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336: How to Grow Sprouts in Your Kitchen for Nutritious and Inexpensive Food With Doug Evans

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336: How to Grow Sprouts in Your Kitchen for Nutritious and Inexpensive Food With Doug Evans

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

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Katie: Hello, and welcome to “The Wellness Mama Podcast.” I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and wellnesse.com, that’s wellness with an E on the end, which is our new personal care line of haircare and toothpaste that are food for your body, food for your hair, nourish you from the inside out. We think this episode is incredibly timely right now, and really practical for anyone listening but especially families, because we’re talking about a very easy, inexpensive way that you can grow some of the most nutrient-dense vegetables available in your own kitchen in a matter of days. I’m here with Doug Evans, who was an early pioneer in the health food movement. He lost his mother to cancer and his father to heart disease and he watched other family members suffer through various health problems, and invested in and co-founded several companies with a goal of helping improve the future of health in our country. He was the inventor and founder of Juicero which was a cold-pressed using system for use at home. And he also is really passionate and involved about sprouting and has written a book called “The Sprout Book.” And he lives off the water grid and the food grid on his land with private hot springs, just east of Joshua Tree, California. And sprouting is a big part of his life. He does it to a very wide degree. But today he shares his expertise and what he’s learned in ways that we can all implement this even if we have small kitchens or even truly no kitchen or no backyard, how we can all start to grow some of our own food. Very practical and very timely episode, and I think you will get a lot out of it. So without further ado, here we go.

Doug, welcome. Thanks for being here today.

Doug: Thank you so much for having me, Katie. It’s a real pleasure and an honor and I’m so excited. I was thinking about this literally all night.

Katie: Well, thank you. I’m excited to have you here. I think this is a really timely topic and an excellent one for moms because it’s so practical and so beneficial. And to start broad, actually I’d love to always start with a story. So we’re gonna go deep on sprouting today, which is something that I do at my house and I love and that you are definitely an expert in. But I always love to hear the story of how did you get into this world in the first place?

Doug: I had a really challenging upbringing and I think we all do, so I won’t go too much on that, but I got into a lot of trouble. All of my friends were on drugs and going to jail and really serious problems. And I escaped that world into another world by leaping and joining the Army. So I was a paratrooper in the US Army and that was more insane than my home life. And then from the Army, I got into graphic design and computer graphics and my life was going, I would say fairly well. I was in a relationship, I was making money, I enjoyed my work. I didn’t really have the connection of meaning and purpose that I do today, but I felt that I was doing good work and it was bringing out the best of me.

And then my aunt got diabetes and they chopped off both of her feet below her ankles. And then my uncle got heart disease and then my mom got stomach cancer. Then my father died from complications related to heart disease. And then my brother had the first of three strokes and then a heart attack and diabetes. And I thought my entire life was genetically-cursed and that I needed to really start to get my affairs in order that I just wasn’t gonna live. And I was 36 pounds heavier and just not having the best time ever. And that was kind of my wake-up call that I needed to explore changes in my life.

And I met someone who was a vegan and I’d never heard of the term “vegan” before. And she kind of enlightened me to the fact that there was a definitive connection, beyond correlated, between lifestyle and chronic illness. And that was so hard for me to believe, almost as if was the world round or flat, right? And it was so hard for me to comprehend. But once I made that connection, and that was 21 years ago, I never looked back.

Katie: Yeah. It seems crazy a little bit to think of now for me when, being where I am now. But I remember that in my journey as well. Probably close to, gosh, almost 15 years ago now. The first time I started realizing there was more to food than just calories and that it wasn’t just a matter of like how much we ate, but that the food quality really mattered so much. And it was, it’s been a long journey for me of learning what works best for my body and choosing the most nutrient dense foods. And part of that process for me has been shifting my focus from kind of the high school and college mentality about food just being calories that were tied to your weight, to food being chemistry and nutrition and vitamins and nutrients and a message that you send to your body. So rather than just looking at the amount that we eat, looking at the micronutrients and the density and what makes food really good for the body and approaching that from a perspective of nourishing the body versus ever depriving the body.

And that’s one of the reasons I like sprouts so much because they are, on the spectrum, an incredibly nutrient dense food and also an incredibly easy to grow and acquire food if you know what you’re doing, which I think is an increasingly important topic right now with everything that we have going on in the world. So to start broad, I would love for you to kind of define what are sprouts for anyone who may not be familiar and what are all the different types of sprouts?

Doug: Sure. Well, sprouts are the result of seeds coming to life. So there would be no life or plant life on the planet if there were not sprouts. And so if we go back to the seed, all plant life begins with a seed, which is a complete, living plant organism. So that’s a seed and they’re staying in this dormant state, literally waiting for the opportunity to burst into life, also known as germination. And my insight was that even though I had been sprouting for over 25 years and sprouting a lot for 21 years, I never made the connection that sprouts could be a meaningful food source as opposed to a garnish.

So the seeds themselves were, in sprouts, were popular in certain cuisines like mung beans in Asian cuisine or alfalfa sprouts for the hippy dippy trippies of the world. But the reality was there’s a whole range literally from A to Z of seeds that are now commonly sprouted, turned into food and they can go from azuki and bean sprouts and lentils and broccoli and clover and alfalfa to peas and hemp and radish. And so literally every vegetable that we know actually has a seed that can be sprouted.

Katie: Got it. So you said, I think maybe you’re right, people probably have heard of sprouts as a garnish, maybe on the sandwich or addition in a restaurant. And you said you had made the shift to thinking of them as an actual food source and not just a garnish. So explain a little bit more what that means and what kind of nutrients can we get from sprouts.

Doug: So I grew up in New York City and then I moved to California and I was toggling between Los Angeles and San Francisco. And then my life got composted. Everything that I knew from work and relationships all kind of ended. And so when it was time to begin, kind of this next chapter, I decided that I wanted to live in nature and I wanted to have space and see sunrises and sunsets. And the place that I could literally afford to do that was the desert because it’s very inexpensive. You could still buy an acre of land in the desert for $500 or $1,000. And so I decided to move to the desert. And so fortunately on my land, I have hot springs. So we have water and we have a little oasis, but we don’t have rich soil. And part of being in the desert is that you’re far away from things.

So not only am I in a desert, I’m in a food desert because I’m an hour and 15 minutes away from a Whole Foods, and the nearest restaurants are Del Taco and Burger King. So with that, I started to, and my life has still been plant-based. So I decided, how was I going to get my organic vegetables? And so I was like, “Oh, well, let me just start to sprout.” So I started to sprout some mung beans and some broccoli sprouts and some alfalfa and some peas, green peas. And there were, I think the epiphany was there was one day when I literally had no other food. It was like on a Friday, I had consumed all of my fruit from the farmer’s market. I didn’t have anything else. And this day I just ate sprouts and I felt good and I wasn’t hungry. And that kind of made the connection that, wow, I now have food sovereignty, I can grow my own food and well, I’m sure we’re going to cover it, but I was doing this in a 48-square foot kitchen without soil, without sunshine, using the most provincial, primitive sprouting tools, Mason jars, unbleached paper towels, cheesecloth and basic kitchen equipment. And all of a sudden, I was growing copious amounts of sprouts in a very small space and I was feeling great. And that was my kind of shift into sprouts.

Katie: I love that. And I think that’s a really important distinction to talk about is that unlike a garden, which I am also a huge fan of and I would guess you are, too, but sprouts don’t require outdoor space. They don’t require soil. They don’t require sunlight in the same way that the gardens do. So for people who don’t have that outdoor space, sprouts are a great alternative. And for people who do, I would say sprouts are also a great thing to use in conjunction with a garden. I’m, right now especially, I’ll just put that plug in there. I think those of us who can absolutely should garden and grow as much of our own food as we can just to support the supply chain and also because then we know where our food came from. And with sprouting, this is truly possible for essentially everyone, because you just said a 48-square foot kitchen. Did I hear that right?

Doug: That is correct. It is tiny. It is tiny, my kitchen.

Katie: And so if you can do it in that small space, you know, all of us with our, any varying size of kitchen can find space. And I’ll even say, for me, there have been times when I lived in small apartments and the kitchen was super small. You don’t actually have to grow them in the kitchen. They just need to be able to be rinsed a couple of times a day. So I’ve grown sprouts on a table in my living room before and things like that. So they’re very adaptable. Talk about like, let’s go through the basic process of sprouting for someone who’s never done it before. Walk us through kind of where they would start.

Doug: Well, I’m gonna start with broccoli sprouts because they, not only are they easy to do, they have these incredible nutrition properties. Basically, I start with filtered water or spring water and I buy organic seeds specifically designed for sprouting, which today I believe we’re very lucky because we live in a world where you can order them online and they can come in a few days. So that’s easy and we can discuss, you know, where to buy them later. But I will, I usually buy my broccoli sprouts seeds in a five-gallon bucket. And I will take one tablespoon of the seeds and add that to a Mason jar and then add about one or two ounces of water, just enough water so that the seeds are fully submerged. And then I will set that Mason jar either in the kitchen cabinet or under the cabinet and keeping it in a semi-dark space and avoiding sunlight and allowing that to sit for five hours or eight hours.

And then using cheesecloth, and they now make these really nifty lids that have a screen on them. So you can put them on top of the Mason jar or you can replace the metal plate that’s in the Mason jar with a piece of cheesecloth and screw it on top. And then I will strain the excess water from the jar and then I’ll add more water. I’ll rinse it again and then I will turn the jar upside down pretty close to, like, 90 degrees, 75 degrees. So it’s at an angle where most of the water will, all of the water will drain out but not instantly. And then I will set the jar upside down at this angle in a jar or in a tray.

I’ve recently adopted a bamboo dish drying tray, which is at a 45 degree angle and I’m keeping my Mason jars inverted in there. And then literally twice a day, in the morning and at night, I add water and then I rinse, add water, rinse, keep inverted. And within two or three days, you’ll start to see the seeds starting to burst to life and they literally grow exponentially. So within seven days, the volume of the broccoli seeds will go from something that is about a 16th of an inch diameter to something that is well over an inch of a living plant organism with leaves and a stem. And it’s picked up along the way, fiber. And we can go into the nutrition in a little bit.

And then after five days, seven days, harvest time comes where I’ll do a final rinse. I will let them sit all day without adding any water and then I’ll start to eat them or put them into the refrigerator. And there’s actually three paths that I’ll do with a finished sprout. I’ll eat it, I will refrigerate it or I’ll freeze it.

Katie: Okay. So talk about that because that’s another important thing to know is how can you store these sprouts after you said you can refrigerate it or freeze it. How does that process work?

Doug: So, because they are a fresh plant, and the operative word here is “fresh,” it has a short shelf life, so you must…refrigeration and chilling is nature’s preservative. So if you refrigerate it, you will extend the shelf life for several days. If you freeze it, you can extend the shelf life for months. And, you know, for those very few people that may have a low temperature dehydrator, you know, used for drying fruit or vegetables, you can also dehydrate them. And they’ll also last for weeks or months being dehydrated. And the ones in the refrigerator, they’re easy to use. You pull them out of the refrigerator. And what I do is literally, I want to add sprouts to every meal. So whatever I’m eating, I’m adding sprouts to them. If it’s frozen, I take them out of the glass jar, I transfer them into a Pyrex container or I have these cloth bags that are reusable bags for the farmer’s market and I put them in there.

And something I’ve recently started to do was I’ll take the sprouts, roll them into little balls and pop them into the ice tray. So I’m making broccoli sprouts ice cubes, and then I’ll add a little filtered water. So then when I’m going to make a smoothie, I pop out a few of the ice cubes, I’m able to add them to the smoothie as opposed to just ice. And there’s a secondary benefit from freezing them where it’s activating this enzyme and simulating the same benefit of massive chewing. So it’s breaking them down and releasing more of the compound sulforaphane, which we can get into. So those are the basics.

Katie: I love it. And yeah, I would love to take a little bit more of a deep dive into broccoli sprouts especially. And I have a tutorial of this and, of course, I’ll link to your book about this as well, but it’s one of my favorite sprouts not just because I think they’re delicious, but also because they have some really unique benefits. And I know there are ways we can optimize these benefits more. But you mentioned sulforaphane. And from my understanding, sulforaphane is created when an enzyme called myrosinase transformed something called glucoraphanin into sulforaphane. And then you can correct me if I’m wrong on that. But basically like from what I understand, those two things, myrosinase and glucoraphanin are found in different parts of the plant. And so you mentioned chewing or freezing or I often blend and that is supposed to help the compounds mix, I think, from what I understand. So first of all, explain what sulforaphane is and why we should all love it.

Doug: So, sulforaphane is an antioxidant compound and it exists in cruciferous vegetables. And so from broccoli and cauliflower and kale and wasabi and bok choy, the entire range of cruciferous vegetables contains this glucoraphanin and which, as you described, is the precursor to the sulforaphane. So they all have this. So the science of how this works and why this works is being deeply, deeply researched. And I’m actually doing a Zoom call recording with Dr. Jed Fahey from Johns Hopkins University, who is one of the team of scientists that discovered that broccoli sprouts and broccoli seeds have the highest level sulforaphane within the cruciferous family 20 years ago, this discovery was made or 23 years ago.

And so part of the plant’s protective mechanism is when there are pests that go to eat it, they respond by being bitter and other kind of natural defense mechanisms, so that bitterness will protect the plant. And it turns out that bitterness can have an effect on cells and the way that sulforaphane kind of works, and there’s a wide range. There was a recent white paper that I was reading that talked about how sulforaphane is being, is now being used to treat, not to cure, autism because it’s creating the same heat shock, which results when someone who has autism has a fever, they have less symptoms of the autism without getting the fever, the broccoli sprouts, a la sulforaphane, is able to create that same, a biochemical reaction in the body. And with treating this, the chemo protective properties are very powerful.

So, without doing a full discussion on antioxidants and how they work, the recommended kind of treatment, and there was probably over 150 documented research studies in 2019 on the use of broccoli sprouts, broccoli sprout extract and the myrosinase and the glucoraphanin forming the sulforaphane in healing. And people have attempted to patent these things. And the supplements are very expensive if you buy a sulforaphane supplement. But the reality is you can literally grow them for pennies a serving and eat maybe an ounce or two ounces to start gaining that benefit of this unique compound from it.

If we just shift over to a little bit more of mainstream nutrition, broccoli sprouts, one cup of broccoli sprouts, which is a few ounces of broccoli sprouts also contain about 60% of the recommended daily allowance of vitamin C. So they have, in these little sprouts, they’ve got vitamin C, they’ve got antioxidants, they’ve got the sulforaphane, they have chlorophyll, they have soluble and insoluble fiber, they have small amounts of protein. And so there’s all these things existing in a seed that you, as the mama, can nurture into development of this food. And it has been documented that all the cruciferous family has sulforaphane. Broccoli sprouts can have 20 to 50 and I’ve heard as even as high as a hundred times more of the sulforaphane of the mature broccoli, that vegetable.

Katie: Wow. Yeah, that’s really, really drastic. And part of my own personal process, I’m gonna try freezing more because that’s a great idea. But I grow these all the time kind of in rotation on my counter and I’ll make a smoothie out of broccoli sprouts and that, like you said, breaking up the broccoli sprouts can increase the sulforaphane availability as can, from what I’ve read and you can verify this, the heat. So we know that cold can, but it seems to be right about 150 degrees that there, it can increase that activity. So I’ll soak the sprouts in water at that temperature and then make it into a smoothie and add a little bit of mustard powder and then drink it immediately. I’m curious if there’s anything about that process that you would change to make it even more available.

