The Stress Reducing and Detoxifying Effects of Beans w/ Karen Hurd | Mitolife Radio Ep. #245

[Music] You're listening to episode 245 of Mol Life Radio. I'm your host, Matt Blackburn, and today I'm interviewing Karen Herd. She has a really interesting background. She worked in the US Army as a biological, chemical, nuclear officer, teaching 500 troops. Her daughter got poisoned with organophosphate fertilizer, and that led her down a really interesting rabbit hole on how to detoxify it. She figured it out, her daughter got better, and the solution has to do with beans, soluble fiber, and how they act on fat-soluble waste in the body. So Karen dives deep into the science of how that works. We talk about anti-nutrients, phytates, lectins, and why they're not an issue. I talk about my history of going essentially fiber-free for a few years and how I felt doing that, the difference between soluble and insoluble fiber, the effect of soluble fiber on cortisol and adrenaline, how you can alleviate a panic attack with a tablespoon of beans. Is it good food combining to combine meat and beans in the same meal? What is the effect of adding fat with your beans, for example, butter? How does soluble fiber help with both constipation and loose stools? And then she shares some really controversial thoughts in the natural health space about what good fats are in her opinion and what bad fats are. She shares her thoughts on instant soluble fiber, like fiber snacks that you can buy at your health food store, her thoughts on psyllium, why she is not a fan of cold thermogenesis, CT, aka polar plunges, why she believes everyone has too much stomach acid, the cause of bloating and how to eliminate it, her thoughts on nutritional supplements, and a lot more. Enjoy the show. Here is Karen.

[Music] Herd. All right, Karen Herd, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I'm pleased to be on the show with you.

Thank you. Yeah, I've, I've really enjoyed, uh, a lot of the interviews that I've listened to, um, on the benefits of beans. And not only that, but just your overall, uh, health philosophy. That's why I enjoy being a podcast host is having a bunch of, you know, a variety of guests on that have different experiences working with clients and, um, just, just different ideas about human health so that people can, you know, take the power back into their own hands and kind of make more informed decisions. So, yeah.

Yeah, that's really important.

Yeah. Um, so you got started into this, if I understand correctly, where, where your daughter was poisoned with a, a pesticide, is that correct?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's why your comment about, you know, people need to take health back into their own hands is so appropriate, because if I had not done that, my daughter would not be alive today. So Ruth, the one you've been coordinating with, you know, back and forth, she is the girl who lived. She is the girl that was not supposed to be here because she was supposed to have passed on. So, I mean, I can tell you about that story, or I can, you know, if people want to read about it on the website, they can. But yeah.

Yeah, well, can you, can you kind of give a brief synopsis, if possible, of what happened and what, uh, what the solution ended up being?

Sure. Um, so I have to start out with some preliminary information. I served the United States Army and in Military Intelligence Corp. And when you're in the, in the Army, you do extracurricular things like you do when you're a teacher, you teach school, but you also coach the girls' basketball, or, you know, you're always, you have extra things to do. Well, in the Army, you do too. And so then I was also the Nuclear Biological Chemical Defense Warfare Officer. So if anybody attacked us and our soldiers with any of those type of weapons, biological, chemical, or nuclear, we would know how to respond and what, what the symptoms were and what the antidotes were. So I came into this, came into this situation with my daughter Ruth with that knowledge. Um, but we had moved into a, a house that had a carpet that was an carpet that had been in somebody's garage for a number of years, and they put it down in this house where we were just going to be renting, basically. It was a parsonage. And, and so, unbeknownst to us and anybody else, the carpet was full of larvae of carpet beetles from being in this guy's garage for however many years. And so they all broke out in the nice warm temperature of December in Missouri and the heat on, and that we had beetles galore. And so then I called the local exterminator, and he came out, he sprayed for bugs, you know, we left the house when they sprayed, leave the windows open, all that. You come back, and then we got back in the house, and it wasn't very long after we all felt very ill. And when my daughter Ruth, who was 18 months at the time, she went into grand mal seizures. And so through a series of events, I mean, we, of course, rushed her to the hospital. And I said, does it have anything to do with her insecticide? They said, no way, she'd have to drink it. No, I said, but this is a direct, you know, there's a direct association. We've never had problems. For she doesn't know she has double pneumonia, and that's what a nerve agent does. This pesticide gives you your lungs filled with fluid. And, and she just had a febrile seizure, seizure. And it was only, but I said, her temperature was only 100 degrees. This is going to be anyway. They sent, they gave her antibiotics, and then, you know, our lungs immediately cleared up as soon as we got out of the environment, and then sent us back home. And then she went in, breathe in all that air again, and she went back into grand mal seizures. This time, first time was only like 10 minutes. Second time was an hour and 10 minutes that she was seizing. And so they thought that she was not going to come out of it. And it was by God's grace that she did come out of that seizure. Um, and then I, I said, I didn't want to go to a major hospital. We were in a local hospital where we were living. And so we went to St. Louis Children's Hospital. And all the neurologists there said, no, no, no, this has nothing to do with anything, you know, she, she just, look, her lungs are, she has double pneumonia again. Imagine that, your antibiotics, and we're going to give you phenobarbital in high doses to keep her from seizing. And, you know, and so that was what. And I said, no, please, please do a cholinesterase level because that will show if she's been poisoned or not. It's a simple blood draw, a simple blood test. And they refused to do it. And I'll never forget the day, nine neurologists sat down with me in St. Louis Children's Hospital in that room of Ruth's. And they said, Mrs. Herd, you're barking up the wrong tree. Drop this. And so, you know, when you have nine physicians that are skilled, you know, in their field, and, you know, at a top hospital in the United States of America, tell you you're, you're off, you're not seeing the right thing, you begin to question yourself. And so I went home. I'm holding my little 18-month-old in my lap. And all everything I, all these symptoms that I had taught these troops, I had 500 troops in my battalion, I taught them in the Army, these are the symptoms of nerve agent poisoning. And I'm watching her eyes go to back in the same contaminated house where all those carpet beetles are broken out, and we had it sprayed. Her eyes go to pinpoint pupils, she has the slight cough, that means her lungs are filling up with fluid. And now she's got the diarrhea. And I thought she's falling asleep, but it's basically going into an unconscious state. I said, the only symptom she doesn't have is she's not seizing, but she won't because of the phenobarbital. So I thought, I'll lay her in their crib, and then I'll go in there in a few minutes and check on her, and she will be dead. And I am not going to do this. I don't care what nine neurologists told me, this has to do with this spray that they sprayed on this carpet because they sprayed every square inch. And I marched out of that parsonage with the other little two kids in hand, and they were sick too. I was sick, my husband was sick. And I did not return there until we could get to the bottom of it. So I ended up calling all kinds of poison controls, finally got a hold of one, and then he did the testing on the carpet. And he said, why haven't your physicians done a cholinesterase level? I said, they refused to do it. He said, give me their number. And so he called them, and they called me within 30 minutes, would you please bring Ruth in for a cholinesterase level? Anyway, it all turned out, yes, she had been poisoned. It was indeed the poisoning. And then they actually had to go back and recall that whole batch because then they tested the batch of the spray that they put on. It was over a hundred times the normal strength that it's supposed to be above the safe levels. And without a doubt, she'd been poisoned. But now we're left with the problem. She'd been poisoned, her liver was compromised, her immune system was compromised, her liver enzymes were so high that you didn't expect to live but just a few weeks because everything was failing because she'd been poisoned so much. And so I said, what can we do? What can we do? You know, I, now everybody recognized she's poisoning. So what's the, you know, the answer? And so bottom line is, I, we've conferred with experts in Dallas and Chicago and in St. Louis, and they said there's nothing you can do. We have, there's no medication, there's no procedure, there's nothing we can do. She is going to die. And I said, I don't like that answer. And so then I went to the University in St. Louis, it's a medical university, Washington University, and I presented myself to the librarian and said, I need to learn everything that I can about the liver and how to get these poisons out of her system. And so that was in the days of microfiche, you know, you couldn't just sit at home and Google, you know, stuff and find out. And so I spent days in there, and then I came up with my own plan about how to do that. It all has to do with soluble fiber that we find in beans, and that's how we can get rid of the fat-soluble waste that's cleared by the liver and help their recovering liver. And so I implemented that with my little girl, and she got better. And then it, somebody, no one ever came and interviewed me, but an article landed in the St. Louis Globe Democrat about, little girl destined to die lives. And then people started calling me, saying, hey, what did you do? You know, and what about, I have a father, I have a son, I have a brother, help me. And I said, I'm not, not a physician, I'm not a nurse, you know, as they say, I, we don't care, help us anyway. And so then, then I had such success with that, and then people started asking me, give lectures at one Bell Telephone, at Jewelry Ends, in their brown bags, St. Louis Catholic parish. And finally, University of Missouri said, would you teach nutrition classes in the university? And I said, I don't have any credentials or degrees. And they say, we know, go get some. And so anyway, then I went ahead and went through all the training. And since then, I've got a master's degree in biochemistry, and I've been practicing, well, informally since 1989 when Ruth was poisoned, but then officially when I finished all my training, got all the certifications I need, is 1994. I've been in practice. And so that's how I got started. It's because I had to act for myself. It's, you have to act for yourself, you have to be your own advocate, because otherwise we get, we get funneled into, we're in a silo that there's only one way to look at this problem. There are many ways to look at this problem, and we have to do that.

Right. Out of that story, the thing, one of the things that stuck out was the hour and a half long grand mal seizure. That's really scary because I've experienced, uh, seizures in my family, and it looks like they're going to die. I mean, it looks like their brain is just disintegrated before your eyes. Um, but I've just seen minutes long ones, not over an hour. So that's pretty intense. And, you know, people will say, oh, it's just magnesium deficiency or it's, you know, these deficiencies and things, but could largely be poisoning, right? By, this was, this was most definitely a poisoning by a pesticide.

Yeah. Wow.

And you mentioned cholinesterase level. What, what is that?

