Cellular Health: What Your Body Needs When Nothing Is Working with Dr. Bill Rawls

What's one daily habit that quietly damages cellular health without people even realizing it?

Big thing that I would say right now that people aren't noticing is the level of environmental toxins in our world, in our air and our food and our water. You know, because I mean, we have 8 billion people on the planet, and to feed, clothe, entertain, and transport those people generates a lot of pollution sourced to fossil fuels, and that's circulating out all through our atmosphere. And it, it's much more detrimental, you know, if you look at studies from organizations like World Health Organization of the impact, but people aren't paying attention to it. And it's a big, big deal. You know, that's something that fortunately you can live around, but it's a factor.

Welcome, Dr. Bill Rawls. Welcome to Rooted in Wellness. I'm thrilled that you're here, especially hearing about your story. Um, how you teach and the essence of what you teach is really impactful and so aligned with the work that I do. To kick things off, I was sharing a bit about the intention of this podcast, and ultimately it's to help people become more rooted, more rooted in themselves and their health and what you and I know is our body's capacity to heal. So can you share with us what are 2 or 3 things that help you feel rooted every day in who you are?

Oh yeah, my whole day is about being rooted. You know, it's, uh, there's, there's so many things that put pressure on our body, you know, sitting in front of computer like right now and just all the stresses and all the unnatural things that we're exposed to. But good, good food, regular exercise. Before I sat down to do this podcast, I did a 20-minute yoga workout, you know. So just the things that you do during the day that bring you back into balance are just really super important.

I love the simplicity of how you said that most people would never opt for a 20-minute yoga session before having to be on. They would be grabbing a coffee or, you know, scrolling or doing something else. And it really is that ownership. And that's something that I love. Every practitioner who answers that question mimics that same intention. We have to lead with intention. So on the flip side, so many of our listeners will use an expression called, "I've fallen off the wagon." And I say that there is no wagon. But do you notice, because of your healing journey, do you notice the practices in your life, or when life demands cause you to feel uprooted? What are those things and what do you do about it?

Oh yeah, the big thing is just having to work on a computer. Yeah, you know, screens, you know that you're dealing with that. But I do a lot of writing. You know, I've learned so much and my part of my therapy over the years has been writing and passing that back along to other people. And I have a significant enough audience now to need to do regular articles, regular publications, writing books, things like that. That locks you into a computer. And that is probably the biggest stress in my life. You know, I mean, I, 2 couple of hours on a computer, I can feel my cortisol levels going up. And sometimes you get in those binds that, well, got to meet a deadline, got to have these things done. So you push, push, push, and you just feel yourself getting sick. And it's like, no, I got to stop. Going for a walk. We're going to go, go do a kayak paddle. We're going to do something and, and burn that down and bring that cortisol back down. But that, that's the biggest thing in my life right now.

Yeah, I agree. We don't realize the impact and, you know, of our brain constantly having to work and process everything that we're looking at. And I remember when I went to the ashram, what it feels like is like shutting down all of the hundreds of running open tabs in your brain. So your body, you finally become, you know, you get out of your head and into your body where healing takes place. And I'm sensing you and I, we would be great neighbors. We would be taking our nature breaks. That's great. I think nature heals. Yeah. All right. So let's dive into some rapid-fire questions. We're going to go deeper into all these topics, but whatever comes to mind. All right. If you could fix one thing about how we approach chronic illness, what would it be?

Yeah, the one thing would take me down to the cellular level. People need to understand the recovery mechanism. Mechanism of the cell called autophagy and how absolutely important that is. And, you know, if you're doing things that disrupt autophagy, you will be sick. It's as simple as that.

Fantastic. That's one of my questions today. So we'll dive in. So fill in the blank for this one. The biggest difference between herbs and pharmaceuticals is—

Pharmaceuticals are targeted therapies to block dysfunction in the body. But what they miss is they don't get to the root causes of that dysfunction. And herbs are actually addressing the root causes of the dysfunction— free radicals, toxic substances, ex— elevated cortisol levels, but especially microbes. So when you get down to herbs, herbs are this super cell protection system where drugs are just plugging holes in a leaky dam.

You got it. True or false? Once your cells are damaged, there's no going back.

Oh no, of course you can get back. There are limits, right? Um, but it— the restorative ability of our body is just amazing. You know, we were talking about heart things and the ability of my heart to recover from a pretty significant insult. Um, when I was struggling with chronic Lyme disease. It's just amazing.

Yeah, I, you know, my clients sometimes roll their eyes, but when I get really excited and I say, your body's a miracle, your body is a miracle, it's like, oh yeah, it's constantly working for me. All right, next one: overrated or underrated, autophagy for long-term health.

Autophagy is long-term health. I mean, that's, you know, when we talk about that word, and we can, we can dive deeper into what exactly that is, but it is central to everything. If you understand autophagy, you understand the core of wellness. And, you know, all, all chronic illnesses are associated with impaired autophagy. So a state of health is when optimal— is when cellular autophagy is working properly. It's really as simple as that.

What's one daily habit that quietly damages cellular health without people even realizing it?

The big thing that I would say right now that people aren't noticing is the level of environmental toxins in our world, in our air and our food and our water. You know, because I mean, we have 8 billion people on the planet and to feed, clothe, entertain, and transport those people generates a lot of pollution sourced to fossil fuels. And that's circulating out all through our atmosphere. And it it's much more detrimental, you know, if you look at studies from organizations like World Health Organization of the impact, but people aren't paying attention to it. And, and it's a big, big deal. Um, so, you know, that's something that fortunately you can live around, but it's a factor.

Yeah, I find that when I do an audit with my clients, the one place that we do have control is in our homes. And until you really take that leap and lower your toxin exposure, you don't necessarily notice what you're exposed to. And then you travel somewhere new and you're aware of the fragrances and the cleaners and the perfumes and the air pollution and stuff like that. It really does add up. And, you know, the studies that we're doing, you know, it's almost like a lot of people are overwhelmed. I'm sure our listeners at some point have been overwhelmed about what we're hearing around what's healthy, the wellness trends that are happening, the wellness industry being a massive industry today. And yet, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 6 in 10 adults have at least one chronic and you've seen this stat, 4 out of 10 have 2 or more. And we're seeing these statistics also bleed into the health of our children. So we're missing something in our approach to healing. So with this paradox and that statistic from the CDC that you just mentioned, or the WHO that you just mentioned, what's broken in how we're approaching health and how do you shift somebody from system management to cellular healing? What was the shift that— I guess this has to do with your story and what you had to learn for yourself.

