The Highwire with Del Bigtree - XLEAR VS. THE FTC

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Nate Jones, founder of best selling nasal rinse, Xlear, describes his long battle against the FTC’s attempt to shut down his clinically tested product because of its efficacy against COVID-19.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

It does take courage. It takes courage to step out. And what's even more amazing is those brave heroes that step out often without even being recognized, all on their own. They're not doing it for fame. They're not doing it for fortune. They're doing it because it's what's right. So many of those courageous heroes have come across this desk and sat on our stage here at the high wire. It's really the thing I'm the most proud of. Today's story is one that maybe you don't know about. seems, you know, no one was paying attention that there are products out there that could have really protected you from COVID, but the U.S. government made sure you didn't hear about it. And if they tried to just tell you what they could prove, they bring a lawsuit and they try to destroy you forever. Most run, most say, what do you need me to pay? All right, I'll never say anything again. You know, this routine? Well, not Nate Jones. Take a look at this. I was born in Kansas City. My dad was going to medical school. He was always looking for natural things to do, non-pharma solutions. And he used saline a lot. And it wasn't until he read some of the studies in the 90s about how dentists were using xylitol to prevent tooth decay. And there was a study that was shown that xylitol is blocking the ability of strepneumal, H flu, MCATN, and some of these other pathogens to adhere to the tissue. And he surmised that if you can block it from adhering to the tissue, you're not going to get sick as often.

So he put xylitol into a saline and started spraying it up their nose, and they stopped getting sick. At the end of 1999, I went out to visit my dad, who lives in West Texas, and I was sitting in his clinic with him, and one of these nurses came in and said, Dr. Jones, we need some more of that jungle juice she mixed up for the kids. Then the nurse came back and said, yeah, that lady, you just went and made that up. She just drove from Arkansas with three sick grandkids in the car because one of her family members that lived out in West Texas was telling her how effective this doctor was treating ear infections. And so she drove out to West Texas, bought a couple of bottles this for, you know,

a couple of bucks, and turned around and drove back to Arkansas. And to me, if someone's willing to drive eight hours each way to buy a couple bottles, you should probably start a business with it. I quit my job working as a diver, doing underwater construction, and moved back here to Utah while I started the company. My dad came up with the name, spelled X-L-E-A-R as pronounce clear because it clears your nose, washes your nose, and the X is from the xylitol. So we were selling a couple bottles a month, and then about six months after we started.

We were at a medical convention down in Texas, and this doctor comes up to us and starts asking a lot of very good questions. And it turns out that it was Dr. David Williams. And he ends up writing this newsletter. And then all of a sudden, within a matter of three days, we went from doing about $1,000 a month in business to doing about $5,000 a day.

And pretty soon, I mean, we were the number one selling nasal spray in the natural market. In 2016, we were in the mass market. We were in a lot of the pharmacies, most of the chains. Everything's going great, and then COVID hit. Mystery virus in China that now has the World Health Organization on edge. New infections exploding from coast to coast, shattering records for single-day deaths, hospitalizations, and new cases. I was concerned about how it would affect my family.

You know, my kids are young. You know, I was worried more about my mom and my dad, who were elderly. It took me a couple of months to realize that it really wasn't what we were being fed in the media, wasn't really what was true. But during early 2020, it kind of started getting a little concern that our public health agencies, they'd forgotten how to read because there was a bunch of papers that started coming out in the medical literature talking about just using saline, just rinsing your airway, and how that would help with COVID.

We've been selling a nasal hygiene product for 20 years. We understand nasal hygiene as good as any other group on the public. planet and we just said hey you know what we've never looked at viruses the doctors are telling us it's having a good effect and so we sent it up to the Utah State University virology lab does this kill this SARS COVID-2 and sure enough that they respond and said yes it destroys it rather effectively and we thought it was a xylitol and what we found out was that the grapefruit seed extract that we've been using for 20 years as a preservative destroys

this virus and the data just kept coming out about why and how it would be effective. And again, we shared that with the government. Again, we shared that with the CDC, and they ignored it. But we had a lot of the professional baseball teams that called us and asked for product for their teams to use. Another one is my phone ring, and it was George Stephanoblus. I have COVID, and this guy reached out and says that your nasal spray might work.

