Realfoodology - 67: Let’s Get Back to Ancient Remedies with Dr. Josh Axe

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

On today's episode I speak with Dr. Josh Axe, founder of Ancient Nutrition and DrAxe.com.  He is a certified doctor of natural medicine (DNM), doctor of chiropractic (DC) and clinical nutritionist (CNS) with a passion to help people get healthy by empowering them to use nutrition to fuel their health. He is the bestselling author of the KETO DIET, Eat Dirt, and COLLAGEN DIET, and author of the new, best-selling book Ancient Remedies. Dr. Axe founded the natural health website DrAxe.com, one of the top natural health website in the world today. Its main topics include nutrition, natural remedies, fitness, healthy recipes, home DIY solutions and trending health news. Dr. Axe is also the co-founder of Ancient Nutrition, which provides protein powders, holistic supplements, vitamins, essential oils and more to the modern world. Dr. Axe is an expert in functional medicine, digestive health and herbal remedies and founded one of the largest functional medicine clinics in the world, in Nashville, TN, and served as a physician for many professional athletes. Show Links: Dr. Axe Website Dr. Axe Facebook Ancient Nutrition Facebook Dr. Axe Instagram Ancient Nutrition Instagram Dr. Axe Pinterest Dr. Axe YouTube

On today's episode of the Real Foodology Podcast. If you want to get healthy, you've got to change your environment, your internal environment. And you do that by the food you eat, by the mindset you keep, you know, by keeping stress low. All of these things help create a healthy internal environment. And the truth is we all actually, this might surprise people, we should all have a certain amount of good bacteria. We should all have a certain amount of parasites are normal,

actually. Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Real Foodology podcast. I am your host, Courtney Swan. I am the creator behind Real Foodology, which is of course this podcast. It started out as a website 10 years ago when I was getting my master's in nutrition and I needed an outlet to talk about all the things that I was learning in school. I'm so passionate about health and getting to the root cause of things. I think we've lost sight of what it really truly means to be healthy and we don't focus enough on diet and lifestyle in this country. And so for me, part of my job is really to have these conversations and hopefully spread light on the things that we can better in our lives. Because ultimately, for me, the goal is just to feel good in my body. You know, I want to live a

long, healthy life. And I want that for everyone, every human on this planet, I believe deserves to thrive in their bodies. And for me, I believe that that really is getting to the root cause of issues, ailments, diseases. And you know, it really, at the end of the day, just comes down to education. The more that we are informed, the better decisions that we can make for our health and our bodies. And when we know better, we do better. So today's episode is really exciting for me. I speak with Dr. Josh Axe. He is the creator behind the wildly successful food company, Ancient Nutrition. He is also an author. He wrote my personal favorite book of his, Eat Dirt, Why Leaky Gut

May Be the Root Cause of Your Health Problems and Five Surprising Steps to Cure It. He also has a book about essential oils, the keto diet, the keto diet cookbook, the collagen diet, and then most recently, Ancient Remedies. You probably most likely know him also by his website, drax.com. I love this website so much. I reference it a lot. You can go to his website and pretty much type in any ailment or diet that you're looking to start. Anything that you're struggling with, really, you can type that in and he has amazing resources that are also cited. He shows the studies and just gives so much amazing information about, I mean, anything that you could possibly imagine. So I highly recommend going and checking out his website if you have not yet.

He is such a great resource. And I am just so excited to bring him on the show today. I've been following his work for probably well over 10 years now. And it was just, I'm just so grateful that I got to have him on today. This was such an amazing conversation. I learned so much. And I really hope that you get a lot out of this conversation because it was a really good one. I hope you guys enjoy it. Dr. Josh Axe is a DC DNM CNS, and he is also a doctor of chiropractic, a certified doctor of natural medicine and a clinical nutritionist. This guy really knows his stuff. His passion is to help

people eat healthy and live a healthy lifestyle. He started a functional medicine center in Nashville in 2008, which grew to become one of the most renowned clinics in the world. We dive into why he got into health in the first place. We also talk about pharmaceuticals and how they took over healthcare and how we got to this place of this pill for every ill kind of culture. We talk about the FDA and the revolving door of the FDA between people at pharmaceutical companies and the FDA themselves. We also talk about how pharmaceutical drugs have a lot of side effects and they deplete your body of certain vitamins

and nutrients. And we also dive into brain theory versus germ theory. We talk about his top three to five vitamins and herbs that he recommends that everyone takes and lifestyle changes. We talk about PCOS, autoimmune disorders, diabetes. There is so much good information in here. I also want to take just a second to explain a little bit more about germ theory versus terrain theory, because I felt like maybe we didn't give a full explanation of really what it is. So germ theory was founded by Pasteur, you know, it comes from pasteurization. And essentially what it means is that we approach medicine in a way that we believe that disease is caused by germs or bacteria, viruses, whatever it is. I mean,

COVID right now would be a perfect, perfect example of this. And the thought is that no matter what, no matter what kind of health you're in this germ or this bacteria or this virus impacts your body in the same exact way across the board for every human. Whereas terrain theory says that yes, viruses, bacteria can have an impact on your body, but what is ultimately going to determine that impact is based on your terrain of your body. So based on what is going on in your body and your gut specifically, and this makes a lot of sense, right? Think about a time that you got really sick. Let's say that you got the flu or somebody, you know, got the flu, but no one else in your house got it. This comes down to

terrain. So everyone is constantly in life being exposed to bacteria, viruses, parasites, and some people are going to get really, really sick by them. And sometimes they're not even going to be affected at all. And they don't even know. I mean, I can't tell you how many times that I had the flu in college, several times, and I was so sick bedridden for days, and none of my roommates got it. And so the reasoning behind this. So the theory goes with train theory is that it is not necessarily about the bug or the virus itself. It's more about your body and how your body is reacting to that virus or bug. And we dive more into this in the episode. But basically, this is why it is so important to take care of our health to eat nourishing foods to protect our immune system,

because ultimately, at the end of the day, it's more about your immune system and how your body is going to react to something than it is about the actual bacteria or virus or parasite that you are exposed to. Terrain theory is not at all saying that there aren't bacterias and viruses that are very harmful, but all it is saying is that it's not the end-all be-all, that the focus is not fully's not the end all be all that the focus is not fully on the bacteria or the virus, that the focus needs to be more on our health because ultimately at the end of the day, what really matters the most is how our immune system is going to respond. And if we have a very healthy immune system that can fight off disease, infection, whatever it

gets exposed to, we are going to have much better outcome than if we are not healthy and we don't have a healthy immune system. I wanted to explain that a little bit in better detail for people that have never heard those terms before. So now that we've talked about that, let's get into the episode with Dr. Josh Axe. Do you want to hear the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging? Of course you do, because all of us are concerned about aging. There is a class of ingredients called senolytics that were discovered less than 10 years ago, and they are being called the biggest

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They're old and worn out and not serving a useful function for our health anymore, but they're taking up space and nutrients from our healthy cells. Much like pruning the yellowing and dead leaves off of a plant, qualia senolytic removes those worn out senescent cells to allow for the rest of them to thrive in the body. And you just take these supplements two days a month. That's right. Just two days a month. Qualia Synolytic is an amazing product that helps to remove these senescent cells. And if you want to hear more about the product and more about these senescent cells that affect aging, go back to the episode that I did with Dr.

