The Truth About Vitamin C: Nature’s Antioxidant, Explained with Dr. Russell Jaffe

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman, the podcast where we explore the best of East and West, old and new, conventional and unconventional, in search of answers to medicine's toughest cases and most difficult problems. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Diagnostics and therapeutics discussed on this podcast may or may not be right for you, so talk to a qualified practitioner before taking action based on what you learn here. If you'd like to become a patient at my practice, go to stillmanmd.com to schedule a complimentary discovery call. Thank you for listening and welcome to today's episode. Hello everyone, Dr. Stillman here. I'm joined by my good friend and mentor, Dr. Russell Jaffe, MD, PhD. I asked him how he would like to be introduced and he said he would like to be introduced as a friend of nature. That was all. So we're going to talk about vitamin C today. Thank you for joining me, Dr. Jaffe.

And let's talk about nature's vitamin C, nature's ascorbate, which is different than almost all ascorbate vitamin C because it's produced in air. Air has oxygen. Oxygen is an oxidizing substance. So what you think of as vitamin C or ascorbate and many different names probably is a mix we have measured of nature's ascorbate plus dehydroascorbate, which has to be re-reduced back to ascorbate to be helpful. That's costly. And then diketogulonic acid, which is an excretory product that must be excreted through urine, sweat, and stool, because if it builds up in your kidneys, it will harm the kidneys. So we produce vitamin C under a nitrogen blanket. We produce it by excluding air and producing nature's ascorbate.

Now you're jumping ahead. We have to give the listeners some context. Number one, you run a supplement company, Perk.

Oh, I do. I'm cross-trained and my livelihood is made from producing the world's best, superior, more bioavailable supplements.

Yes.

Correct.

And you have a relentless dedication to quality, which is why we source a lot of our products from you.

Thank you. And that's why we created the company. I really tried to get other people to step up to the quality level we thought people deserved. And I was told back in the late '80s, I was told, you'll have a hobby, which means you won't make any money because people don't care about bioavailability. They don't care about purity. They don't care about efficacy. They don't care about evidence. They just want a bottle.

There's a certain truth to that.

Oh, I'm not— I'm— I am basically paraphrasing what I heard from friends. These were not frenemies. These were friends. And they were saying to me, be careful because this will be a hobby. You will have to subsidize it. And it's actually grown into quite a very fine business by having absolute attention at all times to quality at all levels.

What proportion of what is labeled as vitamin C on the store shelf out there today would you say is actually the vitamin C that we're talking about, Nature's Ascorbate?

Very important question. The answer is, for commercial vitamin C ascorbate that you get off the shelf, zero.

It's that bad?

It's, it's that expensive to do it right.

Okay, but let me ask you this. Let's say that they do it wrong, right? Is 40% of the powder they're selling or the tablet they're selling the vitamin C?

That's a very important question, and it varies considerably, but it's from the benign to the ridiculous. The point is that air and oxygen damage ascorbate in production, uh-huh. And we pioneered— and the only other use of this high-value Nature's Ascorbate is for IV. IV, it's not perfect, but at least there's some quality efficacy standards that must be met for an IV nutrient. This is an oral version because it's 100% bioavailable and taken up easily, but it must be taken in every day.

When you think about vitamin C, what do you think about as being the greatest benefits to the modern person living in a developed nation like the United States?

Albert Szent-Györgyi, who won the Nobel Prize for something else— he won the Nobel Prize for how muscles work— but he isolated ascorbate, vitamin C, from Hungarian paprika. And he said he did this because his wife was an excellent cook and she would make chicken paprikash, which is chicken with pepper, which he didn't like. And he thought if he would take all the paprika out of the garden, she couldn't make chicken paprikash. And the point— now, this is a charming guy, wonderful mentor to me and many people, but he pointed out In biology, in life, ascorbate is as important as light and air. It's right up there with the most important molecules in biology, and it's one of the simplest molecules, except it's very delicate. It easily oxidizes. Now, how much? Because you asked the right question. It ranges from 30 to 90% harmed ascorbate. A small percentage is L-ascorbate. We recommend fully buffered, fully reduced, 100% L-ascorbate all the time as the most effective, safer, evidence-based nature's ascorbate.

