The REAL Root Cause of All Chronic Disease is NOT What You Think... | Dr. Thomas Levy

The only cause of disease are agents that oxidize. And the only agents that oxidize are toxins. Thousands upon thousands of toxins and air, water, food. Before somebody just pulls their hair out, they ask, "How can I possibly deal with all these different toxins? Know what I'm exposed to?" Give yourself a little comfort with the fact that you need to identify where you fall in your exposure to the three main sources of toxins. If you can identify and eliminate those new exposures, take in enough of the good nutrition, and repair the oxidative damage, you can bring yourself to normal on just about any disease process.

For a long time, I had what I call my super eight supplements. A cell that has increased oxidative stress has a high level of calcium. Unless you can get that calcium down, you're never going to normalize that oxidative stress. The primary way to get that calcium down is to take magnesium. And recently, I've called it now the super 8 plus one because I think it's important to include the fact that we're in this flood of toxins and we need to identify where the new ones are. And just like in the shower, you're never going to get dry if you're letting in new water flooding in. You can't dry off while you're still in the shower.

>> Dr. Levy, you say there's only one cause of disease. Not hundreds, not thousands, one. What is it?

>> Well, there's only one cause of disease, and that's a toxin. And that might seem a little outlandish at first blush, but then you need to first realize the reason a toxin is the only cause of disease is because the only thing that comprises disease is excess oxidation of biomolecules. Biomolecules meaning RNA, DNA, proteins, sugars, fats, enzymes, any sort of molecule in the biological system that plays a role in metabolism or metabolic pathways. And when they're oxidized, meaning they've lost electrons, when they're in the oxidized state, they no longer function. So you turn something in your biological system from a functioning part to a non-functioning part. And if you have a large amount of biomolecules, different locations, different concentrations inactivated, then those metabolic processes are not progressing normally. And that is the disease state. And this is frequently referred to as oxidative stress, which is a good term, increased oxidative stress.

The problem is in the literature, even though you see increased oxidative stress associated with any disease, type in the disease name on PubMed, type in the phrase oxidative stress, and you'll see it there for every single disease. But the wrong conclusion is that oxidative stress causes some sort of disease. In other words, it results in something. That's not accurate. The accurate statement is the increased oxidative stress is the disease.

Now, having said that, it turns out that when something oxidizes a biomolecule, that is a toxic effect. And even though this might seem crazy, because I'll tell you the reason why in a moment, all toxins cause their damage by oxidation. If a substance or a molecule or any sort of thing that's considered to be a poison does not oxidize a biomolecule, it's not toxic. Unless, unless you know, space accumulation, but as far as metabolic interaction, the only thing that allows a molecule to be toxic is for it to take electrons away from biomolecules.

Now, and the definition is then important. The definition is that we see so many synonyms in the literature. A toxin is a prooxidant, the opposite of an antioxidant, a free radical, a reactive oxygen species, or poison. They really all mean the same thing. They're unstable molecules that need to take electrons away from healthy, normal, reduced biomolecules to become stable themselves. And when they do that momentarily, they're no longer toxic because they're no longer in a position to take more electrons, but they've reduced the electron pool. That's an important concept, too.

The more electrons you have freely circulating in a biological system going to and fro between antioxidants, oxidized, reduced, oxidized, reduced, you generate an electron flow. And for those who are listening to us, an electron flow is also known as a current. The flow of electrons is a current, an electrical current. And it's very well established in the literature that the higher electron current inducing a more significant transmembrane voltage, you simply have a healthier cell. I mean, it's basically having an electrical device that's not getting much juice, but getting optimal juice. So the better the electrons flow, the healthier the cell and the less oxidation and oxidative stress in the cell.

Now, I stumbled across this in many ways 30 years ago working with Dr. Hal Huggins. In so far as I became very aware of the power of intravenous vitamin C. And when I researched the literature and saw the work of Dr. Frederick Klenner, the really initial person. He didn't discover vitamin C. Albert Szent-Györgyi did, and he received the Nobel Prize for that. But that's all Szent-Györgyi was. I'm not minimizing it, but he was a researcher, not a clinician. But Klenner took this information and somehow decided that vitamin C was going to be good in large doses for infections and toxins. In any way, he quickly established that no matter what the poisoning was, no matter what the toxin was, if somebody came in severely impaired, dying, whatever, large doses of intravenous vitamin C would completely neutralize the toxicity and, unless the patient was on literally death's doorstep, bring them back to complete normalcy.

And at the time, 30 years ago, I puzzled about this. I said, "How can one substance, vitamin C, simple little vitamin C, how can one substance neutralize the ability of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of different toxins to inflict their harm or to kill somebody or to cause a problem?" And even though it didn't register quite right at that time, I quickly realized that the only way that can be possible is that all toxins need to have a final common denominator of toxicity. Otherwise, there could be no commonality, and otherwise vitamin C couldn't do what it does. And quite simply, it is now very clear that that common causality is that all toxins cause abnormal oxidation or electron theft from biomolecules, putting them into a metabolically inert state.

Okay. And then the next question was, if there's so many different toxins and they cause different clinical syndromes, so how can that be? Well, that's where the individual variability of the toxin comes into play. If it's fat-soluble, if it's water-soluble, if it's a very large molecule, a very small molecule, if it's ionic, if it has a certain physical configuration that allows it to adapt to some molecules versus others. That determines then which molecules does a large dose of a certain toxin cause the most oxidation to. And so the physical characteristics of the toxins determine the anatomical or physical variation in which biomolecules are oxidized. And it's the unique array of biomolecules in concentrations, what metabolic reactions are involved in that determines what the disease is, if you will, what the impairment of the normal function of the cell is. And that, in a big nutshell, is the reason that the title of the book is "The Only Cause of Disease."

The only cause of disease are agents that oxidize, and the only agents that oxidize by definition are toxins.

>> Okay. So, really high level here. You just summarized. I'm going to give you what I'm hearing.

>> Okay.

>> Oxidation is the disease itself. Excess oxidation. There's always some degree of physiological oxidation.

>> Yes.

>> Vitamin C, as an antioxidant, is going to come into play as part of the treatment here.

>> Right.

>> And then depending on what the toxin is, it's going to impact different areas of the body.

>> Right.

And you know, probably one of the most dramatic examples of this is cyanide, okay? Uh, like in a, a, a, a capital punishment where they're going to kill the prisoner and they drop cyanide into a bucket and a release of cyanide gas, and the gas is inhaled, and literally in a minute or two, because of the route of administration, that cyanide gas paralyzes respiratory enzymes that are needed to metabolize oxygen. So you stop metabolizing oxygen. It's just like somebody strangles you to death, and you die. But that same ion, the cyanide ion, is present in some supplements, okay? Vitamin D, vitamin B12 preparations, hydroxycobalamin, hydroxyal, hydroxycyanide. It's got cyanide in it. Okay, I might botch the name there. But that can be taken orally, and there's no toxicity. Okay? But so because you have the oral administration, it has no access via the respiratory system to these enzymes. So that's probably the best demonstration I can think of to show how it's the physical characteristics of a toxin, where it goes, even though the damage being done is the same thing. You're oxidizing a respiratory enzyme, or you're oxidizing a different biomolecule.

>> We have an overview now. What is the first step? If somebody wants to get practical, is it identifying the toxins, trying to heal the body with a substance like vitamin C? How do we begin this protocol?

>> Excellent question. The primary question is, I mean, we certainly want to have as much of a good intake of vitamin C and other antioxidants and nutrition as possible to deal with oxidative damage. And in fact, if there's no new toxicity introduced to a damaged tissue, you can completely repair that tissue and bring it back to normal. Uh, this is another reason why disease is just oxidation, because if oxidation caused some further damage, then just repairing the oxidation is not going to take care of that other damage. So, repair the oxidation is done. Well, I just said toxins cause all pathological oxidation, abnormal oxidation. So the first question I feel, and I try to outline this in the book, is that we're in a flood of toxins these days. I mean, thousands upon thousands of toxins and air, water, food, you know. So before somebody just pulls their hair out and says, "How can I possibly deal with all these different toxins? Know what I'm exposed to?" Well, give yourself a little comfort, some comfort with the fact that you need to identify where you fall in your exposure to what I categorize as the three main sources of toxins. If you can identify and eliminate those new toxin exposures, and then take in enough of the good nutrition that brings new electrons into the blood, into the body, and then repair the oxidative damage, you can bring yourself to normal on just about any disease process.

Dr. Huggins many years ago, when I was working with him 30 years ago, and he would get sarcastic with me. I loved it. And so I was sort of struggling with this concept one day, and Dr. Huggins just sort of snorted at me and said, "Tom," I said, "Yes, sir." He said, "You can't dry off while you're still in the shower." Okay. So, you can't just repair damaged biomolecules and consider the job done. We're in this flood of toxins, and we need to identify where the new ones are. And just like in the shower, you're never going to get dry if you're letting in new water flooding in.