Cholinesterase is a liver enzyme that goes up and down. You see it in, like, in rattlesnakes, you know, that type of poisoning, you'll see a change in your cholinesterase levels. And so that is one of the ways you can see if you're poisoned. And those levels also come in with myasthenia gravis too. The cholinesterase is very involved in that particular disorder. And so I work with many people with myasthenia gravis, and they get, we can get them very well. They're like, whoa, yes, we just need to get some soluble fiber in there. I mean, and, and I don't know what else you're going to ask me today, but I mean, everybody should understand the importance of soluble fiber and how that is helping us. And I can explain that if you want, or, you know, whatever you want me to do.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. Well, I was excited to have you on for many reasons, but I, I just noticed in the natural health community, and I'm sure you've seen, you know, the rise of the carnivore diet and these people talking about anti-nutrients and lectins and, you know, Gundry and oxalates and phytic acid. And I, I feel like, you know, fiber and plants have never been more under attack than they are today, which is really insane to me when you just look at the plethora of, of clinical research data out there on the benefits of phytonutrients alone, let alone the fiber and I, reducing, you know, risk of diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. It, it's kind of an insane, myopic way of looking at nutrition, isn't it?

It, I love your word, myopic. It's that's exactly true. You're, it's, in, in my community, we call it siloing. You're just looking at it from just this one, and like in a silo, and all you see is what's in the silo. You don't see anything outside it, you know? And then I always liken it to, now you understand, I'm from Wisconsin, Green Bay Packer fan. Okay, go, go Green Bayers, go Pack. Anyway, but if you're watching a football game, let's say you're the referee, and you're standing on the goal line, you are right on the goal line, and you're, you're watching that ball come down the field, and you watch him, and it's going to be close, going to be a really close play, and they get it just over the line, and you call it touchdown. And, and they say, wait, wait, wait, we have to review the play from the box. Review, make sure that it really, you know, crossed the line because there's cameras. If you watched, you or been at football games, you know they got cameras all over the field now, floating around, you know, they fly in the sky, be hover, you know, and they're, they're looking at this from all different, from above, from the side, from the left, from the, the right, from underneath. I mean, they, they're, and so even though you were sure you saw it, they review it from the box, they say, no, it was a half an inch from the line. It looks like it from your angle, but when you take all the angles together, it didn't quite make it over the line, and so it's not a touchdown after all. And that's what we do. It's what you just said a moment ago, it's myopic. We look at things from one view alone, and you're not taking in the plethora of all the different ways to look at this. And so then you demonize something because of this, you know, you heard that phytic acid is horrible. Phytic acid is as common as the name Stephen or James. It's all, I mean, it's so common. And so if it's so bad, I guess we should have all been dead thousands of years ago, you know, because phytic acid is in every food we eat. Lectins are ubiquitous. I mean, lectins get this demonization all the time. Lectins are ubiquitous in nature. I mean, they're everywhere you look, and they're not bad. They're used in cellular communication. They are used as far as blood protein levels and regulating it. It's used for cell adhesion, glycoprotein synthesis, recognition of pathogens. It is so necessary. If you don't have lectins, your cells can't talk to each other. So then they can't say, oh, we got a bad pathogen, bad guy, you know, it's going to disease, you know, it's going to get us and kill us. Oh, we can't even talk to theirselves, say, you know, we really should activate the immune system over here because we got a guy over there we want to get rid of him. We can't even talk without lectins. And yet we say, be have lectin gas, they have oxalates, everything. And what people don't know is another thing is when we look at at all these issues, whether it's lectin, phytates, which is phytic acid, phytate is another, it's a different chemical compound, it's the same basic makeup, or whether it's oxalates or whatever it is, is who eats a raw bean? Take a pinto bean, a dry pinto bean, and you just go ahead and shoot that up in your mouth. I mean, don't do that, you're going to break off your teeth, okay? It's not a good idea. You can't do it. You swallow them whole, and then they just blow up. No, you have to cook them. We cook like goes. And when you cook them, we, we have so much data on this that it loses so many of the oxalates and the phytates and all of that is lost in the cooking process. So, you know, you take a raw bean, you say, see how high they are in these nasty anti-nutrients? It's like, first of all, you're calling them an anti-nutrient. I'm not willing to sign my line name on the line that they're anti-nutrients because they're giving us a lot of good. But most of those are cooked. It's the huge proportion of them are cooked out when you're cooking. And so it's just like, quit siloing yourself, quit being myopic in your view, open up and start to look at the whole picture.

I love it. I, I'm sure you're familiar with Ray P. Like, I, I was in his little group for a couple years and experimenting. And I think he taught, you know, about fermentable fibers and really promoted like raw carrot, bamboo shoots, and, um, I think there's one other thing that's like a safe fiber that doesn't, you know, feed bad gut bacteria. But I was mainly relying on a raw carrot for a couple years and I actually don't think that helped me out very much. And I was eating no beans, you know, no, no salad, pretty much only relying on a raw carrot to get my fiber and, um, feel like it created some gut dysbiosis. I'm sure there's some truth to it for certain people, but it's not universal.

No, everyone of us, we're not cookie cutters. I mean, everyone of us has, you know, we're individuals and we have to tailor a program to ourselves. But as far as, you know, a carrot, there's very little soluble fiber in a carrot. A carrot, most of the fiber in a carrot is insoluble fiber. Fiber. And so it adds bulk, it absorbs water, it adds bulk to your stool. It all passes. No fiber crosses the intestinal barrier, whether it's insoluble or soluble fiber, all of it, 100% will pass into the stool. And so insoluble fiber though doesn't have this complex polysaccharide structure that soluble fiber does. And so it is like a, a fine mesh net, the soluble fiber, so able to capture, capture molecules within it. And it is particularly attracted to oil molecules that have fats in them, whether oil is a fat, so we'll just call them fat. They're called micelles. And so, and they can capture a micelle, and bile is all micelles. Bile is all fat molecules. And so then when you eat soluble fiber, it binds with the bile, and then everything that's bound in that saccharide polysaccharide net, all of it's going to pass through the entire small and large colon and out into the toilet in the form of a bowel movement. So it's gone. And that's what we want to do because otherwise our fat-soluble waste recycles at 95%. So all your excess hormones that you're producing when you're stressed out, you're making lots of adrenaline because of your high stress. Those hormones don't break down. The liver very, very rarely breaks down a hormone. It can do that, but it, that it's not a pathway that is normally taken. It just takes the hormone, and hormone is always active where it goes. Even if it triggers a reaction, it doesn't get used up in triggering a cellular response, it just triggers, moves on, and triggers another and another and another and keeps going. The liver clears these active hormones out, puts them into the digestive fluid, bile, sends them down to your gut. And then in your gut, if it meets soluble fiber, not the fiber in a carrot, but the fiber found in pinto beans, navy beans, garbanzo beans, which are chickpeas, lentils, that type of soluble fiber, then that gets caught. And those hormones that are in the bile, and they're made out of fats, they always have to travel in fat carriers because they're made out of fats. And your bile is made out of fat. They travel through the entire gastrointestinal tract and are excreted. If you don't have soluble fiber present, 95% of those hormones in any other fat-soluble waste, which is your pesticides that poisoned Ruth because they were fat-soluble, will just recycle and go back into the bloodstream again. And you never get rid of them. I mean, you're getting rid of 5%, and but that's, you know, but when you make more hormones, I mean, we're making, we're hormone machines. We make hormones all day long. And so you have the new hormones adding to the 95% that recycled, and they mount and mount and mount. When you're talking about estrogen, now we have estrogen receptive cancers, we have progesterone receptive cancers, we have testosterone receptive can, we have all of this. And it's like, is this a surprise when you recycle these hormones over and over and over again, and you're making new ones? And so it's just mounting the amount. And then you, and these hormones are tiny, tiny, tiny. They're usually less than 51 kilodaltons. They, they don't need a pathway to to enter a cell. You normally have gateways, you have to knock on a door, basically, and say, hello, can I come in? Permission to come in? And I mean, you have to be a certain molecular structure, and then you're allowed to come in through the cell membrane and enter the cyto, the cytosol, the inner workings of the cell. With hormones, they're so tiny, they don't need doors, they just walk through the wall. It's called diffusion. They just walk through the wall. And then, hello, I'm in the cytosol. Oh, and there's the nuclear envelope over there. Well, the nuclear envelope is inside of every cell that we have, except red blood cells and neurons, okay? They're the only exception. But every other cell. And so, so what's so particular about a nuclear envelope? It is a secret place. It is a place where the treasure is hidden. Well, what treasure is being protected by this nuclear envelope? It's another cell. It's another, uh, wall. It's a membrane. It's your DNA. You have a full copy of your DNA inside the nuclear envelope in every cell, except for red blood cells and neurons, a full copy of your DNA. And you know what these hormones do? They just walk through the plasma membrane, the cell wall of the big cell, and say, oh, there's a nuclear envelope. Let's go over there and see what's over there. Now, I'm making it really simplified, but they attach to a transcription factor, and there's a bunch of chemical reactions that happen, but they end up walking through because they're so small, they diffuse, walk through the nuclear envelope membrane. And then what do they do? They attach themselves to your DNA. Whenever you have one of these hormones with a transcription factor attached to your DNA, you swap out your nucleotides, your nucleotides, or your DNA, you have a very specific order of how this, what it is, what makes you you, what makes me me. We have a very specific order of our DNA, and they swap them out. And so then it's like, okay, well, this gene doesn't work anymore. And a lot of genes, it's like, you don't notice anything because they don't have a terrific impact on a certain thing. But some genes, like a p53 gene, if you mess up your p53 gene, you're looking cancer straight in the face. I mean, because that's what protects you from cancer is the p53 gene. So it's like, let's get rid of these hormones. Why are we letting them recycle? People say, well, you know, it's a poor man's food, beans. Poor man's food, you know, they used to eat that way back hundreds of years ago. Now we're, we're more sophisticated, you know, we don't have to have beans in our diet. You're just like, what are we doing? You've left out the very crucial thing that you need to be alive and healthy. So, yeah.

Wow, that was an awesome explanation. Yeah, I think I've heard you say, you know, talking about people being chronically stressed and just constantly adrenalized, um, that part of that is because they're not getting enough soluble fiber in. So is that, for, for the stressed and anxious person, just increasing their soluble fiber can help to kind of alleviate some of that, that stressed out?