And so what do you view as the main benefits to people today?

It's across the board. If you want to avoid cancer, if you want to avoid cardio-renal disease, if you want to avoid autoimmunity, if you want to avoid chronic illness, which afflicts 80% of people listening to this podcast. 80% of the general population is suffering, not thriving. And we want you to thrive in the 21st century, which is a toxic, hazardous world. In part, by understanding how essential nature's ascorbate is to regenerate all other antioxidants and prevent free radical damage.

So what are the main mechanisms you view vitamin C acting through to have such a benefit to modern people?

It has to do with something a bit wonky. It has to do with the oxidation reduction potential of the cell. And the redox potential of your and my cells is set by only, and only by, ascorbate. So if you take in as much of nature's ascorbate as you need based on a sea cleanse or however you determine it, you will have a low redox potential. Electrons will flow from the membrane through to the mitochondrial battery and produce ATP, the work molecule of biology. But magnesium is needed to make ATP work. So you need ascorbate and magnesium, a few other things too, but right up there with life and death. You may have heard of scurvy.

Indeed, I've seen it.

You have seen it. I have. And I really want to call attention to the fact that you are a new generation of physicians who are caring and competent and want to get to the cause, not just treat the symptoms. And therefore you want to understand the molecular mechanisms or the biochemistry, which was one of my first loves for a variety of reasons. So yes, I think it is valuable to understand how important ascorbate is. For example, one example, if you want to quench viruses, prions, parasites, and pathogens. Make sure you have enough ascorbate to set the redox potential low. When the redox potential of a cell is high, viruses activate, prions shift from helpful to harmful forms, parasites proliferate. The good news is that if you put enough of the good in, it crowds out the bad. And one of the keys to what you need daily is nature's Ascorbyl to keep the redox potential low, to keep the electrons flowing from the membrane through the mitochondrial battery. And it's— we could get into the details, it's very elegant. I've heard—

I've heard that glutathione is essential for this redox and also that it is controlled by melatonin. What's the link to vitamin C?

Now I'm going to quote from Alton Meister, a very famous biochemist at Cornell and Rockefeller. If you want to regenerate, if you want to improve, if you want to protect your glutathione, then take Nature's Ascorbate. Nature's Ascorbate regenerates glutathione. It also regenerates selenomethionine and tocopherols. It also regenerates ALA and taurine. It also regenerates FAD and NAD, and then it protects the mitochondrial battery, which is saprophytic. It's a very interesting relationship that we have with mitochondria, but they produce ATP and they produce a proton. They produce acid. If you have enough ascorbate, you protect that entire chain of events and you thrive. And if any of that chain is broken, for lack of ascorbate or lack of magnesium, lack of choline, whatever, you're on the way to chronic illness. And I have studied people who reached the peak of their life and then maintained a high level of quality of life past 100. And nature's ascorbate was essential, which means you can't make it, you have to take it in, was required and they enjoyed their daily ascorbate replenishment.

When it comes to all the other molecules you mentioned vitamin C regenerating, do I understand you to mean that there is a major role for vitamin C supplementation to maintain the levels of these nutrients and a minor role for those nutrients themselves, either through supplementation or the diet?

Again, astute question. If you have ascorbate continuously regenerating and protecting all these other antioxidants, they're fine.

People might try—

you try to chase one. I'll give you an example that you're familiar with. Glutathione is not taken up by cells. Cells take up amino acids and dipeptides. They exclude tripeptides and larger for a lot of good reasons, it turns out. So if you take oral glutathione, it has to be broken down in your digestive tract to the amino acids, and it's a very expensive way of taking amino acids. If you want, you could take the 3 amino acids that make up glutathione, and that with ascorbate will regenerate, will create, will protect, will recycle glutathione.

You mentioned pH in there. And I know your vitamin C is formulated to optimize the body's pH. Can you talk a little bit about how you did that and why that's so important?