Doug: I think that mustard seeds can also be sprouted. And are you buying mustard powder or are you using fresh mustard seeds?

Katie: I’m actually usually using just mustard seeds that grind up in the blender as well. But I have read that they can increase the sulforaphane because they also contain myrosinase.

Doug: So this is a secret that I’m happy to share, and this is something I learned after I wrote the book. The most amount of sulforaphane is in the seed itself. And as the seed grows and it sprouts and it goes into a mature vegetable, the sulforaphane or glucoraphanin content does not increase. It stays finite. So the most concentrated amount of the sulforaphane is in the seed itself. So, my secret that I do is I use a coffee grinder and I take mustard seeds and broccoli seeds and I grind them into a powder. And then you sprinkle that dust into anything if you’re looking for a high dose.

And then the most important part on consuming this food is you can’t inhale it. Like, you literally need to stare…..Like, to me, my process is I will stare at it and think about those seeds and the sulforaphane and the broccoli and the nature and the healing properties so that it’s like Pavlov’s dog. I want to be salivating and bringing up the digestive fluids and activating my body for the process of intaking this. So literally the first step for me, it’s a very meditative, surreal, serene process of using my eyes to prepare for the consumption. So that’s phase one.

Phase two is, I will then take this and literally, even though it may be in a liquid form or a blended form, I will chew that to mix this potent formula with my saliva. And by mixing with my saliva, I’m sending keys to the brain, clues and cues to the brain, which are then activating the digestive fluids in the stomach to begin the processing for the absorption. And then the next stage is swallowing it slowly and doing this in a ritualistic fashion on a relatively empty stomach, preferably an empty stomach. So there’s enough within the smoothie, you know, and I’ll add a black pepper, I’ll add a turmeric. I’ll add other more mature vegetables.

The research is actually saying that you get the most benefit when you’re combining broccoli sprouts and mature broccoli in a smoothie. And so really, I’m having this smoothie and letting it sit, letting it digest, letting the body absorb it, because otherwise it could be like eating corn where it’s going in and out without a lot of assimilation and bioavailability.

Katie: I absolutely agree. And I think that’s great advice for anything we eat, truly, is to chew it more, to be more present and to eat slowly. I think that alone can make a big difference for a lot of people in digestion knowing what we know about digestion beginning in the mouth and the enzymes necessary for the entire process and how we can optimize that just by being more conscious when we’re chewing. So I think that’s really, really good advice.

And yeah, I love all the points that you mentioned about sulforaphane and I think we could probably talk all day just about broccoli sprouts and sulforaphane and detoxification and how there are studies. I mean, it’s truly incredible. This is one of those things that I always encourage people to do because it’s so inexpensive and we’ve got studies showing that it’s good for the brain, it’s good for fighting cancer, it’s good for your heart. It increases glutathione as it’s an Nrf2 activator. People use this for weight loss. They think there’s positive effects for anti-aging, it boosts liver function. It reduces inflammation. I think as far as, I don’t think there are any silver bullets, but I think in general, this is one that is almost universally beneficial for people.

And I know I was first introduced to it by my doctor when I got diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. I had nodules on my thyroid and his advice was to start eating broccoli sprouts every day along with some other dietary interventions and some supplements and some, even at the time, pharmaceuticals, of course. But he explained that because of the compounds in broccoli sprouts, they actually show some anti-nodule, anti-tumor and anti-inflammatory activity. So for people who are struggling with any kind of inflammatory disease like an autoimmune disease, it can be really helpful. And I noticed that I really felt better the more and more I did that. And now, like I said, it’s a regular part of my life. What are some of the other favorite sprouts that you always have going in your kitchen?

Doug: I will, I love sunflower sprouts, and sunflower sprouts, which are also a quasi-microgreen, and we could talk about that in a moment, but microgreens are a relatively new category, you know, just a few decades old. But the sunflower sprouts, I love and I use as an alternative to lettuces in my salads. So they’re hearty and they’re rich. And so I love them. I recently started to like leek sprouts because they have this really spicy kind of kick to them, which can add life to a lot of things that I wasn’t prior exposed to.

I’m also, as a, someone who’s plant-based, people always ask, where do I get my omega-3s from? Do I take a supplement? And my experience with supplementing vitamin omega-3s has not been very good because I think the vitamin, the omega-3s get rancid whether you’re doing an algae supplement or a fish oil, which I’ve never done and I don’t have any plans to do it, but the plant-based omega-3s also leave a aftertaste in my mouth. Or if I burp after, or they’ll make me burp, it’s gross.

And so I was really getting into chia and making chia pudding and eating chia seeds. And about a year and a half ago, I started to sprout chia. And so now you’re getting the omega-3s and you’re getting the fiber and you’re getting the chlorophyll and you’re getting vitamin C. So, and I’m sure you remember the Chia Pet. I use an unglazed terracotta pot drip tray from plants and I soak them so that they’re wet. I sprinkle the broccoli, the chia seeds on them, and then I use a little spray mister. And within days, I have these activated chia seeds.

So I’m always working on chia, sunflower sprouts, always broccoli sprouts. I’m probably eating eight ounces of broccoli sprouts a day. And because I’m very active, my source of protein is usually sprouted green peas and sprouted garbanzo beans. And I’ve also, you know, soy, I don’t know what your opinion is on soy, but I think soy gets a bad rap in many instances. And, you know, the quality of soy is very relevant. So, organic soybeans that are sprouted are low-cost, a fraction of the cost of edamame, they taste even fresher and they’re alive. And so I’ve been using organic yellow soybeans. And that’s kind of my daily rotation.

And then I also have wheatgrass growing and I don’t have a wheatgrass juicer now, so I’m actually taking little bits of handfuls and I will chew the wheatgrass. And I’m doing it for my teeth and I’m doing it to get the nutrients from it and I just chew it, chew it, chew it. And no matter how much you chew, you will never break it down fully. So I chew it and then I remove the insoluble, undigestible fiber, roughage, and just compost that. But that chewing exercise is very good. And it’s, you have no choice. You can’t swallow that. So that’s my basic sprouting routine.

Katie: Okay. Let’s talk a little bit more about chia seeds specifically because I also love chia seeds. And people probably are familiar with Chia Pets if they remember them from back in the day. I also know how chia seeds can gel together. That’s one of their amazing properties and that’s why I use them to make chia seed pudding. Are there any special instructions when it comes to sprouting and rinsing chia seeds?

Doug: I don’t rinse them because they will become gelatinous very quickly. So, what I do is I wet, you can do this on cheesecloth, but then you’ll never get it off. So that’s why I like using the terracotta or the unglazed clay as a sprouting mechanism and medium. And it turns out the terracotta is porous and it’s breathable. So I will wet that. I will add the seeds onto it so that they’re literally touching each other. I try not to get a double layer or a stack. So I literally look so that the seeds are as close together as possible to form a single layer across the entire bottom of the terracotta plate. And then I will mist them and then they will kind of touch each other and they’ll form this little gelatinous film. And then I’ll cover that up. And then two or three times a day, I will continue to mist and bring them to life.

And so, if you, I posted something a few, probably a few months ago on chia seeds where I bought organic chia seeds in the health food store. And they weren’t sprouting seeds but they were on sale. And I thought, “Let me just try this.” And literally I put, one, I did sample A, I put the organic seeds, chia seeds in there. And then in sample B, I used my premium Sproutman organic sprouting seeds. And three days later, my organic sprouting seeds were about one inch tall and vibrant and healthy and the other ones were moldy.

And that was another, like, caused a few things for me to think about and research. And I found out that the organic seeds for sprouting were like the creme de la creme. Those are the first ones, the freshest ones. And then the ones that actually go into the bulk and that go into the packaging, they may actually get pasteurized and they get older and they don’t have that high germination rate. So if you’re going to sprout chia, I highly recommend getting fresh seeds specifically designed for sprouting.

Katie: Got it. Okay. That’s great to know.

And to shift gears a little bit, I know one thing I love about this is this is something that’s easy to do with kids as a way for them to see where some of the food supply comes from, even if you don’t have a garden. But it’s also truly something that’s easy enough that kids can do it on their own. Like you’ve explained the process and how easy it is to have this in our kitchen and how a lot of people probably have a lot of the tools already on hand to do this.

But I know you share the importance of this, but knowing where our food comes from and having a relationship with our food supply, and I think that’s something as parents, especially, we really want to make sure that we give our children the opportunity to do because often in today’s world, it’s easy to become completely detached from our food supply. And so I love that this is a way that kids can see the process and it’s so quick that it literally happens before their eyes and it’s exciting to them. And it’s also easy enough that even small children can become responsible for growing the sprouts. I also would love to talk a little bit about the distinction between sprouts and microgreens because that’s another thing that people can grow at home. So can you just kind of walk us through the differences and the similarities there?

Doug: Sure. So, microgreens kind of developed as a second kind of wave of the sprouts germination. So if you think about, a lot of the sprouts will go from a seed to a tail, and the little white tail and maybe forming a little leaf. And the microgreens, so sprouts can be grown in trays, in bags, in Mason jars, on terracotta. Microgreens are almost always grown in a tray so they can vertically grow up. And the microgreens typically will have leaves. They will be in a variety of vegetables that are very familiar in names to their mature vegetable countertops, you know, whether it’s cabbage or kale or arugula or beet or radish or amaranth or cilantro. So all of these are the miniature vegetables and they’re relatively easy to grow.

You typically will need a more sophisticated sprouting medium. And I say “medium” either as like a coconut husk or a soil or trays that allow the roots to go down. And they’re beautiful as a garnish and they’re actually, you know, can be a food source. The thing is they take longer to actually develop. So to grow a microgreen, you know, can be two to three times longer than the sprout. And so I focused on the sprouting because I’m using the sprouts as a food source, whereas the microgreens are, in my kind of view, are less yield, more flavor, more culinary specialty. But I’m not able to get as much food source in the per square inch of the kitchen in the time period that I have to eat.

Katie: Got it. Okay. That makes sense. And I feel like this episode has flown by. I love, like I said, I love this topic. I think it’s super timely right now. And I think that you have an amazing resource for people for getting started. So talk a little bit about your book and where people can find it.

Doug: So, during this time of living in the desert and during this time of home sheltering, sprouts just became really important for me. And so the book, this is probably the worst time to launch a book, but the best time to launch a book about sprouts. So I just, literally it airs today. I did a podcast with Marianne Williamson discussing poverty, starvation, food equality, and how sprouts could be a remedy for that. And so when I wrote the book, it was why to sprout, how to sprout, what to sprout, specifics about individual sprouts and then for the do-it-yourself recipes of how to use the sprouts as part of a meal where the recipes are all 100% plant-based, all raw, and 50% containing sprouts. So that’s the book.

And then the book also had interviews with other medical professionals and dieticians from Dean Ornish and Dr. Joel Fuhrman wrote the foreword and Dr. Joel Kahn to functional medicine doctors, Mark Hyman, and ketogenic doctors like Dr. Josh Axe and Joe Mercola, sort of a wide range of people, including yourself, that I interviewed for the book. So that’s really, the book is jam-packed and the book is available. You know, I was going to self-publish because I don’t like bureaucracy, but I ended up going to New York and taking a flyer and pitching one publisher, St. Martin’s Press, because I wanted the book to have maximum distribution.

So literally, if you go to thesproutbook.com, it lists everywhere where it’s sold from Barnes and Noble and Amazon and Books-A-Million to Powell’s. So it’s all over. The Kindle version is pretty good. I like the trade paperback. We made a specific decision not to put pictures in the book to keep the costs down and make it very accessible. And in times like this, Amazon is shipping the book fairly quickly. So, and it just launched.

Katie: Awesome. And, of course, that link will be in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm. For any of you who are hopefully outside exercising or if you’re driving, you can always find the show notes there and find all the links we’ve talked about including two blog posts on a lot of these topics. Another question I love to ask at the very end is, other than your own, is there a book or a number of books that have really dramatically impacted your life? And if so, what are they and why?

Doug: So, probably, the book that had the most impact for me was probably Scott Peck’s book, “The Road Less Traveled.” And, you know, there was a quote in there that I always think of and I share in particular with young people as well as troubled people is that life is difficult and this is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. And it is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult, once we truly understand and accept it, then life is no longer difficult because once it’s accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

And that resonated with me that, you know, for some reason I thought everything should be easy. And when I realized like, “Oh, if you want to do something, it’s going to take work. If you want to do it well, it’s going to take more work. And if you want to learn something you’d never learned before, all these things are going to be difficult.” So I’ve accepted in my life challenges that are against all odds, and I have a ranch now with 25 acres and hot springs and I’ve never lived in a house before. I’ve never owned land before. I’ve never managed engineers before and water fluid systems and growing and just, it is difficult to kind of move off of the water grid and off of the food grid. But because it’s difficult and I have that in the back of my mind, it doesn’t matter.

This is just part of living that, you know, and I’m not a parent, you’re a parent, so I can’t speak to that. But I can imagine and I look into trying to walk a day in your shoes with your six kids and running a business and doing podcasts. Like, to me, because I’m not doing it, I think like, “Wow, that’s difficult. That’s really difficult.” And so that’s probably a book that had the most impact on me.

Katie: Got it. I love that. And I’ll link to that in the show notes as well. But Doug, I appreciate you giving practical advice. I think this is, like I said at the beginning, a very timely topic right now and one that I hope will stick even after we are able to start returning to life as it was before. I think this is a great change that many of us can implement. So I appreciate your mission to educate and to explain about this and all that you do in the world.

Doug: Well, thank you so much and likewise, I hope that I can be a reflection of the goodness that you have and the genius that you have, Katie. So, thank you and thank you for having me.

Katie: Thank you. And as always, thanks to all of you for joining us today and for sharing one of your most valuable assets, your time. We’re both very grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of “The Wellness Mama Podcast.”

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.

Source: https://wellnessmama.com/podcast/doug-evans/

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tipco613 · 5 years

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New Post has been published on http://cryptonewsuniverse.com/privacy-cryptocurrency-zcash-prepares-for-friendly-fork/

Privacy Cryptocurrency Zcash Prepares for Friendly' Fork

Privacy Cryptocurrency Zcash Prepares for ‘Friendly’ Fork

The privacy-oriented cryptocurrency Zcash will spawn a new blockchain network called Ycash

In about five hours, the privacy-oriented cryptocurrency Zcash will spawn a new blockchain network called Ycash. It’ll be the first of its kind to boast a near-identical codebase to the Zcash blockchain but function as a separate network and de facto competitor. First announced in April, the effort is spearheaded by long-time Zcash supporter Howard Loo. Loo described in a Zcash forum post that Ycash was a preemptive move to resist future community decisions that may extend Zcash’s system of developer funding known as the “Founder’s Reward” beyond a promised 10 percent cap of total token supply.

“We are also launching Ycash to uphold a promise – that the Zcash Founders Reward would be forever capped at 2.1 million coins – that we fear will come under increasing pressure between now and the expiration of the Founders Reward in October 2020,” Loo wrote in the forum post. Since then, prominent leaders in the Zcash community such as founder of the coin Zooko Wilcox have publicly expressed their support of Loo’s initiative, agreeing to disagree on certain network changes to the Founder’s Reward and others that will make Ycash backwards-incompatible to Zcash. Normally, network splits of this nature actually add value to a user’s cryptocurrency holdings. This is because users are able to redeem the exact same amount of coins minted on one blockchain on the new blockchain, free of cost.

