The Shocking Story Of Vaccines, The Toxicity Of Ultrasounds, Why You Shouldn't Play With Your Child & Much More With Dr. Thomas Cowan

Hey guys, what's up? It's Ben Greenfield. This was actually a little bit of a tough podcast episode for me to record. It's an episode focused on children, everything from the toxicity of ultrasounds to the shocking story of vaccinations to some very fringe and outside the box concepts with a guy who's been on my podcast a couple of times. Relatively controversial. And the reason that I originally scheduled this podcast was because I personally have not only been helping a lot of my friends out with raising, as I tend to call it, as cheesy a term as it is tiny superhumans, but I also have been thinking quite a bit lately about whether I want to have another baby myself, whether Jess and I want to bring a new one into this world. And it's kind of a hot topic on my mind right now. And perhaps that's why I've been reading so many baby books and setting up on babies more and even getting a baby podcast on. If you want to jump into the show notes for this episode, which I will reveal during the episode itself, let me know your thoughts on this. Your comments on it. Whether I'm torn between the whole quality of having just two young boys versus the quantity of adding more children into this world. Of course, when you have multiples once, your chance of having multiples again. And I have twins, AKA multiples, which is just a more cutting edge way to say twins, your chances of having multiples goes up by like 30% once you've already had twins. So I could shoot for like one tiny little girl or something and wind up with a basketball team of boys. That also gives me pause. Anyways, though, just a topic on my mind right now. Feel free to jump into the comments section of today's show and let me know what you think about the possibility of another video Greenfield coming into the world in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

The reason we have chronic inflammation is because we have so much of this sclerosis that people are relegated, so to speak, to spending the rest of their life trying to dissolve it. If you ask the question, how did we end up with 150 million people with too many antibodies in their blood causing an inflammatory destruction of the tissues, I mean, the answer is actually very simple.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And I first introduced you to the brilliant and well spoken yet slightly outside the box physician Dr. Thomas Cowan in the podcast episode called how to eat more vegetables. And in that we talked about all these different ways that you could like concentrate the superfoods and vegetables and why a plant is like an upside down human and some very outside the box ways to think about plants and the plants you eat and vegetables. And then Dr. Cohn returned to the podcast for the, in my opinion, pretty mind blowing episode called why your heart is not a pump. You need to listen to that episode if you have any interest whatsoever in your heart or heart disease. And on today's episode, I've invited Dr. Cowan back because as we alluded to in those other shows, but really didn't have a chance to dive into, he is a co author of a book on childcare and has actually written, or co written, I guess, with a gal who is heavily involved with the Weston A. Price Foundation, Sally Fallon Morell, a book called the Nourishing traditions book of baby and childcare. And he delves into everything from the shocking story of vaccines to the toxicity of prenatal ultrasounds to his controversial comment comments like don't play with your kids, all sorts of weird stuff that we'll get into in today's show. And I'm gonna put Dr. Cowan's book as well as his full bio over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com childcare that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com childcare but Dr. Cowan himself, just a quick overview. He had his residency and family practice in New York and then set up a medical practice in New Hampshire and then relocated to San Francisco. Is that, is that where you still live, by the way, Dr. Cowan? San Francisco?

Yeah, I still live in San Francisco.

Cool off to look you up, by the way, when I come down there to do the, I go, I go on an annual mecca to San Francisco to do the Spartan stadium race there. So I'll have to look you up when I'm, when I'm down there.

Yeah.

And, and he, he actually writes the Ask the doctor column, which is a really great column in the Wise Traditions in Food, farming and Healing arts newsletter. He's got another book called the Fourfold Path to Healing. He's got those other books I talked about, too, like, your heart is not a pump, or it's actually called human heart, cosmic heart. And then how to eat more vegetables. And like I mentioned, I'll put a link to all of his other books if you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com childcare now you have this book, and I've read it cover to cover this nourishing traditions book of baby and child care. I think anybody who has a kid or a baby or knows anyone with a kid or a baby should read it. And I had a bunch of pages folded over on this thing, Thomas, you know, pages about, like, you know, feeding your kid cod liver oil and the ideal prenatal vitamin, and, you know, even some of the things you. That are in there, you know, about, like cannabinoids and breast milk and lotus birthing. And when I mentioned to you that I wanted to talk about a lot of this stuff, you came back to me and said, no, no, no, no, no. I have some things that I specifically want to bring up that, that I want to talk about on your show. And so you mentioned to me that some of the main things you wanted to have a conversation about were what childhood illnesses are all about and how we went from a nation of children having almost no chronic diseases to a nation where children with chronic diseases is kind of the norm. And then you also wanted to touch on things like vaccinations and antibiotics and Tylenol and some of these common things that we use with our kids. And then also this controversial statement that you've made about why we shouldn't play with our kids. So I think those are three definite areas that after going through this book, I'm completely on board with you about diving into. Although I'll warn you, you proceed at your own risk by even mentioning the word vaccination on a podcast. But we can talk about that anyways, though. So where I'd like to kick off, if you're game, man, is this idea of kids and why they're getting sick more these days. And you actually make a statement in Chapter 13 of the book that kids who are in balance don't get sick when exposed to germs. Kids who are imbalanced don't get sick when exposed to germs. That's a pretty bold statement. Can you go into what you mean by that? Like, what do it mean for a kid to be out of balance?

Yeah, I may qualify that actually, as we go, but because I think in order to understand that, you have to look at the history of childhood sickness over the last, say, 50 to 100 years. And I would absolutely encourage anybody listening, anybody under 30, ask their parents or grandparents if they still have them. Anybody over 60, I think, will know what I'm talking about. In the people in the middle, you're on your own. But for instance, when I was in grade school, there was, as far as I know, one child in our school who had a chronic disease, which was asthma, because I remember he was in our class, and we made fun of him because he was sick.

That was very nice.