So now I categorize the three main sources of toxins. First and foremost, it's important to understand that nearly all toxins, except for things like heavy metals, nearly all toxins in the body are generated by pathogens. Either an overt infection, an abscess, or what I can talk about a little bit later, what I call a pathogen colonization on the mucous membranes where the pathogens are replicating, but not rapidly enough to form a physically gross infection like an abscess. So, with that in mind, then the pathogens are the primary source of all toxins. I mean, yeah, if you live next to a pesticide plant or something like that and you're inhaling pesticides all day, that's going to be your unique toxin exposure, and you need to address that. But for the quote-unquote average person around the world, with not any abnormally unique and high toxin exposures, it's going to be these three categories that I talk about that really is going to account for well over 95% of all diseases that eventually kill, including heart disease and breast cancer. And I mention those two because we have very specific mechanisms for that. And those two causes alone, outside of malnourished populations, kills over 50% of the population every year.

Okay. What are the categories? The categories: Number one are infections. All right. And an infection anywhere in your body can release enough toxins to make you sick or eventually kill you. I mean, if you have a gangrenous part of your body and you don't cut it off, the toxicity and the pathogens of that gangrene will eventually kill you and your body. The main sources, and because of this, it's my estimation that nearly all the pathogens that cause disease and eventually kill are oral pathogens in the mouth. Far and away. If you have a pristine mouth and you don't have any other extraordinary toxin exposures, you're about as healthy as you could get. Okay? There's other things that impact that, and I'll tell you about that in a moment.

So, oral pathogens, most predominantly, very important, gum disease. All right? Periodontitis, gingivitis. Okay, that's number one because that starts the bandwagon. It's the periodontitis which in the literature is associated with all diseases. Why? Because it's continuing to produce pathogens and toxins that you assimilate into your body. You either swallow them, put them into your lymphatic blood supply, or put them into your blood supply. So it's periodontal disease, gum disease, then infected teeth, abscessed teeth, and the root canal treated tooth is always infected, 100%. There's no such thing as a root canal that's not going to negatively impact your health. Now, if it's leaking badly, it can kill you in short term with a heart attack or breast cancer. If it's extremely well done, a few people live a normal lifespan with them. But how you determine ahead of time which one of those are, that's the problem. So, I never recommend somebody keeping a root canal.

Then, tonsils. This is another occult part because in the mandible and in the jawbone, what's draining infected gums and infected teeth all the time, and it's the palatine tonsils. Okay, the type that get pulled out of childhood. The only problem with that is that the tonsils that chronically drain these dental infections do not present as acute childhood, really large infected tonsils. In fact, and this is what makes them so insidiously damaging, is the fact that they remain normal in size and they don't look inflamed or infected at all from the outside. But we know from some studies that I might tell you about later that once you have a tonsil in line with an infected tooth, you get rid of the tooth, and you still have the infected tonsil that needs to be addressed too, because that can ultimately seed and cause the heart attack or the breast cancer that I was talking about. So that's number one that really involves well over 95% of all diseases and cancers.

Okay, a brief note on cancers. Every cancer you can imagine has been biopsied, either the cancer mass itself or the tissue directly or surrounding the cancer. And guess what? They always grow out pathogens. Cancers don't develop unless you have the circumstances for an optimal, maximal elevation of oxidative stress because they're always producing the toxins. They're always producing these things that consume vitamin C. When you consume vitamin C, the tissue is inflamed and stays inflamed. And the thing that keeps it inflamed is all the antioxidants and vitamin C are consumed, and the oxidative stress is maximal. So that's the biggie for the mouth. There's a lot more details here I can address later.

The number two is, and this one has no relationship at all. The only category not related at all to infections are heavy metal accumulations. And this is very for most people, asymptomatic, low-grade, insidious, and they have no idea that it's going on. Well, the point here is that we all have enormous concentrations of heavy metals, and they're all significant. They all increase the oxidative stress in every tissue, in every organ in our body, some organs more than others. But the point is, is even though they might not be at a level causing you to have an acute or chronic clinical syndrome, they've taken that organ or that tissue and decreased its threshold to being susceptible to new oxidative stress that can cause disease or problems.

Now, one of the most, I'm a cardiologist, that's my background. One of the most incredible papers I ever saw, and I must confess, I saw it 30 years ago, and it didn't strike home at the time, but it strikes home now. In 1999, in the American Journal of Cardiology, they had a series of patients who had very large, dilated, poorly contracting hearts, advanced congestive cardiomyopathy, the type of syndrome that you get in line for a heart transplant because they say nothing else can be done. Your heart's barely contracting, you're going to slip into heart failure and die, or we're going to get something done for you. And as part of the preparation, they do biopsies of the heart, tissue biopsy of the heart, to look at the pathology to categorize it before starting a heart transplant protocol. And in this particular study, they also measured heavy metal levels inside those biopsy specimens. Now, inside the heart, inside the congestive cardiomyopathy cells compared to normal myocytes, normal heart cells, there was 22,000-fold. That's 2,200,000%, 22,000-fold more mercury inside those cells than in normal cells. That by itself is a blow-away type of finding. But there also was 12,000-fold, or 1,200,000% more antimony inside those cells than in normal cells. And I'll go on. I'll talk about mercury in a moment. But antimony, that's something that a lot of docs haven't heard of, and practically no lay people have heard of. But let me tell you, it's a heavy metal, and it's as toxic as arsenic. Okay, where does the antimony come from? It comes from, well, I have a glass right here with water, but it comes from the plastic bottles of water. I mean, we already have a semi-hysteria about microplastics and their particles right now. Well, perhaps as big or bigger hysteria should be the fact that when that water in that plastic bottle has been sitting around for a while, subjected to heat, this, that, or the other, the amount of antimony leaches out because they use antimony to make the damn plastic. All right.

So, and I still remember, for example, I was giving a presentation of this to a group, and I talked about this particular point, and there's like this 35-year-old fellow, his eyes start getting big as cartwheels inside the audience. And later on, he came up and he said, "Well, doc, what you said about the plastic bottles is horrifying." I said, "Well, how's that?" He said, "Well, I was in Afghanistan, and it's so hot, you know, you got to drink 20, 30 of those plastic bottles of water a day. And they would deliver them on large pallets, and the heat was enormous." And he said, "Even though you're thirsty and you know you got to have the water, I got to tell you, every time I drank a bottle of that water, I felt a little nausea at first." Okay. So you're literally rocking a hard place, being forced into poisoning yourself. There's a lot of data on this and a lot of literature, but for anybody that's listening, don't deal with liquids in plastic containers. I'm not saying no plastic bags or things like this, or something that's frozen in a plastic container, but plastic liquid, liquids in plastic containers where they're continually in contact with the plastic and continually in contact with the liquid, that should be avoided as best as possible. I mean, I look at Coca-Cola. Guess what? They used to make it in glass bottles. Now they have it in plastic bottles, and things that are carbonated are even worse because the carbonation leeches out the antimony even more. Uh, I happen to live in Colombia now, and guess what? They have, God bless them, Coca-Cola in glass bottles, and they have bottled water in glass bottles. Okay. So, but it's available in the United States, but you have to be a little more disciplined. You have to look for it. It's not readily available. They make it just so damn easy to get any liquid you want in plastic containers. Now, they can make plastic without antimony, but they're not doing that. Okay? It's just like saying, how come the cereal companies can't stop putting metallic iron filings, that's another thing, inside their cereals? Because they could just stop. It doesn't make the cereal, well, they think it makes the cereal more nutritious, perhaps, but it doesn't have anything to do, and it is an added expense because all they do is throw it in there. So these are things that can be remedied, but until they are, the individual person needs to address this and take hold, take control of their own health.

Now, and there's other heavy metals, much lower content, the antimony and the mercury. Now, where's the mercury come from? Well, today, if you have somebody with advanced heart failure, age 50, odds are they had 20 or 30 years of exposure to mercury amalgam fillings in their mouth because that's the only thing that they used back in the day. Finally, this is getting changed. So I would think I won't be around to know it, but perhaps 30, 40 years from now, there'll be number one, a lot less congestive cardiomyopathy, but number two, there'll be evidence of inconsequential levels of mercury in the heart. I mean, mercury is found in a lot of areas in the fuels and everything like this, but this is the lion's share of the exposure. And so also discussed in the book then are the type of things people need to do to take these, take these things out. Chelation. Okay, there's non-prescription ways to approach this. Prescription is good, some of them very potent, but the prescription ones are costly for a lot of people. Okay. But if you already have a significant clinical syndrome, and particularly if you already have symptoms of heart failure, decreased cardiac contractility, you should find a way to afford yourself a good prescription chelator for the mercury.

