Should You Or Your Kids Get Vaccinated? One Doctor’s Surprising Answer To Making The Big Decision On Vaccines.

I have a master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet, from seal fit, Kokoro, Spartan, Agoji, and the world's toughest mudder to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science. Search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss recovery, gut hormones, brain beauty and brawn to deliver you this podcast, everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride. Over the past 50 years, the rates of autoimmunity and chronic diseases have exploded. A ton of kids have allergies, as you're no doubt aware. One in 11 has asthma. One in 13 has food allergies, one in 36 has autism. And then there's all these other things that are autoimmune related conditions that even adults have, like acne and eczema and joint pain and thyroid issues and leaky gut. And many people will attribute this rise in all these autoimmune conditions to simple increased awareness. Right. And more diagnosis, because we're aware of these issues, you know, kind of similar to how more and more, especially young boys these days are diagnosed with ADD and adhd. I don't know if it's a growing epidemic of ADD and ADHD as much as it is that people are just creating names for diseases that that boys just naturally grow up with, but there's definitely something going on when it comes to autoimmunity. And my guest on today's show, Dr. Thomas Cowan, who has been a guest on this show multiple times. This is his fifth appearance, I believe. Fourth or fifth appearance on my show. And usually when someone appears on my show that much, it's because anytime they release a book or anytime that they write an article, I pay attention because they're forward thinking people who are far ahead of the curve when it comes to medicine. And Dr. Cowan definitely falls into that category. Case in point. He has a new book, it's called Vaccines, Autoimmunity and the Changing Nature of Childhood Illness. And he actually highlights how there's a direct causal relationship to the increase in the number of vaccines that kids get and autoimmune diseases, provocation of the immune response. So the book is fantastic. I have a bunch of stuff underlined that I wanted to ask Dr. Cowan so here he is on the show with us. He may also just. Fun fact for you guys, if you heard me on the Joe Rogan podcast where I was talking about why the heart is not a pump. And Joe definitely raised an eyebrow on me when I was trying to explain that Dr. Thomas Cowan actually wrote the book that describes all of that to you in detail. It's called Human Heart, Cosmic Heart. So that's a good one to read, as are all of his books, frankly. I'll link to all of them in the show notes. But Dr. Cowan, welcome. Welcome back to the show, man. It's old hat for you. You're almost like a podcast sidekick now.

That's right. Well, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, Ben.

Yeah. Yeah. You're always a wealth of knowledge, man. I enjoy the occasional meals we get to have together at the Wes na Price conference when I can make it over there. You're a good guy to eat grass fed butter and lard with.

Yeah. And I appreciate all your support through the years.

Yeah. And one thing I neglected to mention, by the way, for those of you who may not be familiar with this part of Dr. Cowan's life, is he makes these fantastic vegetable powders that me and my family use on, like all of our sautes and our stews. And they're all based on this idea that Dr. Cowan and I delved into when he was on my podcast called how to Eat More Vegetables, about these organic, like heirloom vegetables and threefold blend powders and dark turmeric and kale and leek powders that he actually makes and packages into miron glass jars and ships all over the US So I'll link to that stuff in the show notes as well. So everything that we talk about today you can find over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com autoimmunity that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Autoimmunity because that is indeed the topic of the day. And I think a perfect point for to start, Dr. Cowan, would be this story that you tell about when you were growing up in the 60s and how there was a kid you knew who had asthma. Can you get into that story?

The point of that story was, and people who have old people around in their lives, like me or grandparents or parents, if you ask them, how many children did you know growing up with food allergies and peanut allergies and asthma and eczema and childhood cancer and juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and on and on and on What I remember was one child in our whole elementary school. And it isn't like we were the paragons of healthy eating. You know, we ate frozen food and, you know, basically crap, but still there was only one child. I remember because as I said in the book, he was teased, although I would add, not by me. That's just not my style, I guess, teasing other people. But he was teased. And he was teased because it was like, how dare you be sick now if you fast forward from that till 2016, 2017 or now. You know, I've heard statistics that Detroit Public Schools, which is, you know, where I grew up, something like 40% of the children carry an inhaler to school. So maybe they're teasing the so called normal people now. Seriously, like, what's wrong with you? You don't have any medicine to take. So the whole situation has changed. You know, you can't go to a ball game and eat peanuts. You can't go to a birthday party. Everybody has food allergies and I don't know the percentage. The CDC came out with a 46% of current American children have a diagnosed chronic disease that needs at least intermittent medication and adults.

I went to dinner the other night. I was in. Where was I? I was Chicago. I went to this fantastic Italian restaurant. I was with about 20 people. And when the waiter came out and asked if anyone had food allergies or sensitivities, freaking. Half the hands in the room shot up. And this person was like, I'm not eating gluten. And this person says, I have a sensitivity to lactose. And I realized that part of that is the nature of just having dinner with, as I often do, people who are intensely aware of health. But there are an increasing number of adults who have an enormous number of allergies and skin conditions and all manner of things that frankly are autoimmune issues. Thyroid is another big one. But you're right, we didn't see a lot of this. And I don't know if you have any stats because I mentioned earlier that a lot of people do say that this is just increased diagnosis, increased awareness of the condition. But do you have anything to say to that argument?

