HS 257 - Repairing The Wear and Tear in Our Bodies with Dr. Chris Meletis

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It's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Chris Melides to the show. He is the former dean of the and chief medical officer for the National College of Naturopathic Medicine. He's the former chairman of the International association of Naturopathy and 2003 Naturopathic Physician of the Year. He's the former director of Science and research for Trace Minerals Research and former executive director of the Institute for Healthy Aging. He's author of several books including the hi Anti Aging Answer, Using Hyaluronic Acid for Flexible Joints, Vitamin Vibrant Skin, and a healthy heart. Dr. Chris Melides, welcome. How are you?

Hey. I'm doing great. Thank you, Jason.

Yeah, it's good to have you. So let's. First, we can cover a lot of things on this interview, but, you know, first I'd like to hear a little bit more about hyaluronic acid. I think a lot of people know about it in the skincare arena, but it's useful for a lot more than that, right?

It is. And what's amazing is when we look at the human body made of 50 to 75 trillion cells, we say, what helps keep its frame, its structure, its integrity? And in large part, it comes down to hyaluronic acid. And lots of people ask the question, well, if it's an acid, well, isn't that a bad thing? Because after all, we think of acids as something which is hard on the body. Actually, an acid is merely a molecular structure. In the case of hyaluronic acid, it's actually soothing, relaxing and supportive. And so hyaluronic acid helps everything from the back of our eyeballs. So think of all the eye health issues to the supplementness of our skin. And are we looking as young as we could? We might feel young on the inside, full of vim and vigor, but we're getting a Little wrinkly. We're showing the miles on our tires. And same thing with our joints and our internal connective tissues. And even something, a fancy word called the extracellular matrix, which is how it's in between every one of our little cells. And it's, in my opinion, what's going to be the next big push on drug therapies and natural therapies is taking care of that extracellular matrix. And hyaluronic acid does that.

So how do we consume hyaluronic acid? Certainly it's in creams and lotions and so forth. But is there a supplement we should be taking? Is it an injection, like vitamin B injections?

Yeah, great question. And so in the conventional model, what I term the ANA model, the American Medical association model, the orthopedic surgeons use it often within joints. Eye doctors, ophthalmologists. So the MD eye doctors will often use it while doing eye procedures. And at the same time, the dermatologists and cosmetologists will use it as injections underneath the skin. In my clinical practice of 22 years, I used it as an oral supplement and a topical serum. And that actually allows for basically a non invasive way of delivering hyaluronic acid to our body, which is critically important because when we think of a baby, they have baby soft skin, and our skin is not quite as soft as baby soft skin. And they don't have wrinkles. We have wrinkles. Part of that is the aging process and free radicals and whatnot. But part of it is because we don't make as much hyaluronic acid and not as high quality as when we were younger. So it's kind of. It's the catch 22. It's like we need us more than ever because we have miles on our tires. We show the wear and tear on our bodies and within our body, but we just aren't making this much, so we have to supplement it. And we can do it as a lozenge, and we can also do it topically as a serum.

So are people deficient in this or is it just that we want to be more youthful? Or is it something where, you know, for example, a lot of doctors have told me people are just deficient in vitamin D. You know, D3 is a huge deficiency in our culture, from what I understand. You know, is this something people are really, truly deficient in, or are we just trying to find the fountain of youth?

I think it's a little bit of both. Officially, we can't be deficient in hyaluronic Acid, because only a vitamin or a mineral we can be deficient in. And by definition, it will cause a disease. So if you look at any vitamin out there, like vitamin A or D or E or K or whatever, there has to be a disease associated with the deficiency. And for example, if you have vitamin C deficiency, you have scurvy. If you have vitamin B1 deficiency, you have beriberi, vitamin B3 deficiency, you have pellagra. All diseases due to nutrient true deficiency. But I would argue we're insufficient in hyaluronic acid, and particularly because we're heavier, we sit more, we're less conditioned. And I have a simple equation I share with all my patients. It's wear and tear minus repair. So think of the wear and tear on your body minus the quantity of repair. And hopefully your level of repair, like using hyaluronic acid and glucosamine sulfate and other things is commensurate with your wear and tear. But the moment wear and tear exceeds the level of repair, you start having the aging process in the body, whether it be the skin, the joints, your ligaments, your tendons. So hyaluronic acid comes into play at that level of helping mitigate the wear and tear by helping augment and support repair.

Okay, those are some good distinctions. Thank you for that. Now, one of the things that we've always got to be, you know, kind of concerned about, I guess, is that the body has so much wisdom just built into it. When we supplement with things in certain cases, does that just give our body a signal that, hey, there's enough here, I don't need to make it anymore? Because this is something the body makes, right?