Yeah. I think we have to go there as a society. I mean, and it's going to take a lot of people like you and I out there talking about this for people to gradually come around to it and change what we're doing. But we're basically living outside the margin set by our genes. It's as simple as that. So if you look at humans, humans of our species, Homo sapiens, has been on the Earth roughly about 300,000 years. 97% of that time, 97%, humans foraged. They were hunter-gatherers, 97%. They lived out in the open and life was tough. Their lives were short because of trauma and snake bites and being carried away by animals and lots of other things. But our genes, you know, when you look at genetics, that it— every cell in the body has a set of chromosomes except for your red blood cells, which are kind of disposable. And that's a database. So that database tells that cell what its job is— liver cell, heart cell, whatever— where it should be in the body, how it should function in relation to all the other cells in the body. But it also is a record of all the stress factors that humans have been exposed to. So at any given point in time, we're using about 1.8% of our genetic program. The rest is just storage. It's like this enormous hard drive, and it's in every cell in the body. So all of that past history— what foods we should eat, what toxin, how to process toxic substances, how to fight off microbes, everything that our ancestors were exposed to are recorded in that database. Absolutely everything. You look at how we've changed things in the past 100 years and we're, we're off the map. We have no genetic program for the stress factors that we deal with. The processed foods are abnormal. The toxic substances from burning petroleum for 100 years are abnormal. We don't have a program to process properly process them. The stress, the noise, the lighting, all of these things. Plus, you get right down to the microbe factor and think about 8 billion people and how much we're traveling. We're spreading microbes all over the place. So that's a big deal. We— so we're living outside those margins. We're doing things that aren't— that we just don't have programming for. And I'm not suggesting we go back and live a foraged diet. We don't have to do that. But if we respect that path and start living within those margins, that's how we get back to living a normal life. And I've been quite successful in that for, yeah, well over a decade since I regained my health. You know, I've had robust health for almost 20 years now. Since my recovery. Um, so those things are just really important.

You nailed it. And I love that you put a scientific lens all that because it's a basic understanding. Like, we can just— you don't need data to prove spending more time inside exposed to artificial light, eating more processed food, more toxins in the air. Like, it's just all common sense. The feedback that I get from a lot of people is that, well, if they say to you, Dr. Rawls, like, we're just living in a society where this is going to continue to get worse unless we really kind of make conversations like this go viral. Technology is getting faster than ever before. We're becoming more busy, more stressed. Chronic stress is an epidemic in and of itself. And it's the foundational truths. And, you know, you and I, because we had to go through something so serious with our health, um, I am always ready to make drastic changes. Like, my community knows that I moved to the top of a mountain because I just needed to get access to nature.

It's great.

Yeah. And I know a lot of people don't have that access, but I'm a fan of really modeling what's one or two things that you could do to invite more of that into your life. And I think this is where a lot of people are feeling overwhelmed because they might even be doing everything right on paper, you know, trying to eat better, trying to get morning sunlight, trying to take a supplement protocol, listening to podcasts and stuff like that, but they still don't necessarily feel better. Every day, they still feel fatigue or overwhelm. And do you think that we're missing something in this conversation? I think that what you're speaking to today is actually pretty profound because we're not talking about the changes that we need to see in the world as it relates to our health. But what do you think is the missing piece from your lens?

You know, it's, uh, it is living differently. And, you know, after I just said that, I would also turn around and make a contradictory statement or seemingly contradictory. Now is the best time to be healthy in the history of the human species. Yeah, we have more resources now than we have ever had for people to be healthy, and that's really important to recognize. So I'm 68 years old, and when I was a kid, you couldn't get food like you do now. I mean, you know, we ate— we— my mother liked to serve vegetables, but it was all canned stuff. And sometimes, you know, you eat processed meat. And now, you know, you walk into a Whole Foods or Sprouts or just, you know, there's just a regular grocery store and you've got all these wonderful vegetables and, you know, fresh foods, fresh meat. So, you know, part of using that petroleum system is our food distribution. System is phenomenal. Yeah, it's just really great. So you can get really good food, you can get clean food, you can make the choice of eating organic. Organic is more available than anywhere ever before. And so there are a lot of great choices. You can choose to live a less stressful life. You can choose to say, you know, maybe I don't need to be the top of the scale and income level and farm drive a fancy car and on and on and on. I can bring it down to where I can live comfortably. And that's basically what I've done in my life. And within that, choosing to live— and not everybody has this choice, but choosing to live where you have access to nature is really, really important. And you can find that in places. I was doing a presentation in New York City the other day, and I took a walk down on the boardwalk and there was green space and I found this free kayak place that you could go and plop into a kayak and go paddling out on the Hudson River, which is now much less polluted than when I was around in the '60s and '70s. So there are places you can get out and neighbor to nature, indoor air, air filters, that sort of thing is really important. So just living life so you're just not pushing all the time, so you make time to rest during the day and get decent sleep at night is just really important. And shielding yourself from toxic substances, you can do that. It's really important. And than just, you know, just that idea of exercising every day. And whether that's getting out and walking or going to a yoga class or whatever, moving is essential. That final component is one of the things we're missing from our ancient past is herbal phytochemicals, the chemicals of plants. Because for hundreds of thousands of years, we ate about two-thirds wild plants. This idea of humans sitting around a campfire roasting Welp of my mastodon, it probably didn't exist. So what they ate was, was vegetable matter and about a 1/3 animal. And so they were eating a lot of wild plants, berries and leaves and mushrooms and all of these things. Well, basically they were eating herbs. That's what they were doing. And then when we started cultivating our food and moved away from plants more towards seeds and beans, we'd lost a lot of But our, but you know, even in the recent past, we kept going with medicinal herbs and culinary herbs, and that was a key part of culture. We traded that all for those pharmaceuticals about 100 years ago.

We did.

And missing it.

Yeah. And I say this with sympathy if someone is listening, like there's a time and a place that you and I both agree on for pharmaceuticals, but I think it's the dependency. And even for me in my healing journey, when I wasn't interested in root cause healing, Oh yeah, it was the first person to say, show me the quick fix, what can I take? But then going back to the lot, a lot of the principles that you're sharing about today, when I look at the ashram that I grew up with, there's 4 pillars that they say have to do with health: proper eating, proper breathing, proper relaxation, and proper movement. Yeah, right. Look at one of those pillars, see where you can optimize. Imagine if Dr. Rawls and I were with you. It's just taking a closer look. Where do you need to do an audit in your life? Where is causing you the most stress, the more intense, the most intensity that's preventing you from feeling good?

You know, it's a big deal. It really is.

It really is. Yeah.

Taking time to take, take, take account of everything in your life and moving toward those things that are going to make you feel better, which is going to make life better.

