Episode #73: Minerals with Morley Robbins

Welcome to Better Health Guy Blogcasts. Empowering your better health. And now, here's Scott, your Better Health Guy. The content of this show is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any illness or medical condition. Nothing in today's discussion is meant to serve as medical advice or as information to facilitate self treatment. As always, please discuss any potential health related decisions with your own personal medical authority.

Hello everyone and welcome to episode number 73 of the Better Health Guy Blogcast series. Today's guest is Morley Robbins and the topic of the show is minerals. Morley Robbins, also known as Magnesium man, is the founder of the Magnesium Advocacy group and the creator of the Root Cause Protocol. Morley had been a hospital executive and consultant for 32. Several years ago he developed a condition known as frozen shoulder. His family doctor quickly recommended surgery as the only hope for Morley if he wanted to be able to lift his right hand above his waist ever again. Friends who owned a health food store intervened and encouraged Morley to try chiropractic care. His initial response, thanks guys but I don't do witchcraft. Several months later, the pain was wearing on him and his friends insisted it took only a couple of weeks of light touch chiropractic care before his shoulder had full range of motion once again. The experience was so life changing for Morley that he questioned everything he knew.

Or thought he knew about healing.

He then left the world of hospital administration and became a wellness coach. Today, Morley views it as his life's work to push back the tides of nutritional insanity in the day to day lives of inhabitants of planning planet Earth. And now my interview with Morley Robbins.

I've heard so many different perspectives on magnesium, copper and iron over the years and I'm really excited today to have.

Morley Robbins on the show to give me and to give you a better understanding on the topic of minerals. So thanks so much for being here today, Morley.

Happy to do it, Scott. Looking forward to our conversation.

I am as well. So for those that may not know.

Your story and how you went from.

Being a hospital administrator to a wellness.

Coach, a little bit about what drew you into the field of nutrition and wellness.

The short version is a frozen shoulder unlocked my awareness of natural healing and friends recommended that I go see a chiropractor. And I said I don't do witchcraft because I'd spent my whole life in allopathic medicine and I grew up in.

A very sickly family. I mean, my sister's a nurse, but my parents were very sick. My mother's parents were pretty Pretty sick as well. So I spent a lot of time in hospitals.

But after 20 years of consulting and.

Moving around the country with airplanes, basically.

What my body said was, we're done.

With pulling a suitcase behind your arm. And it locked up.

And it was a fascinating experience to go through. But what I was introduced to after.

Some cajoling was the power and the. Just the amazing properties of light touch, chiropractic therapy.

And suddenly I had full rotation and.

Mobility of my arm that it was. I couldn't pick it up above my waist. I mean, it was just absolutely locked up. So that forced me to think differently.

About what's going on.

Are there other properties? And the book that I was drawn to, it's a wonderful book by Carolyn Dean called the Magnesium Miracle.

And some of your listeners, I'm sure, have read it.

Maybe you've read it as well.

And you're. You're left with this just amazing image.

Of, wow, magnesium solves everything.

And that was what I decided to make a real shift in my career.

I wanted to start over. I decided to become a wellness coach, but I didn't know what the heck that meant. And I took training courses and things.

And as I got deeper into magnesium, I was just absolutely amazed at what.

It was able to do in terms.

Of its properties as a mineral and as a catalyst for enzyme activity. And now, some nine years later, I can boil it down pretty quickly. If you want to solve symptoms, use magnesium. If you want to solve the underlying metabolic problem that's causing the magnesium loss, then you've got to deal with the copper iron dysregulation.

So let's get into magnesium then. So you're known as the magnesium man. I mean, it sounds like a superhero.

To me, and I know that magnesium is important, but why is magnesium so important in the body? What does it actually do for us?

There are about 9,000 enzymes that run the body, and they all work just like the car you drive. When was the last time you drove your car without a key?

Well, I mean, anymore, they don't actually need a key, but.

But the key has to be inside the car.

It's the same problem. Yeah, same property in an enzyme. And so these minerals are the spark.

Plugs that get the engines going. That's what an enzyme is.

It's an engine. It's making something happen. So.

You make. You had reference in some of your notes to the fact that magnesium is involved in 300 enzymes, and that's a.

Very often quoted number. Most people don't know where it Came from.

There's a very famous professor at Harvard Medical School. His name was Bert Vallee, and he was once interviewed back in the 50s.

And asked, why is magnesium so important? How many does it. Does it have enzyme activity?

He said, yeah, I guess it's around 300. And that then became not just scientific legend, but Internet legend.

And it's amazing that no one has.

Ever really delved deeper.

And of course, in 2012, they actually delve into what's called the mag nosome.

Only to discover that there are 3751.

Proteins that simply don't work without the presence of magnesium. Well, that's 42.

That's 42% of your body. So picture being without your arm and your leg. That's what happens when you are magnesium deficient. You're losing a significant portion of your metabolic function. And I describe magnesium as the mineral of motion. Well, there's a lot of motion in the human body, as you well know, and when there's a lack of magnesium.

Things begin to lock up.

Magnesium's gift is, think of it this way. You're familiar with a heartbeat.

Well, there's magnesium expended to make that.

Energy so it can beat. And of course, people know that calcium.

Is being recruited by the cardiomyocytes to actually make the contraction, but it's actually magnesium that's inviting it in and magnesium.

That'S exiting it out.

And then suddenly, the cardiomyocytes need to be replenished with magnesium so they can.

Relax before the next contraction.

So are there some key symptoms or.

Conditions that would lead you to explore magnesium deficiency?

Yeah, I mean, there are many, but it can be anywhere from abdominal pain.

Adrenal fatigue, anxiety, brain fog, you know, depression.

Most people don't realize that the mineral.

Origin of depression is a calcium magnesium imbalance.

And those things that you just mentioned sound like most people that I encounter on a daily basis.

Well, the thing is, again, it's very easy to say, oh, it's, it's a magnesium problem.

And as I noted a minute ago, that's the symptom.

The magnesium loss is, in fact, contributing to enzyme dysfunction.

But.

But it's like being in a boat that has a hole in it, and you realize, oh, I got to keep.

Bailing the boat out so I can stay afloat.

Well, at some point, you got to.

Repair the hole, and that's where the copper iron dynamic gets, gets into it.

So the magnesium is bailing out the water. The hole in the boat is the copper piece. What percentage of people would you suggest might have a magnesium deficiency.

Is it common?

Yeah, it's quite prevalent. The official number is going to be around 80%. Just between you, me and the lamppost, it's 100%.

Yeah.

We live in very stressful times and.

I've coined a phrase called the magnesium burn rate. That's called stress. Well, when people think or when they hear the word stress, they immediately think of emotional stress, and that's one major classification of stress.

But as you know, there's physical stress.

There'S environmental stress, there's metabolic stress, and then what I would argue is the greatest stressor on the human body is iron stress. And it affects all four of those categories, as we'll talk about later.

So are there any lab tests that.

You would recommend to identify how deficient someone might be in magnesium and when.

They'Ve reached a state of restoration of their deficiency?

And then maybe we'll just take that a little more broadly, since we're going to talk about other minerals as well.

Like calcium and copper and iron. What do you recommend from a testing perspective to get some insights around those things?

Yeah, for folks here in the States, they can use requesta test. And I've got a whole series of panels that are done through the Magnesium Advocacy group.

But there's one test that's available called the Full Monty Iron panel with vitamin.

A and D. I've just developed that. It's something that's been evolving for a number of years. But that particular one has magnesium inside.

The red blood cell.

It's looking at plasma zinc, it's looking at serum copper and a key enzyme.

That we'll talk about, ceruloplasmin. And then there are a whole series of iron markers.