You can alleviate a panic attack. If those have experienced a panic attack, they're also called anxiety attacks, where you're like, your heart is pounding, you feel like, I cannot stand, if the crowd is driving me nuts, I'm overwhelmed, you know, you're going, deep breath, deep breath, you know, you know, you're freaking out, okay? Other panic attacks, okay? You could eat a tablespoon of beans. Just eat a tablespoon of beans. Five, 10 minutes later, 20 minutes later, eat another tablespoon of beans, eat another table. And it all goes away because those panic attacks are caused by too much norepinephrine and epinephrine, which we collectively put together and call adrenaline. It's too much adrenaline. And so when you have too much adrenaline, you have anxiety. When you have too little adrenaline, you have depression and fatigue. And they're sisters. And you'll say, well, I can have one or the other. You'll have both because you overproduce and you're like, wired way to the top, you know, freaking out. And then you produce so much adrenaline, your, the adrenal glands that produces adrenaline say, that's it, I'm worn out, I'm tired. Oh, you want more energy? Not doing it. Oh, you want to think more clearly because this one, this particular hormone, adrenaline makes you think very clearly. No, not giving it. I'm tired of worn out because you, you demand so much of me over here because you say, give me adrenaline because you drink coffee. Coffee causes you to release large amounts of adrenaline, or perfumes and fragrances also cause you to release large amounts of hormones, including adrenaline, or, you know, or you're doing sweets. They cause you to produce large amounts of adrenaline. And so then you have this whoosh, big amount, and then you're left with tired out adrenal glands that when you need them, they're not there for you. I mean, you don't die. I mean, if they're completely gone, you would be dead, but they don't produce at the level you want them to. So why do people? So you think about it, you get up in the morning, and what is a typical breakfast of an American? System? They get up, and they have a cup of water, right? Coffee. They have a cup of coffee because they gotta get going for the day, and they're so, they're dragging, you know, and they've got to, they got to be alert, they got to be on top of it, they got to be. How are you going to get that? It's not coffee that does it, and it's not caffeine. We say it's caffeine that does it. It's adrenaline. Caffeine is the whip to the adrenals that caffeine is not a hormone. Caffeine is a stimulant to the adrenal glands to produce the hormone to give you that brightness, that, you know, energy. I'm on top of it. Let me just tell you how it goes here. I'm, I'm doing my job, you know, that is always a hormone. But you gotta, you gotta whip them into shape, you know? And that's what you think about it. And so we use these, we use whips, and then we wonder why our adrenals are so tired and we run out of steam.

Yeah. My, my friend, I have a, a PhD friend, Pedro, and he just posted or sent me something on a actually caffeine plus nicotine helping with the spike protein. Not to get this episode censored, but I guess there was a synergy there with actually pretty, pretty profound protection against the spike protein, which I thought was fascinating. Um, so maybe, maybe there's a case for using, you know, using those, you know, the old, you know, old tobacco and, and coffee of combo.

But what it's doing is it's speeding. It speeds everything. Okay? So what it does, both of those things stimulate the production of adrenaline, and adrenaline speeds every single function. Adrenaline is a neurotransmitter, both in the brain and in the entire peripheral system. It is our number one major neurotransmitter. So it's filling the synaptic gap. There's the synaptic gap where we have to send electrical signals across, tell the cells to tell the muscles to tell the organs, everything to do. That is done by electrical signals, and adrenaline is the primary conductive fluid to make that happen. So if you're making large amounts of it, everything speeds up. Your heart rate, every organ function, and including your immune system, it speeds up. And so yes, it's going to be attacking the virus more quickly. But be aware, you are going to fall off a cliff, and then you're going to go down so far, then it's just a simple common cold. You think you're worried about spike protein, you're going to be worried about just a simple little flu. And she says, why can't I get over this? Was because you ran your immune system down because you, you can't produce the adrenaline you need. If you could do this naturally, if you could just produce the adrenaline all the time, you know, then, then you would be able to fight whatever infection, whether whatever it is, and fight it well because you are always taking care of yourself.

So interesting.

Um, do, do you differentiate between sugar in like maple syrup and raw honey and refined sugar, or do you look at them as having the same kind of adrenaline provoking, you know, deleterious effects?

They have the same provoking deleterious effects. It doesn't matter if you use raw honey, or you use, you know, you take the syrup from the maple trees and boiled it down yourself, you know, it doesn't matter because this has to do with what you're doing with the blood glucose levels. And when the blood glucose levels spike, when they go up really fast, quickly, you will have an adrenaline response, period. You have to, because then you have to release a large amount of insulin. Then the insulin causes your blood sugars to drop. When they drop, you will die. So then you have to have a huge release of, so you have to bring your sugars back up. So you have to be able to make sugar, and you'll make that out of protein, and also you make a hormone called glucagon, and then that stops. I mean, you have set into a whole myriad of hormonal reactions by doing that. No, it's all bad for you. I mean, you just, we just don't do that. I mean, the sweetest thing you should eat is your carrot. Your carrot was okay for eating for sweetness. It just, you need a little of soluble fiber in your diet instead of all the insoluble fiber. Was fine too, you just needed soluble fiber. Way back in those days.

And, and you have the same thoughts with, like, uh, up here in Idaho, we have a lot of like peaches, plums, apples, you know, huckleberries are big up here, blueberries. Even with the fiber in there, kind of the same idea, or a little different?

It's depends on the particular thing. Your peaches are very sweet. Your huckleberries and blueberries are not so sweet. You know, that you can, you can taste them and go, oh, this huckleberry, this is sour, sour, okay? It's not sweet. So it's, it's the, it's the dense, it of sugar density. Density is mass divided by volume. It's how, how dense is the sugar in this particular thing. So like for those who are well, and you're healthy, you have no health problems, having a piece of fruit twice a week as long as it's with a meal that has protein. Because protein slows down the absorption of sugars. It really just really puts a big tamp, tamping it down as far as the absorption. So it does still absorb, but it's much, it's spread out. You don't have spikes, you just have this gentle slope up and you come down. And so twice a week, that would be fine. But if you're eating fruit several times a day, if you're eating fruit actually more than twice a week, it's too much. You're going to pay for this because it's too much sugar. Unless you're getting into your low, low sugar naturally occurring berries like your huckleberries, or, you know, if you've ever eaten a crab apple or persimmon, bitter, sour, yeah, you can have all the lemons you want too, you know, they're for too. Lemons and limes, you can tell when something's sweet.

So, well, you brought up protein, and I think when a lot of people think about legumes, they automatically go to chili. Like, I know I was raised with, you know, you have your, your beans and your red meat, your beef, or whatever it is. Um, it, I think we even had some questions that listeners sent in, is that bad food combining, or I guess a better question is, does that detract from the benefits of soluble fiber that you've been talking about to eat beans with meat in the same meal, or not at all?

It's, they're very beneficial. You should always eat beans together, or meat and beans. That's wonderful for you, okay? And a lot of people are mistakenly thinking, well, beans are a protein, and meat is a protein. That's not a protein. No, beans are not a protein. Beans are a carbohydrate. They're a starch. So a lot of people are very confused about that. They are carbohydrate. Do they have some protein in it? Sure. But so do, so does celery. So does every, you know, car. We all have some of those amino acids that are present. But beans are not a complete protein. They are not and they're not an efficient protein. And they are a carbohydrate. So absolutely, you can eat any protein with beans.

Okay. Maybe it was, was it fat that you don't recommend having with the beans? Like putting butter on your beans?

That's, yeah. Now, fat is a different issue. And that's not for everyone. It's, if you, if you have a health condition that is in desperate need of the good essential fatty acids, if you eat beans with those essential fatty acids, then some of those fatty acids are going to be captured, just like the bile is captured, going to be captured in that soluble fiber, that tight mesh of a polysaccharide net, and they will be carried out. They will never be absorbed. And it's like, wait a minute, wait a minute, I needed that, you know, for like my infertile women that are underproducing in hormones, and most infertile women are actually overproducing, but there's a small percentage that underproduce hormones. We need those good fats in the bloodstream because all those hormones are made out of those good fats. But if you eat beans with those fats, then, then we're throwing a good portion of them into your large colon, which you'll have wonderful bowel movements that are easy to pass, and you'll say, this is wonderful, I've never had such great bowel movements. That's great because you have the fat in there, and your stools will float. And stool should float. That means you're getting adequate fats that are passing through your colon. And then so all of that, you know, would be great. But if you needed those extra ones, then I will tell, like the women who are infertile, or if you have arthritis, that's another one where you need a lot of fats, or if you have hair loss, you need a lot of fats. It's like, you may have fats with your beans. But the, the amount of fat that I'm asking you to eat for your hair loss problem, or for your, your arthritis, or whatever I'm asking them to eat a lot of certain amount of grams of fat for, has to be separate by an hour and a half away from your beans. And so we just separate them out. And that's easy to do. You eat your beans at your meals, you know, you put your black beans on your salad with your salad dressing. That's a salad dressing. That's a fat. Almost all salad dressings have oil. It's good fat. It's all good for you. And you eat that together, and they're working great for you. And then, but this other one, you're going to have to eat your cashews, or whatever source, your avocados, you're going to have to eat those an hour and a half later. And then you can get all those grams of fat then at another time.

Without. Interesting. I thought that was interesting about the stool floating. I've not heard that. I've heard of the, you know, like what is it, the Bristol stool chart or something like that?

Yeah, it's Bristol.

Yeah. And so what if someone's dealing with constipation or diarrhea? Can soluble fiber help with either one?

It will help with either one. It normalizes your stool. So it will, it will stop the diarrhea. And if you have constipation, then it will help that. And so it's, it's very beneficial. But constipation, besides fiber, you have to add some oils. And so that you are binding, you want that oil to bind with a soluble fiber. We want that oil carried to the large colon and not absorbed. It's always absorbed at the terminal part of the ileum, which is the third part of the small colon. That's where all fats are absorbed. But we want this fat to go into the large colon because constipation is happening in the large colon, not in the small colon. And so let it go because fats will move your bowels. It's the best way to move your bowels is fats and good fats. So if you want to make sure the fat gets there, you take them with beans. So people who have constipation, I always say at your meals, when you're eating your beans, eat a few tablespoons of cashews because cashews are very rich in in the good oils. And then they also have a little added benefit. They're rich in magnesium. And magnesium causes a relaxation of that bowel muscle, so it's easier just to flow through.