I'm not necessarily proud of the fact he made fun of him, and hopefully I didn't make fun of him. But the point is, it was so unusual for a child to be, you know, going to school with an inhaler and being sick all the time, that, you know, it was just something that we all took note of.

He was one of those. He was one of those kids who he would have said back in the day, had a weak constitution. Right?

Yeah, right. He was weird. So that's why we picked on. And so, you know, we went from that to a situation where, for instance, and there are things like, you know, hardly anybody, if anybody had food allergies or eczema or chronic asthma. Leukemia was just starting, but was rare. Autism was unheard of. Nobody thought about autism and learning problems, etc. Now, the usual retort you'll hear from conventional doctors and pediatricians, which always kind of amuses me, is, well, we didn't know how to diagnose it then.

Yeah, that's what you hear, too, like celiac disease or gluten intolerance. You hear like, that's on the rise. And some people will say it's because we make wheat more differently. And then other people will say, oh, no, no, no, wheat's the same. We just diagnose stuff now more prevalently because we didn't have a name for it back in the day.

Right. And there may be a very small component, But I can tell you that if somebody comes to your office and says, hey, doc, you see this rash that's oozing on my arms? And you say, oh, that looks like you have eczema, that does not take a rocket scientist. Nor does somebody who says, hear this wheezing, I can't breathe every four weeks. It's not because of under diagnosis. In fact, if anything, doctors then were savvier about diagnosis based on exams and history than they are now when they rely on tests. I actually reject the idea that we just didn't know how to noticed that somebody was autistic back in 1930, it's not that hard to say. There's something really wrong here.

Okay.

All right, so we go from that to a situation where I recently heard a statistic that 40% of the children in Detroit public schools carry an inhaler to school. Now, Detroit is, you know, kind of a desperate situation. Maybe that's the worst. But there has been extensive documentation that Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, asthma, eczema, certainly autism, learning problems, peanut allergies, food allergies, sleep disorders, you name it. It's an astronomical rise in the last 50 years. Yep. So, I mean, anybody who doesn't know that is actually just simply not paying attention to the. To the studies and the facts.

So, of course, I don't think anybody's going to deny that. That, like, kids get sick more nowadays. And we've even talked before on the show, Dr. Cowan, about stuff like, you know, the hygiene hypothesis, right. By how, like, doing bottle boiling and C sections and avoiding exposing your kids to germs and using antibacterial hand soaps have created kids who maybe don't have immune systems that are quite as strong. Like, that's. It's not a horse that we've kicked to death, but it's certainly something that I've brought up before that I think a lot of the listeners are kind of sort of aware of or familiar with.

Right. So there's a lot of those reasons, and all those reasons are absolutely valid and true. But there's a bigger reason, okay? And the bigger reason is the way you get chronic disease is the mistreatment of acute disease. And I've probably said this example on your site before, but the clearest example I can give is if somebody gets a splinter in their finger and they don't take it out, they get pus. Now, in medical school, which I went to, I'm trained as a conventional doctor, we learned that pus means infection, means bad, means kill it. So that person, you would presumably give them an antibiotic to get rid of the pus. The problem is the splinter would stay in there, and they would then go through this cycle of antibiotic, get rid of the pus, the pus would come back, you get rid of it, etc, etc, until you end up with a chronic situation of a scarred, nasty finger. Now, some people would say, well, that's a stupid example because everybody in their right mind would let the pus get the splinter out. Right? But this thing happens, you know, in doctors offices. Hundreds of thousands of times in variations of that. Like persons put smoke in their lungs. That's like putting splinters in your lungs and then you get a cough. And the role of the cough is to clear out the debris from your period. And if your doctor doesn't know that because he either hasn't thought of it or has been somehow convinced that that's not how it works, then he will get rid of your cough and leave you with splinters in your lungs. Right. And that will set you up to keep doing this over and over again because you now have essentially an iatrogenic meaning, doctor caused disease, which is the failure to allow you to get rid of the things that are irritating your body. Okay, go ahead.

So what you're saying in that case is that the doctor should allow that cough to continue to progress in the same way that you'd want like let's say like a fever to continue to progress in a child, to help to clean them out and then go after whatever underlying cause is causing the cough. Say in this case like the smoking or in the case of a child, you know, getting the fever too much. I don't know what that would be. Maybe I'll let you speak to that. But ultimately you're, you're, you're basically more or less just saying like, go after the source of the issue rather than the symptom.

Right. Because the, the job of the doctor traditionally and all natural medicines, and in fact all medicines until current western conventional medicine have seen the role of the doctor as essentially squiring or helping children and people, you know, overcome their acute disease by helping them use, you know, whatever herbs or compresses or teas or warm baths or whatever to help their fever and their cough do the job that it's meant to do. Okay? That's what the job of a doctor is. That's what the art of doing medicine is. That's what doctors should be doing. But instead of that, they suppress the illness. Now I had a very good example of this which relates to the whole etiology of why we have so much asthma. When I was in medical school. So we had a clinic, we had about a 10 year old boy who was on inhaled steroids, oral steroids, bronchodilators, all the time. So then one day he comes into the hospital with 104 fever and actually on X ray had a white out of one part of his lung. So he had a full blown pneumonia. And I went to examine him because he was supposedly my patient. And for the first time he wasn't wheezing. I already knew about this because I knew about natural medicine before I went to medical school. But I asked the head pediatrician, why is it that having bacterial pneumonia seems to have cured him of asthma? He said, a, I don't know, but there are reports in the literature that having pneumonia cures people of asthma. So what did we do? We cured him of the pneumonia and gave him back his asthma medicine. Now, I fully understand that it's possible that the pneumonia could have killed him and that would have been a horrible outcome. And so the second part, the first job of a doctor is to assess the child because this is really all of childhood illness. This is why children get sick. So this quote that you said, that I said, which I'm sure I did, imbalanced children don't get sick. Let me change that a little bit. They encounter things and they burn them out quickly, usually within a day, and then they're left better than they were when they started. That's how healthy children get sick. But what we have created is a situation where every time that cleaning out process, that clearing out process, that process that strengthens our immune system happens, the doctors give them Tylenol, which suppresses the fever and which has been shown to increase the incidence of chronic disease.