And then we've added the vitamin A and D to begin to make people aware of the fact that we have become lost as a society in dementia and we are completely unaware of what's.

Going on with vitamin A, the retinol.

That'S been lost to our diet. We also have a panel that looks at the storage form of vitamin D and the active form of vitamin D, as well as ionic calcium and the.

Magnesium in the red.

The storage and active form of vitamin D is at the D25 and the D125.

That's exactly right.

Okay.

And the 125. The number. The number for the 125 should never.

Be more than two times higher. The number of the storage and what you'll find if you start to do that testing is a frightening elevation of active Especially in people who are chronically ill, dealing with a lot of inflammation.

Right, absolutely. So did you say that people can find this test through request a test? Is there a link on your website as well?

Yeah.

And for people in the uk, I don't where your listeners are, but in UK it's called Blood Tests Direct.

And then there's also a link down in Australia.

Do you find any of the hair.

Mineral analysis to be helpful exploring this whole area?

Yeah, I do two tests regularly. The hair tissue mineral analysis, which looks at 18 minerals, eight heavy metals and.

A dozen other factors.

What you get with the hair test is a forest of minerals and you.

Can begin to see the stress pattern that the person is under.

The limitation of the hair test is the first thing they do with a.

Hair sample is they burn it.

So then they are oxidizing and locking in the oxidation state of the metals. Well, copper has two oxidation states, so does iron, manganese has five, but we're.

Only seeing one, which is the plus two oxidation state.

So that's why I turned to the blood test, to begin to have greater depth of understanding about what these dynamics.

These mineral dynamics were all about.

So we understand from your comments that you need to fix the copper issue in order to fix the magnesium issue. But as people are doing that, it.

Sounds like supplementing magnesium may make sense as well. And so what form of magnesium would you say might be worth exploring? There's.

I know citrate and glycinate and malate.

And oxide and sulfate and chloride. Is there a particular one that you find works best in restoring magnesium levels?

Yeah, I've had the best success with. Again, let's back up. There really are four different forms of.

Magnesium that people can use. Broad categories. There is mineral drops in water and.

They all have a magnesium bias. And you can also use clay, like.

Redmond has a clay that you can.

Add to water and you're going to.

Get minerals from that water and you can pour off the water and drink that. So mineral rich water always has a magnesium bias.

Second category is food. You know, leafy greens, pumpkin seeds, licorice.

Root.

Sea vegetables, sea kelp.

Those are all very rich in magnesium. Why? Because in seawater there's three times as much magnesium as there is calcium. That's a good thing. So we've got mineral rich water, we've.

Got the.

Foods, then we have transdermal. A lot of people are using either Epsom salt baths or magnesium chloride oil baths, or they'll use lotions and creams that have magnesium in Them, they're very restorative, very helpful, especially for trigger point issues. And then we've actually one of our members, Hamat Trivedi, he developed a form. He's actually a chef over in Houston. He developed what's called, called magahol. And it's taking the crystals for magnesium chloride and mixing it with vodka. And it has completely different absorption properties. It's done topically. But, Scott, it goes into the tissue in a completely different way. And it's profoundly restorative for pain.

Is that a commercially available product, Magahol?

No, it's something that people would have to develop themselves. It's on the magnesium advocacy group. And then the fourth category that you're.

Getting at is what about the supplements? And, you know, there's a lot of different forms of chelated supplements. They're probably like 25 different forms.

The two that I've had the best.

Success with are magnesium malate and magnesium glycinate. And there are some very popular forms that I shy away from. One that most people are familiar with.

Natural calm magnesium citrate.

They've got about 60% of the market, which is a rather notable statistic. But what most people don't realize is that the citrate molecule that's coming through a supplement is very toxic to the ceruloplasmin protein.

And people, the difficulty we're gonna have.

In this conversation is that's a new word for most of your listeners. If they know about it, they think of it as a speed bump. But I actually regard the enzyme expression of that protein, which is called ferroxidase. It's Mount Everest. And people don't realize how important that enzyme is in regulating copper and iron inside the body.

You know, it's interesting you mentioned Epsom salts, and I think that is probably a good way for people to get magnesium in the body. There's a lot of people talking now.

About float tanks and how great those can be for many reasons. But one of the reasons being that you're probably getting exposed to a lot of magnesium, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think the only caution you've got to have is there's a lot of kidney disease out there and you have.

To be very careful about how you introduce magnesium in a situation like that. The water based forms, the mineral drops. There's a wonderful source of magnesium for.

People who really want to get a very bioavailable form. There's a bottling company out in California.

In Modesto, but it's called Noah's water. Like The Bible, Noah's Water. It's actually from a spring north of San Francisco, and it's the second richest form of magnesium in water on the planet. The highest would be over in Poland. So it's a very viable option, especially for people with kidney disease. The other caution is people with adrenal fatigue.

And I'm sure you have a lot.

Of clients that struggle with that. The adrenals are really run by the ratio of sodium to magnesium.

And so you've got sodium on the top, magnesium on the bottom, and you.

Start to pump in a lot of magnesium, you're going to drive that ratio down and people are going to get more fatigued. And so we have a formula for what's called the adrenal cocktail that introduces people to more potassium, a broad range of sea salt, and then vitamin C, a whole food form of vitamin C that helps to keep that balance so that they don't take when they start to take these.

So you mentioned the Noah's water. If people are. It's just easier for them to take a capsule or tablet.

Is there a standout product from your perspective in that realm?

Well, the product that I've used personally for probably seven or eight years is Jigsaw Health as a magnesium srt, the magnesium glycinate.

Probably a really good form of it would be PHP Professional Health Products as a magnesium glycinate. Both of those companies are using Albion Minerals, which I think is an exceptional company, and they have excellent products. So those are just two really good forms.

And so those Albion minerals are modified in some way so that they're more highly absorbable, correct?

Exactly. Yeah. About 80 to 85% absorption on those.

So let's talk a little bit about calcium.

Where does calcium, or what you've called.

The mineral of cement, which doesn't make it sound quite so appealing. Where does that fit into a discussion on magnesium? I know people have concerns over taking.

Calcium and having calcium potentially end up in our arteries rather than our bones. Magnesium and calcium, there's this interplay. So if we address our magnesium deficiency, we then need to also supplement calcium.

Or are we already likely higher in.

Calcium because we have a magnesium deficiency?

So let's go back to that seawater where there's three times as much magnesium as calcium.

And there is a theory that we evolved from the sea. Right. So that's a very different composition than what we have currently.

And there was a study done in.

2012 where they were profiling the modern American diet or the standard American diet, and there was Five times more calcium than magnesium in that diet.

And it's important that people understand that.

That'S a 15 fold change in the mineral composition of our tissue. Now that didn't happen over night, obviously. But the important thing is to understand that our ancestors, our ancient ancestors, lived in a very calcium poor environment and a very magnesium rich environment. And so there was a very different landscape 200, 300, 400 years ago. Well before we had, you know, all.

These boxes that we call fast food.

Franchises and all these supermarkets and things like that. A lot of confusion is that people don't realize that there are three calcitropic hormones. There's calcitonin, there's parathyroid hormone, and there's hormone D. It's not a vitamin. In fact, hormone D is the oldest hormone on planet Earth.

Hormone D is the most powerful hormone.

In the human body.

Most people don't know that. A good person for people to really better understand all these dynamics. His name is Robert K. Rood. He was a noted professor of medicine at University of Southern California Medical Center.

And he especially was magnesium and calcium. I mean, he knows, and he's no.

Longer, he's retired now, but he has many articles that explain these dynamics. But the fact of the matter is magnesium status is what dictates the viability.