You don't want to take ascorbic acid. You do want to take a fully buffered, multi-mineralized vitamin C, Nature's Ascorbate, because whether you need 1, 10, or 100 grams of ascorbate, you need minerals to go along with that ascorbate. That's why it's fully buffered. And why we include calcium, magnesium, zinc, and potassium in a balanced form. So whether you need 1, 10, or 100 grams, you get the minerals to activate the vitamin C in certain pathways.

What happens if we, say, chronically consume an acidifying diet or use supplements that are acidifying the body to the body's internal chemistry and nutrient stores?

Then you create metabolic acidosis, which means the loss of the proton gradient in the cell, the loss of ability to make ATP in abundance in the cell, the lack of ATP activation in the cell. And metabolic acidosis is epidemic, and you can check easily with your morning urine after rest. So after 6 hours The fluid in the bladder equilibrates with the lining cells, and you get one time a day the accurate measurement of whether you do or don't have metabolic acidosis. You— your urine pH should be 6.5 to 7.5, and that means you need 2 doses a day of magnesium with choline citrate, and you need ascorbate, we think, ideally based on your weekly sea cleanse, because the amount of stress and toxins you get exposed to varies week by week. So we recommend generally on a weekend, spend an hour or two doing a sea cleanse correctly, and then you gate the amount. You determine the amount of ascorbate you need on a daily basis based on your weekly sea cleanse.

People might ask why we would need or benefit from such large doses of this vitamin, say, making an argument from one or more perspectives of this all sounds good, But why do we really need these doses, particularly in our modern world? What do you say to people who have that objection?

I point out that the 21st century is a radically different time than even the 20th century. The number of toxins, hormone-disrupting forever molecules, solvent residues, toxic minerals, mold products, and radioisotopes— all of them are anti-nutrients that require more antioxidants, especially nature's ascorbate, Because we are marinating in a sea of toxins. And just recently, something we've been talking about for many years has become very au courant, which is microplastics. So I want to reduce by 80% your exposure to these toxins, and I want to increase your body's ability to get rid of the toxins through good hydration, through kidney, sweat, urine, breath, practicing a meditation or a mindfulness practice to relax and de-stress yourself. Then the ascorbate goes further. You will need more ascorbate if you don't practice life enhancement, and you will need less ascorbate if you do.

We focus on total toxic burden as one of the key drivers of disease. You'll take, say, 10 patients. 2 of them very little effort to restore to vitality. 4 of them, more effort. Another 4, even more effort. 2 may really struggle. We come back to the total toxic burden always, as well as stress, which factors into that as the key differentiator between patients in terms of who does very well, very quickly with relatively minimal input, and those who struggle What are your thoughts on how vitamin C plays a role in moving people forward from that very toxic place to a lower toxic, total toxic burden? And, you know, what I've observed in practice that I'll share with you is that rarely is the effect of the vitamin C on patients very profound in an immediate sense. There, there— I'm not saying there aren't, and I'll share a couple of anecdotes. We had a patient who we happened to run into in person once who had a bug bite. We gave them the vitamin C and the bug bite, which was increasingly swelling, and she was concerned about needing medical attention. It shrank by 50% in a matter of hours. She was amazed. I also had a patient who tried it and his 8 out of 10 back pain went to a 2 out of 10. He had been planning on having a back surgery to address this pain, and what I found remarkable about that is that effectively, effectively, this gentleman had subclinical scurvy. I didn't check a vitamin C level in his blood. I didn't do any kind of other—

it's hard to measure vitamin C accurately in the blood. It can be done for research purposes and others, but you can determine chronic scurvy, which he had, from history.

In the end, the real proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Aha.

And what I was getting at is that we do have the occasional case of just profound improvements. And that's why whenever someone is sick, whenever someone has an acute injury, an acute illness, the first thing we reach for is vitamin C, nature's ascorbate, as you like to call it. But the other thing I've tried to impress upon patients is the importance of using vitamin C for a prolonged period of time to help restore all these physiologic systems within the body in a gentle, non-invasive, simple way that doesn't require an extremely complicated protocol or supplement list or daily routine. And I'm curious your perspective on long-term and also some specifics. It's all well and good to say vitamin C helps us minimize or mitigate our damage induced or incurred or suffered from microplastics, but how does it do that?