“From a speculator’s standpoint, network splits often present an intriguing investment opportunity,” said former CoinDesk markets analyst and current crypto trader Sam Ouimet. “New money often buys up the cryptocurrency being forked in order to secure his/her claims of the new coins.” Of course, the value of these newly issued coins, called YECs, on the Ycash network may be significantly lower than ZECs on the Zcash network. However, if past blockchain forks that have spawned spin-off cryptocurrencies are any indicator, coin prices shortly after a hard fork tend to take a hit and then rebound.

Take bitcoin cash for example. The world’s most popular cryptocurrency, bitcoin, forked on Aug. 1, 2017. In just four months time, the resulting cryptocurrency network dubbed bitcoin cash hit an all-time market capitalization of $69 billion with one BCH trading at roughly $4,000. The markets have since cooled considerably but the spin-off network is still ranked among the top five most highly valued blockchain networks in the world. This despite having undergone its own network split in November of last year and a presumed 51 percent attack in May. As such, for users of the near $700 million blockchain network that is Zcash, the creation of Ycash at roughly 3:00 UTC on Friday, July 19 may mark the beginning of a new source of investment returns.

But in order for users to properly take advantage of their new YEC holdings, they must ensure they’re in control of their own private keys and wallet addresses. Alternatively, they can also ensure that the exchange on which they are holding their ZEC tokens offers support for the Zcash/Ycash network split. Crypto exchanges including Binance, OKex, Coinbase and Huobi have yet to affirm support for the impending launch of Ycash. A spokesperson for Binance told CoinDesk the team would be evaluating “community feedback” surrounding the coin to determine a possible future listing.

What it means for ZEC holders

If you are a holder of ZEC, Loo tells CoinDesk one of the best ways to secure access to newly generated YEC coins is by downloading the ZEC wallet. “In order to access Ycash coins, you need to have your Zcash coins at the time of the fork in a wallet that allows you to export your private keys,” explained Loo. “One possible way to claim your coins is to download your ZEC wallet and make sure your coins are in the ZEC wallet at the time of the fork.” Some cryptocurrency exchanges have publicly announced they will be managing private keys of users to support the network split and ensure equivalent holdings of YEC once the spin-off cryptocurrency in created. These exchanges include but are not limited to SafeTrade, BigONE, Hoo and Citex.

However, for all Zcash users who have left their coins on unsupported exchange platforms, Loo says that downloading ZEC wallets not only secures a user’s holdings of YEC but actually creates “ancillary benefits” to the original Zcash network. “A ZEC wallet is a Zcash full node so now all of a sudden all of these people who were Zcash users who weren’t running full nodes are now running full nodes because they’re interested in getting their Ycash,” said Loo. Even so, Zcash Foundation Executive Director Josh Cincinnati says that management of private keys can be a risky endeavor.

Cincinnati told CoinDesk:

“It’s possible you may wind up manipulating your private key on a computer that’s connected to the internet that might have some exploit on it. That’s a tail risk. It’s unlikely something would happen but anytime where you change someone’s security model that way it’s a risk to users.”

As such, Cincinnati says that no matter the “friendly” intentions, there are always risks associated with chain “splits, forks, or anything of the sort” that users should be aware of.

What it means for everyone else

Now, for everyone else who neither holds ZEC or intends to hold YEC, the upcoming blockchain split will simply mark the creation of a new privacy-focused cryptocurrency project. Ycash at launch will differ from the Zcash blockchain in three key ways. First, Ycash will implement a tweaked version of the Equihash mining algorithm currently used on the Zcash network. This is meant to prohibit specialized mining hardware known as ASICs from mining on the newly created Ycash network.

However, in time, ASICs can be adapted to take advantage of the tweaked algorithm which is why Loo says the long-term goal for Ycash is to eventually get rid of Equihash entirely. ProgPoW and RandomX are two commodity hardware mining algorithms that the Ycash developer team is researching. Second, Ycash will implement a reduction to the Founder’s Reward rate, which awards 20 percent of block rewards to a development fund on the Zcash blockchain. On Ycash, this percentage will drop to a perpetual 5 percent and be entirely funneled to one non-profit organization led by Loo called the Ycash Foundation. This reduction to the Founder’s Reward is a key part of why Loo started the Ycash initiative.

Loo told CoinDesk:

“I started to see the writing on the wall that there was going to be some subset of the community that favors not honoring the original promise that 90 percent of the money supply be allocated to users via the free-market mining process and that key organizations of the Zcash ecosystem, including the Electric Coin Company, were likely to take that route as well.”

As such, Loo called Ycash a “preemptive move” to preserve the original promise of capping the Founder’s Reward rate to just 10 percent of all newly issued coins on the network via block rewards. The third and final difference will be a cosmetic change to the address formats of Zcash and Ycash addresses. In order to “make it impossible” to accidentally send Zcash to a Ycash address or vice versa, Loo explains that all shielded addresses (these are private addresses on a Zcash-based network) will begin with a “y” instead of a “z”. “With these bitcoin forks, there was always this concern after the fork of accidentally sending bitcoin to a bitcoin cash address,” said Loo. “To honor the spirit of a friendly fork, we put in engineering effort to change the address format … so it’s impossible to send Zcash to a Ycash address.”

What’s next

For all the preparation that has gone into this self-funded initiative to create a “Zcash-based chain that can be mined on commodity hardware and that honors the original allocation promise,” Loo gives credit for the underpinnings of the idea to the founders of the Zcash, Zooko and Nathan Wilcox. Their early writings on a pluralistic and multi-coin future, Loo argues, not only coined the term for “friendly forks” but laid the groundwork in making Ycash a reality.

Loo said:

“It’s a credit to them both philosophically and technically because of the technical groundwork they laid. This fork I hope will be safer for users than [other blockchain] forks in the past.”

Since the original unveiling of the Ycash initiative back in April, Loo and his team of developers have completed three different dry runs of the split on the Zcash test network and one privately on the Zcash main network. “Because I’m a long-term holder of Zcash, I have a vested interest in the health of the Zcash network,” said Howard. “We put a lot of engineering time in making sure the fork goes smoothly.”

Where to watch

For users who want to watch the fork in real-time, cryptocurrency markets site CoinGecko features a public countdown clock and coin price tracking chart. In addition, crypto exchange SafeTrade and blockchain analytics site BitFly are also supporting a Ycash blockchain explorer where users can track block confirmations in real-time. SafeTrade CEO Jeffrey Galloway said the main thing to watch for will be chain stability and security. “We’re looking at the stability of both chains at launch and any unusual activity,” said Galloway. “There’s a number of things you can look for. For instance, a high number of confirmations. Having a high number of transaction confirmations [is important] before you accept trades.”

A network statistic Ouimet uses to gauge network security and stability is hashrate. Hashrate is a measure of computing power being contributed by miners on a blockchain network to validate transactions and create new blocks. “I’d keep an eye on the network hashrates for both ZEC and YEC to see how much computing power leaves the original chain and transfers to the new one,” Ouimet said. The lower the hashrate is on a network, the easier a potential attacker can overtake a blockchain and meddle with transaction activity. For these reasons, SafeTrade’s Galloway says larger cryptocurrency exchanges will likely choose to begin listing Ycash as a cryptocurrency after it is clear that both the Zcash and Ycash networks are stable with high transaction confirmation counts and hashrate.

Said Galloway:

“If there are bugs in the code, they will be exploited shortly after launch. If there are bugs in the wallet, you’re going to see them exploited shortly after launch. So those are all reasons why exchanges sometimes wait a few days after launch before they list a coin.”

Article Produced By Christine Kim Christine Kim is a News Reporter for CoinDesk.

https://www.coindesk.com/privacy-coin-zcash-will-soon-undergo-its-first-friendly-fork-meet-ycash

#crypto #cryptocurrency #markethive

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trendingnewsb · 6 years

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Facebook to exclude North American users from some privacy enhancements

There’s no way to sugarcoat this message: Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg believes North America users of his platform deserve a lower data protection standard than people everywhere else in the world.

In a phone interview with Reuters yesterday Mark Zuckerberg declined to commit to universally implementing changes to the platform that are necessary to comply with the European Union’s incoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Rather, he said the company was working on a version of the law that would bring some European privacy guarantees worldwide — declining to specify to the reporter which parts of the law would not extend worldwide.

“We’re still nailing down details on this, but it should directionally be, in spirit, the whole thing,” Reuters quotes Zuckerberg on the GDPR question.

This is a subtle shift of line. Facebook’s leadership has previously implied the product changes it’s making to comply with GDPR’s incoming data protection standard would be extended globally.

Back in January, COO Sheryl Sandberg said the company would be rolling out “a new privacy center globally” — putting “the core privacy settings for Facebook in one place and make it much easier for people to manage their data”.

A spokeswoman for Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch today that the changes it revealed late last month — including finally reducing its historical settings sprawl from 20 screens to just one — were what Sandberg was talking about in those earlier comments. Ergo, even those basic tweaks are a direct result of the EU regulation.

However that universal privacy center looks to be just one portion of the changes Facebook needs to make to comply with the new EU standard. And not all these changes are going to be made available to US and Canadian Facebook users — per Zuckerberg’s remarks.

In a blog about the new privacy center late last month, Facebook flagged additional incoming changes to its terms of service — including “commitments” to users, and the language it uses to explain how it’s processing people’s data.

It said these incoming changes would be “about transparency”.

And indeed transparency is a key underlying principle of GDPR, which places requirements on data controllers to clearly explain to people what personal data they intend to collect and for what exact purpose — in order to gain informed consent for processing the data (or, if not consent, another valid basis is required for the data processing to be legal).

What’s less clear is exactly which portions of GDPR Facebook believes it can safely separate out for users on its platform and not risk accidentally mishandling the personal data of an international user — say who might be visiting or living in the US — thereby running the risk of privacy complaints and, ultimately, financial sanctions (penalties for violations can be very large under GDPR).

I’m quite mystified how Facebook is going to reliably distinguish among EU and non-EU users, in order to build separate tiers of GDPR-compliant granular, revocable opt-in consent controls from another tier of opt-out consent controls.

— David Carroll 🦅 (@profcarroll) April 4, 2018

Facebook did not respond to additional questions about its GDPR compliance intentions so we can but speculate at this stage.

It’s even just a risky strategy in pure PR terms. As we wrote in January in our GDPR explainer: “[S]ome US companies might prefer to swallow the hassle and expense of fragmenting their data handling processes… But doing so means managing multiple data regimes. And at very least runs the risk of bad PR if you’re outed as deliberately offering a lower privacy standard to your home users vs customers abroad.”

Safe to say, the calls for equal application of GDPR in the US have started already…

This is a test by Zuck to see how much Americans and Congress will demand of Facebook.

We should rise to this test and demand equal application of GDPR in the US (from all major tech companies).

This is concrete and can be done right now since it’s already built for Europe. https://t.co/wSG8BknJeE

— Gabriel Weinberg (@yegg) April 3, 2018

On the speculation front, consent under GDPR for processing personal data means offering individuals “genuine choice and control”, as the UK’s data watchdog explains it. So perhaps Facebook isn’t comfortable about giving North American users that kind of autonomy to revoke specific consents at will.

Or maybe Zuckerberg is unwilling to let Americans ask for their personal data in an adequately portable form — so they could go and plug it into a rival service. (Though it does already let users download their data.)

Or it could be that Facebook isn’t comfortable with what GDPR has to say about profiling — which is, after all, the core of the company’s ad targeting business model.

The regulation’s transparency requirements do extend to profiling — meaning Facebook will need to inform (at least its international) users they are being profiled when they use the platform, and explain what it means for them.

So perhaps Zuckerberg thinks Americans might balk if they really understood how pervasively it tracks them when it has to explain exactly what it’s doing — as indeed some Facebook users did recently, when they found out Messenger had been logging their call and SMS metadata, for example.

The EU regulation also places some restrictions on the practice of using data to profile individuals if the data is sensitive data — such as health data, political belief, religious affiliation and so on — requiring an even higher standard of explicit consent for doing so.

And of course, with the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, we’ve seen how massive amounts of Facebook data were expressly used to try to infer US voters’ political beliefs.

Let’s not forget that Facebook itself ploughs its own resources into engaging politicians to use its platform for campaigning too. So perhaps it’s worried it might risk losing this chunk of elite business in the US if American Facebook users have to give explicit consent to their political leanings being fair game for ad targeting purposes. (And when many people would probably say ‘no thanks Mark; that’s none of your business’.)

But, as I say, we can but speculate what kind of GDPR carve outs Zuckerberg has planned for users on his home turf at this stage. The regulation comes into force on May 25 — so Facebookers don’t have long to wait to play a game of ‘spot the privacy standard discrepancy’.

What’s most curious about the Facebook founder demurring on a universal application of GDPR is the timing of it — in the midst of arguably the company’s biggest ever privacy scandal.

Facebook responds to data misuse

At a point when consumer groups are calling for new rules to control social media’s excesses and lawmakers are increasingly willing to listen. “Facebook will gather, analyze and monetize more data from US and other countries outside the GDPR,” Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, told us, giving his reaction to Zuckerberg’s comments. “There will be a ongoing weakening of consumer data protection rights as a consequence. NGOs intend to press Facebook, Google and others to adopt any GDPR changes worldwide.”

So if Zuckerberg feels North Americans’ privacy can be handled as a backburner consideration even now, by revealing he plans to work really hard to make sure domestic Facebook users are given second tier privacy status below everyone else in the rest of the world, well, you have to question the authenticity of his recent apology for the “mistakes” that he claimed led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Facebook was actually warned over app permissions in 2011, as we’ve reported before. Yet it did not shut down the developer access that was used to pass personal data on 50M+ Facebook users to Cambridge Analytica until mid 2015. So, frankly, if that was a mistake, it was a very, very, slow moving one.

Some might say it looks rather more like reluctance to comply with data protection standards.

Here’s one of the core architects of GDPR — European MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht — asking the key question now: How long will consumers in North America take being put in privacy coach class? Over to you…

#Facebook CEO #Zuckerberg announces that his business will apply EU‘s #GDPR to Ireland 🇮🇪🇪🇺 representation only. That means the whole world will benefit from high EU #privacy protection with the exception of Canada and the U.S. How long will consumers over there take this? 😶

— Jan Philipp Albrecht (@JanAlbrecht) April 4, 2018

This report was updated with additional comment

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/04/facebook-gdpr-wont-be-universal/

from Viral News HQ https://ift.tt/2J6SI8s via Viral News HQ

#IFTTT #Viral News HQ

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gethealthy18-blog · 4 years

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329: How to Slow Aging, Fight Inflammation, & Improve Cellular Signaling With Brian Dixon

New Post has been published on https://healingawerness.com/news/329-how-to-slow-aging-fight-inflammation-improve-cellular-signaling-with-brian-dixon/

329: How to Slow Aging, Fight Inflammation, & Improve Cellular Signaling With Brian Dixon

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic… a company I’ve loved for years for their superfood mushroom based products. They use mushrooms like lions mane, chaga, cordyceps and reishi in delicious products. Did you know that mushrooms are more genetically similar to humans than plants are? And that they breathe oxygen and exhale CO2 just like we do but mushrooms spores can survive the vacuum and radiation of space. These amazing fungi are always a part of my daily routine in some way, usually with Lion’s Mane Coffee or Matcha in the morning, Plant protein and mushroom elixirs like chaga and cordyceps during the day and reishi at night to wind down. As a listener of this podcast, you can save on all Four Sigmatic products. Go to foursigmatic.com/wellnessmama and the code wellnessmama gives 15% off

Katie: Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and this episode is all about how we can slow the aging process, fight inflammation and improve cellular signaling. I’m here with Brian Dixon who is a Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology from Oregon State University and is affiliated with the Linus Pauling Institute where his research focused on the underlying biochemical and cellular mechanisms of aging. And this is an area I’ve been fascinated with since I had to do a final project on some of these things and work with the Linus Pauling Institute when I was younger as well. He and his work have been featured on, among others, “The Dr. Oz Show”. And he’s authored a number of scientific peer-reviewed manuscripts on topics such as cancer, antioxidants, cellular signaling, gene regulation, stress coping mechanisms, Nrf2, weight management, sports nutrition and recovery.

