Dr. Joel Gator Warsh: How Functional Medicine is Transforming Children's Health | TUH #137

We have to have an extremely high bar of evidence and proof to give a newborn baby something that they don't actively need when the risk is very, very low.

We know autism rates are skyrocketing. We have the highest rates of childhood cancer in recorded history. An educated parent is a great parent. And I think moms and dads are like, what does my pediatrician say? Because obviously these entities must have my kids best interests at heart.

It's almost like vaccines are a crazier topic to talk about now than almost any topic. We have to talk about this. Our kids deserv. There's a lot of information that's just not true.

They're either vaccinate at all costs or your children will die. Or don't vaccinate at all costs or your children will die.

We need to look at the balance of the pros and the cons on everything. And that's how you make decisions. And it doesn't seem like we're doing that.

What vaccines, in my opinion, need to meet is this quantifiable risk hurdle. The risk is not zero that you won't break your ankle if you're playing in the yard.

There is no question that our children's health is a disaster. It's infuriating as a pediatrician and a dad, that we're not open to discussing everything and not coming in with our preconceived notions about things like vaccines. Because at the end of the day, we all want the same thing. We want healthy kids.

Let's just talk about raising healthy children. What are some advice that you would give to parents to raise healthy children?

The most important place to start is.

Ultimate Human. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human podcast. I'm your host, Gary Braca, human biologist, where we go down the road of everything. Anti aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today I have a very, very special guest. So parents, listen up. He is a board certified pediatrician. I love the fact that he has a functional medicine orientation. He's written books on parenting, books on vaccination, both of which are on the table right here. I would encourage you to get both of these books if you're a parent or if you're considering the vaccine controversy for your children. He is board certified pediatrician here in Los Angeles. I'm out in Los Angeles shooting some podcasts. It's a blessing to have him on the podcast today. So welcome to the podcast. Dr. Joel Larsh, thank you for having me on.

It's an honor.

Yeah. So, I mean, this has got to be the hottest topic right now. And I think what happened was the pandemic, you know, sort of split the country in half. You know, people were either pro vaccine or anti vaccine. It had a lot to do with their political orientation. There were people that thought that if you didn't get vaccinated, you were basically fumigating the rest of the population. Then there were people that thought if you got vaccinated, you were part of this massive gene experiment that the government, the World Health Organization, we're doing. And somewhere in the middle, you know, lies, lies the truth. And, and that's the one thing that I deeply appreciated about the book that you wrote. I've also been deep down the rabbit hole on vaccines. I certainly don't purport to be an expert on vaccines by any means. I'm not even a physician or license to practice medicine. You are. I'd love for you to tell my audience a little bit about your journey as a board certified pediatrician. You know, what was your impetus for writing a book on parenting and writing a book on vaccination? What was the objective?

So going back, you know, I did all the regular medical training, went to a great allopathic program, and I would consider myself fairly western at that time. Integrative medicine wasn't really even a part of the things that I thought of. I would have to credit the beginning of that journey to my now wife, who I met during residency. She was very holistic minded. And it started opening up my eyes.

She's also a physician.

She's not a physician, she's a lawyer. But she just grew up in a family that was more holistic minded.

Okay.

And so, you know, eating healthier food, being open to having discussions, I think that really just opened up my eyes to a world that I had never really thought of before. And then looking into functional medicine, going to some functional medicine courses and being like, well, like duh, like, why don't we think this way? Why don't we think about the root cause? Like obviously we should be. There's nothing controversial about that. And so I started practicing integrative medicine, started learning about it. And I'm not against western medicine at all. I just started to blend the best of both worlds together.

Right?

And really seeing how interested people were in that, that just really led me down that path. But over time, I realized that the vast majority of people coming to my office had one major concern or question, and it was around vaccines and wanting to discuss vaccines. I've never been against vaccines. I've always been pro choice and pro informed consent. And so I, I don't force anybody to do anything. I never have. And we have discussions in my office and parents continually come in crying from other places that they were kicked out or that they couldn't even have discussions about vaccines.