So that's number two, heavy metal accumulations. I might add too, you know, the heart gets picked on by these toxins. Why is that? What is the heart? The heart has, maybe right up there with the neurological system and the activity of the neurons and the brain cells. I mean, the heart is just working non-stop, and it's just pulling in nutrients and whatever else comes along with the nutrients. That's where the toxins are, and putting them out. And heavy metals generally are not water-soluble. All right? There's a lot of toxins you get a quick exposure to, and they're water-soluble, and you excrete a large amount of them through the bloodstream and through the kidneys. But heavy metals characteristically toxify you and then accumulate.

Okay. Also, accumulation of toxins and accumulation of oxidized biomolecules is its own toxicity. I mean, these are physical entities. The inside of your cell is a limited space. And when the cells are all healthy, they can interact the way they need to. But if a large block of them are oxidized and inactive, they're still physically present, and they're clearly impairing and inhibiting the ability of the other normal, reduced biomolecules to interact and have their metabolic effects.

Number three, super tragedy, but a major factor these days, probably on the order of 25 million Americans and 300 to 350 million people around the world, is persistent spike protein. Okay, to recap here, we have a person could be in a situation where they're in a unique environment and bringing toxins into the body that way. Otherwise, we have the mouth, heavy metals, spike protein. Let's take some time and go deeper into the mouth.

>> Okay. The importance of finding a biological dentist and then the cone beam X-ray to try and find those infections that often times are hidden.

>> Excellent points. And it's important that everybody understands this because, as I said before, although the spike protein is starting to catch up, the mouth and its pathogens and infections are the culprit well over 90% of the time as the major contributing factor to the toxins that are sustaining any particular disease. Now, for a long time, they have lots of different X-rays in medicine, in dentistry, dental, dental medicine. And they've gotten better over time, but probably in the past roughly 20 or 25 years, and really coming into focus now, no pun intended, is colloquially called the 3D X-ray, and it's called the CBCT, the cone beam computed tomography examination. And they literally put your head and then immobilize it, and then the machine rotates around you. And when you have the final result in the technological advanced state that we're in now, you can literally rotate the images so that you see the different angles because regular X-rays, you have a lot of head-on stuff. So it's shooting in one direction, and you might have an abscess of a tooth back there, but you have so much stuff in front of it, you can't see it. With a cone beam, you unveil it wherever it is. That's important because, you know, if you have a root canal, you have an infected tooth. Maybe it's got an abscess, maybe it doesn't, which the cone beam would show, but the root canal is chronically infected, will stay infected, and will have an enormous negative impact on your health.

But there's another entity out there that's been a little discussed. This is discussed in much greater depth in an earlier book that I wrote called "Hidden Epidemic," but it's also covered in the new book as well, which is an entity called chronic apical periodontitis. In a nutshell, it means an asymptomatic, that's important, not hurting, an asymptomatic abscess at the tip of the tooth, a physical accumulation of pus sitting there at the tooth. Well, I think most of us think that when you get an abscessed tooth, it hurts like hell, and you got to get it out right away. That is the exception to the rule. Okay? I mean, if you all of a sudden you just develop horrible pain one day, you can't live it. The pain's horrible. The tooth's got to come out. It comes out because it got acutely abscessed. Acutely because something introduced pathogens in. Maybe the tooth split or something like that, and they rapidly grew up. And when the pathogens replicate rapidly, what do they do? They put tissues on the stretch. And it's that stretching that causes this horrible acute pain that you don't get relief of until the tooth gets extracted and the socket is properly cleaned.

Well, what happens well over 90, 95% of the time in an infected tooth is there's no symptoms at all. Maybe you got a little bit of periodontitis. It introduced a few pathogens into the tip or the apex of the tooth, and then gradually the pulp of the tooth died, became infected, and then later on accumulated an abscess. It seems counterintuitive, but they're asymptomatic. I mean, you can chew on them all day long, and you think you have a great healthy mouth. And of course, why is this significant? It's significant is because your tooth is sitting on an abscess. And what happens every time, especially molars, but all teeth, the molars come together, and they physically generate probably the greatest pressure that's generated in any biological system, which is the pressure between two opposing teeth when you're chewing and grinding on them. And what happens is your teeth have a blood drainage and a lymph drainage. Okay? And this I use to get people's attention a little bit too. And I want to tell you that having an abscessed tooth in your mouth in the molar area, especially, and chewing, you're going to release more pathogens and toxins into your blood, into your body, than if you took a syringe and injected them IV. That's because you're putting them in two situations. You're putting them into the blood, and you're squeezing them into the lymphatic system.

The lymph is the lymphatic drainage is the blame of pathogens for virtually all cases of breast cancer. The lymphatics of the teeth, they come down to the neck, cause a lot of thyroid problems too, we might add, and come down to the chest and into the breast, and then out of the armpits. And if you have any sort of situation where the pathogen count is too high or the drainage is too poor, what happens is those pathogens accumulate in the breast. And there is, in fact, more problems with large pendulous breasts. Why would that be? Well, you still need gravity. Lymphatic circulation has very minimal pressure in it. You mostly need gravity to get lymph to make its all the way out from its origin source to where it eventually dumps into the blood. Well, women with large pendulous breasts are going to accumulate more. And it's been well established in the literature that although the mouth obviously has a normal flora, and the breasts are always draining lymph from this normal flora of the mouth. So it is normal to culture microorganisms from the breast in and around breast lumps, but that's normal. However, you have a certain time when pathogens, these are microorganisms, bacteria, viruses, etc., fungi that produce toxins when they replicate compared to other innocuous microorganisms because you have a lot of good microorganisms that help your metabolism and other pathogens that are horribly toxic and potent. So then taking this down from the chewing, almost always is the cause of breast cancer. Incidentally, and I mentioned heart disease. What also happens when you chew on these infections? Again, I want to re-emphasize, the chewing is fine. You have no pain at all. You have no more idea that you have an infected tooth without doing the test than you have any idea that your blood sugar is 300 rather than 95 before you draw the blood. You have no idea. Testing is mandatory if you want to make sure you have no infected teeth contributing to your diabetes, high blood pressure, heart condition, arthritis, brain fog, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, all of those things.

Okay. Now, the other thing that happens is every time you chew, I told you the lymphatics go to the breast, but the venous blood supply then goes to the general venous circulation. Now, what's the characteristic of the general venous circulation? Very low pressure. Okay? Arterial pressure 120 over 80. Venous pressure 5, 10, 15. Okay? So it's just slowly flowing without high pressure. So the pathogens or toxins enter the system, and they float merrily along, go through the venous drainage, go to the pulmonary circulation, which is still low pressure, go through the pulmonary circulation, then come down, and on the other side of the pulmonary circulation, getting ready to fuel the arterial side, the pulmonary arteries drain into the left atrium of the heart. You have four chambers: left atrium, right atrium, left ventricle, right ventricle. A drain of the left atrium, which is also low pressure, just like the rest of the veins. And then the left atrium drains it into the left ventricle. Well, once it gets to the left ventricle, with one squeeze of the heart, you go from venous pressures to very high arterial pressures. So you go from 15 to 120, 130, 140, 150, just like that. And that's fine, except for one thing. The coronary arteries are the first artery that's coming out of the aorta that the left ventricle is contracting into. So it gets whatever pathogens are contained into the blood, it gets them at high pressure. And literally, high pressure works to embed those pathogens into the endothelium and eventually multiply themselves and get into the more basic structure of the arterial wall.

Now, what did I say before? Pathogens are your primary source of very high oxidative stress because the toxins of the pathogens consume or use up the antioxidants. Let me just say this. When you have an inflamed tissue, there's very little to no vitamin C in it. When you have an area that you take all the vitamin C away, it becomes inflamed. So an inflamed tissue is the same as a severely vitamin C depleted tissue. So now we have these arterial walls now colonized with pathogens from these infections in the mouth, just sitting there, not making a gross infection. Colonization. I want to differentiate between colonization and infection. Infection, they multiply rapidly and they make an abscess, express pus. This is low-grade. They're living, but they're not thriving. Well, what does the immune system do when it sees inflammation? And that's what I talked about. I said these pathogens are consuming the vitamin C, resulting in that tissue being inflamed. And that inflammation is an immune system trigger. So, at the point in time that this becomes inflamed, the immune system becomes activated. Now, here's the kicker. What's the first immune cell to show up at a situation of inflammation? It's the monocyte. Why is that significant? The monocyte has 80-fold, that's 8,000% more vitamin C packed inside it than is in the circulation. So I just told you inflammation means vitamin C deficiency, which triggers the acute immune response. And the first cell from the immune response to show up there is one that's super packed with vitamin C. I mean, it's very clear to me logically, and I assert this in the book, and I'm sure this is going to give any immunologist that wants to read it conniption fits, but I maintain the primary, overwhelming, most important role, maybe the only role, but I'll stick with most important role of the immune system is to resolve inflammation. Inflammation is a part of all disease processes. Well, I just told you inflammation is vitamin C depletion. So, I extend that to tell you that the primary role of the immune system is to normalize vitamin C levels wherever they're depleted. It's that simple. If you have normal vitamin C levels in all your tissues, your immune system is dormant. It's on standby. It doesn't have anything to do. But you get an infection, you inflame a tissue, then your immune system turns on to try to do two things: nuke the infection because these monocytes have hydrogen peroxide in them as well, nuke the infection and restore the vitamin C level.