Dr. Dixon has also published research in the role of nutrition in recovery from surgery, how we can facilitate a healthy inflammation response, ways to support the immune system, the aging process and how various nutrients come into play with all of those. He has worked in the nutritional industry for over 10 years, and he has seven patents related to different supplements and things within the industry. And in this episode, we go deep on the science of aging, ways we can mitigate it and things like sulforaphane, Nrf2 sirtuins, and many others. If those are new to you, stay tuned and buckle up. This is a fascinating episode.

Brian, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Dr. Dixon: Thank you so much for having me.

Katie: Well, I know you’ve done a lot of research in a lot of different areas, including one that is of increasing importance to me every year that goes by, which is aging. And, unfortunately, it’s something I don’t think we can fully escape, but I know it is something that we can mitigate and do very gracefully in a lot of cases. And there are things that we can do on a cellular level as we age to help protect our bodies. So I’d love to start with aging as a broad topic and then go deeper on some tangents from there. So let’s talk about aging, in general. What factors come into play when we think about aging, both on a cellular level and then also, aesthetically?

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, well, you’re absolutely right. You know, we can’t stop time. That’s that thing that’s just constantly ticking along. It’d be nice if we could stop time or even turn it back, but yeah, it’s kind of our destiny. You know, maybe to take a step back and maybe we’ll start with the bad news first, and then we’ll get into the good news of what people can do. There are currently over 300 different theories of aging. I mean, if you can believe that. So, people, you know, literally, since the beginning of time, have been interested in what we could do to stop the aging process.

I mean, that’s that whole sort of folklore around the fountain of youth. And Ponce de León coming to North America, heading to Florida, and looking for a physical fountain of youth with the notion that you could drink this water and basically, live forever. When we come into scientific circles, scientists have been studying this, you know, for hundreds of years. But it really caught a lot of attention in 1954 when an individual named Denham Harman first proposed the oxidative stress theory of aging. That’s really where a lot of aging research is focused. But I like to kind of lump those 300 theories of aging into just about five general categories.

And I think it’s interesting that we can get people thinking about these different categories, because I don’t doubt for a second that they’re all contributing. And so if we can think about these five individually, and what we can do to kind of check the boxes, you’re really gonna set yourself up for optimal health, and then possibly even extending more years to your lives. So those five general categories, I like to lump those 300 theories of aging in are, you know, very technically, we can talk about biochemical molecular and cellular theories of aging. So basically our biochemistry, our metabolism is just changing on that cellular level, and no one really knows why.

There’s also some really depressing theories of aging out there that’s called the programmed theories of aging. And that notion is, is that in our genes, right, in our DNA, we are literally programmed to die. So you think to yourself, “Well, gosh, why would we be programmed to die?” But if we look at other organisms around us out in nature, you know, it’s really every organism’s job on this planet to reproduce. And so once we’ve passed on our DNA to that next generation, there really is no true biological reason to keep us around. In fact, an organism gets past its reproductive years, all that individual or organism is doing is just consuming resources.

That doesn’t apply so much to humans. You know, we have that knowledge base that comes with age. And in fact, there’s a few higher mammals on this planet where it is evolutionarily beneficial to keep the elderly around. So obviously, humans is one great example. So think about all those things that we learned from our grandma and our grandpa. Whales, they keep the elderly around. In fact, it’s usually the grandmother orca whale that’s raising the young. The elephants are also one long-lived species where the oldest elephants are playing a huge role in their family circles. So programmed theories of aging, that’s number two. Then we can get into number three, the cycle social theories of aging. So basically, what that means is we just need to keep our minds sharp as we age.

A lot of individuals as we get older, we tend to isolate ourselves. We tend not to spend as much time with family and friends, and it really leads to that kind of rotting away of our brains. Number four, I put in a loss of cellular communication, and I throw that into the mix. So what does that mean? Well, basically, our cells, organs, and tissues just aren’t talking to each other as well as they used to. So think about hormonal changes occurring as we get older. So, you know, in men, testosterone levels can decline. Women when they hit menopause, I mean, their hormones are going all over the place until they can find that new normal … so hormonal signaling isn’t working as well as we age. And then just our ability to adapt and respond to our environment.

So if we’re exposed to, let’s say, environmental toxins or oxidative stress, we have these built-in systems to be able to deal with those stresses. But they’re just not sensing the signal and then communicating the potential trouble to the rest of the cell or even the other tissues and organs in our bodies. And then lastly is the damaged theories of aging. So just the different biological structures inside of our bodies and inside of our cells just start to accumulate this damage as we get older. So DNA becomes damaged, the proteins or enzymes inside of our cells get damaged. Even the cellular membrane, the integrity of that membrane gets damaged, and it doesn’t work as well to keep the outside world out and the inside world in.

Katie: Got it. So definitely, like, lots of different approaches, and you mentioned that there’s probably something to be learned from all of them. What view do you take personally when it comes the aging, and which of these are the most important to understand then and start to mitigate?

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, it comes back to that research that I referenced by Professor Harman back in 1954. He postulated probably the most sound theory of aging, and that being the free radical or oxidative stress theory of aging. And in a lot of ways, many of these other theories of aging really kind of playoff of that oxidative stress theory of aging. So you can think about the damaged theories of aging, the loss of cellular communication and, especially those biochemical molecular and cellular theories of aging and really where that research is centered and what we can best do to protect ourselves and set ourselves up for optimal health in the long term is just really making sure that we’re eating a healthy diet. And then luckily, there’s been some great scientific advances in about the last 10 years that have shown us that there is even some pretty fun things that we can do around nutritional supplements to support, especially our body’s own inherent anti-oxidant detoxification defenses.

Katie: Got you. Okay. So I think that’s a perfect place to start diving in and going deeper, because there’s … When you start reading the research and, especially just reading sources online, there’s a lot of theories about different ways that we can do that. Of course, when you talk about free radicals, antioxidants come to mind. That’s a big buzzword with oxidative damage and free radicals. But I also know that there’s a lot of discrepancy in, like, the potential measurements and research related to antioxidants. And some people say, “Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.” So what’s your take on ways that we can reduce that cellular damage, and are antioxidants the answer?

Dr. Dixon: It’s a great question. And, you know, you’re absolutely right. The scientific literature is very muddy when it comes to taking, especially high doses of antioxidants. And can we really extend healthspan and even, lifespan. If you go on and read some of the research on the National Institutes of Health, specifically from the centers for complementary and alternative medicine, they talk about … There’s a line in one of their statements that just says, “In research studies that have been done in thousands and thousands of people, there is no scientific evidence that … especially high dose antioxidants supplementation is actually going to have a beneficial effect on human health and disease.”

My view, as I read the scientific literature and things I’ve incorporated into my life is that, you know, we absolutely have to get the basics, whether it’s from our diet or from our nutritional supplement, and that does include some antioxidants, and it’s what we call the vitamin antioxidant. So these antioxidants that are absolutely essential for life, right? They’re actually working as a vitamin. And then they have this sort of side effect, if you will, of actually being an antioxidant. So if we take vitamin C, for example, vitamin C is an essential nutrient because it’s playing a role, a direct role as a cofactor which means it’s absolutely required for the activity of an enzyme to work. And it’s required in at least 15 different mammalian enzymes.

So if we stop taking vitamin C, those enzymes stop working and that ultimately compromises cellular function. But when we’re thinking about antioxidant protection and really, what is the best strategy, you know, a strategy that I love to incorporate personally, things that I’ve researched in the laboratory for many, many years is really trying to unlock the power that our cells inherently have. So what do I mean by that? It turns out that in our DNA and, specifically in our genes, we have antioxidant enzymes, and we also have detoxification enzymes. If you set the clock back to about 2007, just kind of as the Human Genome Project was kind of wrapping up and people started to really dive into, “Okay. What are all of these genes now that we can map, what are they actually doing?”

Well, they came to discover about that same time, 2006, 2007, that actually there’s this massive interaction between the nutrients that we eat and our genetics. So basically nutrients can turn on genes, and then those genes are also affecting how we were metabolizing nutrients. And when you actually put these things in test tubes, whether it’s these enzymes that are encoded in our DNA or whether we just put these straight antioxidants into test tubes, it turns out that this enzymatic activity, these enzymes that are found in our DNA are significantly more effective at detoxifying antioxidants, free radicals, and those other toxins that may be entering our bodies.

Katie: That’s fascinating. Okay. So you mentioned that basically what we eat has the ability to turn on genes. And I’d love for you to explain this a little bit deeper. Basically I’m assuming that you’re talking about the idea of epigenetics essentially, but for anyone who’s not familiar with that concept, can you explain how that process works?

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, maybe I’m hung up on my scientific circles. But yeah, epigenetics is definitely influenced by the diets that we eat. But another complicated science word that maybe better describes what we’re talking about here is nutrigenomics. So if you break that big word down into its two parts, nutri and genomics, it’s really how nutrition and your genes are interacting. Maybe I’ll take a step back. I mean, maybe scientists and medical professions in their arrogance, they love to break things down into as simple of pieces or parts as possible. A lot of this research really came out of the research that showed that high levels of fruit and vegetable consumption are actually incredibly beneficial for our health.

So in that scientific arrogance, scientists went into fruit and vegetables, and they tried to tease out and find the compound or compounds that might be responsible for that increase in health that we’re seeing in the highest fruits and vegetable consumers. So they pulled out things like vitamin C. They pulled out things like fiber. And definitely, you can supplement with vitamin C, and you see some health benefits. You can supplement with fiber, you see great health benefits. But when you look at the research, it never really equated to the full effect that we were seeing with this fruit and vegetable consumption. So scientists were scratching their heads, thinking to themselves, “Well, there must be something else in these fruits and vegetables that are also providing health benefits.”

So then instead of looking at the things that were present in the largest quantities in fruits and vegetables, they started to focus on compounds that were really present in really very small concentrations. If you think about what gives fruits and vegetables their bright vibrant colors, it turns out it’s a lot of those same compounds that we’re providing these health benefits. So in some studies that were conducted, they teased out these compounds from fruits and vegetables that give them their color. They start to test them in the test tube and yeah, in a test tube, they’re working as very potent antioxidants. But what happened when they gave these compounds to people is they found that they were incredibly poorly bioavailable.

That means they weren’t absorbed by our bodies or if they were absorbed, they were absorbed at a very low rate. More than that, when these compounds were actually getting into our bodies, our bodies were metabolizing them incredibly quickly and then excreting them incredibly quickly as well. So then how could these compounds that are one, present in incredibly low concentrations that we don’t absorb very well and then are metabolized and excreted very quickly, how could they possibly be having any sort of health benefit? Well, it turns out what researchers found is that a lot of these compounds are actually binding to what we call receptors that are either sitting on the outside of the cell membrane or are floating around inside of the cell.

An easy way to think about receptors is just being little sensor molecules. And so when you get the right compound that’s gonna bind to the sensor molecule, what ends up happening is we start a chain of events. A lot like knocking over, let’s say, like, a line of dominoes. So you push over the first domino, you get this chain of events that happens, and then at the end of that chain, something happens. So when we’re talking about what’s happening in our body, a lot of times, that’s actually a protein, right, going into the nucleus and actually flipping these switches on these genes that have been shown to have great health benefits. In fact, they’re known as either anti-stress genes or maybe even more aptly named survival genes.

Katie: Got it. Okay. That makes sense. And it seems like a lot of this also goes back to inflammation which is a big buzzword right now as well. Is that part of this equation and if so, like, what are some things on either side of that equation?

Dr. Dixon: Yep. That inflammatory axis absolutely can be influenced by the foods that we’re eating. Absolutely. So we can target them nutrigenomically. So maybe a lot of your audience might have heard of a protein called NF-kappa B. NF-kappa B really is the master regulator of our immune response. And it’s determining whether or not we have an up-regulated or even hyperinflammatory response, but then it’s also responsible for shutting down that immune response as well. And so when we’re talking about inflammation, what we’re really talking about is a balance. You know, think of a teeter-totter just kind of balancing there. If your immune system is completely shut off, then, you know, that’s gonna compromise us to this outside world that’s constantly trying to get in and invade our cells.

But then again, on the flip side, if you have too much inflammation going on, the scientific literature is incredibly solid on what hyperinflammation can do in its roles as it directly relates to health and then, especially, disease. You know, a few years back, there was a cover of “Time” magazine that just simply said, “The Silent Killer.” And it was really just this kind of furnace that is inflammation getting carried away in our bodies and so left unchecked, inflammation can go on and have just massive consequences to literally every system that’s inside of our bodies. So again, reaching for these compounds that can help regulate that protein NF-kappa B. And then there are some other things that we can do. We wanna make sure that we’re getting plenty of omega-3 fatty acids.

When you look at the biochemical pathway, the different fats that we consume in our diet are going down inside of the cell. They tend to either be pro-inflammatory or anti-inflammatory. And so with our modern diets and most of us tending to eat pretty unhealthy, we tend to reach for foods in a box. We’ve really skewed the balance of our fatty acids to saturated fats and then omega-6s and omega-9s. So when we look at, again, all that scientific literature about the health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, what’s most likely happening is that we’re bringing the balance of those pro and anti-inflammatory fats back into the balance that our bodies prefer to keep them at.

Katie: That’s a great point. What are your preferred sources of omega-3s? Because I know this is also a controversial topic in… People saying, “A lot of them can go rancid if they’re not carefully controlled, and some are not as potent as they claim to be.” Is this better to get from food, or what do you look at for omega-3?

Dr. Dixon: Well, the best and maybe most convenient source of omega-3s would be those traditional fish oil supplements, I think, that we’ve all heard so much about. But exactly, the points that you raised are very valid. And unfortunately, and the nutritional industry, I hate to say it, but it really is buyer beware. And you’re absolutely right that omega-3s are particularly prone to oxidation. So if they’re not handled correctly, you’ve basically changed the structure of those fatty acids, and you’re no longer getting what you think you’re getting. So, you know, I encourage people that you have to spend a little bit of money. Just buying the cheapest thing that might be on a supermarket shelf isn’t the best option.

Spend a little bit of money, make sure you’re buying your products from a reputable high-quality manufacturer to ensure that you’re getting those fatty acids. That’s the simplest way. And maybe a simple check if people want to, maybe go into their pantries and see if their fish oil might be appropriate or not. But simply break open the capsule and smell it because they go rancid so quickly. And I think we’re probably all familiar with what rotten fish smells like. So if you break open your fish oil capsule and it smells like rotten fish, then you’ve got a bad product on your hands. You know, there’s great sources of omega-3s. I know, you know, a lot of people are choosing to be plant-based these days. If not, straight vegetarian or even vegan.

