Detox Expert: EVERYTHING You Know About Toxins Is WRONG! | Dr. Christopher Shade

Detoxification doesn't have to feel bad; in fact, it should feel good. You can't get away from everything, so you really need to prioritize detoxification as one of your health activities in your life. All this stuff comes back that they didn't even realize that they had lost.

Dr. Shade: For somebody that comes up to you and says detoxing is a myth, our body has everything it needs to do that on its own, how would you respond to them?

After a lot of a laugh and a little like, "Ah, Jesus, here we are again," you know it's like, "Yeah, your body does everything right until it doesn't." It controls your blood pressure right until it doesn't; it controls your blood sugar right until it doesn't. And that's just when processes really start deteriorating. You know, we got locked into this sort of binary idea of everything works or everything doesn't, but in reality, it's all a relative scale. And that's relative from genetic factors, but really relative from just how we run our day-to-day life. You know, just even the ratios of carbs to fats, different plant chemicals are regulating how much we induce the genes for the chemo-protective system, meaning we can be riding them high and doing a lot of detoxification, making a lot of antioxidants, or we could be rotting a little bit low. So that's just setting a stage for this relativity, not this absolutism.

And then the biggest thing that drives down and down-regulates functioning of the detox system is inflammation, and we have inflammation coming at us all the time from so many different sources. So it is not true that you're just like, "Oh, everything's fine, I'm detoxing great all the time." Sometimes you're not, and for extended periods you could be not detoxing well, and during those periods you're accumulating all the things that you're exposed to. Then you gotta go, and you gotta turn the system up and get everything out.

Well, let's talk about some of the top things that we're exposed to. So when we're taking on toxins, what are the biggest players?

Oh, there's so many. I mean, there's, you know, a soup of toxins out there. And so you, you've got like agricultural toxins—that's the pesticides, herbicides; Roundup is in everybody's food these days. You go back to the 70s and 80s, we have these pro-cancerous things like atrazine. So there's a number of agricultural things. There's what are called halogenated compounds; those would be the PCBs, those are chlorinated; the polybrominated diphenyl ethers, which are flame retardants; and then the forever chemicals, the PFAS, fluorooctanoic, uh, octane sulfonate, and the octanoic acid. So this, those things. And then we got metals; we got lots of different metals. Mercury, cadmium, arsenic, lead are your main ones, but there's a whole bunch of others as well. You got molds and other, uh, like toxic algal bloom toxins. And then you got metabolic toxins. You know, these are things that build up within us if we're not always going through these processes called autophagy, where we go in and we clean up old unfolded proteins, called the unfolded protein response. We're not taking old damaged mitochondria or damaged organelles out of the system and replacing them with new ones. We have this internal generation of inflammatory pressure from our own metabolic waste. And then, of course, uh, you know, one of the biggest ones these days is plasticizers. And so the plasticizers, you know, I don't give a damn if you think your plastic is BPA-free now; it's BPB, BPS. You know, they're just, you know, various different plasticizers that are endocrine disruptors. You know, and for a long time we called those like these obesogens because they would make you fat, and we thought it was just because of how they were working on our hormone system, but it turns out they directly down-regulate activity of sirtuins. Sirtuins are the things that we have when we're metabolically, cardiometabolically very clear and in good cardiometabolic health; we have high activation certain. So, uh, so then you get the plasters working on plasticizers working on all those levels as well as all the other ones that I mentioned. So there's a lot of them; we're exposed to them every single day.

Well, that's definitely a lot, and it's very overwhelming, I'm sure for all of us. Given that fact, when you think about toxins, how much energy do you put into prevention versus detox?

Uh, uh, I'm putting more effort into detox than prevention. Not that I'm like, you know, openly inviting it all into my life. When I travel, a freaking Tut, you know, I don't have any control over what is sprayed in the airplane, what is sprayed in my hotel room. I don't have any control over the things that are going into food that serve me. I better have some, you know, I choose what restaurants to go to, but you know, you're going to run out of energy trying to chase it all down and protect yourself from all the exposures. So, you know, in our home life, we can make decisions; you know, we buy organic food, and uh, we, you know, are careful about our choices of household cleaning products and things like that. But we really, we can't run away from it all, and I know people who do that; they get into a very paranoid space about it, and then that's putting you into a very fight-or-flight-like state. One of the things that will come out as we talk through this is you can't decouple this tone of your autonomic nervous system from the functioning of your physical body, and detoxification in particular is a parasympathetic tone. So you've got sympathetic—it's fight or flight—you know, and so what do you do when you're in fight or flight? You put all your energy at being able to fight something or run away. You get into this really sympathetic tone state, and you de-prioritize these things that you do in the luxury states when you're calm. And so that's the parasympathetic—rest, digest, repair, regenerate, detoxify. So it's only when we're in that calm state. So if we make our whole life about paranoia about getting away from things, we're inherently making it harder to detoxify. So, you know, you can't get away from everything, so you really need to prioritize detoxification as one of your health activities in your life.

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Well, you've just added a whole another layer to this perfect storm—the fact that stress and our sympathetic nervous system is a player here. Because, as you mentioned, our environment has gotten very toxic, and we have toxins inside the body, and we can, I want to make sure we get into those and how to, you know, alleviate those in the best way, and now we have this stress piece where we're in this ever-connected world with the internet and social media and email and go, go, go, and everybody has these to-do lists. And so, given all that, where does somebody start? How do they get, how do they get a baseline first of all where they're at with their toxic load?

You know, there's a lot of different ways to uh approach this. I mean, number one, unless you've really got a lot of detox, you have a high toxic load. Now you can go and you can test, but what are you going to test for? I mean, this is one, and I run a testing lab here, and what are the difficulties of testing is that people have a perception that I have some magic machine back here and I just punch in all the things I want to measure. Oh, well, then can you, uh, you know, measure this fluorinated chemical in me? Uh, no, I can't. I have to have a totally different machine for that or a totally a different program for that. So there's no like laundry list of like, "Here are a thousand chemicals; we're gonna see which one show up in you." Uh, you know, you, there's things like the envirotox uh panel at Great Plains. Uh, I know uh Doctor State is coming out with a certain one, and they're looking at, you know, metabolites of different toxins in urine, so you can get a good, you know, a good shot at a number of things that are out there. You can do a glyphosate testing, mold testing; you could do it, but it's kind of hit or miss as to how well it works. Metal testing—very well established, you know. So if you want to drop two thousand dollars on the testing, you know, we can get a lot of information about what things you might be exposed to. Now that may affect, you know, how you try to limit your exposure. I mean, one of the really good things to know is whether you have a lot of multi, didn't you, what else, those metals, so you can make some decisions about avoiding, and you can also make some decisions about how you approach the detox. But you know, when you really approach detox well, you're going to hit core mechanisms that are going to get some of everything out. And then you have little techniques to focus on different classes of metals. So you can either go in and test or you can say, "You know, I drop these things," and it used to be when we looked at detox we thought it was very specific, like we're gonna go in and we're going to pull the mercury out of you, you know. But when I sort of rebuilt how we looked at detox, I was like, "No, I'm going to hit these major triggers; all kinds of shit's gonna come out of you, not just the metals." And so when you, at the time we used to think, you know, "Oh, well, towards our optimum wellness, we've got this one thing in the way, and we're just gonna take that out." It usually wasn't even that; that was usually, "I'm sick, I'm really suffering here, and I have to get this thing out to get myself back to, back to some wellness." But now we see with toxins, you're either recovering, like you're really in the hole and you've got to get rid of the toxins to get your system back up and strong, or you're trying to just get yourself the optimum wellness, or you're trying to get yourself the optimum longevity. Because we found more and more that the toxins are inhibiting so many things that there's even a term for certain classes of conscience that slow down or that increase the rate of your aging, shorten your lifespan; they call those gerontagens. And so we always want to uh do some program of detoxification, whether we're clear on what toxins we have in us or if we're not.

Part of the good news in all this, it sounds like what you're alluding to here is the fact that no matter how toxic you are and what toxins you have specifically as an individual, we're going to approach this from relatively the same angle.