And so can get kids in the public school system.

Right, Exactly.

Ostracized.

So I just, I had to start learning more about it and I started doing social media stuff as well, which again, they don't teach you that stuff in medicine. And that started doing really well also. But most of the questions I was getting was around vaccines and I wanted to talk about it and I talk about in my office, but I felt really hindered from talking about it because it's so controversial and it just got me more and more angry. But I went on all sorts of podcasts and shows and I never talked about it. I said like, I will not talk about vaccines. I just can't. You know, it's going to get me in trouble.

And so you really hesitate. You really shied away from it in the beginning. I think it's politics, religion and vaccines, those are like the no fly zones. Right.

But it's almost like vaccines are a crazier topic to talk about now than most of the other things. It was censored heavier than almost any topic. I mean, you could say things that were true, and that's definitively proven now. Like Mark Zuckerberg said that like they, they were actively censoring true information because it would create hesitancy. And I saw that. And I do think that over the last few years with the pandemic, people have started to realize that not everything we're told is completely true. They want more information. And I do think we're at a place now where it's not just mainstream media. All of the other medias are bigger than mainstream media. And so if we're going to talk about vaccines or I'm going to talk about things, I don't need to go on mainstream media. That's fine.

Yeah. And I would suggest that you don't actually get.

Yeah, I don't have a problem doing it. I think we should. I think we should. I think. And that's why wrote the book in the first place now, because I believe that we have to talk about this. We have to talk about vaccines. Our kids deserve that. There's a lot of information that's just not true, that's passed out there. And when you dive into the research, which I obviously know some stuff about vaccines, and pediatrician. But you never learn about vaccine safety when you're going through med school. I looked into the research and there's a study from residency directors. So the heads of the residency programs in pediatrics, 70% of residency programs don't have vaccine safety. I never learned it. We learned about vaccines, we learned about the diseases. But you're not taught this stuff. So you talk more about the schedule.

This is given at this time.

This is given at this time.

You just accept it.

Right. And it's not. Sometimes people want to put a nefarious motive on. There's no nefarious motive. You just taught. That's what you do. So that's what you do. And you don't think about it. And until you go look at the research, you don't really know anything different. And when you do, it blows your mind.

Right.

What is actually there. And so that is why I wanted to write the book. Because I want to get out the information that I saw. And when you read the books that exist, they're very one sided.

I notice that too. You know, they're either like vaccinate at all costs or your children will die. And they don't deserve to be in the public school system or don't vaccinate at all costs or your children.

You feel like you're in different worlds. Like if you read a book from somebody who is part of the cdc, then you have a very rose colored view of vaccines. Everything's perfect. There are no bad studies, there are no problems with it. And then you read something on the other side and vaccines are the worst thing in the world and you should never take one ever in your life.

Right.

And there's nothing in between and there's nothing that has something that RFK says Right. Beside what Paul Offit says on the same topic.

Right.

And you need that to be able to make decisions. And we need to have debates and discussions about those topics and they've never happened.

Yeah. You know, I really have identified with this make America healthy again movement and what Bobby Kennedy is doing inside of the current administration. And I, I hope he gets confirmed. I think that he will. Because I think that, you know, you've got to have someone that is on the one yard line to get, you know, society from the end zone to the 50 yard line. Right. I mean it. And it's not that we're going to move. The pendulum is going to swing all the way, one way or the other. One of the things that I really like is centered around true informed consent because an educated parent is a great parent. And I think for so many decades, moms and dads in the best interest of their children are like, what does my pediatrician say? What does my primary care doctor say? What does the public school system say? Because obviously these entities must have my kids best interests at heart. And they just blindly sort of followed guidelines. And now I think we're getting back to informed choice, you know, which is informed consent, you know, I guess the legal term in the medical literature. And you know, can we give parents that do not have a depth of expertise on vaccination, both sides of the story, and say, here are the risks if you do vaccinate, here are the risks if you don't vaccinate. And here's kind of where the, the research and the literature lies. And one of the things I do appreciate about Bobby Kennedy is that I hear him talk over and over not just about informed consent, but about pushing vaccines to go through the same level of rigorous testing that other drugs and treatments and modalities go through. Longer term studies, larger cohorts, double blind, peer reviewed, placebo controlled, randomized clinical trials, you know, the highest level of scientific scrutiny. And would you agree that that's absent in a lot of. I'm not trying to sway your, your answer one way or another.

