The Science of Healing: Mitochondria, Oxygen and Real Recovery with EWOT

Welcome to the Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast. I'm Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow. The website, this show, and our newsletter all focus on making the science of advanced nutrition and greater overall health accessible to everyone. Buckle up for our latest episode to get ideas, tools, and practical knowledge you can use to improve your health and move towards your perfect version of ultimate wellness. The Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast shares interviews with nutrition experts, health researchers, and everyday people that have changed their lifestyle and nutrition to support greater health. You'll learn how to implement lasting change and create new habits that support greater wellness and a happier, healthier life. Please visit healnourishgrowpodcast.com for full show notes and links to our guests.

Hey everyone, I'm Cheryl McColgan, and today I am joined by Brad Pitzley, and we are going to talk about some of his health history. He has a really interesting background with some challenging diseases and scenarios that he went through. And, you know, like many of the guests on the Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast, he just has a health journey that he wants to share with people and kind of what ended up actually helping him, because so often people go down these roads with different conditions, and they just have a lot of trouble finding out, number one, what it is, number two, if there's anything that can help them feel better or how to treat it. And so I think Brad's going to have a lot of really interesting things to share with us today. So Brad, if you could just maybe start by, um, I don't know how far in the Wayback Machine you want to go, but kind of just, you know, give us a little bit about your health journey. And as we go along, I'm sure I'll have some kind of questions to fill in for everyone.

Yeah, um, I had weird health things going on since grade school. I was diagnosed with psoriasis, but then I had other weird things that just kind of came and went. We'd go to the doctor, they'd give it a label. It would last for a while. There was no, no treatment for said label, and then it would kind of just disappear. And then I'd move on with life. And then a year or 6 months or whatever, something else might pop up. But it really kind of started to come to a head Probably around 2010 or '11, I started to develop autoimmune arthritis, what was considered psoriatic arthritis, which is— it's basically like rheumatoid arthritis, but it's what you get with psoriasis. And they started to test all sorts of different drugs on me. The first sets didn't work. Then they put me on some immune suppressive drugs. They gave me relief for like maybe 6 months and they'd start wearing off and they would double the dose. And I was kind of worse off when it wore off and then it would kind of bring me up a little bit. And then it's kind of like I was taking a stair step into, you know, into a worse and worse place. And I was on those drugs for probably about 2 years and then I developed melanoma. And that's one of the side effects of the drugs is it's got a higher risk of cancer and specifically melanoma. So that was kind of a jumping off point for me. During that period, I also started to develop weird other symptoms. Like I started to get stiffness in the back of my legs. I had tremendous brain fog and energy issues. I had pain in my feet. And I would take this back to the rheumatologist and I'd be like, this is, is this part of the, this disease, I assume? And he was like, no, that's not part of the disease. And I was kind of shocked. I'm like, well, It feels like part of the disease. It's kind of, you know, it's just another symptom of whatever's going on with me. But he didn't really acknowledge that. And then when I got cancer, I went back to him and I was like, hey, you know, I'm really afraid. I'm like, if I keep taking these drugs, more risk of cancer. I don't take these drugs, I, you know, I die crumpled up in a ball in the corner, so to speak. And he was kind of like, no, I don't think that's gonna happen yet. I think we're just gonna try another drug in the, the same category. And that was like, I just started having alarm bells in my head just started shouting at me. I was like, either path feels like it's very bad. And I was a— I had young children at the time. I was a, you know, relatively new father. And that was even more scary. I was kind of the single income in the household. And I just started like, I'm like, what happens if these things happen to me, to not just me, but my family? And that's kind of when I started jumping off and like doing my own research and trying to figure out what I call the third path forward, because Neither of those really made sense to me.

No, those both sound like not very good options. And I'm just kind of curious when you were, you know, going back to the doctor with these things, kind of two questions here actually. One, and I think I already know the answer, but one, were drugs the only answer that this doctor was able to give to you? And secondly, I think having the cancer being a known side effect of the drug is really interesting. Did they ever talk about like what the mechanism there is or anything to know about that? For people with curiosity?

Yeah. Um, so yeah, mostly it was drugs. He did also offer me injections of steroids, um, into some of my joints. He was very skilled at it because he said it was going to be very painful. It wasn't that painful, but steroids turn off your immune system. And it's the same thing with some of the drugs I was on. One of them was a— I won't call brand name, but it was a TNF inhibitor. TNF is stands for tumor necrosis factor, and it's basically a component of our immune system. And so there was some research done and they found that if they turned off that component of your immune system, hey, the pain and symptoms go away. Unfortunately, as the name alludes to, it kills tumors. And when you turn it— we all have cancer in our body, like right now as we speak, everyone has it. It's just our immune system is able to kill it off, and so it never really gains a foothold. But once you start tipping the balance of the scales, obviously, you know, it can run amok. And that's what happened in my case.