Well, I mean, even if you actually believe the CDC and the Health and Human Services numbers, they say it was about 6% of the childhood population had a diagnosed chronic disease in 1980, and it's now 46%. So that's one way to look at it another way. And you know, one of the diseases that is now being questioned, whether there's an actual increase or whether it's all about diagnosis is, of course, autism. So now there's a whole movement to say that autism is normal and we just diagnose it more. But the problem with that is I've spent a lot of my life around autistic people because I worked at camps and I was an anthroposophical doctor working with Camp Hill villages, where there's a lot of autistic people. Something like 75% of people with a diagnosis of autism end up being institutionalized. I don't know about you, Ben, but if I think how many 60, 70 year olds do I know with autism and how many institutions there are for autistic people who are in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, it's basically zero. So where are they all? If they were just as many autistic people 50 years ago as there are now, we would expect, you know, a million autistic adults that are institutionalized, and we see almost none.

You tell another story in the book that I think is perfect for kind of beginning to delve into the changing nature of childhood illness and autoimmune and vaccines. And that's this story of this guy named William Coley. I hadn't really heard of this dude before until I read your book, but can you go into Coley and Coley's toxins?

So when I was first becoming a doctor, and at that time I was learning about anthroposophical medicine, and I would say if you wanted to encapsulate the entirety of the medical philosophy, it's of course complicated, but it goes back to Paracelsus, who sometimes considered the father of medicine, saying, give me a medicine to produce a fever and I can cure any disease. The example that you gave of William Coley is a perfect example of that. Here is a guy who was a trained oncology surgeon specializing in a kind of cancer, which is a bone cancer called osteosarcoma, which is a very aggressive and deadly form of cancer. And he was actually working at Kettering Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York, and he was working under the tutelage of a guy named Ewing, for whom Ewing sarcoma is named after. So Ewing is as big as it gets in the history of sarcoma. So he was the state of the art in 1910, 1920, treating sarcomas. And at one point, then he has John Rockefeller's friend who came to him with a sarcoma, and he did the usual treatment, which was amputation, and then she died six to eight Weeks later, that was an important patient for him, probably for all kinds of reasons. It just apparently very discouraged him. And so he decided to look through the records of the hospital to see, we're the sarcoma center of the world. How are we doing with treating sarcoma? His answer was basically dismally. Now, there was one exception in the records. This dock worker guy named Stein, who all it said in the notes was discharged free of disease. Coley had the good sense to go and track this guy down. This was nine or so years later. And he said, what happened to you? He said, well, they never did do the surgery or any other treatment because while I was in the hospital, I got this disease called erysipelas, which is a very bad strep infection of the skin, which typically causes very high fevers. I had a fever for a month, at which time the sarcoma was gone and never came back. So again, a lot of doctors would hear that and say, well, that's anecdotal and I don't have to pay any attention to that, or I don't know what happened. But there was a movement all over the world at the time of treating cancer with fever therapy. So Coley knew about this. So he decided to give all his sarcoma patients erysipelas because he knew the usual way they treated him wasn't working. He ended up saying that approximately 40% of the people who got erysipelas got better after a month of high fevers. 40% died of the erysipelas. This was in the pre antibiotic era. And 20%, interestingly, no matter what he did, never would get erysipelas and then they would just die of their sarcoma. That's in some ways a great result because 40% of sort of incurable cancer patients got better, far better than anything we can do now. But it's also had a high risk because 40% died of this infection. So that's a high mortality rate. So he said, well, maybe I don't need the infection, maybe I just need the fever. So he figured out how to use attenuated essentially non infective bacteria and just a certain part of them that would provoke a fever without actually giving them an infection. And that's what became Coley's toxins. And it was the main adjunct of treatment for cancer for the next 30 or 40 years.

And it was just causing people to get fevers that somehow was killing off the cancer.

Exactly. Now, interestingly, when I became a doctor, I was contacted by his Granddaughter, a woman named William Coley Knotts, who gave me this manuscript. It had never been published. It was, I don't know, thousands of pages with all the case studies that Coley treated. I went through them all and there was literally hundreds, thousands of people who were cured. And by this time, he was not causing infection because he was not using live bacteria. It wasn't 100%, but it was a huge success. I was looking at this and then I saw some articles that Sloan Kettering was developing an immune therapy program where they would take the chemicals that are made when you have an infection, and they would give them to cancer patients to see if they could stimulate their immune response and get rid of their cancer. Now, the amazing thing about this, and they isolated something called tumor necrosis factor. And they would give this. And then you inject somebody with tumor necrosis factor and you get a fever. And shockingly to me, they would give them Tylenol to bring the fever down. Then the whole thing wouldn't work. And they said, well, I guess immune therapy doesn't work. The bottom line was it's not the tumor necrosis factor or the interferon or the interleukin themselves that are a positive effect. The therapy, it's like Hippocrates said, give me a medicine to produce a fever and I can cure any disease. You have to have the fever, as unpleasant as it may be, and you have to have it to 105 degrees or so for a month. And that causes no problems in itself. But unfortunately, since the 60s, Coley's toxins has been outlawed in the United States. So that whole approach is unavailable.

Why were they outlawed?

I don't know. I mean, they said it was an unproven therapy and I think it was basically pennies and they just didn't want it.

But you don't really need Coley's toxins if you have a child that is allowed to actually get sick. So that the normal, I believe it's called the. Is it the humoral immune system is able to actually kick in and be trained in the right way?