Yeah. Let's shift and talk a little bit more about something that I love, which is the terrain theory and optimizing our health. Health. When we speak about root cause, you and your practice, you know, obviously you look at things like mold, uh, we look at viruses, we look at parasites, we look at Lyme disease. But research is showing us that it's our terrain, it's this immune resilience that we all have within us that we can actually optimize. And when we think about that, we think about optimizing our mitochondrial health and lowering our toxic load, as you said before. So can you walk us through then the impact at a cellular level— stress, toxicity, cellular breakdown What about that creates the condition for something like Lyme or mold or a virus to really grab hold and take place?

Yeah, there are 5 stress factors that affect your cells. It's really that simple. Um, your body is made of cells. When you're— so when your cells are sick, your body is sick. So chronic illness is sick cells. It's simple as that. And when you look at your cells, you can think about them as little biological machines. Every one of them is an independent unit. Now, they're coordinated. You know what, that's what hormones and chemical messengers do, is they coordinate cellular functions. But every cell is an independent— you know, you think about it, every cell came from one cell that diversified into all the cells in our body. So they're structurally basically similar. So in that genetic program that I talk about, there's an operating system that tells the cell how it works and defines what it needs to work properly. So when you look at a cell and, you know, whether it's getting what it needs, it really defines 5 sets of things that stress that cell. So the first one, and we've talked about these things already.

Yeah.

Nutrients. Cells need nutrients to generate energy, to, to do their job, to replace parts, that autophagy thing that we mentioned, you know. So cells need specific nutrients and it's different for different cells. It's like a thyroid cell needs iodine to produce thyroid hormone. Heart cell burns mainly fat. Our brain cells run a little better on carbohydrates. So nutrients, and that comes from a whole food diet. And the more diverse you can make it, the better. You know, that ancient forage food diet, humans were eating an average of 500 plants a year, and we might eat a couple of dozen. Um, so diversity of food provides the nutrients that we need, um, and that's what our cells run on. Second is toxic stress, um, and toxic environment. Um, so within that, you look at these environmental toxins. So, you know, I talked about fossil fuels, petroleum and coal. If you went back several million years to when those things are forming, they form from algae or plant matter. And if you ate that stuff, it'd be really good for you. But what happened over that million years of pressure is it distorted those organic chemicals. Into forms that our body— that are toxic to biological things and our body can't use them. I mean, nobody would drink gasoline, right? But it was plant matter. So, but these chemicals, these organic chemicals get in our body really easily and our body, our cells try to use them, but they're distorted so they don't work and it basically keeps our cells from working properly. So that's a big factor. And, you know, and artificial radiation and noise and all of those things affect us. The third is mental stress. Um, all running from the tiger, that fight-or-flight response is to— for an escape. Our ancient ancestors, they didn't have schedules. They couldn't predict what's coming. You know, it's just like you come out from behind a bush and there's a tiger and you run and you hopefully get away. And if you Well, then you forget about it and you go back to eating berries or whatever. We're always running from the tiger. We always have that stress in the back of our mind. We have schedules and deadlines and we're watching that clock and we're, you know, and then on top of that, we have artificial lighting and everything that raises our cortisol levels. And that is one of the biggest disruptors of cellular functions. So holding your body in that fight or flight response drives your cells too hard and it basically drives them into the ground and that runs down your mitochondria so you can't function. Fourth is physical stress. Now, that's what got our ancient ancestors falling off a cliff, being, you know, being pounced on by a tiger, those kinds of things. So today, trauma isn't as big a deal. But when you look at us, we're sedentary, we don't move. And blood flow is probably one of the most critical things because you look at the spaces between our cells, it's very, very narrow, called the extracellular space. And fluid has to come from the bloodstream to deliver oxygen and nutrients, but also carry away waste. And if you're not moving, if you're not flushing those spaces, debris and congestion build up in that area and it, and it causes congestion in that extracellular space. So basically your cells can't breathe and this happens throughout your body. So moving, it does a lot of things, but flow, it just super important. And then that final stress factor is microbes. And that's where it gets complicated and interesting and fun to talk about.

It's such an— it's a beautiful way to look at healing because we're not blaming a part of ourselves. We're not looking at one specific thing to fix. It's something that's much deeper in understanding how our body actually functions, which is wild that most of us don't even know about that. And for listeners who are curious about this, obviously we can identify with our symptoms, but is there a test that's accurate in, you know, assessing cellular health?

There are a lot of people working on tests, and I've investigated that for years, but there isn't one currently, you know. But possibly there will be at some point. But, but you really have one, right? Yeah, you just have to pay attention. So when you look at symptoms, no matter what a symptom is symptoms are a result of cellular stress. When cells are stressed, they lose their function. They can't work as well, or, or cells are damaged and they release substances that tell the brain that something's wrong, and we feel it as pain. But losing that function is really important. So whether it's gut dysfunction or a painful joint or wherever it is, it's stressed cells. So symptoms are telling you how much cellular stress you have and where that cellular stress is located. And it's actually much better than any testing you could possibly do. You just have to pay attention.

I'm always amazed by doctors in Eastern wisdom who, they look at your eyes, they look at your tongue, they talk to you about your bowel movements, and they come up with the same diagnoses that Western medical labs do. There's a knowing, right? Yeah. All right. So key takeaways then. I think optimizing cellular health is getting back to nature, but also looking at your kitchen. I say this all the time. Look at your kitchen like your first line of defense when it comes to healthcare. And when we think about getting to that 500 plants a year, I love that as a goal. Um, we can include herbs and spices and stuff like that into this category as well. Right?

Absolutely.

Yeah. And, um, okay, so in terms of how to— I'm guessing mitochondrial health has to do with the same type of thing. Would you say that as we age, is it inevitable to suffer from symptoms, or is this also communication from the body? You share that you're 68 years old. Obviously you're tuning in every day.

I think the biggest symptom of aging is just losing energy, but You know, technically, as long as your cells are not stressed, you're not going to have symptoms, right? So aging in a nutshell, we throughout childhood until about age 20, we actually accumulate cells. So growth hormone is high. We're building cells, accumulating, accumulating. The body is growing. Then you reach a point about age 20 where you stop accumulating cells. Now, at that point, depending on how much stress you had as your childhood, you have 5 to 10 times more cells than you actually need to survive. And all those cells are brand new with brand new mitochondria, which is just awesome. That's why so many 20-year-old feel— 20-year-olds feel invincible.

Yeah.

