Why Chronic Disease Skipped Your Great Grandparents but Not You | Dr. Ben Edwards

My nurse prac had celiac disease and grabbed a breakfast burrito a drug rep had brought, started eating it right in front of me. He was totally fine.

So what did he do exactly? Because this is amazing.

We really were designed to be well. So we just learned a new way, a better way, like your ancestors did.

What if managing disease isn't the same as restoring health? Ben, welcome to the show. So you grew up watching your grandfather serve whole communities as small-time doctors. So what did they understand about healing that modern medicine has mostly forgotten?

Thank you, James, for having me on the podcast. My granddads, uh, I'll never forget one day in particular when I told them, hey, I'm gonna follow in your footsteps. I want to be a small-town country doctor like y'all. And my granddad pulled me inside and said, be sure to to keep all your psychology books from medical school because these folks are gonna use you as a counselor. And that's honestly what they need. They need someone to listen more than anything, a shoulder to cry on, encouragement, just a listening ear. And that always stuck with me. You know, they were allopathic, but allopathic medicine used to be a little different before insurance kind of took over and the pharma industry took over. So they still had that bedside manner, the relationship, obviously in a small town. You're delivering these babies, you're taking care of these kids all the way through school until they're adults having their own babies. You're a generational physician, so you get to know the families, you get to know the socioeconomic factors, the different social factors involved in family dynamics and all that. So that always stuck with me, and actually that's kind of what made me want to go to medical school, is watching these 2 guys impact the community in ways beyond medicine. Obviously, um, they were community leaders at church, civic organizations, school boards, stuff like Um, and they're just a great influence. And so that, that really spoke volumes to me. And that's why I went to med school. Honestly, I didn't think I was smart enough to get into med school. So undergrad, I tried to run away from this, uh, call to medicine. I changed my major 5 times. I just came up with every excuse in the world. Um, I don't want to get in that much debt. I don't want to be in school that much longer. I don't think I'm smart enough. Um, medicine was kind of starting to change. This was about 1998. You know, with HMOs and all that stuff. But I just couldn't find anything else that satisfied. Um, you know, I thought about all different careers and just nothing really resonated. So I went to UT Houston Medical School and graduated from there in 2002, which— it's a great institution of higher education as far as conventional medicine goes. I mean, MD Anderson is there in the medical center that I trained in. I did most of my rotations at MD Anderson and considered one of the top cancer hospitals. In the conventional world. So, you know, I thought I learned everything there was to know to help people. I went to Waco Family Practice Residency. I was chief resident there. Um, I felt pretty, like, well-equipped to go out to that small town in West Texas and be that country doctor like my granddads, and, and did that for 7 years.

What did it feel like though when you were in Garza County? Did it feel like you'd become the doctor you, you always wanted to be?

It really did. Yeah, because I got married third year med school. We had our first baby, uh, in residency, so we moved to that small town, you know, pretty newlywed, one baby, one-year-old baby. Um, and, and we just started and then had more kids. So raising a family, small town, Friday night football game, you know, going to the little church there, little grocery store. I mean, it's just a little community. You see everybody, always saying hi to everybody. Everybody knows everybody, just like that. quintessential small-town feel. I was making house calls, you know, I was taking care of the little old ladies in the nursing home. I was the doctor for the county jail, um, you know, the high school football games, all that stuff. So I really was kind of living my dream. Um, it was, it was really cool. Um, but, you know, 7 years of that, and towards the end of that 7 years, kind of the grind's setting in because just the pressure. of the system, especially in a small town. Most small towns socioeconomically a little lower, so a lot of Medicaid, Medicare as your payer. There's some private insurance, Blue Cross Blue Shield, but not much. There wasn't a lot of industry there. But anyways, so you're not getting paid a lot per visit. The way to keep the doors open and to pay your staff and to pay yourself is more visits. So 40 to 50 visits a day, it's all about volume. Um, also in that system, you get paid for procedures is what it's called. There's either an office visit, that's when you just talk to your doctor about your disease, acid reflux, diabetes, asthma, whatever. You're just talking about it and getting a prescription. That's an office visit. A procedure, you're doing something with your hands. And it can be as simple as I'm picking earwax out of your ear so you can hear better. There's actually a diagnosis code for that, a procedure code. You used your hands to do something. Well, procedure codes, cutting off a wart, burning off whatever, a skin cancer, pulling an ingrown toenail, these are minor procedures, but they're still procedures. Setting a broken bone, that's a bigger procedure. Sutures. You do enough procedures, procedures pay more. So you learn. If I do more procedures and I do a lot of office visits and volume, volume, volume, 40 to 50 visits a day, and you make it work. So I'd been doing that because they train you to do that. You have to do that. In fact, there's a journal article in the journal Medical Economics. I'll never forget it because I would read that to make it in a small town county clinic with Medicaid payer, you have to be efficient. And so I'd read that Medical Economics journal to know the business side of medicine. And one of the articles said, here's a tip to improve your efficiency is have your nurse get some duct tape and just put duct tape on the ground coming out of the office and make a little path to the next exam room. And don't get out of that duct tape line, meaning don't go chit-chat and socialize at the nurse's station or go use a bathroom. Even focus room to room to room to room. You know, it sounds crazy, but it really, that was a tip in the military.