Yeah, very interesting.

And also it just brings up so many other questions that I'll have to go down a rabbit hole after we're done with our conversation. But so you had these things, you didn't have good relief, you were still having symptoms, then you got cancer. And I assume obviously you had to get treated for that at that point. Was that really the turning point for you to just be like, I've gotta find some other way to manage this? How did, how did things go from there?

Yeah, it was. And I'm not gonna tell you it was a fast turn for me. It took me several years. But I mean, from there, I just started reading anything I could. I read books, I was out on the internet, I was in chat groups talking to other people who had similar symptoms, Facebook groups, Googling on PubMed, looking at research. So many rabbit holes I ran down. I always joke I'm a recovering engineer. I got my undergraduate in mechanical engineering, so I'm very analytical by my nature, I suppose. Research didn't scare me. And I just was reading anything I could. I wasn't going to wait for them to find something in the research and then try to translate it 20 years later. That does me no good. And I tried everything. I did a lot of self-experimentation, everything from complete changes of diet, supplements, so many— I mean, different modalities, all sorts of weird stuff. Sometimes my family looked at me pretty good side eye when they saw some of the stuff I was doing. But, when you're really desperate and things are getting worse and worse, and particularly particularly when you also feel this responsibility and obligation to your family, you just, it's not even just about you. You're like, what do I do? I like, I'm going to disappoint all these people and life is not going to be good for them. I just told myself I'm not allowed, you know, like this is absolutely not allowed. This is not going to happen. But it kept happening for a few more years. And then I ended up at a doctor's office and he tried all sorts of things. Nothing was working. He was an MD, but he was non-insurance, so he was integrative. And he was trying all sorts of alternate modalities on me. And even the things he was sure were going to do anything, nothing was doing anything. He's doing testing on me. Nothing was popping. And then he suggested I do a Lyme disease test. I remember thinking, I'm like, "Doctor, I don't have Lyme disease." You know, I'm like, "I've never been bitten by one of these ticks. I've never had that bullseye rash thing." I'm thinking to myself, there's— I don't have that. But I was kind of like, you know what, let's— and it was expensive test at the time, it was like $500. Um, insurance didn't pay, but I was like, you know what, I'm gonna pay the $500, I'm gonna do the test so he can see it's negative and we can get him off this Lyme thing. We can get to the real deal because it's not Lyme. And sure enough, it came back that I had Lyme disease and one of its co-infections called Bartonella. Which is the infection that causes cat scratch disease as well. And I was so shocked. I went back to him. I was like, "Doc, what's the chances this is a false positive? I don't think I have it." And he was like, "Brad, it's a urine PCR, which means you have the DNA of those bacteria in your urine. What do you think is the chances it's a false positive?" I'm like, "Got it." And that's when it finally started to hit.

Well, and just for people that aren't familiar, I think everybody's kind of heard of Lyme disease at some point, maybe Bartonella, but What did that kind of mean to you at the time? Like, I'm sure once you got that diagnosis, you wanted to learn more about it. Were you thinking that that explained some of the things that you had up to this point, or how, how did that mesh into the whole symptom profile?

Lyme disease is incredibly challenging for a variety of reasons. One, it's very difficult to get under control. Um, there's a lot of folks in America and across the world, quite frankly, suffering with it. Right now. The other reason it's tough is there's not a lot of doctors willing to treat it. There's this whole stigma about it. What makes it particularly difficult is there's this question on if it actually exists in some doctors' heads. It's like the weirdest thing in the world. We know there's this infectious agent, we know it infects humans, and yet when a human comes to a doctor and says, "I've been infected by it," they're like, "Ah, are you sure?" You know? And so you kind of get— I think the term I hear often is medical gaslit in the— and on top of that, doctors for legal reasons often don't want to touch it. So my doctor didn't want to touch it. And he was like, look, you have to go to a Lyme specialist, 3 hours away. I recommend him as best I can. And it was a long waiting list to get into this doctor's office. And while I was waiting, I just— I was relentless, you know, I just couldn't sit here and let myself deal with all this. It was a 3-month wait. And so I just started reading voraciously on Lyme disease. To your point, I was reading all sorts of research. I was reading books on it, a lot of books on the, like, the science and what was happening to your body mechanically. And it was actually pretty eye-opening because when I started to read all these symptoms, I was like, I started to piece together all these pieces of the puzzle that happened to me in my childhood, things that happened more recently, things that the rheumatologist couldn't explain but now were like clear as day what was going on.. And so the, the jigsaw puzzle started to fall into place for me. Um, so it was kind of an epiphany from that perspective.