You can ask me anything you want. Okay, good, sway me. But I'll push you back, don't worry. Yeah, right. But if you did it against an inert placebo like saltwater, you might actually see a difference there. And maybe there is some sort of danger that you need to be concerned about.

You know, we talked about this before the podcast started. You know, I have a background in probability and statistics and modeling for, for mortality. And it's really interesting how a good statistician can, without manipulating the numbers per se, falsifying the data and outright committing fraud. But they can ask a different question and to get the outcome for the headliner that they want to grab. So, for example, you have 100 people that take a certain therapeutic intervention and one person gets helped and then they modify that intervention and now one and a half people out of 100 get helped and they go, it's 50% more effective. And so, you know, someone reads that and goes, wow, this one is 50% more effective than the other one. But it was a half a person for every hundred people, or, you know, top five people for every thousand people. You know, it's, it, it's, it's really interesting how probability and statistics and statistical modeling without outright fraudulently Fudging data can actually lead to different outcomes depending on you, how you ask this question. And I think very often from what I've seen, this is what's going on in vaccines. And I want to talk a little bit about the genesis of vaccines. Again, I am not a vaccine expert, but we used to make a lot of vaccines out of attenuated viruses where we would extract the DNA, leave the envelope, the nucleocapsid protein, which would cause this antibody response, but it wasn't capable of infecting you. To me, that seems like polio, right? I mean, to me that seems, I don't know, but a, A, a more safe way, if that's even a term, to inoculate somebody's body, because at least you're infecting them with something that can't actually cause the disease. It can't inject its DNA and take over that cellular, that cell's metabolic functions.

So, so that is true. And that's why a lot of vaccines have moved to the inactivated, like polio, because the oral polio vaccine actually can give you polio. It happened. It doesn't happen very often. It's like one in a million or one in a few million, but it was causing more polio than polio was causing polio.

Right.

So they got rid of it and they, they left just the inactivated polio. The problem with the inactivated vaccines over a live vaccine is they just don't work as well. They're not as effect as effective. So you have to wait.

They don't solicit as, as they don't.

Solicit as a robust.

A response.

Like the measles vaccine is a very good vaccine because it's a live. The live vaccines, they tend to give you a more robust response over your lifetime. The oral polio vaccine tends to work better. It's more efficacious than is the inactivated polio vaccine. So that's the trade off that you get for those two vaccines. So it's a give and a take. But that's what we need to do. We need to look at the balance of the pros and the cons on everything. That's how you make decisions. And it doesn't seem like we're doing that right.

So I want to walk through some of the, the more controversial vaccines and some of the more controversial vaccine methods, because I think this is where there's, there's a lot of headlines that are being grabbed right now, meaning hepatitis B vaccine being probably the one that's most common that I see. In the headlines right now because this is a, you know, a virus that is transmitted by sexual activity, by intravenous drug use, and yet it's given with in a very short time frame after birth. And the mothers are tested for hep B. So we know that the mother either is hep B positive or hep B negative. So we know whether or not the fetus has been exposed. But after birth, I mean, the chances of a child, you know, engaging in sexual activity or intravenous drug use are pretty much zero.

So unless they have a wild baby party, which is.

Yeah, baby parties can get out of.

Hand, something else, apparently.