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Thanks to Neurohacker for sponsoring today's episode. This is really exciting. Organifi now has kid stuff. They just released two kid products. One is called Easy Greens, and it's a refreshing green apple juice where kids will never know that it's packed with veggies. And the other one is called Protect. It's a delicious wild berry punch like the Kool-Aid that we used to have as a kid but without any sugar. This is really exciting. And if you've listened to the podcast for a while, you know that I'm a huge fan of Organifi. And most specifically because every single product that they make is glyphosate residue free.

So you know that you're going to be able to give these powders to your kids and know that they will be able to consume them safely without any glyphosate in it. So let's break down each one. The Easy Greens is a nourishing and delicious blend of superfoods and veggies that provides essential nutrients, probiotics, and digestive enzymes to bring balance to kids' growing bodies without fillers, additives, or junk. It helps to fill in nutritional gaps, aids in growth and development, supports digestive health, has a rich micronutrient profile, and includes digestive enzymes. This would be a great way to sneak in greens for your little one without them actually knowing that it's healthy for them.

And the second one, which is the wild berry punch similar to Kool-Aid, is called Protect, and it is to support your child's daily immune health with food-derived nutrients that work to strengthen their body's first line of defense. I know just through girlfriends of mine that have children that when your kids are going to school, going to daycare, they're coming home sick a lot more often just because they're getting exposed to different kids and different viruses when they're out in the world playing with kids. So this would be a great way to help to support your little one's immune health. It's organic and it's also made with real whole food ingredients. It has a delicious berry taste and it's low sugar

and it's gentle enough for kids to take every single day. And I really love the ingredients in this one. It's orange and acerol cherry, which is a powerful source of vitamin C and antioxidants. Astragalus, elderberry and propolis, these are all really great for overall immune health. If you wanna try the products that I talked about today or any of the Organifi products, go to Organifi.com slash realfoodology and use code realfoodology

for 20% off. Again, that's Organifi. It's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com slash realfoodology. Yeah, I'm really excited. So I'm really looking forward to diving into ancient remedies. I know you have a whole book about it and I really want to talk about that. But before we do that, how did you get into health in the first place? Yeah, you know, what really inspired me to move into this field of natural medicine is a health crisis in my family. I think this is true for a lot of health experts I talk to, whether it be a doctor or a health coach or just somebody out there trying to get to the truth. And that is they've overcome something themselves. So for me growing up, my family was very into fitness. In fact, my mom was my gym teacher in elementary school.

She was a swim instructor. My dad was a semi-pro water skier, weightlifter. We just worked out a lot, but we knew nothing about actual health or nutrition. And at 40 years old, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, which I can tell you at the time I was in junior high. And I remember being so devastating to our family. I remember all of us crying as a family. I remember my mom being distraught and her going and starting her chemotherapy treatments. And we really at the time just thought, hey, that's the only way you can treat anything is that you go in, you know, you see your physician and you take drugs or medications. In this case, my mom had went through and had chemotherapy. And I remember her going through those treatments and her losing her hair.

And I remember looking at her at one point and thinking, wow, my mom doesn't even look like the same person like she has aged. It looks like, like years, like 20 years in a matter of weeks. And I remember thinking to myself as a kid, a couple of things. One, I never want to see anyone have to go through this sort of pain again. And number two, there's got to be a better way. And so really, I remember at 14 years old, a year later, after my mom went through chemo, by the way, my mom was diagnosed as being cancer-free and healthy. The crazy thing was though, Courtney, is that she then had more health problems than ever before. My mom was diagnosed as being cancer-free and healthy. The crazy thing was, though, Courtney, is that she then had more health problems than ever before. My mom got put on three medications, including antidepressants, anxiety drugs, had hypothyroidism, digestive issues.

And then she got diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome because she was so tired all of the time. And this went on for 10 years. But when I was 14, I said, OK, I don't know anything about health and nutrition. But I just learned this soda is bad. So even for myself at 14 years old, I said, I'm going to stop drinking, drinking soda, because that's obviously not good for me. And I started, you know, learning about nutrition, even at that time. And then I went on and started training to become a doctor. I went and got my degree in chiropractic and nutrition, and then also a certification in becoming a doctor of natural medicine. And so I just said, hey, I'm going to do everything I can to learn about natural medicine, natural health and wellness.

And then I was in clinic, in student clinic. I was about to move to Nashville to open up my functional medicine clinic. And I get a call from my mom and she's just sobbing on the phone. And she says, Josh, I've got bad news. in student clinic. I was about to move to Nashville to open up my functional medicine clinic. And I get a call from my mom and she's just sobbing on the phone. And she says, Josh, I've got bad news. They just went in and they found that I have cancer. It's back. This time it's in my lungs. She said, what do I do? And I said, I'm mom. I'll be home. I was in school in Florida, flew back to Ohio where I grew up. We sat down, we talked about it. We also prayed together and she felt really led to go all naturally. She spent the good majority of her life doing all these conventional treatments, nothing had seemed to work. And so we met with her oncologist. Her

oncologist said, okay, four months, but then I want to go in and start radiation surgery. And that's what they were recommending. They said, we want to go in three days and do surgery and radiation. So with my mom, we just radically changed everything. She started juicing vegetables. We started giving her supplements like turmeric and reishi mushroom, using essential oils like frankincense, really worked on her mindset, on her overcoming the fear and anxiety in her life. And she quoted Bible verses. She envisioned her natural cells, immune cells, killing the cancer cells. And so she did all of these things for four months. And after four months, we went back to her oncologist, redid a CT scan,

a PET scan, and we got a call the next day and her oncologist said, her exact words were, this is highly unusual. We don't typically see this, but your tumors have shrunk by more than half. She said, no, I want to get to you again in nine months, but come back in nine months and keep doing what you're doing. She did it another nine months and complete remission. And today it's been many years since then, probably about 14 years or so, 15 years. And my mom's in the best shape of her life. She's turned 68 here this year and she's ran 5K. She just brought my niece and nephew to Disney World for about 12 hours, which I don't even think I could do. And so anyways, you know, so that's really what led me into, you know, I learned a few big things there, Courtney. One,

I learned when somebody gets these diagnoses, oftentimes people have such fear that they don't know what to do next. And so you kind of have to like hold their hand, walk them through things. With my mom, I made her a recipe book, right? I made her a cookbook of, or some raw foods too, but like a cookbook of here's exactly what you should eat and how you should eat. Here's a supplement plan. Here's a shopping list. Here's a lifestyle guide in terms of, you know, all of these different things. And, and then I took that and I applied that into my functional medicine clinic. I took that. And then I started drax.com where I started teaching people how to use food as medicine. And then of course led to several books, including a book I wrote recently called ancient remedies. And, and that's kind of how I, how I got where I am today.