In support of this, it's very important to realize that back in 2006, they did a study on 38 patients with known chronic coronary artery disease. They had angiograms. They knew the blockages were there. And they did what's called an atherectomy. They did an angio, and they put in a special device that, just like a roto-rooter, actually scraped the plaque out. So in 38 patients, they scraped plaque out of their coronary arteries and they found over 50 species of virus, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and many of them were characteristic pathogens for the mouth. And they found this in 38 out of 38 coronary artery disease patients. As I like to say, that's pretty close to 100%. So it's, I don't see there's any way possible to develop coronary artery disease as we know it unless there's an inflammation in the blood vessel wall, and virtually always that's going to be due to a pathogen consideration.

I might add one interesting point about the evolution of coronary disease: why does a big fat plaque develop? Okay. Well, I told you that inside the coronary wall, the pathogen colonization is consuming vitamin C. So you have virtually no vitamin C inside the wall. Vitamin C is your single most important substance for synthesizing collagen and connective tissue fibers that make a tissue structurally strong. Okay? Well, the last thing the body wants is for your blood vessel wall to get weak, blow up into an aneurysm, and rupture. Then you're dead right away. So the body has a lot of ways of developing incomplete but compensatory mechanisms. So, in other words, what is the body going to do if it sees, perceives that the blood vessel wall is getting weak and it doesn't have vitamin C available to start remaking this arterial wall strong again and resistant to dilation, aneurysm formation? What's the only other real alternative it can do to prevent that artery from rupturing? Build plaque. You don't make healthy arterial wall, but you make a physical mass that impedes the ability of the blood vessel wall to dilate and rupture. And that, in a nutshell for you, is coronary artery disease and where it comes from.

>> Fascinating. I want to make sure we take some time here and...

>> Sure.

>> fully hash this out. So you said testing is mandatory. Is the cone beam X-ray going to catch everything? Because you mentioned the fact that we can have these pathogens in the mouth that we don't actually feel pain. So I just want to make sure for the person wanting to go from ground zero here, have the testing done in the mouth. What does that look like if they want to be comprehensive?

>> Well, you know, obviously no test is 100%. But the cone beam has taken the 30, 40, 50% ability of regular X-ray to spot abscesses up into the greater than 90, 95% range. Also characteristic of most tests is you have different manufacturers with different quality machines. You have a procedure that, once you have the result, it takes a great deal of expertise to really thoroughly interpret it. So, not trying to take a shot at biological dentists because they're our only hope compared to regular dentists, mainstream dentists. But every biological dentist that gets a cone beam examination should be sending it for a formal, complete interpretation because it takes specially trained radiologists and/or dentists a full 20, 25 minutes to properly interpret this. I mean, the regular dentist, like with any other X-ray, they just slap it up there, give it 15 or 20 seconds, and if there's a big, huge abscess, and they got it, but they're not really taking the time because a lot of abscesses are subtle. I mean, they're not all sitting there like little, little balloons or drops at the end of a micro dropper. Some of them are quite subtle. And they need a proper resolution. So, the long answer to your question is no test is perfect, but we're going to catch many, many, many, many more abscessed teeth, which cause all the detrimental things I'm talking about. And really, well, I mean, everybody should get this, but definitely if you got diabetes, heart disease, this sort of problem, you need to get this done, and you need to get it done right away because you're just not going to get better if you have abscessed teeth in your mouth. It's that simple.

>> So, you mentioned the fact that we need a specialized biological dentist to interpret the test, right?

>> Right.

>> But for the average person, say living in middle America, small town, if they can find a dentist there to do a cone beam X-ray, do most dentists do it in a way that's proficient that they can then send it via the internet to somebody else likely to interpret that?

>> Yeah. Well, that's certainly my understanding. I mean, you do have the, I still don't want to minimize expertise. All right. There's some expertise that's involved in doing the test, but they give a little training program when you get the machine. So, for the most part, the study is the study. And yes, once the study has been done, even at a dental practice that's low volume or different, whatever, yes, it can be sent out, and you can rely on getting a good, accurate interpretation. Yes.

>> You quickly mentioned there the fact that if you have diabetes, this is something you want to act on quickly. You went deep into the heart and the plaque. Let's bring diabetes in and make the connection.

>> Sure. You'd be amazed how this factors into vitamin C as well. Um, I'm going to tell you, and I outline it in the book, that diabetes is an inherited genetic disease. It's an inherited genetic disease because the human being, unlike the wild animals, the human being is not making or synthesizing its own vitamin C. Nearly all the wild animals have a four-enzyme sequence in their liver to turn glucose into vitamin C. And nearly all human beings are deficient in the fourth enzyme. In other words, there appears to be an epigenetic. I say epigenetic because amazingly enough, human beings, when they're infants and babies, most of them make their own vitamin C. But obviously, they eventually encounter some sort of combination of toxins. Who knows what they are that stops the translation mechanism of this fourth enzyme of turning the glucose into vitamin C. But the important point there is in understanding diabetes is that we should be, number one, making our own vitamin C, and we're not. And at the same time, this is the critical part, we're not making that vitamin C. We're accumulating the glucose that we should be using up to make vitamin C. So, it's very, I mean, I think once these genetic, if these genetic deficiencies can be addressed, the average glucose level would be much lower because you'd be using it up to make vitamin C.

Another important thing to remember too is insulin. Insulin can't tell the difference between vitamin C and glucose. I mean, they're very similar molecules. You just make these four minor, minor changes turning glucose into vitamin C, and insulin can't tell the difference. Now, the important thing about not being able to tell the difference is, for example, if you give the patient a large amount of glucose, okay, the pancreas reacts with a big surge of insulin to metabolize the glucose. Well, guess what? If you give a large dose of vitamin C, the same thing happens. You get a big surge of insulin from the pancreas to metabolize the vitamin C that the pancreas thinks is glucose. This comes down to a practical point, which is vitamin C and glucose are directly competitive with each other under the influence of insulin to get inside the cell. So you have a large amount of glucose circulating, not much vitamin C circulating, you're mostly getting glucose inside the cell. But the opposite is true too. If you have your glucose levels down and a big amount of vitamin C, then a dose of insulin is going to push mostly vitamin C inside the cell.

Well, because most diabetics, or their physicians, are not really aware of this, they're just taking their insulin and doing their thing. They're not only not dealing well with their glucose excess, but they're getting very, very little vitamin C inside their cells. This makes diabetes one of our worst metabolic diseases because it induces a state of what I'll call intracellular scurvy throughout their body. I mean, there's just no way. I mean, you can take vitamin C, and that helps, but still, if your diabetes is not well controlled, you're still going to have a large amount of glucose competing for whatever vitamin C you take to get inside the cell. And that's where the action goes.

So, the other important thing to round this off is the fact of how a metabolic, an infectious, or a toxic stress affects the body. We all hear about the fight-or-flight reaction. Okay, in a nutshell, when you introduce a large amount of toxin or a brand new infection into the bloodstream, what does that do? That is causing a lot of oxidation. So you're putting a lot of oxidative stress in the bloodstream. The natural reaction of the healthy body is for your adrenal glands to secrete cortisol, okay? Which is your stress hormone, they like to call it. Well, they call it stress hormone because oxidative stress causes its release. Well, as it turns out, another thing I think that should be kept in mind, just like I told you about vitamin C in the immune system and inflammation, is that the primary, if not virtually exclusive, role of cortisol is to push vitamin C inside the cell. So, cortisol in and of itself is not an anti-inflammatory agent. It promotes the introduction of the most important anti-inflammatory agent, vitamin C, to get inside the cell. Anti-inflammatory relieves inflammation. And if inflammation is depletion of vitamin C, what relieves that inflammation? Vitamin C. So all the wonderful responses you see for inflammation, stress, painful joints, and everything with corticosteroids is their ability early on to push vitamin C inside the cell. But if you just take the steroids and nothing else, you get a quick burnout phenomenon. You sort of push all the available vitamin C inside the cells, and you're not taking any vitamin C. Then all you have are steroid side effects in the long term because it's not appreciated that the primary role of corticosteroids, especially cortisol, is to push vitamin C inside the cell.

So now I put together this picture for you where you get stress, you make cortisol, and what is the cortisol doing? The cortisol is looking for new vitamin C to put inside the cell that your liver should be acutely responding to that stress by making more vitamin C, just like the adrenal glands are responding to the stress by making more cortisol. The two of them working together are wonderful. But when they don't work together, what happens? Then you start to get the corticosteroid side effects. There's no vitamin C to be put inside the cell. And because the body thinks you should be using up your glucose to make more vitamin C, what else does cortisol do? It does something called gluconeogenesis. It starts breaking down protein, mostly muscle, to turn it into glucose, to make more glucose to help feed this. But you're not converting your glucose. So...