So anyway, I've been to clinics like that. I've, I've seen diagrams on the ground telling you where to go. When was the moment that you realized this isn't enough? Because this doesn't sound sustainable.

It's not. And I mean, I was young and, you know, you're gung-ho and you're, you're motivated and you just want to go, you know, cure everybody in the world. But that system will wear you down. So I was getting worn down 5, 6 years into it. I'm like, man, this volume and no one's getting better. That was a big thing. Nobody's getting well. I'm never deprescribing. I'm only prescribing more higher doses and adding more meds because the other, you know, the previous meds just not cutting it anymore. So that was in my head of, man, this is just kind of tough. And the insurance model, you just gotta chart everything just right and fill out the bill just right or it gets rejected. So now you're dealing with all the rejected invoices and the business side. So it's heavy. I didn't know there's any other way. I'm like, this is just how it is. This is modern medicine. The United States, we're the best, blah, blah, blah, is what I thought at the time. 7 years into this, my nurse practitioner at the time who I'd hired to help me because I was so busy, He went to a bed and breakfast one weekend in Amarillo, Texas. We're in Lubbock, so Amarillo is 90 miles north. He went for a weekend getaway with his wife. My nurse prac had celiac disease, which means you can't eat gluten, and it's supposedly incurable. But anyways, he goes to the bed and breakfast, tells the lady, the innkeeper who's going to cook breakfast, hey, I got celiac. I need a gluten-free pancake. And that lady said, okay, I'll cook that for you.

She probably didn't know what gluten-free meant.

She actually did, but she said, hey, you need to talk to this doctor here. He could cure you of that.

Oh.

Which, that was crazy. I mean, you don't cure celiac. And that's what my nurse prac said. Whatever. I don't know what you're talking about. The lady kept pestering him. The doctor's office was in the bed and breakfast. And so to like get this lady off his back and to shut up, he's, let me go talk to this guy just to be polite. He spent 4 hours talking— this MD, PhD, but had turned holistic nutrition-based. That doctor, in those 4 hours, so convinced that nurse practitioner of mine that he could restore his microbiome, because now we know there's 94 different strains of good bacteria that should reside in our gut that actually break down gluten. Stomach acid levels in the human stomach— the normal pH in the human stomach is a pH of 1 to 2. Battery acid is 1.5. You can't get more acidic than the human stomach, meaning you put gluten into battery acid, it's going to dissolve, it's going to chop all those amino protein bonds down to amino acid building blocks. And it was stuff like this, this doctor was getting just real basic with physiology. Hey, you probably don't have enough stomach acid and your microbiome is shot, so you can't digest this gluten potentially. Why don't you try this? My nurse prac did what this doctor said to do, diet and lifestyle changes. And over 3 to 4 months, my nurse prac felt like his gut was healed. He didn't tell me any of this that he was doing initially, um, but I just noticed, you know, just eyeballing the guy over these 3 to 4 months, man, something's going on with Shane. He just looks healthier. Just the vibe he's given, his glow, his energy, his just vibe. And, and he's trimming up and he just Just had this— his complexion was better, everything. And then he comes to me one day and says, Doc, I gotta tell you something. I think I cured my celiac. And of course I laugh at him. What are you talking about? Is it April Fools? What's the deal? What do you mean? And he tells me the story and I'm like, there's no way. There is no way. You can't cure that. And I mean, I kind of offended him. So he marched off to the break room and grabbed a breakfast burrito a drug rep had brought. He came right back to the nurse station, started eating it right in front of me. So that's A tortilla, gluten. He was so sensitive to gluten, he wouldn't even like scrape the eggs off the tortilla and just eat the eggs because of cross-contamination. That's how sensitive he was. He ate that whole thing. At lunch, he goes to the burger joint in town and gets a hamburger, brings it back, eats it right in front of me. That afternoon, another drug rep had brought cookies and he ate it. 3 glutens in one day normally would have completely wiped him out. Bloody stool, cramps, sick, fatigue, called in sick for work. He was totally fine.