And you're 100% correct. And it's a concept. Like, for example, if we give somebody thyroid hormone or male or female hormones, we can create a dependency state. Or back when I was in medical school, we used to call it a welfare state, which, of course, we don't use that term anymore because it's not politically correct. But your body eventually says, hey, well, I get a handout if I get a fish every day. Why do I ever need a fish? Well, in the case of hyaluronic, it's kind of a simple approach.

With hyaluronic acid, we don't have that kind of feedback loop as much as we have with other kinds of hormones and substances in our body. So it's more of we're augmenting. Often I'll describe to a patient, let's say when we have adrenal burnout or adrenal fatigue, their classical rechargeable batteries. So we have a smartphone, we have our Black Bears, we have whatever, but they're only as good as this charge that they have. If they're out of batteries, they can't function. So likewise, when there's not enough building blocks in our body and or we're using up all our building blocks, kind of just maintaining the status quo, a level playing field of my state of brokenness, my state of age, then of course, what we want to do is replete the body and allow the body to have a little bit of a respite and actually start playing catch up. And I give the example of what I term the health savings account. And so we have credits. You've slept well, you've ate well, you've been drinking, you've been taking care of your elimination of toxins from your body. And those are all credits. But then we put in the negative. Well, the chemicals in our environment, the chemtrails, the glade plug ins or other pourri smells out there, and all these things, and all those are negatives. And so what we look for is what does hyaluronic do? It adds to the positive. It allows our body to help support and make up for some of the wear and tear on the health savings Account on a daily basis.

Is there a way we can get our body to produce more of it? Naturally you talk about the health savings account and the negatives. I mean, for example, if we just exercise more, will we produce more of this?

Exercise would actually not generally produce more and it actually would cause more wear and tear. Now, staying limber, staying fit, critical, of course, the more weight we carry around, the more wear and tear. And that's when I use products in my practice, help people maintain their lean body mass. But there's only one active way, and it's called a sticky fruit. And actually Connie Chung did a report on this 10, 15 years ago, and I think it was like, I can't remember the news show where they found a culture in Asia which was actually eating this sticky fruit, which we don't have in the United States. And as a traditional Asian fruit or vegetable. And it's actually allowed for them to actually stand in the sun and smoke and do all these things, but not look as aged as they are on the outside. And so there are some fruits and vegetables that have a little bit of that capacity, but not nearly enough for the average westernized person because our wear and tear just once again exceeds our level of repair.

Right, yeah, Very interesting. Okay. So you've written, I think, about a dozen books, right? Tell us about some of the subjects, and let's talk about, you know, some of some of the other areas that are important. Obviously, we are in an obesity epidemic, and I know you've got something out about that recently, but wherever you want to take it.

Well, yeah, I've written, you know, like I said, a dozen books, and I have a couple more coming out. One's on oxygen therapy. Another one's the power of Green. And not just the color of green, but what's the importance of chlorophyll, But I would say written on infertility. I also wrote a book called Great Health. So let's touch upon the obesity thing because we're at the beginning of the new year. We'll talk about that for a moment and we'll move on to some other topics. Like, I talk about safe herbs and drug nutrient interactions and also herbs and nutrients for the mind. But on the obesity side of things, when we woke up in the morning and we look in the mirror and say, well, I don't remember being that heavy. And, you know, it's kind of like Rip Van Winkle all of a sudden. Like, how in the world did that happen? My hairline's receded and I've got weight in inches where I never thought I was going to have inches because we were all, remember back in high school or even earlier, lean and mean, so to speak. We're ready to go. And all of a sudden we're like, we're tired or worn out or we're wired and tired. And so what I do in my clinical practice, the family practice here in Oregon, is we look for helping mitigate things. So transitioning from the hyaluronic acid conversation, where we have extra wear and tear, like carrying the weight around, I'll use simple things that help bind up fat in the diet. Like there's a special fiber called cyclodetrin, which binds up to 486 calories of saturated fat. So, sure, you want to eat well, you want to exercise, and at the same time, now, if you can have a little bit of a way to fudge for some of the indiscretions of the day with a simple fiber, it gives you that extra little edge.

Good stuff. Good stuff. So in terms of cravings, why are we eating all the wrong foods? I mean, what is the, you know, the. The cause? We. The food is just junk. It's just such low quality most of the time that we just feel hungry all the Time I noticed that when I eat fast food, that's how I feel. It doesn't really satiate me for very long.