Wow. It's so cool that you at such a young age had that insight to kind of start looking into these more natural ways. And I've found too, that there's usually a common theme amongst people that get into kind of the health and wellness world is that either they themselves get sick or someone close to them gets sick and the allopathic healthcare system fails them in some way. And so we're looking for something better because we're usually like, you know, there's something, there has to be something better that works. And I just think that's so cool. So in your first chapter of your book, Ancient Remedies, it's called Pharmaceuticals Took Over Healthcare. I want to go into this a little bit because I feel like this is so important for people to understand how we got to this place of like a pill for every ill culture. Yeah. So, and this is so important in every industry. How did we end up here? The pharmaceutical industry is really interesting too. If you look all the way back in Ford and Carnegie and some of these billionaires, you know, they, they,

they saw the dollar signs and, you know, that was a big part of what, what, what caused the pharmaceutical industry to grow. Also, when you look at the largest lawsuits in the world, they're against pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer. I think it was Pfizer, one of these pharmaceutical companies, just got sued and lost a lawsuit for criminal activity for $2.3 billion because they knew a drug was harming people and they decided to keep selling it anyways. There's many cases of this. Vioxx was a drug not that long ago that killed in many estimates over 100,000 people, causing most people to have heart attacks or their hearts

to explode for this pain medication. And so there are so many instances of this. So for some person to think that pharmaceutical companies and even doctors who are so tied to them financially and pharmaceutical companies that are essentially their educators that back the schools, that pay for all the research facilities to think that, hey, this is your best interest in mind. Because the absolute truth is, if you're comparing an herb like turmeric to, you know, a number of other medications, you're going to find that turmeric is more effective long-term without any of the side effects. And so if it was really about the wellbeing of the patient, you would see that they would, all doctors would first and foremost be prescribing

herbs and lifestyle adjustments and, you know, and a change in diet to truly get the root cause of disease. I'll give an example of this too. By the way, this sort of thinking was started by people like Solomon many years ago, and then Aristotle, you know, really thought like this, it's called first principles thinking. And this is the way that physicians should think, but unfortunately, Courtney, they don't. So remove all assumptions. I'd ask everybody to remove all assumptions. I'm going to give you an example of a case with a certain virus that's really relevant today. Everybody's talking about a virus and pandemic. Let me give you an example of this. Okay. Let's go back and say, what is the root cause of this one? How did it start? Okay. It could have started in a lab in Wuhan, China. We don't know that for certain, but here's the thing I can tell you. We may never know. But here's the thing I can tell you about viruses that would affect somebody like this. The body is amazing and resilient to viruses over time, especially if it's dealt with them before. When you have a new virus that's introduced, it's very different than other viruses.

You know, your body has to create antibodies. Your body has to have time. It needs to adapt. Okay. So typically as a virus more, oftentimes our body is now more used to dealing with it. And then sometimes it can get better or worse depending on how much it changes. But all that being said, what do we know that's true about a virus today? Well, here's a few things we know. Who is dying from this virus? Well, we know as a fact, these are absolute principles, people with preexisting conditions by far, number one, by far, it's not even close as obesity

and then diabetes and heart disease. That's it. I mean, that's almost, I mean, that is really, that's it. And then somebody that's over 70, especially if someone's over 70 with a preexisting condition or immunodeficiency. Okay. So, so we know that for a fact, well, then we go another layer deep. Okay. We know that the root cause is actually not as much the virus. It's more, or what can you change? It's a pre-existing condition. So let's go another layer deep. How do you reverse a pre-existing condition like obesity diabetes and most forms of heart disease it's a diet lifestyle change diet type 2 diabetes is 98 of the time it's diet obesity 99.9 of the time and so if we it was really about healing people this industry this health industry

then everybody would focus on, hey, let's ban, hey, if you want to help kids, I'll tell you how to do it. You start banning marketing agencies from sending your kids on social media and everything else, you know, you know, sugary laden cereals and fast foods and all the hard marketing there. So, so all that being said, you know, when I look at our industry today, unfortunately it's about profit before people, not people before profit and ancient physicians like Hippocrates who, and by the way, I had to take an oath when I became a doctor, first do no harm. The truth is we are doing, there's not a single medication as I covered my

book that doesn't have a side effect, whether it's birth control or a baby aspirin. It's a baby aspirin. It's a blood thinner. It's hard on your stomach. It's hard on your liver. And there's statins. And I feel like the majority of men over 60 are on statins now. I mean, I'm sure the percentage is very high, very high. You know, yeah. Statins, for instance, they deplete your body of coenzyme Q10, vitamin B12 and healthy fats. And so it actually causes demyelination of your nerves causes leads to dementia of somebody who's on a statin drug over time. And so, yeah, so, so there, there is not a, every drug has a serious side effects, herbs and spices foods, they don't. Well, and I what I think is so interesting, and I heard you say this one time is that a lot of prescription drugs are just synthetic versions of what we find in nature, they were like inspired

by compounds that already are in plants. And so it just seems so like counter, I don't know, like, why aren't we just going straight to the plant instead of making these synthetic versions that are now causing side effects? And then on top of that, too, I'm not sure a lot of people are very aware of the revolving door of the FDA. There's a lot of high ranking people at pharmaceutical companies that end up working at the FDA and vice versa, you know, they kind of go back and forth. And a lot of these drugs are approved before like real safety is actually tested, like the Vioxx drug that you brought up. And not to mention a lot of these studies are bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical companies that have vested interest in these drugs.

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there are certain countries that do it like this, but the government essentially has a regulating body that has no, and it's hard because everybody is plugged in financially some way. I mean, it's just, I mean, that's, what's so crazy about this, but again, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's really just not to be trusted. And that's why, you know, anything that the government is tied to or connected to typically does not operate well. It's private sectors, it's small businesses, it's those mom and pop shops, or people that are out there just saying, you know what, like I got, I became a doctor because I care about people. And I'm not being influenced by this major industry.