Yeah. Yeah. That's gotta be— the waiting had to be one of the hardest things, I'm sure. And then once you finally got to him, did he, because he was specialized in Lyme specifically, did he have any solutions for you or then was it somewhere that you still had to go to go down the road?

You know, the, the disappointing thing is I ended up— the whole family was diagnosed with Lyme disease, not just me, my children and so forth. So we all carted in the car down 3 hours from— I live in Dallas area— down to Austin. He had a lot of things to say to us. It was kind of stuff I'd already read. Most of it I'd already tried, you know, supplements I'd already run through myself. And like, it became cost prohibitive, both the time and the visitation, and we just didn't get anywhere. So we probably visited him 5 or 6 times. And then I was like, okay, well, this is not You know, it was each time it was kind of clear, like he, his tools were somewhat limited. And so then it was time to kind of, while I was doing his stuff, I was also just actively experimenting. I was, you know, I was a, you know, a test dummy every set, every second of it, because again, you know, you just can't wait, you know, come back in 2 months. You're like, if this thing doesn't work in a few weeks, I gotta, I'll, I'll keep doing it, but I'll add other things and see where I go.

Right. Well, I'm sure once you knew that your whole family had this issue, that probably made you want to solve it even more, not that it wasn't enough for you to solve it for yourself, but now you've got other people that in your family that you want to feel well, you know.

Absolutely, absolutely. It was definitely sat heavy on my mind. Just, I didn't want the kids to have to go down this path.

So this kind of leads us into this whole backstory into the sign that's behind your head right now, 1000 Roads, because you kind of did that many roads to get here, right? And so what, what did you come across I thought that was like one of the best business names I've ever seen, by the way, because knowing the backstory. Um, but anyway, what was it that you found in the research or what led you to kind of, there's a couple of things that did end up helping you, which is awesome. Cause I think now we're going to share this with people. Cause like you said, there's plenty of people out there with Lyme disease. There's plenty of people out there with unexplained illnesses or things that are affecting them. And, you know, there are some interesting tools that do work, worked in your case. So how did you end up finding what actually ended up working for you?

Well, I eventually started doing a lot of research, um, all sorts of things. And one thing that stuck with me was mitochondrial health. I hear more and more folks talking about it in recent years, which is great, but this is probably about, you know, a little 10, 12 years ago. It really wasn't a well-spoken about area. Um, and I start— the more I researched about mitochondrial health, the more I realized this is at the root of everything. So, for your listeners, the mitochondria are this little organelle, this little subset inside all of your cells that produce the energy. And, they're extremely fragile. And, when they get damaged or they're not working efficiently, nothing works efficiently because everything takes energy, right? Us talking takes energy, thinking takes energy, moving our muscles, our organs working, take energy, repair our immune system, all of it. And so often when you're dealing with chronic health conditions, particularly when you're dealing with an infectious agent or even cancers, they go after our mitochondria because they kind of take the power down in the system and that gives them a leg up on our immune system and our defenses and it allows them to kind of I would call it just burrow deeper into our biology and, you know, shift the biology to be more favorable towards whatever that is.

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So for me, it— that was kind of an epiphany, and I delved into a couple tools. And the first one was something called exercise with oxygen therapy, also known as EWOT. No one was really talking about it. It was kind of the small little thing, not a lot information out there. And then there was a second one which more folks have heard of today, which is red light therapy, and really red and near-infrared light therapy. And they both work through mechanisms that help the mitochondria restore its health.

Yeah, so the exercise— so I was looking at the photo on the website of the EWOT contraption, and I'm kind of having a hard time conceptualizing. I think what mo— and, and actually, before we go into that, let's let's address this other question that came up in my mind when I was looking at the contraption. Cause I'm like, okay, the thing that most people are probably somewhat familiar with nowadays is a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and that is used in cancer treatment. I think it was, um, Dr. Seyfried has this thing and you might be familiar with him just like through your mitochondrial research, but, uh, it's called like a press pulse thing that they use with cancer patients and it has to do with ketogenic diet cuz you're starving the cancer of sugar. And then also this hyperbaric oxygen therapy, that's That's all just kind of a weird aside for people that are hearing this. It really has nothing to do with this conversation, but it's interesting to look up. But for your thing, the hyperbaric works in one way, and I think people like, you can visualize it because you go in it, you kind of just lay down and that's what it is. But this thing, and when people go to the website, they'll see it, it's kind of, it looks like a big balloon or a box. So I guess I'm having trouble kind of conceptualizing how do you even use that or, and how do you exercise with that? It's a very long-winded question, but hopefully we'll get there.