And there are some great vegetarian and vegan sources of omega-3 fatty acids. Things like flaxseeds, walnuts, they’re fantastic sources of omega-3s. So we can get these from our diets as well if we wanna eat a lot of fatty fish. So it’s not just eating fish two to three times per week, but it specifically has to be fatty fish like salmon, tuna, mackerel, sardines are a couple of examples. And then just making sure you’re getting as well a lot of … mostly, nuts tend to be very rich in, you know, omega-3 fatty acids.

Katie: I think those are all such great suggestions, and I love the fatty fish idea. That’s something I’ve adopted that I think is really inexpensive, easy way to get omega-3s is a few times a week, I will eat sardines, and I’ll just make lunch out of a bowl of sardines and veggies and nuts and hemp parts and all kinds of stuff and then just kind of put olive oil on it. And you mentioned fat sources and how the American diet definitely skews towards, not just saturated fats, but even just, like, really unhealthy forms of saturated fats and also, omega-6 oils. A lot of guests on this podcast and a lot of resources I’m seeing are recommending the monounsaturated fats in much higher amounts. Things like olive oil and avocado oil. Is that your take on it as well? Are those the kind of fats we should be prioritizing?

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, it comes back to really what we were talking about initially with antioxidants. I think everything has to be in balance. So what I’m not a fan of is going to an extreme one-way or another. I mean, you can even make the argument that we need saturated fat as well. I mean, most of the fat that makes up our cell membrane is actually saturated fatty acids. But it’s very clear that we’ve just become over-consumers of, especially unhealthy saturated fatty acids. So my best recommendation is just to eat a variety of foods. You know, don’t really be afraid of anything but just eat things in moderation.

And then whenever possible, whenever time and convenience allows, reach for whole foods, so the actual original sources. You know, with our busy lives, that’s not always possible. And I think that’s a good time to start to consider nutritional supplements as the word suggests, right? The word supplement is supposed to be supplementing our diets, and if our diets aren’t healthy and well-balanced, then any nutritional supplement in the world is not going to fix those core problems.

Katie: I agree, and I wanna get to specifics on supplements in just a minute. But first, I wanna pick your brain on a couple of other things. So a few years ago, when I had nodules on my thyroid and had Hashimoto’s before I was able to get it in remission, one of the things my doctor suggested was to consume broccoli sprouts regularly which are a source of sulforaphane which, from what I’ve researched, is known to activate something called Nrf2. And I know this comes into play with this inflammation equation. And I’d love to really explain this, because I’ve never kind of teased this out on the podcast before. And I know this is something that you’ve done research in. So can you explain to us … first of all, is my understanding of this correct? And explain to us what Nrf2 is, and why it’s important?

Dr. Dixon: Absolutely. So Nrf2 is a protein. So it’s a protein that lives in our cell, and it’s an interesting protein, and how it behaves in that. It’s both…One of those center molecules or receptors that we were talking about. It’s also really the signaling molecule itself, and then it’s also the protein that can go into the nucleus, and it actually flips the switches of somewhere between 200 to 300 different survival genes or anti-stress genes. A lot of these tend to be antioxidant enzymes or detoxification enzymes. I’m impressed with your knowledge of sulforaphane, and, especially impressed with the source that you’re going to. So broccoli sprouts have been shown to be the highest sources of sulforaphane.

You know, my recommendation if that’s what some of your listeners are doing, you know, make sure you’re chewing them up. Sulforaphane itself actually comes with another little molecule stuck to it. So it turns out you actually have to really chew any source of cruciferous vegetable that you’re eating to release an enzyme that will remove that other molecule that’s stuck to it so that you can actually get the healthy compound. What’s so interesting and how this protein Nrf2 is working is normally it’s found anchored to the cell membrane. And it’s anchored by a very interesting set of chemical bonds. And the way that sulforaphane is working is that it’s actually interacting with that chemical bond, and it’s releasing Nrf2 from the cell wall, and it floats through the cell, gets into the nucleus, and turns on a bunch of genes like we’re talking about.

A compound that I’m even more familiar with dates back to, gosh, many years ago now. But back when I was doing my graduate work, I studied lipoic acid, if you’re familiar with that compound. That’s just an absolutely … another amazing inducer of Nrf2. We can look at things like Coricidin, green tea, ashwagandha, Bacopa. There are a whole host of compounds that actually are activating Nrf2. And so if activating Nrf2 and turning on these antioxidant and detoxification gene is the strategy you want to employ, then my recommendation would be to look for a mix of healthy compounds that are known to activate Nrf2.

Katie: Got it. Yeah. I love it that you brought that up about having to chew the broccoli sprouts to activate the sulforaphane correctly. You can verify this for me. But to my understanding, you’ve got glucoraphanin and myrosinase in that equation, and it does have to be broken up in certain … and temperature can come into play, and there are things that can help with that. So I don’t recommend it based on taste, but what I do to get enough of this is I will blend up a bunch of broccoli sprouts with some mustard seed powder which has some of those things that you need, and that help break down. And then the blending, I let it sit for a minute, and then drink it. From what I’ve read, that’s supposed to make the sulforaphane more readily available.

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, Katie, I’m incredibly impressed. You are exactly right on all that biochemistry.

Katie: Awesome. Well, I’ll put links, I’ve got posts on how to grow broccoli sprouts. I think that’s one of those easy things we can all do in our own kitchen, and it cost literally, like, 50 cents to grow if you do it yourself versus buying them in a store, so that’s an easy step.

I’d love to now go a little deeper on the science of actually, like, slowing aging and fixing these processes, both in two ways. So I want to start practical and then move onto optimal. But when it comes to the practical side, I’m a big fan of 80/20 and doing the most effective important things that provide the biggest payoff. And I know that there are definitely some of these when it comes to the aging equation, both in supplements and other factors that come into play. So based on your research, if we were going to look at aging in kind of an 80/20 equation, what are those 20% of variables that we should focus on that have kind of 80% of the effects that we’re trying to achieve?

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, the three things that are really at top of mind for me right now are still that free radical theory of aging like we were talking about. For me, it’s also the mitochondrial theory of aging. And if your listeners aren’t familiar with what the mitochondria are, it’s really where the vast majority of our energy production is happening inside of our cells. They’re literally these little nuclear powerhouses that are generating about 95% of all the energy that our body needs every second of every day.

And just to put in the context how important that energy production is, we basically make our body weight every single day in the energy currency, ATP that we need every single day. So think about how much energy is flowing through the mitochondria and all the work they’re doing. And then something else that’s caught a lot of attention for me lately is the molecule, NAD. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that or if your listeners are familiar with that. But some very interesting research around the health benefits of NAD and then, especially what’s happening to NAD as we get older.

Katie: Yeah, let’s talk about that. So I have some experience with NAD, and I know that there’s a lot of research and kind of some controversy about NAD versus NAD precursors. I have done NAD IVs, which for anyone who is not familiar with that, it’s an IV that contains NAD. And it’s somewhat uncomfortable going in, depending on how quickly you do it. I also, one time and will never again, did a push IV of NAD and wished I was dying for a short amount of time. But then I’ve also done research into NAD precursors, which from my understanding, are various forms of vitamin B3, if I’m remembering that correctly. But let’s talk about that. Explain what NAD is and also, what those precursors are in the body.

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, NAD, it’s an incredibly interesting molecule, and it’s absolutely essential for life. So you’re right. We do make NAD from various precursors and like you said, vitamin B3 or niacin is one of those precursors. NAD’s normal role inside of the cell turns out to be inside of the mitochondria, and it is intimately involved in all of that energy production that we need every second of every day. So normally what’s happening is as we’re eating food, our digestive system chops it up into its small little bits. It gets into circulation. Our cells ultimately end up absorbing these compounds.

And then the food tends to make it into the mitochondrial where most of our energy production is happening. It goes through something that’s called the Krebs cycle or the TCA cycle if maybe you’re as old as I am. And then basically the role of this Krebs or TCA cycle is to break the bonds of that food, and as you’re breaking those bonds, effectively you’re releasing the electrons from that chemical bond. One place those electrons end up is attached to NAD, and NAD acts as the shuttle molecule to get the electron into something known as the electron transport chain which is really trying to harness the power or the energy that’s in that electron so that we could ultimately make ATP, which is the energy currency for the cell.

So it’s vitally important if we were to shut off NAD synthesis, I mean, we would be dead in a matter of seconds. But some interesting research that has centered around what’s known as caloric restriction. So we’re talking about a diet, but we’re talking about maybe the most severe diet that anybody has ever been on. We’re talking about a restriction of 40% to 60% of the calories that we would consume every single day. So for me, at about 160 pounds, that would equate to eating right around about 800 calories per day. So I mean, incredibly calorically restricted. The research that has led to this kind of notion of caloric restriction initially started in yeast. Yeast is a fantastic experimental model, especially for geneticists.

So some geneticists embarked on these studies where they were calorically restricting yeast, and then they moved the studies into looking at worms or fruit flies, right, to more experimental models, mice, rats, even some primates. And then some people have even played with caloric restriction themselves. What’s so interesting is when they found that we restricted calories by this huge amount, you got about the same lengthening of lifespan, so around the same 40% to 60% actual increase in lifespan. And it’s really the only known non-pharmacological or nongenetic way that’s been shown to increase lifespan. So, of course, scientists in their inquisitive nature wanted to know, “Well, how is caloric restriction actually eliciting these effects?”

These geneticists went in, and they did a bunch of studies. And then a long scientific story short, they found that there was this family of proteins known as the sirtuins. And when they genetically manipulated or even pharmacologically inhibited this family of proteins or enzymes and then they still calorically restricted these experimental models, they completely lost that extension in lifespan. So scientists then went on to study what’s going on with these sirtuins and exactly how are they working. Well, it turns out the way that these sirtuin molecules are activated is by this molecule called NAD, so NAD is absolutely required for their function to occur. So if we kind of lumped together everything that’s been shown as we’re calorically restricting and you don’t have a lot of those electrons around, your relative levels of NAD actually increase.

And NAD is no longer working to generate energy but actually becomes a signaling molecule to activate this family of proteins called the sirtuins. And then downstream, right, or a better way to say it is that these sirtuin proteins are actually controlling a number of different pathways and factors and enzymes that have been shown to have all sorts of different health benefits, and that’s really why NAD has caught a lot of people’s minds. You throw on top of that that NAD levels declined significantly as we age, probably starting sometime in our late 20s or early 30s and then by the time we’re 60 or 70 years old, our levels can decline by as much as 60%.

Katie: Wow, yeah, that’s really drastic. So there are things … I’m so glad you brought up sirtuin as well. That was one of my questions that I was gonna ask, because I knew that was a factor in this. But so basically there are things that we can do, supplements that help increase the body’s NAD capacity essentially.

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, and you kind of alluded to one, and that’s the precursor approach. And there’s not just vitamin B3, but there are other related molecules that are out there that people are using as substrates. There are also intermediates. So when your cells are building NAD from scratch, it kind of has to go through this process. So people are also trying to incorporate, trying to kind of cheat the biochemical regulation that’s going on by feeding the so-called kind of intermediates which can still be considered precursors. And then some things that’s really caught our attention lately is leveraging also, a Nutrigenomix approach to look at the enzymes that are actually making NAD in our body. And are there ways that we can use nutrients to actually turn on those enzymes to ultimately increase the biosynthetic capacity of our NAD generating pathways.

Katie: That’s fascinating. And I know one concern I’ve heard with certain NAD precursors and taking them in too large of a dose is that some people speculate that it can use methyl groups for, like, that conversion to happen. So that if we take them in too large of amounts, we can deplete methylation factors which can, especially be an issue if people who have MTHFR. Are you seeing that, are you concerned about that, or do you think that’s only an issue with really big doses?

Dr. Dixon: Yeah. Again, it kind of comes back to the gist of most of the conversation we had. And that’s just that everything needs to be in balance, right? Too little of something is bad, right? Let’s use a simple analogy with water, right? Dehydration is terrible, but you can actually drink too much water and kill yourself. So we need to be within this sweet spot of the bell curve, and the bell curve lives everywhere in biology. When it comes to the precursor notion specifically, right, I’m just trying to make sure that I’m getting somewhere slightly elevated over kind of either the RDA or the recommended daily allowance or daily recommended intakes, however, you wanna say it. I’m not a fan or supporter of mega-dosing in any way.

But if we come back and look at the biochemistry with how a lot of these pathways are working, a pathway can only work as fast as its slowest enzyme. I hope that makes sense. So any biochemical pathway in our bodies can only work as fast as the slowest enzyme. So you can kind of think almost like you create a traffic jam in this biochemical pathway or maybe another way if you can think about it in your mind’s eye is think about a funnel. And if I were to pour water into the top of a funnel, water can only move to that funnel as quickly as its narrowest point.

So at some point, we’re gonna overload the system and those compounds that we’re thinking or we’re taking that we think is gonna have an effect on one end isn’t gonna make it into that biochemical pathway, and it’s gonna float around on our bodies, and who knows have what type of effect. So, you know, our approach is to look at it both ways, so providing precursors to some extent, not in massive megadoses. But then what are nutrients that we can utilize to leverage that genetic machinery, turn on that genetic machinery to increase really the biosynthetic capacity of the NAD so that the precursor that’s around will ultimately get consumed in the way that we want it to be consumed.

Katie: Got it. Okay. That makes sense. So then from there, we talked about the practical. What if you could create an optimal scenario for someone to slow aging and to improve all of the things that we’ve talked about, both with supplements, with diet, and with lifestyle, what would that look like?

Dr. Dixon: I think if we want to really increase, not just longevity, but the thing that I’m most focused on right now is healthspan. I think if we can keep ourselves healthier for longer, I think, the side effect is gonna be added years to the end of our lives. You know, the scientific literature is just incredibly discouraging. Every American especially, if not every individual living in a modern society tends to lead their last 10 years of life suffering from some sort of disease or disability. And I just think my best advice is not to accept that as our norm. So the things that we can do in our lives to shorten that length of morbidity or disease or disability, just think of the quality of life.

I mean, if we can take that 10 years and shorten it to 5 years or 5 years down to 1 year and not to get too morbid, but I love to take just a big nose dive into my grave, right? I don’t wanna scratch and claw my way there. But when we wanna look at what are the things that we know in humans that are having the best effects for our healthspan and our lifespan, there’s a lot of different names floating around for the concept. I’ve heard it referred to as Blue Zones. But really, what these Blue Zones are longevity hotspots. And it turns out that there is just a very small handful of them around the world. There’s one in Japan. There’s one in Greece. There’s one in Italy. I throw one in there in France as well. There’s one in Costa Rica, and there’s one in Southern California.

So researchers have gone in and they’ve looked at all of these different populations and ironically, they tend to be very isolated populations. So they don’t seem to be as affected by a lot of our kind of new-age cultural norms. But when they kind of look at the aspects of each of these populations, there’s definitely unique aspects to each and every one of them. In fact, a lot of the diet fads that we’ve seen in probably the last 10 or 20 years are because of these longevity hotspots. So if you take the one in Japan, for example, that’s where really, sushi got really popular and eating the fatty fish. If you look at the populations around Italy and Greece, that’s really where the Mediterranean diet came into play. We can talk about the French paradox also, coming out of France as well.

But some of those newer longevity hotspots that have been found in Costa Rica and California, what they’ve really focused on is really movement and also, decreasing stress. So when we lump all of this research together from these longevity hotspots, the things that they all do share is that they obviously don’t smoke. They tend to eat a very plant-heavy diet, if not, exclusively plant-based. They have constant moderate physical activity. So what does that mean? It means, they’re just constantly moving. They’re not doing extreme workouts but just moving their bodies, and it could be nothing more than just walking around town or walking to their friend’s house. This is a little bit different, but they also tend to eat a lot of beans or legumes.