Ascorbate, among other remarkable features, stimulates repair of your infrastructure, your connective tissue, your collagen, elastin, and glycosaminoglycans. Leland Stillman. I did my PhD on collagen. It's a remarkable molecule, and it does repair. It can always be repaired over time. You do not build collagen by swallowing collagen or collagen peptides. You only build collagen where and when it's needed if you have enough ascorbate to activate the fibroblasts, the dendritic cells, the wiggly cells that touch every other cell in the body. And when something is worn out, they replace it, and they synthesize and put in place healthy new collagen-elastin connective tissue. But that takes tincture of time. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Yes, occasionally people will say God, I'm better. We're grateful for that, but usually it takes time to undo the chronic disease, the loss of infrastructure from connective tissue to hearts and blood vessels to bones and muscles to all of you, including the two brains, the one in your head and the one in your gut. And they communicate continuously through the vagus bidirectional highway, which when I was a young physician, we were taught the vagus nerve comes from the brain to the body, it doesn't go back, because we didn't understand how it really works. So today we know enough to know how hazardous each day is, and if you want to chaperone the toxins out of the body, use Nature's Ascorbate. If you want to protect the kidney, the bowel, the lungs, the heart, the brain. Nature's ascorbate to the rescue. And yes, we need substantially more today than before because of all those toxins.

It's interesting because I— even though we see that we need more today and people benefit greatly from taking more today on a daily basis, I would say indefinitely, and I dose it every day myself with rare exceptions.

We don't have to be perfect. The good news is we don't have to be perfect because if we required perfection, we'd all be dead. Okay. Yes. If you do most of the time, the things that your body wants, needs, and appreciates, it'll be good in response. And if you ignore the signals, you'll rue the day.

I have a new favorite quote. It's Rome wasn't built in a day, but they laid bricks around the clock. Said I thought it was quite funny. So let me summarize that vitamin C is truly remarkable in that it helps regenerate many of the key nutrients that the cell needs for optimal function. It avoids the problems we see with dosing those nutrients independently or alone. It's incredibly versatile in that respect, and the body uses it as it needs to use it by helping the cell create energy. And optimize mitochondrial function, it has a systemic effect of helping the body to eliminate toxins, waste products, defective cells. And some of that is mediated, I'm sure, by the respiratory burst, which, if people don't know, when your immune system is trying to destroy something, it creates what we call the respiratory burst, which is a, essentially, assault of, if you want to look at it that way, some people might take issue with that description, of free radicals that then break down a tissue or cell and then the immune system cleans it up. So it does all of this and it helps produce and repair the body's connective tissue structure in a way that is often the missing link in connective tissue and structure in the body in the modern age. Is that a fair summary? Said Okay, did I miss anything?

No, no, but I do want to reinforce the notion that ascorbate wraps around toxic minerals, it wraps around microplastics, and it chaperones them out of the body. Now, water-soluble things come out through urine, sweat, and stool. Microplastic is lipophilic, it's fat-loving, so there we use low-temperature saunas to mobilize the sweat oils that include lowering your microplastic burden. So you can avoid getting exposed, and then you can get it out of the body. But you have to understand the difference between fat-soluble and water-soluble.

Interesting. You mentioned some other nutrients— magnesium, choline citrate. Let's talk about how those play with vitamin C. Yes.

In order for ascorbate to work, it has to work through ATP. Every ATP molecule requires one magnesium molecule to activate it. Otherwise, it doesn't work. So magnesium is nature's calcium channel blocker. If people had enough magnesium, we could avoid a billion dollars a year of calcium channel blocker medications because they do lower blood pressure, but at a cost. And nature's calcium channel blocker is uptake enhanced. You triple the uptake of magnesium when you combine it with choline citrate.