Yeah, yeah, it really is. And you know, there's questions of how long and how intense your detox is, but a lot of those become feedback; you know, how are you feeling? Such and then, you know, we should probably, you know, just throughout there. I mean, what are the symptoms of a high toxic load? Well, fatigue is always one; these toxins always come to bear either right down onto the mitochondria, which is every cell's energy production, or or and/or they're doing that; they're hitting you energy-wise at a glandular level; maybe their thyroid dysregulators, adrenal dysregulators. And so fatigue is part; immune disruption where you start becoming more allergic and less able to deal with uh different infections that are coming into you. So you find yourself getting sick a lot and reacting to foods and reacting to stuff in the air, and it's just like always this little inflammatory game going on. And then in the brain, so this is for the hard parts of toxins. So we said when you get into fight or flight, then that's going to block detoxification. All right, so let's talk about neurotransmitters a little bit in the brain. Eighty percent of the neurotransmission is a dance between GABA and glutamate. Glutamate is uh your more sympathetic tone neurotransmitter; it's excitatory, and it's responsible for getting you up and on it, having vigilance, having memory. Now, unfortunately, with memory also comes anxiety because memory is tied into fear and survival, and so when that hyperactivates, that puts you into this sympathetic dominant fight or flight. The other side is the GABA, which is it, which is the chill, the Zed neurotransmitter; it's a fibroid that'll put you more in that parasympathetic side. Now, one of the problems is the toxins directly affect the glutamate receptors and hyperactivate the glutamate receptors, so you get more glutamate activity. So like mercury's classic syndromes are fatigue and anxiety. So in the brain space, there can be any combination of anxiety, depression, brain fog, and just that failure to really getting the clear thought is one of the most common things, and then that can, you know, that can result in anxiety, depression, and cycles like that. And so overall your energy is low, it's a little muddy, you've got a lot of inflammatory activity that's resulting in sort of brain fog, a little adrenal fatigue; you just can't get up and going, and then, you know, the brain space is screwed up and the immunity screwed up. So that's a very toxic picture, and the lower you bring that toxic load, the higher the functioning of the body gets. And I'm always just blown away; you can really detox people really heavily; all this stuff comes back that they didn't even realize that they had lost.

Well, it's interesting as you speak here, you're painting a picture of complexity because we know now there are so many different areas that these toxins can come in, and then the way they affect us is throughout the body in so many different ways.

Yeah, so I feel for people. And then the added layer of people out there saying that our body has built-in detox, so a lot of people probably say, "You know, this is complicated; my body detoxes enough," with that and move on. So I can see why people might push this away and and let this just smolder in the background for years or a lifetime.

Totally, totally. You know, and you know what? If your detox is running at sixty percent of max or forty, I'm actually really going to build up a lot of stuff. All right, so one, they, they just go for this binary—it's either working or not. I'm sure my body's detoxing; forget about it. But part of why they go to that so easily is the fear of the detoxification process itself; it's got a lot of sort of, you know, it's got a lot of fear around it because, you know, either they, you know, I give them a detox box and they're like, "Yeah, I just kind of wait until I'm on vacation so I can be right next to my bathroom all the time." It's like, "No, they're not laxatives; that's not what we're doing here." I know some, you know, crude detox is just, you know, make you poop and clear you out a little bit, uh, or they're like, "Oh my God, yeah, all the headaches and the brain fog and the fatigue that's going to happen." The, the think about these negative consequences of detox, but those negative consequences are consequences of improperly designed detoxification. Detoxification doesn't have to feel bad; in fact, it should feel good.

Okay, have that feel-bad factor. I'm glad you touched on that. The other piece I feel like is the fact that there are these stories, if you start googling around on the internet, where you release toxins back into the system as a whole, things that have been locked away in different tissues, and then you hear about them lodging themselves back into the brain or different organs. So people, I think, fear of knowing how to do it properly, and the complexity of some of the classic ways that people detox is hindering people from jumping in.

Totally. Yeah, I mean, uh, you know, there was an old saying, "Detoxification is retoxification," because you're moving it, uh, and when it's not done right, you do recirculate the toxins. You can move them from maybe they're safely stored in the fat; you get them out into circulation; they blast into the thyroid. So that's all ameliorated by creating this sort of baton race of how proper detoxification is going to go. Property toxication, you're going to go from the tissues to the blood, blood into the liver, liver into the bile flow, bile into the GI, and then poop it out; or blood into the kidneys and pee-ano. So how does this all break down if you don't couple the movement of the toxins to the movement of the bile? All that stuff can hit the liver, wind up the liver; the liver is not going to be able to dump it all out, and it'll dump it all back into the blood. So the liver is like collecting a whole bunch of toxins out of the blood, and then it can't get rid of them, and it senses this accumulation in the hepatocyte, then the liver cell, of all these problems, and it dumps them all back into the blood to save itself. And that's when this big load gets out and goes everywhere. Where does it go? Goes to the lower, goes to the kidneys, and and hurts; you get lower back pain and urinary distress; it uh goes to the skin, and you get itching, and then as the toxins come out through the skin, you get these rashes going; it goes to the brain, and you get all that brain fog. But that doesn't have to happen if you're opening up the bile flow; when you release the toxins, they'll go all the way through and into the GI. Then you gotta make sure you catch them with binders so they don't reabsorb. So we call this whole thing "push, catch, liver detox." So in like in our quintessential uh, you know, minimalist detox box, there's this liquid called Liver Sauce, and then powder called Ultra Binder. Now, Liver Sauce has elements that wind up bioflow; has elements that wind up tissue remove, uh, casting out the toxins from the tissues into the blood; it has elements that stabilize the mast cells and stabilize inflammatory processes so you don't react to these things and you absorb all this stuff really quick. And so the toxins go into the blood, into the liver, dump with the bile, and half hour after you do that, you come in with the binders. Binders—this is a blend of things like charcoal, clay, zeolite, kinazan, different gums, and uh proprietary metal binder that we make. So when you're able to do that and just hand off tissue, blood, liver, bile, binder, you just tie this whole thing up in a neat little bow, and then you can, you can insert into that tie between activating the movement of the toxins and binding them; you insert your other activities for detox. My favorite is push, sauna, catch, and I did that before I came in and did this today. You know, it's always amazing; it's just like this weight is released from you. So when you get all that going, everything works really, really well.

So you mentioned this very basic package that you have; your company, Quicksilver, has what's the name of that one called?

Push, catch, liver detox. And that's the most minimalist, but then a jump up from that is the advanced push catch; then we put in uh Kidney Care to support urinary kidney health and urinary flow, and we put in glutathione, which is a master molecule for detox, and something called Membrane Men, which is rebuilding, building all the cell membrane and the membranes of the mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum. And that's a more complete detox. Now, I just, you know, because we brought up the kidney, so you got to get bioflow going and urinary flow going when you double dump all those toxins into the blood, and then you're gonna pee out a lot; you're gonna move things out into the into the file and bind them up, poop them out. So you've got all that stuff flowing, but all that stuff's running; everything works well. Then the last thing it has to stay running is your GI tract; you cannot be constipated; that will not work. You need to take enough magnesium uh or vitamin C or some of the herbal laxatives to make sure everything is flowing real well.

So for somebody who's brand new to this, they haven't taken on a major detox like we're talking about here, and say they're 40 years old, they've lived, you know, classic type lifestyle, and they've probably accumulated quite a bit. Yeah, how do they decide which of the kits to use, and then how long do they have to do that before they move into more of a maintenance phase?