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What that nurse prac did was quit eating processed food for sure. Number one, we've got to restore the microbiome, and processed food kills the microbiome. We've got to restore the mitochondria, the energy factories of the cells of The body, but specifically in him, the cells that line the GI tract need to be super healthy, very efficient, meaning those mitochondria need to make ATP energy and they need to make very little exhaust or free radicals. Because that mitochondria is just like in your vehicle— fuel plus oxygen plus spark plug equals combustion, energy, heat, and exhaust out the tailpipe, the heat out, out of the radiator fan, and then energy to turn your wheels. It's the same in the human cell. Fuel, either fat or carb, can be burned by the mitochondria. Fuel, oxygen from what you breathe, which that's a whole nother topic. People don't breathe good anymore. The spark plug is minerals. We're all demineralized because our food, because the soil has been demineralized. We don't eat enough salt. But in the human body, that's it. Fuel, spark plug, oxygen creates combustion, but the energy is ATP. That's the energy molecule in the cell. So the cell has energy to do its job. Like the lining of the gut, that has a certain job to do. And if it doesn't make enough energy, it can't do that job well. But the exhaust, that's— those are free radicals. But you have antioxidant enzymes that go in there and grab those free radicals and deal with them, no problem. You hear about eating antioxidants, so that's great, but you have an inborn system in you to deal with free radicals. It's called antioxidant enzymes. But the antioxidant enzyme system is shut down by a number of things, but in particular, iron. Excessive iron from iron-fortified foods, primarily the flour that we started sifting in the early 1900s. to make white flour. We put all the, all the nutritions in the germ and the bran that got sent to the feedlot. This white flour was actually malnourishing and, and almost killing people, filling up the psychiatric hospitals because of various psychiatric diseases, because of lack of B vitamins, because it was just white flour. The B vitamins were going to the feedlot. Anyways, they started fortifying that grain, and one of the things was iron. But the type of iron they put in there is very pro-inflammatory to your gut cells and other cells in the body. But I digress. That excess iron shuts down your antioxidant enzyme system. But the Bottom line, my nurse prac did some things to restore the mitochondria, restore the microbiome, restore the stomach acid levels. And it's real basic stuff. It's eat real food, take some probiotics and fermented food. I think he had a little excessive Candida overgrowth, which is a, a bug in the gut, a fungus that it loves processed grain and sugar, and it will explode in population if that's what you feed it, which he was, and most Americans are. So we get this imbalance in our gut microbes, and he was predominantly Candida.

Hmm.

So he did some anti-Candida herbs to knock that down, and he brought back his good bugs and got diversity back and balance back in the microbiome. And, and so with stomach acid levels and a good microbiome, and he dealt with his leaky gut, he sealed that back up, then you can handle that wheat. Now we know more these days about wheat, that the glyphosate that gets sprayed on just people's wheat, that'll open up your tight junctions, kill your microbiome, and a lot of people will be gluten sensitive just because of that recipe of glyphosate plus the modern gluten. I mean, there's other things to consider. He couldn't just eat that hamburger and cookie and tortilla forever and probably remain good. You've got to maintain a healthy terrain and healthy microbiome, and that processed food, if you do it all the time, will kill it. But anyways, that was the first event that opened my eyes of, wait a minute, which of course I tried to go, well, maybe this was just a one-off.