And I overnighted a couple of bottles to him, and when other doctors, when people that were treating people with COVID, started talking about how nasal hygiene worked, Some of them were using our products, some of them were using other products. But we would repost some of those and say, hey, people, wash your nose. And then July 29th of 2020, we actually got a warning letter from the FTC saying that we could not be sharing any of the data from any of our studies or any of the doctors what they were talking about as far as nasal hygiene goes

and how it could be beneficial. I said, this is absolutely stupid. But we took down the social media posts, trying to appease the people at the FTC, And we never heard back from. Our lawyers reached out to him and said, hey, are you happy with this? Do we have your blessing? Are you, you know, did we appease you? And they didn't respond, and they didn't respond.

And when we got new data studies, we would post those studies. We would do press releases. And then they came back to us and said, no, you can't be sharing these press releases because they're not human airway studies. And so then we go and do those. And then they come back and say, well, you can't use those either. Go and do this other study. We go and do that study.

And they say, okay, you can't do that study. use that one either. Now you have to go do two RCT studies. The goalposts were moving. They kept coming back with ridiculous after ridiculous after ridiculous and we said no. And so it was a little bit over a year later after they gave us the warning letter. They sued us. Cusing us of making unsubstantiated claims. They're telling me that I broke the law. I know that I haven't broken the law. I think that the people at the FTC that are censoring us have broken the law and they have caused people to die. I mean, I knew I was in for a fight because I knew that we were in the right. I knew we had science on our side and I wasn't going to back down.

You know, when we all want some lawsuits about the unsubstantiated claims of how about the COVID vaccine and its effectiveness and now it's safety, especially amongst children, I don't see the government stepping in there and bringing a lawsuit, but God forbid you decide to irrigate your know as well at the heart of this, is just a really great individual doing what's right. I'm joined now by Nate Jones. Thanks for having me. It's really a pleasure to have you. You know, lots of people sort of run when the government gets involved. I guess in the beginning, you tried to work with them, right? Like, okay. But what I find interesting about your story is usually when you hear about a vitamin company or somewhere in natural health, they're just making claims,

which is hard to stand by. You were just basically publishing science that you were funding to have look at your product and saying, look, this is what the science shows, right? Correct. I mean, early on in 2020, and again in the intro, it talked about this, we had never in 20 years thought about looking at viruses. And so we obviously didn't have any data to back it up. So we weren't saying anything. But doctors started talking about it, about using it, and while they're treating patients with COVID. People who are, doctors who are treating patients with COVID, you know, not just people at the CDC. Yeah.

And they asked us and said, hey, can you find out why this is working that well? And that's why we actually sent it up and have the studies done. And as soon as those studies came back, we understood from the first set of data that we got that it would be beneficial. For 20 years, we've been out there talking, educating, researching about bacteria and how, if you can stop something in your nose before it spreads to the rest of your body, your chance of getting sick, obviously. I mean, this is something that a kindergartener knows and understands. If it doesn't spread to the rest of your body, your chance of getting sick are going to go down.

We know that. I mean, why do we wash our hands? Why do we brush our teeth? Why do we take, you know, all of this stuff? But we don't really wash our nose that much. And that's where most of the pathogens that in our body come in through. I mean, certainly COVID, all the science said, this thing's colonizing here. It's moving down into your throat.

Right in here is where it starts. If you, you know, that's the moment. Then once it really, once it goes past there and it hits your lungs, then you're in trouble. But if you could stop it here and what I find so shocking about all these stories, but especially is it just, it's such a common sense thing. As you said, saline would do something. But if there's something in that saline that actually kills the virus, then all the better. But meanwhile, we're being every doctor saying, don't do anything at all.

We have absolutely no treatment whatsoever. So what is the side effect of saying you may want to try rinsing your nose? I mean, since that is where it is, maybe some of it will rinse out. I mean, we're so far outside of reason in this conversation. Well, the side effect of doing that is the government would sue you. Right. I don't know, you almost would rather die than actually do it. But no, I mean, we had data.

There were articles that were getting published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggesting that it would probably work. But they had data from this study. The first one that I'm aware of where they actually had data was an NIH-funded study at Vanderbilt University where they were using saline irrigation. And they had 60 people over the age of 65. They all had COVID.