Yeah, so you know, we did make something we call the pre-tox box where we're not here; we're moving. So think about those elements we talked about—moving bile, moving urinary flow, and dumping from the tissues. Now, if you're new to detox, you've probably got a lot in the tissues, a lot in the blood, a lot, you know, stored in the liver, a lot in the kidneys. So this pre-tox, we just open up the the bioflow out of the liver, the kidney flow; we get the binders in there, and we have a little bit of liposomal vitamin C—the control free radicals—but we're not moving the tissue stores out yet. Let's just open up and get what are called the drainage pathways flowing, and that'll help get toxins moving out of the lymph, clearing it out of the liver, detoxifying the GI, opening up the urinary flow. So that pre-tox box is a four-week process, and then you could jump to an advanced push catch. Now, then you got a two-month process; that's pretty darn good. But if you really got a lot of load, you could do one more month with that advanced push catch, either at the regular dose or at a higher uh at a double dose. We have instructions in the book for how to do that. So that's what I call a formal detox, and this is what you ask is when you move on to maintenance. So, you know, two to three months in a formal detox to really clear stuff out. Now, if you've got, if, if you've, if you've got like mold and metals and some Lyme disease, it's going to be longer, and we're going to stretch that out a little bit longer for, but but for most, most people without a real serious pathology, maybe they're cardiometabolically not so tight, insulin resistant, a little bit become a little extra uh fat, then, you know, two to three months for them. Then what are we going to do after that? I mean, we need to incorporate this into our life if this is, you know, one of these wellness lifestyles, the longevjevity lifestyle, optimization lifestyle. And that could be, you know, you got your push catch, you know, your basic one or an advanced one, and you're keeping it like a supplement, like it's, "Oh, it's the weekend, sorry, and I'm gonna run a couple of cycles of push catch with my sauna or foot bath, or I'm going to do some yoga in between or a massage in between," and you do a couple cycles over the weekend or throughout the week, uh, and you just incorporate that into your life. And you know, at the very minimal, binders, and we have our Ultra Binder in capsules too, and you know, I keep a a little jar of those, a little dish of them on my bedside table, and I'll take a couple of those before I go to bed. Everybody's worried that they're going to like demineralize themselves and suck all the vitamins out of themselves if they take too much charcoal, but that's just if you're taking it with your food; if you've already digested or if it's before you eat, then it's not going to be pulling any of that stuff out of you. And I found this great paper from the Russian Institute of Gerontology, and this is a very famous—the Russians really know gerontology—and uh the paper on mice where they just, they started when the mice were a little older, in the left, kind of like forty, fifty years old for a human, and they started giving them charcoal, and the ones that he gave charcoal to left like forty percent longer than the other mice. And then when they look at their biochemistry, they found that uh, you know, all these elements of detoxification, and he had the freaking Russians in 19—this is like in the late 70s or 80s—they're talking about detoxification, and they're talking about it working better than the other mice; they're talking about those autophagic aspects of it, like lysosomal activity, your ability to go down and digest old damaged cell parts. So that ability turned up in these animals, and they talk about having a third organ of detoxification to slow down the rate of aging. All right, so binders is one, and those are just like those are non-negotiable if you want to keep yourself clean. And then the easiest

Thing to like, put into your lifestyle are bitters. So we have two: we have a Bitters Number Nine, a Bitters X. And these are medical-grade bitters, you know, but they are related to cocktail bitters. You know those bitter flavors. In fact, uh, Angostura was developed by a surgeon who was a general, but not a Surgeon General. I was a general and as a surgeon in uh, the US Army. And he had a—it was down in the Caribbean—he had a, he was in charge of a whole bunch of soldiers out of the Caribbean, and he was trying to keep them healthy. So he came up with one thing to give all of them, and that was his original bitters blend, because it bitters stimulates the flow of bile out of the liver. And that's going to move toxins out of the liver, and it's going to increase the efficiency of digestion.

Another thing that we didn't realize that bile does is wash the upper GI. Bile's a detergent that emulsifies fats for you. Bacteria—we think of probiotics and stuff—but those are for the lower GI, for the large intestine, which is a fermenter. The upper GI is a chemical reactor, especially the farther you get up towards the stomach. And what is it when the bacteria crawl up there? Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. One of the biggest ways when you're treating SIBO, a lot of bioflow is how you wash that stuff down out of there. Uh, so, so bioflow is essential for detoxification and upper GI health, and and it really can be just so nicely incorporated into your life. Having it with your meals, anytime you feel a little heavy, having it anytime uh, you're a little nauseous or itchy, having some bitters really moves things out. A lot of people don't realize that itching is quite often bile salts lodged under the skin because the bile, you know, wasn't moving out enough. And uh, you you can only have so much in your liver, and if it builds up, it's going to digest the liver, so you're dumping some back into the blood. So if you don't have that bioflow, you'll itch. So these are some of the things to incorporate in the into uh, into your daily regime or your weekly regime to keep detoxification always moving.

Earlier you touched on the fact that classically when someone thinks of a detox, you gave that example of saving it for when they go on vacation because they're anticipating, you know, the agony and pushing through tough times as they they do the protocol. But you alluded to and quickly touched on the fact that when they when people detox in the manner we're talking about here today, it won't be like that. Yeah, let's talk about symptoms during an initial detox phase, what people can expect so they can plan accordingly when they want to do that. And then during maintenance, if they're doing it—sounds like maintenance is just ongoing—and I'm assuming they probably people wouldn't have a lot of symptoms doing that once they're clearly—they'll have reversed—okay, they have symptoms that they're addressing with their detox, you know, they're like heavy, tired, their immune system's not working, and they in the maintenance phase you detox, you feel, you know, you take—here's how it goes—you take the the liver sauce and the glutathione and stuff, and you're like, okay, that's good, and about 30 minutes later you kind of feel this stuff moving through you, and you're like, well, that's a little funny. And then you take your binder, and it's like, oh, thank you, that feels so much better. So you're just feeling better. In the beginning you can transitory go through some symptoms, uh, you you know, especially if you try to do it really fast and hard, and you don't try one of the lower doses of work up, you can get some some headaches, uh, some some brain fog, uh, you know, just a little discomfort, maybe a little fluish feeling. But those should all be pretty mild, and if they're anything more than mild, then you're just like, uh, okay, I do notice them, you got to pull back on your dosage and just give a couple of days at half of whatever you're doing, and then you can go back up, and you're usually fine. And that's usually very, very transient. Got it. And then if you're doing one of our uh, one of our bigger ones where you jump up doses, you may feel it, you know, say you're at a certain dose, you know, a teaspoon once a day, and you go up to twice a day, you may feel it for, you know, two, three days, and it goes away. And then you jump to up to another dose, you may feel it again, and then it goes away. Uh, but a lot of people just feel better and nothing but. Got it. So both phases is pretty mild, you don't have to buck off a month and no plan this out. No, no, you just never put it off, you know, it's just, you know, you you deal with all the time, you know, we go to work, and it's just like, you know, the pollen's out that day, or, you know, you ate something wrong the day before, you know, and we're like off, you know, quite often, you know, and it's like this is no worse than any other little, you know, field that we run into, you know, during our daily life.