After that point, though, you start losing your cells. And the reason you start losing cells is because they burn out. Their mitochondria. And that's not something that you can just dump in nutrients and expect that to save them. So it's, you know, it's just, it's a fact of life is what it is. So a long time ago, our cells, which are big and complex, found that trying to generate their own energy was really toxic, a lot of free radicals. So they started outsourcing it to bacteria. Bacteria. And that's what became our mitochondria. They've actually found that it was an ancient species of Rickettsia, an ancestor of the bacteria that causes Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which just shows you how long that relationship with intracellular microbes has been. But the mitochondria have their own DNA and they have about 10 sets of DNA. 10 to 15 every mitochondria. And some cells like our heart cells might have thousands of mitochondria. Skin cells have a couple hundred because they don't, you know, they don't need as much energy. But what happens is that process of generating energy is really, really toxic. And so, so the mitochondria burn through their, their DNA, but they have multiple copies. So, but they gradually burn out through all of them. And, you know, and, and it's not the nutrients that are the, the limiting factor. It's just the toxicity of the process. So they all do that. And our cells are actually managing the mitochondria to, to keep, you know, replicate the ones that are still good and try to keep everything going. And exercise stimulates that. That. But it's, uh, it's a mitochondrial effect. So if you went through life and had none of the stress factors that we talked about, zero, it's estimated that your cells and your mitochondria, if you got, you know, a good complement of cells by age 20, you'd make it to around 120 years, probably with symptoms, and you just basically run out of Well, what happens is when we're eating bad food and exposed to toxic substances and we're running from the tiger and we're not sleeping, we're stressing ourselves. And when our— when we stress ourselves, the cells work harder, so they burn out the mitochondria faster. So that's a limiting factor. So it's that tip of the balance of cellular stress. You know, you— once you stress yourselves to a certain point and they burn down the mitochondria and they can't recover, that's when you start developing symptoms. But, you know, we all lose energy. I mean, you don't see many professional athletes beyond age 40 because by age 40, they've burned through half of their cellular reserves and their cells have half the energy that they did at age 20. You go to, say, age 80, half again, right? So, So that's basically aging in a nutshell, and it's influenced heavily by these stress factors.

I got it.

So, you know, I had a lot of stress in my life. My body was broken by age 50. I absolutely changed everything, started taking herbs. And I would say the big thing that limits me at age 68 is just the energy factor. But I have fewer symptoms now than I did when I was in my 30s. And hey, I'm still biking and kitesurfing and kayaking and all the things that I want to do.

There's a lot of intention there. Yeah, my, my knee-jerk reaction is to say, okay, where do we have to live? Where can we live in this world where we're not affected by the top 5? And then I come back to reality.

Maybe New Zealand.

Maybe New Zealand. Yeah, get off social media altogether. Yeah, but what I'm hearing from you is that this is in a fixed state, that our body really responds to the changes that we make. And as we age, I think what I really want to land with our listeners is that your biology isn't fixed. And although you might be somebody like you and I who is given a diagnosis, who is given a prescription, I think more often than not, people are leaving their doctor's offices identifying with that illness or symptom or prescription medication without an action plan to heal. It's like, oh, my body's actually just communicating with me. And I can actually make some changes right now to optimize my cellular function so that I can feel better. That's the dream, right?

That's what it's all about.

That's what it's all about. You often speak—

That's not that hard to do.

Yeah, that's the reminder. I love that you said that because most people listening, the problem right now with health and wellness is that it feels like there's so much to do on our to-do list to be well today. But I think when we understand what it takes to be well according to our blueprint and our biology, it actually becomes quite simple. Asking yourself, what's one thing that my body would really love in this moment to feel more peace, right? Start there. It can really be simplified. Yeah.

You know, it's really important. And, you know, our body is our vehicle for experiencing this life. And the quality of experience is greatly affected by what your body is like. I've given up a lot of things. I've changed a lot of things. I have no regrets because I feel so much better. My life is so rich because of it. You know, it's— I'm almost looking at and going, okay, how do I refine it? What, what are the things you're going to need to give up just to, to, to get to that feeling of just waking up and feeling super great every day?

You know, beautiful.

And you do as you age because you lose cells and mitochondria You have to be more picky about it. That's okay. It's, it's making my life better.

Yeah. It's adapting. Yeah. That's a good point. Stop looking for the protocol that's going to take you through your entire life, but instead identify with what you need in the here and now. Yeah. That's great.

Yeah.

So for listeners—

Uttermost.

Yeah. So for listeners then who might be identifying with some of the symptoms that you're, that you've mentioned, what are some of the signs that you see most commonly in your practice with patients that kind of indicate that cellular stress that you're talking about?

Well, again, any symptom is a reflection of cellular stress. There's no doubt about it. But when you move toward chronic illness, whether you're talking about chronic Lyme, fibromyalgia, autoimmune, I mean, you can just go on and on. You're having whole body stress because all the cells in the body are affected. And that's where this micro factor, I think, really is kind of the wild card of what kind of symptoms people have, what kind of illness people have. I don't really think in terms of diagnosis anymore. Diagnosis is more a, you know, it defines the drug therapy to treat the symptoms with, you know, and I'm more interested in why they're sick, how their illness evolved, what kinds of things are going on in their lives that are driving that illness. And going after that.

Yeah, this is a good segue then. Let's hover on the two that seem to be pretty common right now. A lot more people are testing for mold or maybe becoming more sensitive to mold in their environments, and then of course Lyme disease. Can you touch a little bit on, on those two? Two big ones. We only have an hour. Well, they tend to go together, right?

Um, they tend to go, uh, hand in hand pretty Often it's all about vulnerability, really. People get Lyme disease, you know, when you talk to people with chronic Lyme disease that identify with that, that they've been sick for a long time and ask them, "Do you remember getting sick around the time of the tick bite?" And the answer 90% of the time is, "No, I don't." And some of them don't even remember a tick. Well, what that tells you is that bacteria and probably a lot of other things too entered their body and was quiet before it made them sick. And it wasn't until if you go back and really go through their story, stress factors came together. And a lot of time a perfect storm of stress factors tipped the balance and they became chronically ill. And I, you know, my story is I was in the middle of— I had to stop my practice of obstetrics. I was in a large group. I went— I had to have an office. I was in a smaller town. I needed to generate income. So I started a primary care practice that I didn't have to take call in the hospital. And the only office space I could find was this old building. And I moved in and it was full of mold. So I learned all about mold. But what was important was I was very vulnerable at that time. It wasn't affecting my employees, and I recovered in that building. I rebuilt my resilience, and I didn't have the money at that time to do mold remediation. I put in air filters. I did everything I could to keep my exposure down, but I was able to recover despite that. And I think people are often told, oh, you have to do mycotoxin binders and all of these different things. And it's really, you have to recognize that your body is vulnerable. Your cellular stress, your cells have been stressed by whatever things, all of those factors that we've talked about. And the mycotoxins, what's coming from the mold, adds insult to already a bad situation. So if you you have to eliminate the mycotoxins, which means doing what you can to reduce it in the environment, filtering the air, doing everything you can. But you also have to build resilience and good diet, clean environment, cleaning up your air, cleaning out other toxins, getting regular exercise, getting back in nature. But taking herbs every day is just really super important. But it's exactly the same thing with Lyme disease. You know, it's, um, when somebody becomes chronically ill and what— with what we would define as Lyme disease, there is a point, and I call it the boiling point. So it's well documented that the microbes, Borrelia and all the different co-infections, can be in the body without causing illness. That's the mechanism of the bacteria. That's how they survive. They don't care about making you sick. They want to persist inside a host, get some food, and be able to move on to another host whenever a tick bite comes along.