Let's talk more about that. We see a—

very important, this is very important. There are things called ion channels. There's an ion channel for sodium and potassium, there's an ion channel for calcium and magnesium. But interestingly, it's a very delicate ion channel and it saturates at 1/3 of what you put in. So that means if you put in a unit of magnesium, 1/3 of that unit will get into the body and two-thirds will stay in the intestines. And if you take as much magnesium as you might really need, the magnesium will build up in the intestines and cause diarrhea, and probably you will run away from the person who recommended that. Mildred Seelig was a giant on magnesium for many decades, was a friend and mentor to me and many people, and she kept pointing out that she ran the American College of Nutrition for many years so that people wouldn't forget about magnesium. And now I'll drop in one little pearl. If your serum magnesium— this is easily measured but rarely measured— if your serum magnesium is in the lower half of the usual lab range, you're deficient. And if you're in the upper half of the usual magnesium range, you're sufficient. This is called CLMD, chronic latent magnesium deficiency, defined by Ronald Lean, my colleague and friend, probably 15, 20 years ago, and it's been multiply proven in young and older people that you triple the uptake of magnesium when you include choline citrate. And then you correct the choline deficiency because acetylcholine and choline to inositol and cholinergic bile salts are all helpful and needed in larger amounts today than ever. To the point where my colleague Patricia Deußer at the Military Medical School actually has convinced the Department of Defense to consider including a choline supplement in the meals ready to eat, because if you're choline deficient, you can't fire accurately. You make mistakes. You press the wrong button. That could be very unfortunate for all of us. So the good news is that when you combine a dose of magnesium, which is 2 capsules, with a teaspoon of choline citrate, you triple the uptake of magnesium, you correct the choline deficiency, and you alkalinize, energize, help the mitochondrial battery to produce more ATP.

You've alluded to now the health benefits of choline, which I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on. Why do we need more of this than we have in years past?

A very good question. Choline is depleted by many free radical oxidative harmful chemicals. There's a ratio of choline to inositol at the cell membrane that need— needs to be in balance for the cell to allow things in and out. Inositol is abundant for a variety of reasons. Inositol is abundant in our diet. Choline has been progressively excluded from processed and ultra-processed foods and beverages. And that was a big mistake. Now we look back and we say maybe we shouldn't have done that. But looking forward, the packaged goods industry, they no longer consider themselves a food company. They produce packages, boxes, wraps, things. I've worked with these. These are nice people. They cannot work with whole foods. Quaker Oats and General Foods Both spent several years with me helping their engineers to go back to whole foods, like steel-cut oats, not rolled oats. We had a plan. You could execute that plan completely, but there would have been no profit in either company for 15 months. You will not be the CEO and chairman of a company if it doesn't make any profit. The way we process what are called chipped and crisped and ultra-processed meats and foods and beverages in plastic has created an epidemic of chronic disease. So I get all of my liquids in glass, and I prefer Pellegrino. I prefer sparkling because I have good water, but I also like sparkling water some of the time. And Pellegrino happens to be ultra-low in microplastics. So everything in glass, nothing in plastic, and nothing from the deli.

So how does choline— you mentioned specifically choline plays a number of different roles around the body beyond just cellular function, things like bile function, bile flow. Tell us more.

I think the most important thing is acetylcholine. Acetylcholine is a soothing neurotransmitter. If you have enough acetylcholine you're cool. If you lack acetylcholine, you're anxious. It's that important.

Interesting.

And that fundamental.

What are your thoughts on— I see, I actually don't see a lot of people raving about choline supplements.

No, there's a good reason. You have to use choline citrate, which is a liquid. If you take any other form of choline, it doesn't really have bioavailability. It doesn't really get into your body. There's a lot of different versions of choline that are being sold as supplements, and at best they're placebos.

Why does the citrate molecule matter so much as a complex with the choline?