All you're doing is adding to the excess glucose, and this is a primary cause for diabetes. All right? You're not making your own vitamin C. You're not supplementing vitamin C to quell this cortisol reaction. So this is where you run into all these situations of elevated cortisol level, cortisol levels, hypercortisolia, Cushing syndrome. All of these things, if they don't disappear, especially if they've been around for a long period of time, they nearly always go away completely with vigorous vitamin C supplementation.

Why? Because you're finally getting the vitamin C inside the cell. And that's another stimulus. If you don't have enough vitamin C to put inside the cell, the body, just like I told you with the heart example, you know, where there's just no vitamin C to make the collagen and so the body does something else that's crazy, which is build the plaque to make the blood vessel thicker. Well, in this case, you're not making the vitamin C. You're not taking vitamin C. The cortisol knows its end goal is to put more vitamin C in your cell, and there's not enough vitamin C in the cell. What does your body start doing? Making more and more cortisol in a failing attempt to increase the vitamin C level inside the cell. Failing because there's no vitamin C left to put inside the cell. And this metabolic interplay is the big deal in diabetes.

And I've got to tell you, you've set yourself up for something perfect here. Let me go into this because this is something I came across critically and recently, and the world needs to know about it. Okay, the GLP-1 drugs. All right. Now, be aware that right now, the GLP receptor agonist drugs, Ompic, uh, semaglutide, which is what it is, and the other ones, well, they do something a whole lot more than cause you to lose weight. Their physiological function is primarily to do two things. Yeah, they suppress the appetite. You might get a little nausea, these sorts of things, but the two things that they do is they raise the resting insulin level. Okay? So, you have more circulating insulin when you're taking these drugs than not. But at the same time, by an independent mechanism, not the increased insulin, but by an independent mechanism, they decrease the breakdown of glycogen into new glucose. So two primary metabolic effects: they raise the resting insulin level and they decrease the resting glucose level independently.

So what does that do then when you take a large amount of vitamin C? You open the floodgates for the vitamin C to go inside the cell. You've raised the insulin, which pushes vitamin C inside the cell, and you've decreased the glucose to compete with the vitamin C to go inside the cell. And as a point of fact, these drugs have been established. I wrote a paper on this. Anybody wants to see it, tomlevymd.com under the articles at the bottom. The article is these drugs, in spite of the massive criticism that they have, decrease all-cause mortality. When you take them, any of them, any dose, any style, any application, they all decrease your chances of dying from anything. I mean, you know, they like to talk about the side effects, this, that, or the other. Well, the other thing too is you don't get the side effects if you take large amounts of vitamin C.

Why is this? This is because the whole idea is to, is to, is to dissolve and get rid of fat, right? Well, the first question has to be asked is why do people gain weight? Well, in addition to taking in too many calories, I'm not going to quibble with that, they also are characteristically taking in no supplements at all. Okay. And they're exposed to the same big toxin bag that we're talking about. Well, what does your body do to try to deal with toxins? It wants you to have a lot of vitamin C to neutralize the toxins in the blood. And if it does, everything's fine. No problem. But if you have a lot of toxins in your blood, no good nutrient or antioxidant to neutralize it, then the body goes into another one of its reflex compensatory mechanisms. And that mechanism is the toxins are bad for you. They're going to cause a lot of problems. They can't neutralize them. They can't get rid of them. So they put them into storage. That's what develops fat is the accumulation of unneutralized toxins. Okay? And unfortunately, it's fat. So they're usually fat-soluble toxins which are very difficult to get out of your body anyway. All right. And in fact, they have shown studies where, not dramatically, but clearly, when an obese person starts taking vitamin C for the first time, they do start losing weight. That's because they start neutralizing the toxins that they would otherwise accumulate.

Now flip it all around. What's the hysteria about? Oh, well, this could cause pancreatitis and this caused this and this caused this. Well, what's going to happen when an impatient obese person takes the maximal drugs, starts burning up fat, and they're releasing toxins non-stop? That's what you call a chronic Herxheimer reaction. You're just flooding the body 24/7 with toxins that it has no ability to neutralize. So that's going to take any of the diseases that that obese person would have been subject to otherwise and just increase the chance of them. So, I mean, the person was maybe destined to get pancreatitis anyway, they're going to get it sooner, or the eye problems, all the other problems that they talk about. Remember, the only cause of disease is toxins. The only cause of disease is toxins. And if you neutralize the toxins, you ain't going to develop the disease.

And so the point I make then is that these drugs, especially not especially, but predominantly when you're taking good supplementation, large doses of vitamin C, you're getting so much more benefit of the vitamin C. I mean, the big problem with vitamin C supplementation is ultimately getting it inside the cell. That's why good liposome-encapsulated supplements are very good. Uh, like the company I work with, LiveOn, they have an extraordinary product, uh, even though there's a lot of liposome fraud out there and other things. Corticosteroids, I told you, the cortisol puts vitamin C inside the cell. But now, and this is in my paper, and now I'm going to give you some anecdotal stuff. I started these GLP-1s once because about five months ago, because I was tired of my 25, 30-pound little belly. I just said, "Heck it." But I'm already supplementing extremely large amounts of all the good supplements, including vitamin C. Well, I started it, and weeks later, I got rid of symptoms, problems that I've had all my life, and I was very perplexed by it. I'm 75 years old now. I had a chronic cough that I had for 50 years that disappeared. I mean, it disappeared. Uh, as a 75-year-old, I was getting up five times a night to urinate, now once a night. Sleep better, energy skyrocket, all the things that getting more vitamin C inside your cells can do.

So if anybody wants to listen to me, it's my recommendation that a low-dose GLP receptor agonist drug like semaglutide orally, don't have to, don't have to do the injection, and it's now available really cheap due to, uh, trumprx.gov. I mean, you can go on there and get $1,100 worth of this drug now for $125 with your little coupon and go off and get it with a proper prescription, of course. This is a major longevity intervention, a major positive health intervention. I mean, yes, I'm orthomolecular and I reflexively don't like anything prescription, but you can't make that a blanket. I mean, every now and then, you know, the, uh, the blind dog finds his food. Okay? So, you can eventually, you will get good pharmaceuticals. Not too damn many of them, but they do exist. And this is one, even though it's designed for this purpose, that it has evolved. And I might add, the positive effects on diabetes is used as a treatment for diabetes.

"You mentioned the liposomal vitamin C."

"Right."

"In your book, you talk about the hydrocortisone, right? Taking that in the morning for certain people to help drive that vitamin C in instead of the GLP-1. Could somebody take one of those other routes and get similar results?"

"Sure. Uh, but this is an important point to remember. Uh, at least using myself as an example. All right. I came across the cortisol-vitamin C interaction oh, when I had severe chronic COVID, maybe three, three and a half years ago now. It was '21. Uh, and I had just been reviewing the literature on that. And so I started taking cortisol with my vitamin C, got over it. Well, I also had a lot of other symptoms get better that I'd had all my life. And I read up on cortisol, uh, Dr. Jeffrey's book, *Safe Uses of Cortisol*, a wonderful book. And I realized that in addition to the sex hormones and thyroid hormone, nearly everybody when they get older, they're low in cortisol. And like I said, if they have a high cortisol, they have it because they're not taking enough vitamin C. Remember, okay? But low cortisol. And the thing is is cortisol is so important in getting vitamin C inside your cell. You can just knock out so many infections right before they start. You get your first symptom. Big dose of hydrocortisone. Hydrocortisone is the prescribed form of cortisol. Same molecule. Uh, and so I've been taking, uh, 20 milligrams of cortisol because I really think, and I don't want to put this on other people, but I think my own history, I've been adrenally insufficient for much longer than recently. Although I believe most older people are not having optimal cortisol levels in the morning. It should be high in the morning and then taper off as the day goes along. If yours is not high in the morning, you need some. That is that simple. And it's not like taking steroids. This is called hormone replacement, not hormone treatment. Okay? When you take these 60 milligrams of prednisone for something, that's like taking a sledgehammer to a mosquito. All right? We're talking about physiological doses. Even in the person who has no adrenal function at all, they don't need more than about 40 milligrams of hydrocortisone a day. Now, 20 is the number for me. But anyway, the point I wanted to make going back to what you're saying, yes, I take hydrocortisone with my morning dose of insulin every day, and I've done so for three years now, and I've gotten a lot better. But in the face of cortisol's ability to augment my vitamin C concentration inside the cell, the GLP-1 drug has further improved that vitamin C uptake, at least by the clinical symptoms that I've had. So yes, a lot of people could get enormous benefit, and I recommend it really across the board, uh, for people who'd be taking some small dose of hydrocortisone with their morning dose of vitamin C because even if your adrenal gland is making enough cortisol, and that's very rare in an older person, you're not going to suppress the gland. You're just going to do a little of the work for the gland, and the gland does the rest. It's not like other, uh, other glands in the body that when you do all the work for it, it atrophies and goes away and then you're completely dependent. There's a different situation with the adrenal gland. So, uh, yes, I strongly recommend the hydrocortisone with the vitamin C in the morning. But, uh, and if you feel great, great. But if you have any problems going on, this is a primary health measure that a lot of people can get some extra juice out of. And important also. Well, uh, they're both prescription drugs. No, the hydrocortisone is a prescription drug in the States, and the, uh, GLP-1 is too. But so, uh, and that's probably the only, um, the only negative on their side is that, uh, you just can't get them over the shelf like you might get them in Colombia."

