Transcription
I'm at a medical conference on healthy aging, and we're on lunch break. And so I decided to come back to my hotel room to record a video for you specific to grounding and how grounding is anti-aging.
So, aging—a very simplified way to look at aging—is a balance between inflammation and inflammatory cytokines in the body that are causing acute organ damage versus our ability to regenerate. So stem cell regeneration, meaning we're replacing our older, inflamed, diseased cells with something fresh and new. And so, for a long time, for the majority of our life, our body is on a self-renewal program where we're constantly using our stem cells to make new tissues. And so we're refreshing our organ systems on a daily basis, around the clock, routinely. But at a certain point, the inflammatory cytokines outbalance this, and then our tissues are not capable of regenerating; the stem cell regeneration is done, and you're kind of on your last lap, and those organ systems have their last use. And when you're elderly, you can go into frailty, which you can really see the body is sort of on its last use; it's on its last lap. Muscle mass decreases, bone density decreases, cognitive function declines, and all the organ systems decline in function as it's being used up for a last time.
So anti-aging has got two components you can target. You can specifically target keeping inflammation down and especially decreasing inflammatory cytokines to protect and make it longer before we reach that tipping point of aging and inflammation in our body that causes us to be on our last lap. And then the other target is to boost stem cell regeneration so that we're really putting more gas in the tank and getting a couple more laps out of it.
So grounding plays a role in both of those, and there is scientific, medical studies that suggest that grounding plays essential parts in a couple different avenues of protecting our long-term health. One of them is in decreasing those inflammatory cytokines. So there was a double-blind, placebo-based study back in 2019; the results were published in *PLoS One*, and they followed patients who were grounded and measured multiple different inflammatory cytokines in the blood and found that grounded test subjects had lower concentrations of inflammatory cytokines in their entire body, and the average drop was 10 to 20%.
There were multiple studies that show that grounding is protective of muscle and muscle mass. So back in 2010, there was a double-blind, placebo-based study looking at muscle damage in grounded and ungrounded test subjects. So they had these participants fatigue their muscles to absolute exhaustion, and then they tested their creatinine kinase levels, which is a direct indication of muscle damage, and the grounded test subjects had significantly lower creatinine kinase levels, showing that their muscles were significantly less damaged and inflamed because of this exercise challenge. And on top of that, they reported less soreness. Um, and on top of that, the grounded test subjects had lower cortisol, suggesting that that exercise challenge actually stressed the body out less.
So in 2019, another fabulous study—again, double-blinded, placebo-based studies; the participants as well as the clinicians were completely blinded to whether these were grounded or ungrounded participants—and they did a downhill treadmill test to complete exhaustion. So all of the participants were on a downhill treadmill challenge, and they had to keep going until they could not go anymore, and all of their muscles were burnt out. They followed these participants then for 10 days, just sleeping each night on a grounded mat, and the grounded participants, by day 10, their creatinine kinase values were half of that of the ungrounded participants. So when they slept grounded at night, their body was able to recover twice as quickly as ungrounded subjects, which is incredible. So it suggests that being grounded not only protects your muscles initially but also helps in recovery.
Another way that grounding could be anti-aging and protect our body as we age is by protecting bone density. Now, more studies are definitely needed in this area, but there was one study from 20—which suggests that grounding protects your bone density. Again, this was a double-blind, placebo-based study; they did not know if they were grounded or sham-grounded, nor did the people collecting the specimens and analyzing the results. Um, and it was after one night of sleeping; they followed their mineral balance and their renal excretion—so urine excretion of minerals—and they found that just sleeping one night grounded lowered their risk factor for developing osteoporosis and osteopenia because your bone density—your bones are basically your mineral storage—making sure that your pH is balanced and that you have enough minerals so that you can—all of your organ systems will properly work today—but it's taking it away from your mineral bank, which is your bones. So as you're in a pro-inflammatory state or you're eating acidic foods, like soda—you're drinking a soda—your bones will leech minerals out to help buffer and counterbalance that. So over a lifetime, that causes osteopenia and then osteoporosis because you're constantly taking from this bone bank minerals to help protect your body's function day to day. So we need long-term studies that show what if we're grounded over a lifetime, how does that protect our bone density? But the preliminary results show and suggest that grounding really helps protect the integrity of our bones.
So another really important way that grounding might protect our longevity and be anti-aging is by keeping cortisol levels lower and helping to repair our adrenal glands and keeping us less stressed. So there was a study in 2004—again, double-blinded, placebo-based studies; the participants did not know if they were grounded or not, and the researchers who were looking at serum cortisol levels as well as doing their evaluation subjectively on their sleep patterns—none of them knew whether the subjects were grounded or not. So this is a really high-integrity study, and again, this was back in 2004, and patients who slept grounded had total normalization of their cortisol levels as well as deep repair of their sleep cycles.