Yeah, fluke or something, right?

Maybe he didn't really have celiac. I actually called his dad to verify because his dad was a doctor and the GI doctor When this nurse practitioner was a kid, and I verified it as true diagnosis. But then I thought, well, maybe it's just a miracle cure. God just healed a miracle. I believe there's still miracles. But my nurse practitioner's saying, no, no, I did some things. I created health and I got health because of what I was doing. So what I was faced with was the thought of, man, I witnessed this with my own eyes. I'm going to have another celiac patient come in someday through these doors of my clinic. What am I gonna do? Am I gonna say, eat gluten-free the rest of your life, see you later? Because that's what med school taught me to tell you, and that's the standard of care that the Texas Medical Board requires I give you. Or am I going to say that and say, and there's this other option too that I learned about. It worked for my nurse prac. It may not work for you. I don't really understand it, don't know anything about it really, but if you want to talk to him, you can. Was I gonna Give them two options, and I felt like morally and ethically, yeah, I need to do that just for celiac. Just if a celiac patient comes. But then I thought, well, okay, he's my nurse prac. He's under my license. I'm responsible. I gotta call this. I gotta know what he's doing in there. So I gotta call this doctor. What what'd you teach him? What who are you? What's going on? I call that doctor, and he blew my mind. He just let me have it. I basically said, "Who are you?" What kind of quackery, hocus-pocus, holistic stuff? Because remember, I'm totally allopathic. I don't even know what a chiropractor does at this point. I don't know about herbs, nutrition, zero. I know pharma only. And my thought was, and I think this is most doctors, when they cross that stage in medical school, get their white coat and their MD behind their name and their diploma and all that, they think medical school just taught me all there is to know to go help people in the world. There's an arrogance in that, and there's a lot of assumptions in that. And of course, that's dead wrong. I got 2 hours of nutrition in 4 years of medical school. But my mindset at that time is if any of this other stuff worked, they would have taught me in med school about it. So obviously it doesn't work because they didn't teach it to me. I mean, how naive. But that truly was my thinking. If a little old lady brought some herb in and said, hey, I read this is good for UTIs, I would have been polite about it, but I would have said, ma'am, I don't think it'll hurt you, but no, that's not going to work. If that worked, I would have learned about it. I mean, that's what I thought.

That mentality though, obviously is still happening in the medical system, but it's also happening around people with food. You present to them, well, here's a very natural food. It's not overly processed. It's just natural. It's real food. And people will question that more than they question the laboratory-made stuff. One of the events we were at together, you talked about how medical systems used to teach X, and now they teach Y, and it was due to some very specific reasons. Could you bring that up?