Earlier when we talked about prevention, you got into travel and how we don't have a lot of control over the variables, which is true for all of us. But let's come back to the home, yeah, and talk about things that you've done in the home to filter and be preventative. You mentioned the cleaning products, so picking better cleaning products, but let's move into things like for your water and your air, things we can do to help prevent the buildup in the body. Yeah, totally. Uh, so water, you know, we should all have—it's so easy to get RO systems now—either under-sink RO system or a countertop. I used Aqua True system, you can get that from Water and Wellness, and that's—oh, I mean, the guy who made this—just brilliant. It's such a great system. It sits on the on the countertop, and you don't have to have it vent. Usually you have the reject water which has to be put back, you know, so you push water through these RO membranes, and you know, the clean water seeps out, and this stuff that gets saltier and saltier goes down the drain. Uh, in this system, you fill up a reservoir, put it on there, and it actually takes the water out and puts the reject water back into the water it's cleaning, and then it goes down out about two-thirds of the way, and then you've got to dump that out and then redo it. And uh, I just I'm a fan of that one, but if you can get an under-sink one with a with a with a nozzle, you definitely want want to be cleaning up the tap water. And don't just use that for uh, for the cold water you drink when you're making tea and stuff, use that. So water cleanliness is huge. Air—if you can do it—if you can get some HEPA filtration going in your house, that's awesome. If you can get carbon filtration, that's even better. There are some big carbon filters that will just sit in your living room and just run all the time that are pretty quiet. Uh, and you especially need those after like somebody comes in and paints your house, or, you know, does some plumbing work, or, you know, some construction work, you're going to have all those fumes. You get a new mattress, you get a new rug, you know, all these are very poisonous things. Uh, so if you can do—have some air control—and you actually—it's just non-negotiable—you need some water control in one area within the water. I think a lot of people forget, and I'm big on this, is shower filters. Is that something you advocate for and use? Yeah, it's totally—and I totally don't have a shower filter. And uh, yeah, I mean, it's a question—what—yeah, how how far how far do you go on all these things? I probably should do that. We uh, our water we have is just—it's not the best drinking water, but there's not a lot of chlorine uh and fluorine in it, and so there's—there's where I didn't go all the way. When I think about the home environment, another area of bombardment would be EMFs. Is that something—yeah—and protect yourself. Uh, you know, we do all kinds of things, you know, we always have, you know, some sort of, you know, magical amulet somewhere that's supposed to protect you. I have a Somavedic at home. I really, really like the Somavedic. Uh, I used to have another one that was really good, but I don't know even who made it. This guy's made cold lasers, and this thing looked like a UFO that would just set this field, and it was just like really clean things up, uh, you know, when you have that off. And I love to travel with them, and uh, and I also travel with earthing mats, and I have a full-size earthing sheet underneath uh, you know, on my king-size bed, and then I travel with one that goes under my head and under my feet uh to help just accommodate stuff. Then higher level is you you turn your freaking routers off at night. Now, you know, it's like I got to an age where I had like teenagers driving around, and you know, I and I realized, you know, I have my router off, and so the VoIP phone is off, and I got my phone on airplane mode, and I'm like—and then the cops call you at 2 AM picking up your degenerate son, and then like uh, oh, I can't do that, you know. So it's like you gotta kind of juggle a little—some of the routers you can keep the uh CAT5s on and turn off the Wi-Fi. That is ideal, that you run all CAT5 and you don't have Wi-Fi, but then you're in some building—yeah—I mean, you you flip on your your phone and you like—there's all your neighbors, you know, and then they got like three bars totally on their freaking Wi-Fi. So it's like how much can you do to get away from this stuff? But actually the field decreases with uh, with this—that with the square root of distance, so the farther you are, the more that intensity is really going down. So again, anything to kind of control the field in your space, turn off that Wi-Fi at night, turn off uh, you know, go to airplane mode at night, uh, and try to hardwire phones and computers.

You touched on something there. I want to highlight the fact that we also need to sometimes find the middle ground. It's, you know, we can talk about all everything how to do it perfectly here on the show, but then there's real life. And this ties back into what we talked about before, the stress piece. So if you're somebody that is stressing and trying to create the quote-unquote perfect environment all the time, yeah, you might be in sympathetic, and you're not even allowing your body to properly detox. So it's totally, you know, you you see your your neighbor's Wi-Fi pickup, and you think you have control over everything, and then you're really mad at him—what a terrible man he is for leaving his Wi-Fi on, you know. It's—yeah—I mean, you gotta roll—you gotta roll—and you know, it's like that that space of peace and compassion and giving to everybody is really an X factor for our health. You know, I have a Tibetan monk that lives at my house uh that, you know, I give a place to to live, and the guy's just freaking happy all the time, you know. And it's like I went to a retreat the other day—I used to do all this highfalutin stuff—and you know, it was just based on a basic loving kindness and compassion, and it was like the most profound teachings I've had in 20 years, because hey, you know, sometimes you forget that basic stuff. But—brink comes up right in you're autonomics—you know, forgiving and loving and kind and compassionate—our body is going to be much more resilient. How long have you been living with the Monk? Uh, he's been living with me about a year. What are some of the biggest lessons that you've taken just being in his proximity and and spending so much time together? It's that that happiness in that cheerfulness uh of, you know, giving and and just, you know, try and put, you know, other people forward and just having that compassion all the time just makes everything uh just makes life a lot easier and a lot more joyful.

He touched on a couple of the biohacks—hardware that you bring with you when you travel—talk about different supplements you'll bring when you travel, and is that different than things you'll have back at home? Uh, not a whole lot, except I bring more. We have uh these little shots called Immune Charge—like huge big doses of D and A and C and and a couple other things in there—and so I'm hitting one of those every day—like ten thousand IU of D, 25,000 IU of A and a couple other things that are in there—while I travel. NAD uh NAD boosters are big for me; those are a constancy. And when I travel, I do a much higher dose. And detox is always traveling with me, you know, there's a lot of socializing going on when you're going to all these doctor events, which means there's a lot of booze flowing, which means you're always detoxifying. Uh, and so I'll have some aspect of this push and always have the binders with me uh when I travel. But big for me when I travel uh bitters, Kidney Care, cardio performance, cardio, glutathione, binders, and then the NAD Builders and uh uh and the immune the immune stuff and and some adaptogens. We've been talking about things—detoxing from the level you're at now—but you've been in this game for a while. Yeah, what are some of the challenges and things you've learned about detox the hard way along your path? It's a good question. I mean, I came in and kind of upended the Apple cart on how people were doing Mercury detox at the beginning, and then really all detox, and I got people away from chelators and on to doing glutathione system up-regulation, forgetting where the heavy metals—and it works brilliant—and that takes out all the different toxic—not just the metal. So there was a lot of, you know, trying to get people past these old ideas. Uh, but the thing that we are missing in the beginning was the couple that movement of toxins to the bioflow and uh and to address inflammation simultaneously. And so we we cut our teeth really in the autism community figuring out how all that was supposed to fit together because the uh the autistic kids versus their typical kids—there's so much more easily wound up at a neurological and an immunological level—level. So they wind up systemic inflammation and neuroinflammation. Whenever you give them anything, they react—everything—and so we learned to like put the dimmer switch on inflammation while we were doing the detox. So the things that made everything work: we had the couple, the detox to the bile flow to the monitor, and then we would do—not—and then—but really before the first thing we would give them a CBD, which works to control neuroinflammation and control systemic inflammation. It's not immunosuppressive, but it's just turns the dimmer switch down. In fact, mast cells, macrophages—no cannabinoid receptors on them—and that just sort of turns it down a little bit. And so uh, you know, putting that all together, we were able to really do advanced detox uh in a very peaceful way for the body. What are some of the changes you're able to see within people that had always—I mean, the you you know, they would be very regressed in their age—like emotional age versus chronological age—and you could move that needle forward very, very—you know, really get them uh behaviorally much better. Uh, a lot of the this chronic viral activity—we're good at suppressing that—it's just one of the things that toxins really screw up your immune system and allow you to have long-term low-grade infections, you know, biofilm infections, long latent viral infections. And in autism, that's really, really bad, especially the viral stuff. And so when you're able to push down that toxin level, the immune system's to come able to come up and have a, you know, right response, and uh and so you really get a nice movement in them both physically and neurologically.