Yeah, yeah. It's, it's really upsetting. And but I feel like once people kind of start to understand that we can start having these conversations and helping people open up to the possibility of taking more natural routes. So that's something else I want to talk about. Cause you know, I, I personally, I got into health because I feel the same way as you do. I really believe in getting to the root cause and that's truly ultimately the best way to find healing in your body. But then, you know, I struggle a lot with my dad who fights me on a lot of this stuff. He's a lot more in kind of allopathic medical route. And I want to know what you would say to someone like my dad, who is very skeptical, you know, like I tell him,

dad, you don't need to be on statins. Like we need to change your lifestyle and change your diet and get you on, you know, an anti-inflammatory diet and all this stuff. But he, it's like, he doesn't, if it feels like this mainstream narrative is very against these natural remedies and how do we, how do we convince people, I guess, for lack of a better word, that these natural remedies are effective. Yeah. Well, by the way, I want to answer that question. I also want to go back to this COVID thing. I do want to mention this too. If we continue to go to these root causes, if we're talking about the root cause, we're talking about diet and lifestyle and those things. And with that, also, if we're talking about certain herbal remedies, if you want to strengthen your immune system, use vitamin D, use zinc, use elderberry, use echinacea, do ginger herbal tea. All of these things are going to lift

and strengthen your immune system. And what we're finding today is that this virus actually affects the blood in most cases, blood and heart. And for that case, turmeric, even for that is probably one of the most effective remedies doing larger doses of turmeric, 3000 milligrams once to twice daily is very effective. In terms of how you influence people, here's what I would say. Number one, understand where they're at. Number two, understand that people make decisions based on two major feelings, pain and pleasure. And so you really need to connect with people in the way I'll give an example with my own father. OK, so my dad, old military guy, stubborn, only eats meat, meat and potatoes and vegetables now. And, you know, if you put sushi in front of him, he would say, what, you know, what is this? You know, so, so all that being said, my dad,

a few years ago, my dad is into fitness, and he wants his joints to feel good. And so he would always take these, you know, NSAIDs. And, you know, for joint pain, and I showed him an article I saw years ago, and I said, Dad, look at this, it actually shows that over time, this, you know, for joint pain, and I showed him an article I saw years ago, and I said, Dad, look at this. It actually shows that over time, this will actually, it actually decreases your ability to actually recover and build muscle and do certain other things and actually build muscle. And I said, hey, here's an alternative. So I created some pain in his life in that way of saying, hey, this thing that you're doing actually to avoid pain, it's actually going to create more pain.

Can you see that? To where you can't be water skiing and do the things you love. My dad is 70, about to turn 73 and still water skis, like full slalom course. He's just, but, and I showed him this and I said, Hey, here's an alternative. I got him this, this turmeric supplement, Boswellia, these fish, you know, fish oil and bone broth protein. And I have them taking all these supplements together and this regimen. And I said, Hey, do this for me. You know, don't take this ever, but if you have to, you know, you know, take this instead anyway. So I just laid out a plan for him. I said, Hey, here's pain. Hey, here's pleasure. By the way, this is also going to help you avoid, you know, the hospital. And

I had him read for himself. I said, Hey, wow, this research article just came out, you should read it. And even if it's only if it's very short, I'll even highlight the summary and send it to him. But I do everything I can to create the right type of pain, you know, the right type of pleasure, wrong type, you know, pain in terms of getting him to supporting him and making decisions. People actually have to convince themselves. They have to educate themselves. And so, but that's, that's sort of the, uh, the strategy that I've, I've implemented with my own family. I love that. Yeah. I mean, it's hard. Like I said, I feel like there's kind of this push right now against more natural remedies.

And I mean, I believe it's a lot of, because of what we're going through right now. like there's kind of this push right now against more natural remedies. And I mean, I believe it's a lot of because of what we're going through right now. And there's been this big push for pharmaceutical drugs. And, you know, we could we could talk about that. But I do want to kind of go back to COVID if you're OK to talk about it for a second, because I know a lot in your book, you talk about toxic emotions and like fear and how that really affects the body as well. And I'm curious to know kind of what that connection is with everything we've been dealing with COVID for the last two years. I mean, it's very clear everyone is living very,

you know, in very like fearful states, anxious states all the time, and it has to be affecting our immune system. Well, here's the other thing too. And listen, everybody has a different belief system. I have, I'm a very faith-based person in terms of believing in God and that, that he loves us and, you know, wants to see us thrive and the human body's incredible and its ability to heal. So that's really where I come from on this, but there's a Bible verse I love that says, uh, there is no fear in love. And so that perfect love casts out fear. And actually it's kind of interesting because in the Bible, it sort of poses the opposite is love is one here on one end and fears on a completely other end. And what evil does is these evil forces of the world, they use fear. It's a form of manipulation and they use

that fear to gain power and to influence people. So you can influence people in two ways. You can influence them with fear and control. Think about people that are very controlling of your life. It's actually the opposite of love. And so with that, anytime you see anyone in government trying to do that, you just need to put it on me like that's evil. Recognize when you see CNN and these different news networks and they have in Fox for it could be either whatever political party but they have a countdown for how many people are dying by striking fear and people constantly so so so we know that fear actually of all emotions both in the bible and in chinese medicine and ayurveda it's known as being kind of the chief emotion that drains your adrenal glands right fear puts you in

a fight or flight state it's known in Chinese medicine that that area actually sort of supports and sends energy to your entire body. And so fear is probably the most devastating and damaging of all emotions for our physical health, but it starts with our reproductive organs and it affects both our nervous system and our hormones, those two systems of the body. So nervous system, hormones, most directly adrenal glands. And so what you start to do is you start to, you know, deplete your adrenals. Think about your body as a battery that charges your entire body. That battery gets lowered when you're living in a state of fear. And so all that being said, and by the way, listen to this, this is so, I think insightful when you look at Chinese medicine, different, different emotions affect different organ

systems. And so when you have a disease, oftentimes it's less about genetics. It's more about a gene is turned on because of your environment. And just because let's say if you have, you know, somebody got breast cancer, a parent did, and then their child got that same breast cancer as well later on in life. It's oftentimes due to the emotional environment that they're in. So to give you an example, worry, right? If somebody worries, people will start to say, oh, I feel like my stomach is tied in knots.