Right.

That's what they, they do. If you're sick, it's because your, your body, your cells became vulnerable. And so it's really important to address that vulnerability. But what the boiling point is, is where you have cellular stress and then increased microbe activity and the microbes start attacking the cells and it gets to be this vicious cycle that at that point the microbes are driving the illness. So you do have to find something to kill the active microbes. And if you do that with antibiotics, antibiotics, it doesn't work because these things don't respond to antibiotics in the same way. They grow very slowly. They, they hide out inside cells in our body. That's a big deal. But with antibiotics, you've, you've got a, a time limit. So all antibiotics within 10 days will start disrupting the gut. All antibiotics within 10 days start generating antibiotic-resistant pathogens. That's a big deal.

Yeah.

Lyme disease, a lot of people get sick, but not many people die from it. Mm-hmm. Antibiotic-resistant pathogens are now killing over a million people every single year because we're overusing antibiotics. But antibiotics also work best for fast-growing bacteria. You get a pneumococcal pneumonia, bacteria are turning over every 20 minutes. They're growing fast. And that's what antibiotics need. Borrelia, Babesia, all the different Lyme microbes— slow growth is a survival mechanism that makes them less of a target to the immune system. They're turning over about every 12 to 24 hours. That's really slow, and antibiotics take a long time to work. So you need something that will kill the active bacteria, plot— but protect the cells, won't disrupt the gut flora, won't generate resistant pathogens, and The only thing on earth that I know that can do that is herbal medicine. That's it.

Fascinating. And yet, more often than not, we hear about people kind of attacking the system, right, with chronic antibiotic use. And a lot of MDs, logically, I guess it makes sense to them without understanding the impact of the gut.

Right.

And it's funny, I, I wonder in terms of this concept of cellular health and cellular energy and optimizing the terrain, Would you say that some people are still catching up since the pandemic, being inside, not having exposure that we, that we had? You know, that's— I ended up getting mold exposure, or I guess more susceptible to mold exposure after I had COVID. But it was also during the pandemic where we were inside more, and it took me a long time to catch up. But what I did is, and this was under the guidance of a practitioner, I hit my body with mold protocol after mold protocol, binder after binder. And what felt like, and looking back now, I was stripping my gut microbiome completely, like the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I would never do that again.

Wonders are a bad idea.

You got it. Yeah, it was too intense, and I knew intuitively as well. So do you think a lot of people are playing catch-up still from that time?

Maybe, probably so. The time inside and that sort of thing. I did the opposite. I had a great year. I'm I mean, it's, you know, we were less socially contacted, but I spent an enormous time, amount of time out in nature during that time. Walks in the woods, trips to the mountains, you know, spent a lot of time paddling out in marshes here on the East Coast. It was a very healthy year for me because it was also, I had more time to do stuff.

Yeah, more time to optimize. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

You're right. A lot of people didn't do that and they, and they lived. They forced themselves to live in, in conditions that were somewhat unhealthy.

Yeah.

But there are some things that we should have learned from that. I mean, we pass microbes very, very easily and we should be more cognizant of just how much that occurs with large, large social groups and all the contacts that we have with people. Um, you know, just washing our hands more and just be— yeah, just be careful. If you've got something, try not to spread around to other folks.

Lots of lessons from that time, that's for sure. And this isn't about judgment or anything like that, but I think it's about awareness. When you start to track your symptoms the days, the months, or the years where you tended to feel better. What were you doing in that time, and what was preventing you from feeling that way? So let's do a deeper dive then. Obviously, herbal medicine, um, a big part of this intention was to shine some light on that, and it's been used for thousands of years. It's been used by Eastern practitioners for thousands and thousands of years. And now, of course, we look for studies to really validate, you know, phytochemicals and adaptogens that are out in the world, immune modulators as well that come from herbal medicine. So what would you say modern science is finally proving about what you're speaking to today? And why do they differ so drastically to pharmaceuticals? So you said pharmaceuticals in the rapid fire, um, they don't go to root cause, right? Whereas adaptogens through herbal medicine actually understand the body as a system. Can you dive deeper into that?

Sure. Yeah. And as you said, I think there's a place and purpose for every medication made. Um, they are valuable. Uh, modern antibiotics antibiotics for certain kinds of infections are just really important. And, but we should be using all of these things judiciously. And I think we're not. Where our conventional medical system shines is acute intervention. So somebody comes in with a blood pressure of 230 over 120 or something, they need a medication to bring it down to keep them from having a stroke. Stroke. But long term— so, yeah, and so we do a great job with blocked heart vessels and broken legs and all of these things. And that's really how— that's where conventional medicine has always worked and always shined. Um, but about the 1970s, we started seeing more people with chronic illness because all these stress factors were adding up. So we continued using those same tools. We're going to fix chronic illness using short-term targeted acute intervention. You know, we don't treat someone's vascular system so that it restores normal blood pressure. We just block the blood pressure every day, every day, every day with these very toxic drugs. And, and that applies to virtually everything. You know, we don't, we don't look and say, well, what's driving the inflammation? We just block the inflammation, not recognizing that, well, inflammation is really part of the healing process, and we're blocking some things that are really critical in the body. So all of your drugs are single chemicals that have a direct targeted effect, and that can be hitting a receptor, blocking an enzyme, but it's doing something to block dysfunction in the body, which can reduce symptoms. But because it has— because you're, you're, you're manipulating one thing without correcting the whole problem, people always have a lot of side effects. The biggest problem with drug therapy, and any doctor will tell you this, is getting people to continue taking the drugs because they have so many side effects. Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's a real issue. I, like most people, long, long time ago, really put drugs and herbs in the same basket, and the herbs are just kind of a weak version of the drugs. And that's, that's, you know, so yeah, they're they're not as good as drugs.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of people make that assumption. And now I look at them and go, yeah, it's apples and oranges. They're not anywhere close. It is true, you know, when you look at, when you say that word herb, it expands all the way from culinary herbs and food plants to herbal plants that are extremely toxic and were occasionally used in traditional herbal medicine, but were basically really considered poisonous. And half of our drugs actually come from chemicals in plants. Well, it comes from those very toxic plants. That's where we get our drugs. So people hear, well, drugs come from plants, it's coming from herbs. No, no, no, no. It's coming from really toxic plants that we only— that we don't really use because they're poisonous. So when we look at herbs, and especially herbs that I would define as adaptogens. Basically, what they're— what you're doing is borrowing a living organism's chemical cellular protection and regulatory system. So plants have to protect their cells from, against free radicals, toxic substances, radiation, and especially microbes, but also regulate cellular functions. And they use a lot of the same chemical messengers that we do. Mm-hmm. And plants that we define as herbs are things that humans have found mesh well with our biochemistry because we've been using them for, like you said, thousands of years and possibly even exposed to them for a whole lot longer than that.