They test positive. They have symptoms. And in under a week, they're all better. And when you go out and try to share this, the companies that provided the material, you know, their competitors of ours, Neomed, Navaj. They said, okay, well, we won't share the data. Which if you ask me, I think that's a track.

to their customers. Yeah. And it's a travesty to our country because they need to stand up and share the data for something that's so safe and has, I mean, yeah, granted it was a study of 60 people. But the safety factor that in the efficacy, is it really going to hurt anybody if they go and put some salt water up their nose? Not really. And we've known that you can use iodine in a nasal spray.

They use baby shampoo in nasal sprays. We've been using xylitol for decades. Iota carogen, and there's all kinds of things that we know block bacteria and viruses from adhering in our nose. Just here in the U.S., we suppress that information. There's too much money being made off of the pharmaceuticals to treat all these diseases that we breed in. So tell me a little bit about sort of, let's take it back a step because we sort of rushed through it in that. Your father decides, let me try putting xylitol into a nasal spray. Is that sort of how this starts?

What was his thinking on that? Why xylitol? Because, so they've known since the 40, and that's the 40s, since the 60s, they started doing it in the 40s, so that's where I got missed up. Okay. But they started doing research in the 60s looking at how xylitol prevents tooth decay. Okay. Dentists were looking these research studies. Dentists really don't, you know, they didn't really communicate that much with docked with physicians.

And what happened is when PubMed came online, my dad was on there querying how to prevent ear infections. and what kept coming up with these dental research studies, because the dentists, they keep all the data, and the kids in these studies with all the xylitol chewing gum, looking at how it prevents tooth decay, they noticed they also were recording the data showing that they got 42% fewer respiratory infections, ear infections, just by chewing gum with xylitol.

Really? Okay? You get rid of tooth decay, 42% fewer air infections. These are University of Michigan dental school studies. They're published. They were published a long time ago. And my dad read that, and then there was a study that came out in 98,

in a journal of antimicrobial chemotherapy where they actually talked and said this is what's happening. Zylitol is blocking the ability of strefnumo, H, flu, M, cat, and all these pathogens from adhering to the tissue. If you can block that adhesion, you're obviously not going to get sick that much.

And so we understood that. My dad, he goes, well, I have all these babies that are having current ear infections rather than bombarding. It's a huge issue in kids. It didn't used to be, but kids have been the tubes in their ears and just it's a real mess for a lot of parents.

But he started putting it into a saline spray, started washing their nose out and they stopped getting sick. Kids that were coming in, you know, constantly for antibiotics, they stopped getting sick. So I quit my day job. I started the company and 20 years later, we're in most of your pharmacies, your grocery stores, your retailer, I mean, we're everywhere. And, you know, and then we have COVID and we end up learning what it does for not just SARS COVID-2, but H1N1, RSV, and a couple of other ones. Wow. And so all you were doing is, You know, putting up the study here, we just did a study, here's where it's at, this is what you can say.

You're not, you know, I mean, beyond that, you're not like we're curing coronavirus, just this is what it shows how it's affecting the virus. What is it, what is the source of Zyla? Because to me, in my mind, I'm like, that's like a fake sugar, right? It's like a fake sugar product. So how is it end up having some medicinal value? It's actually a natural sugar. Okay. In fact, the best way to get it is if you go break a corn cob after you didn't, your next year,

of corn and the cob, break the cob in half and suck on it, and that's xylitol. About 40% of the dry weight of a corn cobb is xylitol. Really? But it's the number one sugar in biomass. I mean, it's one of the sugars that makes up plant walls. So I mean, it's extremely common. And if you go back a couple hundred years before we were processing glucose, sucrose, it was the number one sugar that we ate as humans.

Wow, so that was really our sweetener in nature when we're just eating things and not adding and outside sugar. And so now you're bringing that back around. Are there, I mean, you were telling me backstage that they're doing some looking at gut biome being affected by. Yeah, there's a, there's a couple of studies out there that are, where they're looking at things like autism, gut bone microbiome. They're looking at, they're looking at cancer. Even though I'm funding it, that's outside of my area of what I truly understand. Yeah.