It'll upset their digestive system. That's because of worry, that specific emotion affects the upper digestive system. Anger. Why do we call someone an angry drunk? Anger and frustration and patience cause liver toxicity. Think about anxiety. What does that do? Your heart starts to race. Your blood pressure increases. So we know that that form of nervousness and anxiety actually affects the heart. And then what's also interesting is there's something called the five elements of Chinese medicine. When one emotion gets very far off, it can then start to affect another organ system. So example is typically it's anxiety that causes racing heart

rate and high blood pressure. But over time, what can cause chronic low blood pressure is if somebody has a lot of anger and impatience, that organ system is directly tied. So it goes liver to heart. And so then that starts to affect blood pressure long-term. And this is also why, you know, if somebody has hypothyroidism, the root cause of treating hypothyroidism

actually tends to be treating the adrenals because if the adrenals get off balance too much and that stress builds up, that will then start to affect the thyroid. And so, you know, and we know this, right, Courtney, like you know this with like autoimmune disease, right? Autoimmune disease, what organ system is tied directly to the immune system? The digestive system. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is too, actually in the reverse order of what you just said, but yes. And so that's affecting that. So, so, you know, that's, what's incredible about emotions, like our emotional health is, I would say just as important, but actually a hair more important than what we eat. Cause we all know people, Hey, they're stress-free, they're relaxed, they eat terrible. They've hardly exercised in their life and yet their health, you know,

at least there's these free from what we know. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting too, you brought up fight or flight and you know, when we're in that fight or flight state, which I think a lot of people have been chronically living in it for the last two years, you basically shut down every other process in your body, except for, you know, to like the ability to run essentially, you know, like your digestion goes down. And so you're not going to be functioning at an optimal level when you're in this like fear based fight or flight state. That's, that's right. You know, and these things work and it's, it's, yeah, you know, your parasympathetic nerve system and you're sympathetic. So we were just talking about sympathetic, right, with fear.

And when your body's in that fear-based response, it's in the same as if your body goes back to this thing of like, OK, I'm running from a lion or I'm probably not going to want to fight against a bear, but that sort of thing, right, that fight or flight response. You're either fighting or you're running. So what happens physiologically is all of the blood and energy in your body goes to your extremities and your brain. Okay. It goes to your extremities so you can run faster, goes to your brain so you can be more alert and think. But when all that blood and energy, it leaves your inside, what happens is this is why you cannot be

doing, like I used to do a lot of triathlons. I couldn't eat a cheeseburger when I was in a triathlon or if somebody's out there running, you can't eat a cheeseburger. If you're in the middle of a workout, you can't digest it, it'll come up because your body doesn't have the energy and the blood there to actually break it down because it's all in your extremities. Versus if you're in a relaxed state, you spent time in prayer, meditation, reading a novel or spiritual growth book, or just take some deep breaths. All of your energy goes right into your organs for you to balance hormones and digest and do all these things. And so anyways, yeah, your body can't do both at once. Ask to do either or, or at least have most of the energy in one place versus the other.

Yeah. Well, this is a great argument for why lifestyle is such an important component of our health, because if we can't control and manage our surroundings and our fear and, you know, learn to take a deep breath and, um, get our sleep on track and everything, then it's going to affect all of our organs and our bodies. So like you said earlier, we could be eating a really healthy diet. I mean, I'm a perfect example of this. Actually, I, um, have been a pretty baseline anxious person, most of my, um, like most of my twenties and early thirties. And I've only more recently really started to tackle that. And even though I had my diet really on lock, it was like, where, what is this missing piece here? And it was like, oh,

I'm, I'm living in fight or flight. Like I need to figure out how to calm down my nervous system in order to allow my body to assimilate the nutrients from that food. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, you're 100% right. Guys. Okay. So I want to talk a little bit about you brought up the comorbidity component of COVID. And I don't know if many people are aware of this like germ theory versus terrain theory. And I want to talk about this because I think this, yeah, I think this plays a huge role and also kind of goes into lifestyle because there, do you want to explain it for everyone listening? I feel like you'll probably give a better explanation. Yeah, happy to. So, so one, one of the things that, um, is, is just grossly wrong

with our whole medical mindset today is that, uh, it's genetics that actually make us ill. It's not genetics. It's your environment. Okay. So, and I don't give an example. If somebody is successful or not successful in business, let's just give it that as an example. Some people would say, oh, it's because this person's parents weren't or they weren't versus no, no, this person had good mentors and coaches and parents and all of these things. And they were trained up in the right way. That's why they're successful in life. It's the same thing with your body. You know, our bodies, you know, Louis Pasteur really started this and started with a germ theory. He said, the reason you get sick is because you have bugs. Okay. You have germs that get inside your body and they start to take over.

And a man named Bachamp, who I think it was Antoine, he said, no, that's not the reason. He said the germs are there because of the unhealthy environment. And so he started using an analogy, like imagine if you have a bucket of trash, it's going to attract rodents and bugs and worms and all these things, versus if you take out the trash, if you clean the environment and make it healthy, then all the bugs just leave. But he said, what happens today is we have sort of our, we fill our body with trash. And then the medical system says, I'm going to throw in some bombs, just try to blow up the bugs and kill them off. But then what happens is over time, they just relentlessly keep coming back. If you want to

get healthy, you've got to change your environment, your internal environment. And you do that by the food you eat, by the mindset you keep, you know, by keeping stress low, all of these things help create a healthy internal environment. And the truth is we all actually, this might surprise people. We should all have a certain amount of good bacteria. We should all have a certain amount of parasites are normal, actually. Certain things like that, even yeast, but it's when you have too much, when you feed it too much, that it sort of gets out of control. Somebody can get something like candida if the environment gets too out of balance. Yeah. It's like you said,

we want that balance of good and bad bacteria. Like not all bad bacteria is bad. It's just bad when we have an overgrowth of, we have too much of the bad bacteria that's taking over. And I think this conversation about epigenetics is so interesting because, um, like you mentioned earlier, you know, for example, maybe a daughter that has the Baraka gene and her mom also had breast cancer. And I think this conversation is so interesting because what I've learned is that, yes, you may have that gene.

And of course, like if you keep going down that same path of like not taking care of your health, you could turn that gene on. But oftentimes I, what I, what I've read and what I understand is that, um, you usually get this because you have the same habits as your mom. Right. So like you got your, isn't that so, I just find that so interesting. It's like you kind of eat the same foods as your mom did because you guys grew up in the same household. Maybe you were exposed to the same things like mold in the house or whatever it is.

There's so many external environmental factors involved. And this is why I think it's so important to talk about these lifestyle changes because just because you have that gene does not mean that this is your fate. A hundred percent. In fact, I even had a friend who went and I'm surprised she was a physician. She went and got a double mastectomy because she said, Oh, I've got this gene. And that just shows how brainwashed and polluted a lot of even physicians are today. A lot of people. And again, this is fear. This is this fear based thing that I'm talking about versus, hey, if you have, if you're a person of, like, listen, it could be a faith or not a faith, but for me, it's like knowing, no, God has a purpose and plan for my life. It's for good, and so I think when you live in that world and that have that more identity and worldview, that also allows you to make

different decisions versus of others who think, I'm a victim. There's no way I can do anything but get this. And it's a victim mentality that's so damaging today. When you say I'm a victim, you become then a powerless person and say, hey, I'm just a victim of whatever happens. There's nothing I can do to change things. And you lose power because you start to essentially tell yourself there's nothing I can do that's within my control to fix this, to do anything. And so anyways, all that being said, yeah, I mean, again, the big thing is, yeah, you can have a BRCA gene, but you know what? Your genes have to be turned on. That's the whole thing. Your genes have to be turned on. And so again, and how they turned on, well, you mentioned it's lifestyle. And so

if you live a healthy lifestyle, these genes won't be turned on. And when we talk about epigenetics, you know, I think it's so fascinating to even know that even what we do as parents affects our children before they're born. Yeah. Whoa. Big one. I mean, the studies on, for instance, mothers and their microbiome in terms of, hey, if they supplement and they have a healthy gut

via taking probiotics and eating certain vegetables and fruits, what that does for their child's immune system and gut health and their health later on is just so incredible. I mean, that's just one example of, think about this, by you taking a probiotic supplement or by you eating more vegetables and fruits and just keeping stress low, how that affects your kids' health later on in life before they're even born. It's pretty incredible. Yeah, I love it. I love these kind of conversations. And it makes me excited and happy that I am aware and I'm taking care of my health now because I hope to have kids in the next couple years.