Yeah, that's great. So I think it's two questions. What is it? How's how does it work sort of things. Exercise with oxygen therapy at its principle is really simple. It simply involves doing any sort of exercise, preferably something that gets your heart rate up, generally cardiovascular exercise, while wearing a mask and breathing near pure oxygen, so about 93% oxygen. So to your point about how does the, the Contraption or the EWOT system work, it works, it's like this, there's actually a device called an oxygen concentrator. That can produce an endless supply of oxygen. You plug it into the wall and you flip the switch, and it takes the oxygen in your room, which is probably at like, let's say, 21% at sea level, and it purifies it to 93% oxygen by separating out the other gases, the nitrogen and the argon, um, which is great. But these machines that you can plug into your wall, your home outlet, they produce only 5 or 10 liters of oxygen in a minute. And when you exercise, you can easily use 50 or 60 liters in a minute. So to get a 15-minute session in, you can easily use 900+ liters of oxygen. Um, and that machine's only putting out at the best 10 liters of it. And so every minute. And so what we do is we take that machine and we fill a large reservoir. It's 1,000 liters. So think of it as about 6 feet, 5.5, 6 feet squared. It looks like a big pillow and we fill that thing with oxygen. Now, to like dimensionalize this for folks, 1,000 liters of oxygen is similar to the amount of oxygen you'll breathe in an entire day. And we'll fill this, this, you know, balloon, what we call a reservoir with oxygen. And then we'll attach a hose with a mask on the end of it, put the mask on and you just breathe out of that reservoir. So, so again, in that 15 minutes, you can take in a whole day of oxygen. It's really a massive amount. Now, how does it compare to hyperbaric oxygen? That's a really good question. Hyperbaric oxygen, at its core, what you do is you get inside of a chamber, they pressurize it, and that forces more oxygen through your lung membrane and into your blood. Now, once it gets past your lung membrane and into your blood, your— what happens in hyperbaric oxygen is it goes not just into your red blood cells, because if you look at your red blood cells right now, which are the parts of your blood that are designed to carry oxygen, they're at capacity. Like, you can put a little pulse oximeter on your finger and it'll say 99% or 100% or 98%. And so there's not room for more oxygen. But what hyperbaric does— and EWOT does the same thing— is it actually forces oxygen into your blood plasma. Now, blood plasma is this clearish brown liquid. It's effectively water plus plus. That all the red and white blood cells ride on. And so it can actually turn that into an oxygen-carrying vehicle inside your blood, something that normally doesn't carry very much oxygen. And that's through a process called Henry's Law, which goes beyond human biology. It's really just a chemistry law that says you take an insoluble gas and, and force it on top of an insoluble liquid, it'll force the gas to go into solution. In this case, the gas is oxygen. And the liquid is blood plasma. Now, in hyperbaric oxygen, the body tries to get back into balance. It notices there's a surplus of oxygen in the blood, so your body tries to regulate, go back to homeostasis by using something called vasoconstriction, which means your blood vessels constrict, they get smaller to allow less of that oxygen through. So, your body is naturally fighting against delivering that oxygen in spite of that, you deliver a large dose of oxygen to the tissues. In EWOT, what we do is we kind of do the opposite. Instead of using pressure to force more oxygen into and through your lungs, we use exercise to pull it through. So when you start exercising, your body immediately recognizes that it needs more energy, and the gating factor in producing more energy is oxygen. We all in this Western world generally get enough food. It's just we're— when you're exercising, there's not enough oxygen. So when it notices this, you have all these physiological changes, right? You start breathing faster and deeper. Your lung membrane actually thins out to allow more oxygen to pass through. Your heart starts beating faster. Every beat is deeper. Your blood vessels actually dilate. They actually open up to allow larger blood flow through them. And then when you exercise naturally, actually your blood pressure goes up. And most of us think, oh no, high blood pressure is bad. But in exercise, it's actually really good. Because the more pressure inside your blood, that differential between the pressure in your circulatory system and the tissues is like a driving force that drives the oxygen out of the blood and into the tissues. So we do EWOT, we're taking advantage of all those physiological changes to allow us to take in oxygen very quickly and deliver deeply into the tissues. So in a, in a 15-minute EWOT session, you could take in as much oxygen as you would in a hyperbaric session in 90 or more minutes. It's really quite a large dose. Wow.