Yes. And that, that doctor helped open my eyes to the corruption in medicine. And really what happened was about 1910, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie get together in a philanthropic endeavor, and they hire a gentleman named Abraham Flexner, who's an education expert. And they asked Mr. Flexner to go all over the country and examine and look at and survey the landscape as far as medical education goes. The different medical schools and medical school curriculum, because there were about 23 homeopathic medical schools in the United States in the late 1800s, turn of the century, 1900. And there were herbalist schools, chiropractic schools, naturopathic schools, osteopathic, allopathic, a variety. Well, Flexner comes back and basically says there's too much variety, there's too much kind of chaos out there. We need to standardize medical education at one model. And he recommended allopathic That's MD, pharmaceutical, chemical-based, really treat a symptom only. And that's what happened. So the money flowed into those schools and hospitals and universities and research labs. All the other schools were not funded. And even the AMA gets involved in state legislatures and they start licensing doctors coming out of the allopathic school and making it illegal to see an unlicensed medical provider. So by 1920, those 23 homeopathic medical schools were shut down. There were over 5,000 homeopathic physicians at that time, but those schools shut down. 10,000 herbalists were out of business. Those schools were shutting down. The chiropractors survived because they took them— took the AMA to court, and they survived barely. But really, they just ran everybody else out, either by calling them quacks and not licensing them or actually making their practice illegal. And so allopathic ruled the day by 1920, 1930. Pharma's starting to come in. These are petroleum byproducts, initial drugs. And even to this day, a lot of the drugs are byproducts of the petroleum industry. So that happened about 100 years ago, and it is right when the— I call the Big 3 happened in our nutrition. We started sifting the grain that I mentioned earlier. Enriched white flour came on board, as opposed to fresh milled, make it yourself. We can get the whole wheat germ and bran all together. We went from saturated animal fat, tallow, lard, the traditional cooking oils and fats, olive oil. We moved to polyunsaturated fatty acids. That's the seed oils— cottonseed, Crisco, margarine, soybean oil. All that came in about that time is when it started. And then that processed sugar, that white sugar, coming in at a much higher rate of use. All 3 of those happened about that same time that medical education changed to pharmaceutical-based. So it's been about 100 years, and that's where the chronic disease starts. The first reported case of Alzheimer's in the medical literature is in 1906. The first reported case of a heart attack ever in this country is 1912. There was one in the entire country, first one ever. First case of autism reported, 1934. So chronic disease used to not exist, and it's not because people weren't living long enough. There's a real tricky little statistical thing. If you just Google what's life expectancy in the United States in 1899 or 1900, it'll say like 35 or 40 years old. That is absolutely inaccurate. If you consider the infant mortality rate was 50%. So half the babies weren't making it to their 5-year-old birthday. So if you had twins, statistically one's going to be alive at 5 years old and one's not. But that one that made it to 5, he's going to live a normal lifespan to 80. But if you average in all the babies dying, you're— then your average is 40. People were living to be 80, 90, 100 years old. They could have had heart attacks, cancer, Alzheimer's, all these chronic diseases. They didn't. And just a little side note on those babies dying, 50% of the babies dying in the big cities in the Industrial Revolution, that infant mortality rate dropped 99%, dropped, pretty much went away by 1950. That's prior to vaccines coming on the scene. CDC researchers, Hopkins researchers, Boston University researchers and Harvard all looked at that 1900 to 1950 drop in infant mortality and said 1 to 3% of that was medical care. Most of it was because of sanitation, clean running water, indoor plumbing, good disposal of the waste, nutrition, cleaning up the dirty cities. Basically, these were cesspools, these East Coast cities in the Industrial Revolution. So it's all about the terrain. But what I'm saying is it was this perfect storm. Medical education changed, the nutrition changed, and chronic disease starts. And all these pharma drugs just treat a symptom. High blood sugar is not a disease. We call it a disease, diabetes. It's not a disease. High sugar in your blood is a symptom of an underlying problem. And the problem is your carburetor. I mentioned fuel, burning fuel. Your carburetor's so broken it can't burn sugar for fuel anymore. And that sugar backs up in the fuel line and sits in your blood. You can no longer process sugar because of a broken engine. You take a pharma drug, it just removes that sugar out of your bloodstream. It doesn't fix the engine at all. That's why you stay chronically sick. And the American Diabetes Association website says type 2 diabetes is a chronic progressive disease, meaning you're going to have it forever. It's going to progressively get worse over time. You're eventually gonna need insulin. Yep, that's true. If you decide to just treat the smoke and not the fire, if you're just going to treat the symptom, not the cause, you fix the engine. We have the power. It's our body.

So if a household wants to become less dependent on the medical system, what would you have them rebuild first at home?

Honestly, now knowing what I know, the first thing I would rebuild is the community, even within the home. Turn the devices off, turn that TV off, start eating around the table together, talk to each other, listen. To each other because your kids are trying to tell you something. Don't just jump on their— jump down their throat the moment you hear something you don't like. We've got to receive each other, listen to each other. That's definitely step number one. As far as like practical things, move. Get outside in nature in particular and move. Even if nature is trees along a sidewalk in a city, or find a park. Sunshine, nature, birds chirping, green space. It's so beneficial for the body. Obviously eat real food. Hydrate well, but eat your water. A lot of hydrating foods, and that water absorbs into the body slower and better. So I like hydrating foods. But we call it the four pillars: nutrition, hydration, movement, and peace. And those four things, if you can steward those four things, that's what the body, the inputs the body needs to self heal, to self detox, to self regenerate. We're supposed to be. Cleaning ourselves cellularly every night when we sleep. We're supposed to tell our stem cells to wake up and repair the cartilage in my knee that got damaged today. We have all this in, in us, but it's, it's in hibernation, or it's got one hand tied behind its back. It's not stewarded. So it's the basic things. I know there's all kinds of really cool biohacks and gadgets and supplements and all these things, but your great-great-granddads didn't have to do any of that. And they were healthy. So it's really the basics. Get down to those basics. Once you have the basics down, if there's still symptoms, fine, add one or two other things in, but you really shouldn't need a whole lot of extra. Go deep nutrition, move, hydration, and true peace.