And, yeah, it's interesting to see how the things that I do will affect the future health of my kids. It's pretty wild. Yeah. You know, in Chinese medicine, just, you know, my wife and I, we just had our first child not long ago and, you know, we'll have more in the future. And so with that though, you know, in Chinese medicine, what they really focus on, if you want to support your body in, there's two things in conceiving. So becoming pregnant and then carrying a child, there's two main systems. One is that hormonal system, reproductive and adrenal. So with that, you want to do a lot of things like wild caught fish, seaweed, black rice, but those foods that really nourish that organ system. And the other one is caring. And this tends to be an issue that's even more prevalent today. And that's where you want to support your pancreas. Okay. Keeping your pancreas very healthy.

And so that's going to be foods that are orange in Chinese medicine. It's going to be pumpkin, butternut squash, sweet potato, an herb like cinnamon that has that orangish reddish color, turmeric. These are herbs that are really going to help heal and strengthen the pancreas. You want to also keep sugar low, but you do want to get some good carbs that are just mildly sweet again, like pumpkin or sweet potato. But anyways, those are the foods that really help anytime I've worked with women who have had issues with carrying their child or having miscarriage, we've actually found that, Hey, we really start improving the diet, reducing stress. I mean, it just, it helps tremendously.

Yeah. That's so important. I love that. Um, so what would you say for people listening? Um, do you have maybe like three to five top either vitamins, herbs, maybe a combination of both that you feel like most people would, wouldn't benefit from taking them every single day? Sure. Yeah. So let me, let me head on the general population. Then I can, I'm going to get into some maybe specific categories. I think for general people, most everybody needs more collagen or bone broth. Our ancient ancestors got a lot of bone broth. Here's the reason why this is such a big deal. One third of all the protein in your body is made up of collagen and collagen. Isn't even a micronutrient. It's a macronutrient. So think about if you didn't eat fat ever or had no protein. Collagen is a macronutrient that makes up your skin, hair, nails, bones, ligaments, tendons, discs, connective tissue, gut lining is 70% collagen.

So if you want health in any of those areas, you've got to be having this as a building block to be as healthy as possible. So I would say taking a bone broth supplement is like a powder in a smoothie or a collagen. There's multiple forms of collagen. I mean, that's what I would say, number one. Number two, I would say is a soil-based organism probiotic. We used to be more in touch with our soil. We used to get probiotics actually from getting some of the dirt on the food that we ate. We don't need more. The most powerful probiotics are known as SBOs or soil-based organism probiotics. So get some probiotics. So I would say those are my top two for most people. I think that make the biggest difference. After those, you know, in the winter, if you live up north, vitamin D is really critical.

I would say just getting on some different conditions now, if you want to support your joints, you have any pain, inflammation, want to support your joints, turmeric is going to be at the top. Do you want to balance hormones? Let's say if you have an irregular menstrual cycle or heavy bleeding, Vitex for premenopausal women, and then black cohosh for postmenopausal women, and then black cohosh for postmenopausal women. For men that have a lot of stress, I like ashwagandha. For women or men that have hypothyroidism, I love ashwagandha. For men over the age of 50 that have low testosterone and low libido, I like a combination

of ginseng, panix ginseng, and fenugreek. You know, for brain health, lion's mane mushroom and ginkgo biloba are very powerful. So I'm very much more into personalized nutrition. I think everybody can benefit from, you know, from collagen and probiotics just because of our activity today and everything else. But I do think, you know, and by the way, I do cover this in my book, Ancient Remedies. I cover, you know, nearly, you know, like, it's like 80 different conditions. So whether you have high shimodas, thyroiditis, or infertility, or something else, I go through the top five supplements, the exact foods for each and every one of those conditions. Yeah, I mean, I love this book.

It's such a great resource. I actually have it sitting here right now. I was looking through it earlier. It's, it's such an amazing resource. And it's just so helpful, you know, and I mean, it's, it's a sad reality that many, many of us, many Americans are, um, chronically sick now, you know, whether it's, I mean, you named a couple of things. I mean, we have diabetes, autoimmune disorders, PCOS, and, um, it feels like, I mean, I mean, it feels like the allopathic conventional medical system has

really failed us, you know, because it was designed for acute care. And now we have all these people that are chronically ill, and doctors are not well versed in getting to the root cause of things. And so I'm just so grateful for people like you that are making this aware, you're creating awareness around this on a very large scale for people. And I think it's really important. Yeah, thanks a lot. Again, I think for me that the reason the reason why I do what I do is I mentioned my mom's story earlier, like, I just want to help people heal, I want to see them be, you know, I want to see everybody thriving. And I just wish today that doctors and our whole medical system wasn't driven by profit and greed, and, and, you know, political bias. Instead, it

was, hey, physicians and health coaches and other people are just saying, hey, we just want to serve. We want to love, want to help people get healthy. We want to use food as medicine. You know, the things that have worked since the beginning of time still work today in terms of as you know, in terms of what works for in the nutritional realm, at least. Yeah, absolutely. Can we talk just about a couple of these conditions that people deal with and maybe give them a couple tips to kind of where maybe where to start? I know PCOS is a really big one, especially for women kind of, you know, on the younger end of the spectrum. What advice would you give them kind of where should they start looking maybe some herbs and you know, just some remedies that they can, they can look into? Yeah, PCOS, I've literally helped thousands of women with PCOS, whether it

was in my functional medicine clinic in the past or people online today. But it's PCOS is almost completely an issue related to the pancreas, it's insulin, it's blood sugar. And so with that diet wise, you got to eliminate and lower the refined carbs, you know, excess grains, things like that. And you also don't want to go super high fat either. You want to do a lot of protein fiber, some healthy fat and some moderate carbs, moderate to lower carb. The ideal foods are some of the, what I mentioned earlier for pancreas, it's orange food. You want to do a lot of pumpkin and sweet potato, butternut squash, steamed carrots, things like that, and green leafy vegetables. So a lot of green vegetables like broccoli and a lot of orange vegetables like carrots. So that should make up half of your plate.