Well, it's the cell mediated, literally, Ben, since that day, every single time I've seen a sick child in my practice with a fever, I literally think to myself, I am preemptively treating their cancer to be. In other words, if I can get them through somehow this febrile illness without suppressing the fever, then I know that I have just literally for their entire life, pushed them in a direction away from cancer. That's why I'M doing that. If it takes a day of a fever, that's good. If it takes a week of a fever, that's fine. My job is to somehow help them undertake this process. So at the end of the day, this funny word that we say after you're sick, now I'm better. Because literally you're better than what you were when you started.

So what are the type of conditions that a kid would get when they're young that would allow that proper cell mediated immune response to kick in so that the body is able to mount its normal immune response, get a fever, and then remember that specific antibody or toxin or sickness so that the person doesn't get it again.

Right. So maybe we should just go through that for a minute, if that's okay. Just to put that in context.

You mean like how that immune system is actually working? Yeah, yeah, I think that would be valuable because I think a lot of people don't really even understand that there's two main branches of the immune system that we're talking about here.

Right. So here's the way it works. Let's just take like a measles infection. So if you're a child and you've never been exposed to measles, and you get exposed to this virus and it gets in and it gets infects, it gets inside your cells, probably millions of them or certainly thousands, and your body is now looking at these infected cells, the first thing it does is it mounts a cell mediated, meaning it's based in the white blood cells response whose job it is, is to essentially like attack and digest these infected cells and then clear them out of the body. Now it does this through the mechanism of fever and rash and mucus and cough and diarrhea and all the things that we call being sick. If there's anything people will remember from hearing me or reading my book, it's that, that which we call being sick. You know, fever, rash, cough, all that, that's not the virus, it's not the measles virus. It's your cell mediated immune system, essentially eliminating the virus. Now, the virus provoked the cell mediated response, but the actual symptoms are from the cell mediated response getting rid of the infected cells.

Right. The wisdom of your body.

Yes, I know that. Because if you inhibit your cell mediated response, you can infect people and even kill them and they'll never be sick. So sick means your cell mediated response is working.

Wait, what do you mean? You could infect people and kill them and they wouldn't get sick.

So if you give People a measles infection and then give them prednisone so that they don't have a fever or a rash. The infection will continue and it could even kill them. But your body has been thwarted in its attempt to get rid of it, and that's a dangerous situation. You don't want to stop your body from using its natural mechanisms to clear the infected cells. That's a bad strategy. Now, once that happens, it usually takes seven to 10 days and then you're back to normal. The body in its evolutionary wisdom says, I don't want to do this over and over again. So I'm going to tag one of the pieces of the measles virus and make antibodies against it. That's the humoral or antibody arm of the immune system. So that if I ever enc that virus again, I can keep it from infecting my cells without getting my cell mediated immune system involved. Because the humoral antibody immune system is not associated with symptoms. You don't know anything's happening. You never get sick again from that virus. When those two things happen in that sequence, infection, cell mediated clears it, antibodies remember it. It's unbelievably, almost 100% foolproof. Nobody ever gets measles twice in their life.

So you're saying we should just let kids get measles and let measles run its course?

Well, that's, I'll get to that. But at this point I want to point out that that's the way our immune system always worked until about 50 years ago. The theory of vaccines is, well, the cell mediated part is the sickness part. We don't want the sickness part. So we're just going to take a piece of that measles virus or kill it, or so called attenuate it. And we're going to stimulate you to make antibodies. Sometimes we actually have to give you, you know, essentially toxins to make you make antibodies. So we're going to embark on an antibody only strategy. That's the theory of the vaccine. No more cell mediated immune system, only antibodies. And so that's what they do. They give you, you know, they give you pieces of the virus or pieces of toxins or killed viruses, and then they have to mix it with things like aluminum and formaldehyde and mercury and fetal DNA cells and glyphosate and all kinds of things to make you make antibodies. And it works. Now you have people who've skipped the cell mediated part and have an accelerated antibody response. Now, I would point out two things about that strategy. Number One, there is zero possibility of getting lifelong immunity through an antibody only strategy. And for people who don't believe me, it's simply the reason why every vaccine has to have boosters. Because the immunity that you get when you only stimulate the antibody part the first time lasts seven to 10 years. The subsequent boosters last two to three years. So when you're 30 or 25, you no longer have antibodies. You're just as susceptible to it as when you were a newborn baby. The second thing I would point out about an antibody only strategy is just like you eloquently talked about the rise in autoimmune disease. An autoimmune disease is defined, defined as the situation of accelerated antibodies that are targeting your own tissues. So if you ask the question, how did we end up with like, what Yeehuda Schoenfeld says, 150 million people who have autoimmune disease. Well, an autoimmune disease meaning too many antibodies. This is maybe a funny way to say it, but that's the whole point of the vaccine program. So it worked.

So the problem is, though, that all of these people who get that humoral system stimulated early in life from the vaccines never get a chance to actually get sick from that particular illness and mount a natural immune response to that illness that then causes the body to remember that illness and not get it again.