So there are a ton of medical studies looking at how grounding helps protect our brain function, and that is my favorite, favorite way that grounding may really truly be anti-aging and help protect our long-term function, and that's by protecting brain and preserving brain function. There's tons of medical studies, and that's because it's very easy to do: you hook participants up who don't know if they're grounded or not to an EEG, and so you can watch the electrical output of the brain when someone's grounded and ungrounded, and you can change their grounding status and they don't even know, and there's an near instantaneous shift in their EEG when they become grounded, and their brain goes into a healing brain wave pattern.
So the parahippocampal gyrus—we know this from studies on that area of the brain—it's also a very early indicator of Alzheimer's disease because that area shrinks and loses volume, and all of a sudden the meaning and the ability of our to process memories in context of our life reduces, and that could contribute to Alzheimer's disease. And also stroke patients who have had strokes in that area of the brain lose contextual meaning. So, for example, you might be able to tell—you might retain the ability to discern that it's a female standing in front of you, but you might not know that that's your daughter. That's what the parahippocampal gyrus area does. So or you go out into the parking lot, and you see that the parking lot is filled with cars, but you don't know which one is yours. So you're losing that contextual meaning, and that's the area where that Earth's heartbeat—that human resonance—is completely cohesive with our brains on a broader level. The Earth also has an electrical output called the Carnegie curve, and this is an annual rhythm that has—it's an elliptical pattern, and it has seasonal variations, and it also helps orient you on this globe to where you are, which is why one of the first uses of grounding was to help prevent and treat jet lag. Because if you travel to a different time zone and you get off the plane and you're in a different part of the world in a different time zone, if you get grounded, you will sync yourself up to that Carnegie curve in that area of the Earth, which will orient you to that time zone and that season and will help your body reacclimate quicker.
So it's no surprise that medical studies have shown that grounding significantly boosts mood because now it's giving you back your day-night rhythm; it's orienting you to where you are on this planet, and it's giving you that clarity and that contextual meaning and significance in your own life, and then it's switching your brain wave patterns into a healing state. So of course, it has an effect on mood.
And the least important way that grounding could be anti-aging—is the least important, but it's still great, and it's worth talking about—and that's boosting skin health. So I have talked about this in other videos where I talk about when I turned 50; I made a video on seven practices that just helped boost longevity, and grounding was one of them. And the reason I included that in that video was because grounding has been shown to near instantaneously boost circulation in your skin. There was a very recent study in 2023 that showed that applying DC energy—which is the energy from the Earth—to the skin helped boost skin repair; in fact, skin that had DC energy applied to it healed three times faster, and the rate of collagen repair was three times faster than ungrounded skin. And then they did a model comparing and contrasting diabetic skin with non-diabetic skin, and the diabetic skin healed as well when it was grounded as non-diabetic skin. Even though we're talking superficially about skin, there's really lots of ramifications about increased blood flow to all your end organ systems and that boosting nutrients and oxygen being transported to as well as toxins being removed from all your organ systems; it's just that skin's easier to test because it's superficial. So you can look at blood flow directly through the skin as well as wound repair, and both of those were enhanced when test subjects were grounded. And so this has applications not just in, you know, cosmetic facial skin collagen but also probably throughout the entire body: joints and arthritic changes and long, you know, long-term wear and tear on the body. If we're keeping our collagen integrity boosted, grounding is a key part of that, and so that would play a major role in anti-aging.
So I'd be really excited to see long-term studies on grounding showing this cumulative effect of having decreased inflammation and boosted stem cell regeneration and how that comes together to potentially lengthen our lifespan. But even if our lifespan isn't lengthened, to boost our resiliency and keep us feeling our best for as long as possible, and I really believe that grounding is an essential, crucial part of that because if you're not grounding, then you are in a pro-inflammatory state. And so I really encourage you to make grounding part of your daily rhythm.
So I hope that video helped inspire you to make grounding part of your daily routine, and if you need some guidance on that, I hope I'll see you over at my website at intuition-physician.com. I have my book, *The Earth Prescription*, to really help introduce grounding into your life and give you lots of different ideas all year round, no matter where you live, how you can get grounded directly to the Earth outside. I also have thousands of holistic healing articles that are totally free on my website, tons of videos, free ebooks, lots of different ways to support your health both conductively and in other aspects of holistic health. My next video that I'm going to make is going to be another one about anti-aging and longevity, and it's not going to be specific to grounding; it's going to be other ways to boost your stem cell reserve so you have more laps, more gas in that tank. And grounding is definitely going to be one of them, but there's lots of other things you can do to boost your stem cell regeneration. So hopefully you'll get on my newsletter so that the next video I release comes directly to your inbox. And again, you can sign up for my newsletter on my website at intuitionphysician.com, and I really hope to see you there, and I hope this was really helpful.