And then you can use things like tahini as a topping. Hummus is fantastic. You know, even a little guacamole or a cashew cheese all of these would be good options with that you know meat grass-fed beef wild-caught salmon you know chicken and turkey so getting that but that's sort of an ideal meal is you've got like your you know carrots and broccoli and maybe like some some hummus or tahini you steam it you bake it some of those organic meats there then you're using lots of herbs like cinnamon. Cinnamon is so effective for PCOS. One of the best herbs you could ever use for that. Holy basil tea, holy basil is very good. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot, and I have this specific prescription in my, you know, in the ancient remedies book, but those are some of the

things that would absolutely help. Amazing. I feel like fiber has to be a great, a really important component of that, right? Because I know with bowel movements, you get out excess hormones. And I know that with PCOS, it is a hormonal imbalance also with the insulin dysregulation as well. So what about autoimmune disorders? I know this is a really big one. And I know it's kind of a big blanket thing. But what are some things that people can start doing to address those? Yeah. Autoimmune disease is completely caused by a condition called leaky gut syndrome. And so this is essentially where you're in.

Let me not say completely the majority of the time. And so when we're looking at this, um, you want to really focus on digestive health. If you have autoimmune disease, consume foods that are easy on your body. So think about act almost like you have a colder flu. If you have autoimmune disease. Consume foods that are easy on your body. So think about, act almost like you have a cold or flu if you have autoimmune disease. You want to be doing things like chicken vegetable soup, drinking ginger tea, having like beef stew, immunity stew, like miso soup. Like lots of soups and stews are going to be very good. So it's a lot of cooked vegetables and meat.

Really, if you want to reverse autoimmune disease, cook vegetable and meat. Every meal, don't have hardly anything else. If you're going to have a grain, do rice. So do rice is what's called congee in Chinese medicine, where you throw it in like a chicken soup, where you let it cook overnight and you kind of have it, it's kind of like a mushy rice. It's so good. Yeah. I mean, there's so many different ways to make up some congee, but essentially congee is just, it's mushy rice. Like you could cook rice for a long time. You can even add chicken broth to it if it's savory, or you can make it a little sweet with a little bit of like, like, like pears would be good for autoimmune disease.

Like you chop up pears with a little bit of, you know, rice and you put those in an overnight slow cooker or pressure cooker. And then from a supplement standpoint, a collagen and probiotics, like a bone broth, a protein powder, and then a probiotic supplement for autoimmune disease would be my top two followed by, and then as an herb, a stragglers is probably the most powerful herb for autoimmune disease today. Oh, that's so interesting. I didn't know, uh, for autoimmune disorders. I take stragglers anytime I feel like I'm getting a cold or anything like that. Cause I know it's powerful. Right. And so the way it works is it might strengthen your digestive system

via also your immune system. So those are the two key areas that works on a stragglers is digestion system. So it helps heal leaky gut and then also boosting your immune system at the same time, which those are the two key areas for autoimmune disease as well. Yeah. I also want to make a note because you had mentioned that with autoimmune disorders, oftentimes it starts with a leaky gut. And the reason why collagen for people listening that don't know is so important is it helps to seal the gut so that you don't have that leaky gut anymore. Okay. Amazing. I love this. One more, because I feel like this is another huge one is diabetes. What would you tell people to do to address that? Yeah. Diabetes is pretty,

pretty simple. Actually similar paint pancreas. Again, you got to eliminate carbs. I mean, that is huge. And so you want to focus on meat and vegetables. That is the bulk of your diet. I wouldn't do any fruit. I would do very little grains. You can do some beans if you want on occasion. You could do a little sweet potato earlier in the day, like around lunch. But I would say at night, just meat, vegetables, and a healthy fat like avocado or tahini, something like that, olives and olive oil. All those would be good for supplements. The two most effective would be a combination of chromium picolinate. It's a trace mineral, 200 micrograms at meals, and then cinnamon as well, like a fourth a teaspoon or a half a teaspoon, you know, at breakfast. Those are the two most effective. There's also other herbs.

There's a bitter melon. Yeah. Holy basil is another good. fenugreek actually is another very good herb for diabetes, but cinnamon and chromium will have the biggest effect. Awesome. This is so helpful. Thank you. I'm sure everyone listening is going to be taking a lot of notes on this and hopefully they'll just get your book because it's like I said, it's a great resource for anything that anyone is dealing with. So before we go, I like to always ask all of my guests, what your health non-negotiables are. So these are things, no matter how busy or crazy your day is, you always do these things to prioritize your health and it can be food related, um, lifestyle related, whatever it is. Well, I do a, I call it habit stacking. And every morning I do my, my spiritual triathlon,

my breakfast and my workout. And so for me, my spiritual triathlon is I spend five minutes saying everything I'm grateful for spend five minutes, at least reading. It could be my Bible, it could be a spiritual growth book. And then I spend five minutes in prayer or meditation to sort of silence and solitude there and just connecting with God. And then I go and I tend to have a superfood smoothie or something like congee with some

collagen. And then I go and do a workout. And so I tend to, you know, get up at 630 and then get all that done by, you know, about, you know, 8am or 8, 8, 3am or so. And, but that's sort of, you know, that spiritual triathlon, a good quick breakfast. And then, you know, even if it's just a 15 minute workout, but that's, that's what I do. I mean, almost every day, it's very consistent, uh, you know, that, that rhythm and flow.

Yeah. I love that. So is there anything else that we didn't cover that you feel is really important for people that are maybe struggling with their health, trying to get back on track? Do you have any tips or advice for them? One, you become who you surround yourself with. Community is really important. Look at the people in your life who are always bringing you down, who are trying to get you out of your, really, who aren't inspired people. And focus on spending more time with people saying, I want to be more

like them. It's sort of this iron sharpens iron mentality and approach. And I've surrounded myself with those sort of people, whether it be workout partners, you know, I do a leadership group that I'm a part of, you know, those sort of things. And so I would say, you know, focus on pursuing relationships with people that you, you know, are aspired to be like, and or grow closer to in terms of, you know, they're going to help make you a better person, you're going to try and add value to them as well. And so I think that's one of the big things, you know, this thing of community that we oxytocin. It's that hormone that women will feel very strongly when they're breastfeeding, this deep connection, but we get it when we hug people. These hormones are critical for our health, and every study has ever shown this. When somebody isolates themselves, it actually leads to disease and sickness, both

mental health disorders, number one by far, but also physical health disorders. We need to get back to hugging people, shaking hands, doing all of that stuff, because overall it actually builds our health more than it takes away, no matter what's going on in the world. Absolutely. And then, you know, if you take the advice that we've been talking about this whole podcast, if you have your health in order, then even if you are exposed to, you know, God forbid virus, bacteria, whatever it is, if you're in good health, your body is going to be able to fight it off. It's that terrain that we talked about earlier. Well, here's the thing you have to like where our bodies are designed to get a virus, build up immunity, and then fight off the next thing that we're exposed to. Here's the thing