Correct. There have been study after study showing that children who get chickenpox have less glioblastoma kind of brain cancer, children who get measles, have less osteoarthritis, have less arteriosclerosis, have less heart disease, have less dementia. There's study after study showing that children who get febrile childhood disease have less chronic disease later in life, period. Anybody who doesn't know that just simply doesn't know the history of medicine or the current literature on the relationship of childhood illness and chronic disease. The other thing I would point out is that when people say, well, it's fine to not go through these illnesses, the fact of the matter is I happen to know the exact date. The CDC says anybody born before 1956 or before is considered immune to measles. And that happens to be the year I was born. So anybody 62 or older by definition had measles. So we have no idea whether a human being can actually get to be 65 who didn't have measles when they were a child. Because there's nobody like that. Could be it's fine, could be it's not fine. We don't know.

So when it comes to the whole idea behind vaccines and actual cellular function, there's a section in your book that kind of blew my mind because everything I learned in exercise physiology and a lot of my coursework at University of Idaho seems to be relatively incomplete, specifically when it comes to cell biology and the cell membrane. I realize that this might sound completely separate from any consideration of autoimmune or vaccination, but I think you can probably pretty elegantly weave this into this discussion because you have a whole chapter in the book about why we need to rethink cell biology. We've got time to unpack this, but can you get into what we currently believe about cell membranes or what medicine and science currently believes is the way that a cell operates and why that could be a flawed pattern of thinking?

The basic premise of cell biology all came from trying to understand this central paradox of mammalian including human cells, which is how does a cell live in a sodium rich environment, yet has a sodium poor internal milieu? Now, that may sound like a mouthful, but if you put a cell in a high salt concentration, it will equilibrate and the sodium will be balanced on either side. But that's clearly not the case with any mammalian cell. The sodium stays on the outside, the potassium collects on the inside, and this causes a separation of charges, which is fundamental to allowing the cell to be a charged entity, like a battery that can actually do work. So if you lose the charge because you lose this separation of sodium potassium, you're talking about a dead cell. It's literally 200 years of research into how the cell accomplishes that. Nobel Prizes were given. And the answer is you have this cell which is a membrane bound sac of water, and it has a pump in the membrane which pumps the sodium out and the potassium in. And that's how it happens. And here's the pump. And we studied it and we got our prizes for it.

I remember the little spheres in my textbooks in college showing the NA and the K moving in and out of the cell membrane based on that sodium potassium pump, right?

And that creates the charge of the cell. It's the most fundamental part of cell biology you can imagine. Now, here's the problem with that, and I have to acknowledge a guy named Gilbert Ling, who was a biologist who really spent four decades critiquing this system and showing that it's basically baloney. The first problem is, okay, we have a. A cell is a sack of water with stuff in it. I often tell the story when I was an ER doctor, we're told that 70% of the intracellular content is liquid water. And I would see people with bullet wounds and bayoneted and shot and all kinds of stuff. And I never saw a puddle of water on the floor next to them or water squirting out of a human being. I asked myself, where's the water here? I know there's blood, but that's different. Supposedly the cells are 70% water, yet there's no water in the human body. That's one problem with that model. The second problem is Ling actually ran the energetics of this sodium potassium pump and absolutely conclusively determined that in order to create this differential, you would need approximately 40 times the energy that a human being, a human cell, has available to it just to run the pump. That's like if you have a mortgage on your house that's 20,000amonth and your salary is 1,000amonth, it's not going to work. A, a, you're not going to be able to pay the mortgage, and B, you're not going to have enough money for food. You cannot run that pump, given the amount of energy it takes. And why he was the only one to understand that, as I have no idea.

So basically, there isn't actually enough ATP available to be responsible for the proper distribution of sodium and potassium based on the pump model.

Exactly. The other part of that is, and I'm glad you said that, because he also pointed out very clearly that unlike what seemingly everybody thinks, ATP is not the energy molecule that we think it is. There is no more energy in an ATP molecule than any other common molecule. So the system does not run by ATP as some energy source fueling this pump, pumping the potassium in and the sodium out. So the question then is, how does it work and what does that have to do with autoimmune disease? The answer is our cells are made of this fourth phase, structured water or gel water that I know you've got into a lot with Dr. Pollack and other people. It's structured similarly to how Jello is. You take proteins, you add water, you put an energy source. In the case of Jello, it's heat that unfolds the proteins, allows them to interact with water. When it cools down, it forms a gel. 100% of the water in our cells is in this gel form, not a liquid form. Even though people say there is no gel form, but there is. And the way that it's structured similarly to Jell O is you take the intracellular proteins, the ATP interacts with the ends of the Proteins and unfolds them. It allows them to interact with water to create what I call the perfect gel. The perfect gel. Now think of it like it has a sort of mesh, like a mosquito netting. The mesh is so constituted so that by itself it attaches to potassium and repels the sodium. So there's no pump needed. All you have to do is use ATP to unfold the protein structure. The water that structured water, by definition collects the potassium, expels the sodium, and that creates work on the cell that the cell can do, and everything is good.

Yeah, that's actually Gerald Pollock, who I interviewed and I'll link to all of this again if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com autoimmunity he gets into how all of this fourth phase water, this so called structured water that surrounds. Well, would you describe that as surrounding our cells or would you say that it is.

No, it's the very nature of the water in our cells.

Inside the cells, inside the cells, even.

Around DNA in the nucleus, there's a small amount of structured water which determines which part of the DNA will be expressed. The structured water does everything. It's like the reason it's water is because it has infinite binding sites and so it can interact with thoughts, emotions, hormones, vitamins, everything.