Of those calcitropic hormones.

And not a lot of people, and.

Not a lot of practitioners are really well versed in that.

And so it turns out that magnesium.

Regulates calcium, turns out that copper regulates iron.

That's a mind bender. Most people don't know that. And so a lot of the confusion.

Around calcium is around osteoporosis and osteopenia. And there is in fact, there is in fact calcium loss in the bone.

But unfortunately, adding calcium back into the.

Diet is not going to reverse that process because the osteoporosis is triggered by excess unbound iron. And most people don't know that iron activates the acid phosphatase enzyme, that is what is eroding the bone tissue.

And iron also activates the osteoclasts, the.

Bone crushers, and it puts the osteoblasts, the builders, to sleep.

So all the dynamics around osteoporosis are between magnesium and copper and iron. And calcium is just a passive bystander.

Who'S getting lost because of the dynamics between these other minerals.

So from your perspective then, when someone has osteopenia or osteoporosis, it's not about adding calcium, it's about looking at magnesium.

It's about looking at copper and it's about looking at iron.

Exactly.

And they've got to understand. The thing is, the focus of the.

Work that I do is to understand the stress mosaic of the individual. Again, because stress causes magnesium loss.

I want to hear about the car.

Accidents and the divorce and the job loss and things like that, because what.

I'm able to do is connect people.

To the stress causing the mineral loss, the mineral loss, and affecting the enzymes. The enzyme pathways, when they stop working, create symptoms.

And what do people do?

They take a bag of symptoms into.

The doctor, pour it on their table.

The doctor looks down at it, opens up the Merck manual and says, oh, you have XYZ syndrome. And because you and I are human, we're also very gullible, and we believe that story, but it's still a story. And there's another whole, another way of looking at it, because I firmly believe that there is no medical disease on this planet, but there is metabolic dysfunction that's caused by mineral dysregulation.

And the greatest source of mineral dysregulation.

Is excess unbound iron, because practitioners don't know how to interpret a blood test.

So let's talk a little about calcium and iron, then. So if I'm hearing what you're saying correctly, it's the loss of calcium in the bones that's actually caused from excess iron.

And the buildup of calcium when it ends up in our arteries and our organs and so on as we age, is also associated to the iron overload.

Absolutely. If you look at the detailed breakdown of atherosclerosis, there are about 10 to 12 different events that are taking place.

The creation of foam cells and the expression of MCP1, and all sorts of.

Dynamics taking place in the intima. Well, guess what? The fight is between magnesium and iron.

And iron is activating all of these events. Iron activates MCP1, iron activates TGF1. The TGF1 is the.

Is the protein that causes calcification.

MCP1 is the protein that causes fibrosis.

People need to know that. And again, we live in a world where iron has been venerated.

And they.

They don't understand what's really going on.

That's the problem.

So let's. Let's get in then, to the copper and iron discussion.

So let's start with copper.

So many people over the years that I've listened to suggest that people are.

Copper toxic, and that's the cause of a whole list of symptoms.

I've also talked to people that suggest.

Copper toxicity is relatively uncommon and that people are in fact more likely to be copper deficient.

So from your perspective, which one of.

Those is more true copper toxicity or copper deficiency?

Well, let's go into the lab, 1927, a Berlin lab that was being staffed by a guy named Otto Warburg and.

Hans Krebs, two very probably two of.

The most preeminent clinical scientists on this planet in their day. And Krebs worked for Warburg and they.

Were bleeding birds almost to the point of extinction because they wanted to see.

When these birds were completely devoid of iron what happened. They really wanted to understand what is.

The metabolic response to a lack of iron, because that was the first true.

Laboratory state of iron deficiency. And what will surprise people is to find out that there was a three to six fold increase in copper enzymes in the blood which shocked Warburg and Krebs. And it's written up in an article in 1927. I've translated it, so I know exactly what they're talking about.

And four years later, Warburg gets the.

Nobel Prize for discovering the respiratory enzyme.

Which we know as Complex 4.

But here's the catch. He referred to it as iron oxidase. And that threw everybody off the trail. Well, there's two heme groups in complex four, but there's two copper centers. And what they've just discovered recently, in the last year, is that the electrons.

That flow through complex 4 go through the copper centers. They never touch the heme groups.

There is no this, this idea that.

It'S bouncing around the heme groups is, that's just contemporary fiction. And people don't realize how instrumental bioavailable copper is to activating oxygen. So we live on a planet that has oxygen, right?

And we got to deal with it. Well, what does that mean to activate oxygen? Well, these oxygen atoms are together and they've got to be pulled apart. Because what we're trying to do in complex four is make water so we can release ADP that can then go over to complex five.

So this complex pulls the oxygens apart, then it facilitates the movement of four.

Electrons from four different cytochrome Cs to.

Go to those oxygens to form two water molecules.

And at the same time, four hydrogens.

Get pumped over to Complex 5, which.

Is called ATP synthase, which is actually a rotor that's spinning at 9,000 RPM.

Your car red lines at 6,000.

So this is, I think this is one of the most preeminent transactions in.

The body, this activation of oxygen by bioavailable copper. It's why we exist on this planet. And so what we're pummeled with is these terms of copper toxicity and iron deficiency. And in fact, we live in an era of post1984. And guess what? People are not copper toxic and they're not iron deficient. It's just the opposite. And in fact, the problem is this enzyme, ferroxidase, which is vitally important for.

Regulating iron status, has got to have copper inside it.

And under the right conditions, when there's too much inflammation, too much hydrogen peroxide, too much peroxy nitrate, the protein begins to breach and the copper leaks out. But the statistic that most people are not at all aware of is it for every atom of copper, there's 60 atoms of iron.

And so we're blaming copper for all the booga wooga oxidative stress.

Like, are you serious? There's 60 atoms of iron and 70% of our iron is in hemoglobin. Well, hemoglobin is incredibly fragile and toxic.

If there isn't enough haptoglobin, and most.

People like haptoglobin, what's that? What's the marker that they don't measure in a blood test to tell you how balanced is hemoglobin to haptoglobin to keep the hydrogen peroxide low?

So if we look at copper deficiency, since you're suggesting that copper toxicity is a rare event, it sounds like if.

We'Re looking at copper deficiency or a lack of bioavailable copper, what are some.

Of the things that we would then.

Associate in terms of symptoms or conditions that might be the result of a lack of bioavailable copper?

Well, lack of energy because of the failure of cytochrome C oxidase, hypersensitivity to the environment, because ferro oxidase is also called histaminase, it's very important for histamine.

But this is tied into the whole mast cell activation and histamine intolerance, then.

Absolutely any kind of connective disorder. The lysyl oxidase is a copper dependent enzyme. So any kind of connective tissue, including blood vessels, needs lyso oxidase to keep.

It having proper integrity, proper flexibility.

Then we've got the functions around neurotransmitters. That is so foundational. But most people don't realize that we have three different classes of what are called biogenic amines. So we have the neurotransmitters and we.

Have histamine, which we talked about, and.

Then we have what were. When they were discovered in the early.

1900S, they were called vital amines.

Well, we know them today as vitamins. Well, all biogenic amines must have bioavailable copper in order for proper deamination to take place, for those entities to be.

Properly activated and regulated. Again, it's bioavailable copper that's. That's missing in so many people because we've been told that ascorbic acid is the same thing as whole food vitamin C, and it's not.

So how is bioavailable copper, which you've called the mineral of sunshine, I believe, how is bioavailable copper different from just plain copper, which my understanding is what.

We get in most supplements say copper is not bioavailable copper.

Right. So copper, again, has two oxidation states.

