artificial treatments and neglected these things which have these tremendous benefits for us. And they're actually not just random by their existence. They were actually planned that way by the creator of the universe.

Now, that's a great point. And this was something that was touched upon last week by the doctor that we had on the show talking about how these fungal and these yeast growths within the body can be caused by tons of things that just about everybody living in Western society has had in their diet or in their lives at some point, Whether it be antibiotics, birth control pills, chemotherapy, anti inflammatory drugs, radiation, high consumption of alcohol, high consumption of sugar. Any of these things can cause yeast or fungal overgrowths within the body that just stay there. And they can cause things such as low energy, depressed immune system function, and especially a concern with many of the clients that I work with, resistance to weight loss, resistance to fat loss, because the body simply is not working on the level that it should be with these types of fungal overgrowths in the digestive tract. So when we're talking about oil of oregano, it can obviously be used to relieve that health problem. And just to give someone kind of an idea of how that works, can you explain the process? I'm not asking for dosage recommendations or anything like that, but I know some people don't, you know, do you mix this stuff in a glass of water and drink it down? Do you put it on the back of your neck? I mean, how would it work for treating something as serious as like a yeast or a fungal overgrowth in the digestive tract?

Okay, I've got to be kind of careful here because I'm not a health professional. So consequently I cannot prescribe, diagnose, etc. But let me just give some anecdotal type scenarios here of how oregano oil is used without telling your listeners that they should use oregano oil this way. Oregano oil can be applied topically or it can be ingested. One of the ways that it's applied topically is just to put it right on the skin. Sometimes it's used in the form of porpolitus where you just say, put it on a piece of gauze or some such and put it over an open wound. But let's talk about the yeast infection. Generally what people do with a yeast infection, Ben, is they will ingest the oregano oil. Now, the oil that's offered by Ben Greenville fitness is not 100% pure oregano oil. It is a dilution. It's a dilution of 1 to 7 with almond oil. The reason for that is that oregano oil undiluted is such a potent chemical that it can cause skin burns, chemical burns. But diluted like this is benign. We dilute it with this almond oil and a few drops, two or three drops can be placed under the tongue. I've sometimes put a few drops in a glass of V8 juice and drunk it down. On other cases where I was wanting to get a heavier dose, I would take an empty gel cap and put as many as 15 or 20 drops in that gel cap and take it with a glass of water. The oregano oil is peppery, hot like a jalapeno. So consequently, some people may not like the taste of it, may not want it under the tongue, but when you put it in a gel cap, you don't even taste it.

Yeah, when I tried it, it actually wasn't too bad mixed with the almond oil. I would imagine if it were undiluted that it would definitely be a bit overpowering in the mouth. But I was just putting a couple of drops under my tongue and it comes in this ounce bottle with a medicine dropper cap. Do you store this stuff in the refrigerator?

That's not really necessary, but you do need to keep it in a cool place and we need to keep it out of direct sunlight, so refrigeration is not necessary then.

Okay, well, what I'd like to do is expand on this a little bit and talk about some of the other potential health problems that the Oreganum vulgare essential oil could potentially be used for. Well.

In the book called the Extra Pharmacopedia, which was written by William Harrison Martindale and this is a standard British pharmacological textbook, he said the essential oil of oregano is the most powerful plant derived antiseptic known. This stuff has been shown to be stronger than phenol, which is used in many of the disinfecting solutions that you can buy commercially at the grocery store. This could be used on a scratch, cut, burn, any such, where there might be a danger of infection. As we've said before, it eradicates fungal infections, but it's also effective against viruses as we and most. I talked to a doctor one time, Ben, and I was talking to him I was pretty young and I said, well, can't you use antibiotics against viruses? And he laughed and he said, no, no, Shuford, using antibiotics against the virus is like shooting ping pong balls at an elephant. So unlike pharmaceutical antibiotics, oregano oil has been demonstrated to be effective against viral path. Really kind of incredible. It destroys internal parasites, as I mentioned earlier, and it's a potent antioxidant. It can even be used. Dr. James Duke, who wrote the book the Green Pharmacy, documented how that oregano oil had been proven to have several compounds that lowered blood pressure. There are a multitude of things that oregano oil can do. I guess I'm a little wary of sounding like a snake oil salesman saying that this stuff can fix a dislocated shoulder or something. I don't want to go completely over the top, but the things that I've mentioned today have some scientific evidence to support the claims that I'm making.