Sorry to interrupt, but if you have that negative electric charge, essentially you have almost a crystalline structure that can absorb different forms of information or energy or signals. And this relates to the whole concept of the body being a human battery and also relates to the concept of how we're affected by, you know, as Bruce Lipton goes into in his book Biology of Belief, or Joe Dispen's outlines in his book, you are the placebo. How we can and ourselves can even respond to things like energy and emotions and sound frequencies and all manner of things that go beyond simple, I guess we would call atoms, you know, and can instead interact with subatomic particles and then interact with waves and vibrations as well.

Yes, all that is because of the perfect crystalline, negatively charged water gel. Now that gets into the next thing. So why do we get sick? And in particular, I often joke that the reason I wrote this book was because I wanted to understand for myself the sequence of events that happens to me. And I don't think I'm the only one. When you get sick, here's the sequence. So, A, I'm fine, then I don't feel well and I get a fever and then it sort of breaks down and then I get snot and then I snot out the snot and then I get better. So why does it happen like that? Nobody ever told me, nobody ever said anything why that sequence of events. But here's why. Let's say you have this perfect gel. So now you're a perfectly tuned radio and you can accept all the influences that a human being is supposed to. And then you dissolve arsenic in your gel, so that distorts the gel. So now you have an out of tune radio that can't accept signals. And you're going down a bad path here. You can't make an energy charge, you're just. That's what we call being sick. So your body says to itself, I've got to get rid of that arsenic. But I got it interspersed in my gel. So what I'm going to do here is heat up the gel so it make it back into a liquid and then I'm going to make it run out of the cells and I'm going to snot it out of my body and then I'm going to reconstitute a more perfect gel. So that's what we do.

So in a case of something like an autoimmune condition that would involve inflammation, these cells actually get into this pathological state. Is that based on some kind of an inhibition of this negative charge or the inability of water to basically move in and out of the cell?

So the way I would put it is, let's say you have like with chickenpox or measles, so your gels are healthy, you get an infection, you clear it out, you reconstitute perfect gels and now you're fine. But let's say it's not a chickenpox virus that's distorting your cells, but aluminum being injected into your cells. That happens over and over again. So you clear it out, you get sick and then you get more, and then you clear it out and you get more. And at the end of the day you end up with a distorted cell which is weak in its ability to accept impulses and it's weak in its ability to create this charge. And now you have a chronic inflamed situation because your body is continually trying to clean itself out of whatever else, whatever was put in there, but you keep putting it in there and you keep inhibiting your body from doing this house cleaning. And I mean, what else would you expect to happen? But you end up with chronic sickness.

It's interesting because this is similar to our discussion of the heart in our last episode about how the heart actually pumps less than what we think Very similar to this sodium potassium pump being possibly something that isn't, even from a pure biochemical standpoint, feasible. And when we talked about the heart, you talked about how water, particularly the charges of water, allow it to move through a well designed shape of the heart. I believe you called it a tetrahedron structure without the heart necessarily needing to pump, but rather the heart relying upon the vortices, like movement of water through that structure of the heart. And in the same way that water moves through plants and the vasculature in plants, without the plant needing a heart, water and fluids can move through the human body in a similar way. And what you've just described is very similarly almost like this self sustaining system that doesn't rely upon a lot of outside energy for accomplishing movement, but in fact allows for the cell to operate assuming a state of adequate hydration and an adequately charged body. Which we'll get into in a second without necessarily requiring, say, ATP.

Exactly. I couldn't put it any more succinctly. That's exactly right. These pump models are from a. The reason we think that way is because Descartes said, from now on only mechanical ideas will influence how we think about the human being. That's why we think that.

But it's more than just mechanics. It comes down also to electricity, charges and frequencies.

Yes, exactly. It's more than mechanics. And in fact, when you get into the mechanics, it can't possibly be the heart pushing the blood, it just doesn't, it mechanically doesn't work. And similarly, it can't possibly be this sodium potassium pump creating this charge. The energy just doesn't add up. There is a whole other way, and that gets into a lot of things. But basically, unfortunately, our biology is based on inanimate inorganic principles. We don't know the difference between life and death, therefore we can't study life.

Now, I want to get into your whole protocol for supporting the immune system based on supporting the innate immune system response, especially in childhood, rather than vaccinations. But to bring things full circle, what you're saying is when we look at aluminum and mercury or formaldehyde, or any of these other chemicals or metals that are in a vaccine vaccine, what those do is they can actually insert themselves into the intracellular matrix and interfere with the actual charge generating ability of the cell itself.

Right? Or any toxin. Anytime you live in a toxic world or nutritionally depleted world, you're going to interfere with the formation of your gels, which is how we interact with the world. That's what, what Collects and processes information, which in a sense is what a human being or a living system is. It's an information communication device with the rest of the world. And now we're human beings whose radios are out of tune.

Yeah, and this is important too, because this is one of the things that I explained to people when they asked me what are the top things they could do to maintain ideal health and wellness. And a lot of it comes down to supporting this natural gel matrix within the cell and the natural negative charge of the structured water in the body. That comes down to very good water intake, preferably structured water, but water that has maintained its normal negative charge. I have a whole house structured water filtration system installed in my own home. And although I don't get a lot of structured water when I travel, you know, there are even ways you can bring structured water when you travel. Like I have these little liquid shots called Oral iv, for example, that I can throw in my travel bag and bring with me. And then in addition to the structured water, adequate mineral intake, I mean, we go through tons of. We've got trace liquid minerals and Celtic sea salts and all sorts of things here at our house that my kids and my wife and I use. And then getting outside barefoot on the ground with adequate sunshine, I mean, water, minerals, the earth and sunshine are before you go and buy a bunch of colostrum and liver capsules, all these things that do support the immune system. I mean, you have to take care of that low hanging fruit.