I was going to make a really bad joke, but I won't do that. But the, you know, so baby is born. Their little immune system has barely entered this world. I mean, they're. They're adjusting to this entirely new environment. I mean, they're breathing for the first time, they're nursing for the first time, they're out of the womb. And then immediately we hit them with a hepatitis B vaccine for sexually transmitted or intravenous drug use vaccine that the.

Chance, a response like the measles vaccine is a very good vaccine because it's a live. The live vaccines, they tend to give you a more robust response over your lifetime. The oral polio vaccine tends to work better. It's more efficacious than is the inactivated polio vaccine. So that's the trade off that you get for those two vaccines. So it's a give and a take, but that's what we need to do. We need to look at the balance of the pros and the cons on everything. And that's how you make decisions. And it doesn't seem like we're doing that right.

So I want to walk through some of the. The more controversial vaccines and some of the more controversial vaccine methods because I think this is where there's a lot of headlines that are being grabbed right now in hepatitis B vaccine being probably the one that's most common that I see in the headlines right now, because this is a, you know, a virus that is transmitted by sexual activity by intravenous drug use, and yet it's given with, in a very short time frame after birth, and the mothers are tested for hep B. So we know that the mother either is hep B positive or hep B negative. So we know whether or not the fetus has been exposed. But after birth, I mean, the chances of a child, you know, engaging in sexual activity or intravenous drug use are pretty much zero.

So Unless they have a wild baby party, which is.

Yeah, baby parties can get out of hand sometimes, apparently. I was going to make a really bad joke, but I won't do that. But the, you know, so baby is born. Their little immune system has barely entered this world. I mean, they're, they're adjusting to this entirely new environment. I mean, they're breathing for the first time, they're nursing for the first time, they're out of the womb. And then immediately we hit them with a hepatitis B vaccine for sexually transmitted or intravenous drug use vaccine that the chances of them contracting are zero. And I want to start there because, you know, that level of controversy seems to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom of this vaccine schedule. And it's, it's unnecessarily, in my opinion, activating their immune system at such an early stage when it's really just trying to figure out its way in the world. What's your, specifically to the hepatitis B vaccine? What, what are your thoughts on that vaccine and the timing of it?

So it's a great question. It's the most controversial vaccine, I would say, in terms of the timing in my office, in the questions that I get. It's the most skipped vaccine, I would say, for individuals, probably any of all the vaccines, because of the things that you mentioned. So I would say the one thing you said that's incorrect is there isn't zero risk. It's just very, very, very low risk. Right, right. It's not zero risk because the reason, if you go back and you look at why they changed hepatitis B to give it to babies. So originally it was just given to high risk groups. So those that were sexually active, those that were older, those that were promiscuous, those kinds of things. And then they decided at whatever point that that wasn't good enough. There were still kids getting hepatitis B, and so they wanted more universal vaccination, so they gave it to them at birth. Because you technically can get it from some who has hepatitis B. If they bleed on you, if you're not aware. So the, the risk to a newborn is basically zero if you don't have hepatitis B, if nobody in your house has hepatitis B, if you don't go around anybody with hepatitis B and you don't get bled on or something like that, the risk is infinitely low. But you can have hepatitis B and not know it. So that's the theoretical concern. Nowadays we test realistically.

What's really interesting is, is, I mean, there's a, there's a quantifiable risk to just about everything. Right. There's a risk every time that you get in a car to drive your kid to school that you, you could get in a motor vehicle accident. And if you look at motor vehicle accident deaths for prepubescent children, you know, that are traveling to and from school or even on public transportation, there is a risk that you'll be involved in a motor vehicle accident. We can't stop taking kids to school.

Correct.

I think what, what vaccines, in my opinion need to meet is this quantifiable risk hurdle. Like, okay, yes, the risk is not absolutely zero, but the risk is not zero that you won't break your ankle if you're playing in the yard.