Yeah, no, I completely agree with you. You know, one of the things I definitely don't want our podcast to come on sounding like, you know, is a bunch of quackery that's, that's meant to sell a substance. But there are some things that I've found out about this that are amazing, not only in terms of its health properties, but about 100 grams of oregano plant has 1600 milligrams of calcium. So ounce for ounce, that's more than like cheese, vegetables, salmon, milk, you know, that, that, that's almost 20 times the calcium of a lot of dairy products. Yes, iron. You know, I've got a lot of people I work with that have problems with anemia. And it's got 50 milligrams of iron in 100 grams of oregano. And you know, one of them, one of the highest natural iron containing substances like blackstrap molasses, that's three times as much as that.

Yes. Oregano oil is a truly amazing substance, Ben, and it's taken from a common little plant that grows wild in the Mediterranean basin. I guess that's the amazing thing about the whole story.

I wanted to touch on topical applications or even non body based applications. How about if it's an antioxidant? How about anti inflammatory properties? Have any used for that?

Yes, it's used sometimes as a massage oil for people that have sprained muscles, etc. And it is not only anti inflammatory, it's analgesic. You talk about non body uses. Let me talk about some of the other anecdotal stories that my customers have written and told me about. I have one lady that raises organically fed dogs. I've never heard of such a thing until she told me. But she has an organic.

Hopefully these are not for human consumption as food like organically fed beef. Maybe she's over in China, I don't know.

She was asking me can I use oregano oil as a natural substance as a disinfectant in my kennel. And I think you certainly can. So she wrote me back and told me what she had done. She mixed up oregano oil with vodka as a carrier and put it in a spray bottle and she used this to disinfect the hard surfaces in her kennel. I work on a dairy here and several months ago I had to put a sick calf in a stall near a cow that I was milking. And that caused me some concern. I didn't want to be some kind of cross infection between the two. So I started adding a little bit of oregano oil to this cow's feed. Well, this cow had a wart like growth on one of her ears and it had just been there ever since we had obtained the cow. And I never paid much attention to it. Such things are fairly common. But after she ate this oregano oil on her food for probably three or four weeks, I came in one day and that growth had fallen off of her ear. I'm not saying that there was a necessity, cause, effect relationship there. I'm just telling you what happened. I'll let every person judge for themselves. Oregano oil can be used not only with humans, but with animals also. I was once a manager of a poultry farm where we had a large number of ducks. We sold duck eggs to high dollar restaurants down in San Francisco where they made these fancy Chinese dishes out of them. And we had some ducks that developed a respiratory problem, the nature of which I never really understood. I started misting a little bit of oregano oil in their food every day and. And all of that respiratory problem cleared up. There's a problem in milk cows called mastatis where there's actually an inflammation of the mammary gland and you can't use that milk until the mastitis clears. Well, I had a friend. Now, Ben, I'm not advocating that anybody do this. I'm telling this as an anecdotal story. She said, can oregano oil be used to treat mastitis? I said, I've never found any sort of viral, fungal or bacterial infection that could withstand oregano oil yet. So my guess would be yes. I thought she was going to massage the oregano oil on the bag of the cow. She took a syringe and injected the oregano oil into the bag. And within just a few days the mastatis was completely cleared again. I'm not telling anybody to do anything. I'm just telling what I've seen and heard. There was a customer that wrote us. He was at the point of death. The doctor had pretty much given up on him. He had Lyme disease, He'd contracted a tick borne infection and he was going downhill. And he said, well, oregano oil help Lyme disease. I said, sir, the research that I've looked at says that it is good for tick borne diseases, but it would be irresponsible for me to tell you without more evidence than that that it will help you. I don't know if it will help you or not. He said, well, send me some. So I sent him some. In a few months he wrote us back and he said, I'm virtually over my Lyme's disease.