Exactly. You just outlined exactly the plan on how to maintain healthy gels and a healthy body. Right there. That was it.

Now, in terms of the actual immune system itself and this idea of alternatives to vaccines, I know that you have kind of a basic autoimmune treatment protocol. I think this is important because a lot of adults especially have been vaccinated. A lot of adults have children or people are listening in who might even be children who have been vaccinated. I mean, is it really a hopeless scenario for a lot of these folks, their humoral immune system being triggered when they were young without the innate immune system? Or are there things that we can do to heal the body?

Yeah, I mean, it's basically so there's no human being who's hopeless. That is not even the way to look at it. It's always just taking one step at a time. If you're sick, these dynamics that you just talked about and that we're talking about are in play. And so what's needed is to put together a cellular gel restoration program. Now, those four basic, water and sunlight and earthing and movement. That's the basic for any plan. Then I would say the next most basic is at some point in your life, your cell mediated immune system will start to rear its head again and say, remember that I'm still here. At that point, you have to honor it. You have to go through the illness. If you need to have somebody who knows how to do that help you. And you've got to let your body do its own house cleaning. Now you can, you know, some of the strategies that I outlined in the book with, you know, different diets and like you say, colostrum and you can use vitamin C and you can do the GAPS diet and you can use low dose naltrexone. All these things are attempts to bring this back into balance. But the rubber hits the road when your child eventually will get sick again because their cell mediated immune system will say, now we're strong enough to do this and you have to squire it through. If you need help, that's fine, so that they get to the end of the day in a better shape than when they started.

Now, I want to actually explore a few of those things that you just brought up as far as ways to kind of heal the body and to quell this autoimmune response. One that you just mentioned was low dose naltrexone. And it's pretty rare that, you know, I'll have docs on like you who are using a lot of natural healing protocols who will mention a pharmaceutical drug like that. But what is it that you like about this low dose naltrexone?

So naltrexone was originally discovered as an opiate receptor inhibitor, meaning if you took an overdose of heroin, this naltrexone inhibits the attachment of the heroin to your opiate receptors and basically will save your life within seconds. So it's called Narcan and it's used in all the emergency rooms probably all over the world. So then they started giving it to addicts 50 milligrams a day. And that would inhibit the ability of the heroin to make you high, which I guess is good, but it also made you feel so lousy that people didn't take it. And so it failed as an addiction drug. And that's because when you block opiates like heroin, you're also blocking endorphins, which are endogenously produced opiates. And life without endorphins is not much fun. So that would have been the end of it, except there was a number of doctors, a guy named Bahari in particular, who said, these people with autoimmune disease, they have a low endorphin symptom state. That's why they feel so lousy. So if I can improve their endorphins, I can make them feel better and their whole immune system will function better. So he ended up giving them very small doses of naltrexone, which essentially tricks your body into making endorphins and that rebalances your immune system. It lowers the humeral, it's stimulates cell mediated immunity that can make an unbelievable difference for people suffering from autoimmune disease. I have cases in the book of people with Graves disease, people with pemphigus. I've got story after story of people who do all those things that you say, plus eating low antigen diets so they're not overreacting like paleo or GAPS or something like that, and take low dose naltrexone and they finally get a rebalancing of their immune system and if we're lucky, an actual remission of their autoimmune disease.

Now, I know that that's something that you would normally have prescribed by a physician, but it is ldn, this low dose naltrexone, something that one could buy online.

There is a pharmacy out of Israel, I don't remember the name of it, but that you can actually buy it, although it takes a little bit of expertise to get the dose right. So it would be best to work with somebody who uses low dose naltrexone regularly. I was going to say, you're right. It's the only pharmaceutical medicine in a typical month that I actually use.

My friend Grace Liu, who I worked with when I was healing my gut a couple of years ago, uses that and also mistletoe as a very similar treatment that apparently works quite well along with LDN for not just gut issues that come along with autoimmune disease, but also a lot of the inflammation that comes along with that. Have you ever done much with mistletoe?

I have done a lot with mistletoe. And mistletoe is basically Rudolf Steiner's fever therapy. It's like coli toxins in a shot. It stimulates the cell mediated immune system. Fever is not the only way, but there's also hyperthermia. People have come up with various ways of cleaning the gels and stimulating. Steiner called it the etheric body or the water body, which is sort of the same thing. And when Steiner was asked what does mistletoe Do. He said it simulates a bacterial infection. In other words, Coley's toxins in injection form.

Interesting. Okay, so you've got LDN and mistletoe as two things for people to look into who are experiencing autoimmune issues. And then another one that you mentioned, and I've had this guy in the show before, is this. This lignite stuff, and are you recommending lignite as something one would use short term, or is that just something based on glyphosate exposure that you have patients just taking? Almost like a daily multivitamin.