And then what about— so how does that affect the mitochondria? Does it just give them more energy and it kind of helps them repair quicker, or what's the connection between mitochondrial health and the EWOT?

This is actually the really fascinating part, and this is the, the thing that really got me more interested in it. Um, EWOT was founded actually in the 1960s and '70s. There was this prolific inventor named Manfred von Arden. He was a German physicist inventor. Like, he invented the scanning electron microscope. He helped commercialize television technology in the 1930s. And he got interested in oxygen in the 1960s and '70s because, um, there was a gentleman named Warburg in the 1920s who had proven that he could take any cancerous cell, any regular cell, and turn it into a cancer cell simply by depriving it of oxygen. And the reverse was true. So, Van Arden got interested in that, wanted to start experiment with oxygen, simply trying to reverse cancer. And along the way, what he discovered is something really powerful about our circulatory system, which is as we age, this thing we now refer to as inflammaging happens inside our bodies, this slow gradual increase in inflammation. And that affects every part of our body, including our circulatory system. But our circulatory system is actually kind of a weak link. At the very end of your circulatory system, is your capillaries, and they're incredibly thin. And they're actually the component where the oxygen and the nutrients gets transferred from the circulatory system to the tissues. So, you've got these really thin capillaries, thinner than a human hair, actually smaller than a red blood cell. In order for a red blood cell to get in a healthy capillary, it has to fold over like a taco to get in because it can't fit in like normal. If it's fully expanded. So, there's not a lot of room for error. And, when you start having this inflammaging, it causes blockages in the capillaries. So, when that happens, you lose circulation downstream. You have what I call a brownout. All the cells on the other side of that inflammation are no longer getting red blood cells, they're no longer getting oxygen. Luckily, our body does have a backup generator and that's called anaerobic respiration. Anaerobic respiration is when they create energy without oxygen. But the problem with it is multifold. Number one, it only can produce about 5% of the energy it can produce when it has oxygen. So immediately the cells are like powering down. They're not able to do all of their essential functions. Problem is it produces a massive amount of metabolic waste and free radicals, and those things damage our mitochondria. Because our mitochondria are incredibly fragile as we spoke about earlier and they're right at the heart of it. Wherever you're producing energy, you have free— some free radicals. But now when you shift over to anaerobic, all of a sudden you're just spitting out all sorts of damaging chemicals, if you will, and it has no energy so it has no way to actually clear it. And so it becomes— I kind of call it like a doom loop, which is it starts with dysfunction, the dysfunction causes more free radicals which causes more damage and dysfunction, And soon enough, you know, you've got these kind of almost zombie cells. They're just having a hard time doing anything. And then when you do EWOT, what's amazing is the oxygen, because it's inside the plasma, it can get through those blockages. So it immediately starts to feed those downstream cells the oxygen they've been starving. But more importantly than that immediate fix, if you will, is they cause an anti-inflammatory effect. And this was another like big aha in my healing journeys when I realized, um, there's plenty of research on this. Anywhere in your body you have inflammation, you have the hypoxia, which is the fancy medical term for oxygen starvation. So inflammation means local oxygen starvation. And anywhere you have oxygen starvation, you have inflammation. They go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other.. And so, when we restore oxygen even in the circulatory system, we can turn off that inflammaging that's happening in our capillaries, reestablish normal blood flow. So, you get done doing your EWOT sessions and van Arden discovered this. He had elderly people. He looked at their capillaries and their throughput and he had them do just a couple sessions of EWOT and they came back weeks later and their microcirculation was still reestablished to more youthful levels. So, he was able to open them back up. Where red blood cells were able to deliver oxygen. Really, at the root of it all is, you know, every chronic illness you can think of, it has inflammation, right? I mean, there's not one— Alzheimer's, cancer, autoimmunity, the list goes on and on. Name one and it has chronic inflammation. And there's actually— there's a gentleman, Arthur Guyton. He wrote the textbook Medical Physiology, and every doctor any of us has ever gone to had to use that medical physiology book. Book when they went to medical school. It's been the standard across the world for over 50 years. And he has this great quote where he says, all disease at its root is lack of oxygen. And it's really true because once the mitochondria break down and we start having inflammation, all the negative effects come from downstream from that. And so that was kind of my aha light bulb moment, which is if I can turn my mitochondria on, it and I can turn down the inflammation and eventually turn off the inflammation, then like my body will have energy to get ahead. It can start to repair itself. It can start to detoxify. The immune system then will have energy to do everything it needs to do and help, you know, kind of kick on and start to fight a good battle, so to speak.