Plus one and plus two.

And in ordinary agricultural practices, the microbiome.

Of the soil is able to convert the soil copper, which is plus two.

It reduces it to a plus one.

So that the plant can actually work with that copper.

And then we eat those plants and that copper gets into our body. We have been as a society and.

As a civilization, we've been decimated by antibiotics.

One of the strains of biota that.

Have been wiped out are the reductases.

And now we're subjected to glyphosate, which is basically a mineral. It's an antibiotic, but it's a mineral chelator. And what I learned recently from Stephanie.

Seneff at your conference in Chicago, that was one of the highlights of my life. Thank you very much.

She's amazing.

Yeah, she absolutely is amazing. And she was telling me about the 16 conserved glycine in ceruloplasm. And I said, what does that word conserve mean?

And she smiled. She says, these are really important. And then she said, and what you.

May not know is that glyphosate chelates.

Copper down to the PH of one that's below our stomach acid. And so we live in an environment where the copper has been pulled out, and we live in an environment where they've been fortifying iron since 1941.

And people have it all backwards thinking.

That we're copper toxic and iron deficient, we're swimming in iron, and we don't have enough bioavailable copper to spit out.

So let's talk now about your, I think one of your favorite enzymes, this ceruloplasmin, and why that's important, how we potentially measure it, and then what's an optimal range?

I believe that can be Blood tested. What's the optimal range for ceruloplasmin?

Yeah, so in 1947, 1948, when Holmberg.

And Laurel, two Swedish physiologists, discovered ceruloplasm.

They thought they discovered the holy grail.

I mean, they were just, they were apoplexic about it.

And back then it had the composition.

Of four plus one coppers and four.

Plus two coppers surrounding a dioxygen molecule. We're talking about a protein that has 1046amino acids. There's no other amino acid that even. No other protein that even comes close to that. Size, complexity, structure. And big pharma has been trying to.

Demonize it ever since they discovered it 70 years ago.

So we're talking about the protein ceruloplasmin.

Gets loaded with copper.

And this is happening at subcellular organelles. And there's an enzyme called ATP7A that's.

Actually loading the copper. Well, what I discovered recently is research done by Barbara and Cousins. They were noted iron researchers at the University of Florida in Gainesville. In 1987, they revealed that in fact.

Retinol and retinoic acid was essential for.

Loading copper into the ceruloplasm protein.

So this is back to the vitamin A discussion.

Exactly. So ceruloplasm is the protein, you load the coppers in it, and. And when you have the right composition of copper, it is able to express what's called the ferro oxidase enzyme. And it's probably the most confusing part of this conversation is getting people to.

Realize that ceruloplasm and ferroxidase is like transformers and one morphs into the other in terms of its enzymatic expression. And that enzyme, as I've said earlier.

Is, to me, it's the equivalent of Mount Everest.

So picture an iceberg. You've got this little mountain above the.

Water and this big bolus of ice below the water. Well, now put a picture of Mount.

Everest above the water, and then big.

Bolus below the water is retinal. And so why is that significant? Because we're 60 years into a low fat diet. When they took fat out of our diet, we lost retinol. And what people don't know is what is retinol? What is retinol? The aldehyde.

What is retinyl acetate?

What is retinoic acid?

What are the RXR and RAR receptors?

People have no idea because they're suffering from dementia. And what does vitamin D do? It kills retinol function in the body.

So we've lost the supreme enzyme. And what is its real gift to.

The body is its ability to regulate.

The oxidation state of iron so that.

When we have iron in our diet, it comes into the digestive cells called the enterocyte, and then it's got to come out the back door and get back into the bloodstream. Well, there's a, there's a door there. It's called ferroportin.

And the ferroportin protein needs to have.

The ferro oxidase enzyme. And it's, it's called hephaestin, but it's still ferro oxidase to get it into the bloodstream.

Well, the same thing is happening in the liver cells. They're called hepatocytes. Iron gets in those cells, it's got to get out.

It's got to get out through the.

Exact same doorway, but here it's the ferro oxidase. And if these cells, including the macrophages.

Don'T express the ferroxidase enzyme, the iron gets locked in the cell, can't get out. And that's the leading edge. Thinking of Dr. Nancy Andrews, Dr. Rebecca.

King, and Dr. Marianne Wesley Resnick, the leading thinking is that that's the source of autoimmune disease.

Wow.

So is the ceruloplasmin, is that making copper bioavailable?

Yes, the body makes ceruloplasma. It's also, it's an acute phase reactant. And so the body will make ceruplasm.

In the face of retinol and in.

The face of Interleukin 1, which is.

A cytokine that you're certainly familiar with.

So there's a good stimulus and a.

Bad stimulus for ceruloplasm. The catch is, in order for ceruloplasm.

To express properly, it needs retinol to load the copper so that it can.

In fact have that regulatory function over iron.

So how do we. Coming back to how we measure it and what's optimal for ceruloplasmin, what should the goal be?

There is a blood test.

It's a serum blood test. I put the marker at 35 to.

40 units after several thousand blood tests. Now, most people probably 80 to 85% percent between 18 and 22.

And I came, just came across some.

Research from 1970 that was measuring, was comparing 10 different studies of not just ceruloplasm level, but ferro oxidase function. The ferro oxidase function was in the high 30s. So 40 years ago, 40, 48 years ago, people, our parents and grandparents, were pumping out at a much different rate.

Than we are today.

And the difficulty is, if you don't really understand what it's doing, the orders of magnitude of crisis don't well up in your psyche because you're like, well, yeah, okay, but, but when someone is expressing at 35% or 40% deficiency of that enzyme. So let's put it into context. What's normal body temperature or ideal body temperature is either 98.6 or 37 degrees Celsius? Well, if there's a 4% differential, we call that a fever. These people are the differential from where the ideal level of ceruloplasm is. It's nine or ten fold a fever. And so at a cellular level, what's happening? That marker is a litmus test for bioavailable copper. And what it's telling you is complex IV can't activate oxygen, can't pull the oxygen apart, can't get the electrons down, can't get the protein or the protons over to Complex Complex 5. And so suddenly everything's breaking down. And what's the significance of that? Well, optimal generation of energy is at 7.4 pH. It's a bell shaped curve. Bell shaped curve at 7.4. And to the left of it is acid, to the right of it is alkaline. And so this energy drops off when it's too acidic or too alkaline.

So pathogens wake up when the vibration drops off.

That's when the pathogens take over.

So in people that have Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, these fatiguing illnesses with low energy fatigue, low ATP, it sounds.

Like bioavailable copper is critical in that energy production system.

Right.

And the other side of it, Scott.

Is that depending upon which, which research study you want to pursue, when there's too much iron in the cell and certainly too much iron in the mitochondria, and it's very common. It's called labile iron. That's a polite way of saying free. It's free. Have as much as you want. Right. So there's four different studies. There's a 40% loss of energy, 60% loss, 80% loss, 96% loss of energy function depending upon what the concentration of iron is. And people don't realize that. And my shorthand for people with Lyme diseases, they're all iron toxic.

So let's talk about iron then. So iron, another area where I've seen arguments on both sides, deficient versus Toxic.

We see lots of practitioners that will.

Run iron testing, ferritin and so on.

Look at those markers, and that results then in a recommendation for supplemental iron.

And then what you're talking about is.

That we already potentially have an overabsorption or iron toxicity state. Other people like Bob Miller talk about how we're over absorbing iron. So tell us a little bit more.

About this dilemma that we have between.

Iron toxicity and iron deficiency.

Right.

It all stems from misunderstanding of what anemia means.

And what does iron deficiency mean?

And I contend if you go to.