Right. And that's the key factor there, right. That, that's the key question that has to be asked and has to be discussed and has to be debated because there isn't any question that the amount of hepatitis B, the rates have gone down because of universal vaccination. There are fewer people that have it, there are few people to pass it on. We don't see babies that get anymore because kids get hepatitis B if they decide to do it. But the question is, at what cost? At what cost? And mainstream medicine media says, oh, there's no cost. Vaccines are perfect. They barely cause any issues. We have a few things that are kind of listed, maybe it happens once in a million, but other than that, you're totally fine. And that just can't be totally true. We have to research things in a way to figure out what the actual long term effects are. And of course there has to be some effect to some babies. If you're giving a newborn baby something that changes up their immune system in some way and how that affects you long term, it's, it's impossible to know because we don't study that, we don't study things in that way. If you look at the original hepatitis B vaccine studies, they studied them for safety for just a couple of days, like four or five days was the active studying. And so you can't really know all that much from that. There certainly have been follow up studies that have looked at these things. But how do you know what hepatitis B vaccine does to you 20 years later?

Right?

Like we just don't know. So I'm not saying that it isn't safe.

Right?

We just don't know. And we have to have a extremely high bar of evidence and proof to give a newborn baby something that they don't actively need when the risk, in my opinion, is very, very Very low. Not zero, but very, very, very low. So to balance out that very low risk, you have to have a really high bar of safety. And when people talk about safety testing, that's what they're talking about is do we have that robust level of data to confidently say that we feel like the benefits outweigh the risks and that's what we need so people can make an informed choice. Right. It doesn't mean you shouldn't take it. It just means that you should be able to know the risks and the benefits so you can decide if, if it's right for you. Because you might want to protect your.

Baby from hepatitis B. Yeah, well, I mean, I guess you would want to protect them if you were in a high risk environment. I guess the million dollar question as a board certified pediatrician, the author of this book on vaccines, is, did your child get the hepatitis B vaccine?

So I don't ever talk about my own kids. I say in my office, in my office people do all sorts of things. That's the most what I let them, you know, one day, if they want to talk about it, they can talk about whatever they did or didn't do. But in my office, people do everything, meaning vaccinate some, vaccinate some, don't. I would say the vast majority, it choose not to do that one because they've been tested and they decide to do it later if they're going to do vaccines.

Okay. And then, you know, there's a, there's another controversy around the use of some of these metals because, especially aluminum, because aluminum does solicit an inflammatory response which in, in the case of a vaccine would heighten the immune systems response to that antigen. And again, correct me if I'm saying something strong, but the portion of the aluminum that has not really been studied are, does it actually heighten or solicit the inflammatory and allergenic response to other things like pollen, hay fever, ragweed, eggs, you know, then peanuts. And there, there seems to be some correlated studies, not causal studies that would indicate that, you know, when we were using these metals in vaccines to elicit this heightened immune response that in the presence of other antigens that we weren't really trying to inoculate the child against like peanuts and other things that, you know, if they happen to have ingested peanuts, you know, at the time where they were, were getting this vaccine, now all of a sudden they have this peanut allergy or they have an allergy to something else because the immune system flared up because of the, you know, the, the Aluminum carrier that was designed to really heighten the response to that, that vaccine and sort of crossed over into other areas of now very, what turn out to be very severe allergies. I mean, you look at the, the number of peanut allergies now in young kids. I mean, my, my father's 82 years old, and I, I asked him the other day, Captain John Breck, I was like, how many kids did you know growing up that had peanut allergies? He's like, nobody. He didn't, he actually didn't know anybody that had autism either, which is another whole hot topic. But, you know, and I didn't either as a child. Now my 16 year old knows 10 people with autism. And so there's no doubt that there's skyrocketing rates of autism. The question is why? But I want to get back to the aluminum.

So three big questions here.

Yeah, I'm piling all these. It's coming.

These are all their own chapters. We'll do each one. We'll do all three because they're all super interesting.

Okay, so, so can we just, you know, touch on some of these carrier mechanisms that we're using? We use an attenuated virus, which I think seems to be the safest route to me. But. And then we also purposely put other compounds in these vaccines so that we heighten the immune system's response. And now it seems to carry over into other reactions.