So they’re, you know, great sources of protein but also, great sources of fiber. Coming back to one of those psychosocial theories of aging, they also make family and friends a huge priority. I don’t know if you or any of your listeners maybe have been to France or Italy. But goodness, it’s tough to get out of a restaurant in two hours for lunch, and you’re probably sitting down for dinner for three or four hours, right? They make a big ceremony around food, getting everyone around the table, and just having fun, laughing, joking.

Something else these populations have in common is they slow down, and they try to minimize the stress that they have in their lives. So when we really look at those basically, all six, seven, eight things, right, so family, no smoking, plant-heavy diet. They eat a lot of beans. They’re socially engaged in their environment. They’re constantly moving, and they just try to decrease the amount of stress and slow their lives down. So that’s my advice for your listeners.

Katie: I love that. And I love that it always comes back to community in some form. That’s something that I’ve talked about so much in the last couple of years, especially that when we look at the data, it really is astounding. How important having those really solid relationships and spending time with people. That really is a dramatic indicator of health like you mentioned, and so I think you’re right. I think it’s important to have all those dietary strategies in place. And in today’s world where our food system is so depleted, it’s also important to take supplements in certain cases. But also, we can’t minimize those lifestyle factors like just being outside and moving like we’re supposed to move and spending time with people and having great relationships. So I love that you tie those in as well. Where can people keep learning more about these topics and keep learning more about you?

Dr. Dixon: We have a wonderful blog on our website where we’re talking about all aspects of health. We talk a bunch about theories of aging and the different things that people can do to help set themselves up. You know, all those lifestyle, things that we’re talking about. When supplementation makes sense. What supplements you should be reaching for. So you can find that blog on our main website at LifeVantage, so L-I-F-E and then Vantage, V-A-N-T-A-G-E.com. Look for the blog link there and, you know, we encourage everyone to also, subscribe to really all of our social media channels where we’re literally everywhere, so Facebook, Instagram. You can just search LifeVantage, and you’ll be able to find us there. We’re constantly trickling out all sorts of content around healthy lifestyles and nutritional supplementation.

Katie: I will make sure that is linked in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm for any of you if you’re listening while you are driving or running or doing any other activities, you can find those there and also, link to my post on a lot of these topics that we have talked about. Another question I’d love to ask at the end, somewhat unrelated or it might be related is if there’s a book or a number of books that have had a really dramatic impact on your life. And if so, what they are and why?

Dr. Dixon: Gosh, mine tends to go back and forth to what I’m currently reading. But if I had to choose one book to recommend, I would have to go with “Influencer.” I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that book. But it’s actually “Influencer: The Power to Change Anything.” It’s such a fascinating book, and it really kind of breaks down really kind of the psychology of where people are at. If people aren’t familiar with that book, it really looks at a couple of just seemingly impossible life circumstances that humans have found themselves in and then really just trying to break down the human behavior that’s responsible for those behaviors, and then ultimately how people could intervene to completely reverse those behaviors.

And I think the lessons in that book are just so incredibly powerful for literally every aspect of our lives, so whether it’s eating healthy, exercising, if we want to maybe lose a couple of pounds, just thinking about those key decisions that we’re making, and how we can really set ourselves up to overcome really our own human psychology, I found that book to be incredibly powerful.

Katie: I love it. And that’s a new recommendation. I will make sure that that is linked in the show notes as well. But Brian, this has been a fascinating episode. I loved getting to deep dive with you into some of these topics, especially ones like Nrf2 and sirtuins that I haven’t talked about here before. And I’m really grateful for all the work you’re doing on spreading the word about how we can stay healthy as we age gracefully.

Dr. Dixon: Well, Katie, I appreciate that very much, and I’d like to applaud you as well for all that you’re doing to help get, you know, useful and practical information out to your listeners and really on the simple things that people can do to improve their lives in every sense of the word. So thanks for all you’re doing.

Katie: Thank you. And thanks as always to all of you for listening, for sharing one of your most valuable assets, your time, with both of us today. We’re so grateful that you did and that you were here, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of “The Wellness Mama Podcast.”

Source: https://wellnessmama.com/podcast/brian-dixon/

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327: Optimizing Gut Health to Keep the Immune System Strong With Tina Anderson

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327: Optimizing Gut Health to Keep the Immune System Strong With Tina Anderson

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

This podcast is sponsored by Jigsaw Health, my source for magnesium. You probably know, if you’ve read my blog, that magnesium is responsible for over 300 biochemical reactions in the body. It impacts blood pressure, metabolism, immune function, and many other aspects of health, including hormones. It’s known as the master mineral and it’s one of the few supplements I take regularly. And I have found a specific way to take it that works best for me in very specific forms because if magnesium is taken in the wrong way it can lead to digestive upset or if it’s taken too quickly it can cause all kinds of problems. So, I take two supplements. One called MagSRT which is a slow release form of the dimagnesium malate. The slow release technology makes it easier on the digestive system. So I don’t get any of the digestive disturbance that comes with some forms of magnesium. I take this form in the morning and at lunch. So, two capsules with breakfast, two capsules with lunch. And at night, I take a different product MagSoothe, which is magnesium glycinate which is magnesium bound with the amino acid glycine to help sleep. And in combination, I noticed the biggest effect from those two particular products. You can check them both out and save by going to jigsawhealth.com/wellnessmama. And the code wellness10 will give you $10 off any order.

This podcast is brought to you by Wellnesse, a new company I co-founded to bring the best personal care products from my family to yours. Our whitening toothpaste is based on my DIY formula that I have been making and perfecting for over a decade. Now, after almost 100 rounds of tweaking the formula and thousands of positive reviews, I could not be more proud to share this with your family. Have you ever read a tube of normal toothpaste? I did when my older kids were little, and I found a warning that said, “Warning, keep away from children. Do not swallow. If ingested contact Poison Control or seek medical attention immediately.” That seemed a little extreme for something that I was putting in my mouth and my children’s mouth multiple times a day. And I didn’t want my kids using something that often that I would need to call a poison control center if they accidentally swallowed. I set out to create a truly safe and effective alternative. And the Wellnesse Whitening toothpaste is just that. It’s designed to support the oral microbiome and the natural process of saliva and teeth so that teeth can stay white and strong. This dentist approved formula is safe for the whole family and will leave your teeth shiny and your breath fresh. You can check out our toothpaste and our completely natural hair food hair care products at wellnesse.com. That’s wellnesse.com. An insider tip, if you grab an essentials bundle or try autoship, you will lock in a discount so that you can try everything at a great price.

Katie: Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and wellnesse.com, that’s “wellnesse” with an E on the end. And this special episode is all about some practical and evidence-based strategies and supplements that I’m using to focus on gut and immune health right now and to keep my family, hopefully, safe and well. And I feel like supporting immune health and gut health, that is important all the time, something we can all always improve and it’s really important to do anytime, but especially important right now, which is why I asked my friend Tina Anderson of Just Thrive Health to join me today. And we talk about several products that are backed by scientific studies, including her probiotic which is backed by a double-blind placebo study, and the effects those can have on gut health and what that looks like for supporting the immune system. We also delve into some other immune-supporting strategies that are inexpensive or completely free, and some lifestyle management stuff that we’re both doing to keep our families healthy and happy right now, in the midst of all of this. But I think this episode is packed with a lot of really practical tips, and I hope that it will help you and your family. And without further ado, let’s join Tina.

Tina, welcome. Thanks for joining me again.

Tina: Thanks, Katie. I’m so excited to be here.

Katie: I am so excited to chat with you, and that is one of my silver linings of us both being stuck in homes right now is that I have more time to do things like podcast, which means I get to talk to you today. So, I’m gonna be extremely grateful for that, and I know that that’s your mindset as well is to find the positive. And people have heard me quote you many, many times. You were the origin of my quote that everything will work out perfectly for me. That came from you, so I always have to say that when we’re together or chatting.

But I’m excited today. I think we have a lot to talk about right now just in a very timely way with all of the things that are going on and just how uncertain and a little bit wild everything has gotten in the last few weeks, of course, with the virus and everything else. And I can’t wait to delve into some practical strategies on this and then really go deep on a couple of them. So, to start, I’d love to hear both from your mindset and then on the practical side, what are you doing to support your own system and your family right now?

Tina: Yeah. I think from the mindset is super important, Katie. I mean, that is really the key to this. This is such a scary time for people, and I think we should just shift our focus. You know, you’re right. I talk about gratitude all the time because I think gratitude allows us to shift our focus, and I have been just focusing on how happy I am to have more time with my kids. My one daughter is in college in California, and she’s home with me now. So it’s so wonderful to have her around and having my son…you know, having my kids around and having time and eating dinner together at the table and all that kind of stuff instead of focusing on what’s going on in the news and watching the news. And I’ve been really trying to focus on my mind because it’s scary for all of us, even people like me who really try to look at…you know, shift my focus in that respect.

And one of the biggest things I do is breathwork. I’m a huge fan of doing deep breathing. I do meditate. I don’t meditate as well as I think maybe I should, but I’m really into breathwork, and meditation, exercise, sauna. All of those things are just so key during this time for our mental health as well as our physical health. And then, of course, taking all kinds of supplements, which are super critically important, like the probiotic, IgG, prebiotic, the vitamin C, vitamin D. Trying to get outside as much as possible to get vitamin D and all those kinds of things. Staying really hydrated I think is also really important.

Katie: Absolutely. And, yeah, I think we’re gonna delve into all of those strategies in detail today, and I’m always reminded of…well, first of all, every time I talk to you, I feel like you lift my spirits and you’re just such a good reminder of being grateful and finding the positive. And at times like this, I also think of one of my favorite books is “Man’s Search for Meaning,” and there’s a quote from Viktor Frankl. He said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” And I just keep thinking about that in a time like this because so many of us are told we can’t go anywhere. Like, so much we’re told we cannot do. And that’s what I’ve been reminding my kids and reminding myself is that we still have always the choice to choose to be positive and to be grateful and to be that for others in our life as well.

And also I know we both know Ryan Holiday, and I love all of his books, kind of his modern approach to stoicism. And it’s funny because there’s a Latin quote, “Amor fati,” which means love of fate or basically love what is. And that was kind of my quote for this year. I didn’t quite expect to get such a crash course in it because it’s easy to love your fate when…you know, like a month ago everything is wonderful, and the economy looks like…everything’s going great, and all the kids are healthy, and business is great. And it actually requires a little more work when we’re actually facing hard things, and so that’s been my inner lesson I think. And this is to learn to love even the bad things because there’s a lesson or there’s a silver lining or there’s a good in everything, not just the things that at first glance seem good.

Tina: Yes. Oh, my God, I love that, Katie. That’s exactly the way I try to live my life myself and try to spread that to so many other people. But I know it’s hard when people are struggling and losing jobs and the economic uncertainty. It’s very frightening, but then you’re right. We have the power to control our attitude toward whatever situation that we’re presented with.

Katie: Exactly. And that’s why I love that we started with mindset. I think that’s super important, and I just keep reminding people, too, is every storm runs out of rain, and this too shall pass. And before we move into the health strategies, I also just wanna say like I think our words are so important, and so I’m asking people to consider changing and stop saying social distancing. Maybe say physical distancing, but I think we need emotional and social connection. It makes me sad to see people being afraid of other people, and I know we have to keep our distance, but let’s not social distance let’s just physical distance for now.

Tina: I love that, so true.

Katie: Okay. So let’s talk about the health side now because the reason I wanted to have you on right now specifically is that you have done a lot of research and created amazing products that help gut health. And I know most people understand that the gut has a really important role in our immune system, but I wanna really like…can you walk us through that in detail and explain just how our gut health affects obviously our whole body but our immune health?

Tina: Oh, definitely. Really, this is a time that we should be focusing on our gut health, I mean, if there’s ever a time. I’m actually just so grateful that I’m in the business that I’m in right now because knowing that my kids and my parents and my in-laws and siblings and family members and close friends and our family of customers are taking these products because it is…this is the most critical time to be taking care of our gut health. This is a time that we need to build our resilience.

There is no treatment right now for COVID-19. There’s been nothing to show that there’s a drug or pharmaceutical natural remedy out there to show that we could treat or prevent COVID-19. But what we do know is that we have to count on our own immune system to protect us from this because there is no drug or treatment out there. And our immune system has to be functioning optimally. So all the things we do to be healthy are really important, and the gut plays a really important role in the immune system.

So, about 80% of our immune tissue is in the gut. We started following the recent studies on how the immune system battles this particular virus. There was a study out there that came out of Australia, and we found that the study was showing that there was a proliferation of cells called T cells and B cells that are required to detect and start to fight the virus. And most of that proliferation occurs in the tissues that are found in the gut in the small intestine, and that’s why it’s so critical to be taking care of our gut.

The key is a healthier microbiome because it’s our microbiome that stimulates those tissues to improve the proliferation of the immune cells. So, you know, keep in mind our immune system is our only defense against this virus right now, and 80% of our immune system is in the gut. So if you have a dysfunctional gut, your immune system can be suppressed or confused, or on the flip side, if you have a healthy and a functioning microbiome, your immune system should be working more optimally.

So the virus, this coronavirus does infect the gut as well. We know that, there was a recent study that showed that the virus presented in high levels in fecal matter. So it is replicating in the gut. And actually, there was another study that showed that 53% of the cases of COVID-19 show gastrointestinal symptoms first before even a scratchy throat, like diarrhea, cramping, that type of thing. So, the gut immune system is trying to figure out how to deal with it.

So, our immune system is predominantly in the gut, and the gut drives the functioning and the proliferation of the immune system starting in the gut but then everywhere else in the body as well. So, it becomes a really important part of our defense mechanism, and of course probiotics can help. You know, we show that the strains in Just Thrive actually up-regulates some of the beneficial immune responses in the gut, which then translates to the rest of the body as well.

We also know that the strains, the spores that are found in Just Thrive, also increase the diversity of bacteria in your gut, which is really important for keeping your immune system primed and can help keep down the pathogenic infectious bacteria and compete against them in the gut, which is really important. Because like the last thing we need right now is the overgrowth of any pathogenic bacteria that are producing toxins and increasing inflammation and increasing leaky gut because all of that works against a functioning immune system. So really, really important to keep our gut as strong and healthy as possible during this time because so much of our immune system is found in our gut.

Katie: Yeah. I think that’s such a great point. Again, to focus on what is in our control is we know that there aren’t any direct remedies for this, even medicine that’s directly working, although I know that there are scientists working hard on that. But what we can do, like you said, is to focus on ways to fortify our own system to be able to handle this. And I also always remind people, our immune system was designed to be able to do this. This is why we have an immune system. And so we don’t have to go into complete freak out mode. We just need to find some practical strategies that help our immune system be ready in case. And I think, like you just explained, that this is a really important factor is gut health. Can you talk about… I know you did in your first podcast episode, and I will make sure that’s linked in the show notes. But just give us a primer, again, on the different types of probiotics and why you wanna focus on these particular strains, especially when you’re talking about trying to optimize the gut like this.

Tina: Right. Okay. Yes. So the strains in Just Thrive are considered spore-based probiotics. The majority of other probiotics on the market are made up of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium type strain. And so the majority of probiotics are made up of these Lactobacillus Bifidobacterium strains are very sensitive organisms generally. They have difficulty surviving in the gastric system.