The World Health Organization, they'll tell you that the greatest nutrient deficiency on the planet is iron deficiency. I'm like, really? Do you know what the. You know what the composition of iron is on planet Earth? It's the number one element at 36%. 36% of the Earth is iron. And so the modern species that's living on the Earth is. Can't metabolize it. That's different than being deficient. And what three noted authors who are iron researchers, what they're now saying is when we say iron deficiency, what we really mean is lack of functional iron. Wink, wink, okay? And what they don't go on to say is what makes iron functional is copper. It won't go that far. But they do clarify what iron deficiency is. But that thinking that awareness has not seeped into medical school yet or naturopathic school or chiropractic school or whatever school. So where does the problem arise? Well, there's a dipstick measure for iron called ferritin, the ferritin level. That's a dipstick. And then there is a homeostatic measure of iron. Turns out that 98% of our daily iron requirement comes from what's called the reticulo endothelial system, which is an absurd way of saying recycling. And there are macrophages all over the body that are recycling iron. And we need about 25 milligrams of iron every day. And 24 milligrams of it is supposed to come from this recycling program. One milligram. One milligram is supposed to come from our mouth.

That's it. And I have a client in.

In Texas who was told by her obstetrician that she was anemic.

And he advised her to take twice a day an iron supplement that has 325 milligrams of iron.

And she did that for a month.

And at the end of the month, she called me because she was feeling horrible.

And I said, do you realize that.

You'Ve now taken 43 years worth of iron.

Then she burst into tears.

And Scott, that is just one example of a thousand that I could give you by practitioners of all faiths not.

Understanding that the dipstick measure of iron is called ferritin.

It's a scam.

Let me explain why.

Because we're measuring. We're using an external medium called the.

Serum that's outside of the cell to.

Measure a protein that's found inside the cell.

Okay, that's the first set of breaches.

Second is, do you know the difference between heavy chain ferritin and light chain ferritin?

Well, there's two forms.

Most people don't know that. And the heavy chain has ferroxinase enzyme function.

It's called catch and release. And it's really important for the organs, especially the heart and the kidneys and the pancreas to have catch and release. The liver has more of the storage form. But wait, but we don't distinguish that.

In the blood test.

We just measure ferritin.

We don't know what it is.

Then there's a. There's a third breach in that in.

Order to load iron in ferritin, you got to have ferro oxidase enzyme function. Most people don't know that. And so if there isn't, if the person is copper deficient, as most people are, where they certainly lack bioavailable copper, then the body automatically shunts the iron into hemosiderin.

So what's important for people to understand.

Is that one atom of iron has four unpaired electrons. Mother Nature abhors anything unpaired. So we've got this element that has four unpaired electrons.

One molecule of ferritin has 10,000 unpaired electrons. One molecule of hemosiderin has 100,000 unpaired electrons.

So those are free radicals in that scenario then, right?

Well, they're going to help contribute to that. Absolutely. So think of ferritin as an ATM machine, and think of hemosiderin as a.

Bank vault that requires a manager with a key in a combination so that the hemosiderin starts to build. But they don't measure for that. There's no measurement for hemosiderin. Then we have the fourth assault, which.

Is that this is the work of.

Douglas Kell, who was recently knighted in 2014, where his thesis, and the reason.

Why he was knighted, is that the ferritin that's showing up in the extracellular.

Medium he contends has already spilled its guts. Of the 4,500 atoms of iron and we're seeing the shell of the protein, but the iron is already distributed to the tissue. That's a frightening thought. And so for four classic reasons, the use of the dipstick measure of ferritin is.

I think it's completely.

It's erroneous.

I think it's the cause of a lot of confusion.

And the fact is that less than.

10% of our iron is tied up in ferritin. 70% of our iron is tied up in hemoglobin.

And starting in 1972 with the publication.

By Jacobs et al in the British.

Journal of Medicine, they moved the spotlight.

Away from hemoglobin and moved it over to ferritin. And that, to me, was a tragic mistake 45 years ago.

So you mentioned the dipstick, and then you mentioned the homeostatic way of measuring iron.

So what is a more potentially more proper way of looking at iron?

Well, the full Monte iron panel that I've got measures 11 different markers. But the real acid test for homeostasis.

For iron is serum iron. And in a, in a woman, that number should be 100.

And in a guy, it should be 120. Again, I'm talking about ideal conditions, 98.6.

Or 37 degrees Celsius. So when that number as it is in most people, and if you look at this blood test in your clients.

I think you're going to find most.

Of them have serum iron well below 100. And that's a sign that iron is being sequestered into the macrophages because it can't get recycled back into the bloodstream. And so the numbers are going to look low, the percent saturation is going to look low. Ferritin very likely is going to look low. And the reasonable person would say, you need more iron. You're like, no, that's the whole problem. It's lack of functional iron, not lack of actual iron.

So iron toxicity plays a significant role in many issues in the body. It sounds like what are some of the symptoms and conditions that you think.

Are most closely associated to excess iron?

Do you have a copy of the Merck manual?

So everything essentially, potentially is related to.

So the two gateways to these metabolic conditions are oxidative stress or inflammation. Well, they're flip sides of the same coin.

And it sounds like you and Bob Miller may be coming at it from different angles, but it sounds like on the iron topic, there's a lot of.

Overlap in what I'm hearing.

Oh, absolutely.

I'm thrilled to make the connection with Bob. I went down to his conference in Florida, he wanted me to talk for 90 minutes, and I ended up talking for five hours.

I could see that happening.

Yeah.

You know so much about this.

The thing, what's important, Scott, is that people, they have amassed a lot of information, but what I think has been.

Missing is how does the body really work?

And this is a late in life experience for me.

If you saw my college transcript, you'd.

Say, my God, how does this guy.

Know how to spell iron, much less talk about it?

So it sounds like then there's a connection between this bioavailable copper and iron. And you call iron the mineral of.

Rust and aging, which sounds terrible.

So is it then the bioavailable copper.

That allows us to more properly utilize the iron?

You got it. What's happening? Here's a very simple model.

When we're under stress, we lose magnesium and B vitamins.

Those go like that. They leave the body and they're in.

Our urine and feces very quickly.

When the stress becomes chronic, it triggers the production of metallothione, which you're probably familiar with that protein. But metallothione binds up copper 1000 times stronger than it binds up zinc. And so suddenly the body has the.

The copper is in shackles. What are shackles made out of? Iron.

So the copper is not available to make the ferroxidase enzyme.

And then iron goes rogue in the.

Body and the propensity to make oxidative.

Stress and inflammation takes off like a rocket. What's important for the listeners to understand is that the NLRP3 protein, it's called the danger sensor of the cell.

It's also called the inflammasome. Well, Nagamura and his team in 2016.

Discovered that that protein is activated by iron.

People don't know that iron is involved in every facet of inflammation.

And the whole nuclear creation and formation.

Of the inflammasome and then the release.

Of capsidase 1 and 3 and all that's iron driven. And most people don't realize that.

And it sounds like iron has a negative effect on our ability to create ATP and energy.

Absolutely, absolutely. And so the thing is, think of it this way. 70% of our iron is in hemoglobin.

And what is it doing? It's carrying oxygen. So it's a waiter, Right.

And we go to restaurants and they've got waiters. Right.

But there's usually only one chef.

And what's the chef doing? The chef is activating the food.

So it's an amazing experience. And it's a nutritious meal. Well, that's copper. So we have all these waiters carrying.

The oxygen, but it's only copper that can activate it. That's an important thing for people to understand.

So is the focus then on increasing bioavailable copper, or is there scenario where you may want to do something to reduce the excess iron accumulation that ages us over time? So I know, for example, females have a monthly cycle. That's one way that they can get.