And now we go to Sir Hans Krebs, the man who discovered cycles. Biochemistry before Hans Krebs was linear. After Hans Krebs, it was cycle, cycles. Now, he identified the first, the citric acid cycle. And citrate plays a critical role in the citric acid cycle. So if you want to produce ATP, you want to feed citrate into the battery or mitochondria. And if you take choline in another form, it stays in the gut. So fooling Mother Nature is never a good deal, but fooling consumers in the marketplace is often done, unfortunately. And that's why we have these kinds of conversations.

That's right. Very interesting. And the other thing that makes me think about is the fact that you mentioned metabolic acidosis and citric acid is one of those funny acids that produces a more alkaline pH in the body.

Paradoxically, but yes, this goes again back to the Krebs cycle. You take in and you work through the cycle to generate ATP and a proton. If that proton builds up in the mitochondria, it'll shut the mitochondria down. It's called acidosis. So the mitochondria gives the cytoplasm, gives the cell the ATP, and accompanies it with a proton. Now you need citrate to alkalinize the environment, and you need choline and magnesium to help get rid of that extra acid proton. That's the definition of metabolic acidosis. If you want to know whether you have metabolic acidosis, check your urine pH after rest.

What's fascinating about this is that I've noticed in the acid-alkaline debates online in the functional medicine, integrative medicine space, very few people actually get to this level of detail. But what is interesting is that from what I can tell, what matters about whether or not the food drives the urinary pH down And for people who don't know, the short list of things that drive your urinary pH down are alcoholic beverages, meats. The redder the meat, generally the more acidifying it is. I believe fish are less acidifying, but still so that's largely driven by the protein content, which is acidic because it's amino acids and the fat that is acidifying.

So we have alkalizing fat. That's good for you. And we have acidifying fat, that's bad for you.

Now that's a fascinating concept we'll have to come back to. Sure. The rest of the shortlist is grains and pseudo-grains. And then the—

and we have an answer. What you just said is absolutely correct. But what we say is eat whole, organic, and biodynamic if possible. Eat low on the food chain. There'll be less toxins and more nutritious, delicious, aromatic, with herbs and seasonings, but be careful because herbs and seasonings are often contaminated.

Yes.

I use turmeric in my curry, but I have a lead-free turmeric. I use a variety of herbs that either come from my permaculture biodynamic food forest garden out front, from a quality source that cares about contamination. What you said is absolutely true with the addition of today No grains at all, not even rice. Rice contains arsenic. We know this. We know that arsenic is bad for you. They can't get the arsenic out of the water where they grow the rice. So we say no grains at all, which means no gluten, nothing hard to digest, low toxicity, which means lots of grasses. You can have millet and fonio. You can have buckwheat. And quinoa, and a wide variety of nutritious, delicious grasses with no glutens and low toxicity.

So to be clear here though, we're splitting a hair. Most people don't know this. There are grains and there are pseudo grains.

That's a way of saying it. But my point is, if you can make a bread out of it, it's a grain with gluten. Wheat gluten is different than oat gluten, different than rice gluten, et cetera. But All grains have gluten, and that's why you can make muffins and breads out of grasses or pseudo grains. You can't.

Interesting. I will confess that I have not—

easier, and they're easier to digest. That's my point. Your microbiome delights in grasses, and it really is troubled by grains.

I have not purged grains from my diet.

One step at a time.

I'm young. I'm still getting away with it.

Uh-huh.

And then I also, I think I may have forgotten to mention that legumes are acidifying in general.

Yes, but a wide variety of whole foods in a wide variety of ways. So once a week we have a chili, multi-bean with lots of herbs and probiotics and so forth. Once a week we have a dal, lentil, again with lots of herbs and spices and shallots. Which are alkalizing and detoxifying. Once a week we have a curry. Once a week we have a liquid nutrient day. Once a week we have fungi and sea vegetables. In Japan, where people live longer and stay healthier longer, they eat a lot of sea vegetables, which means iodine and iodide. Yes, we need more iodine and iodide from natural sources like sea vegetables And fungi. In my backyard, we have 7 mushroom guilds. So we harvest our own shiitakes twice a year. Nice. It is. It makes me hopeful to go out and harvest rosemary and maybe reishi mushrooms or maybe lion's mane. In my green grocer, they have fresh mushrooms and the lion's mane sells out fastest because people have discovered that lion's mane, which looks like a brain, is actually good for your brain. You learned that from Paul Stamet.