I could say enough just to confuse myself and, you know, everybody, else but no it's some exciting research so now this lawsuit are you the only one I mean as you said Navage as all these other you know nasal irrigation companies you can go to the drug store you see them there you see clear there did they receive the same letter they received the same morning letter and they just uh yeah walked with they just ran and they just said we'll stay away from it tucked down in their foxhole was their word right until it blows over and then you decided to step out so like just you know I don't promote products but this is about a product but you you made it clear like

you're fighting for this yeah but really this is this is a competitor right correct how will this competitor be affected because is this also a xylitol product or is it no they use xylitol there's a couple other ones you use it's it's what I'm trying to get to is that the concept of nasal hygiene is something that we do need to look at and understand okay I know it, I understand it. We're blocked from actually discussing what it does because of our government and these agencies that I guess are run by the pharmaceutical companies. Because public health, I mean, I'll give you a good example, is soap. Yeah. We all know that soap, washing your hands with

soap and water is probably the best way to stop the spread of communicable diseases out there, period. But the soap companies can't go say that. Right. Okay, because they're not a drug. So we can go in and say washing your nose helps you smell better. Right. But we can't really get into what's behind it. And in the past, the CDC, when they were actually doing their job, they were out there educating people. They were out there talking to people about washing their hands, using soap and water,

singing the happy birthday to you while you're washing your hands. They were also out there sending dental hygienists to schools to teach people, teach kids, how to brush their teeth, how to use a little pink pills and give you a toothbrush and some toothpaste. And they were teaching people how to do that. And, you know, since 1980, I guess, because that's when I was there, they've kind of abdicated that. They just don't do it anymore. And they're just so myopically focused on, you know, just sit around waiting to you have a vaccine for everything. Well, I mean, as we pointed out just earlier in the show, every doctor is being paid.

Essentially, it looks like to be a drug pusher. Yes, they are. And if it doesn't, if a drug doesn't fix it, everybody else has got to keep their science off the television, keep it off your websites. You're not allowed to talk about it only. And this is really where this gets very complicated, right? Because on the one hand, I mean, I fight for safety studies every day. I was like, where are the safety trials on vaccines? It's one of the big questions.

But pharma likes that we have the randomized control trial out there because really technically they're the only ones that can afford to do it. I mean, it does cost oftentimes millions of dollars to do a trial like that. Yeah, but usually that's the sad thing is these days it's not really the pharmaceutical companies that are paying for it. It's mostly our tax dollars. How so? Because the NIH, I mean, you listen to all this during COO. Whoa, we're funding that.

We fund all this research. The NIH and the NIAID, they fund billions of dollars in research. They're the ones that are funding most of that. The pharmaceutical companies don't fund as much. Everybody thinks that they fund a lot of money, but it's usually the government that's funding it because they get kickbacks from it. They get royalty payments from it.

Yeah, that's something that we saw with COVID. Multiple scientists would be paid for life. for developing an inside of a government agency. And then that same government agency promotes the product that they developed. They get their kickbacks. And lo and behold, the side effects, la, la, la, la, I don't know what you're talking about. We don't see any side effects. We're not doing any studies to look at it.

We're not looking at VERS. We refuse to refute what's happening there. So, you know, when you did these, you kept going and doing studies of your product. I mean, that has to have an expense to it, too. Why do it? Because I like to know. Yeah. I like to know what I'm talking about.

You know, and we, you know, when we started, so we, when we really started doing studies was actually during COVID because that opened up a whole new door of viruses. And, you know, we did a study, we did a study in 2006, I want to say, where we actually had a, we couldn't find anybody in the US to do it, so we found someone in the Czech Republic, but they went and looked at a bunch of kids, you know, and used a xylenthal nasal spray. on them prophylactically for a couple of months, kids that had chronic ear infection, chronicotitis media. And that study, you know, it showed that the kids that used a nasal spray with xylitol, it reduced the incidence of ear infections by over 80%, which was phenomenal.

We brought up, and the other thing that it showed is it showed a shift of the nasal microbiome from pathogenic bacteria to non-pathogenic bacteria. So the good bacteria, it takes over. It's commensals. So it doesn't kill everything. It's not like an antibiotic, which has its own issues, because it wipes out the good and the bad. Correct. And we know that. And we also know that from 50 years of studies of xylitol in the mouth, because it does the same thing in the mouth.