Rid of some iron.

Is there a place for therapeutic phlebotomy.

In males, for example?

Absolutely, yeah. And with the root cause protocol that we've developed inspired by Mother Nature, it's.

Basically primarily on food.

But what we're doing is we're helping.

To stimulate the production of bioavailable copper and this ferro oxidase enzyme. And we're dealing with the excess iron.

And one of the recommendations is that for women who are still actively cycling.

That they do blood donations twice a year, but for menopausal women and for.

Men, that they do it four times a year.

So the different.

The difference is that our ancestors used.

To work their tail off in the field and they sweat a lot and.

They would lose some iron in that process.

Their ancestors used to fight in the field and they would get injured and they would bleed. Well, we don't work so hard and we don't bleed so much.

And so that's building up.

Men are magnets for iron and a very important figure in this, in this research. His name was Jerome Sullivan, and he was a med student at the University of Florida in Gainesville. And in the early 70s, it was.

A class in cardiology, and they were.

Studying the differences of heart disease in cycling women and men. And he had this thought, he says, gee, I wonder if it's because. Because of their monthly bloodline.

He became a pathologist. And what he developed in 1981 was.

The Iron heart theory of heart disease, which is to this day still controversial. But when you read it, you're like, it makes so much sense because the iron is building up in the heart, because iron, it gets stored in our liver first and then the organs, especially the heart joints, and then as we age, our brain. That's why there's so much neurodegeneration in the society today.

So there's such a big focus on killing pathogens to get well in people dealing with conditions like Lyme disease, for example.

And we know that pathogens benefit from iron. So is it our toxic terrain that's.

Really kind of the core issue in.

Terms of feeding these pathogens. And does reducing iron toxicity, increasing bioavailable copper, does that help to address the pathogen burden?

By itself, there's no question it has a profound influence. And so two schools of thought, attack.

The guest or strengthen the host in.

Western medicine is all based on attacking.

The guest based on Pasteur. And so it's one channel. I don't think it's the best channel. And what the focus on getting rid of the excess iron does is all these pathogens feed on an iron buffet. When I had the opportunity to chat with Dr. Kel about six months ago, there was a Skype call. And he's got this wall of books behind him. He's about my age, very affable guy. And he said, Marley, he said, I just want you to know two things. He said, I really enjoyed your My Theory of Everything video. I said, that was very well done. He said, but secondly, I really want to put your mind at rest. He said, the pathogens feed on iron, all pathogens.

And so it's just, it was just an affirmation.

And he and Dr. Pretorius just published an article this year on the profound effect of excess vitamin D and iron to feed the pathogens. People don't understand what's going on.

So we talked about the fact that copper toxicity is relatively uncommon.

What about iron associated anemia?

Is that also relatively uncommon?

I would contend it's not possible. I think what is really happening is.

We have, I call a hyphenaemia. And what's missing, we have a lack of vitamin A, we have a lack of.

The condition of low ceruloplasm is called aceruloplasm anemia.

So we have too little ferroxidase.

I'm just learning about a key hormone.

That you probably are familiar with, adiponectin or adiponectin is this. When it's deficient, it's a gateway for so many conditions. You know, the insulin resistance, diabetes, heart disease, pcos. It's just, it's, it's, it's a major hub. Well, guess what you got to have in order to have healthy adiponectin, you got to have retinol and copper. And so we're back to the same cast of characters. And so I think that what's happened is there have been sincere recommendations on how to change our diet with an intention to try and improve our health. And the phrase that I use is we have been misled and misfed. And there have been a whole series of unintended consequences. We don't need to get into bashing different industries or whatever. It's just it happened. But let's wake up to the fact that in 1855, the Alkalis Thompson, who is a member, is a fellow of the Royal Society and a physician. He was using cod liver oil to cure anemia. And that's well documented and there are hundreds of studies since then, but now we've been trained like circus bears riding a bike in a tutu that, oh, you've got anemia, you need more iron. That's not the answer. Adding iron to this chaotic dysmetabolic state of copper iron dysregulation is not going to at all move the needle the way it needs to.

And in that scenario that you were just talking about with the cod liver oil, the mechanism of the cod liver oil in that case was what? Because it's providing vitamin A.

It's providing vitamin A and it's. Haptoglobin is stimulated by retinol. One of retinol's greatest properties as an.

Antioxidant, it is known as the chain breaker. It stops lipid peroxidation, it stops hydrogen peroxide in its tracks. And hydrogen peroxide, as it builds up in the blood is what causes the drop off of hemoglobin, which is the clinical term for anemia, is there's too little hemoglobin. That's the clinical term for anemia. It isn't ferritin. That's all 1972 and on. That's a very recent phenomenon.

So with your protocol, some people actually see ferritin and iron coming up to what look like more appropriate levels without even supplementing iron. And so is that primarily through the.

Bioactive copper levels increasing that, then the iron looks like it's increased even without supplementation.

Yeah. Case study client in New Jersey. Again, it's an n of 1. I know that's anecdotal, but she had.

Been struggling with anemia for 10 years and the doctor was always on her to take her iron. Well, she got to a point where just it was really making her uncomfortable. So she started to do the root cause protocol, and after six months, her serum iron was in the 40s and her ferritin was in the teens, and.

It had been that way for years.

Despite how much iron she was taking. So she started the root cause protocol and then she did her blood work after six months and her serum iron went into the 140s and her ferritin jumped up into the low hundreds and so she presented this information to her doctor and his response was, well, I'm really glad to see that the iron is finally taking root in your body. And she said, well, doctor, I stopped taking iron six months ago.

And he was aghast.

She said, do you want to know what I'm doing? He said, no. And with that he turned around and went to his computer and he typed in, she could see him typing. He said, patient is finally responding to iron therapy. She said, doctor, that's not true.

And he wheeled around with a real grimace on his face. He says, you want me to get paid, don't you? Gosh.

Wow.

Not surprising.

That's just a case study, but it's a very powerful case study of how.

You can keep throwing iron into this body. But if it doesn't know how to work with it, if it doesn't how to make it function functional, it becomes a very disruptive and destructive element because of its capacity to make oxygen free, you know, reactive oxygen species or make inflammation.

So let's talk then about the root cause protocol. And I know I'll mention at the end that the root causeprotocol.com for people that want more details because I'm sure we're not going to be able to get into all of this, but there's.

Some things that you recommend stopping, some of which people might find interesting. So we've talked about vitamin D, for example. You've talked about why that may not always be ideal. We've talked about calcium. Talk a little bit about the ascorbic acid versus whole food vitamin C. Why is ascorbic acid, when that's used as a vitamin C source, why is that not potentially a good thing?

The whole food vitamin C has seven.

Parts and at the center of the whole food vitamin C is an enzyme called tyrosinase. And tyrosinase is a three sided pyramid with copper at all four points. That's the, that's the bioavailable copper that the neurotransmitters use to regulate the neurotransmitters.

So the ascorbic acid then is disrupting that copper ceruloplasmin.

Absolutely. And the ascorbic acid is the shell of the, of the vitamin complex.

It doesn't have the minerals and it is toxic to the ceruloplasm protein. And furthermore, it stores iron deeper into the tissue. It's a very disruptive element that people don't realize. And what's important for folks to do, to really understand is that six years after Warburg won the Nobel for the complex four. Albert Sven Gorgi gets the Nobel for vitamin C. But a year and a half before he won the Nobel, he wrote a letter to Nature Journal. So we have New England Journal of Medicine looks up to Lancet and Lancet looks up to Nature. So it's the top of the pecky order of science. And in the article he makes it very clear. I've got a copy of the art of the letter that he wrote to the editors. He said ascorbic acid does not cure scurvy. It requires hyaluronic acid, which is his way of describing the whole food vitamin C complex. So there's been a controversy ever since 1936. And then a year and a half later, he wins the Nobel. But he wrote this article on the 4th of July, 1936. I find that very. I don't know why, but I just love that date. But the fact of the matter is ascorbic acid is a metabolic lie.