In fact, you know, many need to be refrigerated to stay alive. So we always wonder like if it needs to be refrigerated to stay alive, then how in the world will it ever survive your body temperature, which is 98.6, let alone the gastric system, which is so acidic and it’s known as the gastric barrier. And the answer is most of those strains never make it to the intestines alive.

One of the first studies that we did as a company was a survivability study. We took the leading selling probiotic sold at a major health food store that had 50 billion count CFU, colony-forming unit, and it showed that 99.99% of the probiotic strains die before they ever got to the intestines. Since then, an independent third-party lab has tested hundreds of different probiotics on the market showing that most of those die, 99.9% of the cells die by the time they get to the intestines.

So really, with a lot of those probiotics, we’re having dead cell therapy, which actually, there are some studies that show that even dead bacteria will provide some symptomatic relief. The difference with the spores that are found in Just Thrive is they have this endospore shell around themselves, and again, this is not something that we have done to…you know, we have not engineered them. These are the way these strains that we got from the environment, they naturally had this endospore shell around themselves, and when they have this shell around themselves, they’re dormant. So it’s not until they hit the intestines that they take the shell off, and they go into their live vegetative cell state.

So when they’re in the capsule, they’re dormant. When they were found in the soil, they were dormant. When they’re in production, they’re dormant. When you swallow them, they’re dormant. When they go through your gastric system, they’re dormant. It’s not ’til they hit the intestines that they take their shell off and they become alive, and that’s where you need a probiotic to be alive is in the intestines.

And then the other big difference is that when they get in the intestines, they actually stay there for about 21 to 28 days where they work. They go in. You know, I love to use this garden analogy, and I think I mentioned it in the first episode is these strains go into the garden, which you compare that to the gut…to the intestines. They go into the garden, and they attach to the soil. They have the ability to get rid of the weeds in the garden, and then they have the ability to bring plants that have been stepped on and trampled on back to life.

So in the gut, they’re attaching to the intestinal cell wall. They have the ability to actually get rid of some pathogenic bacteria, an overgrowth of bacteria. And then they have the ability to actually bring good bacteria. They create compounds and nutrients to bring the good bacteria almost back to life and really make this lush, beautiful, diverse garden in our gut, which is so, so critically important to our overall health.

Katie: Absolutely. I think that distinction is really, really important and especially right now. And I know that there are some other strategies that can go hand-in-hand with that when we’re talking specifically about gut health. Right now I’ve heard a lot of doctors, for instance, mention, remove anything that could be inflammatory right now, so things like sugar or processed food, anything that can cause inflammation. And then the beneficial side is putting those things in the gut to give it chance, like you said, for all of those good things to grow.

Another thing I wanna make sure we talk about, because it’s a new product for you guys, and I haven’t talked about on the podcast yet, but there’s also like potentially a really specific benefit right now is the role of IgG. So, to start broad, can you explain to us what IgG is first of all, and then we’ll go into the supplemental side?

Tina: Sure. Yep. IgG stands for immunoglobulin G, and immunoglobulin G is the most abundant type of antibody found in the body. So, it is the most common antibody that’s found in the body, and its job is to fight antigens, so things like bacteria, viruses, and toxins. So it’s really, really important that we have our IgG, our natural IgG working to fight that…you know, grab on.

So what IgG just does in the body is it binds. So it grabs on to these toxins that are found from, like I said, viruses, bacterial overgrowth, pathogenic bacteria, viruses like mold toxins and different type of environmental toxins, and they bind them. So they grab onto them, and then they neutralize them so they’re not spreading anymore. And then the body safely removes them from the body through defecation. So, IgG is so critical, especially right now in this time.

And so we have developed a product called Ultimate IgG, and so what that does is it allow…it gives our body about 25% more IgG in our body. And the actual formulation that is in our product has been studied in other viral infections. In fact, the way we found out about this ingredient was the work that we did with HIV patients.

We were involved in this consortium with HIV because we know that a lot of people with HIV are…they’re dying from gut enteropathy, not necessarily the viral load. So, when I say gut enteropathy, I’m talking about the leakiness of the gut or the permeability of our gut. So, when we have LPS toxins in our gut, they could seep into the bloodstream, and that becomes very problematic. It also is very problematic for people with HIV.

So, this IgG was actually also studied with different viral infections like HIV, and what those studies show is that the IgG dramatically increases the CD4 T cells. And these CD4 T cells are critical and what helps our adaptive immune response to proliferate. So we want an adaptive immune response. We don’t want an innate immune response. We want an adaptive immune response when we’re dealing with these types of viruses.

So, they also show that the oral IgG binds and neutralizes bacterial toxins, mold toxins, and viral toxins. And there’s no evidence that it’s binding COVID-19, and I’m not suggesting that at all. But there is evidence that it binds other toxins and pathogens, and this brings down that load on our immune systems, and it brings down the toxigenic effect in the body. So it’s a really, really important supportive mechanism.

They’ve done studies on using oral IgG and other viral challenges, not COVID-19, but other viruses. And they actually found that the presence of the oral IgG intake really helps the immune system clear these viral infections faster than when you don’t have oral IgG. So it’s really important. It’s a really supportive mechanism of the immune system and its antiviral component. I mean, basically it’s taking the load off the immune system. The best way to look at it is like if we’re taking…you know, reducing the amount of bad guys, and so now we have more of our natural immune system to be fighting what it needs to fight. So more tools in our immune system is basically what it does.

And, you know, you had talked about inflammation, and I think it’s really important to talk about the role of LPS, which I think I may have talked about briefly. LPS just stands for lipopolysaccharides. It’s an endotoxin that’s primarily found in our gut, which is not really that problematic when it’s in the gut. It’s when it seeps into the bloodstream that our immune system has this like inflammatory response to it. And we did a double-blind human clinical trial on leaky gut. It was published back in 2017, and that study actually showed that using the spore-based bacteria, we could actually reduce the amount of LPS leaking into the bloodstream.

You know, and not only is the constant leaking of LPS in the bloodstream causing low-grade inflammation and is the driver of most chronic condition, it’s also increasing the expression of target receptors of COVID-19 and other types of viruses. So, the more LPS you have in your circulation just is a major risk factor for the majority of chronic illnesses, but it also becomes even more important now because LPS in your circulatory system will up-regulate the expression of these target receptors of COVID-19 and other types of viruses. So, we really wanna make sure that we’re sealing up that gut lining.

And both the spores have been shown in double-blind clinical trial to actually help create proteins to seal up the tight junctions to make the gut lining stronger. But IgG has also shown to really be supportive of a much stronger gut barrier function. So, the combination is really…like I said, I’m just so grateful that my kids are taking it, my parents are taking it, my in-laws. You know, all my family and our family of customers are taking it because I feel like we are really helping change the world right now in this pandemic that we’re in because we’re helping people really support their immune system.

Katie: Yeah. And it’s so helpful just to have the tools and to know you can do something that’s gonna help your body in case you do get the virus just to have stronger immune health in general. And on the note of IgG, I think people might be familiar with that term if they’ve had, for instance, like food sensitivity testing or something like that because IgG is basically a marker as well in the body from what I understand that can…like, for instance, when I do IgG testing, it shows an allergy to eggs or an intolerance. So I can’t eat eggs. Can you explain like how all those pieces fit together?

Tina: Yeah. It’s a little different. I mean, it’s the same thing. It’s showing how our antibodies are responding to an infection. So, in fact, that study I mentioned in Australia, what that study showed is that there was a 47-year-old woman who was to develop COVID-19, and they were testing her blood. They were closely monitoring her, and they found that her IgG and her IgM levels were heightened when the symptoms started to go away, so when the COVID-19 symptoms started to go away.

So it’s telling us that it’s the IgG and the IgM that are actually fighting this particular virus, which is really interesting. It’s a different mechanism than when we’re looking at…I mean, we just know that the IgG is actually fighting…you know, grabbing on to these particular antigens and pathogens that are going on in our body right now.

Katie: Got it. Okay. That makes sense. And so I think that’s important to understand is that this is something that we have in the body, and you said it’s the most abundant one. I know there are also ones like IgM and IgA, but like you said, so IgG is the one that’s gonna be most involved in this fighting off infection in the body and our ability to withstand that kind of thing, right?

Tina: Right. It’s most in demand in the body, and it’s the most common immunoglobulin antibody in the body.

Katie: Got it. And I think it’s also important to highlight that like you said in the HIV patients in the study there that people weren’t actually dying of the virus itself. They were dying of the effects of it like in the gut endotoxins, and that appears to be what we’re seeing in a lot of cases with COVID is that people aren’t dying of the virus itself. They’re dying of, for instance, sepsis or secondary things. And so anything we can do to fortify the body to be able to better handle all of those things I think is just super important right now.

Tina: Yeah. I could not agree more. I mean, all of these things like the vitamin C is super important, but supporting your gut barrier is really so, so critical to making…we want our immune system to be functioning optimally right now, and that can’t be stressed enough. And we know that the immune system is primarily in the gut tissue. So it’s really, really important.

Katie: Absolutely. I know I will put links in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm to both the IgG and the probiotic as well as to some of the research that I know you guys have and that you…and some of the educational articles on your site so people can continue to delve into that. Like you said, I think we’re gonna continue to see research on this, and especially when it comes to COVID-19, we’re still very new in what we know and what we don’t know, but to be able to have some practical strategies that we can implement right now is so helpful.

And on that note, I wanna also talk about like other supportive strategies that you’re doing with your family. I think we probably have a lot of overlap in the approach we’re taking. You mentioned, and I know this is gonna be a big one for both of us but just spending as much time as possible outside. The research I’m seeing is we know not from specific studies on COVID-19, but we know from studies on respiratory issues, to begin with, any kind of respiratory illness, that vitamin D is super protective. And we know across the board that having optimized vitamin D levels, for instance, help you be able to better handle almost every type of illness, and so that is another strategy. Thankfully, it’s getting sunny in a lot of places but another strategy that we can all implement. I know I’m trying to spend as much time as possible outside right now, and I’m guessing you are, too. But let’s talk about like sunlight and vitamin D and time outside.

Tina: Oh, yeah, I could not agree with you more, Katie. I mean, even if you’re in cold climates, it’s so important to get outside. For mental health as well as our physical health, we know we need vitamin D to help support our immune system as well. You know, I’ve been trying to spend as much time outside going on walks, sweating. I’ve really been trying to sweat. I’m fortunate enough to have a sauna in my house like you. It’s so important to be getting that sweat, too. But I mean, even if you don’t have a sauna, going out and running and sweating and getting your body heated up, which of course helps combat, too.

I mean, the studies are showing now that the virus doesn’t like heat. So that’s a good sign. But we’ve been going outside, going on bike rides, going on walks. I think that’s another gift in this whole thing. I’ve seen so many more people outside on bike rides, even in the colder weather, and just walking as a family and spending time outside playing basketball outside, you know, just with the family and doing different things like that. There are so many gifts in this time. It’s unbelievable. I know there are a lot of sad stories, too, but there are so many gifts. I’m spending more time with the kids and being outside together and going on bike rides and things like that.

Katie: Yeah. I absolutely agree. I know school being deferred or canceled has been a big change for a lot of families certainly, and I know a lot of moms maybe weren’t quite ready for summer to start in the middle of March. But the silver lining of it, like you said, is you get time with your kids, especially with older kids, like you wouldn’t have probably gotten to spend so much quality time with them at this point in the year if they were still in school right now.

Tina: Yeah, absolutely. Yes. You are so right. My daughter is in college in California, and she came home, and so it’s just so wonderful to have her home with all of us and just to be together as a family. I feel so blessed to have that extra time and not be running. That’s the thing, running from practice to practice and game to game. It’s been really nice to have this time together.

Katie: Yeah. Exactly. I hope that we can all look back sooner than later and realize that this was a great time of bonding and getting to focus on the really important things like time with family. Again, I’m hoping this will pass relatively quickly. We’ll see. Time will tell. But I hope that we can all one day…

Tina: Yes, me too.

Katie: …look back and have positive memories and have found the good in it, and certainly be interesting to see what our kids look back and say, too.

Tina: Right. I think it’s so fun seeing the kids become so creative to do different things. You know, I just think it’s been a great challenge for them also. I’m not saying it’s not hard, and I agree. I hope it passes sooner rather than later, but just seeing them cooking together and being more creative and doing different things. My kids are older, but I mean, even like some friends you see on Facebook and Instagram doing different fun things with their families and cooking. And the memes have been hysterical. I mean, I have never laughed so hard with some of the memes out there. My mom and I keep sending things back and forth to each other. We have so many different group chats. We did a huge family group FaceTime with both my husband’s side of the family and my side of the family. They were like 20 of us. No one could hear anything, but we just laughed the whole time. So, it’s been a time to really laugh and enjoy and have time for humor.

Katie: Absolutely. And I figure like it’s one of those things like I’m gonna try to learn. I know your kids are on TikTok. I need to learn TikTok. Like all these things I would never have ever thought to do otherwise.

Tina: Oh, my God, that’s fortunate. That’s all they’re doing is doing more TikTok. That’s hysterical. I know. I couldn’t agree more.

Katie: Yeah. I agree. The memes are funny, and I think it’s also important to think of like this is such a rare thing that we truly are all in this together, not even just the U.S., but we are globally in this together. And so, I know that we’re all isolated but at the same time like we’re in something together. And if we can build the community out of this and use this time to nurture relationships and to make them stronger, I think we can, on the other side of this hopefully all emerge stronger and better and more connected. That’s my hope.

Tina: Absolutely. I mean, I see it already. I feel like I’m making more calls to people I’ve been out of touch with and just touching base with people that time didn’t allow me before to do that. So, it’s very, very true. And there’s so many cool learning. I think parents are learning all these different learning tools out there. There are so many online sources, and I think people are starting to realize that they could take a bigger role in their child’s learning. That’s pretty cool, too.

Katie: Yeah. It’ll be really interesting to see the lasting changes in the education system that come from this. And what I’ve been encouraging my kids to do…because I think boredom is the big struggle for kids especially as we all adjust to like, “How do you keep everyone busy when we’re all in the same house?” And so what I’ve been encouraging my kids to do is I’m like, “We have literally the entirety of information, human information available at your fingertips through the internet. So how are you gonna use this hopefully only in next couple of weeks but maybe months to improve yourself?”

And so I’ve even, since we do homeschool, been letting them negotiate. I’m like, “Come to me with a proposal and tell me how you’re gonna improve yourself in the next two months and what skills are you gonna learn. Let’s make this a time of like building and improving and not just thinking of all the bad that’s gonna happen.” And so we are collectively learning Japanese. I’ve got kids learning harmonica and piano. One is learning how to do a backflip, which I might die of heart fright from watching her, but she, I have no doubt, will get it. And so that’s my other encouragement to moms is like let it be fun. Let it be a game. And like how can we all improve ourselves. I’m finally doing some exercise classes much more regularly because I’m home and have time to do them.

Tina: Right. Me too. Right. Exactly.

Katie: Yeah. So the other thing we can talk about both from the mom perspective and the health side is the importance of a daily routine in general but also like an immune-supporting daily routine right now. And so like I’ll share some things that I think are helpful and you can build on them. I’ve mentioned it before, but I am a big fan of light. Not just for the vitamin D, I think that’s super important as well. But I’ve always encouraged people, and I try to everyday go outside really soon after waking up and get natural light as soon as possible after waking up, and that also is important for immune health and hormone health and so many other things because that light signals the whole circadian cascade. And so that’s something simple and free that we can all do is just get light as soon as possible after waking up.