Yeah, well, Tylenol causes liver failure, right?

Tylenol causes liver failure.

At least it's toxic to the liver. I'm aware of that now, however, though, don't you need to shut down a fever? I mean, don't you get to a certain point where the human body isn't supposed to be, like, hot for that period of time because it can lead to things like dehydration and some cellular death. Don't you have to control the fever somehow?

Well, the answer to that is mostly no. There is no evidence that fevers in and of themselves do any harm. But that's the second job of a doctor, is to know when this has gotten to be too much and then to stop it by any way necessary.

Now, what do you mean fevers don't do any. I mean, can a fever dehydrate you? I mean, wouldn't our. I mean, looking at this from like an ancestral standpoint, right, Wouldn't our ancestors have given somebody who had fever, like water and bone broth and salts and electrolytes and things of that nature?

Yeah, right, exactly. That's part of what doctors and parents should be doing when fever is to prevent dehydration, help them expectorate whatever it is that needs to be expectorated to support them through the process. Exactly. So that they don't get dehydrated, so they don't have excessive cellular damage. But my point is, if you do that properly, the risk of that event turning bad, I mean, in 35 years, I've basically never seen it turn bad.

Yeah. Okay, now what you're saying makes sense. And I actually do want to dive into some of the nitty gritty tactics that you outlined in this chapter for, you know, you give a lot of really great natural ways to do things like treat colds and fever and congestion, some of the favorite things that you like to use with kids. But like, when I hung out with you at the Wesley Price conference down in Georgia this year, you had your granddaughter there in your lap. What was her name again?

Amia.

Amia. Yes. You had Amia there.

Yeah.

And let's say that, you know, you talk about a balance versus an imbalanced kid and how an imbalanced kid is going to be a lot more susceptible to either these sicknesses taking a very long time to run their course, or, you know, taking over a kid in the first place. Now, can you go into what a balanced kid would look like? I mean, when you're talking about ensuring that a child does not have an imbalance, you know, in the case of someone like Amia, like, what advice would you be giving to, like, your son and his wife, you know, as far as, like, how they could help Amia become more balanced? Or for anybody else listening in, how do you actually create a balanced child? And the reason I ask this is because I think it's kind of relevant to something you and I talked about when we talked about vegetables, Right? This whole, like, concept of the threefold man, and how you kind of. You kind of equate a person to a vegetable, and then you take care of that person's, you know, vegetable, like, shape accordingly. Can you kind of like. Like bring that together and talk about how you would actually do that with a child?

Yeah. So, I mean, it's. It's pretty simple. So if we. If we get this point that what acute disease, which is what people worry about and have to deal with with their children, in other words, their children get sick. So the question is, how do you keep a child from getting sick? I mean, and the big picture is don't put splinters in there, which means don't put toxic stuff, don't expose them to toxic stuff that they're going to need to use. The only mechanism we have to get it out, which is Being sick. See, the sickness is the therapy. That's my point. So for instance, if you inject them with aluminum, they will have to flush that out somehow. So they flush it out by what we call being sick. So in other words, if you don't want them to be sick, don't inject them with aluminum, then they won't have aluminum to flush out and they won't be sick.

By the way, when you're saying don't inject them with aluminum, you're talking about vaccinations.

Yeah.

Okay.

For instance, or don't feed them, you know, food that's not really food, that's, you know, in, that's what some people call non food edible stuff. Because that also always creates a certain toxicity in this, in their bodies, which children being good at this, they will try to, to eliminate that. And the elimination process, that which we call being sick, is their body's cell mediated reaction, which is a fundamentally an elimination detoxification reaction. Okay, so that's the strategy for not having sick children.

Now when you're talking about not introducing toxins into a kid, that makes sense. But I mean, like, you know, like this kid that you mentioned that you like would have made fun of back in the day who had asthma, are you saying that that kid was like eating lunchables and getting injected with aluminum? That's why they got sick. And that's the only reason that kids would be getting sick these days. Because it seems like, I mean, even before the advent of, you know, fake processed foods and vaccinations, kids were getting sick, weren't they?

Kids get sick and by and large, that sick process is basically their method of exercising their cell mediated immune system. And so, for instance, we know that if, for instance, the sick we're talking about is measles, so you're going along and you're a perfectly fine, healthy child, and then you contact this measles virus and then you're quote, sick. Now let's define sick. Fever, cough, rash, headaches, don't feel well for two weeks, all the things that are measles. We know that that growth process, which is measles, confers a certain lifelong immunity. And for instance, we know now through studies that children who go through that kind of sickness have less heart disease, have less autoimmune disease, have less neurological problems, have less learning problems, have less leukemia than children who don't go through that process in a sense. So children do get sick. That's how they exercise and end up having a robust immune system. It's sort of like with you, if you had decided you were never going to run and then all of a sudden run in this race in San Francisco, that wouldn't work. So being the intelligent, brilliant guy that.

You are, it work. It just suck.

Right? You train a little bit, you exercise your muscles so that they can do that. That's what being sick for a child is. And they got sick, you know, once or twice a year with very characteristic illnesses that in a sense left them more robust than they were before they got the sickness. So I even in some ways hesitate. I mean, of course they're sick and it's inconvenient. And I don't even want to belittle the fact that in an extremely rare case, that process could go wrong and something very bad could happen. But that's the job of a doctor to essentially usher the child or anybody through that acute phase. So, like this word that's common in our language, the child is better when they're done. They're actually better off than when they started.

Okay, got it.

It's like you're better off if you.