Yeah, and that's the trick is we now are servants to our technology. And so we have all this asking of ourselves. We got our emails and our text and our telephone and we, I think we all remember the day, or most of us will remember the day where if you weren't home, there was no answer machine. If someone needed to call you, they call you back. And those were, those were the simple days. And now we're so fast paced now all of a sudden a fast food, like, well, okay, I'm going to go through that. Drive through. Boy, they're not very fast here. I wonder why they're so slow today. And then we eat our foods and lots of people make that mistake. And it's of course high in sodium, high in saturated fat, and that's where I use the cyclodextrin or a product called calories. But then at the same time, why? Because we're basically having more processed food. Think about the concept of should we eat organic? Well, that's a question our grandparents or great grandparents never asked because everything was organic unless they put some fish fertilizer. But it was even organic. Organic fish from a fairly pristine river. For our great grandparents, everything by nature was organic. And now we're going back to the concept of what are we eating? There's an interesting statistic out there that 200 years ago there's about 21 inches of topsoil in the United States and Now there's about 6 inches on much of the farmland. And so if you think of Little House on the Prairie and Charles and Caroline Ingalls, and with the genre that I grew up in, in the 60s, well, you watch these shows and you're like, okay, Charles has this new virgin piece of land and he tills that land and he takes the crop to the mercantile. And of course, nutrients go from the soil into the plant, into the mercantile, and then eventually into the people. But year after year, the same land being tilled and worked, they're not adding the trace minerals back. They're not adding to other nutrients, the micro and macronutrients. They're adding some iron and some nitrogen. So you have green and lush, but you're not getting a lot of those other nutrients. So we're actually undernourished. And lots of times the trace minerals like chromium, selenium, molybdenum, vanadium, all terms that lots of doctors still don't even know the words, but they all have functions within the body. But now all of a sudden, when you're low in chromium, you will crave more carbohydrates because you don't have blood sugar regulation. So you go up and then you go down. And so I call chromium willpower in the bottle, for example.

Very interesting. So do we just need to take 40 vitamin pills every morning and a bunch of supplements or what's the easy way to do all this?

Well, I think I have an approach in my great health book which is called the 3:2:1:1:1 diet. And it's if you were to think about what society does and doesn't do in the westernized world, what we don't eat is our vegetables. Mom was right, we need to eat our veggies. And it was in a 2007 medical article that said only 11% of us eat our five to seven servings of fruits and veggies. That means 89% of us are epically failing. And so my 3211 diet is you should throughout the day, if you were to add up all your foods, it should be in proportion, three veggies, three two fresh fruits, one grain, not a lot of grain, and a large source of protein. And that should be your ratio. And I describe it this way to my patients. If you actually had to go chop down a sugar cane in Hawaii and then mill it up and make it into granulated sugar, how much sugar would you end up wanting to put on your cereal or in your coffee?

Not much. If you had to work for it like that.

Exactly. And it's the same thing if you, if I had you and I had to go till the soil, feed the horses, plow and then grow the wheat and then mill the wheat and then knead the bread. I can tell you I think I'm going to cut it off at one slice. I better make that loaf of bread last a whole heck of a long time. So three, two, one plus one, three veggies, two fruits a grain, which can include rice and oats and other corn, which is also course a grain and not a vegetable. And of course then a large source of quality lean protein, ideally not farm raised and not genetically modified and not full of hormones.

Yeah. So this is really kind of maybe a low key version of the paleo diet then, right?

Yeah, it's ancestral diet. And you know. Yeah, it's like, hey, you wouldn't put a whole lot of, you're too busy surviving to go into it. I actually wrote that book about 10 years ago for Paleo is Big. And just applying common sense. There's not a whole lot of fat rabbits out there. I'll just leave it there.

Yeah, good point. Good point. For sure. In that 3, 2, 1 ratio, I really like that because that simplifies things a lot. Vegetables. Vegetables are so important, and I happen to be one of those maybe somewhat rare people who loves vegetables, but, you know, how should we consume our vegetables for. For example, I've heard people say that frozen vegetables are actually better and fresher than what we consider to be fresh vegetables because of the time to market and so forth. If we microwave our vegetables, does that take out all the nutrients? You know, those kinds of questions. On the veggie side, you're asking tough.

Questions and also very controversial questions.

Yeah. I don't know if anybody knows, really.