Also, I’ve been tightening up my fasting regimen right now just in the name of supporting immune health. What I’ve been reading from the researchers on this like Dr. Peter Attia. He’s saying we don’t know if long water fasts are good right now because we just don’t have any research on that, and there’s a chance they could…like during a long fast, you might temporarily suppress the immune system. So they’re not recommending long fasts, but they are recommending kind of what they call circadian fasting, which is just eating in a shorter window during the day, whatever window that ends up being for you, and then just not eating after dark. And that’s another signaling mechanism because food is part of that circadian biology.

And so basically like we started talking about from the very beginning of this episode like what are some ways that we can work in harmony with our circadian biology and with our biology to support the immune system naturally and to support hormone health naturally and just to optimize every factor. So, those are a couple I’m doing. I’m also making sure we all take obviously probiotics and IgG and then also vitamin D and vitamin C and get movement every day. How has your routine changed since we have all become homebound?

Tina: Yeah. I wanna piggyback on that fasting because I really am so glad you mentioned that because that…I recently over the last year or so I’ve been practicing intermittent fasting, and I cannot stress how important that is enough right now because we know…from the leaky gut study that we did, it showed us that every time we eat, it causes…especially if we have a leaky gut, which a lot of people…they’re estimating 80% of the adult population has a leaky gut. It causes this inflammatory response. I mean, of course, we all have to eat. So I’m not suggesting that we don’t eat, but I think limiting the time is really, really critical to be supporting our immune system because we don’t want that inflammatory response on a regular basis. And we wanna make sure we’re tightening up the gut barrier and all of that and the leakiness of the gut.

But I agree with the fasting. I agree with getting outside like we talked about. And the breathwork with the sleep is so important. I’m so glad you brought that up because I was just on another podcast the other day, and I kept talking about how important that is. And I think it’s really hard right now with the kids not being on a regular schedule to allow them to sleep in, and yet that’s probably one of the worst things that we…

We want them to get enough sleep, but we don’t want them to be messing around with their circadian rhythm and their sleep cycles that they’re accustomed to because that’s not really great for their immune system either. So, I would definitely agree with you on that about the sleep for sure. I’ve been working out like crazy, too.

Just the sweating alone is just I think really important doing a lot of working out. I don’t think like really hard, hard strenuous workout is good either because that could cause too much stress on the body, too. You know, working out and getting a sweat going I think is really important, and like I mentioned, the breathwork.

I mean, I agree we need to stay away from sugar, and I’ve been really trying to do that as well. It’s really hard right now with the kids because they’re home, and it’s like, “Oh, let’s treat ourselves,” and trying to stay away from alcohol, but I’m always so grateful for Dry Farm Wines that they don’t have sugar in their wines. So, during this time it’s been really nice. I’m like, “Make sure we don’t run out of our Dry Farm Wines,” and I know you’re a big fan, too.

Katie: Yeah. Definitely shout out to Todd, and also just they have been a light and an inspiration during this whole thing as well. Even separate of the wine, I know the emails I’m getting from them they’re…even though they can’t all come together as a team, they’re doing group meditation and grateful practice every single day via the internet via Zoom, and they’re still making that a priority. And they have even been like letting other people join them and just trying to encourage everyone to keep the focus on gratitude even during the hard time. And thankfully, they were declared an essential activity, and so mine is still available. I think a lot of moms right now might agree that wine is an essential.

Tina: Yes. Exactly. And thank God for Dry Farm, exactly. And then, obviously, I’ve been taking lots of vitamin C. So, that’s been great, and of course, I love Paleovalley vitamin C. I think you’re a fan, too, so just lots of great…there’s so many great things out there that could help us just get through this time for sure, so many great supplements, so many great tools that you just talked about. I think we’re very fortunate to have all those tools in our toolbox.

Katie: I agree, and I’ll make sure, like I said, that everything is linked in the show notes, and if you guys are listening, I’ll also put swipe up links to these things on Instagram, so you can find them.

This podcast is brought to you by Wellnesse, a new company I co-founded to bring the best personal care products from my family to yours. Our whitening toothpaste is based on my DIY formula that I have been making and perfecting for over a decade. Now, after almost 100 rounds of tweaking the formula and thousands of positive reviews, I could not be more proud to share this with your family. Have you ever read a tube of normal toothpaste? I did when my older kids were little, and I found a warning that said, “Warning, keep away from children. Do not swallow. If ingested contact Poison Control or seek medical attention immediately.” That seemed a little extreme for something that I was putting in my mouth and my children’s mouth multiple times a day. And I didn’t want my kids using something that often that I would need to call a poison control center if they accidentally swallowed. I set out to create a truly safe and effective alternative. And the Wellnesse Whitening toothpaste is just that. It’s designed to support the oral microbiome and the natural process of saliva and teeth so that teeth can stay white and strong. This dentist approved formula is safe for the whole family and will leave your teeth shiny and your breath fresh. You can check out our toothpaste and our completely natural hair food hair care products at wellnesse.com. That’s wellnesse.com. An insider tip, if you grab an essentials bundle or try autoship, you will lock in a discount so that you can try everything at a great price.

I know as a lot of supplements and supplies are selling out everywhere, are you guys still in stock of these? Can people still get them?

Tina: Yes. Thank goodness, we just got a huge shipment in like two days ago actually, and so we’re really fortunate because it has been selling like crazy. It’s unbelievable how quickly it’s been selling, especially the IgG and the probiotic, of course, is always a top seller for us, but the IgG is just going crazy because we keep hearing about it.

You know, you listen to the press briefings, the White House press briefings, and you always hear the doctors talking about the IgG and your IgM and your IgG, and so I think people are starting to understand, “Wait, I need to pay attention to what IgGs do in the body.” So, yeah, that’s been selling like crazy. So, right now we do. So hopefully, it’ll stay that way so we could get it out to as many people as possible. We actually did start putting a limit on orders because we just don’t want to have a hoarding situation either because that was happening in the beginning, too.

Katie: Got it. Yeah. And that’s another thing to speak to from, like just the mom side through all this is I know there’s all kinds of encouragement online to please not hoard and only take what we actually need right now but just to reiterate that and also to be supportive. I know like I’ve been texting people that live near us and just checking in like, “Do you guys need anything? Can I leave anything on your porch?” You know, like I think that aspect of community is really important as things do stock out, which is really sad to see, and especially I know there’s even some elderly people in our area that weren’t able to get things like toilet paper because people were hoarding it. And so I also just encourage people like check in. I know we can’t like physically check in, but check in with people near you and see how you can support and build community. And I think like if we all focus on that. Hopefully, this thing will end soon, but if not, we’re all gonna get through it better than we entered hopefully.

Tina: Absolutely. And, yes, that’s I think another…I’m glad you brought that up, too. Just helping everybody in the neighborhood and community has been great, and I think it’s been great for the kids, too. And I think that’s another great thing to do for the kids is getting them involved in that, and maybe riding their bikes and bringing over a couple rolls of toilet paper to the elderly and other people in the community that are immunocompromised and shouldn’t be going to the store at all either.

So, I agree. Another gift is to show the kids how to give back because I think kids are so focused on their activities, and we have to go to this practice and this practice, and we’ve got homework and do this. It’s like this is a time to allow them to give back more than they maybe had time to otherwise.

Katie: Yeah, such a good perspective. Okay. So on a practical level just dosage wise. I know that neither of us are doctors, and we’re not trying to give medical advice. Although, for anyone listening, I know telemedicine is what they’re saying is the option right now. Like, don’t go anywhere unless you absolutely have to medically. So I will put a link to SteadyMD, which is my form of concierge telemedicine that I use with our family. So, if you do need to talk to a medical professional, I’ll put that link in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm. But without giving medical advice, Tina, I’m curious, like just walk us through what dosing you’re taking of all the different products right now to support your immune system.

Tina: Okay. Sure. So the probiotic I take normally I would take one a day. During this time, I’m taking two a day, and when we say two a day, I take two at the same time, and you always take it after a meal. That’s what I always do. But, you know, one or two a day is so, so important, and even if you took a half of the capsule every day or one capsule every other day, you are in such a better shape than somebody that’s not getting these spores in them. So I would definitely recommend doing that.

The IgG is probably my next priority. I take four of those a day. The normal dosage is four a day. The only reason I have my parents, my in-laws taking more than that because I just really wanna make sure that they are totally supported because they are saying it’s affecting the elderly a little bit more. Not that I consider any of them elderly because they feel so young, but they meet the age criteria, so four a day for most people.

You could take up to 10 a day because the study that was done on the ingredients actually was 5 grams, 4 capsules of our product is 2 grams. So anyway, you could take up to 10 capsules, but I usually take 4 a day. I take a scoop full of our prebiotic. Of course, the prebiotic is so, so important because it’s helping feed our good bacteria in our gut. So, I do that.

And then I take vitamin C. I take like four or five of the Paleovalley vitamin C. I’m taking about 30,000 IUs of the vitamin D but mostly trying to get outside trying to do that. What else am I doing for… I have so many supplements, Katie. You could only imagine, and, of course, our vitamin K2 I’m taking. Because when you’re taking vitamin D, you need to take the vitamin K2.

Oh, our Gluten Away product. That’s the other thing, Gluten Away. I mean, we don’t need to get into that. We could do a whole other episode. But that’s really important because when we’re eating gluten, there’s a study that show that everyone that eats gluten, even if you don’t have any outward symptoms of gluten intolerance, it is still showing this inflammatory response. So, I’m trying to take gluten away before I eat so it could help protect a little bit of that. It’s not a replacement for a gluten-free diet and that we could talk about that later. Mostly the probiotic, the IgG are a number one priority, our prebiotic K2 vitamin. And then vitamin C is also probably number three priority and vitamin D. That’s about it. I know I’m taking more, but I can’t really remember them all.

Katie: Yeah. I’m in a very similar protocol, and I’ll type that out and put it in the show notes so you guys can find all of those things directly. But I think as we like get close to wrapping up, it’s important to reiterate where we started, which is like do all of these things physically to support yourself and your immune system and get sleep and sweat and take supplements. But also at the end of the day, mindset is huge as well, especially for either moms listening, like our mindset so often affects the whole family. It like kind of has a ripple effect, and so to the degree that we can stay positive and grateful and all of those things, that will help our kids navigate this as well, and just to focus on the blessings that are hidden in this in the family time and the ability to for those of us who are home have more time to focus on things and projects and stuff that we’ve been waiting to do.

Tina: Yeah. I could not agree more. The mindset is so important, Katie. And the one thing I forgot to mention is affirmations and just saying that. You know, being careful, like you said, with your words, the words that you use but saying things like, “I am perfect health. I am health. I am in perfect health or I am healthy,” or whatever it is that you wanna say, but saying those things out loud. And it’s not that they miraculously happen. It’s that you’re putting that out there to the world, and then you make choices that will support a healthy lifestyle. So I think, you know, saying affirmations and having that positive mindset is so, so critical to your immune health, is so critical.

Katie: I agree. And like I said, links to everything will be in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm. So if you guys are hopefully maybe in the sunshine exercising while you’re listening to this, you can find all of the links there. And you guys leave comments in the show notes, and both of us will answer questions. I know we both wanna be to whatever degree we can be remotely a source of support for any of you guys, and I think the community is so, so important right now. And I’m so grateful for the “Wellness Mama” community and, Tina, for you and for your family and for everyone spreading positivity and being a source of support right now.

Tina: Well, thank you, Katie. I’m so grateful for you and for the platform that you have for people and listeners. You are an amazing human being. So thank you.

Katie: Well, thank you. And thanks to all of you for listening, for sharing your most valuable asset, your time with us today. We’re both so grateful that you were here, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the “Wellness Mama Podcast.” And I hope that soon it will be with all of us not in isolation, but stay positive and stay grateful and stay well.

Source: https://wellnessmama.com/podcast/igg-gut-health/

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gethealthy18-blog · 4 years

Text

327: Optimizing Gut Health to Keep the Immune System Strong During COVID-19 With Tina Anderson

New Post has been published on https://healingawerness.com/news/327-optimizing-gut-health-to-keep-the-immune-system-strong-during-covid-19-with-tina-anderson/

327: Optimizing Gut Health to Keep the Immune System Strong During COVID-19 With Tina Anderson

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

This podcast is brought to you by Wellnesse, a new company I co-founded to bring the best personal care products from my family to yours. Our whitening toothpaste is based on my DIY formula that I have been making and perfecting for over a decade. Now, after almost 100 rounds of tweaking the formula and thousands of positive reviews, I could not be more proud to share this with your family. Have you ever read a tube of normal toothpaste? I did when my older kids were little, and I found a warning that said, “Warning, keep away from children. Do not swallow. If ingested contact Poison Control or seek medical attention immediately.” That seemed a little extreme for something that I was putting in my mouth and my children’s mouth multiple times a day. And I didn’t want my kids using something that often that I would need to call a poison control center if they accidentally swallowed. I set out to create a truly safe and effective alternative. And the Wellnesse Whitening toothpaste is just that. It’s designed to support the oral microbiome and the natural process of saliva and teeth so that teeth can stay white and strong. This dentist approved formula is safe for the whole family and will leave your teeth shiny and your breath fresh. You can check out our toothpaste and our completely natural hair food hair care products at wellnesse.com. That’s wellnesse.com. An insider tip, if you grab an essentials bundle or try autoship, you will lock in a discount so that you can try everything at a great price.

Tina, welcome. Thanks for joining me again.

Tina: Thanks, Katie. I’m so excited to be here.

Tina: I love that, so true.

Tina: Right. It’s most in demand in the body, and it’s the most common immunoglobulin antibody in the body.

Tina: Yes, me too.

Katie: …look back and have positive memories and have found the good in it, and certainly be interesting to see what our kids look back and say, too.

Tina: Oh, my God, that’s fortunate. That’s all they’re doing is doing more TikTok. That’s hysterical. I know. I couldn’t agree more.

Tina: Right. Me too. Right. Exactly.

This podcast is brought to you by Wellnesse, a new company I co-founded to bring the best personal care products from my family to yours. Our whitening toothpaste is based on my DIY formula that I have been making and perfecting for over a decade. Now, after almost 100 rounds of tweaking the formula and thousands of positive reviews, I could not be more proud to share this with your family. Have you ever read a tube of normal toothpaste? I did when my older kids were little, and I found a warning that said, “Warning, keep away from children. Do not swallow. If ingested contact Poison Control or seek medical attention immediately.” That seemed a little extreme for something that I was putting in my mouth and my children’s mouth multiple times a day. And I didn’t want my kids using something that often that I would need to call a poison control center if they accidentally swallowed. I set out to create a truly safe and effective alternative. And the Wellnesse Whitening toothpaste is just that. It’s designed to support the oral microbiome and the natural process of saliva and teeth so that teeth can stay white and strong. This dentist approved formula is safe for the whole family and will leave your teeth shiny and your breath fresh. You can check out our toothpaste and our completely natural hair food hair care products at wellnesse.com. That’s wellnesse.com. An insider tip, if you grab an essentials bundle or try autoship, you will lock in a discount so that you can try everything at a great price.

I know as a lot of supplements and supplies are selling out everywhere, are you guys still in stock of these? Can people still get them?

Tina: Well, thank you, Katie. I’m so grateful for you and for the platform that you have for people and listeners. You are an amazing human being. So thank you.

Source: https://wellnessmama.com/podcast/covid-19/

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