Going back to the early days of undetox, what initially piqued your interest in this field? Uh, my PhD was in Mercury chemistry, and a Mercury biogeochemistry was in the how Mercury moves through the environment uh how it gets into the biota and biomagnifies and all the different aspects of it. And I was doing environmental testing, but I wanted to get back into clinical because I was an organic farmer before I was a PhD chemist. In fact, you know, if you go—I was sort of this sort of reductionist scientific dude, son of an academic—went in high school, went into college, wasn't very inspired by what I was doing, uh dropped some acid, had, you know, mystical experiences, and then left what I was doing and became an organic farmer. I was into changing people's health not through chasing around polluters and environmental science, but and try to really get good nutrition into people. Uh, and so I always had this desire for, you know, working in human health. And then I joked that I left organic farming the year Whole Foods was formed—like there was no money in it back then—and so I went back to grad school, and then I started working again uh around agriculture, and then I moved into working uh around Mercury as a pollutant, patented some testing around it, and then started my company doing the Mercury testing. Then had to make the solution to uh to the Mercury testing. Now, all the while I'm going through doing a Mercury PhD, I got 17 amalgams in my mouth—you know, those Mercury fillings, those silver fillings are 50% Mercury—and so I was, you know, I didn't realize I was having so many health problems, but it was like immune problems, adrenal, thyroid, fatigue, uh, you know, get sick a lot when my kids get sick, when I travel. Then I took all my amalgams out, and in the beginning I didn't think I was going to make supplements for detox, I thought I was just going to do testing. So I was doing testing, and I took uh the pharmaceutical chelators DMSA, and it just got me sicker and sicker and sicker, and I wasn't seeing the Mercury come out. And that was because I hadn't opened up my body to be able to move and drain all these things out. And so uh sort of I say in the Dark Knight of my biochemical soul when I was at the sickest trying to do this Mercury detox, I had the epiphany that I had to do it all differently, and that was what led me down this line. And the first thing that I made was this Mercury-specific binder called IMD, Intestinal Metal Detox. These were—it's like putting a chelator on a little sand grain that goes through your GI, binds all the metals, and takes them out. So that opening up of the metals to move out of the liver into the GI, get bound and come out, was the first thing that started getting me well, and uh I I shared that with some of the old detox stalwarts like Dietrich Klinghardt, Hal Huggins, and they just love the product, and then that led me to figure out the rest of how the detox system works, how the glutathione system is integrated, and then I built everything from there. Let's talk more about the Mercury piece. And she mentioned the 17 Mercury fillings he had that are—was it around 50% Mercury? Yeah, they're all, you know, it's like 48 to 50% Mercury, silver, and then a little bit to other metals. Got it. I'm sure a lot of people can relate, especially people that are, you know, getting a little bit older, when that was a more common practice. But the way I understand it, a lot of dentists are still using them. What I want to get at here though is somebody in a similar boat—say, you know, 17 is is a lot—but if somebody has metal in their mouth—whatever amount—given what you know now, take us through the the steps—what should somebody do to have that removed in a healthy way? Yeah, now a couple of things here. So uh one—how much are people even putting—dental management still—that's what you get when you get Medicaid. So there's a socioeconomic thing—everybody on Medicaid gets Mercury, they all get poisoned—that's what the government does for you. Then if you're on better uh insurance programs, everybody wants the white fillings, and so now they do composite, so they don't do so much of the amalgam anymore. But those of us, you know, who are grandfathered into having amalgams uh by our age—what do you do when you have them? Now, I do not like Mercury amalgams whatsoever. They do off-gas a little less with time, but they never stop doing that; they're always bleeding Mercury into you, and they're interfering on a number of different levels. So I always want to get them out, but you don't want to just like, oh my God, it's bad, run out to your dentist and have them drill everything out right away without protection. Uh, there are things called dental dams, which are, you know, it's kind of like a condom, they put over the over the mouth, and just the two sticks out, and they work on it. Because when you drill out the amalgam, you're vaporizing a whole bunch of it, and you're making little nanoparticles out of it, and it's splattering all over the place. So they have to protect you from that. There's something called the SMART protocol that one of the holistic dental groups called the IAOMT developed, and you can ask the dentist—they should be holistic dentists—and they should be trained in one of these protocols to uh protect you. And then they usually just take a couple out at a time; they don't do them all in one fell swoop. And then you need to go and do the detox after you get these things out uh or, you know, along the way. And that's—I'd like to start even before you start removing them—and uh and as more and more coming out, you start marching up the doses and getting a little bit more uh intense about the detox. And when you say detox, is this what we were talking about before, the different packet choices, or is there something additional? Yeah, it is the different packet choices. Now there uh you're gonna incorporate more glutathione into it. Advanced push catch will work well. Our sort of Cadillac for that is called Cube 2.0, uh that only goes through our practitioners, uh but you can find practitioners uh to get that through. Uh, but even the advanced push catch will work work well there. Uh, so you tend to be putting in more IMD and more glutathione uh when when you're doing a Mercury detox. And then the dentist will have this thing called the MerkProtect protocol, which starts a few days before the removal and goes to a few days afterward. They like that because it's like prescribing a prophylactic antibiotic during an oral surgery; it's prophylactic against the exposure there. So you could do one of those little boxes each time you have some out, and then when you're done, get on one of the longer ones. Uh, there's a lot of different strategies for for putting that together. And then when it comes to Mercury, obviously this is a big area of exposure, and you know, in the layer world, another area often talked about is is bigger fish like tuna. Yeah, but what are the different areas that people need to be aware of when it comes to exposure? Classically, like 20 years ago—that's classical—there was dental amalgam, vaccines, and fish. Now, vaccines—only a few of them still have thimerosal in them, and none of the pediatric ones do—so that is going away—this all kinds of other things that, you know, our problem with vaccines, but the Mercury isn't as much anymore. Then the amalgams are going away, but they're still in there. Dental amalgams have two aspects: one is vapor phase that's coming off of it that you're absorbing and is goes into your blood and then becomes this form called inorganic Mercury, and that's the form that sticks onto the cells and blocks biochemistry. The other form is a corrosion product on your teeth that you swallow, and that kind of poisons your GI and locks up your liver's ability to dump toxins into the GI. So that's why amalgam is so bad, because one form is poisoning your detox system while the other form is going all—

Through your body, then the last form is fish. And fish have a very big scale, uh, like if you're eating like sardines and anchovies and kippers—little fish—you can eat them three times a day for your whole life, and you'll never be mercury toxic. If you're eating tuna, swordfish, shark, that has one to ten thousand times more mercury than these little things, and so you can easily get very, very toxic.

Now, Tony Robbins tells the story of, uh, how he went from being vegan to being paleo, and, uh, he was just eating salad and fish all day long. And the fish were tuna and swordfish flown in from off the coast of Hawaii, where the mercury levels are really high. And so he got incredibly mercury toxic and was losing memory, had fatigue issues, inflammation issues, and we were able to pull all those levels down and get him restored. So there's really a choice of where you go in the food chain. Now, lower down the food chain, and you're getting shellfish and stuff like shrimp, and shellfish have almost no mercury, but they have arsenic. And so, like, and the people that I test from Hong Kong and and Japan, they tend to have high mercury and high arsenic. If you're just eating high-level fish like Tony, uh, then it's just mercury, but you can decide from along this range, you know, like, uh, how much of this fish am I going to eat? How much of that fish am I going to eat? In salmon, I mean, you got pink, coho, sockeye—they're all kind of small, lowish mercury level—then you got king, that's starting to be high. Can you taste the best? Just don't eat it all the time, and just, you know, work your way through the food chain and be conscious about your choices, and you should be okay. And you know, you can test every once in a while, let's see where you're at.

Given what you know about toxicity, what does your diet look like these days?

Ah, my diet, I—we know you come from the organic farming world, so I'm assuming organic—yeah. So the vegetables are all are all organic. I.E., uh, I eat a fair amount of protein, and so I have I get grass-raised beef from up in the mountains and keep it in my freezer, and so I've got a good stock of that. Uh, I do some fish and chicken and weave those in. Uh, I try to make sure those—yeah, you know—control as much as you can. Chicken, you can control for organic and grass, grass-fed, uh, and then organic is are the vegetables. And you know, it's it's either it's very simple, or I'm, you know, being a foodie and making a lot of stuff. But yeah, you just try to minimize, uh, exposure, uh, to the different, uh, to the different chemicals out there, and food is a big way to minimize that.

Well, let's talk about some of the biggest culprits. You got you got into it there with the fish and mercury, but just giving people a bird's-eye view of different areas they want to be wary about. And within the pockets where there is trouble, are there certain choices—say it's organic or non-GMO or different qualities within that—that are going to be more helpful?