Train what you're saying makes sense. And before I ask you about some of those practical ways that we can manage some of these things to help a kid get better, one of the last things I wanted to ask you about, like a term that you throw around in this part about why kids are getting sick more and how we should be treating kids, is this medical term called sclerosis. I haven't seen that mentioned too much in books. But why do you bring up sclerosis? And what is that? How's it relevant to this discussion?

Sclerosis means essentially tissues getting harder. And that's one of the hallmarks of any chronic disease. So for instance, if you do a pathology study of the lungs of an asthmatic person, you'll find that it becomes, it has all these crystals called Charcot les Dan crystals and Kirschman spirals. So the tissue is becoming hard and stiff and brittle. And so what does the body do? Just like this child I talked about, the body dissolves it with warmth and pus. That's the only strategy there is. And Ben, I cannot emphasize that enough. That's the only strategy a body has access to. My tissues are becoming hard, stiff, crystalline and dysfunctional. So think about cancers, think about hardening of the arteries, think about plaque development in your brain. And the only recourse the body has is by activating the cell mediated inflammatory response. That's why we have so much inflammation in this country. But the inflammation is the therapy. Now the reason we have chronic inflammation is because we have so much of this sclerosis that people are relegated, so to speak, to spending the rest of their life trying to dissolve it. Got it successfully. Because they take anti inflammatories. It's like trying to burn a bunch of wet logs.

Yeah, I think that's why a lot of people feel so good when they start to just. And I know this sounds like a dumb solution, but just like drink really good water and really good water. I mean like clean, clear, structured water or water that has like minerals added to it or, you know, there's a lot of people now like making glass bottled water and setting it out in the sun so it gets charged with infrared light. I mean, something as simple as water. When you talk about so many diseases being related to sclerotic hardening, dehydrating type of processes, I mean, I, I've, I've run into people who have literally changed things like fibromyalgia and calcification and chronic fatigue just by switching up the type of water that they drink or just drinking more water. Which sounds dumb, but it actually works in many situations.

Right. And my point here is once you get the big picture, there's literally thousands of different strategies that you can use to accomplish this. You can drink good water, you can take cold showers, you can exercise and sweat, you can eat warming foods like ginger and turmeric, you can have hot soup broth. So the answer to your earlier question, what do you do to have healthy children? Is you do all those things. You get exposed to lots of soil microbes by playing in the dirt. All these things then come naturally. Once you get the big picture, which is I'm using warmth and heat and microbes to create a cell mediated reaction which keeps my body from getting too hard too soon, too sclerotic, too brittle, too sick too soon. You do that, you have a healthy child.

Now this book is chock full of natural remedies. Too many for me to really go into. Obviously if people read the book, they can use it as more of like a, you know, almost like a manual for like if a kid gets a fever, here's some things for that. If a kid gets a cold, here's some things for that. Congestion, here's some things for that. But there are a few little things that you mentioned in the book that I think we should bring up. Like you were just talking about the influence inflammatory process and we were talking about fevers. You are a fan, for example, of Vitamin A. Why are you such a fan of vitamin A?

It's a good question. You know, again, I keep going back to this theme. The job of a doctor is to understand that when a child gets sick, so for instance with measles, that your job, this is not a catastrophe, this is a growth opportunity. Your job is to help the child get to the end of this in a better shape than that's your job. Right around the time that measles was the immunization which basically thwarted this whole process and therefore contributes to chronic disease, there was an interesting article which I carry in my office called Measles have We Learned Nothing Yet? And it was published in the American Academy of Pediatrics. So that's the bible of pediatricians. And that when children are given vitamin A in the form of cod liver oil, the morbidity and mortality and complication rates from natural measles basically goes to zero. In fact, there was a widespread understanding of this in the 10 years before the measles vaccine was introduced. And According to the CDC, there was less than 10 deaths per year from measles each year in the decade before the measles vaccine. So basically they had wiped out any complications. And it was because of the widespread use of, of the so called anti infective vitamin, otherwise known as vitamin A. Vitamin A is a fat soluble vitamin found only in animal fats. So things like cod liver oil and butter and lard, etc. It's not the same as beta carotene, which is two vitamin A's hooked together because children don't have the enzyme to cleave those two beta carotenes into effective vitamin A. And that's typically why children don't like to eat green vegetables because they can't utilize it. So it's better to run the green vegetables through a cow because cows like green vegetables, that is Grass. They cleave the vitamin, the beta carotene into vitamin A. And I don't know a single child who doesn't like to eat cream.

Yeah, I'm a, I'm a huge fan. You know, mymy kids for example, they don't do a lot of the cod liver oil, but I mean egg yolks, they do a lot of, we have liver just about once a week. You know, theythey do a lot of like whole yogurt. You know, obviously our chickens outside give them tons of eggs. But vitamin A, I wasn't really aware of itsof its crucial importance, especially for kids who have had fever or inflammation. But that was one interesting One that you talked about. And I know a lot of people in the Weston A. Price foundation are really into this whole idea of cod liver oil and giving the kids some form of cod liver oil. But I mean, even if you haven't hopped on that bandwagon, just this idea of egg yolks I think is a pretty sound one, especially for kids. There's so much in there, I mean, in terms of choline and things for neural health and stuff that goes above and beyond just the A.

Right. That's why I don't think we should. I personally don't focus on, well, it has to be cod liver oil or whatever. If your best source. Best meaning, you know, it's always about how the food was grown. So if your best source of food is your own chickens that you feed bugs and worms and tree collards, etc. That's your best source of vitamin A. It doesn't matter. Could be that, it could be lamb. It could be you have pigs or, you know, a farmer with, you know, pigs that snooter out in the forest and eat acorns. All that stuff is the same. Once you know the principle, you can figure this out for yourself. Which way you like what your children like, what's the most affordable, palatable. All those questions.