So, so what's your definition of good fats? Because, uh, you know, at the beginning of the show, I mentioned, you know, the carnivore diet, and they're kind of, you know, the more the better of butter and, you know, high cholesterol doesn't matter. And, you know, there's a lot of things where I'm, it, it seems a little out of balance to me, just to have unlimited amounts of certain things, whether it's raw milk or butter, whatever. Um, what are your thoughts on, on just good fats in general, and, and, you know, cholesterol?

Yeah, the good fats are liquid at room temperature. That's the easiest way to recognize a good fat from a bad fat. A bad fat is solid at room temperature. So if you think about a stick of butter, and you got it on a plate and you left it out all day, it'll be soft, but it's still a solid. It's not a pool of liquid. That means it's a saturated fat. And if it's a liquid, then that's an unsaturated fat. Um, and what people always say, what is it saturated with? It's fats are made out of long, long chains of carbons. Carbon is a particular element, and carbons have to bind with four things. They have to, this is chemistry, okay? You have to have four bonds. A carbon has to have hold hands with four things. And so it holds hand in fats, it holds hand with a carbon on its right and a carbon on its left, okay? Two hands are taken care. Now we got two more hands, okay? Up and down. And they have to have something attached to them. And that what always is attached to them in a fat is a hydrogen. A hydrogen is another element. And so then when you have a saturated fat, it means that every single carbon has got all four bonding to two hydrogens, and then the carbon on the side, that's the saturated fat. It's saturated with hydrogens. And that means it will be solid at room temperature. And unsaturated fat, it's got two carbon buddies on the side, it's got one hydrogen up here, but it's got one other bond that it actually made with a carbon buddy. So it's got a carbon over here, and then over here, hey, we're going to hold two hands together, carbon and carbon. We're going to have two, it's called a double bond, a double carbon bond. And when you have a double carbon bond, it's an unsaturated fat because you have, you could break that one carbon where you have a double bond, the pi bond is the second bond, the sigma bond is the first bond. Pi bond is the second bond. You break and pi is pi. It's not like a pie you eat, it's pi. It's, it's a Greek. Okay, all right. And so you break the pi bond, and then you have that carbon is able to bind with what? It's going to bind with the hydrogen. And then you just saturated it. That's how we take an unsaturated fat, like you'll see corn oil, margarine. How many times have you seen that in the grocery store? Corn oil is liquid or solid at room temperature? Just corn oil, it's liquid. It's unsaturated fat. It's a polyunsaturated fat. And it's, it's okay for you. Corn oil is okay for you. It's not bad. Everybody says it's bad for you. It's when you hydrogenate it. And that word hydrogenated should be ringing bells with people's heads right now. It's like, she's talking about adding a hydrogen onto the carbon chain. They hydrogenated, yes, they pump hydrogen gas into, they bubble it into the oil. And all that hydrogen, then they, then there's also, they have to do, they have to go across the zinc coat of plate because you got to be able to be make an electron well to break the bond. But anyway, there's a couple little steps of chemistry that have to happen. But what happens is that pi bond breaks, and then all this excess hydrogen's everywhere, and then it will bind to a hydrogen and it turns that oil into to a solid. And now you have a margarine, a corn oil margarine, or you have Better Than Butter, you know, which is, you know, still, it's a hydrogenated fat. So the hydrogenated fats are bad for us. Why? And why are the saturated fats bad for us? Because they don't play well. They don't play at all to be able, you're looking at a stable molecule, a saturated fat. All those carbons, everybody is linked to everybody else. They are very happy. They do not want to make any chemical bonds with anybody else. You want to make a hormone out of me? No, you see, I'm all bound. I have all my little connections made. I have no room for you. Out with you, you know? And they will not chemically react because they can't. They don't have any bonds that are open. There's no free hand to be able to bond with some other molecule. And so for the body to be able to take a saturated fat, like butter, or like the fat and beef fat, fat, or the fat in pork bacon, that's a saturated fat. And you don't have any other fat in your life, we will use that fat to make hormones. But to make

It's usable. It has to go through a very lengthy process called the beta oxidation cycle, and that is done in the cell itself. And we will have to break that bond. It takes a lot of energy to break a bond, and you will spend a lot of energy breaking the bond. That's why people, you know, talk about fat and keto diets, you know, it's just like, "Oh, I'm burning all this energy." Do you understand what you're doing? The beta, you do not even know you're back to this this myopic view again. You're just looking at one part of it. Do you understand the damage that you were doing by forcing this lots of energy to break the bond in the beta oxidation cycle? And then it has to go through several steps to be able to turn into an unsaturated fat because we're going to take a saturated fat and we're going to make it an unsaturated fat. We're going to break that carbon off, and then you'll have a double bond with the two carbons, two carbons doubly bonded. And then you'll be able to go in and make a hormone out of it or make whatever we need out of it because we, we make a lot of things out of fats. It's just like, but to go through the beta oxidation cycle, you will have several steps along the way that you're going to create free radicals. A free radical is a carbon that is not bound at the moment, and it has this free electron. And electrons always want to be in pairs, and it goes around and it bounces into another cell. And if, depending on the speed and the angle it bounces into the cell, it can damage the DNA. It slams into the cell so hard, it penetrates through the cell membrane, through the nuclear envelope, and then it goes, "boom," and it blows up on your DNA. What does that do to your DNA? Causes mutation. Your free radicals cause mutation. Your free radicals are cancer. Cancer is a mutation of your DNA, period. Stop. Cancer is a mutation of DNA. And so we're trying to stop the mutation of DNA. And free radicals can mutate DNA. So whenever you eat a lot of saturated fat, just know your body will use that fat, but it's going through a very oxidative process. Beta oxidation is the name of the cycle to be able to make that into a usable fat. It's just like, why didn't you just eat a usable fat in the first place? How about you have olive oil, one of the best oils we have, olive oil? How about you have the peanut oil, the avocado oil, the, the, the safflower oil, the, just name the oil, even canola oil. And I say even, I shouldn't even say even. It's not even canola oil is good for you. People say, "Oh, canola oil, it's rapeseed oil, it's horrible, no good." No, it is a polyunsaturated fat. It has double bonds between your carbons, and it's very useful. It will help you be healthy. But instead, you go over there and dive into the butter, into the bacon, and it's just like, "Okay, this is whatever you want to do, you know, this is your life." Well, I guess it's unconventional to what's taught in, like, university. Have you read like The Weston A. Price Foundation articles and stuff, and their counterarguments to what you were talking about? And yeah, and I can come back, counter-argue. Just like, "Are you guys even looking at the biochemistry of this?" They're not looking at the biochemistry of it. They're not. And so what, what has to, what has to happen is that we have to, we have to look at this from several different angles. And what they, they're doing, it's just, what, it's just human nature. I'll be honest with you, it's just human nature. You just want to look at it from your one myopic viewpoint to be able to get your point across. Could you look at it in all the things, all the biochemical reactions that are happening now? And so now you're worried about your high LDL? Now you're worried about, you know, whatever. HDL being high is great, but your LDL, that's low-density lipoprotein, is not great. So yeah, and I, I imagine soluble fiber can help bring that down. Soluble fiber is the answer to high cholesterol because these are fats. Cholesterol is a fat, and cholesterol is cleared out of your bloodstream by the liver. Where is this cholesterol placed? In your digestive fluid, bile. That's where you're, you're always going to find cholesterol in bile. You can examine bile, collect it from animals, however you want. You collect it from humans too. You can actually get it in your stool, but, and you will look at it under the microscope, and you'll say, "Oh, these are cholesterol molecules." Can you know? Yes, that's how we get rid of cholesterol. But you have to be eating soluble fiber so that the cholesterol does not reabsorb at 95% into the bloodstream. Because remember, at that terminal part of the ileum, the third part of the small intestine, we absorb 95% of all fats, including your own bile fats that are carrying the cholesterol and the hormones. They're all made out of fats too. 95% go back into your bloodstream. So you have cholesterol in your bloodstream again. So that can choke up your arteries, you know, and then you have the, you know, the, that's, we, that's how we get a heart attack is the arteries get full of cholesterol, and then they close off, and that's a heart attack. And so we got to throw it away. Well, how do you throw it away? Eat soluble fiber. It binds up with the bile. So all the cholesterol is in the bile. You just threw it in the toilet because no soluble fiber can cross the intestinal barrier. Zero. 100% of it will be excreted, and whatever captured in its net will also be excreted.