Yeah, so you go to like chicken, uh, uh, conventional chicken can have a lot of arsenic in it, as well as a number of of different agricultural toxins, pesticides, herbicides to get those chickens all in there. And they got a poison, they gotta throw stuff down to keep, uh, bugs from being all over the place, uh, versus an organic chicken isn't going to have those arsenic issues and those those other poisonings. Uh, eggs, getting free-range chicken that are fed, you know, some sort of diet high in Omega-3s, and you'll see the yolks are deep orange versus yellow, uh, that'll go a long way to helping things. Uh, I think corn is just dangerous, and I, you know, it I'm around all these, you know, I'm kind of in the Southwest, and there's Mexican restaurants everywhere, and I love Mexican food, but God, gym of corn just sucks because GMO corn. And you know, you maybe, you know, you got like blue corn chips, and so then you don't have the GMO stuff, but still there's, you know, corn can can have a lot of anti-nutrients in it and be a little rough on the GI. But the GMO stuff, there they get botulism toxin, uh, built into the genes, and so it's growing—oh, no, I'm sorry, not botulism, that's Botox, we put that in our face—bacillus thuringiensis is a bacteria we used to use in organic farming; we would spray it on the plants, and the caterpillars that were eating the plants would would get, you know, GI distress and die. Well, if that's in your corn, a lot of people get GI distress. In fact, uh, there's a guy named Professor Huber who was studying the GMO corn, and it was screwing up all the cattle, uh, that were eating it. And so corn is one that you really got to be got to be careful with, and maybe just stick to the blue stuff, uh, and and you know, watch where you are there. Uh, vegetables, uh, organic whenever possible, but then you know, sip like an avocado, the the rind that's gonna see any pesticides is going to be peeled off and thrown away, versus like a, you know, a strawberry or leafy greens, you know, there you really, you know, anything that's out, expose the elements, you gotta you gotta have that, uh, that's really one of where you want to focus on getting good organic stuff, especially those greens.

How do you feel about intermittent fasting and tying it into our theme here of detox, giving our digestion that break? Does it allow our body to process toxins and eliminate them?

Freaking love it. All right, so this whole discussion then comes up around so when we're trying to activate detoxification and push things out of the tissues in the blood, there's a trigger we're trying to hit called Nrf2, and it's, uh, all the nuclear transcription factor, it goes into the nucleus, and it turns on all the genes related to chemo protection—that's detoxification, antioxidant activity, protein repair activity—and that's the one we're hitting for environmental detox. But then the one for cleaning, for like biological detox, for cleaning up, uh, old damaged cells, cell parts, accumulations of bad proteins, that's under the domain of AMPK. AMPK activation blocks mTOR and activates autophagy—the inner digesting of old waste—and mTOR is activated when you fast, carb restrict, keto diet, or exercise. I think people would mean AMPK, right? AMPK, AMPK is activated by all those things. So in the morning, AMPK activity is higher. So for intermittent fasting and, uh, we're gonna do our detox, and a lot of our detoxes are AMPK activators in it as well as Nrf2 activators. Then it turns out that when AMPK's high, it's really easy to activate Nrf2, so those two go together. This environmental and this inner detoxification are actually interwoven. So your best detox is going to be while you're fasted.

Got it. So what does your fasting protocol look like? Do you do daily intermittent fasting? You throw any longer fasts in?

I, I should throw longer fasts in. I, I basically don't eat anything in the morning, uh, and you know, eat between 12 and 2 p.m. for the first time, uh, and I'd like to do some longer ones, but I've just been a little bit too, you know, I I just got off a sequence where I I did nine trips in 10 weeks, since so, you know, a two-day water fast wasn't real high on my list for doing that, but I would like to get back to a little bit longer ones. You know, I think because I'm pushing these detox things all the time, and I have these AMPK activators, the mTOR blockers, I've got set analytics going on, I think that I'm making up, uh, for what I would get during the longer fast.

Up until this point, we focus primarily on toxins coming in from the outside. Let's hone in on inside the body—endotoxins—where those are coming from and how we can go about handling them the best way. So, you know, for on the hero's journey here, and we're in the Star Wars realm, endotoxin is without a doubt Darth Vader. And endotoxin, uh, is an inflammagen, meaning it winds up inflammation, also called a pyrogen because it winds up so much inflammation that it generates heat. So what is endotoxin? Endotoxin are parts of gram-negative bacteria that get into circulation, and you have these pattern recognition receptors on your immune cells that recognize them as, you know, a GI bacteria like, oh my God, there's sepsis in this system. And so your immune system winds up inflammation to try to kill whatever it receives is there, even though this is just pieces and parts of the bacteria. And when it winds up inflammation, it turns down all kinds of things; it turns down the whole chemo-protective system; it's turning down detoxification. Why is that? Because inflammation is a pro-oxidant endeavor. If you did have a bacteria, how would you kill it? Your immune cells would go and spew hydrogen peroxide on it; you can make hypochlorous acid—that's bleach—and throw that at it; superoxide radicals—you kill it with pro-oxidants. So you necessarily want to turn down your own antioxidant activity so you've got more potency in your pro-oxidant activity, and detoxification is part of the antioxidant system. So as long as that inflammation is going up, all this detox is going down, and that makes endotoxin synergistically toxic with the toxins that are coming in. So if we're turning detoxification down at a cell level, then we're turning down the glutathione system, which is neutralizing those toxins and getting them out of the system before they attack something. So if we turn that down, then the toxins can get in and hit all these sites. If we're turning it down in the liver, we're not pumping this stuff out in the bile anymore; instead, we're pumping it back into the blood. If we turn it down to the kidneys, we're not pumping the toxins in, uh, to the urinary flow. So if you look up endotoxemia, like if you hear, uh, uh, Kieran Krishna and talk about, uh, it from MicrobioLabs, in all kinds of cardiovascular, cardiometabolic diseases, neurological things are associated with endotoxemia because of its ability to turn up damage. Swear to get into toxins. Now, the primary one is or probably the biggest these days is leaky gut—opening up of the permeability in the GI—and that's where not all bacteria, but these little parts are getting into circulation. Now, ones that we don't think about as much would be periodontal infections, so bacterial overgrowth in the periodontal area leads to inflammation, and then these parts of bacteria get into circulation. In fact, periodontitis is associated with cardiovascular disease and pressure. Depression is neural inflammation. Uh, urinary tract infections—that's a big one—and so now and also chronic nasal infections, root canals, and uh, cavitations, which are necrotic tissue in the oral cavity. So how do we address all these? But by lowering inflammation in the gut especially and increasing barrier function. So we want to, you know, there's so many different roots of attack at this, but you want to take less inflammatory food, less food. Glyphosate causes, uh, directly causes leaky gut, so you want to have pure food, not food you react to—a nice immunotolerant diet—diet to bring that down, and then you want to seal up the GI tract. Well, one of the things that regulates tight junctions are AMPK activity and NAD levels, and it's hard to separate AMPK, NAD, and Nrf2, and they all kind of work together, but they work to close up those tight junctions. In fact, that's when I travel, I up my doses of—we do a liposomal nicotinamide mononucleotide and a NAD precursor—it's one called NAD Platinum, one called NAD Gold—I up my doses quite a bit, like three or four times my normal when I travel, and it just locks the gut down so that that food is not is not winding up inflammation in there because everything's hitting me. Then I'm in the plane, I got EMF all over the place, you know, this wireless—I mean, everything's hitting you there—and working on that. So if we can, uh, seal up the gut, but we also seal up the brain—the blood-brain barrier—so you know, it's when that inflammation gets in your brain, everything gets dysregulated, then the autonomics get dysregulated. So we need to protect the health of our gut, keep the bad toxins out, get AMPK activity and NAD levels up, is seal up, uh, that those junctions there.

As you talk about the blood-brain barrier, it gets me thinking about toxins in the brain that we talked about before. And when we typically think about the blood-brain barrier, we're thinking about protecting things from coming up into the brain, but how does that work the other way around when we're trying to remove things—toxins that have built up in the brain—having that membrane there, or at least I think of it as a membrane, how, how tricky is it to get things down and out through that?