"I want to come back to this epigenetic piece."

"Sure."

"You quickly went over the fact that babies can make vitamin C because of epigenetic changes. Adult humans can't. Do we have any more detail on why that would happen? If vitamin C is such an important antioxidant for all these systems and cells in the body, why would that happen?"

"Good question. And, and let me say, do we know exactly what's happening? No. But there's some information we can put together, which is, as I said, most babies can make their own vitamin C because they have a nice, pristine liver and they don't have the incredible, uh, melting pot of toxins early on. But as they get older, the food and the air and the water changes, and they do more and more and start getting older with other little kids, then they get exposed to more toxins. I say epigenetic because genetic defect is where there's an alteration in the DNA code. You know, you got the wrong, wrong code there. That's a fixed genetic defect. In this case, the code for the vitamin C exists, and the messenger RNA gets poorly transcribed. It hits what's called a stop codon. It goes, and so you end up with an incomplete, non-functioning enzyme. Once again, going back on what I talked about being the only cause of disease and excitation, that applies here as well. It would appear, this is my conclusion, by, do I have a paper that states this? No. This is my conclusion, is that a relatively common, extremely common, unique array of toxins, as the baby gets older, there's a greater and greater exposure, and it uniquely for the chemical characteristics of the toxins causes abnormal oxidation on this translation site. Now, having said that, I'm glad, really glad you asked this, because it's, this is an important thing to introduce. Is there have been discovered agents that reverse or block this blockage? Okay. Uh, one of the prominent ones is hydroxytyrosol, which is a very an antioxidant polyphenol that's usually concentrated in high amounts in olive leaf extract. And very clear-cut studies, volunteers, they take the, uh, 50 milligrams of hydroxytyrosol a day, and within two weeks, they've doubled their resting vitamin C levels inside their. But there are different speculations as to what's causing that. I don't think there's any way possible that it's caused by anything other than the fact that you're unblocking the ability, the body's ability to make vitamin C. And to this end, I think I covered this in the book. If not, I covered it in a paper. In order to establish this, my colleague Dr. Ron Honeycutt and I, some couple years ago, were taking hydroxytyrosol. All right. And, uh, we wanted to see, we wanted to test the ability of the liver to make more vitamin C. Now, briefly recalling what happens normally, if a non-functioning liver, in terms of making vitamin C, encounters a large amount of toxins, pro-oxidant, it metabolizes and uses up all the vitamin C in the blood. So whatever your vitamin C level is, you take a large amount of toxins, the level is going to drop, right? Well, what happens if your liver is functioning well, this is not blocked, and you take a large amount of toxins, the liver vitamin C production is going to rise. So simply measuring blood levels of vitamin C before, during, and after is going to give you an idea of what your, what your liver is going to do. So I went to, uh, Witchita, where Dr. Honey worked, lived, stayed at his house, and we chose our poisons. All right. He chose malt beer, and I chose scotch. Liked scotch whiskey. And we had some people there to take care of us and draw blood at the house and everything like that. So anyway, uh, he took a large amount of his beer. I took a large amount of our, our scotch. And the both of us, we had nice vitamin C levels at the start. And the second measurement after we were already moderately blissed, the vitamin C was sky-high. Not only was it sky-high, it stayed sky-high for a full 24 hours to metabolize the alcohol until it came back down again. I consider that personally to be proof positive of the fact that number one, we can make our own vitamin C, and number two, something like hydroxytyrosol is able to reduce whatever areas got oxidized by this unique array of toxins that brought about the epigenetic defect to begin with."

"Okay, given what you just shared there, these agents that can reverse this change in the liver, is this recommended part of your protocol to take those, or are we just looking at that to see the physiology?"

"No, because it seems like..."

"It's recommended."

"Okay. Cuz to me it seems like to objectively make sure on a regular basis you're getting to those levels in the body of vitamin C. From what you're sharing, it doesn't sound like that would be a totally reliable way. But you still recommend putting that into the mix."

"I'm not recommending doing this and not taking any vitamin C at all. Okay. No, I mean, I think you should do both. Uh, also too, remember what I was talking about the GLP-1s too. And maybe this is also why I responded so well in my symptomatology is because I've been taking the olive leaf extract for quite some time that has a high concentration of hydroxytyrosol. So, if you're making your own vitamin C, once again, what else are you doing? You're using up your glucose. So, you have less glucose circulating because it's being turned into vitamin C. And then, uh, combine that with the increased insulin level of the GLP-1, and then more of the vitamin C goes inside the cell. Uh, for a long time, I had what I call my Super Eight supplements, uh, that I talked about in the book. And when people ask, I say, 'This is my highest recommendation for baseline supplementation.' That's not to say X, Y, and Z might not be good for you, but there's a lot of people that don't have much money. So, I try to give the optimal supplement program for as minimal an investment as possible. And recently, I've called it now the Super Eight Plus One because I think it's important to include the olive leaf extract."

"All right. Well, I wanted to walk through the Super Eight next. So, let's get into it. And we'll start with vitamin C. We've talked a lot about it, but there's different types, dosages. Give the 101 on what that looks like."

"Sure. Oh, I, I, I divide it into two sections of four. The first four are vitamin C, magnesium, vitamin D3, and vitamin K2. First of all, it needs to be noted that each of these supplements separately by themselves have been shown to decrease all-cause mortality. So, you know you're onto something good right there when just large amounts of any one of them decreases your chances of dying from anything. That also tells you that it's exerting positive effects on every cell in the body. How else could it affect all diseases unless it positively affects all cells? Now, of course, uh, vitamin C and magnesium are the really foundational ones. Vitamin C, if you don't take vitamin C, you die of scurvy. Okay? But there are so many levels of what I would call subclinical scurvy long before you get to the point of not having enough vitamin C inside you to survive. Uh, it could be taken in many different ways. We have the liposomal forms, which are good, but they're a little more costly. All right. Uh, because I've been a consultant at the company for so long, I have a really good deal, or LiveOn Labs, liposomal vitamin C, I get all I want. And I understand people that are wanting to cut their budget. But if you want to have the most reliable way of getting your supplement vitamin C inside yourself, this is the way to go. Several grams a day of this. Because for just two or three grams of the liposomal, you really need five, 10, 15 or more grams of regular vitamin C to give yourself an equivalent impact. But be that as it may, if you don't have the liposome, then you take, it's not etched in stone. Everybody has a different requirement. But for all intents and purposes, to put yourself on a schedule, you can deal with taking something on the order of three grams, three times a day. So you get yourself up to nine grams a day. Nothing wrong with taking more and less positive impact, but okay if you take less. Again, it's very, very, you feel your way through it. Uh, of course, when you're acutely ill, taking large amounts of the liposomal, getting yourself an IV and get a hold of it. Those are the ways to go. Magnesium is incredibly important. I like to, even though I've written a lot, I've written about magnesium too, but I've written a lot more about vitamin C in the hypothetical and I want to call it hypothetical situation of what's more important, vitamin C supplementation or magnesium supplementation. Believe it or not, I would tell you magnesium. Because when you're not supplementing vitamin C, other supplements, other antioxidants can partially compensate for that lack of vitamin C. Nothing compensates for a magnesium deficiency other than magnesium. And everybody's deficient in magnesium. Many diseases are primarily caused by magnesium deficiency, and 100% of diseases are made worse by it. This is because the primary chemical anomaly, abnormality inside a sick cell, a cell that has increased oxidative stress, is a high level of calcium. And unless you can get that calcium down, you're never going to normalize that oxidative stress. Never. Well, the primary way to get that, that calcium down is to take magnesium. They have absolutely yin and yang effects. One counteracts the other. You cannot have elevated levels of both inside your cell. Once you get the magnesium in, the calcium comes out, and then the vitamin C can accumulate, the glutathione can synthesize, and, uh, and you can start making all the other ATP and all the good stuff happens. But none of that good stuff happens until you get the calcium down, which is nearly always attributable to getting your magnesium up. So there's your vitamin C and your magnesium. Then you have vitamin D3. Let me say right now for the person who's really poor. All right. The three things you should always take are vitamin C, vitamin D, and magnesium. Vitamin D3 and magnesium. I mean, do whatever you can. You, everybody should be taking those three at least some. All right? You know, if you can only afford $15 a month, well then, you know, take a small dose of each every day, but get some going because those are your most critical things. Everybody's deficient in all three. I mean, unless you're a lifeguard, you're deficient in vitamin D3. All right? Because we live indoors, we get inside cars, we wear hats, we wear lots of clothes. We, we say we're out in the sun, but we're not. Okay? So, everybody's low in vitamin D3. And of course, everybody's very low in magnesium, uh, and in, uh, and in vitamin C. Now, vitamin D3, this is the only one where you need to get a blood level and a follow-up blood level. You don't get it getting frequently, but you do a blood level and it's low. Low being less than 50 nanograms per cc. If by some stroke of luck you got a 60 resting without supplementing any vitamin D3, well then fine. You don't need it. I haven't run into anybody like that, but if that's the case, fine. And then if you're a small person, two or three thousand units a day are going to do it. A large person, maybe 10,000. A moderately large-sized person, five or six thousand. So, uh, I think for most normal-sized adults, get your baseline, start taking 5,000 a day, and then check it again in a couple months. And then if you're between 50 and 100 in a couple months, you don't need to check it anymore. Just stay on that dose indefinitely. Number three, uh, number four, vitamin K2. This is also very important in getting calcium out where it should not be. Okay. So, it's a very important, uh, vitamin in your calcium metabolism. You know, uh, this is in milligrams. This is in micrograms. So, you know, 500 micrograms to a gram a day is fine. So, those are your basic four vitamins. Well, three vitamins and magnesium, uh, that regulate and work very potently to get oxidative stress down inside your cells. Now, the second four, before you get there, I want to ask some follow-ups on those."