Yeah.

So there is a synergy. So when we take an herb, we're taking all of those beneficial properties that is adding a level of protection protection to our cells directly. So all those stress factors that I talked about, including stress or even eating too much carbohydrate, protects the cells. But really importantly, they all have— every herb that I studied has antimicrobial properties. And, and that makes sense because every plant has to protect itself from microbes. Now, some plants, depending what kind of stress factors are good, for how we can use the plant depend on the stress factors that the plant has in its environment because plants move, of course, you know, they're kind of stuck where they are. So some plants have stronger antimicrobial properties. Some plants help us adapt to other stress factors better, but they all have that span. And so it's, it's a really remarkable package that when you take an herb, You're just gaining all these wonderful benefits. And certain herbs like adaptogens that really don't have chemicals that have any drug-like effects, you can take every day. I have been taking pretty robust quantities of herbs for 20 years now.

Wow. You've studied herbs and you used a word that I love, which is synergy. And I think a lot of, um, Eastern healers or people who prescribe herbal medicine, they understand the synergistic effect of specific herbs within the body. And I say that just to call out, I know there might be someone listening who they hears about something being good for them and they go and they decide to take everything. And even in Ayurveda, from the science that I grew up with, you know, ashwagandha, despite its benefits, wouldn't be prescribed to absolutely everyone and they wouldn't stay on it forever. So can you tell us a little bit about how you choose? It's a personalized approach. You know your body, but can you describe that a little bit more? And maybe you can actually use that as a segue to understanding your Restore 180 framework, if that ties into that.

Yeah, there are, there are. It is true. I mean, we all have different chemistry and there's some people that tolerate certain herbs better than others. And there are situations where you might use one set of herbs and not another set. But there are many, many herbs, these herbs that we define as adaptogens, that do really, really well. In a lot of situations because of that broad-spectrum protection and the lack of drug-like effects, which gives them a very low potential for harm. You mentioned ashwagandha, and you're correct, there are properties about it that you would not want to use like just forever for your whole life, though some people do and they do fine with it. I mean, I, I'm, you know, there's—

I—

it's a really, really herb. Um, you— I actually use it in the program that we have. It's one of our first step herbs because so many people have that exaggerated fight or flight because their body is in turmoil. Um, so ashwagandha, especially paired with some other calming herbs and L-theanine, has this really nice effect of bringing down cortisol. So we keep people on that for several months and then gradually taper them off to doing other herbs. Longer-term herbs are adaptogens like Cordyceps and Reishi, which are medicinal mushrooms. They can be taken for a long time. They're really wonderful. But I'm starting to use a term called antimicrobial adaptogenic, or adaptogenic antimicrobial, of herbs that I used. And they're, they're not true adaptogens. A true adaptogen adaptogen, lowers your stress hormones. So these are herbs like Japanese knotweed, Chinese skullcap, cat's claw, um, that— but they really have wonderful adaptogenic properties because they protect cells, but they also have very, very good antimicrobial properties. And, and that's really important because what I learned from chronic Lyme disease is we all pick up things and, and we have this idea that, you know, we get an infection, we get sick, the symptoms go away, we clear the microbe and it's gone. And what I've realized is that's just not the case.

Yeah.

That so many microbes and the Lyme pathogens, but others, Epstein-Barr virus, mycoplasma, chlamydia, toxoplasma, this list just goes on and on and on, we pick up things. And microbes, you know, what they want to do is have a presence in our body because that gives them lots of opportunities to spread, and they don't have to make us sick to do that. And how they do it is they grow very slowly, but they invade cells in the body. And different microbes invade different cells. This is really important. Different microbes invade different cells. Different of the co-infections from Lyme or Bartonella that you picked up from a kid, kid, a cat or a dog invade different cells in the body and they can go dormant inside the cells. Dormancy is a really important survival mechanism. When you look at, at the biomass of all microbes on Earth at any given point in time, 60% of them dormant in a dormant state. So they can invade our cells, they can go dormant. This has been well documented for so many microbes, and they can stay there for a long time. Cell keeps right on working. Yeah, you don't know that they're there, you don't feel any symptoms. But when you're stressed, when you eat a bad diet and don't sleep and you have all these things going on, your cells get stressed where those microbes are and they reactivate. And when they reactivate, they break down that cell and start invading other cells. And sometimes you can have have little flare-ups of symptoms that can't come and go. Yeah, but if you go past that boiling point, then you're driving everything, and it's not just the Lyme bacteria, it's everything you've picked up in your whole life, right? And that's what chronic Lyme is, but it's also what autoimmune is and fibromyalgia and dementia and virtually every chronic illness. Different symptom profiles because because different microbes are reactivating from different cells in the body, and every— we all pick up a different spread. Well, herbs are really, really good for giving you the extra protection to keep those things quiet. It's not going to eradicate them from your body, but it will keep them quiet. So those antimicrobial properties without disrupting the gut, and broad spectrum for viruses and bacteria and all these things really important for keeping us healthy. And I think that's, that's one of the big things that people are missing out there. Whether you're overcoming a chronic illness or you just want to be healthier or even gain athletic performance, that micro factor is often ignored, and herbs are really the best thing that we can do for that.

That was such a fantastic breakdown. Yeah, I think a lot of listeners might be able to identify most with something like um, Epstein-Barr virus, right? I went through a period where a lot of doctors were testing for it, and then they decided, well, no, everyone's a carrier. If it's activated, then it likely is during— because of a cycle that you're in at that moment, and without identity— identifying with it. So what a brilliant way to consider if our body, if it's in a resilient state, if we rebuild that resilience, it's actually pretty phenomenal in terms of what it's able to, to hold, right? And if we're meant to be out in this world exposing ourselves to as much as possible, what a gift, right? They're laying dormant within our body, but are we consuming what we need to be consuming? So if someone is coming— you've obviously helped thousands of people through this protocol and supporting them in restoring cellular health. You mentioned cat's claw, skullcap. Any other favorites? Like, everyone wants to know, I'm sure, what's included in your daily roundup that you, that you love.