Well, you got to use the active transporters that pump out. So in detoxification, like if we just go into a cell here, all right, inside the cell you've got mercury, and it's bound to some enzyme on the membrane, how do we get it get it out? We need glutathione, and then we need this thing called glutathione—that's transferase—it's called a phase two detox, uh, enzyme, and that links it, pulls mercury off of the membrane, sulfhydryl, and binds it onto the glutathione. So then we're in the cell floating around mercury-glutathione conjugate. Then at the cell membrane, there's transporters that push it out. So it turns out, I had the blood-brain barrier, you have high density of both the phase two and the phase three, uh, transporters to export toxins out of the brain. So we need to upregulate that activity through Nrf2 upregulation. So that's in the different compounds that we're taking for upregulating detox. The biggest one that I use for that is called R-lipoic acid, uh, but question and, uh, Looney Island and DIM have some activity on that. Another real potent one is sulforaphane, uh, so we need to get that activity of those detox transporters upregulated, and then we'll there'll be a net pumping out of the brain. We don't have to open up the blood-brain barrier to get stuff to diffuse out; it's active transport.

For somebody who's tuned into this point and they're thinking to themselves, you know, I've had a very toxic job my whole life—maybe they're a farmer dealing with pesticides—and they feel like whatever it is, they feel like their body right now is possibly beyond repair. How do you address that person who feels, you know, they're in midlife or beyond and they just feel so toxic right now, but they found this interview, they're feeling inspired right now? Is there hope for that person?

Okay, totally, uh, there's so much you can do. The body wants to be resilient, but the body is deciding what programs to run based on availability of nutrient inputs and proximity to damaging, like, toxins. And so if it's in a toxic soup, it's not going to choose these longevity programs where you're alive and you're thriving; it's going to choose just basic survival. And as you pull these toxins down, the body gets to choose from higher and higher states of being. These are, you know, in the nucleus, it's just the library of potentialities for the consciousness and the biology—your body—to access, but it has to be in a state that can support those. So the more you pull this crap out, the more your immune system is going to flip and get rid of old infections, the more you're going to start activating sirtuin and get NAD levels high, so you're going to be able to live at these higher states of being. So this is totally available. I remember meeting this guy; they'd been in construction, uh, and he'd worked in some chemical plants; he had worked, uh, as a, uh, he had done some, uh, pest, you know, so some pest control stuff, so just really exposed to all kinds of crap, and he was having all kinds of issues, uh, and his his new wife was way into this stuff, and he was like, I'm all in. And I gave him nine boxes of push catch to go through every one of the levels, and I saw him a year later; he goes, I did it all; I feel freaking great. You know, you you really can get better. And then you can get into some regenerative stuff like stem cells, exosomes, peptides, to really take everything up to the next level. But you don't want to go into these expensive, high-end therapies with a toxic system, but you get it all clean, everything will work really well. And one thing I got to bring up is in addressing the long-term infections that are in there—some of these are in biofilms that we think are like cardiovascular plaques, but they're actually creatures living in there—and these viral, like the herpes family, the cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Barr virus, which are herpes five and seven, herpes six, uh, these things can become chronically active in us, and we have to suppress those as well. And sometimes just detoxifying is enough, but like we use a cat's claw formula to work on that, some artemisinin, and you might need some herbals that help clear away some of the that biology that's living in you as well.

I mean, we're coming to terms with the idea that the microbiome extends beyond the gut—that we actually have one in circulation—and there's even, uh, brain microbiome. When it comes to the microbiome, how do you go about making sure you keep yours healthy, and how does that tie into detox?

Uh, inflammation in the jaw jacks blocks detoxification—no sand butts about it—and so having the right flora in the GI to have, you know, bring down inflammation, digest right, is really important. And you know, I don't religiously take probiotics; I take them kind of in cycles. I'll get into it and go through a bottle if, you know, I, you know, being through the last couple of, uh, years and like, oh, I've got COVID, I'm going to take everything right now, you know, we're blowing up our microbiome, you know, I had to go in and take a lot of, a lot of probiotics. But, uh, otherwise, you know, I tend to get it more from, uh, fermented foods. Uh, yeah, I do mostly that, small amounts of probiotics, and but in the one of the things towards a long-term stable microbiome is your fiber input. And so if you're getting that from vegetables and even soluble fibers—we do a lot of gums in the binders—there's Pectasol, there's a cassia gum, and those are really friendly to the microbiome as well, uh, and then things like collagen powder is good for helping you restore barrier lining there as well. And you know, anything we get to have a little bit too much of an idea that the microbiome controls us. The story of the microbiome became a very fascinating one as to how important it is, but it became very one-sided—like we're at the whim of the microbiome. Fact is, our immune system reverse controls, uh, the microbiome as well. It's so when you have a healthy immune system and a healthy barrier function and you're not hyper-reacting to everything, you get a a much more hormonally funny microbiome going on.

Coming back to how we opened this whole conversation up, the people that say, okay, my body has built-in systems to detox and take care of my body. Let's talk about that general physiology; let's talk about what happens on a cellular level when toxins come in the body, how the body without these products goes about trying to sequester and protect us. Some of this we know, some of this we don't know; a lot of it's still a mystery. To be like, where do we bury these things? And really, really deeply, but in the tissues, we can bury things into, uh, lysosomes, which are sort of, and vacuoles, which are sort of storage devices. You, uh, fat solubles go into the fat, like mercury in the metals don't don't go into the fat; they go into other protein spaces, and some things go into the bone marrow and the bone tissue, uh, so you've got a lot of these things building up in different areas. And then what do they do? Now, I'll I'll go back to talking about plasticizers. Plasticizers, you know, we call them obesogens because people go fat from them. Then we saw their cardiotoxic—that people were having cardiovascular issues from that—they have cardiovascular, cardiometabolic unwellness and obesity. What does that mean? And found out they're directly downregulating certain activity, and certain activity encodes us into higher metabolic spaces where we burn very clearly. There's sort of a, you know, the I came up with this term on Wednesday—sips—there's sips versus certs. Certs bring us into this cardiometabolic cleanness; you could basically go down a clean, non-inflammatory bath or a weight-gaining, inflammatory path. So what's a sip? That's a shitty inflammatory process, and that's my bucket for all of these different ways that you can go down this wrong direction. And our body is tuned to flip into inflammation quickly because inflammation creates, uh, insulin resistance and makes us gain weight. We have a lot of years in the presence of ice ages, and so the body's tuned not to be like young and fit; it's tuned to get fat so we can get through the next winter. And that, you know, once we flip into that inflammatory process, then we're downregulating detox, downregulating AMPK, upregulating AMPD and uric acid production, and, uh, the, you know, all, uh, that, uh, you know, insulin resistance and and accumulation of adipose tissue, and the adipose is then moving into, uh, into senescence. Like we we look at these ideas like senescent cells—senescent cells are these cells that stop growing—so at the base of wrinkles or senescent fibroblasts that aren't making collagen and elastin anymore. And you know, then the, you know, once they the senescent activity propagates, so you get one cell, and it'll start releasing pro-inflammatory cytokines, and it will induce other cells into senescence. So let's look how this downward spiral happens. Let's use cadmium. Cadmium gets into a cell, causes telomere attrition—the telomeres—the end caps of the chromosomes that are correlated with length of life and quality of life—they shrink, causes mitochondrial dysfunction, flips the cell into the senescence, uh, what's called the senescence-associated secretory phenotype, so it stops growing, the mitochondria then release pro-inflammatory cytokines, and those spread. And then they weren't sure how they recruited other cells into senescence, but one of the ways to go this in essence is to damage NAD levels and bring down NAD levels. So this senescence-associated phenotype is stimulating CD38 activity in the immune system and the epithelia around it, and that stimulates a rapid consumption of NAD, bringing down NAD levels. NAD levels go down, then other cells go into senescence, and NAD levels go down, the detox goes down, then more toxins accumulate, the whole thing it just propagates into this downward spiral versus going the other way where we're building and they'd be building glutathione, uh, reversing senescence—we either kill the cell or we pull it out of senescence—activating AMPK and activating autophagy and killing off and recycling old accumulations of bad proteins, uh, bringing up the sirtuin activity, encoding that higher anti-inflammatory, clean-burning, burning way. So you know, absence of toxins and feeding all the things, you go that way; presence of toxins, you go that way.