What, what's the frequency of, um, fiber that you recommend? I guess it depends on the, the, the transit time. Does that differ individual to individual? Like today, for example, I had a bowl of Great Northern beans, you know, and it was the Eden brand, pressure cooked. It's just easy. I don't know. Oh, the pressure cooked is great, actually. The more cooked they are, the more soluble fiber they have, and pressure cooking is a higher. They get you more soluble fiber in pressure-cooked beans and open kettle. Oh, great. Yeah. Well, what would be the average transit time for that to reach my colon once I've ingested that? Well, that depends on the person. That, that depends on the person. Um, you have some people, they will eat them. If they already have a, a, a problem with the gastrointestinal tract, it could be through their GI tract and out in the toilet in two minutes flat, or it could be two days. It depends on your transit time. And so what you want to do is, everybody should be eating soluble fiber three times a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You should always have some beans on your plate or in your salad or, you know, a bean soup or, you know, some, some way have beans at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Everybody should have that. Okay. And say someone's on the go, say they're a, a taxi driver or truck driver or something like that, could they, um, can you do it with, with pills? Like, you know, in the supplement store, you can buy psyllium fiber capsules or whatever. Um, would, would that achieve the same thing if they took enough? Or, Absolutely yes. It does achieve the same thing. There's several alternatives. So you can either eat the beans, carry them with you, or carry, you know, buy the Bonitos. Bonitos is one brand. There's all kinds of. And they're just chips made out of beans. Okay, so you're getting them. I mean, it's like, ten chips or eleven chips are going to give you a whole serving of beans. You know, you can easily eat eleven, ten, eleven chips. Or you can buy these, um, their, their, uh, toasted garbanzo beans or little snacks or crunchy. The Bonito beans that have been soaked and and cooked and then they, they toast them, they roast them. Roasted garbanzo beans. And so they're a really nice crunchy snack. So you could do that. And they have, they do the same things with lentils, and they have lentil puffs and everything. But if you want to take a pill, you could do psyllium. Psyllium is a soluble fiber. It's the only soluble fiber that is comparable to beans. People say, "What about guar gum?" No, it's not comparable. "What about pectin?" That's only one. The beans have all five. There's five major soluble fibers, and beans have all five of them. The psyllium comes the closest to having because there's mucilage or hemicellulose or hemicelluloses. There's several different types of soluble fiber. And so psyllium, you could take that. And so usually there's 500 milligrams of psyllium in one capsule. Like if you buy, there's several different brands out there, and they're good. Most brands are good. I haven't really seen a brand that's not good. Um, and then most of them have 500 milligrams of psyllium. So you would take eight of those, and that's the same as eating a half a cup of beans. While capsules, make sure you take them with water because psyllium absorbs water. You just like, you need some water in there. Okay. So, but you could certainly do that.

Did you say beans have five different kinds of soluble fiber in them? Yeah, they do. That's interesting. Wow. Yeah, they do. So, yeah, there's different kinds of soluble fiber, and some of it's more effective at absorbing bile than others. And that's why you want to do the most effective, which is why we don't just eat, you know, like, uh, beta-glucan fiber, it's just, or wheat dextrin. These are very weak soluble fibers that do not have the polysaccharide net that, you know, you can find with these more complex fibers that are found in beans. And then you had mentioned about your pressure-cooked beans. You, you need to know that soluble fiber comes from insoluble fiber always. So if you, if you were growing beans, you're a farmer, you're out in the field, you could pick your beans. Let's just take peas, this is because everybody can relate to this. Let's take peas. Okay, everybody knows peas is a vegetable, right? We all had these green English peas, you know, on our plate. And they're the first thing that harvest in, in, you know, late spring, early summer. There is the fresh peas. Okay, they have soluble fiber, and they have a lot of insoluble fiber. But leave them on the vine, don't pick them, just let them stay all summer on the vine, exposed to the rain, the wind, the weather, the sun. And then when you get late into fall, you will have grown split peas. You'll notice, oh, the, the little pods got all, they used to be fleshy and everything when I was, you know, I had them way back in this late, uh, spring. And now that's all dried up and like a dry husk, and inside it's this hard little pea. It's then we call those split peas. What has happened to that little pea is all of that insoluble fiber that was part of the vegetable, a pea, has become soluble fiber through the wind and the sun and the rain, the weathering. The insoluble fiber breaks down, the actual chemical structure of it breaks down into this polysaccharide net and becomes a soluble fiber. And that's why whenever you buy pinto beans, dry, or, you know, whatever bean you have, Great Northerns, like you mentioned, it doesn't, whatever the bean is, you can soak them and you can boil them on an open kettle. That's very good. They, they have tons of soluble fiber. It works great. But if you say, "I want the most amount of soluble fiber," put them in your pressure cooker because the more heat, the more it gets processed. This is where you, you feel like, "I thought the less processing the better." Nope. This one, the more processed, the more soluble fiber you are going to get because you're breaking insoluble fiber into. That's the only way we make soluble fibers through the breaking down of insoluble fiber. Now, likewise, you need to go, can go the other way because I have people all the time that will email me and say, "Is it okay if I sprout my mung beans? Is it okay if I sprout my beans?" You know, they're dry beans, you know, you know how to sprout a bean, you put them in water and then they grow little sprouts. Now I can eat that and that'll be my soluble fiber. Yay. No, actually, you're eating a vegetable now. Your bean sprouts are vegetable because you turn the soluble fiber, all that cellulose, is now insoluble fiber. It's a very good vegetable, enjoy them, have them. But it's not going to bind up with the bile that we need to be bound up with. We need those actual hard beans that have been cooked until they're tender, and then you eat those. That's where your soluble fiber is.

Wow, that, that's great. Um, so you mentioned adrenaline. We, um, talked about pesticides at the beginning. Does it touch cortisol at all? Eat beans? Yes. Cortisol is a very powerful hormone that's made in the adrenal cortex. And by the way, adrenaline is made in the medulla. You have different layers of the adrenal glands. You have the inner, and then you have the medulla, the middle, and then you have the cortex, which is the outline part of the adrenal gland. And in that cortex, we make cortisol. And or that's also where all your cortical steroids are made there. And those are hormones. They are made out of fats. They are very powerful. Um, they can elicit all kinds of cellular responses. And if you have too much cortisol, oh, you'll feel it. If you have too little, you'll feel it too. And that's when your adrenals get tired and they can't make the cortisol that you need. But that cortisol, when the liver is constantly filtering it out of the bloodstream so you don't have too much at one time, and it puts it in the digestive fluid, bile. Once it's out of the bloodstream and in the bile fluids, it is not influencing what's happening in the bloodstream. It's gone from there. It is now in your gut, which is separate from the bloodstream. Now, it can cause some problems in your gut too because it'll actually interact with some of your, this lining of your, the cells on your lining can create some, some discomfort. But it's not the same as in the bloodstream. And so that cortisol is then in your gut. And when it gets down to the terminal part of the ileum, 95% of that cortisol, because it's made out of fat, goes back into your bloodstream. And so if it's bound up with beans, though, it is gone into, it's going into the toilet. And by the way, once it's in that, encapsulated in that bean structure, in that polysaccharide net, it, it's not available. It can't, like, break out of the net to trigger a reaction with a cell in the gut, you know, on the lining of the gut. It can't say, "I'm going to trigger you and I'm going to make you have a little nauseousness here. I'm going to, you know, do." No, it's, once it's bound, it's just like, "You are inactive. You have been thrown in a cell and you can't get out." You can't reach through the bars and, you know, make something happen.

Wow. Um, do you recommend people consume soluble fiber in combination with other, uh, detoxification methods like sweating in a sauna or, or, you know, coffee enemas? And, um, people that are super sick? To, no, I not recommend. I don't recommend the, the detox methods that like that. I mean, that is very hard on your system. The soluble fiber alone will do this. I don't mind sauna. It's just because if you, some of our disease states, you have to understand, many of our bacteria and all of our cancer cells, they're very fragile. And in high heat, they, they will, they will actually their DNA will unravel and they just fall to pieces. So heat is a very effective tool if you're sick. But just to say, "I'm going to detox and sweat out all this stuff." All you're doing is sweating out a whole bunch of minerals. I mean, that's all you're doing. And you really needed those minerals because minerals are vital in almost every chemical reaction that we do. And so it's just like, "Oh yeah, you know." No, I don't mind you being warm. I want you to be warm. And, you know, I would advise a heating pad, you know, if you had cancer, breast cancer. So no metal. Don't ever put, because sometimes we use metal leads now in surgeries. They will actually put metal in for different diagnostic ways, you know, to see it under a particular, you know, scanning type of equipment. Says I never, never, never put a heating pad if you have metal inside because that will, metal heats up, it will burn and damage all the cells that it comes in contact with. Very bad. But if you didn't have metal, put heat on it, then you're going to kill cancer cells. I mean, you're going to, you're going to do a lot of good work. And just staying warm, keeping homeostasis where you're supposed to be around 98 degrees Fahrenheit, 98.6. But it's actually a range in there, around the 96.8, um, 98.6 mean. And so what we want to do is just keep this, keep ourselves warm all the time. Don't get cold. All these polar plunges, that is so bad for your health. That is so bad for you. But no, I don't recommend coffee enemas because that caffeine is easily absorbed through the gastrointestinal tract. It goes straight, and it's absolutely absorbed through the skin because a lot of skin products will put caffeine because they'll say, "Oh, I feel so invigorated when I use the skin product." Well, you're just getting caffeine right through the skin because it absorbs so easily through the skin. So now, I detox. Best thing to do, just eat your beans three times a day, and that's the best thing to do.

So your idea on on cold thermogenesis and polar plunges being not good for your health, is that because of the increase in, um, is it adrenaline? I think I read a study was like 500% or something in adrenaline. Your adrenaline, it's your fight and flight hormone. And if you're going to die, you're going to have a release of adrenaline because this is your last ditch effort to stay alive. You have to, when your body temperature drops, if you're, if you're dropped to 90, your 80s, you're dead, you're gone. It's, you know, it's called hypothermia. And so when you do a polar plunge, what you did is you took a 98.6 degree body and you just put it in whatever frigid temperature is of this water, and you will die. And so your body is in survival. We must, must survive. If we do not raise this person's body temperature, they will be dead in moments. No joke. In moments. And so what it does is have a huge release of adrenaline. So this increases your heart rate, and then all your muscles are pumping, everything is going fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, so that we can create some type of warmth inside your body. So you have this fabulous adrenal and rush. "I feel fabulous. I can conquer the world. I am a Nordic Queen." But you just put your adrenals through the wringer, and you will pay. Mark my words. As you continue this, you will pay. And you'll say, "Why do I have arthritis? Why do I have chronic fatigue? Why am I so tired all the time? Why can't I think clearly? Why am I forgetting things?" Welcome to the world of not producing enough adrenaline because you just put through, through the biggest tube. It's like me asking you to lift a car. Let's lift that every day, shall we? How long is it going to take you to say, "I can't lift cars anymore"? It's just, it's too much. I can do that once in a great while, but you continue this. It is horrible. It's horrible thing to do to your body. It's, it's, it's beating it up, running it through, you know, just, just running it through a horrible, horrible mill. You know, for a high, if you want a high on adrenaline, go drink a cup of coffee, have two cups of coffee, get one of these, you know, energy drinks, drinks, and you'd have the same high without killing your body badly, you know.