Well, those are some of the big ones and I think they're really good. Interestingly, there have been some good studies and it's in 2020, there was a study out of Johns Hopkins University that looked at some of the herbs that were being used, have been used over the past couple of decades for Lyme, ones that I took, Japanese knotweed, Chinese skullcap, Cryptolepis, cat's claw, a few others, and they actually outperformed formed out antibiotics for killing Borrelia. So we do know they have documented antimicrobial properties. But wow, there's some— there's such a list of great herbs. I love trying new herbs. I, you know, I'd never just try newer new drugs to see how they work, but you can do that with herbs if, if you know what you're, you're dealing with. And, um, so yeah, I take a pretty wide range of different kinds of things. Hawthorn. I still take Hawthorn. Really good for the vascular system and the heart. And not to say it's not good for every cell in the body, but it's good for so many things. My cholesterol is better now than it was in my 40s.

Wow.

And part of that is because I take milk thistle every day and have been for the past 20 years. Milk thistle protects your liver cells. You know, when we talk about detoxification, everybody's doing all these crazy protocols. Well, the problem is we're burning out our liver. 25% of Americans have fatty liver disease. You know, when I— a long time ago when I was practicing gynecology, I did laparoscopies, and I used to look around the whole abdomen, and I would see somebody in their 20s and they had this nice beefy red healthy liver. But you get through somebody around 40 or 50 and the liver was starting to have this color and you start replacing your, uh, your, your liver cells with fat cells. You're burning out your liver cells. The good thing though is you're, you're, you take the pressure off and you can regenerate new liver cells and milk thistle helps you do that. It protects your liver cells so they can regenerate. Liver is really important not only for processing toxic substances, this massive load of stuff that we're, we're exposed to, but it's also important for managing your cholesterol. And cholesterol starts to go up as you age because you're losing liver capacity to keep it managed.

Yeah.

So taking milk thistle all these years, I've actually been able to improve my cholesterol cholesterol, which is really interesting. But it's not cell-specific. This is— it's affecting cells all in the body. So I read a study not too long ago that they looked at milk thistle and they found that it has just a wonderful effect on the cells that reorganize our bone and actually was beneficial for postmenopausal osteoporosis. So yeah, So the, you know, when you take these herbs, people say, well, I'm going to take it for one thing or another thing, but it's helping everything. It's really good.

Yeah. Everything in the body communicates, right? Everything. It's all synergistic. And I think you really nailed it. You know, the wellness industry today often pushes more supplements, more protocols, more testing. And we often like go after our liver and it's like attacking it with something that feels harsh or intensive and hardcore. And I think that's part of the addiction, right? We think if we do something with more intensity and we feel it working, we feel symptoms, that it's working better when you could be doing more harm than good. And I love the way that you describe that because, you know, the synergistic effect of these herbs over time, over the years for you, and how you felt them support you, I think is really powerful. And I keep going back to this concept, like if you're looking at your kitchen kitchen as at how it can serve yourselves. I'm a big fan of teas, so I get my milk thistle through my teas. And often for my clients who don't want to be taking tinctures and stuff like that, we start with teas. So look for variety that way. But I think you gave some really, really great tips. Hawthorn, I completely forgot about. I'm going to bring that back into the mix. The mix.

It's a nice one. Yeah, there's Arjuna is another really nice one for the heart. So just really nice things. Great. Now, another story on me. I was diagnosed with essential hypertension when I was in my 30s. And that typically means you have hypertension, we don't know why, it's going to get worse as you get older. And anytime I went in for a physical, and this was when I was in my 30s, my blood pressure would be like 150 over 100. And they kept trying to get me to take medications. They all had side effects. I just couldn't tolerate them. And I finally just said, forget it. I just can't worry about it. And I ended up getting my health collapsed from overworking. And then my body was being eaten alive by bacteria.

Exactly.

Changed my life, did the herbs. Long story short, my blood pressure got better. Now typically when I go in for an exam, it's about 115, 120 over 70 at age 68. Yeah. So essential hypertension thing was, was false. So my body was just stressed. My vascular system was stressed.

I'm going to hover on that for a second because more often than not, for people that I work with from their mid-40s and up going to the doctor with something like that, their immediate reaction would be to prescribe something. And I think it's, you know, a doctor might feel it's their responsibility to go there immediately, but it's not prevention. And the reason why I want to hover on that is, I don't know, my mother, she's 83. Looking at people that age and, you know, being in the hospital, the amount of prescription medications that doctors are now prescribing to play catch-up because one pharmaceutical drug is causing symptoms. And so they prescribe another and then another, and all of a sudden it's like, oh my gosh, we've gotten so far away from root cause. So the prevention with that, I think, is, is really key. And starting early, earlier than later, is really, really key.

Yeah, yeah. You, you said something that's now hitting on a nerve, having practiced, um, as a conventional doctor. And when I was doing primary care, I seeing maybe 15, 20 at the most patients in a day. And I was doing a lot of counseling and a lot of talking to people, and it's really hard to make a living like that. Our conventional medical system, our healthcare system, is— has shifted from providing services to generating profit. And that's what's so important. Um, our, our primary care physicians are seeing an average of 40— 30 to 50 patients in a day. That is not time to give anybody half the time of day. It's the time to write a prescription, and that's about it. And so the tools that they're trained on are pharmaceuticals. They don't know about anything else. They don't know about how to, uh, to restore somebody's health or help them rearrange their life for prevention. Um, but I've kind of come around to I'm thinking maybe that's not really their job. Maybe we all let the healthcare system do acute intervention.

Yeah.

And we should be managing our own health. It's not hard. It's not something that needs to come from a doctor's office. You know, all the things that we've talked about, you don't need to go to see a doctor for that. So get healthy. Do the things that you need to do. Have a goal of not waiting to use the healthcare system. Go in for your physical, get your basic labs, all of that sort of thing, but have a goal of that being it, not having to go in every 2 months or 3 months for prescriptions. And if everybody did that, we wouldn't have a healthcare crisis. We'd be using our healthcare for what it's built for, which is acute intervention.

Yeah, it's time for a rebrand on that completely. I can't wait for the day— I say this over and over— for when we practice, we actually practice integrative healthcare, where, you know, you get to your doctor's office, you're guided through breathwork, you might meet with the medical doctor, but after that you might meet with an herbalist or an acupuncturist or whoever it is to really understand all parts of us.

So, you know, yeah, it's the practicality though. Doing that is very, very expensive. And, you know, that's— and quite frankly, a lot of integrative and functional medicine has become a big money machine too, with testing and testing and therapies. And, you know, we're gonna plug in an IV and do this and do that. And health comes from inside your body, you know. And, and I— more people need to just be responsible. It's not that hard to do. Um, and we'd all be living in a better —world.