Right. And that comes because, you know, there's a number of ways to get into this autoimmune situation, meaning you have too many antibodies and you're reacting to yourself. The too many antibodies is often and largely a consequence of vaccines, but it's also a consequence of absorbing antigens, which are proteins from your gut, and then your body has to react against them by making antibodies. So if you can seal the pores in your gut, then you will be less exposed to antigens and therefore make less antibodies, therefore have less autoimmune disease. And this stuff that you mentioned called restore, is one of the ways, and maybe the best way that I know of, to seal the gut. So I use it with people with autoimmune disease and gut issues until they're clear of it. Basically. Yeah.

You just take a shot like about a half hour before you eat a meal, Right?

Yep, exactly.

Got it. And then another one that seems to act similarly in terms of tight junctions in the stomach and lowering the activity of this zonulin protein that seems to be able to open these tight junctions and cause more of these autoimmune food allergy, food intolerance, other inflammatory conditions is colostrum. So colostrum is another one that I've talked about before on the show quite a bit. But in terms of that, are you also recommending that for both children and adults who are having autoimmune issues?

Yeah, I mean, colostrum, again, the reason, one of the ways you get into this autoimmune disease is because you're absorbing antigens from the gut, and that's because you have a disordered gut flora and too much zonulin and the pores are too open. So what colostrum does is it's basically the first milk that's there to stimulate the implantation of the healthy gut flora. So if you give that to a person and give them a diet that includes fermented foods and maybe probiotics, if needed. Then you encourage the implantation of healthy gut flora that prevents leakage into the bloodstream and that helps the autoimmune disease.

Okay, got it. And then the last one I want to talk to you about is these organ preparations that you use. What are those?

So one of the reasons why autoimmune disease, let's take, say Hashimoto's becomes chronic, is so, you know, you stimulate antibodies, you have these antigens stimulating antibodies, you have these adjuvants in vaccines stimulating antibodies. And one of the antibodies cross reacts with, say, your thyroid and it causes an inflammatory reaction in your thyroid, which means it puts out proteins from the thyroid into the bloodstream. Now that of course, makes your body make more antibodies to these antigens floating in your bloodstream. Those antibodies then cross react with your thyroid, create inflammation. More antigens in the bloodstream, more antibodies, more inflammation. And that's why it becomes a chronic situation. In order to break that cycle, if you eat the organ that you're attacking. So in this case, the thyroid. If you eat a desiccated thyroid from a grass fed cow, the hope is that your body's antibodies will go after the thyroid that you just ingested and leave your own thyroid alone. This has been used in the Brigham and Women's hospital for about 40 years. They call it oral tolerance therapy because many of the antibodies are made in the Peyer's patches around your gut. So if you eat cartilage, then your antibodies attack that leave your own thyroid alone, your thyroid can heal and that breaks the cycle.

Now, thesethese type of glandulars, are these similar to something like low dose naltrexone that you would need to get a prescription for? Or are these the same type of things you could find, say on Amazon when you go there and you see like, you know, grass fed desiccated beef organs and desiccated liver. And I know now foods is one brand that is, that's recommended as far as like a good, safe source of liver extract. Are these the type of things that people can use just in order on their own?

Yes, they're similar. I mean, I use the ones mostly from allergy research because they seem like they've tested them and they worked with a friend of mine named Nick Gonzales who basically directed them how to do it. Whether they're so much better than any other one, I don't really know.

Yeah, but even the allergy research stuff, you can order that off Amazon, right?

Yeah. Right. So I know, I mean, it's not going to hurt you. So that's fine. I mean, it's always good to work with somebody who's done this before. But, you know, I'm not saying it's imperative. It's certainly imperative if you're having a horrible time with rheumatoid arthritis or Graves disease. I wouldn't want somebody doing that on their own, but.

Okay. All right. Now I want to come full circle, and I will, of course, link to Dr. Cowan's book for those of you who want to delve into his autoimmune protocol even more deeply. And some of the dosages and uses of some of the things we talked about, like colostrum and LDN and some of these organ extracts. But one of the things that I find fascinating that I didn't have a chance to ask you yet, is this idea behind Rudolf Steiner, somebody who you mentioned earlier, and the fact that there are actual identified developmental stages that a normal, healthy human child should be almost, like, allowed to go through. And he has kind of outlined these different stages of life where you're supposed to get sick, you're supposed to get some of these diseases that we're trying to eradicate. Can you explain what I believe he calls it? The cosmology of our development would be in respect to that.

So normal science and normal medicine says we have a body, meaning a physical body, and there's nothing else to a human being but that. That's the way we're taught. Now, that's even why sometimes I bristle at saying even the word science, because there's no doubt everybody wants to get at the truth and do that as carefully as possible. But if the definition of science is the belief that only material stuff exists in the universe, I'm not sure I can agree with that. Or let me put another way, I don't agree with that, because what about, like, love? I don't know anybody who can measure love, and yet everybody knows it exists. Now, Steiner took that into a more, I would say, particular or scientific way. And it's hard to know how he got these things, but let's just say he. Whatever method he used, and he said, well, we not only have a physical body, but we have three other bodies. One is a water body and one is an air body, and one is a warmth body. He gave them different names, like etheric body and astral body and ego, but that's what he meant. And he said, just like the physical body gets born, the etheric body or water body gets born, and the soul body or air body gets born. And then the Warmth body or ego gets born, and they get born by going through certain illnesses. So the etheric or water body gets born when you're seven, and that's when you go through measles, your air body, your soul body, sort of the whole puberty thing gets born when you're 12 to 14, and then you go through rheumatic fever or strep infection, and then your ego gets born when you're 20, 21, and then you go through mano when you're born. Your physical body gets born through interacting with the air. You know, the Greeks said when you interact with the air, that's the birth of the physical body. And that happens through overcoming pertussis or whooping cough. So that's this sort of scheme he laid out. I think the point for anybody to realize is that a strategy of keeping children from overcoming obstacles is fundamentally a strategy of creating weak human beings.