And I'd have to imagine, by the time people find you, find your products, a lot of them have been through, you know, the mill and tried a lot of different detox protocols unsuccessfully. What I'm getting at here is what are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making when it comes to detox?

Well, it's just like not doing everything we do. So say they're like, oh, I heard sulforaphane upregulates Nrf2, and that'll get me to detox, and then they kick this stuff into circulation, but they haven't done anything for the drainage pathways; they haven't done anything for the bioflow; they're not taking any binders and not not doing anything for the kidney. And then they start moving these toxins, as I said, they build up in the liver, and, uh, the liver actually has doors into the liver cells, so every liver cell or hepatocyte is fed by blood on one side, dreamed by bile on the other side, and they have transporters bringing things in, transporters going into the bile, and transporters that can go back out. So you start moving these toxins, they build up in the liver, but if the liver is not draining right, the liver squirts them all back into the blood, and that's when you have this inflammation and this this movement of inflammagens and toxins and free radicals all through the body, and you shake all that up. So not coupling it to bioflow, not supporting kidneys, not having binders on board—those are the biggest, uh, problems that people get. Yeah, I mean, I feel for people because, you know, it's

Human nature: we hear different things and pull certain pieces even out of a conversation like this. And that's why, before we wrap up, I want to make sure we, for the person out there that doesn't understand the science or have the time to dig into it, I want to make sure those people, the end users, have what they need to get started. So let's actually go there now. Let's talk—when we did get into the kits at the beginning and stuff—but I want to make sure it's really clear by the time we part ways.

For somebody who has been on the fence, they've been, they've had that fear; they haven't done a detox because, you know, they just don't want to quote-unquote mess things up.

Yeah. Let's help guide the end user and, and as we wrap up here, give them some direction.

Yeah, I mean, you know, if we go back to looking at that advanced push-catch, uh, that's, you know, you've got the liver, kidney, the glutathione, the membrane support binder. I mean, that's a really nice system, and somebody might think, oh, you know, I gotta wait for it, you know, I gotta wait to start that. Uh, we did—one of our local doctors did a 30-day detox challenge, and she had roughly 30 people sign up and all do that, and nobody had to back out; nobody was like, oh my god, I've got migraines, I'm dying. You're like, everybody did great on it, and they had a glowing response to it. And so that's a great general go-to for people.

Uh, I'd talk about the pre-talks where we're not moving as much of the peripheral toxins; we're just opening up and draining. If you want to do that first, then the other one that will work really beautifully. Uh, if you're just sort of piecing it together, you're going to need something as for bidders for bioflow; you're going to need some support for the cellular detox system, either glutathione or glutathione precursor, and some ability to upregulate this thing Nrf2. And, uh, you know, we have a variety of different products that'll have the lipoic acid in them; the liver source is the quintessential one. So I've got liver source and some sort of glutathione source, and then you need uh some sort of binder in there. If you got a lot of information, something to—especially if you're getting a lot of anxiety uh or brain fog, you're gonna want—or if you don't sleep right, you're going to want something to calm the system down—be CBD. We have a lot of forms of CBD. Uh, GABA, we have liposomal GABA. GABA and CBD are very similar in calming the whole system down. Uh, curcumin for inflammation; those, those are good inputs. I'm kind of adding too many things to the list to the list here, but you know, you see that my go-to is you do the advanced push-catch, and everything's taken care of in there.

And for somebody tuning in right now who has chronic health issues, maybe they're on different medications, yeah, is detoxing right for everybody? And let's talk specifically on that medication piece: how would somebody go about doing a protocol if they're taking something for a chronic health issue?

Uh, you got to look at, you know, if you're taking pharmaceuticals, uh, often what you'll do is you'll break down the pharmaceuticals a little faster, uh, and so if you're on anti-clotting, you're measuring your INR, you just kind of make sure that that's not changing while, while you're going through this. Often the getting rid of the toxins makes up for uh some of the, some of the problems that you are having, uh, and so you got to watch when you're clotting stuff; you got to watch when you're on blood pressure meds, uh, but we haven't run into, we haven't run into a lot of problems; people have been pretty, pretty tolerant of this. But you know, the complex ones who are on a polypharmacy, you've got to watch a little bit and ease them into it; maybe start at half doses and then slowly come up. And I've noticed with the liposomal products, they say to take those away from food. He can talk about the physiology there.

Yeah, so in all of our liquid products, we use these advanced bioavailability delivery systems, so we're using liposomes and nanoemulsions, sometimes micro-motions. What these are are little microscopic droplets of oil surrounding the nutrients, and when you put them—the droplets of oil are suspended in a water-glycerin matrix—and when you put them in your mouth, they absorb right through the mucous membranes into the capillaries, and when you swallow, they're absorbing across the stomach lining, the upper GI, and you get all this stuff in and peeking in the blood in 15 to 25 minutes, which is really amazing because a lot of the capsules you take, the different compounds have very different absorption rates; something maybe in an hour, the, you know, another ingredient in the same formula takes three hours to peak, another one takes five hours; one might be going in for eight hours. If you want them while working on the same place at the same time, you need them all to come in together. So when you put them in these nanoparticle formats, you get that simultaneous absorption—call it biosynchronous activation—because you're hitting all the triggers all together at the same time with all the ingredients. So we want these to absorb on an empty stomach, and so we have like, if you're doing the detox, you wake up, you take the liquids, half hour later you take the binder, half hour later you eat or don't eat; just keep going on with your fast. Now if you have already eaten and you're having some symptom, you know, you're a little nauseous, you want some bitters, uh, then just hold it in your mouth longer and get as much inch oral absorption before you swallow it.

And how do you feel about mixing different supplements? Like right now I'm taking the D3K2, the CoQ10, and the B complex, and because that's three different things and I have to take them on an empty stomach, I've been squirting them all in at the same time and letting them absorb together. Is that, is that kosher?

There's just a, there's an area of diminishing returns, like, uh, imagine you put one pump in and it's got all that surface area; it's a lot of absorption. Imagine you put so much in, you're like, then you got all this volume, same surface area, but a lot more volume trying to get in, so you lower the amount you absorb, uh, so you know, kind of a, a teaspoon total is kind of my max; that would be 10 pumps.

Okay, I haven't done that many, so I'm good.

Okay, good. One thing I do notice, talking about the absorption, is the fact that when I take your supplements versus capsules, you do feel the difference, and it hits you so quickly. I think you said something about 50 and 30 minutes; like I feel like within five minutes I'm feeling such a difference.

So the pharmacokinetic profiles, like from the get-go, they're going up, and then they'll peak in 15 to 25 minutes and then come down. So within five minutes here, you know, a third of the way up to the peak almost. And, uh, yeah, we've seen really high levels of different things in five minutes, so that's why you're feeling it so damn fast. In a B12 study, in two minutes you already had, you know, like a 20 jump in the B12 level. And so that stuff really does get in and make itself known. It's such a difference for people that have been taking capsules for years. You take these things, you're gonna feel it.

Yeah, it's really nice, and there's, there's a great neurological feedback that, you know, I'm doing something good for myself here; it's not just like whatever. So the mindfulness aspect of your self-care and your supplement supplementing becomes enhanced because you can feel them.

Dr. Shade really loved the conversation; we're gonna link up your social media, website; we're going to link up the products. And yeah, I really enjoyed this; we covered a lot of ground and demystified a lot of the, the common myths when it comes to detox, and hopefully of people that have tuned into this point are feeling confident and ready to take that on to whatever level they're ready.

Excellent, Jesse. Thanks so much.

It's my pleasure. Thank you. Now that you've done my conversation with Dr. Shade, you're going to want to stick around here and catch my chat with Mindy; she shares her heavy metal detox journey. You don't want to miss this. I'll see you over there. So it's, it sounds crazy.