Yeah, well, you know, of course, course there's a whole big thing like, microwaves have been banned in certain countries and they're, you know, we're kind of slow here in the United States and North America and other Westernized worlds that were. We're still using microwaves and we're like, hey, we can watch a little carousel go around and around. Like, no, don't do that. You're microwaving yourself indirectly. Because lots of times we have leaking microwaves, which actually leak out microwave into the environment. So I do agree that a lot of the produce that we import from other countries, no matter what country you're in, actually has been picked early and basically imported. And a lot of those nutrients aren't there. It's better to have something that's been fresh and pristine and then frozen immediately than to have something that's been on a boat or a barge for 30 days and kind of artificially kept in suspended animation. So I would definitely say the answer is yes on that. I'm a big fan of farmers markets and buying locally.

Is that yes on fresh or yes on frozen?

I would say yes on frozen. I think definitely frozen, if it's done right and there's no question. And fresh is good. If we do it through a farmer's market. Buy locally, think globally. So support your local people. Get it from much like our great grandparents and our grandparents and even myself. As a kid, I grew corn. I grew carrots during the summer and pumpkins during the harvest season. Once again, it was from my backyard and it was literally from the yard to the table immediately full of the vitality, the live enzymes and the nutrients. There's a saying, live food for living people, dead food for dying people, heavily processed things or things that have been dead on the vine and kept in suspended animation. These are becoming more and more devoid of nutrients or something. A tomato that's picked green, it's going to take this long to get to market. And then it's artificially basically ripened. No, you want something right off the vine and into the dinner plate and dinner table.

Just like the way nature meant for us to eat it. Imagine that, right?

Hey, what a concept. It's like, hey, let's rediscover that concept, huh?

Yeah, absolutely. Very good concept to reduce discover. No question about it. You talked a few minutes ago about thinning hair. Is there a good supplementation program for that? I think we're on the verge of hearing an FDA announcement for stem cell therapies and so forth, which, that's pretty fascinating. But what about hair loss? A lot of people suffer from it, male and female, actually.

Yeah, well, part of the hair loss and actually there's a theory that I've came up with called the knee fed theory. And I go around the country lecturing the medical doctors on the latest cutting edge concepts of how does our body talk to us? And the knee said theory, ne S I D is neuroendocrine stress induced dysfunction. And a lot of times you'll notice that people lose their hair or have accelerated hair loss. Maybe they were losing their hair. Now they're really losing their hair when they're stressed. And that's because our stress hormones, just like gasoline in the car, have to be eventually combusted and broken down, metabolized. And they're metabolized through an enzyme, fancy word 5 alpha reductase. But it's the same enzyme in men and women alike that convert testosterone, so women have it too, of course, into dht, dihydrotestosterone, which contributes to what has been termed male pattern baldness. But equal opportunity here, women can have it too. And so a lot of times after a surgery, a medical procedure, a life event, something sad within our immediate family and loved ones, we will start shedding our hair. So it's not just a seasonal thing, it's actually a stress induced thing. So I would say that, yeah, you want to make sure you got your zinc, you want to make sure you're basically helping protect those pathways. And we need to not sweat the small things. Today's world is way too chaotic and basically our skin and our hair reflect the wear and tear. And so we need to safeguard ourselves by creating a little psychological, spiritual bubble around ourselves saying, and I'm going to let that one slide.

Yeah, right. Pick your battles. Right.

Exactly.

Good advice. Good advice. Dr. Give out your website if you would.

Sure. It's Dr. Melides. So D R M E L E t I s so doctormelitis.com and I post routinely everything on health topics on my social media, my Twitter accounts and I have some two international articles there, access to videos. I've done books and so yeah, that's what I do. I love sharing, educating people. And when the patient and the consumer is educated, that is when true health begins.

Maybe I'll ask you to close just on this one. And that is the subject we didn't talk about yet about fertility for men and women. Environmental factors can affect it and what can be done about it. If you anything.

I love the term fertility and I wrote a book on fertility. The concept here is what is fertile. Just like we were talking about produce and gardens and ground and so forth. Fertility is how fertile are you? And it's not just can I get pregnant, but where am I planting the seed, where am I planting the baby, how toxic am I? And so what I tell my patients is, you know, six months ahead of time when you're thinking about conceiving male and female like you make sure you have a cleaner diet, cleaner lifestyle and you actually are creating an environment which when the fertilized egg gets implanted, it's not toxic. In fact, I tell my patients, never lose more than five pounds within the six months you're going to try to become pregnant for females because you're going to liberate toxins and basically what I call metabolic pollutants from your fat, put them through circulation. Now you want everything to be quiet and pristine. You want to be eating well so that you're as fertile not only from being able to conceive, but to actually nurture the little one as it grows.

Good stuff. Well, Chris Melides, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you very much.

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