Yeah. I mean, I want to go back to how this actually helped you and how you actually found one and all that stuff. But my brain is just going, The one thing that I keep coming to hearing your explanation, this, and I, that was an amazing explanation, by the way, for laypeople. I can tell you're an engineer. So the system where you're talking about going all the way to the capillaries, I mean, heart disease is the number one killer, right? And we have, I think a lot of it is the chronic inflammation that you're talking about. But obviously once that process is already done, you know, you're describing how the capillaries can't get any red blood cells. So to me it would make perfect sense that this might be— not only did it help you in your disease process with Lyme disease and the arthritis and everything, but it seems like it would be pretty amazing for cardiovascular patients or people that don't have good blood flow. Like, that on top of the mitochondrial benefit.

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It's actually— we are helping folks with everything from autoimmunity, cancer, Lyme, Long COVID, chronic fatigue, Parkinson's, heart disease, so many things. Because if you, if you can turn off the inflammation and you can give the body energy to heal, it will do just amazing things. That was kind of like the shocking thing to me when I first got into it. I was like, wait a second, like every time I was treating myself as a pincushion and trying something new, I always had to ask the question, like, what if this doesn't work? And like, what, what damage could I be doing? You know, because there were things that were a little bit risky, to be quite honest, where I found out risks, you know, a little bit too late for my liking. But this was one where I was like, it's oxygen. And like, so it was kind of shocking when I started looking at the benefits. And I was like, this is kind of crazy that we're talking about something as simple as oxygen. With all these health benefits. But yeah, we've had folks with all sorts of different chronic cardiovascular conditions. Now, there's a lot of health benefits to it, but the other crazy thing about oxygen is there's all these athletic performance benefits. So, and this is important because directly to your cardiovascular component, which is actually a lot of Olympic teams have used EWOT to improve their athletic performance. And because athletic teams are very science-driven, there's some really good research on it showing it improves VO2 max, reduces recovery time, improves short-term memory, it improves power output, et cetera. And all of this is really due to being able to fuel our, our cells and our muscles more and also helping clear out all that metabolic waste. Cuz that metabolic waste primarily develops when you have a shortage of oxygen when you're exercising.

Amazing that something so simple could be so hugely beneficial. So, so once you finally saw this, you're like, Warburg knew this about cancer and this guy's onto this exercise with oxygen thing. Like, well, how do you do it? Where do you get it? Like, nobody's ever seen this before. I think like you're saying the athletic teams might have it and stuff, but I mean, I've certainly never been anywhere where I've seen like, hey, get EWOT therapy here. So how did, how did you find it?

It's really, really kind of a rare thing. And 15 years ago it was incredibly rare. There really wasn't anywhere to go. You could find it occasionally. You might find it in a chiropractor's office here or there or some sort of recovery clinic. Now, you know, nowadays they're more widespread. So there are places that do it— doctors, chiropractors. But for me, there were a couple of folks selling it, but they were— I didn't have a whole lot of faith. There was no customer reviews. There was no customers talking about it on chat. It was just them as the company. And they— a lot of them spoke in superlatives and like marketing speak that didn't make me feel really comfortable. And they were very expensive, too. You know, they were maybe the cheapest was $5,000 and the most expensive one I saw was $20,000. And it was this kind of crosshatch of I didn't have confidence and geez, that's a lot of money for this next experiment when the last 26 behind me didn't do anything or 57 or whatever it was. So that's when I kind of decided, did a little bit more research and decided I was going to try to build my own.

Yeah, I was thinking that. I was like, if I was an engineer, the next thing would be like, can I just build this? So that's what you did, obviously, right? I did it out of necessity.

Necessity because I just didn't have faith. I built my own. I didn't think it was— I'll be honest, I didn't think this was going to be my solution. Nothing else was. And I started doing it. And, you know, slowly but surely, I started to walk out of that basement, that proverbial basement. I just kept taking steps up and up. At first, it was subtle. And then it was kind of all at once sort of thing where I was shocked. You know, it was like things like, oh my gosh, my brain fog's gone. I'm like focusing in a meeting or I just got down on the floor and played with the kids and I don't need to lay in bed for 2 days in pain. You know, slowly but surely, I just felt better and better. And it wasn't until I saw that same doctor again. And he was like, wow, you're like a year later. And he's like, wow, you're so much better. What did you do? And I told him and he's like, wow, would you consider selling them to my patients? And that was kind of the, you know, jumping off point where I was like, well, gosh, yeah, maybe we could help other people with this.