Wow, it's amazing. And you know, I actually had food poisoning a few weeks ago when I was getting ready for a triathlon and eating, eating foods I wasn't used to in a different city. And man, if I would have had some of this stuff in my, in my bag, in my travel bag, I definitely would have used it. And I'm going to be, I'm going to be putting it in my travel bag as a antimicrobial whenever I go anywhere from now on. Just, just for that instance, you know, the same as I use probiotics now, I take those with me everywhere I go. I'm going to be beginning to use this as well. And then the other thing that, you know, after I heard about this, this effect, as far as it being used as a cleansing agent, few drops in a, in a spray bottle that I actually use as a, as a misting, you know, as a cleaning agent in the kitchen. You can actually just mist the air in the room like the living room. And it actually helps to clean the air and acts as basically an airborne antimicrobial.

Or you could use it in the diffuser or put it on a pot of boiling water on the stove, touching the toxins that you were talking about and how it would help with that. An interesting story that I read recently was how that Aristotle observed turtles eating oregano plant after they had ingested a poisonous snake. And he came to the conclusion that the oregano plant contained antitoxins from watching these turtles. At that point, Aristotle started advocating that people use oregano as a remedy should they ingest some toxin?

Interesting. It's fascinating. Shofuit. Is there any other resource that you would point people towards if they want to find out more about oil of oregano? I'm going to put a link to this book that you mentioned, the cures in the cupboard on the show notes to this podcast. Anything else that you would recommend? I know that there are quite a few studies out there on the Internet about the effects of this Carvacrol, but what would you recommend?

Well, as with any natural substance, there's a lot of hyperbole that's out there and you have to kind of cut through that. I would suggest if they wanted to get some hard clinical research, if they could get a pencil ready to write this down that they tried www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov and then search on pub, two words pubmed, oregano oil or some of the latest research that has been done in a clinical or laboratory environment with regular oil.

I will put a link to that in the show notes so people can just go click on it. But just so you know listeners, this is, this is actually what, what is the most respected peer reviewed clinical research journal Access, that's out there on the Internet to find out whether stuff is just bunk or whether studies have actually been done on it. And because I work as a nutritional consultant and come across many, many nutritional supplements, this is one of the first places I go when I start to find out more about what's actually been claimed about any substance. And so that's a great resource. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well as a link, this book that Schuffer talked about and some more information about where you can get your hands on some of this oil of oregano. Shuford, I would like to thank you for coming on the show. I think this was wonderfully insightful for our audience to be able to find out more about this natural substance that can really do a lot of wonders, it seems. And I look forward to using it more in my own lifestyle and talking to my clients and my listeners more about it. So thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you kindly for having us, Ben. We'll talk to you later.

All right, goodbye.

Bye bye, folks. After my discussion with Shuford, I decided to make this stuff available from BenGreenfieldFitness.com now, what I've been given a chance to do is give you access to one of the most highly concentrated and certified sources of oil of oregano at a price that's so affordable it's literally going to blow your mind. It's a 7:1 mixture with almond oil. It comes in a 1 ounce medicine droplet bottle that lasts about one or two months, depending on how frequently you use it. It's readily assimilated into the skin. It is easy to use orally. You can put it on your skin. You can put it under your tongue. You can even mix it into a spray bottle to mist your house. I give you the full spiel on this stuff if you go to the Show Notes for this week's podcast. I really don't think that I need to say anything more about it. It is simply amazing. So go check that out@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and and that's most what we have for today's podcast. Remember, if you are interested in any of the other things that I mentioned in terms of the calendar of events, if you want to look at the research from this week's listener Q and A as well as from the interview with Shuford on the oil oregano, I have all that posted on the website. I have the link to the triathlon camp and the triathlon training programs. I have a link to the free February 22nd pill poppin nutritional supplement interview with me, the recipe for Delta T, the 100 ways to boost your metabolism book. So lots to go check out. @BenGreenfieldFitness.com we have upcoming interviews on maximizing your swimming performance. We have a very interesting interview on goat's milk as well as later on in the month, the featured podcast with Lance Armstrong's personal physical therapist on some of the techniques that he used. So until next time, this is Ben Greenfield signing out. Oh and hey, remember to go visit itunes. At the very, very end of the link to the Show Notes in this podcast I put a link where you can go click on and leave us a ranking in itunes. It would really help us get the word out about the podcast and it's very, very simple and easy to do. Just click on that link link, it'll take you to itunes and you can spread the word. This is Ben Greenfield signing out.