And you also talk about like elderberry, thyme syrup and echinacea. I'm a huge fan, by the way, of both echinacea and elderberry. Those are two things that we have in our medicine cabinet along with the other two that I have in there that I don't think you talk about in the book, but that I definitely have hanging around along with the echinacea and the elderberry are a thieves essential oil and then a wild Mediterranean oil of oregano. Like those are. Those are some of the biggies we have around for. For if our kids ever come down with something.

All that is just this. The various strategies to help detoxify, warm up and excrete.

Right.

That's various ways. The Chinese have their ways and the Native Americans had their ways, but they're all doing the same thing. The only people who aren't doing that is the conventional doctrine.

Right? Yeah, exactly. Now, speaking of conventional medicine, I want to open up a can of worms here, but I'm gonna blame you because you brought it up first, talking about aluminum and that's vaccinations. You've got a whole chapter in here on vaccinations. And where I'm coming at, by the way, on this is that because I get this question a lot from people about whether or not I vaccinated my boys, river and Terran. Well, when they were born, my wife and I took them all over the freaking planet, from Chile to Thailand to Mexico and beyond because we wanted our kids to be savvy little world travelers. And a couple years into that, I realized that everything from the constant exposure to airline and solar radiation to disruption of circadian rhythm to a child's rapidly dividing neural cells and thinner skull and all these other issues kind of dictated that perhaps having a baby who's a full time world traveler isn't the healthiest thing for that baby. And there's actually an entire article out there on the Internet called the Dark side of Hypermobility. I'll link to that in the shownotes over@bengreenfieldfitness.com childcare for people who want to delve into that article. However, because we did so much travel, my kids kind of did like the minimalist vaccination schedule, right? Like they did all the stuff that I spoke with my pediatrician about that might be prudent to do because of the amount of foreign travel that we were doing. Now since then, I've kind of looked into alternative schedules like either a very minimal spread out dosing schedule for vaccines or even the use of things that would naturally protect the body. Some of those things that we discussed, you know, fat soluble vitamins, even some of the use of things like homeopaths that you talk about in the book and some of the other ways that we might have been able to use to perhaps get by with no vaccinations at all potentially. But what is your take on vaccinations? Like with Amia, what did you do or what would you have advised being done with her and why when it comes to vaccinations?

So again, if, if I may, let me give you an overview so that people can make their own decision based on help with my input maybe. So here's what I like people to know. We have two immune systems. We have a cell mediated and we have a humoral or antibody immune system. Some people say we have one immune system, but that's clearly not the case the way it works. So for instance, let's take an illness like chickenpox. So you get a virus that you haven't encountered before. The virus infects your cells in the thousands or even millions. So you have these huge number of infected cells. Your body uses the cell mediated reaction, which means the white blood cells go in, digest those cells and Excrete them out and use the process of fever, cough and rash and a few other things to do this cell mediated cleansing process, which usually takes about 7 to 14 days. The important point of that is what we call being sick. In other words, having the chickenpox is not because of the virus, it's because of the cell mediated reaction. Now, if people say, well, how do I know that the reason, because you can stimulate a cell mediated reaction and the person will be sick. No virus or bacteria needed. On the other hand, you can inject somebody with chickenpox and even kill them. And if you suppress their cell mediated reaction, they will never be, quote, sick. So the sickness part, that which we call being sick is your cell mediated reaction, right?

Which is the only way that we have of getting rid of like toxins.

And microorganisms and everything, aluminum, viruses, infected cells, etc. Now, in order to not get chickenpox again, we also have an antibody arm which codes for an antibody to a piece of that chickenpox virus. So it will tag it and eliminate it before it gets into the cell again. Now the important point of that is the antibody reaction is silent. So you're not sick. You don't notice anything is happening. It usually takes about four to six weeks and then you will be immune for life from chickenpox. Right? Right. That's how sickness works. Now, that's how sickness worked at least until 1950 or so, because for the first time with vaccination, we decided to bypass the cell mediated immune system and just stimulate the antibody response. So we did that and we started doing it three times and now we do it 69 times before the age of 18. And so two things happen as a result of that. One is all the things that we injected, the aluminum, the formaldehyde, the thimerosal, the dead fetal cells, et cetera, those can't be eliminated because there's no cell mediated reaction. The whole point of a vaccine is to not have a cell mediated reaction and have a humoral or antibody reaction. Because if you injected somebody and you created a cell mediated reaction, the parents would say, hey, you just made my child sick. And they wouldn't do it anymore. So they're literally engineered to suppress the cell mediated and stimulate the humoral system. Now let me give you a list of the diseases which we know are characterized by a suppressed cell mediated and accelerated humoral immunity. Okay, so number one, cancer. Number two, all the autoimmune disease, Crohn's disease, asthma, eczema, autism, neurodevelopmental, issues, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, rheumatoid arthritis, on and on and on. All of them. Well, most of them we diagnose by finding accelerated antibodies in the blood. So how do you diagnose Hashimoto's? 40 million people have Hashimoto's. We look for too many antibodies in the blood. How do we diagnose rheumatoid arthritis? We look for an increased antibody in the blood. If you ask the question, how did we end up with 150 million people with too many antibodies in their blood causing an inflammatory destruction of the tissues? I mean, the answer is actually very simple. That was the whole point of the vaccine program.

Interesting. So basically when we look at like these two arms of the immune system, the cell mediated immune system, that' sthat's the one that you often see written as TH1. Right. And the other one, the humoral one, is the TH2. And what you're saying is vaccines cause a ragingly high number of antibodies. They activate the TH2, the humoral part of the immune system. They shut down that cell mediated that TH one part of the immune system. So essentially you get just like a crap ton of antibodies and sure you don't get sickness, but that cell mediated sickness is actually what you need to actually teach the body how to deal with that particular illness.

Exactly. And when people say, oh well, that's not, there's no proof of that. I would point out two things. One is there have been number of animal studies and for people who want to find that out, a guy named Neil Miller wrote a book, 400 peer reviewed studies on vaccines. And one of them is a study that's the name of the book, 400 Studies on Vaccines.