Which one do most people underestimate?

Peace.

Yeah, that, that would have been my answer too.

We don't even know what peace is. I mean, We kind of recognize stress, then we do stress management stuff. But a true rest, it's foreign. And when people actually kind of get there, they feel uncomfortable. They've never truly been at rest. And I'm not saying sit around, don't do anything. You're going to do stuff, but you got to know who you are. My personal belief, you got to know who your creator is and you got to know who you are. And once you are secure in who you are, I believe we have natural giftings and talents put, put into us by our Creator. Those will naturally flow. You're going to go do stuff. But if you have it reversed, you don't know who you are, your identity is in what you do, you're going to try to get self-worth and value out of what you do and how much money and what your title and all that, that is a heavy burden. It's going to crush you. So you got to get that prioritized right. You got to know who you are. And then go do stuff. But it comes from a place of rest. I mean, that's more of a spiritual, you know, another conversation. But honestly, that's, that's the most important thing. The mitochondria is not meant to operate in a state of tense. And you're going to be tense if you're not truly at rest.

How do we teach people to be medically sovereign without making them fearful, anti-doctor, or overwhelmed?

Well, I'm obviously biased. We have an education platform, which I don't want to just promote my own stuff only, but we have a course called You're the Cure. And the point of that is to convince people that you're the cure. Your doctor can't cure you, honestly. And we go through the stats that show this. The pharmaceuticals they're giving you— and I'll take statins for example. I mean, heart disease is your number one killer. The doctors think it's high cholesterol that causes it, so they give you a statin drug to lower your LDL and total cholesterol on the paper. So everyone's happy, right? Oh, my cholesterol is below 200. Yay, keep my Lipitor going. No. Does that decrease heart attacks and does that increase mortality or decrease mortality? Here's what JAMA said when they reviewed all the 21 top randomized controlled trials on statins. The statins will decrease your all-cause mortality 0.8%. You're getting a less than 1% risk reduction by following your doctor's orders for your number one killer. But you can go right down. The number one drug for Alzheimer's, the number one drug for cancer, the number one drug for depression. For osteoporosis, hip fracture, the best we have is we can lower hip fractures in 1,000 women taking an osteoporotic drug for 6 years. It reduces the number of hip fractures by 4. 12 hip fractures in the non-treatment group, 8 hip fractures in the treatment group. 4 out of 1,000, that— what's that, 0.04%? 4% risk reduction. So once the people get the truth that what they're tethered to and think they can't leave has such poor outcomes, you just give them the truth. So it's education, education, education, and you get them convinced that, no, my body really is— my bones are meant to be strong, but I gotta do resistance training. I need minerals. I need a low-inflammatory diet. I need sunshine. All that equals bone growth. You teach them, you show them. So educate, educate, educate. That's what we do on our platform. And I mean, I still— I love the health share. Catastrophic things happen, you know, or car wrecks, whatever. And fine, you can go use that system. Trauma surgeons are amazing and they take cash. Cash payments are way cheaper than insurance payments anyways. And then you turn around, hand that receipt to your health share, and they reimburse you. It's a beautiful way. So you're not just out there, oh no, I'm going to go broke if I get catastrophic. No. And the health share monthly share is so small. Very affordable. So there is another system, it's being built. People don't know about it. So educate them. And then just start stewarding your health. And you'll see you don't— you reverse your preexistings.