"Okay. Right."

"So, magnesium, there are so many different types. Okay. What is your favorite? And then dosage. How much per day?"

"Great question. It takes a little while to answer it, but it's a good question. Yeah, there are numerous forms of magnesium. 10, 15 or more. I mean, you can, you can attach magnesium to so many different things. Now, they're all good in terms of getting magnesium inside of you. Some are more effective and more better absorbed than others, okay? But they all do the job. With that in mind, uh, for both expense and antipathogenic effect, I like magnesium chloride. Very simple, very straightforward. Now, I want to first say I've got nothing against the other ones. If you want to take magnesium glycinate, if you want to take magnesium threonate, that's all fine. But let me tell you why I recommend the magnesium chloride is because, uh, the chloride anion has a powerful antipathogenic effect. Okay. And in the days now since the, since the pandemic and all, I say, why not make the form of magnesium that you take also something that in and of itself is a potent antipathogen. And there's a number of studies that show that, and it is so ridiculously positive as an antipathogen. They actually have test tube test, uh, agar plate studies that show that, for example, certain viruses, magnesium chloride knocks out the virus. Magnesium sulfate increases the growth of the virus. So you can have absolute opposite effects on viral growth. Now, that's a, that's a laboratory condition, but it still demonstrates what the agent can do. So there's nothing wrong with getting magnesium sulfate as, as an IV infusion in your IV. It's going to be good. It's not going to cause you to get overwhelmed with the virus. But the point is, is I mean, gargling with salt water, sodium chloride, the chloride is a very powerful antipathogenic effect. And finally, for those who don't know this, Dr. Klenner back in the late 1930s took 60 cases of polio children and infants and cured all 60 with intravenous vitamin C, uh, 57 in three days, the other three in two more days, combination of IV and oral. Guess what? Very little known. At the same time, in France, a doctor Nuvo had also about 10, 11, 12 polio patients, all of different ages, some infants, some children, some young adults, some already beginning with paralysis. And all he gave them was oral magnesium chloride solution and resolved the polio very rapidly in all of them. So I don't know that there's any other mineral that can do that. But that's why I get back to that's my recommendation for magnesium. Now, you say, 'How much?' This gets much more complicated because we're very severely depleted in magnesium, and it gets worse every day. And sort of like vitamin C, it's hard to get enough magnesium in you by the oral route because it too, like vitamin C, can cause a loose osmotic diarrhea when too much accumulates in the colon. Well, I've developed for somebody who really is motivated. I developed a practical way. I mean, they have red blood cell magnesiums. That's a good one. You got to keep it in the high normal range, not the mid-normal, but the high normal range. Blood levels mean next to nothing except to tell you if you're severely depleted. In vitamin C, if you have magnesium, if you have a low magnesium blood level, you're really low in magnesium and severely low intracellularly. If it's quote unquote in the normal range, you might be okay intracellularly, but you're no longer massively depleted in your body. A practical way, and it's my recommendation for older folks, especially those who are dealing with heart arrhythmias, is magnesium is the primary agent that controls the electrical stability of a heart cell. Just like it controls the electrical stability of a neuron from keeping it from firing and causing a seizure. This keeps, stabilizes a heart cell and keeps it from generating a spark for an arrhythmia. When older patients who have done Holter monitors, that's where you record all your heartbeats for 24 hours, print them out, and you can literally qualify and quantify any extra beats that are taking place. Believe it or not, your heart cannot generate an extra beat if the cellular level of magnesium inside that, inside that heart cell is normal. There's always a, now you might not be able to get the level high enough, but the point being is if you can do a Holter monitor and it's completely normal, you're taking enough magnesium. If they still have extra beats, you need to take more until you reach a point, of course, where for loose bowel reasons or whatever, you can't. But for people, and they also have things called biopsy studies, but who wants to get a muscle biopsy to determine, uh, what the status of the magnesium level is? But the point is, is everybody, or the doc should definitely realize there's a functional nature to this. And I think it's very important to know that my level of magnesium is functionally keeping my heart stable because if you have enough magnesium to stabilize your heart muscle cells, you have enough magnesium everywhere else."

"I want to come back to vitamin C."

"All right."

"Different types there. We've talked about IV, right? Liposomal, we have ascorbic acid, sodium ascorbate. When it comes to the ones we're going to take in orally between the two I just mentioned there at the end or other forms of vitamin C, what are your thoughts on different types?"

"Well, ascorbic acid is fine if it doesn't upset your stomach. Okay? So, in many ways, sodium ascorbate is the, is the gut-calming vitamin C. You're really never going to get an upset stomach on sodium ascorbate. However, and this is important for people to realize, they have their stomach-protective or whatever you call it, vitamin C's, their calcium ascorbate. You don't want to take calcium ascorbate. We just talked before about high levels of calcium in your cell. You don't want any supplemental calcium. Problem is, calcium does calm an acidic stomach just like that. So a lot of people get hooked on Rolaids and Tums or this form of vitamin C because it doesn't aggravate their stomach. Well, sodium ascorbate is not going to do that. So you can take that. They have another form called ascorbyl palmitate. That's actually a fat-soluble form. That's good if you want to deal with oxidative stress inside the fatty cell walls that you have in your body. Intravenous can be dealt with in many different ways. And how you do intravenous depends a lot on what you're treating. If you're dealing with an acute infection like Dr. Klenner was back in the day, well then you go with intravenous 50, 75, 100 grams and you don't back off until, until the infection is resolving, which is usually pretty rapid. I mean, we're not talking about treating something for three, four, five days with this amount of vitamin C. It responds very, very quickly. And then you have the, the hydrocortisone-augmented vitamin C infusions too. So it's not just for oral, but taking, uh, doses of hydrocortisone orally or intravenously with and before your IV vitamin infusion or other forms of vitamin C is highly effective as well."

"What do you think about this talk of ascorbic acid being made from GMO corn and also on top of that, whole food vitamin C versus ascorbic acid? There's also talk that ascorbic acid is only part of the vitamin C. So share your thoughts."

"Great question."

"Okay. Before we move into the back half of the Super Eight, you talked about calcium. We want to avoid that. In your book, you also talk about copper and iron. So, we should talk about the other side to this too, things to avoid. So, expand on those."