we've been so damaged by. When you look at the study by far the only good, the largest study, it's out of Israel, and it shows natural immunity is by far more powerful than a shot. Do you know in 1918, during the Spanish influenza, people that had the Spanish influenza in 1918 were still immune 100 years later. They looked at stuff, go on Google right now or DuckDuckGo or Brave, whatever search engine you use, and search 1918 Spanish influenza natural immunity. And read all the articles. The same is going to be true from now. So when you naturally get something, you're now protected, more protected from Delta and Beta and whatever, you know, Gamda, whatever thing they come up with that. But I might say whatever they name it next you are better immune

to not just that one but all of the variants versus if you don't get it and just get you know a shot like you don't have that same you know strength in your immune system and that is proven by research even though nobody will cover it or talk about it it's just crazy so anyways we're designed to get and the best way to protect yourself is just what you said. Keep your own immune system strong. Keep your family's immune system strong. Like my dad, guess what? I shipped him by even though he's in Florida, I shipped him some vitamin D. I have him taking some zinc. I have him, you know, drinking his chicken broth. Like, you know, that's the best way to serve and love people is by, you know, actually helping them treat the root cause of their disease. Absolutely. And I want to bring up that natural immunity

thing, just because I was reading too, that I don't think a lot of people know this. So yeah, we have the 1918 flu. But also, they've been doing studies on people that have gotten SARS-CoV-1, which is very similar to SARS-CoV-2. I know it's not exactly the same. And those people 19 years later still have immunity for it. So, and it's driving me absolutely insane that no one is talking about this and we're acting as if natural immunity just doesn't even exist. I mean, it's banned on Instagram right now. It's crazy. It's crazy. I did a mission trip, a mission trip to China many years ago. And we went over there to just sort of like bring food and clothes and just sort of minister to some people over there as physicians. We we took care of work to the hospital. And when I was over there, I remember seeing the censorship and thinking, this is unbelievable.

I can't imagine being somewhere where they're censoring like you can't say certain things. And we're here today and some people are still just I mean, I mean, just it blows my mind. I just don't think people aren't aware. You mentioned history earlier. When you study history, anybody that knows and studies history would not be, you know, for the way that our government is running things today. But that's just because they're uneducated. They haven't studied history and don't really know where this can lead. So anyways, I'm not trying to get political here.

I just, it's, you know, it's just, it's just the truth. And so I, uh, yeah, natural immunity is powerful and it's really what we should be focusing on. Um, so yeah, I appreciate the conversation here and the questions. Yeah, me too. Okay. Well, before we go then, just because we're talking about natural immunity, can we talk about, um, just a couple of things that people can do? I know we kind of mentioned it a little bit,

but can we really talk about things that people can take that will really strengthen their immune system and just keep them in good shape? Yeah. Now when we're talking about these, this virus here, I really believe vitamin C is okay, but it's not the most important vitamin D and zinc are by far the two most important nutrients, 30 milligrams a day of zinc, 5,000. I use a vitamin D. Now listen, if you're in Florida or Southern California and you're out and getting full body sun, you don't need to take vitamin D, but if you're not getting it, especially in the winter,

you do want to be getting those two as supplements for ongoing immunity. I like a bone broth supplement, like a bone broth protein. I like probiotics, but, like a bone broth protein. I like probiotics, but also as things that are more, uh, but then in addition, I think right now, something like turmeric and elderberry or turmeric and echinacea, and then even astragalus, that's another really good one for the longterm. But I would say maybe even astragalus and turmeric for longterm would be two of the best. What do you think about quercetin? Because I know quercetin is a zinc ionifer.

Yeah, quercetin is the other one. Yeah, quercetin now also you can get in larger doses in lemons and onions. Onions are very high in quercetin. In fact, I have a something I've given patients in the past. It's called miso immunity soup. And the recipe is it's chicken broth. It's miso it's onions. It's shiitake mushrooms is a little bit of chicken and rice. And then, and so, and then ginger and, um, and garlic. And anyways, it's a very good, but yeah, I mean, quercetin is another supplement, especially if you are have some some, some symptoms coming on that I think is a good good option. Yeah, well, quercetin is an interesting one, because it's a zinc ionifer, which means that it pushes the zinc into the cell. So I feel like that's one that I've really been paying attention to for the last two years because of everything going on. So and I

will say so I actually had COVID earlier this year and your, I, I really, truly believe that part of the reason that it only lasted like four days because I was going and I literally, every single morning I woke up, I would put on my bathing suit and I would immediately just go and I would lay in the sun for like two hours a day just to like get that vitamin D and it really helped. And I think that's really what made it, it only lasts for a couple of days. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. We had it as well. Our whole family had, I think that's really what made it, it only lasts for a couple of days. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. We had it as well. Our whole family had, I think I'm the only one that didn't lose my taste and smell everyone else, my extended family all lost it. But anyways, they regained it pretty quickly. I know some people six months later that still didn't have

it back. And I actually wrote down a whole plan for what they need to do, but it's all about blood stagnation. And so you've got to get your blood moving. And again, this is where high doses of turmeric that I mentioned, I think is are very, very good for that. And quercetin is another one that's actually good for that. Isn't zinc good for that too? Isn't there something about zinc with the loss of taste and smell? Yeah. And I can mention 30 things and it's different with everybody's zinc, but sometimes then it's B12. That's another vitamin that's really closely linked to the health of your nervous system. But yeah, zinc absolutely can affect it too.

Interesting. Okay. Well, I really enjoy this conversation. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find you online? Where can they find your books? Sure. Well, I've got a website, draxe.com. It's D-R-A-X-E.com. I cover a range of health topics. And you can always just search my name. I've written a lot of articles on health conditions. So, for instance, if you've got hypothyroidism, search Dr. Axe hypothyroidism. I've covered exactly what to do there. You can find this information, my new book, Ancient Remedies. Just go to Amazon dot com, search Dr. Axe Ancient Remedies, and you'll find that on there. I've also co-founded a supplement company called ancient nutrition, uh, here as well. And, um, yeah, I would say that those are, and then you can find me on social media, Instagram, Facebook is just at Dr. Josh Axe and a Courtney. Hey,

I love your show. I appreciate you having me on today. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks a lot. Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Real Foodology podcast. If you liked this episode, please leave a review in your podcast app to let me know. This is a resident media production produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Chris McCone. The theme song is called Heaven by the amazing singer Georgie, spelled with a J. Love you guys so much. See you next week. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't constitute a provider patient relationship. I am a nutritionist, but I am not your nutritionist.

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