I'm with you on that, and it's about ownership. So for someone listening right now who might feel stuck, burnt out, but also very inspired by today's conversation, what would you say would be the immediate step that you could recommend to them to just go and start taking to optimize their cellular health today?

Well, there are a lot of sources of information. I mean, I wrote a book called The Cellular Wellness Solution that lays all of that out. I'm sure you have plenty of resources for that. Health coaches are really good for helping people orient their lives. I created a 6-month program that's really focused on people with chronic Lyme and other complex other illnesses that are being marginalized by the medical system that aren't being helped of rebuilding their body at the cellular level, starting with calming sympathetic overactivity and using herbs like ashwagandha, like I mentioned, and then moving toward, you know, real detoxification, opening up detoxification pathways and restoring gut function. And finally, really just doubling down on restoring cellular health. And part of that is controlling that active microbe burden, which everybody that's chronically ill has. And the best way to do that was with a regiment of herbs that changes through the program as needed. But, you know, all of, you know, there, there are lots of sources. The information is there. Like I said, we live in a time where you have a higher potential to be healthy than any other time that humans have been on Earth because we have knowledge that we didn't have 50 years ago. Yeah. And we have resources that we didn't have 50 ago. And it's just a matter of paying attention and doing it.

You are an incredible teacher. Uh, it's funny, looking back at your path, everything we can say happened for a reason. You're such a great teacher. And even myself, I'm so curious about your program. I'm an eternal student. I think that's the one thing that we should be, just being curious around all the things that land or that kind of pull at us or that call our attention. One thing I want to get your advice on, or maybe just a note for people who are going to start incorporating herbs. Are there any precautions that they should take? I know, because, you know, as you said, the functional medicine industry is starting to mimic the next pharmaceutical industry. I'll, I'll say that. Sure. Um, a lot of companies that have nothing to do with healthcare or prevention are launching these herbal supplement formulas. What should we look out for?

Fortunately, most of them are pretty harmless. Um, but the problem is, you know, when you go on a website and you see a lot of science and everything sounds really good and impressive, but then you start looking for the actual ingredients and you can't find them. Yeah. Yeah. That's a big red flag. What most companies are doing is using the lowest quality extract that they can use. And so people just aren't getting the level of phytochemicals chemistry. So there, there's different ways. You mentioned tea. That's a, that's a nice way, and it's a very pleasant way to get herbs. But to give a really good concentration of the phytochemistry, you move toward, uh, other products. So what a lot of people are taking are whole herb capsules. There, it's a capsule, and basically it's a powder, and they take the plant on the root leaves whatever. They crush it into a powder. They put it in a capsule. Not much chemistry. That's what most people are getting. You got it. Second to that is a tincture, and I like tinctures. And that basically, you're taking the plant, soaking it in water and alcohol. So you're getting a wider spectrum of the chemicals than you would just in a tea. And then you throw away the plant parts. So you're getting just the chemistry. And those are real good. And I use a lot of tinctures. I enjoy enjoying the flavor of the herb. I mean, it's just, you know, some of them are really bitter, but I like that. Yeah. But getting a high concentration and what we, what I used in my recovery and what we use in our programs are what are called standardized extracts. So if you look on a bottle and typically a standardized extract is going to cost a lot more because what it is, is they take the plant, they build a tincture, they take that tincture, that water alcohol tincture, they put it on a surface, dry off the water and alcohol, and collect the powder. So it's pure plant chemistry. So when you look at a whole herb powder compared to a standard extract powder, the capsules look the same, but the standardized extract is typically 10 times more concentrated than that whole herb powder. And unless you're seeing the scientific name and, you know, an indication of what it's standardized to— they typically pick a phytochemical and they give the milligram quantity of that herb— you really don't know what you're getting. And, and that's what most people are getting in herbs. And And they're, you know, so they're just not getting the quality that they need. But knowing which herbs, I actually, you know, one of the parts of the book that I wrote is a primer on herbs. And we created this chart called the Green Zone Herbs of herbs that had a low potential to have drug-like effects or side effects that are pretty safe for most individuals. Not to say that, you know, a person couldn't react to any given herb, but the potential for that is really low. So green zone herbs are things that you would take just for health. Beautiful. The next zone is yellow zone herbs, and those have more drug-like effects. They're still really nice herbs. So St. John's Wort would fit in that category, right? Because it, you know, it does actually affect chemicals like the drug Prozac would. Them to affect serotonin. And then red zone are those poison things that we make drugs out of that we don't want to touch.

We don't want to touch, right? That's a great call. And we're going to link out your book and everything below. And thank you for hovering on that. I think it's really, really important. I like taking— I'm fine with mushroom tinctures, so reishi and lion's mane tend to go down a little bit easier for me. But yeah, read your labels of your supplements. If you see more ingredients than the actual herb itself, that tells you that there's a lot of filler. Look for the scientific name, but those are really great tips for, for understanding. And we'll link out to your program as well. I hope our listeners— I hope you really just take in that if you rebuild the body's resilience, your capacity to heal is going to pay off tenfold when it comes to lifespan. Maybe we'll get to that 120 with our generation a little bit more naturally than the biohacking and the poking and the prodding and the protocols and stuff like that, because I think it's possible.

You know, it's, it's, um, I don't know how long I'm going to be on this planet. I mean, I did some pretty bad cellular stress in my early life, but I, I just looking at 70 now and thinking, you know, I'm still doing things that I didn't think I was going to be doing at this point. So it's, it's all about just being healthy, keeping yourselves healthy and minimizing debilitating symptoms them so that you can enjoy life. But I just don't have the aches and pains and arthritis and all the things that so many people that, that my age typically do. And it's a nice way to spend life.

Absolutely. So don't ignore those symptoms, uh, and don't even focus on 100 or 120. Focus on the here and now. You gave so many beautiful, you know, descriptions about your day, and, um, it just feels like there's a lot of love with your daily rituals and I think that's something that's very inspiring. So I can't wait to meet you in person. As I said, you are one of my favorite teachers. To close things— Oh, thank you. You really are. To close things off, tell us one thing that you're excited about in the future of herbal medicine.

Just the availability of herbs. You know, that's the other side of things is when you look at our herbal history, I think it was very sporadically available for people. You know, it was very seasonal. You may have lived in a place where somebody knew about various different herbs and other places didn't. Now we have so much knowledge of these things and availability, we can tap into this extraordinary potential like humans have never done before. And it's just really, really cool to be right in a front row seat on that. It's just just fun. I agree.

Let's go back to the source of it all. Uh, well, thank you so much for being here today. My pleasure. Thank you. You're welcome.