"As they say, I didn't tell you to say that or ask that, but I'm glad you asked that. I mean, uh, to say it politely, this is such BS. Okay. And the thing is is you have ways of taking vitamin C and purifying it from plant sources. Vitamin C is something that can be completely synthesized. Some people recoil against that. Well, guess what? The vitamin C molecule is the vitamin C molecule is a vitamin C molecule. I mean, if you have something that was synthesized and it's pure, that's fine. If you have something that was properly extracted and purified from a plant origin, that's fine. Uh, I mean, you might want to not deliberately use a GMO source of something, but there's going to be nothing of consequence GMO-wise left in it once you properly purify it. So, I wouldn't worry about that. But you can certainly find other sources of vitamin C that might, that might make you feel more comfortable in case you're really upset about this idea of getting a vitamin C from a GMO source. Now, so anyway, vitamin C is vitamin C is vitamin C. Ascorbic acid is vitamin. Ascorbate is vitamin C. So sodium ascorbate, vitamin C, hydrogen ascorbate or ascorbic acid, vitamin C, calcium ascorbate, vitamin C, molybdenum ascorbate, vitamin C, magnesium ascorbate, vitamin C. A lot of those are good, but I don't recommend taking them in their mineral forms because the amount of vitamin C that you need to take a day will give you usually too much of the mineral. Minerals can be pushed to toxicity relatively easily. You can't make somebody toxic on vitamin C. Now, this is very irritating. I mean, these whole food forms or natural vitamin C or whole complex vitamin C, that is pure horse hockey. But let me tell you where the truth lies. Number one is in the literature, there's over 80,000, probably about 90,000 articles now showing what vitamin C can do in different clinical situations. And all they're using is ascorbic acid or sodium ascorbate in their pure form. It's not using some whole food complex. That's number one. So vitamin C does not need anything else to have its powerful anti-toxic and antipathogen effects. Now, having said that, the more the merrier. You have in your body what I call an antioxidant matrix. They're all working together with each other. So if you can take in good antioxidant bioflavonoids and polyphenols and other great nutrients from your food, do it. But don't be blinded or misled into the fact that your vitamin C is incomplete and not going to do you any good if you don't take it with a whole bunch of other stuff. And that is completely manufactured stuff. When they talk about a P element, I mean, yes, there might be a matrix inside certain plants and you take the whole, whole matrix and vitamin C is a part of it where it's a very good supplement. I'm not going to say any of these natural supplements that also contain vitamin C are not good. They're just making it very needlessly expensive to get the amount of vitamin C that you need on a daily basis. So, I, I take it mostly marketing. I mean, everybody wants to sell their product. And in this case, like I said, the whole food vitamin C's, they're fine. They're good products. Why? Because they have healthy nutrients in them. And they have vitamin C. Does that mean you're going to get the same impact out of, uh, a couple grams of this rather than 15 grams of vitamin C? No, not even close."

"The toxic nutrient triad. Okay. Calcium, uh, to make a long story short, we covered that. I mean, the thing is is all three of these things, they're absolutely essential for life, but beyond a very minimal dose, they're toxic. And all three are absolutely essential in the mechanisms that kill a cell. So they're all part of natural cell death as well. Now, so pushing calcium aside for a moment, which you should not supplement ever. I mean, this is a big subject. It's in the book, it's in *Death by Calcium*, another book I wrote, all the data. Iron and copper are transition metals, fundamental metals. They're transition metals that relay electrons, pass them along very quickly, and they are always part of the mechanisms that increase oxidative stress inside cells. I mean, you increase the iron level inside a cell, you increase the copper level inside the cell, you are shooting oxidative stress. So, I think at this point in time, we know increasing oxidative stress is never desirable. And there are so many people that are just wedded to this idea of the benefits of copper. It's so wrong. The more copper you take, the higher your oxidative stress, the greater your incidence of cancer, the greater your increase in all-cause mortality. I mean, always go back to the all-cause mortality. In many ways, all the lesser studies are not nearly the consequence of, well, what's the bottom line? So, if I take this, am I going to live longer? If I take this, am I going to live shorter? That's really your ultimate study. And when that study is well done, you may leave yourself with some questions about the other studies, how they relate in certain enzyme reactions. But the bottom line is, does it make me healthier or does it make me less healthy? Now, another primary reason why these should be never supplemented is because they're recycled. Okay? Uh, most nutrients and everything you take in, it has a peal effect and you excrete them. You excrete very, very, very little cap, uh, iron or copper. And when you start supplementing them, you just increase the body, the body amount, which is never desirable. And like I said, iron especially. Okay, let's leave copper aside, talk about iron. We have the ferritin test. The ferritin test looks at the amount of iron that's stored in your body. Okay? And they have some crazy people, well, that's a bad way to, uninformed people, uninformed toxic think 50 or 100 ferritin is fine. No, it's not. It's toxic. Not as toxic as 400, but toxic. Ferritin should be less than 20. Okay? And it can't go too low if your blood count is normal. If you have a normal hemoglobin and a normal hematocrit, that's what you need iron for. And that takes, and, and if you have enough iron to make normal blood, you have more than enough iron to fuel every little, uh, enzyme or metabolic reaction that it might be a co-factor in. Uh, taking an iron supplement, if you're not iron deficient anemia, and an iron deficient anemia, not anemia in general, but iron deficiency anemia, hypochromic, microcytic, you're poisoning yourself very directly and very profoundly. So, that's the scoop on calcium, iron, and copper."

"Okay, just looking at the time here. I want to make sure we have time to cover a couple of things I think are really important."

"Not that the back end of the Super Eight isn't, but I'm going to quickly go over."

"Yeah, I was going to say B3, CoQ10, and the one I really want to dive into is methylene blue."

"Okay, fair enough."

"So, go ahead and give me your 30-second overview and then dive into methylene blue."

"Well, you know, the whole thing is is you want enough NAD inside your brain and all the other areas of the body. NAD supplements are great, but they're needlessly expensive. Niacinamide, uh, the, uh, vitamin B3 is a direct precursor of NAD. You, you supplement that, well, the NAD goes up. Vitamin B2, riboflavin for the second stage, as you mentioned, co-enzyme Q10 for the third stage. Methylene blue is fascinating because it manages, if you needed to, to directly give an electron at the fourth stage without even involving the first three stages and without even involving the mandatory but minimal amount of physiological oxidative stress that those steps involve. So you're just going straight to the money, uh, giving an electron to cytochrome B oxidase. That's the fourth step. Okay. And then that somehow magically passes it along to ATP synthase. And for who's listening, ATP is your most important energy-delivering molecule in your body. If you have high ATP, you're healthy. If you have low ATP, you're not. So, uh, that's the short story there. Methylene blue is incredible because it's a tiny molecule. It goes everywhere. It's fat-soluble. It's water-soluble. It gets almost completely absorbed. I mean, if you have no oral areas available, you can give it intravenously, but it's not really necessary. But intravenously, methylene blue by itself has very effectively and completely resolved patients dying of advanced septic shock. I mean, low blood pressure, sepsis, that's about as sick as you can be before you're actually dead. And methylene blue as a single agent has repeatedly brought people out of this. Still not used that much in that way, but very effective in that way. Now, one point, and this brings us back to the vitamin C and the electrons, is oxidized versus reduction. All your electrons should come, are going to come from your nutrition. Methylene blue, as it stands, is oxidized. So methylene blue, you're giving it as an electron-depleted agent, but it picks up the available electrons in the body and then distributes them. So vitamin C, methylene blue, and other antioxidants are electron distributors, not primary electron suppliers. But methylene blue, I've been taking that for years now, and it's, it's phenomenal, phenomenal, phenomenal agent. Talk about mixing that in a glass with vitamin C, making the leuco-methylene blue, and the differences there. That's interesting because like I just said, and that proves what I just said, is that when you take, and it's usually ascorbic acid, for some reason sodium ascorbate doesn't have the same effect, but you put some ascorbic acid powder inside a blue solution, methylene blue, if the doses, amounts are correct, you'll clarify that solution and turn it into clear leuco-methylene blue, and that's because the vitamin C donates the electrons to the methylene blue, turning into methylene blue, which clears it up. Uh, that's, uh, there's no need to supplement it that way, but it, it's one of many good ways to supplement it when you just have the methylene blue. I finally got to the point where I got tired of blue stains on the counter, on my clothes, on my hands, and you just take a dropper full and open up and just touch it on the back of your tongue and squeeze it in there. Uh, very, very good, minimally bitter taste for three or four seconds, and then you're fine. Uh, they also make, are finally starting to make different companies, methylene blue, uh, pills and methylene blue capsules."

"One thing I think I've heard you talk about on another show is taking that ascorbic acid with the methylene blue and oxidizing the vitamin C and that being able to penetrate the blood-brain barrier."

"Excellent point too. And, uh, because they have other studies that show DHA, dehydroascorbic acid versus ascorbic acid. DHA is the oxidized, electron-depleted form, but it's electrically neutral. It doesn't have a charge, and it passes right across the blood-brain barrier and cellular barrier using the glucose transporters. So, uh, yes, it, DHA, the oxidized form of vitamin C, in animal studies, has been shown to be as good as or better than regular vitamin C in preventing, uh, brain damage from, you know, experimentally induced strokes and laboratory animals and that sort of thing. So, no, I think DHA would be a superior way to take vitamin C, but they don't make it. Okay? It's, it's available for research studies. All the supplement manufacturers think that they, all the, all the supplements have to be in the reduced form. But guess what? Co-enzyme Q10, ubiquinone and ubiquinol, they come available in oxidized and reduced forms, and both are fine. Same thing with vitamin K2. Menaquinone and menaquinol."

"All right, Dr. Levy, we're going to leave it there for today. I'm going to link up your books, your website. Really enjoyed this. Your book's fantastic. I read your latest book. Really enjoyed it. Learned a lot. Thank you."

"Thank you, sir. Thanks for having me on. Spread the word."

"Thank you for watching. Stick around here for this other great interview. You don't want to miss it. I'll see you over there. I don't think that many doctors get this is that energy delivery mechanisms are at the root of all pathological conditions, almost without exception. They are vital in preventing and reversing dementia, preventing and treating."