Anyway, I like your perspective on a lot of things because I, I look at what people are doing in the health community, and it seems like, you know, there's these waves of trends. And, you know, people know I've experimented over the years. I used to do cold plunges all the time, and I don't anymore, even though I live in a really cold climate. But it, it seems like people aren't concerned about longevity anymore. It's more about, you know, getting the most jacked physique and performance. But who cares about longevity? That's, that's at least my view of like the mainstream alternative health. Yeah, I think you're correct. I really do. I think you're correct. Because how many, how many women have sat in my office and just cried and cried and cried because when they were teens and in their early 20s, but most, well, it's in their teens, they had to be the athletic star, and they ran, and they, you know, lifted weights, and "Look at my body, you know, I am, you know, look at this." And now they're infertile because they put such a stress on their frame that you can't make all those hormones and also make the hormones you need to have a menstrual cycle and to have a fertile egg so that you can become pregnant. And they, they bawl and they cry because they have created their infertility. Now they're in their early 30s, they want to have children, and there's none coming. Just like, "You did this to yourself to be the athletic queen." You know, what, why, why are we doing this? Is it for some body shape? For some, it all comes down to vanity. It's vanity. It's like, just take care of your body for the long haul, you know? When, when you get in your mid-30s, actually, I think that's when people start to grow up, you know, and realize that life is serious, you know, and that, boy, I did a lot of dumb things in my 20s and my late teens, you know, it's just like, that was not smart, you know? But now I'm settling down, I have got to, I have a family, or I want a family. I want to raise kids. I got to have a good job. I've got to think about ahead in retirement. What's going to happen when I'm 65 or when I'm 70? What am I going to do? How am I going to make sure there's food on the table to feed me? You know, then you start to get real. So if we can start to teach, I teach my grandchildren this. I taught my children this. I teach them from a young age. Teach them, take care of your body so that you can live our longevity. I don't know if you realize it, but we are set. Humankind is set to live for 120 years. If you will take care of your body, you can live 120 years. All medical evidence says that your teeth will last that long. We have little caps on the end of our DNA. And then every time it goes through mitosis, a cellular cycle, then that cap shortens a little bit. And when that cap is gone, that cell will no longer be able to reproduce. And so that is death to that type of cell. And so that's where that's where this aging process comes in. And we cause ourselves to age rapidly. So you can look at people that are, I look at people that are 10 and 15 years younger than me, and I'm just thinking, that's pathetic. You guys are so, so out of, you know, and you could live for so long and do so much, you know, and not have to suffer. They suffer. So we need to teach them.

Yeah, I love it. Um, well, do you want to jump into some questions here for the final part here? Um, this is a great question. Are there benefits to different types of beans and the color of beans? Like, I mentioned I had Great Northern, and I know that the Eden brand we can buy up here at the store, they have like, you know, black beans and, um, trying to remember the other ones that we got. There's, there's a ton of different ones. But yeah, no, there's some people say that they, they handle lentils better than they do black beans. Some people say handle black beans better than they do kidney beans. Some people say the only bean I can eat is kidney beans. As far as the color is concerned, colors are good because colors carry antioxidants. I mean, to make a color, to make a purple, I mean, or, you know, that's what I'm thinking. Kidney bean is like a dark red, you know, I'll call it. It's not quite purple, but anyway. Then those are helpful. But you can still eat, you know, your just your pintos, which are, you know, sort of brownish and gray or whatever. It's the soluble fiber and the minerals are not changing the color. It's actually vitamins. Those are what change the color, like beta-carotene. That's a color-giving, um, nutrient. But you can eat any type of legumin. If all you like are pinto beans or Great Northerns, you can eat those, and you will get all the benefits that you need because you're going to be getting your colors. Where do the colors come from? It's your vegetables. They are rich. They're orange, they're purple, they're yellow, they're green. That's where you're really getting those really good nutrients. So your beans, don't worry. They're giving you the minerals you need. Minerals don't have the colors. You're getting the minerals you need, and you're getting the soluble fiber. That's great.

Um, what is the best way to purchase beans? Someone asked, dried or canned? Does that depend on how busy they are? Yeah, it really depends on how busy you are. And then how much money you want to spend too, because if you buy dry beans, they are very inexpensive. You know, you can get a 25-pound bag of them, you know, at a time, even 50 pounds or, you know, or just the little two-pounders or whatever you want to buy. They're very inexpensive. But that means you have to soak them, and you have to boil them, or you put them in your pressure cooker, you know, or an Insta Pot, whatever you're using to cook them. And all that's fine. You have to cook them. Some people are on the go and they want, you know, "I just want to open up a can," you know, and just open my can of, you know, kidney beans and just eat them. Then that's fine too. You're saying, "Well, it's better to eat them raw." Actually, your canned beans have more soluble fiber than the ones you're going to cook on your open kettle. So, yeah, it's just whatever you have time for and want to do. Because you have to cook them for hours and hours if you're doing them on the, on the stovetop, right? Yeah, you do. You do. It takes a long time. It's good we have a wood stove, but it still canned is still easier. Yeah. Yep, it is easier. And then sometimes you get them on sale, you know, get a whole case of them at a time or something. So, yeah.

Uh, do beans help with acne, or have you, have you worked with clients with acne? Beans are an essential part of healing from acne. Acne is caused by an overproduction, or let me put it more specifically, an overcirculation of hormones. You're circulating those hormones. In men, it's testosterone. In women, it's estrogen. And you're circulating higher levels of that hormone, and it is a hormone that's creating the acne. And then once you have the acne, you can, and people will know what type of acne, it depends on the kind you have. But then we have opportunistic bacteria that's on our skin. We all do. It doesn't matter. You can scrub your face all day long, you're still going to have it. It's in the air, and it just lands on your face. And that opportunistic bacteria will get into these little pores where you're having this acne that's developed because of the hormone. And then it becomes infected. Quote, "Now this is a pimple." So that's all it is. It's just a, it's, it is a hormonal problem. It is strictly hormonal. And then we can take care of the bacteria by doing like baking soda. You just use baking soda and water, and then you just pat on a little, and then that kills all the bacteria. And then you wash it off after 10 minutes. And then you have to get rid of all those excessive hormones. And how do you get rid of the excessive hormones? You have to eat beans. And three times a day is usually not enough. If you have a bad set of, if you have mild acne, that's enough. If you have severe acne, we're going to have to do this six, eight, 10 times a day. And it's not eat a half a cup at a time. It's just like, quarter cup or three tablespoons or two tablespoons, and you eat them because you have got to throw away hormones. But it will, it'll turn around. And then you have got to stop putting things in that create the hormones. Stop eating sugar. Stop doing caffeine. Stop doing perfumes and fragrances. Because you can eat all the beans in the world, but you're doing the caffeine and the sugar and the fragrances, you're making hormones as fast as we're throwing them away. We're not making any progress here, you know.

Yeah, I was one of the common, you know, teenagers. I think my acne started in junior high school and then went into early college years. And at one point, years ago, I experimented with raw veganism, and that actually eradicated it. I was like, green vegetable juicing and doing smoothies and really just eating more fiber than I've ever had in my life. You got rid of your sweets, right? Did you get rid of your sweets and caffeine? I did. Yeah, cold turkey. I kind of stopped all that stuff. Yeah. So you have to remember that because a lot of people say it was because I did, you know, the diet. It's like, yes, you did, but you gave up the sweets and the caffeine at the same time. And it's the sweets and the caffeine that did it for you. It's because you stopped that. And, you know, people say, "I can't believe that it's hormones that really do this." It is. Because think of when you get acne. Do you have it when you're six years old? Do you have it when you're seven? Do you have it when you're two years old? No. You have it when you go through menarche for women, or you're going through, you know, you're becoming a man from being a boy. And that's because of this huge release of hormones. We're all back to hormones. So just throw some of them out. You got too many of them. If you have acne, you will have too many circulating hormones. Bottom line. That's it.

Wow. Um, someone asked about bloating. So how to handle the bloat that beans cause? Sounds like they might have like leaky gut or something like that. Or bloating is caused by fermentation. Bloating is gas. It's trapped gas that hasn't passed. Because you'll find out if you can burp up the gas or you can pass it as flatulence, all of a sudden you're not bloated anymore. Bloating is not this big tummy because you ate so much. It's because you're puffed up. You're like blowing up a balloon. You get big. That's what the bloating is from. Bloating is caused by the fermentation of foods. It is not caused by beans. Beans are something that's fermented, but it's a fermentation. Think about it. If you have grapes, what do we do to make wine? We ferment them. We have cabbage. What do we do to make it become sauerkraut? We ferment it. When you introduce a ferment process, it always creates gas. Not sometimes, not in some situations, 100% of the time you are going to have gas. If that gas is trapped in your gut and you can't burp it out or pass it as flatulence, then you're going to just get bigger and bigger, and it's very uncomfortable. I mean, it's very uncomfortable. Can be downright painful, trapped gas. And it's because you're fermenting your foods. Okay. So why are you fermenting your foods? Well, it's that gut bacteria that's all off. No, it's actually your hormones. You have to trigger a fermentation pathway. Every single chemical reaction happens along a pathway. There's several chemical reactions, and it all happens in order in a pathway. We have to have something trigger the fermentation pathway because a fermentation pathway is not the natural and best way to digest foods. There's two ways to digest your foods when you eat. One is through digestive enzymes. The second is through fermentation. The body would prefer digestive enzymes. You make them in lots of amounts. This is what your stomach is to create secreting, and your duodenum also does the same thing, and some in the jejunum too. These are parts of your small intestine. They're producing the digestive enzymes to break your food down so they can cross the little hairlike projections that are in that's projecting out into the lumen, or the opening of the intestinal tract, and then the food is absorbed along these villi, is what they're called, and it goes into your bloodstream, and you're nourished. That's wonderful. Okay. Digestive enzymes break those big pieces of food globule molecules into the little tiny pieces. Fermentation will do that too, but we would prefer to do it with digestion because that is the body's most effective way to digest foods. But if you have hormones, a lot of hormones in your bile fluids, and where are your bile fluids going? They're made in the liver, they get dumped right here in your gastrointestinal tract, right here in the duodenum. And so now you have a bunch of bile full of hormones because you're going through, you know, through menarche, or whatever, you know, you're growing into a young man. And so you have all these hormones, or you're all stressed out at work, or you're jumping into polar plunges, and you have to make huge amounts of hormones. And so you make all this big amount of hormones. They're in the bile. And then the bile gets down to the gastrointestinal tract, and it is these hormones that trigger the fermentation pathway. So we're going to ferment our foods instead of using digestive enzymes. And say, "Stand down, digestive enzymes, we got this handled. Look at all these hormones." We're going to do fermentation. And when you have fermentation, you will have gas. You'll say, "Well, the beans can give me gas." The beans are being fermented. You can have a piece of bread, and you're going to get gas. People come to me all the time, they say, "I don't eat beans because it gives me gas." I said, "You have gas now?" "Well, that's why I'm seeing you because I have such bad gas." "But you don't eat beans." "That's right." So what's causing your gas if you're not eating any beans? It's not the beans. Beans get fermented along with everything else. It's, you've got too many hormones. And so we have to throw the hormones away. How can you do that? Only with soluble fiber. If a person has really bad gas pains and everything else, say, then wait on the beans. Just use the psyllium because psyllium cannot be fermented. There are no other starches. There's no starch in psyllium. It is strictly a fiber. Beans have fiber and all those carbohydrates too. And so the carbohydrates, the starch, is what's being fermented. But psyllium has no starch. So you could just say, "I'll do psyllium." It will not cause you any gas. And you'll say, "Well, I'm still having gas." It's like, "Because we're still circulating hormones." But you're not. You'll eventually not have it at all because you, you will ferment any carbohydrates you eat. Doesn't matter if it's a piece of bread, if it's rice, it's a potato, it's a cereal, you know, whatever. You're going to ferment it. Vegetables ferment them.