But when we tried to get that study published, the editors of the pediatric journals were like, nah, there's no way, there's no way this is valid. There's no way that spraying sugar water up your nose is going to reduce your infections like this. And so we just said, well, we just spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on getting a study done. Yeah.

And it's money wasted. So we kind of slowed down doing a lot of research in the nasal space. We funded a bunch in oral care and stuff, but it's mostly so that we know it. We can go in and talk to the doctors and the dentists about it and share the data with them, but the government stops us from actually sharing that data with the public. What faith do you have from your vantage point now in the sort of government regulatory system? It's supposed to be looking, I mean, it's supposed to be protecting, you know, people, federal Trade Commission protecting America's consumers.

That's their tagline. Yeah. But I can show you with data that by the stuff that they're censoring, just censoring us, censoring our competitors, people died. I mean, if they'd come out on the news and said, hey, guys, just wash your nose with saltwater, I guarantee you there would be hundreds of thousands of people alive today. The studies show that. Yeah.

I mean, it's not like it was making up. Studies show that, you know. You took, you took, you know, as safe of drugs as there's going to be out there with ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, took them out of people's reach while you had no answers. Then you push remdesivir, which in its study manipulates itself mid-study. Tony Fauci goes in, changes the endpoints, you know, change the protocols, which is, I mean, it's fraud. Like, they perform fraud, but bring the case against you.

How confident are you with your case? I mean, you know, it's... I'm pretty confident because they still, I mean, it's... I mean, it's just the stuff that we found out in depositions already. I mean, they're deposing me the last week of June, but we've already deposed them. And one of the funny things, I mean, it's not funny. It's really sad, is that the people at the FTC,

they acknowledge that they never even opened the emails and read the studies. Really? We could have sent them any study they wanted. And they said it wasn't in the news, so it can't be true. The news? Yeah. Well, that reminds me of, you know, when, you know, the head of the CDC says, says, I learned about the COVID at CNN or the vaccine, I think it was the vaccine. She said,

I learned about it at CNN. I was like, you're the head of the CDC. You're learning about the fact that it's going to be ready by the news? Yeah, but to answer your question, I have very little confidence. You know, I mean, you have so many drugs that are approved and then, and then, you know, we find out they're harmful. I mean, you have opioids that are approved. You have Viox. I mean, the list is long. Yeah. But yet everybody sits there and talks about regulating. I'm I'm not in a supplement business, I don't sell supplements. But everybody talks about the need to regulate the supplement business more. More people use supplements in America than use pharmaceuticals.

They're cheaper people to use them. But yet you have over 2 million people reporting adverse effects from drugs every year, and you have about 3,000 people reporting adverse events from supplements. So tell me which one you think needs to be regulated more. Right. What, when you look at the government system, I mean, if you were king for a day, I mean, it does appear regulatory capture is a huge issue. The pharmaceutical industry has just got itself wrapped around the CDC, FDA. I don't know FTC what's involved there, but we see EPA's got Exxon, official.

It's just like somehow these lobbyists have, you know, where these regulatory agencies are supposed to be, as they said, looking out for the consumer. Ultimately, they're doing the bidding for their bosses, which appears to be. the industries were supposed to be being protected from. If I was president, because here in the U.S. we don't have kings. If I was president for a day, I would probably just demand that the CDC and the surgeon general, you've got to increase what they're doing to educate people about how to stay healthy. Public health, the golden century, yeah. But the golden time of public health was really from the late 1800s to the late 1900s.

We had a reduction in almost every type of communicable disease, and it wasn't through vaccines. It wasn't through pharmaceutical products. It was because our public health agencies were out there making sure that we exercised, that we ate food, good nutrition, that we had good personal hygiene, and that we had good sanitation. We had water coming to our houses. We had the sewage getting pumped away. We had the trash getting taken away. All of that stuff.

Those are the four pillars that public health policy should be based on. They shouldn't be based on sticking a needle in everybody. And they shouldn't be based on pharmaceuticals. But that's what the surgeon general, and that's what the CDC are doing now, is they're focusing on that. And I tried to find out what the budget, the amount of money being spent on prevention and education was compared to the $4 trillion that we spend on sick care, healthcare. And I couldn't find a good solid number, but it's a couple of billion.