So we've got these acidifying foods over here, and if we over-rely on these, they will create this metabolic acidosis you're talking about. The mitochondria will function more and more poorly. I've been struck by when I look at the nutritional profiles of the foods that causes acidification versus alkalinization, that the foods that tend to alkalinize are very rich and have a higher density in minerals—potassium, magnesium, calcium, to a certain extent sodium—and then micronutrients, right? Manganese, zinc, copper, other trace elements. What are your thoughts on these effects of the minerals on the pH of the diet and therefore the function of the mitochondria?

About 30 years ago, we put together the Food Effects on Body Chemistry Chart, which is the next generation after acid ash residue, which is misleading. And we recommend that 80% of what you eat, 80% of what you consume, be from the alkaline form inside while you're recovering, and at least 60% when you're well. So now we can produce— and the free download if you want to get it online— the food effects on body chemistry. And many foods are acid in the laboratory but alkaline in the body. Yes. That's just biochemistry. So we recommend using this to guide consumption. And if you do this, you'll have a wide variety of foods in a wide variety of yummy ways and easy to digest, helpful to the microbiome, helpful to the metabolome, helpful for detoxification. Bio-detoxification is essential. It starts with Nature's Ascorbate. It includes magnesium and choline citrate. But then you get to GGOBE: garlic, ginger, red onions and shallots, broccoli sprouts. All sprouts are good, broccoli sprouts are especially good. And either duck or quail eggs. Unfortunately, both chicken and chicken eggs today are too contaminated, even the organic ones.

I'm still eating them.

Look, I want you to live well and happy, and I want you to be dancing with me in another 30 years. You're still young. But I'm looking forward to the next decades because we can clean up our inner and outer environment and we can thrive even in this 21st century. But we have to be proactive. We have to be engaged. We have to use predictive biomarkers interpreted to best outcome goal values the way you do.

One thing that we haven't mentioned that I think is important to talk about is the B vitamins and trace elements, we use your Perk Lifeguard multimineral multivitamin. And I think it's a very important part of this story because all the supplements we've mentioned up till now, the vitamin C, the magnesium, the choline citrate, we view as very powerful. We use them regularly. Although I will mention that part of why I wanted to sit down with you and discuss this is that compliance is poor. I had an interesting conversation with someone else very well placed in the supplement industry who explained to me that I should basically not bother selling anything other than a pill because people don't comply and don't take it. I should just focus on something that— things that come in pills. Otherwise, I would never get compliance, let alone the choline citrate you, you offer through Perk is that choline citrate is refrigerated.

And so, yes, for 1 month it can be on the counter. If you want to store it for more than a month, it should be refrigerated. We keep it in the fridge. We keep it cold.

I keep it in the fridge.

We keep it cold. And I recently— but I will say, if you can see the bottle, you're more likely to use it, and if it's hidden in the refrigerator, you're less likely to use it. But I do want to head on or address head-on this issue of Lifestyle choice and epigenetics. Very often when I am in conversation with someone about what ails them, I bring up, is it worth a few minutes throughout the day to save your life? I can tell you how to do that, and I can tell you how to do that in a few minutes here and there. It doesn't require a major disruption in your life, but it's a makeover in your kitchen, in your bedroom, in your personal care, and in your environment. I find more and more people willing to put in that effort. It is effort. And I'm in the industry, as you correctly said, but I view us as a lifestyle company wanting to be— wanting people to live long and joyfully, including needed supplements. But the supplements have to come after the cooking pot. They have to come after the activity. Mental and physical and emotional. For those who are ready, we are ready. For those who say we need more studies and evidence, we actually don't. We have among the most successful outcome studies in type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, fibromyalgia. These were 6-month-long, properly controlled. We've done a double-blind placebo-controlled trial of our Lifeguard tabs fuel. We had to invent a novel delivery system. And with regard to B complex, it should be complete B complex. And it turns out all the B vitamins need to be regenerated by ascorbic.