It is not the whole food vitamin.

C. So many of the things that you suggest stopping are because of their negative effect on either copper, iron or ceruloplasmin. So you've about talked, you talked about sugar. You talk about getting over the idea of low fat diets being healthy because they're not.

You talk about avoiding Omega 6. You talk about fluoride.

I know you've talked about vitamins and.

Multivitamins having copper and iron and things in them that we don't necessarily want to consume regularly. Then one of the ones that was interesting was colloidal silver. So tell us a little bit about colloidal silver. Many people using colloidal silver for Lyme disease and other chronic infections. Are there forms of silver that may be okay to use?

Yeah, absolutely. So if you look on a periodic table.

I'm sure your listeners have a periodic table nearby.

Probably not as close as where yours.

Is there, but you'll look and you'll.

See that silver sits below copper and in the colloidal form, it'll knock copper out of the the body. In a nano form, it's completely different. Nano silver is a very useful form.

And there's a lot of confusion about that.

But the colloidal form is very popular in the alternative community. But it's very disruptive to copper bioavailability.

And one of the ones that I see commonly at events, in fact, the event you and I were both just out in Chicago is the Argentin 23. My understanding is that falls into what you're defining as a nano silver.

And is something that would be okay to utilize.

Absolutely, absolutely.

So you talk about the things to stop and then there's a number of things in your protocol. And I'm going to put the links in the show notes because you have.

A great video there, lots of really good information to get all of the details. But then you have a list of things people should start, magnesium being one of them.

We've talked about that. The adrenal cocktail, which you talked about.

As well, with orange juice and cream of tartar and sea salt for balancing electrolytes. Cod liver oil, you've talked about that. For the vitamin A whole food, vitamin C we just touched on. Tell us a little about the importance of natural sources of B vitamins and how we should best get those.

Yeah. So when you break down the root cause protocol, there's three categories.

There's new minerals, vitamin complexes and nutrient dense food. That's really what the protocol is. And so the minerals, you know, I think we pretty much covered that. And one of them is boron, that a lot of people don't know that boron and iron are antagonists in the body. And boron is very effective at helping to deal with this rogue elephant. But the B vitamins, Mother Nature knows you can't pollinate a flower without copper. In fact, you can't pollinate an animal without copper. You can talk to sheep farmers or cattle farmers and if they've got animals that are having trouble conceiving, there's only one, only one mineral they add to their feed. It's always copper. It has very noted effects.

But bee pollen is a very rich.

Source of B vitamins and they're very bioavailable. And what makes them bioavailable is that copper that's in the pollen. Another rich source of bioavailable copper is organ meats, but especially liver from grass fed cows. And I've talked to over 5,000 people in nine years. I've got a running list of 11 people who are actually excited that they could start eating cow beef liver again.

My grandmother was one of them.

Well, the thing is I've got 25 vegan clients who are having desiccated liver.

That's how desperate they are to feel better.

So if you can't handle the real.

Deal, get the desiccated products. Perfect nutrition or ancestral supplements or there are several different companies, but those that food is nutrient dense. Liver is the highest source of B vitamins on the planet. Highest source of bioavailable copper. There's twice as much copper as there Is iron in beef liver, highest source of choline, highest source of catalase, an immensely important enzyme to break down hydrogen peroxide.

And so people have lost that as part of their diet. I can't figure out what happened, but they have.

And so the important thing is these nutrient dense foods make a major difference. And then the third source that we use is rice bran. Again, it's a source of B vitamins. It also has phytic acid. And we've all been thrown off the trail by Adele Davis who said, oh, soak your grains and seeds and nuts because of all the phytic acid. Well, it turns out that phytic acid is a very effective iron chelator when it's taken away from food. So there's a lot of tricks to the trade. And our ancestors knew this. See that the part that most people don't realize is that once iron gets inside the body, there's only one way to get rid of it, and that's through blood loss. Here we lose it, we lose a milligram a day in our bowel movements. But when we do a blood donation, we're going to, going to donate 250 milligrams. That really jump starts the recycling program that is so important for vitalizing our body.

So for people that have something like Lyme disease and are not allowed to donate blood, how can they go about doing therapeutic phlebotomy?

They're going to have to network to find practitioners who will do it.

They're out there.

The other thing they can do is.

They can work with products like apolactoferrin or idetox or quercetin. There are a number of iron chelators or IP6. Wonderful. IP6 is the, is the chemistry name for phytic acid. It's inositol hexaphosphate. So it's an acetal electron with six phosphates around it.

And so those are very effective in.

Getting rid of iron.

So coming back to the things to start in the root cause protocol, we talked about the, the B vitamins, the importance of those for ceruloplasmin production as well. Silica is another thing that you mention in the protocol.

Lots of people in the realm of Dr. Klinghardt, for example, that use silica primarily for the aluminum detoxification aspect of it. But it sounds like silica also has other benefits in terms of stimulating this ceruloplasmin for the bioavailable copper product purposes, correct?

Absolutely.

And the other thing that I learned the other day, Scott, is that silica.

Is very effective for activating the M2 macrophage function which is very important for dealing with. Dealing with parasites.

Interesting.

Yeah, totally shifts.

What happens is the macrophages get stuck in either M1 or M2 because of the iron overload. And what the silica does is it will breaks up the N2 function which is really very, very important for tissue repair.

So you talk also about boron, which we touched on. You talk about taurine and then you talk about the fact that a high fat, high protein diet is probably better.

Than or certainly better than low fat diets. And then you also talk about.

I believe there's one more piece to start.

Iodine.

Iodine, that's it.

So in the ferro oxidase enzyme you.

Take four ferrous iron and it's able to create four ferric atoms of iron but it creates two molecules of water. That's its gift is it's keeping the iron regulated but it's also providing water. Iodine does the same thing by turning ferrous into ferric, get four ferrous, get four ferric but there's no water. So when practitioners are using iodine, of course it has a role in the thyroid, but I think it is real secret is why they use it in the breast cancer community is that breast cancer cells have five times more iron in them than the healthy cells next to them. And so what they're doing is they're helping to regulate that iron that is the cause of the cancer metabolism.

And do you find that most people tolerate the iodine? I know there's potential concerns in those that have autoimmune, thyroid, Hashimoto's types of conditions. What's been your experience there?

I'm actually very cautious about iodine for that reason. There's a reason why it's last on the protocol. I think it's better. I'm more inclined to use food based.

Forms like kelp or seaweed than I am to jump into lubols or iodorol or whatever.

Right.

So one of the last things that I really want to touch on is zinc. And so you talk about high dose zinc supplements. Lots of us are on zinc for cryptopyroluria for example.

Another piece maybe we can loop in here is the whole molybdenum.

So in the community of people that.

I am generally talking to, zinc and molybdenum are two really helpful and good things.

But I know in your world maybe.

There are some different thoughts about it. So tell us about zinc and then.

Molybdenum Again, we're back to distinguishing between treating symptoms and solving problems.