Right. So you're spending a couple of billion as a country on educating people and preventing and teaching them how to brush their teeth and wash their nose and wash your hands. Well, is it even that because when we look into it, we look at food pyramids or whatever shape they put the food, you see that it's being funded by Kellogg's and Nabisco and that's not a thing is. So is the funding even going to actual health or again?

Again, that's the issue is building through the poisons. Is, you know, what is good for you when it comes to nutrition? I don't believe that what's good for you or you. you or you is the same for me. I read a book once called The China Study about being a vegetarian. And I'm like, oh, this makes sense. So I became a vegetarian for a year

and I blew up to like 320 pounds. I mean, I was way bigger than I am now. Yeah. And so obviously being a vegetarian doesn't work for me. I have a neighbor who's a vegetarian. He's healthy as can be. So obviously, it's not a one-size-fits-all

and people in public health should understand that. Right, absolutely. But yeah, but I think that, I don't think that the CDC, or that the CDC, I don't think that the FTC should be able to sue people unless they're actually making faults and misleading statements. That's what the law says. The law says that we can't make false and misleading statements. That's what Congress gave them. We all acknowledge that.

Everybody in business says, yeah, that's true. We probably shouldn't be allowed to go out and lie about what this does. We shouldn't be able to go out and lie that this vaccine is going to prevent you from getting something. Right. Totally. Like, let's all play, let's even play field. What's in this book? you got here what's this about so this is actually it's just you know they're saying you don't have

the the thing that they have is the FTC says you have to have substantial studies right okay there's bunches of studies back someone just get this someone is this available for people oh no that's just they're all the studies are all available on our web page link on your web page yeah what's your web page it's clear xcel eaar dot com forward slash studies okay and you know there's been a couple of of great people that have talked about this i mean you know dr. McCullough he's He talks about this a lot now. You know, other doctors have come out and talked about it, you know. That great peril, by the way.

Like by saying it, it's like your license is suddenly under review for, you know. So when they sued me, this is actually interesting. When they sued me, the very first person that reached out to me and said, hey, we, I want to talk to you about this because the government's suing you, what you're selling is probably true and it's probably effective. Right. It's getting to that point. And it was a podcast called Investigator Earth. And they started getting, you know, people calling him up hating on them. Wow.

Which tell me why that even makes sense. What are next steps in this case? Where are you at right now? Is there anyone else left to be deposed? Me and they just roped in my 87-year-old dad. Oh, really? Yeah. They just noticed up last week that they wanted to depose him.

Right. You know, I think that they know they're not going to win and they're just trying to make as much hassle as they can. Yeah. For the simple reason that, you know, that's their thing is the FTC has many times said that it isn't, we don't care whether we're going to lose. It's the process is the punishment. Wow.

And so if you ask if I was king for a day, I would just abolish the FTC for the simple reason that they're not doing anything good. Yeah. I mean, you'd think they were, but it's so easy to prove someone's lying, and it becomes way more difficult to sit there and make it so vague, So they can, really, what they're trying to do is they're putting out guidelines that make it so vague that they can suit anybody they want to for making any claim at all. I mean, that's what I think really is. It's guys like you.

True, that's really what it means to be a true American patriot now. Someone's got to stand the ground. If everyone just gives in, if everyone runs away. I mean, you could. You have a successful company. Nobody knows this is going on. The product's still on the shelves. People can go and get it.

So you're going out of your way to sort of stand your ground and put yourself. in, you know, harm's way. I think as I dig more into it, I realize that there's more at stake than just me or even my company. If you take away all the supplements and stuff that people, you know, rely on in their, you know, natural products,

again, I think that's a bigger impact on America, not just taking away, but because now they're going to go and rely more on pharmaceutical products. Right, exactly right. That's the whole goal. I think that's shifting, though. I really feel like we're in a very important moment. very important moments why it's so important to tell stories like this I'm

really happy to meet you it's an honor to meet people that are just doing what's right just do it right well take care best of luck let us post it on all of your successes we'll do thank all right we'll keep you in our prayers