I actually use a health share. And I've used it for the last, I want to say 3 or 4 years. It is absolutely that, you know, what happened is our monthlies went down. So we were previously paying for the lowest HSA, we were paying $1,400 for 2 adults and 2 kids a month. And that was continuing to just go up every year, even though we hadn't, uh, had any issues, you know, major surgeries or anything. And when we moved to a health share, it went down to $600. So $1,400 down to $600. And then we've just been using the extra money for lifestyle, getting more massages, like, like doing things that support the peace. The movement, the nutrition, and the hydration, you know, but it's a little scary.

I teach my patients, don't ever let fear come into the equation, which it's going to try to. Of course, we're all prone to get scared of something, but just at least recognize when fear is entering your decision-making process, call a timeout and really address that. What am I truly fearful of? You get fear dealt with, then you can see more clearly and you can make better decisions. And any system that's using fear to keep you bound to it, that's not a system you want to be in.

When you look at chronic disease today, what do you think modern life has stripped away from the body most?

That's a hard one because so much has been stripped away. I mean, obviously the nutrition's completely depleted. I mean, you look at apples in 1950 and you got to eat 26 apples in 1997 to equal the mineral content in one apple. in 1954. That's an actual study. But it's across the board— the broccoli, the carrots, everything— absolutely devoid of minerals. But the microbiome's completely devastated too. These bugs in our, in our gut do so much for us. They make our serotonin for mood. They interact with our immune system in a good way. They break down our food. They make vitamin C. They make B vitamins. It's amazing what the microbes do. And ancestral tribes that you can go study today, they have 30,000 different species And of each species, there's billions, so trillions altogether. The average American is down to 5,000 species instead of 30,000. So we've stripped away the microbiome, we've stripped away micronutrients, we've stripped away community. We're all divided, we're busy, we're distracted, these phones. I mean, there's so many things we've stripped away. I don't know that I could narrow it down to just one.

The difference between being calorie sufficient Which is what most people are doing versus nutrient sufficient. Because we think we're under the illusion of health. We think if I have that skinless, boneless chicken breast, the steamed vegetables, the baked potato, I'm now healthy. So I cut out the junk food and we think that what we're doing is healthy, but it's completely devoid of nutrition still.

Yes. I mean, it, one of my pet peeves, if I'm anywhere like at a hotel at a conference or something, I hear someone order an egg white omelet, I just want to go over there and say, wait a minute, you just ruined the best whole food.

Yeah.

Yes. And we do it with the dairy. We strip it out, we strip out all the fat, we homogenize it, we pasteurize it. All the good proteins and bacteria are killed, the enzymes. I mean, we just completely destroy stuff. Yeah, we got plenty of calories now, but we have no nutrition. So we call it deep nutrition. And we have 5 superfood groups is what we call it because there's so much nutrition in each one of these groups. One of those, and probably number one, is organ meats for sure. And then we love ferments, we love raw dairy, we love homemade bone broth, and then fresh milled grain. I'm not an anti-grain guy if you mill it yourself like your ancestors did, and of course organic grain. But there's so much nutrition, those are powerhouses of nutrition, as, as people well know with the organ meats. But, um, that's what we need. We need nutrient-dense food, that deep nutrition.

So for the parent listening who wants one practical first step this week, where would you have them begin?

For a parent, um, I'm looking at that sugar water because those kids love sugar so much and they're addicted to it. If the Gatorade, Powerade, Coca-Cola, obviously, but even the juices, that sugar water is Not good. So I'm gonna start weaning off that some. You may not go cold turkey, start weaning that. I'm trying to get at least one of those 5 superfoods in every single day with the goal of getting all 5 on some reasonable time frame, you know, within the next 3 months. Let's add one a week or whatever, one every month, whatever it is. Get an actual calendar out and put it on there. And if you don't think they're like an organ meat, then there's great ways to sneak it in there, like Pluck. I mean, that's just right on there. There's different smoothie blends, there's different ancestral primal blends, there's all kinds of tricks. I mean, there's so much now you can find on the internet. Just start getting the deep nutrition going. Definitely limit the screen time, no doubt about that. I mean, those are probably my top 3: cut the sugar water, limit the screen time, start getting deep nutrition— those 5 superfoods, organ meats in particular.