Yeah, that's awesome. I'm so glad, you know, it's, it's, it's always an interesting thing on podcasts because sometimes you get, I think not on this particular podcast, but other ones, it's like people that kind of are just selling stuff, you know, or snake oil things or whatever. But what I really love is when there are people that, you know, had their own health problem, they dive into the research, they try it all, they use themselves as an experiment, as a pincushion, as you said, and then they find something that actually works. And then they, they make it so that they can, you know, share it with everybody else. You don't just keep it to yourself because I'm sure it kind of felt like a miracle at the time that something finally worked for you.

You know, it really was. I mean, I was— because the hardest part is also when you're in these groups and you're talking to all these other folks and they're like, oh, try this, nothing worked, and then this worked, and you try that thing and it didn't work. You know, you'd try 57 other different things I was saying and you kind of just start losing any hope. You're like, I don't think— I think I'm just that case that there's nothing that's going to work. But yeah, when you do find it, it's, yeah, it's obviously life-changing. Even having hope and like, I always tell folks like when you're really sick, it's not about, you want to get to 100%, like 100% is amazing. It's the dream we all have when we're sick. But more important than 100% is like feeling better this week than last week or this month than last month. Because at some point when you're in it, you just lose a lot of hope and it becomes kind of this like the spiral downward that you, you just don't believe in anything and it just lowers you spiritually, I just say. And having something to know like, hey, yeah, it still kind of stinks, but like, remember a month ago it was worse. And so like, now you're like, yeah, I can't wait to see how I'm going to be 2 months from now, you know, or where am I going to be by this summer sort of thing. Like, it was, um, it's kind of the exact opposite. It's kind of like this hope spiral, if you will.

Yeah, well, it's kind of— that's something that I think it's good to point out for people too, is that You know, you mentioned there is all this research on this. There's a lot of good science to back up mitochondrial health, but that's kind of— mitochondrial health is kind of a long game, and it's kind of something that you, you know, have to continually do, not over, you know, just a few days and you're going to feel so much better. It's week after week, month after month. The more that you support your mitochondrial health, the, you know, more chance you have of really feeling better. So it's not just this thing where you can try it for a week and you're like, oh, that doesn't work. You have to keep up on it for a while, right?

Yeah, you know, you're absolutely right in general speaking. I mean, we have people come to me and they ask like, hey, how long am I going to have to do this for? What I tell them is I can't say how long, you know, until you get to the top of the mountain, so to speak. But I find that most folks who get to the top of the mountain, they feel so good when they do it, they don't ever want to stop. And some of those folks never really exercise, they hated it, but now they're like, it's like 15 minutes, I do it 3 or 5 times a week, and like, I feel like, I feel amazing, so why wouldn't I do it? And we talked about that capillary thinning, that's actually a chronic thing that happens to all of us in Western society. And so this is something that's anti-aging at that very kind of cellular level. So I recommend it for folks, but I guess for me, when I was really sick, I always say one of the hardest parts was the ceremonies, is what I call them, counting pills every night, doing this protocol, doing that protocol. You keep adding, like if there's 10 more minutes in your day, you add 10 more minutes of some protocol that you're hoping will make you feel better. And then you get to a point where you realize you're spending 6 hours of your day, you know, just all you're doing is these protocols and it just becomes overwhelming. You're like, even if I felt better, what's the purpose if all I'm doing is going from the sauna to the this and I'm doing this pill and I'm doing this? And that's kind of the, um, what I found one of the things I really loved about EWOT was, is something I could do consistently in my home 15 minutes a day. And it helps with your mitochondria, help health. It helps with detoxification. It helps with energy. So it's like, it's multiple, it's kind of multifaceted in the way it benefits you relatively short period of time.

Yeah. And you mentioned, and I want to be respectful of your time, I know we're kind of getting a little bit long here, but one of the other things when in respect to mitochondrial health is red light therapy. And there's also a ton of great research on that. And so I kind of wasn't surprised when I went, you know, to your website that that's something that you also got into because I mean, I think it's— when you look at the number and the breadth of research on that, I think it's pretty undeniable that it is good for people, that it serves a real purpose, that it does help the mitochondria. So at what point after you found the EWOT, I'm assuming you kind of got on this, oh, mitochondrial health thing, and then maybe stumbled into that stuff? Is that how it went, or is there something else?