I think I'll hunt it down and link to it in the show notes.

One of them was from Kyoto University where they took dogs, I think maybe rabbits, and they just vaccinated them until they got an autoimmune disease. And they were able to say in order to get an autoimmune disease in 40%, you give this many, 60%, you have to give this many, etc. So we have absolutely direct evidence with animal studies that if you know the definition of an autoimmune disease is too many antibodies, that's how we find them. If you want to make somebody have too many antibodies, just give them a medicine so called that makes them make antibodies. I mean, so my point is when you're thinking, when you or any of your listeners are thinking about vaccination, you should be Clear that each time you vaccinate, you are pushing the child towards a suppressed cell mediated immune system and towards what we call autoimmunity every time. Now, some of them will have clinical evidence of that and some of them won't. We have about 100 million people or so who have clinical evidence of that right now. But whether you have evidence of that, that's what's happening immunologically in 100% of the cases. Again, sometimes it's manifest, sometimes it's not. That's for complex nutritional, biochemical, genetic reasons. I'm sure some people are able to detoxify better than others. And this is completely apart from the issue of injecting neurotoxins in people. So that's a whole different issue. But even if that wasn't the case, this is what's happening immunologically. So for any, the only thing I don't want is somebody to say, yeah, it's either get the disease like measles or nothing bad will happen. That is just, that's magical thinking.

Yeah. Now you, of course, you know, and we could talk for like hours about the ingredients in vaccines, some of the side effects of vaccination, some of the stuff you, you go into in the book. But obviously you can't just like not vaccinate and ensure that a child is able to deal with all these sicknesses. You actually have to be proactive and you talk about things that you should include for nutritional support for a baby or a child if you do want them to have a proper combination of that humoral immune system and that cell mediated immune system. We talked about vitamin A and stuff like egg yolks and cod liver oil. But what would be some of the other biggies that you would say would just be crucial, you know, and perhaps even more crucial if you're not gonna vaccinate your kids?

Well, you know, I'm not sure I agree that it's more crucial. If you're gonna vaccinate, you're ending, you're gonna, you're dealing with a cell mediated deficient child. So you're gonna have to do a lot of remediation there. Okay, so everybody needs this. What do they need? They need nourishing traditions diet, which is good fats, animal fats, soup, broth, good bacteria, fermented foods, yogurt, sauerkraut, kefir. I wrote a whole book, as you said, on how to eat more vegetables. So they need lots of phytonutrients, just basically nourishing traditions diet. They Also need to be out in the sun. They need to be in an emotionally healthy environment, you know, not two parents fighting and killing each other. They need to be outside as much as possible. They need to be as little schooled and more educated as possible. There's a whole lot of things like that, but it's not like it's.

What you say is insane, man. We can't get kids out in the sun and feed them egg yolks. They need lunchables in classrooms. No, I completely agree. You know, just yesterday, man, my kids got home from school and I kind of do this thing where they go to a really good private school, and then when they get home, I don't unschool them, but I kind of, I put the icing on the cake, so to speak. So while they're at school, they're learning how to use a Kindle and they're learning how to speak Spanish, and they're learning how to make little business projects with all the other kids and be good little factory workers. And then when they get home, that's when I teach them how to shoot a bow. And I teach them how to forage for wild plant foods and teach them how to, how to cook amazing meals. And yesterday, you know, they get home from school and they do what my boys do when they get home from school. They take off their shoes, they go outside barefoot out in our 10 acres, you know, you don't have to have 10 acres. You can do this in the neighborhood. But, you know, they walk around in their bare feet, they forage, they find plants, they come in, they'll make themselves things like scrambled eggs or they'll open up a can of sardines, you know, and they eat wild caught fish. And when we're out at the restaurants, they'll, they'll throw out the kids menu with the chicken fingers and the hamburgers on it. And they instead just like order things like, you know, bone marrow and, and broths and things like that off the adult menu. I mean, it's, it's not hard to teach kids how to do these kind of things, but I think so many people will hear you say something like more sunshine and cod liver oil and think, oh, that' sthat's crazy talk. You know, that's not the way kids live these days. But it really is doable. I mean, is it? I guess I'm looking for, maybe I'm just looking for some verification from you, but I mean, you've seen a lot of your patients be able to adopt this kind of Lifestyle, right?

Absolutely. And you know, it's ironic, my children unfortunately ended up going to school as well. And I'm a very hands off parenter by nature.

Yeah, see I, you know what, I actually not, not to be too contrarian here, but like I, I don't think it's unfortunate that my kids go to school or that they have things like homework or some amount of structured education because that's the frickin world that they're going to have to. Well, let me put it this way. They might grow up to be little hippies living out in the forest growing a vegetable garden with goats and chickens and I don't know, like selling horseshoes for a living or something like that. But you know, I would imagine that if they want to be a computer programmer or an astronaut or a surgeon or an airline pilot or something like that, you know, there's a certain amount of structured education that has to take place. And I was homeschooled K through 12.

I just have to interrupt.

Yeah, go ahead.

I do not agree with that. My experience, I know a lot of unschooling people is this way that you have to learn, not you, but children have to learn in the time frame that the other children like this yo yo over here, he doesn't even like it. To me is crazy children. If he wants to be an airline pilot, he will figure out how to be an airline pilot and he will tell you, dad, get me this book on how to be an airline pilot. And by the way, I don't know how to read, so I want you to teach me how to read. And he will learn to read in three weeks instead of wasting his time for years because Joey over there doesn't care about airline pilots. So he doesn't want to learn about that. And your son does. To me it's a hopelessly inefficient, makes them spend inordinate amount of time inside being bored doing stuff that they're not interested in.