And for you, is, is the screen time The issue because it's kind of removing you from community and connection?

Obviously we need screens pretty much. I mean, life these days, kids need to know how to use it probably, but they also need guardrails and they need time constraints because that thing, it's designed to suck you in and pretty soon it's been 4 hours, you know, your eyeballs never got off that. But even from the blue light going in, um, as opposed to the full spectrum sunlight, um, there's lots of reasons to be off that. But yeah, community is part of it, the blue light issue is another part, and just the dopamine hit of that that keeps addicted to that, you know, that disrupts neurochemistry in ways we don't understand fully. Doing it smartly.

I have to admit, as a parent, I'm struggling a lot with that because when you do anything different from what the majority of people do, you feel like an outlier. But when you're a kid, that doesn't feel very fun.

Yeah, it is. It's a huge challenge. And that's, again, I'm always going to go to education. And I mean, kids may or may not receive that education, but It's getting in, it's getting in there. So that's where you try to compromise, set some limits the best you can, or just have some holiday time from it. You know, let's pick one night where there's nothing that's going to be on, um, or one weekend, let's get away to the mountains and we're going to leave our phones on this hike and not take them on this hike. You know, there's ways to compromise on that.

So I, uh, always end with this question. If you could wave a magic wand, bring back one ancestral practice, what would it be and why?

Man, that's a good one. I don't know if this is an ancestral practice necessarily, but just being outside together. You know, everything was outside. They washed their clothes in the creek. They're in the garden. They're hunting. There wasn't this sit inside isolated. There's just something about sitting around a campfire together or sitting around a table together, just going on a walk together. Um, there's something about community that's really, really impactful. And when you're obviously outside in nature. So I don't know if that counts as a practice or not. The next one would probably honestly be the organ meats. I'm not saying that just because of plug. It's just such a powerhouse of nutrition. I mean, getting back to that nose to tail kind of, even just from a stewardship, you know, these animals being sacrificed to, for us to eat just their muscle meat. Come on. That's not good stewardship. So, and to honor Honor that animal. That'd probably be on a more practical level one of the top ones.

Well, I can get behind that one. I'm sure there's going to be people that want to work with you, want to learn more about you, dive deep into Dr. Ben Edwards' world. How can they do that?

Veritas. V as in Victor, E-R-I-T-A-S. That's Latin for truth. But, uh, veritasmedical.com, Veritas Wellness member. Those both takes you actually to the same website. We do have a medical clinic in Lubbock, Texas, and Abilene, Texas, but our goal is not for you to come to our clinic. Actually, my goal is to shut down the clinic. So the wellness platform is virtual. We have 10 health coaches. We have clients in all 50 states and 6 countries. You can get a blood panel done on there, tons of education, one-on-one support, group classes. Our goal is to teach you to not need a doctor. So veritaswellnessmember.com. Then we're on social media, Dr. Ben Edwards, YouTube, an Instagram, Facebook. I think my team does all that. But, um, really appreciate you having me on the podcast. Love what you do. I've enjoyed really getting to know you better too at these conferences. We keep running into each other. Love the Pluck product. We carry it in our store. We have a little store here in Lubbock. It's great connecting with like-minded folks that are building that, um, parallel system. So keep up the good work.

Thank you. Uh, right back at you. Uh, and thank you for just breaking things down and helping people understand. I think that's the best thing we can do is just provide some contrast so that people can start to better understand the fuller picture, right? Because you only know what you know. And until we expose new ideas, people stay stuck in the concepts that they're currently running. So thank you for exposing everyone to some new, very powerful ideas.

You're welcome. That's what I love to do, connect the dots for people, because we really were designed to be well. And it's just lack of knowledge, corruption, lack of stewardship. It's got us where we're at. So we just learn a new way, a better way, and we can get out of this mess. So thank you for having me on so I could share.

That is the perfect way to end. Thank you all for joining us. And as always, stay curious. That is how we, how we make changes is just get, you got to stay curious. So thank you all and be well. Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links, and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's E-A-T-P-L-U-C-K dot com. And hey, if you know someone who'd get something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.