It's so inconvenient, though, to have to get scarlet fever and the measles and take the more, shall we say, stoic approach to sickness rather than just trying to nuke it with a vaccine.

Yes, maybe. But if you realize, as I've come to, that there's no other choice, A and that with proper care, and so some of what you learn in anthroposophical medicine is the proper care of these illnesses. But even if they weren't, the mortality rate from measles in the decade prior to the measles vaccine had dropped to almost zero. So there was very little case to be made that this was a dangerous disease to the American population before the measles vaccine. So now we have a whole lot of hysteria about it. But the bottom line was we had measles parties. My parents brought me when they wanted me to get measles so I didn't miss so much school. And it's a whole different world of how we think about these things. People then had a sense that you cannot prevent children from experiencing challenges because that's not how human beings develop.

Yeah, it kind of just comes full circle, honestly, to everything that is wrong with the way that we raise our kids, right? From antibacterial hand soaps, to soy milk formulas, to the built up protective covering on the floor of all the playgrounds at the schools. It's just sacrificing kids muscle mass, their bone density, their immune systems, and then we carry that into adulthood, at which point then we have to pull out all those fringe things we talked about earlier, like LDN and mistletoe and colostrum. And, you know, these soil extracts are digging up from the earth, like restore. And a big part of it is, sure, a little bit of the glyphosate and the herbicide and the pesticide and the modern battle we're fighting in an era where our food is compromised. But another big part of it is the way that our immune systems have been treated when we were babies.

We're babies. And it's the lucky ones who can just use those things. It's the unlucky ones who get all the really life altering, horrible situations that we have in literally epidemic levels, whether it's Ms. And ALS and autism and breast cancer at age 35 that was never seen before. So, you know, if that's the way we want to go, then we've got a perfect strategy for that right now.

Yeah. And I guess I would close with this because a lot of people will ask me, well, what do you do, Ben, with your kids? And we did a lot of international travel with our kids. We got a couple vaccines that if I could go back and do it again, as you and I discussed in our last podcast, I would probably use a lot more natural defense mechanisms like, you know, thieves, essential oil and vitamin D and all these other ways that you can support the immune system or fight off infection. But then the other thing, I mean, my kids, every morning they're taking, especially during cold and flu season where they're surrounded by sick kids at school, they're taking double the amount of vitamin D and K. They take glutathione with PQQ and coenzyme Q10 for mitochondrial support before they go off to school. We have Chaga tea, you know, vats of Chaga tea in the refrigerator that the kids are drinking. Everybody in our house takes colostrum if there's any type of flu or immune system issue going around. We take a shot of restore each time before we eat a meal. And while this might sound laborious, for us, it's like taking a shower, brushing our teeth. These are the ways that we protect ourselves. And for me, and especially for my children, doing this rather than putting a bunch of metals and toxins into their body is a far superior approach. And for those of you listening in, who have questions, who have comments about this kind of stuff, I would recommend that you not only read Dr. Cowan's book, Vaccines, Autoimmunity and the Changing Nature of Childhood Illness, because admittedly, you know, we skim the surface of the gel matrix inside of the cell and also, you know, some of the, Some of the politics and the science behind vaccinations and things like measles and smallpox. And it's a wonderful resource that I think anybody who has an immune system or children should own. So I'm gonna link to that one in the show notes along with everything else that Dr. Cowan and I talked about and my previous three or four, I don't remember, podcast episodes with him all over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Autoimmunity that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com AutoImmunity and Dr. Cowan, I want to thank you again for coming on the show and for all this forward thinking work that you're doing.

Thank you. Ben, I just want to say again, I think I said this before, but I so appreciate your thoughtfulness and your wonderful way that you ask questions and sort of process this because it makes it much easier for me. Believe me, not everybody can do that.

Well, I've said this before on shows, but one of my favorite parts about my job is when the book from, you know, whatever, Victory Belt or Chelsea Green or any of these other kind of forward thinking publishers shows up at my doorstep because they know I want advanced copies and I get to lay in bed at night and read them and my wife gets sick of me. Just like it sounds like this when I'm reading. Interesting. Hey babe, listen to this. And I underline everything. But the coolest part is as I'm sitting there reading the book, folding pages, underlining and occasionally with the Kindle, you know, dragging my finger across and highlighting that once I assimilate all of those questions, I get to get a guy like you on the phone and actually pick your brain about the book that you wrote. That's my favorite part about my job. So yeah, it's hopefully doing some people some amount of service. So anyways, thanks for your time, man. I appreciate it.

Okay, Ben, thank you.

All right, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Thomas Cowan signing out all the show notes are@BenGreenfieldFitness.com autoimmunity have an amazing week. Want more? Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com where you can subscribe to my information packed and entertaining newsletter and click the link up on the right hand side of that webpage that says Ben Recommends, where you'll see a full list of everything I've ever recommended to enhance your body and your brain. Finally, to get your hands on all of the unique supplement formulations that I personally develop, you can visit the website of my company kion@getkion.com that's getkion.com.