So pyroloria, the process of making heme, involves eight enzymes. Four of them are inside the mitochondria, four of them are outside the mitochondria, and the four that are inside the mitochondria are dependent on copper. Anytime you see the word oxidase means it's got to have copper. And so the rate limiting variable in making heme is alas one and that's copper dependent. And the last step, number eight is ferrochelatase. Well, that's a crane operator that's dropping the iron into the heme protein. A crane operator is called bioavailable copper. And apparently Bill Walsh and Albert Mensah don't seem to know that. And so people are. I get that the cryptopyrroles are causing zinc loss and B6 loss, but that's a symptom of the problem. That is not the problem. And so giving people high doses of zinc, what is it doing? It's shutting down copper because zinc activates that same metallothione protein. And do people feel better? Of course they do, but they're not solving the problem. You feel better when you're in that boat that's taking on water, when you're able to keep scooping it out, but you haven't solved the hole yet. And so then the other side of it is molybdenum. It's a very proven copper chelator. The liver, it's used routinely. There's a form of molybdenum, it's tetramolidate, that's used in cancer treatment. What the oncologists have not gotten through their thick skulls is that there is no disease called cancer. It's cancer metabolism that is lacking bioavailable copper that is essential for making that, that transaction work. And when it doesn't work, the body has to go off of aerobic metabolism, it goes to anaerobic metabolism. So then you go from 136 ATP down to 2 ATP. There's a big change in the, in the fuel efficiency of that system. And so what does the cell have to do? It's got to multiply, which is what metastasis is all about, because it's going, making 2, 2 ATP per transaction. So that's why there's this foment of production. But they're using molybdate, tetramolybdate, to grab up the loose copper. Why is the copper loose? Because of the excess Iron in the cell and in the mitochondria, that's destroying the bioavailability of the enzyme that holds the copper. Again, they've got it all confused. And so then copper will build in the liver when there is a lot of iron in it, because the enzyme can't be made to make it bioavailable. So then the practitioners will come in with molybdenum, which is a copper chelator, and totally destroy the bioavailability of energy production and the antioxidant enzymes.

Wow. Very, very interesting. As someone who's taken molybdenum, it's a very interesting, interesting thought process to think through, and it's good to have some different ideas. If we had all the answers, then fantastic.

We obviously don't have all the answers.

I like it when there's differing perspectives because that's the only way we get.

Closer to the answer, I think. Talk to us as we wrap up about trace minerals. We've talked about magnesium, copper, iron. How important are trace minerals, like some.

Of the seawaters and, you know, Quinton water and things like that?

How important is getting a good source of trace minerals in this whole discussion?

Well, there are 84 minerals in seawater.

And there's 18 essential minerals.

And they obviously are there for a reason. Before the advent of refrigeration, our ancestors.

Used three times more salt to protect the meats and the foods. So I think they were much healthier than we are. So we were raised in an era with, oh, low salt because we're afraid of hypertension, when in fact it was the chloride ion, not the sodium ion. So I'm a liberal proponent of adding salt and pepper to food, but sea salt, not Morton salt. And regularly add any water that you use to cook with or drink needs to be vitalized with minerals. And the way I describe it to people is there's two elements in water. When we're thirsty, we're looking for two elements. We're looking for H2O, and we're looking for the 84 minerals that our ancestors took for granted. So that's the easiest way to do it, is just mineralize the water that you're drinking. I tend to take a different stance on how much water do we need. Drink when you're thirsty, don't force that.

Water into your body.

Most people don't realize that the bottle of water that they're drinking is basically reverse osmosis water. They didn't know that. And so what is RO water? It's hungry water. And what's it doing? It's leaching the minerals out of our tissue. People don't realize that. And so it's a, it's a magnet for the, for these minerals.

So I think people just need to.

Be more aware of the fact that water and minerals go hand in glove and that minerals are these catalysts for these enzymes, and we need more of them.

Totally agree.

As a society, we are minerally deprived.

So outside maybe of the root CA protocol, obviously your brain is working amazingly well. You're functioning really well.

What are some of the key things that you personally do on a daily basis to support your own health?

Well, I'm blessed that my wife is.

A chiropractor of 40 years.

The one that fixed your shoulder that you loved so much.

You married her?

Absolutely. So she de Stresses me on a regular basis, but it's a double gift.

Because she's a world class chef and she loves to cook.

And I can look in the refrigerator.

And say, well, there's nothing to eat. Let's go out. She says, slow down, tiger.

And in a matter of 20 minutes, she has a five course meal.

I'm like, where'd you find that? She goes, it was in the refrigerator. So I enjoy these meals. It's very important to nourish yourself on a regular basis. I have one cup of coffee and I read every morning for two and a half hours with a cup of.

Coffee and get my neurons firing and start learning all this stuff. And I've been doing that every day.

For nine years, Scott. So that's, that's part of my ritual. We regularly walk. That's our exercise.

I'm 65.

I went through that period when I was younger when I had to prove to myself that I could go the distance. And I did a marathon. And then the next year I did two marathons, two weeks apart. And then the next year I did an Olympic distance triathlon.

And so I proved to myself that.

I've got the capacity both mental and.

Physical, to do that.

But you don't need to do that to stay healthy. I try to avoid, obviously avoid the processed food. I mean, that's just. That doesn't happen. But we're human. And every now and then we like to go get some ice cream or something, but try to keep that to a minimum. We don't drink alcohol, so that's. We've taken that fast sugar out of our diet. And so we're just really thoughtful about living a low stress lifestyle. We left the Chicago area, which, as you know, is teeming with what, 9 million people? We moved to a community with 40,000 people, got about nine or 10 street lights, and it's a very different lifestyle. But it really has helped revitalize us and really allowed us to kind of slow down. It's actually been beautiful.

And you're passionate every day about the work that you're doing, which I think is also a key part of our maintaining our health and continuing to be healthy and vital. If people want to learn more about the work that you're doing, I will mention the gut and the root causeprotocol.com.

As well and put that in the show notes. Any other things that you'd like to say as we wrap up?

Sure.

People can certainly join the Magnesium Advocacy Group on Facebook.

About 1000 to 1200 people a week join that group and have been for several years. We just passed the threshold of 150,000.

Wow.

I refer to them as magpies and mag nets, but we've got a very robust community. The other thing people are certainly welcome to reach out to me by email. It's my first and last name, Morley robbinsmail.com and I give out my cell phone. It's area code 847-922-8061. The show host always blanch when I give out my phone number.

I are you sure you want to do that?

Well, I learned it from a CEO that I worked with. I was a consultant to him and I looked at his business card and I said, dude, what are you doing with your cell phone? He said, morally, only people who really have an emergency are going to call me. And I found that to be true as well. I don't get bombarded with calls. I should knock on wood.

I want people to feel like they.

Can get access to me whenever possible. But people are very judicious about the fact that they know I'm a reasonably busy guy and keeping track of a lot of stuff. But I'm happy to spend time with people.

Well, thank you for enlightening us today with some new ideas and some different perspectives on this whole magnesium, calcium, copper and iron conversation. I definitely have learned some things.

I learned some things in preparing for this show.

I know that I will continue to.

Learn from your work as well.

So I just want to thank you.

For all you're doing, for your purposeful work and for your passion in helping others.

Well, I appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation. Hopefully there'll be some more in the future.

To learn more about Today's guest, visit gotmag.org that's gotmag.org or therootcauseprotocol.com that's the root cause protocol. Thanks for your interest in today's show. If you'd like to follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you can find me there as Better HealthGuy. To support the show, please visit betterhealthguy.com donate if you'd like to be added to my newsletter, visit betterhealthguy.com newsletters and this and other shows can be found on YouTube, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify.

Thanks for listening to this Better Health Guy blogcast with Scott, your Better Health Guy. To check out additional shows and learn more about Scott's personal journey to better health, please visit betterhealthguy.com.