Is there a particular hormone that that triggers the fermentation pathway, or, or is it a combination? It is most generally, it's epinephrine or norepinephrine. So you'll notice when you're nervous, when you're stressed, people should just think about this that they're listening to this podcast. When you're stressed, what normally happens? You got to run to the bathroom because you got to pee. You got to urinate. Okay? And that's from adrenaline causing your, your, uh, bladder to contract so that you can empty it because you're about to go into a stressful situation. You can't have time, you know, to run to the bathroom. And then you'll notice you start to have gas. You have gas whenever you make, or women, when you're around your menstrual cycle, when you're coming up on a menstrual cycle, coming up on ovulation, or you're nursing a baby and producing a lot of prolactin, you're making lots of hormones. Whenever you're making lots of hormones, you'll notice, "Why do I have so much gas all the time?" Because you're making a lot of hormones. But epinephrine, norepinephrine, I'll say they're the most common, just because that's the one everybody produces when we're under stress. If you're nursing a baby, prolactin will definitely cause it too. But you only get that when you're nursing a baby, or, you know, if you're in a menstrual cycle, you only have that if you're women and, you know, you're getting ready to have a menstrual cycle or you're ready to ovulate. So, yeah. But yeah, that's that, that's really fascinating.

Um, let's see. What about sunspots? Have you heard of beans reducing, uh, sunspots or seeing those disappear? Well, actually, that's it's not the beans that do that. The sunspots are, there's melanin. There's a, there is a substance in our skin cells that give us the color of our skin. And the more melanin that we have, then the darker our skin will be. And so, and damaged skin cells, because the sun can damage, because it has our UV coming from, UV is ultraviolet light that comes from the sun. It actually can damage cells. It damages the DNA. So the cell then is not functioning right. You basically blew up your cell. You, you, you harmed it. So now it's not able to secrete the correct amount of, of this, this coloring, this pigmentation, the melanin. And so it creates too much. And so where you have those sunspots, that's where you've had sun damage. You've actually damaged your cells. Now, the good news about that is those cells, they have a, they have a cycle, life cycle too. They're going to die off and go away, and they'll be replaced by new ones. So just quit exposing yourself to the sun, and they'll all eventually go away. But it's not the soluble fiber that gets rid of them. It's staying out of the sun. And then to, to, to rejuvenate your skin, it's water and fat. The good fats that help repair the cell damage to those, they're called melanocytes, the name of the cells that make melanin. But, and you mean just good drinking water? Yeah. You, yeah, drinking water. By the way, you should be drinking purified water so it doesn't have chlorine and fluoride in it. Both chlorine and fluoride are known carcinogens. We know they cause cancer. So you just buy purified water or get yourself a purifier. They're not that expensive.

That's great. Well, I think, yeah, I think a lot of the other questions you answered. I did have one that came up, um, that we didn't touch on yet. Um, low stomach acid. Do, do you think, uh, do I? Is it common? There are a lot of practitioners out there that say your problem is, is because you don't make enough stomach acid. I disagree with that totally. Our problems are because we have too much stomach acid. We have these, these cells in the stomach that produce hydrochloric acid for us, and they are easily stimulated by the hormones that are in the bile fluids that are washing through the entire duodenal area. And then they backwash, there's a little valve, the pyloric sphincter, that they can backwash into the stomach. And so it's too much acid, not too little acid. So I disagree. I mean, it's, it's an interesting hypothesis. That's the nicest thing I can say about it. An interesting hypothesis. But I'm telling you, I, no, this is too much stomach acid. And then people avoid all this stuff, and it's like, just eat your beans. It would fix it all, you know? Or take your psyllium if you're afraid of the, until you can get rid of the gas, and then you can go back into the.

Well, I was just talking to a friend last night that's that's dealing with ulcers. And is that an issue of too much stomach acid? Usually, you think? Or, Yes. Ulcers is too much stomach acid. And so they all get these antiproton, a proton pump inhibitors, is what they're given usually for too much acid because it's a proton pump inhibitor. It gets into a lot of detail, but it's the cells that are producing the hydrochloric acid. We're trying to block that, and that's what those pills do. They block the action of producing the hydrochloric acid.

Wow. Yeah, that, that's really interesting. So I think you mentioned sodium bicarbonate before, but you're more a fan of it topically, not necessarily orally ingesting small amounts? No, you can do that. If you have a reason to, like if you have heartburn, first of all, if you have heartburn, first thing you do is just eat a couple spoonfuls of beans. You have to eat a bowl. Me, just a couple spoonfuls, and you will notice within minutes, it will be under five minutes that it goes away. If it doesn't go away, then you take a teaspoon of, of bicarbonate soda, which is baking soda, and you stir that in a little bit of water and you drink it, and it will instantaneously go away. You say, "Why didn't I do that first?" Because there's no soluble fiber in the baking soda. And at least if you put the soluble fiber in there, you would have bound up the bile and the acid that created the problem, so we can throw it away. So it's not going to recycle. The bicarbonate will neutralize it for the moment, but believe me, it won't. It's, you still have the problem. It's just, it's very basic, and acids are acid. And so what you're doing is, it's just an acid-base balance when you put in something basic to the acid.

Okay. Um, trying to think of some last minute questions. What this might be the last one. What are your thoughts in general of, um, like depleted soil and just the, uh, increased oxidative stress that we're under, you know, whether it's from excessive UV or, you know, whatever, increasing our nutrient requirements? Like, do you think def, I guess a more direct way to ask it, or do you think nutrient deficiencies that are talked about in the natural health community is a real thing? Like that most people are chronically, say, magnesium deficient or zinc or anything like that? Um, but what are your general thoughts on not, it is not the soil deficiency that creates this general malaise in our public. It's because we're choosing to eat the wrong things. We choose to drink the coffee, we choose to do the energy drinks, we choose to use the supplements that will give us an adrenaline rush because we say, "Oh, this is a good thing." If I use guarana, that is a stimulant. We use all these different herbs to give us this. You, you're eating things that you shouldn't be eating. It's not because the foods lack the nutrients. That's not the problem. You say, "Well, I can see that. I'm magnesium deficient, so I didn't get it from my food." No, the reactions that you cause in all the stimulation of adrenaline because you use perfumes, you use, you're doing the sugars, you're doing the caffeine, you're in a high-stress job, whatever it is, that's what's depleting the nutrients because you have to respond to all of those negative stimuli. That's what you're losing the nutrients from. It's not because it wasn't in the food. And I never got it because, let me ask you this, if the foods don't have the nutrients to grow, will they grow? The soil is depleted. Let's just say you have a soil that's completely depleted of nutrients. You plant a seed. There's no nutrients in the soil. Will that seed germinate? Will it grow and produce a product? Will it produce a bean or whatever you're growing, a green bean, a pea? They won't. They won't.

Yeah, I interviewed, uh, Jeff Litton. This is like two years ago. He's like a permaculture guy. Really interesting perspective. And he did a lecture, I don't know, two decades ago. It was a long time ago on NPK fertilizer, like nitrogen, you know, potassium, phosphate fertilizer. And he was saying the issue is the fertilizer that we're using. This is the theory that.

It's salt-based, and so that it causes the plants to bloat and retain water, and they'll grow and they'll look good. But they can still be missing all the other minerals and nutrients that, you know, minerals that they need to resist pests. And that's why we have to use pesticides and herbicides and fungicides because of that issue. And that, that made sense to me years ago, but I'm always open, you know, I'm always learning. So I, I just, just thought that was an interesting perspective.