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Yeah, um, It is. I started looking at it early on, probably about 6 months after I was doing EWOT, 4 to 6 months right in there. I'd say I started doing red light. The fast— so you're right, there's like tens of thousands of peer-reviewed research studies out there and what it does. They work really interestingly together because we mentioned EWOT. When you do it, you increase the supply of oxygen massively, right? It's a day of oxygen in 15 minutes. So you're flooding your body with oxygen.. And then, if you do red light immediately afterwards, what it does is it— the way it primarily works is it increases oxygen demand in your mitochondria. So, it forces the mitochondria to suck up more oxygen. And when they do that, they produce more energy. So, any of the research you read on red light, whether it's skin health, collagen growth, bone, mental health, brain health, excuse me, athletic recovery, performance, healing in general, it all comes from the same thing is that it's just forcing our mitochondria to suck up more oxygen and produce more energy. So if you compare those two, if you pair them at the same time, you first drive a massive increase in supply of oxygen and then you increase the mitochondrial demand for it and so you get this kind of one-two punch. The interesting thing is why I think we need it in today's society as well is we're actually deficient on red and near-infrared light. And the reason is, if you look at the sun, the sun is full spectrum. It has everything from ultraviolet and the blues through the reds and the near-infrareds. So when you go outside and it changes throughout the day, early and late in the day, you get more of those reds and near-infrareds, and at high noon you get more of the blues. Now, unfortunately, or fortunately, however you want to look at it, over time as a species, we've moved indoors and we started using indoor lighting primarily, and we spend more and more time there. And then more recently, we've switched from incandescent to LED lighting. Now, LED lighting is very energy efficient, and one of the ways they make it incredibly energy efficient is they take out all the reds and the near-infrareds that we experience as heat, because obviously you don't want your lighting to heat your room. You don't want it to— everyone sees that as energy waste. And so that to the extent you're trying to use it for lighting, it can be. However, that puts us in a place where we spend a lot of time bathed in blue lights and not really getting enough of the, the reds and the other parts of the spectrum.

Yeah, that's, that's another interesting rabbit hole for people to go down if they haven't already, is just the, you know, changing out some of the lighting your home or using specific lighting for certain scenarios, like in your bedroom and towards night as you're getting ready to go to sleep. But anyway, I just want to clarify one quick point there because I'm envisioning— that was actually what I was envisioning when you started talking about the synergy between red light and the EWOT. So, do you, like, do your EWOT with the red light panel, like, in front of you, or do you just do it right after?

I prefer to do it right after. The challenge with doing it right on you is is to get the best benefit from red light. Red light works on something called a biphasic dose response, fancy science term, which just means the benefits over time look like a bell curve. So, too little, you won't get any benefit. There's kind of like a just right where you get peak benefit. And then, if you do more, it starts diminishing in benefit. It doesn't harm, it's just a waste of time, right? So, you spent 5 more minutes to get less sort of thing. With exercising and red light is one, One, I like to get as much skin exposure as possible so you're hitting as many mitochondria as possible. And two is you're moving. So, sometimes you're close to the light, sometimes you're further away. And so, you're not really able to kind of measure that dose effectively to get inside that biphasic kind of peak zone.

Okay. No, that makes a ton of sense. Although, I still am going to put this out to you that maybe you put at least on the little face mask while you're exercising. I feel like you can attach it to the oxygen part and just put a red light around it. Maybe that's a little too— maybe that's a little too much. But anyway, well, Brad, this has been so wonderful, and I, I just appreciate you so much sharing your whole journey and then how you came to find this. If people want to connect with you online or learn more about EWOT and learn more about red light, where's the best place that they can find you and connect with you?

Yeah, go to 1000roads.com/Cheryl, and we have a great offer for your listeners they can check out. You can also—

Awesome.

Go to our YouTube channel. We put out weekly videos. One Thousand Roads HQ is our channel. It's all spelled out, O-N-E-T-H-O-U-S-A-N-D-R-O-A-D-S.com.

Okay, awesome. And all that'll be in the show notes for everyone, so don't feel like you have to write it down. But Brad, again, thank you so much for coming and sharing your knowledge today, and I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much, Cheryl.

This has been the Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast. Again, I'm Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow. You can find show notes for this episode at healnourishgrowpodcast.com. If you have feedback on today's episode or questions about the content, please email us at podcast@healnourishgrow.com. We'd love to hear from you. Be sure to sign up for our email list at healnourishgrow.com and subscribe to the show with your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. Join us next time for more information that helps you live your best and healthiest life. Thanks for listening. Content on the Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast does not constitute medical advice. Content contained in the Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast is not intended as medical diagnosis or treatment. Neither the company nor its owner, Heal, Nourish, Grow LLC, nor any of the company's employees, agents, agents or guest speakers provide medical advice. The content provided on Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please consult your medical provider with any questions about what health practices are right for you.