Interesting, that I've not heard.

They're all antioxidants, and all antioxidants need to get regenerated by the maternal sacrificial antioxidant known as nature's ascorbic.

The doses you used in your multimineral multivitamin. Would you briefly touch on why you formulated it the way that you did with what are on the high end of doses compared to what people consume on a daily basis?

To be specific, if you take an entire bottle of Theragran or One A Day or Nature's Made, an entire bottle, it will have less bioavailable nutrition than two of our Lifeguard capsules. What I used to do as a demo was open a bottle of the other competitor, pour it into a big glass, and point out that 2 of our Lifeguard capsules have more bioavailable nutrition than the entire bottle, making that a very expensive placebo. Now, daily values and RDAs were designed to tell you how much you needed at a minimum. They don't tell you how much you need to be optimum. Emmanuel Chereskin and other colleagues spent decades trying to get the FDA to keep daily values but include ODAs, optimum daily allowances. Right now, the methodology that FDA uses to measure how much magnesium and how much zinc and how much certain other nutrients that you need is clearly and universally agreed to be below the human need for survival. But changing methodology in any big organization is a challenge. Ronaldine and other colleagues of ours have been urging FDA to recognize the deficiency of magnesium at least in regard to diabetes and other autoimmune conditions for decades. The evidence is very clear, but moving a big organization administratively is a challenge. Let me just rest with that. My point is you need to be proactive. You need to have a health coach or a physician who can guide you personally to what you need today. 'Cause probably it's gonna be a bunch more. And I'll just pick one example, B6. You need more B6 to activate a whole bunch of reactions that are beneficial. And not too long ago, B6 was under a cloud. It was under a cloud because some scientists associated B6 with neuropathy. Nerve damage. In hindsight, it was clear that nature's B6 was always safe and effective at treating this condition, but synthetic B6 had a lot of what are called congeners, a lot of other molecules that actually competed with B6. The same thing is true for tryptophan. When Prozac was new, tryptophan was under a cloud. Because of a manufacturing glitch. My team published the fact that uncontaminated tryptophan treated EMS, eosinophilia myalgia syndrome, was successfully treated and reported by us using uncontaminated tryptophan, and we concluded there must be some contaminant. I have an excellent FDA lawyer. He called me up and he said, did you publish something that the FDA doesn't like? I said, "I publish the truth." He said, "Why didn't you call me?" I said, "I didn't think I needed protection." He said, "I'll get you out of this. Don't do it again." No, this is serious. The Food and Drug Administration eventually found something called Peak E, which was a contaminant in the tryptophan that caused this problem. So they eventually agreed completely with our group, but we got there first. And again, these were excellent scientists, good people who couldn't see the forest for the trees. And that's the situation we're in today. We have to get very up close and personal with ourselves, understand your nature, nurture, and wholeness needs. And then you can thrive in the 21st century, which is a title of our book. And we want to make it fun, easy, to make these changes, these makeovers in kitchen, bedroom, personal care. And environment includes relationships. Relationships can be nurturing or relationships can be toxic. I prefer those that are nurturing. I also laugh every day. Sometimes I just laugh, not at anything. Nothing stimulates the laughter. I just find that Patch Adams' concept of chakra therapy, chuckles, and laughter. It changes your brain. And if you go out and walk for just 20 minutes in a garden or a forest or a glade, your brain improves. Just 20 minutes. And walking turns out to be an excellent exercise. If you want to do more exercise, stretch more. We're big fans of stretching, mentastics, Feldenkrais. I was Moshe Feldenkrais's doctor for a brief period of time. So I went to debunk a number of people from whom I learned an enormous amount about my ignorance. And I've done my best to repackage, reframe, not use esoteric jargon, but just speak plainly about what it takes to save your life today.

Thank you for joining me, Russ. It's always good to see you.

A pleasure to be with you.