I will gladly agree with you that there's a lot of inefficiencies that happen, especially in the public school system and to a certain extent in many private schools as well. I think that the pros outweigh the cons as far as a child being able to learn along with others from experts in their respective categories. And the reason that I say that is I was homeschooled K through 12 and I did pretty well. I was a really independent learner. I would find things I really liked to learn about. My parents would like buy me the books about the things that I wanted to learn about. I graduated high school when I was 15, started college when I was 16, did really well, had some of the top scores in the country. I did have an uphill battle though, when it came to social adjustment in college, when it came to being able to play well with others, when it came to being able to cooperate with groups. And many of my siblings, they just, they full on flunked out because they didn't do well with that model of just like mom and dad handing them a book and then them going off and learning on their own. I mean, if there's like a teacher at my kid's school, school who knows robotic programming of Legos inside and out and could teach that to my kids, you know, I'm, I'm a fan of outsourcing to the experts. What I'm gonna have a hard time teaching to my kids myself just because, you know, I'm, I'm off speaking and traveling and authoring and, and doing what I'm doing because we tried to homeschool for a couple of years and it was just, it was like mom was having to do a lot of the schooling and she wasn't great at schooling and I, I wound up doing a lot of it. But then that being unfair to my kids because like 10 to 14 days out of the month I'd be, I'd be gone. And so, yeah, I mean, like, there's a lot of inefficiencies at their school, but at the same time for me, I, I think the pros outweigh the cons when it comes to them being able to have that type of education. And I guess the last thing I'd throw in there is that I've hung around with a lot of kids who have gone like full on homeschooling and full on, on unschooling and they're a little bit socially awkward. Like they, you know, they, they have a poor time with like eye contact or like even like playing with my kids. And I don't know, I mean, maybe, maybe you know, they're not doing it perfectly. And of course a lot of public schools and private schools aren't doing it perfectly. But that's kind of my take on the whole education thing.

Yeah, well, you know, and everybody has to see for themselves what works for their family, that's for sure. But all I would say is that neither model actually is right because the problem is so many percentage of the children experts are sort of co opted into this school model. Whereas if they weren't and it was more of a freely chosen educational system. I think then there would be more ability to socialize and more ability to find experts outside of the school environment, which would be the most efficient way of all.

Right. More of like an apprenticeship type of model.

Yeah, I mean, there have been actual models that, you know, one of my favorite authors, a guy named Ivan Illich, actually, you know, drew up a whole way to do this and then actually showed it how it would work in Guatemala. And so there are ways. My only point is, when you ask the question of how to have healthy children, it includes things like, so children who are naturally resistant. It includes everything that has to do with the life of the child, certainly has to do with food, certainly has to do with not improperly treating them when they do get sick. Like, we know that outcome of children who take. Who have measles, who take Tylenol, is far worse than children who are allowed to let the fever run its course. Children who take vitamin A in the form of cod liver oil or something else with measles have a much better course than children who don't. And playing outside, being in the dirt, learning fun things, having a social environment, swimming, you know, all these things work to create healthy children.

Yeah.

And unfortunately, that's not the life we're providing for our children, generally speaking, this country.

You know, I do like this concept that a lot of places, you know, like Finland has this. I know, like my friend Katie Bowman, who I've had on the podcast before, she does this over in Seattle. But like this concept of nature school or wilderness school, where a lot of the kids education really is just like taking them off into the forest and they're learning, you know, geometry by making a tree house, you know, and they're learning crafts by making things out of pine cones and moss. And I think that's a cool way to learn. I just, you know, I think you have to strike a balance, too, between that and having a kid who is somewhat literate with things like, you know, technology and the Internet of things, even though, you know, some of that stuff might not be all that healthy for a child from.

They're gonna learn that no matter what you do.

Yeah, yeah. You know, and. And my kids, admittedly, like, they're really not that familiar with Google or how to find their way around my MacBook Air or even, like, how to use a Kindle all that. Well, because we, when we do use electronics, we're almost always in airplane mode, WI fi off, Bluetooth off. And they'll eventually learn that stuff. But even for that, you know, sometimes I do kind of like cringe when we, when we get on the airplane and the other kids like have their phones and can navigate through those things, you know, like, like, like it's nothing. And my kids don't really even know how to open up an app on my phone all that well. But I guarantee, I think, I think yeah, they'll figure it out. Okay, we're, we're, we kind of went down a little bit of a rabbit hole there. And of course if you want the four full meal deal on vaccinations, read, read the frickin book. But you also talk about, and I promise I would bring this up. So I'm going to. You say something like you shouldn't play with your kid. Can you explain what you mean when you say that?

Right, so, and it's interesting when you read Amazon reviews, that's the line that I've gotten the most criticism.

Oh really?

Which is why I'm glad I wrote it. So what I mean by that is, and you know, I have three children, one stepchild, three and a half grandchildren. So I have, and I've had practice, you know, with a practice with children for years, which doesn't mean I know anything, but that's been my experience. What I find works the best is see the children are full of, if you don't quote, ruin them. They're full of interest, imagination, questions and their own self initiative. In fact, that's what we want, I think anybody would agree. We want children who out of their own impulse figure out what they want to do in the world and who they want to be. So if you take an example of, okay, like a four year old or a five year old and say I am going to teach you how to do Legos because I'm adult and I, or I know about how to play baseball or I know about how to draw pictures. So I am going to teach you how to draw pictures. I'm going to play with you. So we're going to sit down with these blocks and I'm going to play blocks with you and show you how to do blocks. To me, the best reaction a child can have to that is see you later, I'm out of here. What you instead want to do is, you know, your job as a parent is number one, to keep them safe so they don't run in the street and get hit by a car. That's number one. Number two, if they have any inclination to play in sandboxes or blocks or Whatever you give them blocks and sandboxes if you can afford it. It's all that stuff. And then you get out of the way. Now, if they ask you, so, dad, how do you put this block on top of that one without any sort of particular emotion? You just show them how to do it. Well, you do it like this. And so that stimulates them to say, oh. And they will keep asking you, well, how about if you want to make a bridge? Well, how do you do that? Next thing you know, you will have a child who's very interested in the subject, knows he has a partner that he can go to if he gets stuck, and will decide on his own impulse where to take this, versus a child who's been, you know what, he's telling me what to do. I don't want to have anything to do with this.