When we fertilize soil, we are putting in certain nutrients to cause that plant to grow. So now, now, so this has moved to a different, I mean, in this way, it's a different question. What you move to because if the soil is truly depleted, then what we do is we add fertilizer to make that plant grow. And so it's going to draw from that fertilizer. It depends on the fertilizer that you're using as far as it causing the plant to bloat. I don't know about that because I haven't looked at his work. And so I, I would like to look at it from a biochemist lens and see what he's actually referring to. But if we don't have the nutrients in the soil, the plant won't grow. If the plant grew, there will be some nutrients. There will be nutrients in that plant because it can't, it needs magnesium, it needs phosphorus, it needs nitrogen, it needs all these things to be able to form that pea or to form that bean. Because beans do have magnesium, so it came from someplace. Where did it come from? It came from the soil. The zinc came from the soil. All of our plants have zinc. They have all these minerals here. It had to come from the soil. So if it's not in the soil, that plant can't develop. It's not like it's just like a little reservoir holding those things. Those are part of the molecular structure. These minerals are part of the molecular structure of the plant. It can't form into it's like trying to grow a baby and saying, okay, you're pregnant. I mean, you're not pregnant, but the woman is pregnant, okay? And so she's not going to get any nutrients. Will the baby grow? Will there be a baby? There's no nutrients. The baby will not grow, and neither will the mother. The mother will die because there's no nutrients. So that's what we're talking about. So I mean, it doesn't make any logical sense. If there's no nutrients in the soil, then there's no plants. So we're not eating the plants, you don't have to worry about it. If you're eating the plant, there are nutrients in that plant because it had to have it to be able to be formed. And it's not just formed of water. So it's interesting to bloat and it looks like it, except no, there's actually a structure to that pea. I mean, it, it's not just a bubble of water. There's some, you know, there's a structure to that pea, and it has to have those nutrients to have that structure.

Well, this is a really fun, fun conversation. And uh, we're putting up a greenhouse next month, if all goes well, and I'm looking forward to growing some beans up here.

Okay, great, great. Thanks so much for coming on. I, I really had a lot of fun and I love hearing your perspective on different things. Um, is, is Karenherd.com the best place for people to explore your work?

Yes, that's the best place to go. Karenherd.com.

Yeah, awesome. Yeah, I noticed you have ecourses and topics on all sorts of things, EBV, Hashimotos, heavy metals, everything.

Yeah, you register for an ecourse and then you get me giving you the uh, a lecture series of how, why this all works. And then I give a specific protocol. This is the way you need to be eating if you have severe arthritis. This is the protocol you need to follow if you have moderate arthritis, mild arthritis. If you're ADD or, and you don't have the HD, if you're HD, that's hyperactive attention deficit disorder, then you, you, I have all the protocols. And then when you're in a course, then you have unlimited email contact with me forever. You can always email me. I will always answer your questions personally. And you can, I mean, so you have a, a onboard nutritionist with you to walk through for however long you live or I live. And hopefully I'll live to 120. So I think you will.

Well, thanks. I'm eating well, so that, I mean, I'm, I'm giving myself the best possible, you know, resource to do that. So I love it. Well, thanks, Karen. Um, stick around as we close out the show. Thanks so much.

Okay, thank you. That was a really fun discussion. Karen is so engaging. You could feel her passion and the way that she shares the information. And even if you don't agree with everything that she says, I think that's the mistake that I often bring up here on the podcast. Just because you don't agree with 100% of what someone says, it doesn't mean that the rest of what they say is false. I think everybody's figuring it out and has a different perspective on human health and nutrition. And even if you disagree with 50% of what someone says, that other 50% could be so valuable that it could essentially save your life or the life of a loved one. So her and I definitely disagree on the good fat, bad fat thing, as well as the nutritional supplement requirements. I think they're absolutely necessary for health, but that's okay. You know, because the soluble fiber info is very valuable to me and has been helpful since I've been adding beans back into my diet. I'll often get comments on my social media, Matt, why didn't you debate your guest on XYZ, whether it's high-dose melatonin that you're a fan of or PUFAs or whatever it is. There's only a limited amount of time that I have with every guest because we all have busy lives. So to stop the interview at several points and argue my point and debate, I feel just take away from the cohesiveness of the show. And I'm just trying to share an overview of information. If you want deep dives, I recommend going back and listening to my solo shows. I have a really good one explaining why whole food C is not better than ascorbic acid, and in fact, ascorbic acid is generally better than quote whole food vitamin C. I don't know how many people are interested in that level of detail, which is why I save those for the solo shows and try to make these shows kind of big picture to help as many people as possible.

I will say, I hope that she does go and check out Jeff Lorton, the permaculture guy that I had on the podcast, and also recommend you go back and listen to that show because it can look like food, it could taste like food, but it could be far from what it's supposed to be depending on the fertilizer that's used. And even beyond that, when you look at how widespread and prevalent nutritional deficiencies are, it's very obvious that we have an issue, especially with iron, zinc, magnesium, all the fat soluble vitamins, vitamin C, all the B vitamins, pretty much everything in my opinion, which is why I keep adding to the Mytolife brand. I've seen supplements save lives and I'll never stop taking supplements. Even when my 42-foot greenhouse is built out here and we have our orchard and are putting good compost, ideally homemade compost and indigenous microorganisms, filtered water, there's still going to be Elon Musk satellites from Starlink overhead that I can see every night going right over my house. We didn't have that even five years ago. So we live in a different environment and I think to discount that as a grave mistake that will have tremendous consequences for our health. We have extreme oxidative stress like the world has never seen before, and that increases our nutrient requirements. It is not possible to get it from food.

I also thought the low stomach acid question was interesting. When I said, is low stomach acid common? And she said, we have too much stomach acid generally. I wonder how that relates to widespread zinc deficiency that exists proven in the medical literature that so many people are zinc deficient because you need hydrochloric acid to absorb zinc. So if everyone had too much stomach acid, I would imagine that we wouldn't have a zinc deficiency epidemic. So many offshoots of questions that came from this interview. I might have to have her back on because it was really fun to hear her perspective. I love, love having on people that aren't just, you know, in the Weston A. Price mindset or the high red meat diet mindset. I see so many podcasts where it's just so tunnel vision and the blinders are on and the guests have to fit into this certain paradigm. That's what I think makes this show so unique is I have so many different contradictory views that are presented here. And I think that's really where the gold lies. That's where we can separate the wheat from the chaff and start to really dive into the nuances and find the truth with all these different topics.

So if you want to check out Karen Herd, go to Karenherd.com. She has her ecourses up there and she also has some great interviews if you just search her name on YouTube. If you want to hear answer some different questions, I've really enjoyed those shows that she's done. My website is mattblackburn.edu. I'm still loving those HVMN exogenous ketone shots. So that's 1,3-butanediol. And I went down the rabbit hole several months ago looking at the difference between ketone esters, which taste really, really bad, and 1,3-butanediol. And there was this, me talk about nuance, there was this argument back and forth, like battle of which one's better to supplement and safer and more effective. And I really like the 1,3-butanediol better. I, I feel it more. And I'm averaging probably three shots a day, sometimes five if I have a really intense day. But, but I love taking them in the car on long rides. We live in a rural area, so if I'm driving long distance, I'm starting to get tired. Just shooting back 10 grams, which is one shot, two ounces of those ketones from HVMN, really gets me going, gets my brain focused to where the drive is not exhausting anymore and it's just enjoyable. Or even if I'm just home and I have a lot going on and I'm not eating as frequently as I like, that's another time where I'll combine this with some electrolytes, you know, magnesium, sodium, potassium, maybe some essential amino acids. I mean, this is if I'm just back-to-back phone calls and people come to the door because we're doing a lot of things here on the homestead. There are days like that. So that's where I use this as one of those tools in that kit for, you know, going longer time in between eating meals.

My brand is Mytolife. You can find that at Mytolife.co. The water filter, as I've been saying for about seven months, is right around the corner. We're super close. We finally finalized the box design, which is really exciting. So that'll be bulletproof, won't break in transit, and it's totally built from scratch, not private labeled. The most unique water filtration system anyone's ever seen. And once you get a hold of it, once the word gets out, I believe it's going to blow up and help a whole lot of people to improve their health because the quality of your water is everything. And if you're into coffee, quality of your water really affects the taste and experience of a brewing coffee. And I do get asked a lot, even though it's not out yet, about the filter change requirements. So how often do you have to switch out the filters? And the answer to that is really, it depends. Whether you're on municipal water, well water, spring water. Most people are on municipal water. And it depends how bad the water is, how high TDS, how hard is it. So on the most extreme case, which would be for the worst water quality, the filter schedule would look something like every six months changing out the sediment and KDF 55 plus GAC, which are the pre-filters, and the carbon, which is the post-filter. So basically switching out three of the filters once every six months. On the high end of that, if you have relatively clean water or it's municipal, but it's not, you know, heavily treated or you're not in a population dense area, which is probably the biggest factor, then that's every 12 months. So six to 12 months for those three filters. And then same thing with the RO, the deionization, and the remineralization cartridges. Those are every 12 months on the most extreme end or every 24 months. So once every two years if, if you have relatively good water that's going into it.

Then the follow-up question there would be, well, how much does that cost? So if it's every six months and you have really bad water and it's switching out those three filters that I mentioned, then that's just going to be a hundred bucks every six months. And that could be, you know, between six and 12 months, so once a year on average, $100 for the filter changes. And our system makes it really easy because it's just a twist off. And then for the 12 to 24 months, that's $245 bucks. So it could be just every two years you're spending about $250 bucks. And furthermore, you could buy them from us or you can buy them anywhere else. It's probably easier to buy them from from us. You don't have to, you know, shop around and find the ones, even though we put the exact part number for each one. So this is an open source filter, once again, nothing like it. I'm really excited for it to finally be released.

The Mag ATP magnesium product on the website was just upgraded. It's been a work in progress, but we've been switching over to bamboo extract for the other ingredients because you have to hit a very specific milligrams per capsule to keep the price right. And we chose bamboo extract instead of magnesium stearate or just regular silica. So really excited to announce that that's one more product that's over to bamboo silica. And I think at this point, most, if not all of them now, contain bamboo silica instead of the normal cheap excipients that you find. You also notice the biob bottle logo on a lot of the new products. That stands for biob bottle, and that means that it's essentially biodegradable, even the cap. So once you throw it in the trash, it's not going to break down in your closet, but once it's in the trash and it goes to the landfill and UV light hits it and bacteria hit it, it starts to break down within a year and it releases no microplastics into the environment. So you'll see that on the inceptylon, on the zinc, the jellyfish jolt, and that's really exciting to me because between the bamboo silica and the biodegradable biob bottles, we're really setting a new standard for supplement companies to follow. And that's really what differentiates Mytolife from all the others. It costs a lot of money, but to me, it's worth it to not contaminate the Earth with more plastic.

So that's it. We'll see you guys next Friday. Stay supercharged.