So. Okay, so let's do. So number one, one of the big reasons why we need to talk about this is all the stuff that you just mentioned with chronic disease. Because, yes, it is very true that basically every chronic disease is increasing in kids. Like 50% of kids or so have a chronic disease. Asthma rates have doubled or tripled. Allergy rates, double or tripled. Autism rates have gone through the roof. It was 1 in 150 in 20 in 2000, and now it's 1 in 36. 1 in 22 in California. So, like, those numbers have skyrocketed.

1 in 22.

1 in 22.

We're in California.

Yeah. Wow. Let's leave autism. We'll come back to it.

Wow.

People always want to talk about autism. So we'll, we'll do it. But yeah, let's start with aluminum. So that would be, I would say, the hottest topic in terms of the ingredients in vaccines right now. The issue. So aluminum, like you said, it's used to help stimulate the immune response. That's why it's there. If you don't stimulate the immune response for some of These vaccines, it doesn't give you as robust an immune response. So it doesn't work that well. So that's why they have it in there. The research from mainstream is that it doesn't cause any negative side effects. They've done panels and groups and all the research, you know, overall shows that. So that that's kind of the mainstream opinion on aluminum. My concern with it.

Love to see the conflicts of interest on this panel.

Yeah, there, there are plenty.

That's another topic you can. Okay.

There's conflicts of interest in everything because the people that do a lot of the research are like the head of the CDC vaccine safety. And if they find vaccine problems, they're probably not keeping their job very long. So there is inherent conflicts, not that they shouldn't do research, but that, that's the inherent conflict there. But if you look at the other metals, so start with lead. Right. Lead was never in vaccines, but lead was totally fine for a long time. Right. And then we started to learn more and know more and you drop the amount that was okay. And now we say no lead is safe. Then you had mercury in vaccines, so you had thimerosal, that was one of the active ingredients. Still never technically proven to cause an issue, but they pulled it out of vaccines anyways out of precaution because of all the controversy around 2000 around it. And so they pulled it out. So it was. So we have other medicines.

They pulled it out after they inoculated millions of kids.

Oh yeah, it was. In fact, it's still in some vaccines, not, not the main ones. It's in the multi dose, multi dose flu because it is a really good preservative. So it helps kill the bacteria in the fungi. So that's why it's in there. It was never proven air quotes to be a problem, but they took it out in an abundance of caution because the concern was that you were getting more mercury in vaccines than was stated to be safe to get mercury from food. So they decided that in an abundance of caution they would take it out is what they say. So that happened. So now you have aluminum. That's the other thing that's in there. And they say that it's safe. But I guess the question is going to be over the next 10, 20 years, as we get more and more research and data, are we going to decide that it's not very safe? And you cannot possibly say that aluminum is totally safe because we have safety regulations on everything else. You have how much aluminum you can have in the air when you're working. You have safety data from the EPA and water, you can have 0.2, you know, 0.2 milligrams in, in water, in a liter, but you can have that much aluminum in a vaccine. So then they say, well, you know, you're drinking water all the time versus a vaccine. You're just getting every now and again. So once in a while is okay. And, oh, by the way, we have lots of aluminum in our food and you have aluminum in medications, and that's much, much higher dose. So the amount of aluminum you're getting from vaccines overall is still really, really, really low. So therefore, you know, we don't need to worry about it. And that's the rationale they have. And it's true, it is much lower than you get in general, but it's not injecting it into you. It's a little bit of a different mechanism. Hey, guys.

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Well, I would argue that.

I would argue that, you know, a lot of times, you know, we say the dosage determines the poison. And I don't know that that's necessarily true a lot of times because very often it's the cumulative dosage that determines the poison. You know, the, you know, nobody got mercury poisoning from eating one piece of tuna fish. They got mercury poisoning because mercury is extraordinarily slow to.