That's interesting. You know, there's this. Are you familiar with the author, David Hawkins? Dr. David Hawkins. He wrote the book, a really good book called Letting Go, the Pathway of Surrender. I think it's basically kind of similar to Bruce Lipton's Biology of Belief, how our bodies can actually sense the emotions and the frequency frequencies of other people's bodies. Just basic quantum physics, the movement of protons, how if someone is thinking thoughts of love. We know love vibrates at a frequency of 530 some odd hertz. And other people can feel that, and their heart rates and their brain rhythms respond accordingly. He goes into that book, or in that book he goes into how when you try to force things on people, in many cases they can sense that and almost, almost kind of, kind of shy away from that. And so, perfect example of that is, like for my kids, when, when they're shooting their bows, right, If, If I go to them and I tell them, hey, you guys need to shoot your bow 10 times a day at the target at 15 yards, they're going to kind of get mopey and not really want to go shoot. But if, if, if I strap my bow on my shoulder and go out and take a few shots, big smile on my face, and then come back in and talk about how fun it was that I shot my bow and make sure that, that they've got bows, they've got something to do, and then they're able to go out and do that on their own without me telling them to, it works a lot better, basically, me just living as an example and then not telling them what to do. You know, I do the same thing with it, with, with stuff like, you know, gluten Right? I don't tell my kids not to eat gluten. I do tell them, hey, I think I'm gonna opt for the. I think I'm gonna opt for. For the toasted millet on the menu today because I really don't feel like doing the. Whatever the wheat bulgur or the, you know, or the whole wheat bread they're gonna bring to the table. So I set up an example for my kids. If they ask why, I explain to them, oh, well, it causes some issues with my brain feeling funny later on the next day. Or sometimes it can make your gut not absorb healthy vitamins and nutrients quite as well. And then I just shut up and let them make the decision. And in many cases, they'll. They'll do something like, they'll reach for the bread at the dinner table at a restaurant, and they'll take, like, a quarter piece. They'll be like, dad, I just want to taste this. I know it's. It's got gluten, everything in it, but I want to try it out and see what this bread tastes like. And I just let them do their thing.

Right?

And. And I. I agree. I. I get what you're. I get what you're saying. You know, it kind of makes a little bit more sense now. You're not saying, like, don't hang out. Don't. Don't play with your child, but you're instead saying, don't. Don't force certain activities on your kid. Let them make educated decisions for themselves and then support them in the decisions that they make.

Yeah, but even. I mean, it's a little bit more than that, because there was an example of a woman who ran a preschool thing that I really liked. And, for instance, one of the rules was nobody was allowed to help anybody climb this big tree in the middle of the yard. So, you know, people. The children all love the tree, and they hang out with the tree and they touch the tree, etc. But if you think about it, if somebody helps you climb, you know, what you really want is a child, like, looking at that tree for, like, six months, scoping it out, trying it out. They can't do it. They're not strong enough. If they're not strong enough, it's probably not safe for them as well. And after a year of doing it with nobody helping them, nobody saying, oh, come on, you can do it. You know, you don't do any of that stuff. You just do your thing. You know, you make applesauce, you climb the tree if you want you know, if that's what makes you happy, eventually they will climb it and you will have the greatest explosion of joy because they figured it out for themselves.

Yeah.

And that's how, that's how you develop people who say, what do I want to do? I'm going to figure this out for myself. I'll put in whatever perseverance I need because I don't have this guy bugging me about, you know, here's how I should do it.

Yeah, yeah, no, I like it. I like it. It's that combination of supporting your kid but not being too in their face. So there's so much more in this book. I mean, I know you co wrote it with Sally Fallon and so she, she does a lot of the stuff on like the birthing and the breathing. I mean, you guys talk about freaking like in addition to vaccination, another highly non controversial subject, circumcision, that's in there. Neurological disorders, whole bunch of recipes for babies to kids and beyond. You know, there, there are certain books that I recommend every parent read who either is expecting or has a baby or has young children. One is deep nutrition by Dr. Kate Shanahan. Another one is really any of Katie Bowman's work on like biomechanics and kids and barefoot and furniture and stuff like that. But then this one, the Nourishing Traditions book of baby and child Care. I definitely recommend that you add it to your, to your child care library. And also if you haven't listened to my other two episodes with Dr. Cowan, please do. Not only is the Heart is not a Pump, a fabulous one for cardiovascular disease, but then his how and why to eat more Vegetables book is really good. And I'm still full on the Dr. Cowan's vegetable garden vegetable powders. I use his kale vegetable powder, his nori. I use the beet, I use the horseradish. What's another one that I have upstairs? Oh, the turmeric. The turmeric's really good too. Like any of his, they're just basically like super high quality compounds that you dehydrate. Right, Dr. Cowan?

Yep. Some we grow, some we get from local farms. We just carefully dehydrate them and put them into mirin jars.

Yeah, mirin glass jars. They're protected from radiation. They're, they're really. If you haven't tried them, try them. I'll put a code. Or you could just go to his website and use code. Ben, that gets, gets you 15% off, but I'll put a discount code in the show Notes as well. I'll put a link to the Miller's review of critical vaccine studies that we talked about, some of the cod liver oil, the previous episodes that I've done with Dr. Cowan's book, a link where you can get a free copy of his book, how and why to Eat More Vegetables. A lot more. Check out this childcare book and leave any comments or questions that you have by going to BenGreenfieldFitness.com childcare Dr. Cowan, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Okay. Thank you, Ben. It's always good to talk to you.

All right, folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Dr. Thomas Cowan signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.